Ruchira Paul in Accidental Blogger:

If a car measures up to my mundane criteria, I don’t much care about make or model … and I reserve the sole veto power after a test drive.) So when I came across this Time magazine compilation, I browsed through it with some interest only because it is the “worst cars of all time” list.  That made it a more engrossing read than the fawning, over the top showroom jargon of sensuality, grace, power, elegance and status enhancing qualities associated with the “best” automobiles. The “worst” list is perhaps also more interesting and its colorful language more convincing because nobody is trying to sell us anything. In fact its whole point is to alert us to automotive follies, past and present, foreign and domestic. Here for example is the withering put down of the Renault Dauphine, the worst car of 1956.

The most ineffective bit of French engineering since the Maginot Line, the Renault Dauphine was originally to be named the Corvette, tres ironie. It was, in fact, a rickety, paper-thin scandal of a car that, if you stood beside it, you could actually hear rusting. Its most salient feature was its slowness, a rate of acceleration you could measure with a calendar. It took the drivers at Road and Track 32 seconds to reach 60 mph, which would put the Dauphine at a severe disadvantage in any drag race involving farm equipment. The fact that the ultra-cheap, super-sketchy Dauphine sold over 2 million copies around the world is an index of how desperately people wanted cars. Any cars.

More here.

Also for this 9/11, Seamus Heaney’s reading and commentary on “Horace and the Thunder” (approximately 16 minutes and 15 seconds into the audio file of the reading). From the transcript:

After that day [9/11/2001], a poem which I had cherished for different reasons took on new strengths and new strangeness – Horace, a poem by Quintus Horatius Flaccus, a Latin poet, of the Augustan age. If anybody’s interested, it’s in Carminum Liber Primus. That’s the first Book of Odes, Number 34. Horace, in this poem, gets a shock. He says, I’m a pretty cool kind of guy. I’m not really gospel greedy. I go with the crowd. But, something happened that really put the wind up me. Oops! And the terms of the poem…it’s really about poetry’s covenant with the irrational, I thought first of all. It’s about thunder in the clear, blue sky. Shock, Jupiter, the thunder god, ba-boom. But some of the terms used were so resonant in a new world of the twenty first century. He talked about (Latin), god certainly has power, he said. (Latin) He can change the highest for the lowest. He can (Latin)…He can bring the unknown forward. And this moment of great danger, great grief, great dread, promised a re-tilting of the world in all kinds of ways. Both the hammer coming down, and, something else, perhaps we’re being shown new…..It required what the poet, W.B. Yeats, said that was required of every kind of mature intellect; it required us to ‘hold in a single thought reality and justice.’ Beautiful to formulate; extremely difficult to manage. But, the danger and menace of this was in the poem for me. So this is called ‘Horace and the Thunder’. Three stanzas of Horace, one stanza of Heaney, but I’ll not tell you which is which. [laughter]

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now,
He galloped his thunder-cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underneath, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest things

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked esteemed. Hooked-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing off
Crests for sport, letting them drop wherever.

Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid,
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Smoke furl and boiling ashes darken day.

The most outlandish claim about Qin Shi Huangdi – that he declared war on death itself – has now been proved true, so long after his demise. Sima Qian wrote in great detail about the subterranean mausoleum, recounting how the emperor’s tomb, with its rivers of mercury and its jewel-encrusted ceiling, was protected by great underground ramparts. According to the historian, the fortifications, built way below the water table, were sealed watertight, and the tomb candles, made from whale oil, were designed to burn for eternity. He even described elaborate booby traps: artisans constructed crossbows that would be triggered mechanically, firing a volley of arrows at any unsuspecting grave-robber.

In recent years, geological surveys have proved his seemingly fanciful descriptions to be accurate. The subterranean chambers, protected by huge protective walls, really exist. Even more astonishing is the revelation that the subsoil of the tomb mound contains unnaturally high quantities of mercury, concentrated in a series of apparent channels – indicating that the silvery streams representing the Yangtze and the Yellow River are still flowing around a gold coffin.

more from The New Statesman here.

The pathos of The Savage Detectives lies in that single contrast—the pathos of the ardent young poets who cavort like satyrs and nymphs in the sacred wood of high poetry and, then again, have to drag their way around the hardscrabble streets of Mexico City, and sometimes die all too soon, as Rubén Darío did at age 49, and Roberto Bolaño did at age 50, in both cases of liver failure.

But I don’t mean to bring my drum-banging on Bolaño’s behalf to a gloomy thud of a conclusion. The Savage Detectives sings a love song to the grandeur of Latin American literature and to the passions it inspires, and there is no reason to suppose that, in spite of every prediction, these particular grandeurs and passions have reached their appointed end. Bolaño’s friend Carmen Boullosa in The Nation and Francisco Goldman in the New York Review of Books have both insisted lately that Bolaño wrote a further novel, not yet translated into English, that is stronger, or at least more prodigious, even, than The Savage Detectives.

more from Slate here.

If this makes him sound like some Nabokovian pervert obsessed with young Lolitas flashing their thighs, it is worth remembering that Willem de Kooning was just as taken with these twirling, gesticulating nymphs in their parades of ritualised motion. And that is precisely what these sacrificial lambs – prizes for returning warriors, the artist calls them – have become in Hume’s latest paintings, displayed in American Tan, at London’s White Cube MAson’s YArd.

Balletic, athletic, slender limbs outflung, cartwheeling, jack-knifing, landing in splits, these are bodies put through extraordinary contortions. Caught in freeze-frame, they scarcely look like nubile teenagers at all. They are, in short, ideal subject matter for this painter of radically denatured images.

more from The Observer Review here.

From 3quarksdaily.com:

(I still think that these two short paragraphs by Abbas are the most poignant and moving account of our feelings on 9/11. I urge you to read his entire article from last year. Azra).

That night, we slept fitfully, gripped by the confusion of sadness, fear, anger. The next day, I managed to collect myself enough to send an email to friends and family expressing some of what I felt. I reproduce that message here:

Hello,

As time elapses, I am more clearly able to identify and articulate what it is that has been making me so sad about this attack. It is this: some cities do not belong to any particular country but are treasures for all people; cosmopolitan and international by nature, they are the repositories of our shared world culture and artistic production, testaments to what is common and binding among diverse peoples, and sources of creative energy. They come to stand for our notions of community and brotherhood. New York has been by far the most magnificent of these world treasures, and it still is today. Here, on every block you will meet people from forty different countries. Here you can speak Urdu with the cab drivers, and Korean at the grocery store. Here, bhangra rhythms and classical sitar mix with calypso and Finnish ambient chants. Here is where mosques and synagogues are separated by no green-lines. Here is where Rodney King’s wish has mostly come true: we do get along. This city is the least provincial; no nationalism flourishes here. It is the most potent fountainhead of intellectual and artistic endeavor. What this mindless attack has done is desecrate and damage the ideals of international community that this city not only symbolizes, but instantiates as fact and lovely example. And it is this desecration which is so devastatingly heart-breaking.

I recall two things: one, the pleasure and awe with which my mother took in the incomparably stunning view from the 110th floor observation deck of the World Trade Center on a visit from Pakistan in 1974. And two, her reading in Urdu, the words of welcome inscribed in the lobby of that building in over one hundred languages, to all people of the world. Alas, no one shall ever do either again.

Abbas

More here. 

From Southcoast Today:

I see the souls all rising,
Through smoke and fire — first one,
Then tens, and finally hundreds —
All heading toward the sun.
It is a sight unseen before
By anyone on Earth —
So many kinds of people,
Each different at their birth.
Yet all now are joined in death and love
To one God — undefined.
Their shock will pass as they’re held so dear
By the ones they left behind.
Their message to all of us is one:
“Let this be the end of hate!”
If only this one thing is done,
Theirs was a worthy fate.

MARY CONWAY, ONSET

More here.

Unwanted Pregnancy
Jaffer Kolb, 2005

Mark Edmundson in the New York Times Magazine:

Late in life — he was in his 80s, in fact — Sigmund Freud got religion. No, Freud didn’t begin showing up at temple every Saturday, wrapping himself in a prayer shawl and reading from the Torah. To the end of his life, he maintained his stance as an uncompromising atheist, the stance he is best known for down to the present. In “The Future of an Illusion,” he described belief in God as a collective neurosis: he called it “longing for a father.” But in his last completed book, “Moses and Monotheism,” something new emerges. There Freud, without abandoning his atheism, begins to see the Jewish faith that he was born into as a source of cultural progress in the past and of personal inspiration in the present. Close to his own death, Freud starts to recognize the poetry and promise in religion.

More here.

Michael Tomasky in the New York Review of Books:

For a significant number of impatient citizens, there is one more possible candidate who is, they would argue, the most electable of all. First, he’s already won a presidential election; he was merely denied his rightful victory by an ethically compromised Supreme Court majority. Second, to the extent that foreign policy and terrorism remain potential Democratic weaknesses, he has extensive experience and expertise in dealing with both. Third, he was right on Iraq. And fourth and most importantly, he has reemerged in the Bush era as a completely different man from the cautious candidate, surrounded by too many consultants, we saw in the 2000 campaign.

Al Gore could not even bring himself to criticize the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in the science curricula of Kansas schools in 1999 (a moment that has stuck with me). Now, he has cast caution aside and is a truth-teller—on Iraq, on executive power, on the corrosive role of television in politics, and indeed on the need to give science priority over faith in public deliberations (although not specifically, to my knowledge, on Darwin). The Assault on Reason, in which he meticulously considers these four subjects, reflects the speeches he’s given in recent years and, of course, his film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth—a record that has, for most liberals, washed away the memory of the man who couldn’t quite decide in 2000 whether he was a centrist or a populist and who, facing the likes of Karl Rove and James Baker in Florida, didn’t seem willing to fight.

More here.

Carl Zimmer over at Seed Magazine:

It’s hard to think of a word more charged with meaning—or meanings—than “life.” Some of the most passionate debates of our day, over stem cells or the right to die, genetically modified food, or wartime conduct, revolve around it. Whether we’re talking about when life begins or when it ends, the sanctity of life, or the danger of playing God, we all have an idea of what we mean when we talk about life. Yet, it often turns out, we actually mean different things. Scientists, despite their intimacy with the subject, aren’t exempt from this confusion.

“There is no one definition that we agree upon,” says Radu Popa, geobiologist and the author of Between Probability and Necessity: Searching for the Definition and Origin of Life. In the course of researching his book, Popa started collecting definitions that have appeared in the scientific literature. He eventually lost count. “I’ve found at least three hundred, maybe four hundred definitions,” he says.

Amitava Kumar raises some questions on the new Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein movie:

This brief video was put on YouTube two days ago and was sent my way by Liz Blum. We start with electroshock therapy and a connection is revealed between that form of treatment and CIA experiments on torture; and then, the shock doctrine in torture is related to the shock doctrine of free market economy preached by Milton Friedman. Does one argument lead seamlessly to the other? The metaphor of shock is a powerful one, and the film-makers exploit it to provoke a connection that is—well, shocking. I hope it sparks debates everywhere.

When was the last time you couldn’t put down a book of literary criticism or didn’t want it to end? Ever? In Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare, Angus Fletcher, a magically gifted teacher in whose presence we hear what thinking feels like, has given us not only a brilliant study of the early modern period but a handbook for our time as well, a meditation on the extended moment when the “mind . . . discovers the psyche to be an integral part of the world out there.” While Fletcher’s frame is the 110 years between the births of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Galileo in 1564 and the death of Milton in 1674, the consequences of the change in habit of mind necessitated by the New Science of that period continue today to disturb the peace of all of us who wish to be settled in knowing who and where we are. Fletcher’s aim is “to catch the intellectual feel of this transforming scene,” when “a scientific revolution occurred that rivals the Copernican revolution in scope of physical and metaphysical meaning,” the revolution contained in Galileo’s “Eppur si muove”— “And yet it moves”—the realization that there is no center in the universe we inhabit, that all is what Galileo called, interchangeably, “locomotion” or “local motion,” with motion being “the most important [subject] in nature.” From this observation, it was only one step (though a giant one) to Einstein and to the cosmological and ethical problems that so engage our attention in the present, still under pressure as we are “to think of human life and its context in terms, precisely, of its instability.”

more from Bookforum here.

Reading Frost’s private notebooks is the opposite of pulling back the curtain on Oz. While the real Oz turns out to be a little man working a big speaker system, the real Frost turns out to be someone naturally—preternaturally—amplified even when nobody else is listening. The Notebooks of Robert Frost is his collected scraps, none of it written for an audience; it is the not-poetry, not-letters, not-lectures; it is the teacher’s book lists and lecturer’s notes, private reminders, scotched ideas, trial balloons, epigram practice sheets, scraps of plays and drafts of verse, fulminations and less-than-fulminations—all exactly as they came, except no longer in Frost’s blocky hand (though his ink colors are duly noted). Over the course of 688 pages, Frost has the answer for everything and the counter question—repeated to the Fth power. The voice that comes through even this fractured note-jotting is so supersaturated with authority that one winds up amazed that Frost was able to get down from his horse long enough to write the most beautiful American poems of the twentieth century.

more from Poetry here.

The dreamlike paintings of the German artist Neo Rauch are as mystifying and enigmatic as those of any artist at work today, although his figurative scenes, carnivalesque in their rich, surprising colors and tricky shifts from the real to the fantastic, are also among the likeliest to grab the attention of twelve-year-olds. In pictures marked by a naturalist’s precision about light, decor, and weather conditions, and that might be set in a factory office, on a farm at night, by the side of a cliff, or in many places at once, vaguely somnambulistic men (and rarely more than one or two women) can be seen conferring about a document, say, or playing cards, or trudging about in one heavy-going endeavor or another. They might even be caught up in violent incidents, like upheavals in the earth or street demonstrations with flags set on fire—events that occur in a number of the fourteen pictures in a show the artist is currently having at the Metropolitan Museum of work made this year.

The story line, however, is never fully the point with the forty-seven-year-old Rauch, a native of Leipzig, in the former East Germany, where he still lives.

more from the NYRB here.

From The Wislon Quarterly:

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.

Edelman suggests that thanks to the recent development of instruments capable of measuring brain structure within millimeters and brain activity within milliseconds, perceptions, thoughts, memories, willed acts, and other mind matters traditionally considered private and impenetrable to scientific scrutiny now can be correlated with brain activity. Our consciousness (a ­“first-­person affair” displaying intentionality, reflecting beliefs and desires, etc.), our creativity, even our value systems, have a basis in brain ­function.

More here.

Simon Jenkins in The London Times:

The American and British armies do not have to withdraw from Iraq. They are powerful and can stay as long as they wish, even if entombed like French legionnaires in desert forts and sustained at great cost in lives and money. Their governments are a different matter. They need reasons for occupying foreign countries and now face humiliation in the greatest war of ideological intervention since Vietnam. They are praying for their armies to save them from this humiliation.

This week David Petraeus, the talented American general in Baghdad, reports on the progress of his “surge” strategy to an impatient Congress. Two thirds of Americans have joined two thirds of world opinion in wanting a swift American withdrawal, defined as inside a year. Petraeus’s predicament is therefore agonising. He cannot possibly offer victory. He can offer only defeat or a desperate clinging on, as now. For George Bush, his commander-in-chief, only the last is imaginable. Petraeus must therefore forget about a better yesterday or a better tomorrow, and concentrate on today.

Here he is trapped.

More here.

Part of the full transcript of the recent Bin Laden video from FOX News:

More here.

Gloria Goodale in the Christian Science Monitor:

TV shows have never shied away from trading on the sex appeal of their stars, but a quick look at the new fall season reveals that the overall TV landscape is about to get a whole lot sexier and more explicit. From the graphic grappling in HBO’s new relationship drama, “Tell Me You Love Me,” to the partner-swapping in CBS’s “Swingtown,” and the teen sex – including rape – of CW’s “Gossip Girl,” the sex is getting rawer and the camera ever closer.

This escalating emphasis on explicit scenes as well as themes is the result of seismic changes already rocking Hollywood and the larger society, say culture watchers: the competition for market share in a spiraling world of entertainment choices, the mainstreaming of pornography, and the explosive growth of an unregulated Internet.

Sexual mores are a good measure of social change, says Kevin Scott, coauthor of the upcoming Beacon Press book, “The Porning of America: Choosing Our Sexual Future.” The combination of adult erotica moving onto Main Street America by the mid 1990s, along with the emergence of the Internet as a massive distribution network, has created what Mr. Scott calls a “perfect storm” of cultural change. “Our general view of sexuality today is so much broader than what it was just 15 years ago,” he adds.

More here.