Since it appears to be poetry day and since Azra has posted a review of Cartledge’s Thermopylae, I’ve decided to mesh the two. Translated by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard:

Honor to those who in the life they lead
define and guard a Thermopylae.
Never betraying what is right,
consistent and just in all they do
but showing pity also, and compassion;
generous when they’re rich, and when they’re poor,
still generous in small ways,
still helping as much as they can;
always speaking the truth,
yet without hating those who lie.
And even more honor is due to them
when they foresee (as many do foresee)
that Ephialtis will turn up in the end,
that the Medes will break through after all.

Jasper Griffin in The New York Review of Books:

The early history of Europe is a history of constant invasions from the East. The peoples which think of themselves nowadays as quintessentially European — the French, the Germans, the Anglo-Saxons — all came into what we now call Europe, originally, from what we now call Asia. It was only later that invasion and conquest began to move in the opposite direction, and that Europe, an increasingly precocious and disrespectful heir to the ancient civilizations of Asia, began to march eastward, and to conquer the progenitors of its own upstart culture.

The rise of Greece, in this perspective, was made easier — perhaps was made possible altogether — by a rare intermission in the succession of great powers which usually dominated what we now call the Middle East. The polis, the city-state, the typical form of Greek society in the classical period, grew up in the position, a rare and privileged one, of freedom from the immediate shadow of an overwhelming power. Such empires, like that of Assyria, were based somewhere further east than Hellas. A power of that kind would inevitably, sooner or later, invade and conquer the Greek cities of Asia Minor, where philosophy and the scientific attitude were beginning to take their first tentative root. As it was, the eastern Greeks encountered, in the sixth century BCE, only the rather well disposed and Hellenophile kingdom of Lydia, based in what is now northwestern Turkey, and surprisingly open to Greek art and to Greek cultural influences.

More here.

Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:

“Gravity,” goes the slogan on posters and bumper stickers. “It isn’t just a good idea. It’s the law.” And what a law. Unlike, say, traffic or drug laws, you don’t have a choice about obeying gravity or any of the other laws of physics. Jump and you will come back down. Faith or good intentions have nothing to do with it. Existence didn’t have to be that way, as Einstein reminded us when he said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” Against all the odds, we can send e-mail to Sri Lanka, thread spacecraft through the rings of Saturn, take a pill to chase the inky tendrils of depression, bake a turkey or a soufflé and bury a jump shot from the corner.

Yes, it’s a lawful universe. But what kind of laws are these, anyway, that might be inscribed on a T-shirt but apparently not on any stone tablet that we have ever been able to find? Are they merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world? Do they govern nature or just describe it? And does it matter that we don’t know and that most scientists don’t seem to know or care where they come from? Apparently it does matter, judging from the reaction to a recent article by Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University and author of popular science books, on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.

More here.

On a rainy October night in Washington, D.C., the friends and family of Jeremy Blake gathered for a private memorial service at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Blake, an art-world star acclaimed for his lush and moody “moving paintings,” shape-shifting innovations mixing abstract painting and digital film, had ended his life on the night of July 17, walking into the Atlantic Ocean off Rockaway Beach, Queens, never to return.

“I am going to join the lovely Theresa,” Blake, 35, had written on the back of a business card, which he left on the beach, along with his clothes. Police helicopters searched for him for days on the chance he might still be alive. Friends prayed that he was, talking of how his passport was missing, he had bought a ticket to Germany. Then on July 22, a fisherman found his body floating 4.5 miles off Sea Girt, New Jersey.

“The lovely Theresa” was Theresa Duncan, a writer, filmmaker, computer-game creator, and Blake’s girlfriend of 12 years. He had found her lifeless body on July 10, in the rectory of St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan’s East Village, where the couple had been renting an apartment. There was a bowl full of Benadryl pills, a bottle of Tylenol PM, and a champagne glass on the nightstand. There was a note saying, “I love all of you.” Duncan was 40. The last post on her blog, “The Wit of the Staircase,” was a quote from author Reynolds Price about the human need for storytelling and the impossibility of surviving in silence.

more from Vanity Fair here.

There are people who think of J. M. Coetzee as a cold writer, and he might agree, or pretend to agree. “If he were a warmer person he would no doubt find it all easier: life, love, poetry,” he writes of himself in his memoir “Youth.” “But warmth is not in his nature.” The protagonist of Coetzee’s new novel, “Diary of a Bad Year” (Viking; $24.95), is, like his creator, an aging South African novelist resident in Australia, who muses at one moment that his father surely thought him a selfish child “who has turned into a cold man.” His art, he laments, is “not great-souled.” It lacks “generosity, fails to celebrate life, lacks love.”

Yet this is the cold air just beyond the reach of a fire. Coetzee’s chaste, exact, ashen prose may look like the very embers of restraint, but it is drawn, again and again, to passionate extremity: an uneducated gardener forced to live like an animal off the South African earth (“Life & Times of Michael K”); a white woman dying of cancer while a black township burns, and writing, in her last days, a letter of brutal truths to her daughter (“Age of Iron”); a white woman raped on her farm by a gang of black men, and impregnated (“Disgrace”); a recent amputee, the victim of a road accident that mangled a leg, helpless in his Adelaide apartment, and awkwardly in love with his Croatian nurse (“Slow Man”). Coetzee seems compelled to test his celebrated restraint against subjects and ideas whose extremity challenges novelistic representation.

more from The New Yorker here.

Torture isn’t an alien force invading our democracy from the benighted realms of dictatorships. In fact, it is the democracies that have been the real innovators in 20th-century torture. Britain, France, and the United States were perfecting new forms of torture long before the CIA even existed. It might make Americans uncomfortable, but the modern repertoire of torture is mainly a democratic innovation.

In one instance after another, democracies developed new torture techniques, refined them, and then exported them to more authoritarian regimes. Americans didn’t just develop electric power; they invented the first electrotorture devices and used them in police stations from Arkansas to Seattle. Magneto torture, a technique favored by the Nazis involving a portable generator, was actually developed and spread by the French. Waterboarding and forced standing owe their wide use to the Americans and British.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

PD Smith in Kafka’s mouse:

One of the most significant cultural events of 2007 was undoubtedly The Simpsons Movie. The contribution of Homer Jay Simpson (aka the “Wizard of Evergreen Terrace”) to science is often sadly overlooked. Physicist Stephen Hawking is a great fan of the TV show and has appeared twice. He knows a good scientific idea when he sees one and Homer’s theory that the universe is shaped like a donut made an immediate impression: “intriguing….I may have to steal it.” This as well as many other weird and wonderful scientific moments in the series – such as what processes could produce Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish and do toilets in the northern and southern hemispheres really swirl in opposite directions (as Lisa claims in “Bart vs Australia”) – are explained in What’s Science Ever Done for Us? What The Simpsons can teach us about Physics, Robots, Life, and the Universe, by Paul Halpern. A delightful book; as Montgomery Burns might say: “Exx-cellent!”

More here.

A strange new family of algorithms probes the boundary between easy and hard problems.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Why are some computational problems so hard and others easy? This may sound like a childish, whining question, to be dismissed with a shrug or a wisecrack, but if you dress it up in the fancy jargon of computational complexity theory, it becomes quite a serious and grownup question: Is P equal to NP? An answer—accompanied by a proof—will get you a million bucks from the Clay Mathematics Institute.

I’ll return in a moment to P and NP, but first an example, which offers a glimpse of the mystery lurking beneath the surface of hard and easy problems. Consider a mathematical graph, a collection of vertices (represented by dots) and edges (lines that connect the dots). Here’s a nicely symmetrical example:

Is it possible to construct a path that traverses each edge exactly once and returns to the starting point? For any graph with a finite number of edges, we could answer such a question by brute force: Simply list all possible paths and check to see whether any of them meet the stated conditions. But there’s a better way. In 1736 Leonhard Euler proved that the desired path (now called an Eulerian circuit) exists if and only if every vertex is the end point of an even number of edges. We can check whether a graph has this property without any laborious enumeration of pathways.

Now take the same graph and ask a slightly different question: Is there a circuit that passes through every vertex exactly once? This problem was posed in 1858 by William Rowan Hamilton, and the path is called a Hamiltonian circuit. Again we can get the answer by brute force. But in this case there is no trick like Euler’s; no one knows any method that gives the correct answer for all graphs and does so substantially quicker than exhaustive search. Superficially, the two problems look almost identical, but Hamilton’s version is far harder. Why? Is it because no shortcut solution exists, or have we not yet been clever enough to find one?

More here.

Faraz is the greatest living Urdu poet. This is for Choti:

Douglas Goetsch in The American Scholar:

In July of 2006, I received an e-mail from Richard K. Weems, who directs the creative writing division of the New Jersey Governor’s School of the Arts. He had hired me to teach poetry to a group of gifted high school students later that month, and he wanted to know if I was interested in conducting a “Drive-by poetry” field trip, which is what past teachers had done.

Drive-by poetry, as Rich described it, entails loading the students into a van, cruising around a commercial area in Trenton, and pulling over near targeted pedestrians. One of the students sticks his or her head out the passenger window and serenades — or accosts — the startled pedestrian with some passionately recited lines by Walt Whitman or Pablo Neruda. The kid pops back in, rolls up the window, and the van takes off in search of the next victim.

More here.

Bharti Kher. The Skin Speaks a Language Not its Own. 2006.

Bindis on fiberglass.

More on this talented young artist here and here.

Thanks to Anjuli Kolb.

In The Smart Set, Morgan continues on the Art Basel Miami Beach, and finds solace in consumption:

Clement Greenberg is the brilliant and extreme case. He once wrote:

“Value judgments constitute the substance of aesthetic experience. I don’t want to argue this assertion. I point to it as a fact, the fact that identifies the presence, the reality in experience of the aesthetic. I don’t want to argue, either, about the nature of aesthetic value judgments. They are acts of intuition, and intuition remains unanalyzable.”

I don’t want to argue either. It is a beautiful night in South Beach and there is a man standing on a balcony not far from me exclaiming loudly, slowly, and with labored enunciation, “I am an exceptional artist” to any and everyone standing in the sudden tropical downpour below. Earlier today a man explained to me that he collects old giant objects. Not new giant objects, not old regular-sized objects. He collects old giant objects and he has been doing it obsessively for longer than I have been alive. So, agreed, I’m in no mood to argue about the substance of aesthetic experience. I would like to point out one thing though.

If Clement Greenberg is right than it shouldn’t — it couldn’t — matter whether we’re looking at a work in a museum, in a gallery, in someone’s home, or at an art fair. Intuition is going to do the mysterious work it does and no one’s going to damn well stop it. “Show me a work,” suggests Clem, “and I’ll view it and judge it practically before you even set the sucker down.” This is a site-indifferent approach to the process of looking at art. I suspect you could throw paintings at Clement Greenberg while he was standing at the bottom of a gorge and he would have been satisfied that he’d done most of them justice in the next week’s column. I exaggerate for effect.

But if my Aunt Lou Ann is right, and she has never steered me wrong, then we have to be prepared for the idea that art is not the selfsame thing in all cases that Clement Greenberg (and most of the rest of us, though in less stubborn and precise manner) assume it to be. Point being that if I glance suddenly at an Anselm Kiefer painting in a booth at Art Basel, I’m going to look at it slightly differently if I have an eye toward things I might acquire than if I intend to write an article, or borrow something for a museum show.

Via Andrew Sullivan, the paper cut sculptures of Jen Stark, in PingMag (Japan):

Look at these intriguing, repetitive shapes like eruptions by Miami-based Jen Stark: Her three-dimensional, kaleidoscopic paper art is simply hand-made with dozens of layers of thick coloured paper. With her abstract geometrical patterns just shown in the new Tactile book, PingMag feeds you an interview with the artist about the quality of cardboard.

When did you start with your… can I call it kaleidoscope paper art?

I began making paper sculptures when I went to study in France for a semester. Since I could only take two suitcases with me for five months, I decided to purchase art supplies when I got there. The Euro was high and everything was pretty expensive, so I decided to get the cheapest but coolest looking thing in the art store – a stack of construction paper! I started experimenting with what paper could turn into and it took off from there.

What is truly worrying is not simply the number of failed democracies. It is rather the extensive misuse of democratic institutions, symbols, and practices. Thus, presidential elections become an opportunity to propel to power an unstable demagogue (Venezuela) and parliamentary elections an opportunity for the business oligarchy to buy political influence (Ukraine). From Thailand to Bolivia, from Russia to the Gaza Strip, democracy everywhere has been perverted beyond recognition; often, demagogues do not even that pretend theirs is the “Western” variant of democracy. Francis Fukuyama’s contention that we are witnessing the final triumph of “liberal democracy” sounds increasingly shallow. The perception of the classical authors is probably truer. Free states are precious few, beacons of light in the dark and boundless ocean of despotism.

more from Eurozine here.

In other words, McEwan’s fiction has sometimes felt artificial. It should be said, in his favor, that most contemporary novelists feel artificial because they are not competent enough to tell a convincing or interesting story; it is a peculiar excess of proficiency and talent, like McEwan’s–or like Robert Stone’s, W. Somerset Maugham’s, or Graham Greene’s–that produces a fiction so competently told that it also feels artificial. Still, one has tended to read McEwan with the sense that he is beautifully constructing and managing various hypothetical situations rather than freely following and grasping at a great truth. (That this latter mode is also an artifice is only a banal paradox.) In particular, McEwan’s characters, while never less than interesting, lively, and sometimes interestingly weird, have tended not to be quite human. Many of them have neither pasts nor futures, but are frozen in the threatening present. Many of them have parents who died when they were young. They rarely refer to their childhoods, and seem not to have the use of deep memory as such. McEwan, unlike most writers, has not seemed to need any kitty of childhood detail on which to draw. This absence of past stories, of loitering retrospect, allows him to polish the clean lines of his stories. Since his writing rarely dips into the reflective past, it can exist the better as pure novelty. This is the key to McEwan’s extraordinary narrative stealth. His fictions, like detective stories, are always moving forward. They seem to shed their sentences rather than to accumulate them.

more from TNR here.

This is a love letter. To a love song. One I keep returning to. One I keep feeling I need to do justice to. I don’t know if I can, but I’ll try.

A couple of months ago, I’d gone back to playing it. Only I can’t play it just once. I have to play it over and over again for hours on end. I can’t get enough of it. It’s not just a love song: It’s a road song, it’s a motel song, it’s a Southwestern desert song, it’s a disappearance and death song. It’s a Joni Mitchell song. It’s “Amelia.”

People get that way about Joni Mitchell songs. Bob Dylan once told me that he’d written “Tangled up in Blue,” the opening song of the much-celebrated Blood on the Tracks, after spending a weekend immersed in JM’s Blue (although I think he may have been talking about the whole album, not just the song).

more from Slate here.

Via NoUtopia:

Trust
Thomas R. Smith

It’s like so many other things in life
to which you must say no or yes.
So you take your car to the new mechanic.
Sometimes the best thing to do is trust.

The package left with the disreputable-looking
clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit,
the envelope passed by dozens of strangers–
all show up at their intended destinations.
The theft that could have happened doesn’t.

Wind finally gets where it was going
through the snowy trees, and the river, even
when frozen, arrives at the right place.

And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life
is delivered, even though you can’t read the address.

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

Fareed Zakaria deserves a medal for breaking with the mainstream media pack to slap down, with the requisite rudeness, the hysteria over Iran being manufactured by the neocons, opportunist Israeli politicians and the Bush Administration. Perhaps stung by having participated in a secret Bush Administration policy discussion to help shape the Iraq war policy before the invasion, Zakaria is acting with honor now to prevent another disaster. This while much of the rest of the media is futzing around asking the wrong questions on Iran and getting the answers that only the wrong questions can produce. Exhibit A: The Washington Post editorial suggesting that the only “alternative” to harsh new sanctions that most of the international community opposes is war, and then scolding “those who say they oppose military action — including a couple of the second-tier Democratic presidential candidates — to portray the sanctions initiative as a buildup to war by Mr. Bush. We’ve seen no evidence that the president has decided on war, and it’s clear that many senior administration officials understand the package as the best way to avoid military action. It is not they but those who oppose tougher sanctions who make war with Iran more likely.”

More here.

Robin Givhan in The Washington Post:

It’s impossible not to be charmed by the two boys who star in the film, which opened Friday and is based on the best-selling book about friendship, betrayal and guilt. Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada and Zekeria Ebrahimi have faces far more expressive and eloquent than any of the dialogue they recite. In particular, Ahmad Khan, who plays Hassan, has a face of such exquisite soulfulness that it’s almost too much to bear. It takes approximately five seconds to fall in love with him.

Because the boys’ story is set in Afghanistan in the 1970s, both speak entirely in Dari. There are English subtitles, but the young actors’ facial expressions are especially important in the telling of their story. English-speaking audiences don’t have the benefit of subtle vocal intonations to help them connect with the characters. But they do have American popular culture. It’s there from the moment Zekeria, who plays the privileged young Amir, appears on-screen. He’s wearing a striped sweater and ski vest and looks as though he has stepped from the pages of any class photo from middle America. The boys are obsessed with “The Magnificent Seven” and its stars, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson. They’ve seen the movie so many times that they can quote dialogue. And the streets of their home town are filled with Western tourists; bohemians and hippies wander through the market. There’s nothing terribly obvious or heavy-handed in the way American popular culture is portrayed. It’s simply an undeniable part of their daily life.

More here.

Tad Safran in The Times:

In the iconic chick-flick Bridget Jones’s Diary, the title character is a sad, lonely, overweight, posh-sounding chain-smoker in her thirties with a drinking problem and no dating prospects. She then, one day, goes to the gym for an hour or two, spends £200 at Topshop, reads a self-help book and, lo and behold, she finds herself in the delightful position of having to decide between Hugh Grant and Colin Firth.

Women of Britain: Bridget Jones’s Diary is not a documentary. It’s a work of fiction, a fairytale. The fact is that control-top granny pants are simply not a substitute for regular exercise, thoughtful grooming and a healthy diet. Certainly not if you’re single and interested in men. An informal poll of my US female friends revealed that they spend roughly $700 (£350) a month on what they consider standard obligatory beauty maintenance. That covers haircut, highlights, manicure, pedicure, waxing, tanning, make-up, facials, teeth whitening etc. They will spend a further $1,000 (£500) a month on physical conditioning such as military fitness, spinning sessions, vikram yoga, Pilates, deep-tissue sports massage, personal training etc. On top of that, add the occasional spa day, a week-long “bikini boot camp” in Mexico at the start of every summer and seasonal splurges on personal shoppers and clothing. I’m not sure any of my British female friends spends £700 during an entire year on her appearance. American women see these costs as a simple and sensible investment in their future.

More here.