From The Village Voice:

In 1967, Walter Brooke famously asked Dustin Hoffman to consider “just one word,” a word that had come to represent, for many of the era, a sleek soullessness: plastics. Whether or not a young, soon-to-be-famous sculptor named Eva Hesse saw The Graduate that year, she would shortly take the advice, but in ways that upended the connotations. Hesse used plastics and rubber—specifically, resin, fiberglass, and latex—to transform the vogue of a cold, corporate-like minimalism into something softer and more approachable. A smartly comprehensive exhibit at the Jewish Museum reveals that Hesse’s sculpture, though physically deteriorating somewhat, still enchants.

Minimalism’s kingpins billed their movement as a thoughtful rebuke to overt expression, but the work often seemed manufactured—perfect forms that elicited little more from the viewer than they gave. White paintings received blank stares. Though strongly influenced by these artists (Sol LeWitt was a good friend), Hesse sort of rebuked the rebuke, introducing chance, defect, and variation—and thereby delightful flora and fauna elements—into geometry and repetition.

More here.

From Science:

The decision to mesh motherhood with a nascent career as an environmental biologist wasn’t one that Margaret Dalzwell Lowman had the luxury of choosing. Rather, it was a lifestyle born out of necessity. After completing her doctorate at the University of Sydney in 1983, Lowman (pictured left) launched her career as a visiting professor in the Department of Biology and Environmental Sciences at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts–the same college she attended as an undergraduate. She was recently divorced and had two active young sons, ages 3 and 5.

But she was determined to make it work. “When I became a single mom, I looked at the world a little differently,” she says. “Suddenly I had to be successful because my children were depending on me.” Sixteen years later, Lowman has scaled new heights, literally and figuratively: She found a niche for herself studying the world’s forest canopies, which are home to about 40 percent of all biological species. She has pioneered techniques for canopy access, including ropes, walkways, hot-air balloons, and construction cranes. She also found time to write two critically acclaimed books, Life in the Treetops and It’s a Jungle Up There: More Tales from the Treetops, which document the ecology of the canopy, particularly its plant-insect relationships. The most recent book was co-authored with her two sons, James and Eddie.

More here.

Christina Lamb reviews Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron, in the London Times:

The Silk Road has long been a great romantic destination for travellers. At university, I remember poring over maps with a friend, considering retracing it through evocatively named places such as Tashkent and Samarkand. What we soon discovered was that the Silk Road was never a road, but a shifting network of routes starting in China and crossing central Asia. Until I read Thubron’s book, however, I did not know that the route (which dates from Roman times) has been called the Silk Road only since the 19th century when the term was coined by a German. Nor was it used just for transporting silk. The camel trains that left Changan were often laden with iron, bronze, lacquer work and ceramics, and they would come back with Indian spices, glass, golden and silver artefacts, woollens and the western marvel of chairs. Later, they would transport fruit and flowers, including the first roses to arrive in the West. The road was also a conduit for ideas, religion and scientific knowledge. Among the revolutionary inventions that it took west from China were printing, gunpowder and the compass.

The northern route chosen by Thubron traverses some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth, skirting the Gobi desert through asbestos mountains and “expanses of alarming yellow nothingness” to Kashgar and on to the ancient Mediterranean port of Antioch.

More here.

Edward B. Rackeley in his excellent blog, Across the Divide:

In an excellent editorial by, I’m assuming, Sebastian Mallaby in this morning’s Washington Post, the obstacles facing the much debated and awaited UN re-hatting of AU peacekeepers in Darfur are laid bare. People unfamiliar with the internal politics and divergent loyalties of Security Council Member states tend to blame the Darfur tragedy on ‘Western inaction’ or ‘Khartoum intransigency’. Both are true, but amount to blaming today’s weather on ‘the weather’ — a finer tautology could not be found.

The resulting absence of a common front of decisive action on problems like Darfur or Rwanda is not justifiably glossed as ‘the failure of the UN’, as many would have it. It is simply the working reality of multilateral bodies where state interests dominate the agenda exactly as they do in the world of bilateral interaction between sovereign states. States act the same way alone as when they are in a team huddle; that is, they protect themselves and their friends of the moment. If we want UNSC member states to act differently, i.e., with greater common concern for problems like Darfur, someone needs to invent an entirely new basis on which states interact.

More here.

Marc D. Hauser in American Scientist:

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell once said that “it must have required many ages to discover that a brace of pheasants and a couple of days were both instances of the number two.” That discovery, however, was made not by the brace of pheasants, but the philosopher himself, presumably as an adult human being. And what of the pheasants? Are they capable of understanding that as a pair they represent the number two?

Birding wisdom holds that to watch most birds without disturbing them, it is best to hide behind a blind. If the bird sees you enter, however, you’re not much better off because it is now aware of the blind. One way around this problem is for two people to enter the blind together. Some time later, one person leaves and the bird, apparently assuming the coast is clear, goes back to business as usual. Why? Because most birds observed in this situation are incapable of computing a simple subtraction: 2 – 1 = 1!

It would seem that, if birds are any indication, animals are far from the most astute of mathematicians. But…

More here.

One way to remember Naguib Mahfouz, I thought, would be to resurrect this 2001 piece about him by another much-missed Arab intellectual, Edward W. Said. This is from The Nation:

Before he won the Nobel Prize in 1988, Naguib Mahfouz was known outside the Arab world to students of Arab or Middle Eastern studies largely as the author of picturesque stories about lower-middle-class Cairo life. In 1980 I tried to interest a New York publisher, who was then looking for “Third World” books to publish, in putting out several of the great writer’s works in first-rate translations, but after a little reflection the idea was turned down. When I inquired why, I was told (with no detectable irony) that Arabic was a controversial language.

A few years later I had an amiable and, from my point of view, encouraging correspondence about him with Jacqueline Onassis, who was trying to decide whether to take him on; she then became one of the people responsible for bringing Mahfouz to Doubleday, which is where he now resides, albeit still in rather spotty versions that dribble out without much fanfare or notice. Rights to his English translations are held by the American University in Cairo Press, so poor Mahfouz, who seems to have sold them off without expecting that he would someday be a world- famous author, has no say in what has obviously been an unliterary, largely commercial enterprise without much artistic or linguistic coherence.

More here.

James Traub in the New York Times Magazine:

In Late July, as the United Nations Security Council argued long into the night over the wording of a so-called presidential statement castigating Israel for the bombing attack that killed four U.N. observers in southern Lebanon, Wang Guangya, the Chinese ambassador, blew his stack. This was almost unprecedented: Wang, a veteran diplomat, typically comports himself with unnerving calm. But one of the four fatalities had been Chinese, and Wang had grown increasingly frustrated with the refusal of the United States to condemn Israel outright for the bombing. Worse still, the United States was represented not by Ambassador John Bolton but by a junior diplomat, a breach of etiquette that Wang apparently took to be a calculated insult.

Without naming any countries — he lost his temper, not his grip — Wang lashed out at “a tyranny of the minority in the council” and vowed that there would be “implications for future discussions” on other subjects.

More here.

Lakshmi Sandhana in Wired News:

What if buildings could function like living systems, altering their shapes in response to changing weather conditions or the way people use them?

That’s the vision of a new breed of architects who are working on what they think is the future of architecture — “responsive structures” that observe their internal and external environment and change form to suit any situation…

At the Office for Robotic Architectural Media & The Bureau for Responsive Architecture, Tristan d’Estree Sterk is working on shape-changing “building envelopes” using “actuated tensegrity” structures — a system of rods and wires manipulated by pneumatic “muscles” that serve as the building’s skeleton, forming the framework of all its walls.

By connecting the skeleton to embedded, intelligent systems, Sterk is creating smart structures that are light, extremely robust and capable of making extensive shape changes without consuming a lot of energy.

More here.

Hazel Rowley in The Nation:

At least 12 million people from Africa were loaded into slave ships and transported to the Americas. How do people of African descent, scattered around the world, see their relationship to their ancestral home? Do they consider themselves “the African diaspora”? If their African heritage dates back several generations, is it “nebulous atavistic yearnings,” as the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen once said, to search for their roots, to want some kind of bond with their ancestral homeland? Or is it important, in a neocolonial and still-racist world, that Africans and people of African descent see themselves as part of a transnational community? After all, the ancestors in question did not choose to leave their homeland; they arrived in the Americas in chains, and from the time they landed they were divided and dispersed, as a strategy of domination. And even though slavery has ended, people of African descent still wear its imprint on their skin, like a tattoo. Out of slavery came an ideology of racism that permeates the Western world to this day. Given the black collective memory of slavery, it is easy to understand the emotional tug of the ancestral land, the longing for Pan-African brotherhood and the desire for a community that is not racist. The trouble is, as these three books all show, Afro-diasporic solidarity is complex, and often fraught.

More here.

“A glittering insight into hostile faiths”

Murrough O’Brian reviews the new book by Stephen O’Shea, in The Independent:

In one of his tales, the writer Ivo Andric, Catholic Serb in Muslim-dominated Bosnia, asserts that most great conflicts begin in the struggle between older and younger brothers. In The Sea of Faith, Stephen O’Shea finds a metaphor for Muslim/Christian relations in “two sons struggling over the inheritance”; the father being Judaism. And that insight – a convincing one – is just the start. In concentrating his attention on the medieval maritime phase of this grand contention, O’Shea reminds us that it was a characteristically Mediterrean conflict, its violent squalls alternating with benign discussion in the shade of an olive tree.

This seemingly cosmetic shift of perspective has vast ramifications: you stop thinking of Muslim and Christian states, even of spheres of influence, since these shift all over the place. Every page carries a glittering freight of insight, detail and sometimes caustic observation. The breadth of research is intimidating, but the author tells his story with an engaging blend of swagger and sensitivity. You are caught up by this vast wave of learning, but never cast down.

O’Shea has walked the walk, quite literally. He has visited the battlefields on foot, and relays to the reader the very different fashions in which they have been commemorated.

More here.  And other reviews here and here.  [Thanks to Sughra Raza.]

From The Washington Post:

In one of her bracing essays about writing, Flannery O’Connor says, “There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift.” It is no secret that Alice McDermott, winner of the 1998 National Book Award for Charming Billy, is a writer of many talents, but to read her new novel, After This , is to be reminded how rare her gifts are.

McDermott country is Long Island, 1940 to the present, and her people Irish Catholics: parents, spinster aunts, alcoholic relatives and always observant children who must grow beyond the safe-keeping of their parents. In After This , McDermott continues to pose her perennial questions: Does the lie that is faith, that is romance, that is poetry, make ordinary life better or worse? How best can a person survive disappointments, sorrows and also blessings day after day? How do we preserve our love for the dead when we can obtain only a limited amount of solace from telling stories about them?

More here.

From Nature:

Why not buy some land on the Moon? There seems to be plenty available on the Internet, including plots going at a bargain £14.25 per acre (plus tax and fees) from the Lunar Embassy, the company selling the ‘property’ of American entrepreneur Dennis Hope, who infamously claimed practically all of the Solar System in 1980 because no one else had.

No one has officially recognized that Hope’s lunar ‘deeds’ are anything more than novelty gifts. But more than 2 million have been sold since the 1980s, says the company, generating sales of millions of dollars out of empty space, leaving experts to wonder whether the commercial opportunities on the Moon might someday lead to real sales; and to suggest that perhaps they should.

More here.

A Shakespearean monologue delivered mid-blow job. A robber baron channeling spirits. Period detail as studied as dissertation endnotes. A tangled thicket of baroque and blue dialogue. How does HBO’s Deadwood—TV’s finest ensemble drama, which concluded its third and final regular season on Sunday—get away with this stuff? Concealed well behind the camera, Deadwood’s signal performance has been the single-minded creative control of series creator, writer, and executive producer David Milch. Deadwood’s two DVD box sets, packed with Milch sit-downs, asides, and voice-overs, shine a new light on the scope of his ringmaster talents. The DVDs reveal the Milch persona, a throwback figure familiar to English-degree-holders everywhere: the male literary intellectual as hipster shaman. A former Yale and Iowa English lecturer, Milch dresses up his auteurlike compulsiveness with a professorial bearing and impressive erudition, a pose that allows him to effectively advance his idiosyncratic vision for the series. He gets what he wants by keeping the line between perfectionism and egghead narcissism deliciously vague.

more from Slate here.

Poetry in this country is ready for something new. We are at the start of a century, and that, in the past, has marked new beginnings for the art. Pound and Eliot launched Modernism in the opening years of the twentieth century, in the pages of this magazine. And in the opening years of the nineteenth, 1802 to be exact, Wordsworth launched poetry’s Romantic era with the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. (The centennial calendar does not go further back. The early years of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not mark new departures for English poetry. And American poetry found its true beginnings in Whitman and Dickinson, who did their writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, not at either end.)

But it’s not really a matter of calendar. American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now.

more from Poetry Magazine here.

The N + 7 constraint, invented by Jean Lescure, consists in replacing every noun (proper nouns excluded) in a given text with the seventh following noun in a dictionary of your choice.[1] It is usually performed on pre-existing works, often famous ones—a Shakespearean soliloquy or a paragraph of Proust’s—in which case it serves as a fine example of “analytical Oulipism,” i.e., a constraint used not to structure a new work, but better to understand the structure of an old one. In the case above, I generated a text myself, on which I performed the N + 7 operation using the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th edition. If all of this seems a bit much—i.e., tiresome or ridiculous—we should consider more run-of-the-mill Oulipian constraints.

Among such forms, the sonnet lies perhaps closest to the collective Oulipian heart. The sonnet’s structure—fourteen lines, with various regional particulars of meter and rhyme in French, in English, and in Italian—is almost aggressively arbitrary, and so its central place in the histories of several national literatures puts the lie to the notion that working with constraints is an amiable diversion from the real project of literature. In fact, the Oulipo owes its birth to a series of sonnets—100,000,000,000,000 of them, to be precise: Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliard de poèmes consists of ten sonnets, all identical in rhyme scheme and grammatical structure, such that each first line may be replaced by any other first line in the series, each second by any second, and so on.

more from The Believer here.

IMAGINE AN ART EXHIBITION called “Modernism” focusing on the years 1914 to 1939. Sounds unlikely, doesn’t it? We think of artistic modernism as having had two great expansive phases: the first leading from Cézanne through Cubism to the birth of abstraction in the Netherlands and Russia but soon eclipsed—in the West by the postwar “return to order,” in Russia by the political changes wrought by Lenin’s death in 1924 (though the complete triumph of socialist realism would only come a decade later)—and the second, very different phase, commencing after World War II with the Abstract Expressionists and centered as much on the United States as on Europe. Not that this modernism did not undergo compelling developments in the ’20s and ’30s, far from it, but those difficult and embattled years would certainly not be the ones an overview of the movement would take as its focus.

All the more fascinating, then, for an observer schooled in art more than in design to be reminded that, in the latter field, the interwar period might be considered modernism’s heyday.

more from artforum here.

From Harvard Magazine:

There will be no need of great national armies,” Edwin Ginn declaimed in 1901, once an international force controlled by a league of nations exists to put down aggressions. Nations would then be prepared to submit disputes to an international court, disarmament would follow, and peace prevail. Ginn admitted that such a force would be costly, but said, “[W]e spend hundreds of millions a year for war: can we afford to spend one million for peace?”

This “large-hearted, broad-minded” businessman was a self-made textbook publisher who emerged from hardscrabble Universalist-influenced surroundings in Downeast Maine to attend Tufts College and eventually become one of Boston’s corporate stars and one of America’s leading world-peace adherents. Ginn believed “expert, specialized knowledge—was somehow power.”

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Two of 17 people with advanced melanoma—a deadly form of skin cancer—who underwent experimental treatment with the engineered immune cells saw their tumors shrivel. A year and a half after therapy began, the two patients were declared free of the disease. “This is the first example of an effective gene therapy that works in cancer patients,” said Steven Rosenberg, chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and leader of the research team.

The therapy has so far been applied only to melanoma patients. But the researchers are optimistic that their treatment can be used for many other types of cancer. The team has already engineered similar immune cells for more common tumors, such as breast, lung, and liver cancers.

More here.

China finds German workmanship shoddy after the Maglev fire, in The People’s Daily (China). (And why are battery cells catching fire everywhere?)

If China didn’t develop her Maglev technology, if the German Maglev train had not caught fire, how would the Sino-German Maglev project have resulted? Since the Maglev fire in Shanghai on August 11th, the train has remained there unmoved. By August 18th, the train was repaired then moved on to a maintenance station. The next day, Shanghai Maglev Development Company said that they had preliminarily examined the cause of the fire to be the battery cell provided by Germany. A Chinese expert working in the German Maglev project believed the reason for the fire to be the Shanghai climate since it is more humid there than in Germany. The battery cell has never caused a fire in Germany before. The accident where the Shanghai Maglev cable end was burned in 2003 was also attributed to the Shanghai’s humid weather and bad air quality.

When the accident took place two weeks ago, the German spokesman declared that the first step of investigation was focusing on the improper use of the battery cell. However they have not yet been able to draw any conclusions still. Three days later, the spokesman found the cause of the fire to be the battery cell.

“Why has Germany delayed the announcement about the cause of the fire? It may be more beneficial for them to do so.” A Chinese scientist who is working in the German transportation sector told reporter. “Now it is time for the Hu-Hang(Shanghai-Hangzhou) Maglev project to be completed, Germany is using a delaying strategy.”

In the LRB, Zizek on Jerusalem.

If there ever was a passionate attachment to the lost object, a refusal to come to terms with its loss, it is the attachment of Israelis and many diaspora Jews to the ‘Holy Land’ and above all to Jerusalem. The present troubles are supreme proof of the consequences of such a radical fidelity, when taken literally. For almost two thousand years, when the Jews were fundamentally a nation without land, living in exile, their reference to Jerusalem was a negative one, a prohibition against ‘painting an image of home’ or indeed against feeling at home anywhere on earth. Once the return to Palestine began a century ago, the metaphysical Other Place was identified with a specific place on the map and became the object of a positive identification, the place where the wandering which characterises human existence would end. The identification, negative and positive by turns, had always involved a dream of settlement. When a two-thousand-year-old dream is finally close to realisation, such realisation has to turn into a nightmare.

Brecht’s joke a propos the East Berlin workers’ uprising in 1953 – ‘The Party is not satisfied with its people, so it will replace them with a people more supportive of its politics’ – is suggestive of the way Israelis regard the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza. That Israelis, descendants of exemplary victims, should be considering a thorough ethnic cleansing – or ‘transfer’ – of the Palestinians from the West Bank is the ultimate historical irony.

What would be a proper imaginative act in the Middle East today? For Israelis and Arabs, it would involve giving up political control of Jerusalem, agreeing that the Old Town should become a city without a state, a place of worship, neither a part of Israel nor of a putative Palestine, administered for the time being by an international force.