TJ Clark’s absorbing book takes the form of a diary and, like all published diaries, it frees the author to write in many genres at once. He began it as a way of simply recording his impressions of two paintings by Poussin, Landscape With a Man Killed by a Snake and Landscape With a Calm, that were hanging facing each other at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles when he was there for what he calls ‘a six-month stint’ in January 2000. He had arrived at the Getty not quite knowing what to do with himself and, after settling in, went ‘in search of several paintings’ in the Getty collection, one of which was Poussin’s Landscape With a Calm – ‘Nothing special was in my mind. I was just looking.’ . . .

It is not incidental that at a time when there is more visual art than ever before, most writing about the visual arts is either mind-numbingly pretentious and cliquey or boringly descriptive and without vision. Clark’s book could not be more timely.

more from The Guardian Unlimited here.

What was her name, her home, her life, her past?” wonders Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau on seeing Mme Arnoux for the first time. “Even the desire for physical possession gave way to a deeper yearning, an aching curiosity which knew no bounds.” Much the same feeling is stirred in the narrator of Mario Vargas Llosa’s new novel Travesuras de la niña mala (“The Bad Girl’s Escapades”) by the woman to whom he consecrates his life. So indefatigably unreliable and elusive will she prove, so resourceful in her self-reinventions, that Ricardo Somocurcio’s curiosity, far from being satisfied, is endlessly renewed. He will meet her again and again, over forty years, in several different cities and under a variety of names, and fall in love with her anew each and every time. She really is a bad girl, and his will be a sentimental education one wouldn’t wish on anybody, yet we can hardly imagine that Ricardo would have had it any other way. And since, for narratives as for mistresses, there are clear advantages in unpredictability, the result is a wonderfully seductive and enthralling novel.

more from the TLS here.

From The London Times:

KATEY: The Life and Loves of Dickens’s Artist Daughter by Lucinda Hawksley. To his public, Dickens was a sun, dispensing warmth, light and laughter. But to his family he was a black hole — a vast, irresistible attractor that sucked all the energy and willpower out of them, and left them limp. Of his 10 children, only two made anything of their lives — Katey, the subject of this biography, and Henry, who became a high-court judge and was Lucinda Hawksley’s great-great-grandfather.

Katey, born in 1839, was Dickens’s favourite. He nicknamed her Lucifer Box because of her fiery nature. Her talent for painting and drawing soon became apparent, and he arranged for her to have lessons at Bedford College. To outsiders, the Dickens children’s life seemed idyllic — the fun and frivolity, the hilarious parties and parlour games, with Dickens as indefatigable master of ceremonies, the famous Christmases at Gad’s Hill, the summers in France, Italy or Switzerland. Thackeray’s daughter Anny remembered how she envied the Dickens daughters’ white satin shoes and long flowing white sashes. Their father’s fame ensured a constant stream of fascinating visitors — writers, actors, artists. Katey got to know John Everett Millais, and in his 1860 Royal Academy painting The Black Brunswicker he used her as the model for the distraught girl clinging to her soldier lover, who is off to Waterloo.

But there was another side.

More here.

In the wake of the current Arab-Israeli, Fred Halliday offers and odd recollection of his first encounter with the issue and turns to Isaac Deutscher and Hannah Arendt.

The Oxford debate of October 1964 [on the Arab-Israeli conflict] thus took place before the enormous shifts of sentiment and solidarity, evident today in relation to Lebanon and the Hizbollah movement, towards Arab causes and away from Israel…

The debate was conducted along already (and still) familiar lines: on one side, evocation of the genocide of Jews in Europe under Nazism (the term “holocaust” came into general use only later), the Arab refusal to accept the 1947 United Nations partition plan, the Arab responsibility for the flight of the Palestinian population in the war of 1947-1949; on the other, the violence of the Zionist acquisition and conquest of Arab land, the betrayal by Britain of its many promises to the Arabs up to its unilateral backdoor scuttle from Palestine in May 1948, the hypocrisy and passivity of the international community thereafter.

As it continued, however, the atmosphere became more disputatious. Edward Attiyah’s speech was interrupted by the shouts, way beyond normal heckling, of a group of young supporters of Israel who rose to their feet in unison, seeking to silence the speaker by accusing him of being a “Nazi” and raising their arms in mock-Hitler salute. This must have been hard to take for the author of the elegiac autobiography of a Lebanese upbringing, Having Been an Arab, who (in common with other modern Arab intellectuals such as George Antonius, Albert Hourani, Hanan Ashrawi and Edward Said) was brought up as a Protestant, and in his case had identified England as his spiritual home.

I was never to find out. Attiyah battled on, his voice rising intermittently above the din, before a sudden pause. A throttled sound came from his throat, and he fell to the floor, victim of a heart attack. He was dead. I shall never forget the sound of his body hitting the union’s wooden floor.

From The National Geographic:

They can crush a stack of concrete slabs with a bare fist, walk with catlike balance on a bamboo pole, and generate deadly kicks and punches at lightning-fast speeds. Real-life martial artists have long defied what many people would think is humanly possible, and their seemingly superpowered abilities have inspired generations of movies and television shows.

But where do the true skills end and the special effects begin? Maybe Hollywood magic doesn’t enter the equation as soon as you think. For the upcoming television special, Fight Science, researchers used high-tech equipment to put real martial artists to the test. The feature will air on August 20 on the National Geographic Channel. The action took place inside a specially designed film studio that is part laboratory and part dojo, a school for training in the various arts of self-defense. Here world champion martial artists from diverse disciplines were pitted against a customized crash-test dummy outfitted with impact sensors. The sensors—along with infrared, high-speed, and high-definition motion-capture cameras—allowed scientists to measure and map the speed, force, range, and impact of the fighter’s techniques.

The result is an unprecedented look at how martial artists generate the power and speed behind each move.

More here.

Jonathan Curiel in Saudi Aramco World:

Sylviane Diouf knows her audience might be skeptical, so to demonstrate the connec- tion between Muslim traditions and American blues music, she’ll play two recordings: The athaan, the Muslim call to prayer that’s heard from minarets around the world, and “Levee Camp Holler,” an early type of blues song that first sprang up in the Mississippi Delta more than 100 years ago.

“Levee Camp Holler” is no ordinary song. It’s the product of ex-slaves who worked moving earth all day in post-Civil War America. The version that Diouf uses in presentations has lyrics that, like the call to prayer, speak about a glorious God. But it’s the song’s melody and note changes that closely resemble oneof Islam’s best-known refrains. Like the call to prayer, “Levee Camp Holler” emphasizes words that seem to quiver and shake in the reciter’s vocal chords. Dramatic changes in musical scales punctuate both “Levee Camp Holler” and the adhan. A nasal intonation is evident in both.

More here.  [Thanks to Moshe Behar.]

When Clement Greenberg was five years old, he beat a goose to death with a shovel handle. Near the end of his life, Greenberg explained that he had killed the bird not out of cruelty but out of fear. This incident was a portent, quipped the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik: “The slow escalation in targets, the growing taste for blood, the rise to bigger and uglier assaults…The die is cast; the boy will become an art critic.”

The anecdote and Gopnik’s response are retold in Art Czar, Alice Goldfarb Marquis’ masterful biography of Greenberg (1909-1994). With a rare combination of meticulous scholarship and crisp, vivid prose, Marquis has astutely constructed a complex, highly nuanced portrait of America’s most controversial art critic.

more from Brooklyn Rail here.

I hear it said all the time: Why paint today, when ever-new forms of interactive technologies compete for our attention? How instrumental can painting be in a world that’s changing faster than we can measure? Sure, we can bring it forward, revise histories, finesse attitudes. But cover new ground? There’s room for doubt.

This discursive rumble is most audible in Chelsea, where it is rare to encounter art that is not almost exclusively of the moment. Anything produced before postmodernism gets bumped up to midtown, with the result that big questions about painting and the relevancy of art are staged in a partial vacuum. That said, as galleries have become increasingly large, with the clout and the budget to mount ambitious, museum-quality exhibitions, new models are emerging that challenge the status quo of “all contemporary, all the time.” New art is beginning to rub shoulders with modernist art, downtown, in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

Mix it up, and the rewards can be huge. There’s no better example than “The New Landscape/The New Still Life: Soutine and Modern Art.”

more from the Village Voice here.

David Skinner in The New Atlantis:

One has to think of such prosaic activities as paying the mortgage and grocery shopping to be reminded of the quiet and non-revelatory quality of rudimentary arithmetic. Which is not to put such labor down. Adding the price of milk and eggs in one’s head is also brain work, and we should never forget the central place of mere calculation in the development of more sophisticated areas of human knowledge.

Long before the dawn of calculators and inexpensive desktop computers, the grinding work of large problems had to be broken up into discrete, simple parts and done by hand. Where scads of numbers needed computing—for astronomical purposes at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, or to establish the metric system at the Bureau du Cadastre in Paris—such work was accomplished factory-style. In his book When Computers Were Human, a history of the pre-machine era in computing, David Alan Grier quotes Charles Dickens’s Hard Times to capture the atmosphere of such workplaces: “a stern room with a deadly statistical clock in it, which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin-lid.” The most famous modern example of such work is probably Los Alamos, where scientists’ wives were recruited in the early stages to compute long math problems for the Manhattan Project.

More here.

Paul Boutin in Slate:

AOL researchers recently published the search logs of about 650,000 members—a total of 36,389,629 individual searches…

The search records don’t include users’ names, but each search is tagged with a number that’s tied to a specific AOL account. The New York Times quickly sussed out that AOL Searcher No. 4417749 was 62-year-old Thelma Arnold. Indeed, Arnold has a “dog who urinate on everything,” just as she’d typed into the search box. Valleywag has become one of many clearinghouses for funny, bizarre, and painful user profiles. The searches of AOL user No. 672368, for example, morphed over several weeks from “you’re pregnant he doesn’t want the baby” to “foods to eat when pregnant” to “abortion clinics charlotte nc” to “can christians be forgiven for abortion.”

More here.

Edward J. Rupke in Scientific American:

It is estimated that on average, each airplane in the U.S. commercial fleet is struck lightly by lightning more than once each year. In fact, aircraft often trigger lightning when flying through a heavily charged region of a cloud. In these instances, the lightning flash originates at the airplane and extends away in opposite directions. Although record keeping is poor, smaller business and private airplanes are thought to be struck less frequently because of their small size and because they often can avoid weather that is conducive to lightning strikes.

The last confirmed commercial plane crash in the U.S. directly attributed to lightning occurred in 1967, when lightning caused a catastrophic fuel tank explosion.

More here.

From the New York Times:

More here.  [Thanks to Moshe Behar.]

Also from the NYT: “How to Make Sure Children Are Scientifically Illiterate” by Lawrence Krauss.

Today is the birthday of Saleem Sinai, which means that yesterday was Pakistan’s Independence Day and today is India’s Indpendence Day. Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” speech is still worth reading and listening to.

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.

It is also the anniversary of the chaotic and bloody partition of the subcontinent, in which more than 14 million people were displaced into what they hoped would be safe majority states and in which somewhere between 200,000 and a million people were slaughtered in one of the regions more shameful episodes. The BBC website today has some photos of partition taken by Margaret Bourke-White.

From The New York Times:

Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space. After posting a few short papers on the Internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr. Perelman disappeared back into the Russian woods in the spring of 2003, leaving the world’s mathematicians to pick up the pieces and decide if he was right.

Now they say they have finished his work, and the evidence is circulating among scholars in the form of three book-length papers with about 1,000 pages of dense mathematics and prose between them. As a result there is a growing feeling, a cautious optimism that they have finally achieved a landmark not just of mathematics, but of human thought. “It’s really a great moment in mathematics,” said Bruce Kleiner of Yale, who has spent the last three years helping to explicate Dr. Perelman’s work. “It could have happened 100 years from now, or never.”

In a speech at a conference in Beijing this summer, Shing-Tung Yau of Harvard said the understanding of three-dimensional space brought about by Poincaré’s conjecture could be one of the major pillars of math in the 21st century. Quoting Poincaré himself, Dr.Yau said, “Thought is only a flash in the middle of a long night, but the flash that means everything.”

But at the moment of his putative triumph, Dr. Perelman is nowhere in sight. He is an odds-on favorite to win a Fields Medal, math’s version of the Nobel Prize, when the International Mathematics Union convenes in Madrid next Tuesday. But there is no indication whether he will show up. Also left hanging, for now, is $1 million offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass., for the first published proof of the conjecture, one of seven outstanding questions for which they offered a ransom back at the beginning of the millennium.

More here.

From Nature:

Attention henpecked husbands: animal experts have shown that, for cockatiels at least, a one-sided relationship is the best way to ensure harmonious family life. The cockatiel mating game is largely a case of ‘opposites attract’, says Rebecca Fox of the University of California, Davis, who led the research. She found that cockatiels (Nymphicus hollandicus) actively seek out potential mates with a personality different to their own, and that these unions tend to progress most smoothly. “Cockatiels are similar to us in the way they have relationships,” says Fox. “They have long, cooperative partnerships, raise young together, and compatibility is important to them. It’s something people can relate to.”

The most important consideration for the birds is how agreeable or aggressive their partner is, Fox found when studying their mating tactics. Most aggressive cockatiels tend to court only those that are more docile, and vice versa.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Gastric Kaleidoscope. 1999.

Digitally manipulated radiograph.

From The Guardian:

Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain By Judith Flanders. In the 17th century it was not unusual for a poor, rural household to own no more than two or three pots, a knife apiece and a cup between them. By 1715, 90 per cent of families had a clock, and by the end of the 19th century comparable households lived in cottages filled with ‘Victorian clutter’. By 1910, there was one piano for every 10 to 20 people. These and many other thought-provoking statistics may be found in Judith Flanders’ formidable book on 19th-century leisure and consumption.

Flanders’ book is a panoramic view of a society and economy transformed by retail, travel and the production of inessential goods, which produced a vast upward leap in the standard of living. While travel became increasingly important, paradoxically, the notion of domestic pleasure became more and more significant, as did all aspects of interior decoration.

Best in show: At the 1851 Great Exhibition

· A steamship couch which could be turned into a bed and, thanks to its base of cork, a life raft.

· Yachting garb with inbuilt flotation devices.

· A doctor’s suit with coat, waistcoat and trousers made in one piece to prevent time wastage in the event of a night-time emergency.

· Church pews connected to a pulpit by rubber pipes so that the hard of hearing could listen to the sermon.

· An oyster-shucking machine.

· A silver nose for those missing a nose of their own.

· A bed which in the morning tilted its occupant straight into a waiting bath.

· A vase made of mutton fat and lard.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Judging from his oft-quoted lament, Indiana Jones would sympathize with FBI agent Nelville Flynn, the hero of the latest animal horror movie Snakes on a Plane. Flynn, played by Hollywood heavyweight Samuel L. Jackson, finds himself midair battling a planeload of deadly serpents.

But before you decide to go medieval on the nearest limbless reptile, get the real facts about serpent dangers with stories, photos, and videos from National Geographic News. Go behind the scenes with the movie’s snake wrangler, learn how to survive snakebites, and discover some of the weirdest and rarest snake species on the planet.

More here. (For Abbas and Jed).

As the art world grows swollen—bloated by money, distended by exaggerations of scale—the small becomes more interesting to those with a contrary turn of mind. Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789), an unfamiliar artist here but well-known in his native Switzerland, was a sharp-eyed master of the tiny but brilliant effect. At home as a miniaturist, he preferred pastels to oils and was better at portraying intelligent women than important men. His women become intimates who, it seems certain, could amuse a salon or charm a stranger in a corner tête-à-tête. Flaubert, no small student of women, described one Liotard subject this way: “Mme de l’Épinay [sic], thin face, black hair, black eye, long jaw, homely, but a woman one notices and that one would surely love greatly if one loved (she must have smelled either rank or sweet).”

more from New York Magazine here.

Beer: anti-Semitism

Wine: hatred of Gypsies

Aspirin: mild disdain for babies

Chocolate: distrust of squirrels

Iced tea: quizzing mentally disabled Wal-Mart greeter about his involvement in 9/11

Oxygen: being a total douchebag

more from McSweeney’s here.