Jeffrey J. Williams in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Literary theorists, and probably other scholars, might be divided into two types: settlers and wanderers. The settlers stay put, “hovering one inch” over a set of issues or topics, as Paul de Man, the most influential theorist of the 1970s, remarked in an interview. Their work, through the course of their careers, claims ownership of a specific intellectual turf. The wanderers are more restless, starting with one approach or field but leaving it behind for the next foray. Their work takes the shape of serial engagements, more oriented toward climatic currents. The distinction is not between expert and generalist, or, in Isaiah Berlin’s distinction, between knowing one thing like a hedgehog and knowing many things like a fox; it is a different application of expertise.

Stanley Fish, for instance, might seem a protean public commentator, but he has actually “hawked the same wares,” as he once put it, returning to certain issues of interpretation as well as to the texts of John Milton over the course of his career. J. Hillis Miller, on the other hand, has morphed over a long career from a traditional commentator on Dickens and 19th-century British literature to phenomenological readings of modernist poets and novelists, then shifted again to become the primary American proponent of deconstruction, and more recently has taken on the role of defender of the humanities, ethics, and the future of literary studies.

While the difference between the two types might seem a conscious choice, it is probably more an expression of disposition. Settlers gravitate toward consistency, stability, and depth, looking for different facets of the same terrain, whereas wanderers are pulled toward the new and the next, finding the facets that motivate them in different terrain. It is perhaps a relation to time: Settlers are drawn to Parmenidean sameness, wanderers to the Heraclitean flux.

Terry Eagleton has been a quintessential wanderer.

More here.

William K. Purvez in Scientific American:

Spider silk is not a single, unique material–different species produce various kinds of silk. Some possess as many as seven distinct kinds of glands, each of which produces a different silk.

Why so many kinds of silk? Each kind plays particular roles. All spiders make so-called dragline silk that functions in part as a lifeline, enabling the creatures to hang from ceilings. And it serves as a constant connection to the web, facilitating quick escapes from danger. Dragline silk also forms the radial spokes of the web; bridgeline silk is the first strand, by which the web hangs from its support; yet another silk forms the great spiral.

The different silks have unique physical properties such as strength, toughness and elasticity, but all are very strong compared to other natural and synthetic materials. Dragline silk combines toughness and strength to an extraordinary degree. A dragline strand is several times stronger than steel, on a weight-for-weight basis, but a spider’s dragline is only about one-tenth the diameter of a human hair. The movie Spider-Man drastically underestimates the strength of silk—real dragline silk would not need to be nearly as thick as the strands deployed by our web-swinging hero in the movie.

More here.

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was “the painter of the painters”, declared Édouard Manet – but he was much more than that. The days when artists played a leading role in national or international politics are long gone (what does this say about the cliquey introspection of today’s art world?), but while Velázquez’s work is justly celebrated for its aesthetic achievements, far less well known is the role he played in articulating the political imperatives of his masters.

The work has become divorced from its poli tical context largely because it is so seductive as art. The breathtaking ease of the brushwork, the huge but seemingly effortless restraint with which Velázquez controlled his colour palette and pictorial composition, the sheer facility of draughtsmanship: all are amply demonstrated at a forthcoming exhibition at the National Gallery in London – amazingly, the first ever monograph show in the UK of Velázquez’s work.

more from The New Statesman here.

Trevelyan, like Michelet and like Hume, was not afraid to display and manipulate feeling, to conjure and to care. Today’s popular historians must write self-consciously, carefully and with respect for the sensibilities of their subjects; but they can be confident about writing within this tradition, writing with feeling, and about it. There are dangers in too great an identification between author and subject, which can lead to a mapping of modern sensibilities and narratives of life onto the past. But in the best hands, what I’d like to call “emotional history” can combine an original authorial voice, literary awareness and an unashamed quality of love to produce modern popular classics which will last as long as readers find in them something which moves as well as instructs. Emotional history is no less scholarly and no less sophisticated about sources than any other kind. Deducing what someone feels from documentary evidence uses exactly the same techniques as coming to any other sort of conclusion, and since all historical judgements are necessarily partial and subjective, it is equally valid.

more from the TLS here.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that Old Master paintings don’t go anywhere. They stay flat against the wall in their black and gold frames, or pinned like butterflies as reproductions in books. Yet here I am in the National Gallery, watching some of the greatest works of art in the world bounce up and down, dance from one room to the next, shift this way and that, as couriers, handlers, registrars and curators remove gods and monarchs from their packing cases.

Nearly four centuries ago, Diego Velázquez painted the gods of the classical world as if they were real people. He portrayed Mars, god of war, Venus, the goddess who loved him, and Vulcan, her cuckolded husband, as if they were characters in a tragicomic novel, with compassion for their foibles. Perhaps his ability to imagine so acutely the failures of divinities came about because, as painter to the king of Spain, he lived close to the melancholy and ironies of royal existence. His portraits of Philip IV and his minister Olivares, of infantas and dwarves, see a weakness in royal and humble faces alike, a humanity and a pathos that have rightly made Velázquez one of the most honoured of all artists.

more from The Guardian here.

From BBC News:

Scientists working with the conservation group WWF have discovered stunning orchid species in the forests of Papua New Guinea. They say eight are definitely new species, and a further 20-odd may prove to be new to science as well.

The discoveries include the succulent bloom of Cadetia kutubu, named after Lake Kutubu in its home region.

Papua New Guinea is incredibly rich in orchids. Of some 25,000 species known worldwide, 3,000 come from PNG.

More here.

From Nature:

Has anyone ever told you that you have the same expressions as your siblings or parents? You might think you picked that up by hanging around with your family too long. But scientists now say that such family ‘signatures’ may be genetic.

To separate the impact of mimicry from genetic inheritance, scientists at the University of Haifa, Israel, looked at people who were born blind.

The authors note that their blind subjects considered it to be a common public misconception that they can learn expressions by touch. The participants said that without a mental model of what a face looks like, it is hard to translate expressions felt through the hands to expressions on their own face.

Picture: expressions are similar between blind participants (left) and their relatives (right).

More here.

Ruby Chishti. My birth will take place a thousand times no matter how you celebrate it. 2001.

Cast fabric, stitched and stuffed with straw, yarn.

More on this quirky, wonderful Pakistani artist and her work here, here and here.

When Jones writes (in “The Work of Poets”) “Willie Cooper, what are you doing here, this early in your death?” he’s written a perfectly intelligible English sentence and described a perfectly intelligible human sentiment; yet he has also, at the same time, echoed some of the most affecting lines in all of Rilke, from that poet’s “Requiem fur eine Freundlin.” I won’t quote the Rilke, but I will say that, as with all really effective allusions, the predecessor text becomes our algebra, our way out of mere esteem. You feel esteem everywhere in Jones—for phrases (the engine of an old truck hung “from a rafter like a ham”), for cadences (“The hackberry in the sand field will be there long objectifying”), for turns of thought:

My rage began at forty. The unstirred person, the third-
person,
void, the you of accusations and reprisals, visited me.
Many nights we sang together; you don’t even exist.
—From A Defense of Poetry

more from Poetry Magazine here.

In Second Nature, Nobel ­Prize–­winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman proposes what he calls ­“brain-­based epistemology,” which aims at solving the mystery of how we acquire knowledge by grounding it in an understanding of how the brain ­works.

Edelman’s title is, in part, meant “to call attention to the fact that our thoughts often float free of our realistic descriptions of nature,” even as he sets out to explore how the mind and the body interact. He favors the idea that the brain and mind are unified, but has little patience with the claim that the brain is a computer. Fortunately for the general reader, his explanations of brain function are accessible, buttressed by concrete examples and ­metaphors.

more from the Wilson Quarterly here.

Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi, Fridays at 9 p.m. ET), now entering its third season, is not science fiction—or “speculative fiction” or “SF,” or whatever you’re supposed to call it these days. Ignore the fact that the series is a remake of a late-’70s Star Wars knockoff. Forget that its action variously unfolds on starships and on a colonized planet called New Caprica. And never mind its stunning special effects, which outclass the endearingly schlocky stuff found elsewhere on its network. Sullen, complex, and eager to obsess over grand conspiracies and intimate betrayals alike, it is TV noir. Listen to Adm. William Adama (Edward James Olmos) gruffly rumble along as a weary soldier in a crooked universe. Check out the way that Hitchcock kisses lead seamlessly to knives in the gut. Just look at the Venetian blinds.

more from Slate here.

Read the title carefully; then read it again. Just about everything in this marvelous book has been weighed and assessed more than is usual. William Mann doesn’t settle for the obvious, the given, the rubber stamp. And so, it seems to me, we’re being gently guided before the book begins. For if there was a phenomenon, a storm, a force or a myth that would be called “Hepburn” long before her death (and for how long afterwards we do not know), then is it possible that “Kate” was the girl, the woman, the body that bore up under the legend? There’s something rare and frightening about actors and actresses. It amounts to a kind of religious worship in which these figures are experienced, “known” by millions of strangers, “loved” by those who will never meet them, when they—the person inside, the person wearing the name and the legend—may sometimes realize, “Well, there’s not much left for me, is there?” You may remember that Katharine Hepburn called her own book (published in 1991, and emphatically not ghostwritten) Me, as if she had always had the fear of being left out. I can only add that if she’d lived to face Mr. Mann’s book, I think she would have put it down, dry-eyed but full of tears, and admitted, quietly: “me.”

more from the NY Observer here.

From Edge:

Edge was recently in Venice for the 2nd World Conference on the Future of Science which was held on September 20th-23rd 2006, at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the Isle of San Giorgio Maggiore.

Daniel C. Dennett, who took on Cardinal Ratzinger in his book Breaking the Spell, had hoped some day to confront him personally on his own turf, but due to a sudden promotion, Ratzinger was unavailable and sent his deputy, Monsignor Sanchez Sorondo, Chancellor of the Vatican. Dennett, was on his game when he delivered the final talk of the conference on “The Domestication of the Wild Memes of Religion” in front of the packed audience. Later, back at Hotel Monaco and Grand Canal, Dennett, Michael Gazzaniga, the Monsignor, among others, were relaxing around the bar, when a posse of Italian paparazzi suddenly stormed through the bar heading to the dock outside. Two speedboat taxis pulled up and deposited Paris Hilton and her entourage on the dock. In one Fellini moment: end of discussion of natural selection, of Charles Darwin, of the Pope, of Daniel C. Dennett. The Edgies went tabloid for the rest of the evening.

Fortunately for Edge readers, Professor Dennett, who bonded with the paparazzi, was there with his digital camera to capture the moment.

More here. Picture on the left shows Paris Hilton Arriving at Hotel Monaco [photo by Daniel C. Dennett].

From The Hindu:

IN the tribal belt of Orissa, in the infamous Kalahandi district, there is a village, Dasi, where the people live in extreme poverty and deprivation. Hunger and malnutrition are a way of life here, and the future seems bleak. In such conditions, in 2000, the Ma Thakurani Self Help Group was formed by Parivartan, a development organisation working with the poor in Kalahandi for more than a decade. The purpose was to bring poor women together; and to practise credit and thrift activities. In the village lies a bhatti, a parlour for illicit liquor consumption where many men-folk consume alchohol, get drunk, become violent and create havoc.

The Ma Thakurani Self Help Group consists of 13 women. Together, they save, borrow, meet and discuss issues. Together, they make a difference in each other’s lives. One day, after their monthly SHG meeting, the members of the Ma Thakurani SHG group passed by the bhatti. The men as usual were inebriated; they foul mouthed the women, and accused the SHG of ruining the village. The women had already had enough. For 15 years, they had borne the brunt of the drunken men and the bhatti. They decided to do something about this situation in the village; they decided to take charge. They called a Village Committee meeting and expressed that something needed to be done about the bhatti; it had to be shut. They received a lot of support from other villagers, and under pressure, the bhatti owner, committed that he will shut the liquor shop.

The members accepted the challenge, much to the ward official’s surprise and everyone else’s too.

More here.

Ruth Pavey reviews the novel by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Sarah Maguire and Yama Yari, in The Independent:

The novel is set in 1979, a time of reckless political upheaval in Afghanistan just before the Soviet Union’s vain attempt to impose order by invasion. Using a technique of total immersion, Atiq Rahimi plunges the reader straight into the pain and bewilderment of a character thinking in the first person, so wounded by a brutal attack that he hardly knows whether he is awake or asleep, alive or dead, as he lies in a roadside sewer, hearing a child’s voice calling him “Father”. This is a short novel, and the reader is a quarter of the way through before learning that the confused thoughts we are sharing are those of Farhad, an educated young man who has been out drinking with a friend and forgotten the curfew.

More here.

Kevin Purday reviews Why We Love by Helen E. Fisher, in Metapsychology:

This book is an ambitious attempt to map the physiological basis of what we call love. The author is an anthropologist but in this work she cooperates with specialists in several fields, most notably specialists in brain scanning, to try to gain a genuinely comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of love. She is currently a research professor at Rutgers University and is already well known for her books The First Sex, and Anatomy of Love.

The book is a melange of anthropology — stories of falling in love from cultures all over the world, history — numerous historical accounts of love, literature — many quotations about love from poetry and novels, animal biology — analogies between human love and ‘love’ in many different species of animal, and human biology/psychology — in-depth accounts of the physiology and psychology of love. It is a heady mixture.

More here.

Jack Shafer in Slate:

That Michael Bloomberg, who now presides over New York City as mayor, created in a little over two decades a news and information giant worth $5 billion-plus speaks as much to his enterprise as it does to the sloth and myopia of the conventional press. Better than anyone, Bloomberg perceived in the early 1980s an untapped need for instantly transmitted, market-moving news for traders of stocks and bonds. He understood that with new and affordable computer technologies he could leapfrog the old guard at Reuters and Telerate (once owned by the Wall Street Journal‘s parent, Dow Jones). A 10-second advantage over a competitor on a market-moving morsel of data could easily translate into substantial profits. Stock and bond traders rushed to rent the pricey Bloomberg Terminal, which now costs users about $1,425 a month. It not only delivered data but allowed customers to assemble elaborate, software-powered “what-if?” scenarios, and spat out useful analytical charts and graphs. One testament to Bloomberg’s power is that every major American newspaper business page now has a terminal or two doing heavy lifting for its reporters who cover the markets.

More here.

Daniel Mendelsohn reviews Jonathan Franzen’s new collection of essays in the New York Times:

Like the hero of some Greek play, Jonathan Franzen — apparently motivated, as so many tragic characters are, by an excessively lofty sense of himself — caused his moment of greatest triumph to disintegrate into public humiliation. The triumph, of course, was his National Book Award-winning novel, “The Corrections,” an acerbic and often searingly painful dissection of one Midwestern family’s disintegration as its stodgy values were put to the test by the go-go avidity of American culture in the 1990’s. The public humiliation (of course) was the fracas that ensued after Franzen expressed disdain for Oprah Winfrey’s choice of his novel for her book club; as he put it, his work belonged to the “high-art literary tradition,” whereas Oprah’s picks had tended, in his opinion, to be “schmaltzy.” As with Greek heroes, fervid adherence to principle did not come cheap: Oprah’s invitations, it is said, can increase sales of a given book by more than half a million copies.

Unlike Oedipus or Hippolytus, however, Franzen seems to have learned nothing from his fall. Or so you’re forced to conclude after reading “The Discomfort Zone,” an unappetizing new essay collection that makes it only too clear that the weird poles between which the author seemed to oscillate during l’affaire Oprah — a kind of smug cleverness, on the one hand, and a disarming, sometimes misguided candor, on the other; a self-involved and self-regarding precocity and an adolescent failure to grasp the effect of his grandiosity on others — frame not only the career, but the man himself.

More here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Water runs downhill—we all know that. As a rule, it follows the path of steepest descent, seeking out the shortest and fastest route from top to bottom. So how can we make sense of meandering rivers, which wiggle-waggle down the valley, prolonging their journey to the sea and greatly lengthening their course? Why doesn’t the flowing water—acting under the tug of gravity—just carve out a shortcut across all those loops?

I first encountered the mysteries of meanders in an article by Luna B. Leopold and Walter Langbein, published 40 years ago in Scientific American. They gave a lucid account of how meanders form and why they assume their characteristic sinuous shapes. I was a student at the time, and the article made a lasting impression. Not that I was inspired to go off and pursue a career in potamology, but the Leopold-Langbein theory of meanders was an eye-opener all the same. It brought home to me the curious fact that the world is a comprehensible place: You can look at a landform, say, and expect to understand what you see. The patterns of nature make sense, if you know how to read them.

More here.

Noam Scheiber of The New Republic recognizes the problem, arguing that it’s impossible for liberals to invoke the common good whenever it’s convenient and ignore it when it’s not. It would be better for Democrats not to bring the idea up in the first place, he says, rather than go to the voters as the party fervently dedicated to advancing the common good—except when they aren’t. National health insurance, for example, can’t be mandated by the common good if abortion remains solely a question of inviolable privacy rights. But the latter position, clearly, is not open for discussion among liberals. At a recent forum of the liberal Center for American Progress, Rachel Laser, an abortion rights activist, said that 1.3 million abortions in America each year is too many. She reports that when she asked how many people in the room felt the same way, “It was only me and maybe one other who raised our hands.”

Ultimately, a public philosophy based on the common good won’t work unless it can make useful distinctions about what is and isn’t common, and what is and isn’t good. As it stands, common-good liberalism is just case-by-case liberalism on stilts. In the fight between those who say big ideas are indispensable to the resuscitation of liberalism and those who say big ideas are incompatible with the essence of liberalism, the scorecard shows that, so far, both sides are right.

more from Claremont Review here.