Here is a sentence that struck me last week from the Times:

NOTHING is perfect, but at times that most unlikely and hyperbolic of words does pop into my head. It did so repeatedly as I played Tekken: Dark Resurrection, a martial arts game from Namco Bandai that is a shining example of what works best on the PlayStation Portable hand-held game console.

Why is this bit of prose funny?  Well, like much funny stuff, it’s the result of a collision of usually disparate things.  In this case, the things are: 1) a video game with a campy, gothic name, and 2) the New York Times’ magisterial house style for criticism.  Note that the repeated references to an opinionated “I” (“pop into my head”) license the writer’s generalizations (“a shining example of what works best”).  Note also that the writer is fully aware of the ironic juxtaposition of the concept of perfection and the wares of Namco Bandai, and yet all the same desires to communicate just how good a video game this is.  And note, lastly, that despite the author’s self-aware use of mild irony, that the amusement we derive from reading it seems somehow to exceed the author’s intention.  Don’t you think?

This tone of bemusement, so familiar to coffee-mug wielding Times readers (“I read it for the crossword!”  “Me?  For the Style section.”), exists in a symbiotic relationship to the more po-faced tone the Times reserves for journalism.  By taking liberties with meaning, by using writerly effects in its criticism, the Times implies that such usages are restricted to those language artisans who populate the entertainment and opinion sections.  The great figures for this type of writing are probably A.O. Scott and Frank Rich, but there are many critics whose voice complicates and plays with the simpler tones of reportage: Frank Bruni, David Pogue, Virginia Heffernan (hmmm – these three all have Times blogs).  How can I draw together so many diverse writers, you ask?  Well, I think house style is among the least appreciated and most powerful forces in journalistic writing: ever notice how, upon beginning to write for the New Yorker, a writer’s distinctive voice seems to be waffle-ironed into conformity with that august publication’s trademark tone? 

Of course, the Times is a sophisticated complex of styles, but the founding opposition of the paper’s rhetorical identity is that between the “name” critics and the trustable, unplayed-with language of the straight reportage.  The bemusement that characterizes the criticism and the seriousness that characterizes the reportage imply two different ways of using language, as a pleasurable end and as a means to truth, respectively.  Yet underneath that opposition lies a greater commonality.  This is the drive to produce the historical record, a text that will be authoritative even when read years later.  Of course, the straight journalistic tone also produces surprising new juxtapositions, but they usually come off as striking rather than funny, as in this sentence also from last week:

Scott W., 64, a retired school teacher and real estate agent, relieved his occasional need for homosexual sex with anonymous encounters on East Hampton Beach without quite labeling himself as gay or bisexual.

Note here the impassive recording of a non-judgmental, just-the-facts stance towards anonymous hookups.  A stance that is a historically new entrant to mainstream public discourse arrives disguised as mere reportage.  This is the Times’ claim to distinctiveness: its prose, of both varieties, gives off the sense of being responsible to history (the success of this endeavor being, of course, rather questionable).  Thus a taxonomy emerges by which “serious” events, conflicts, and social shifts are reported unironically and with apparent recourse to facts, while restaurants, movies, and fashion trends are mediated by the clever and literary voices of critics.

Please don’t think that I take very seriously the Times’ self-seriousness – if nothing else, reading it demonstrates the importance of form (placement of article, size of accompanying photo, choice of headline and title) over what gets covered.  Actually, the standards of what constitutes magisterial, authoritative language shift constantly, with the entrance of new locutions and words and the obsolescence of others.  The house style of the Times, therefore, might be seen as purposely moving more slowly than the culture-at-large, in order to preserve the impression that it is an unchanging institution of prose, a bulwark against “lol” and “what up, dawg!”  (Of course, if Frank Bruni or Tony Scott ended a piece with “LOL” it would be a fully controlled laugh line – omg, Bruni just wrote “LOL” – lol!  rotfl!).

But this last point, about the Times and similar organs’ desire to retain a sense of unchangingness, to be our reference points, even as they record the daily newness of life, gets me back to Tekken: Dark Resurrection.  The reason that sentence was so funny to me was that it exceeded intentions: sure, it painted a chuckle-worthy portrait of a computer-game lover trying to find a way to express his delight for the great accomplishments in his field to a world that considers that field to be adolescent and silly.  Don’t you guys get it, these games are the real works of art our culture is producing today, etc., etc.  And of course, the ironic tone is a way to hedge these same claims as just a literary device.  But it’s funnier than that.  It’s funny because it’s such a perfect reenactment of the New York Times formula: the pretensions of the prose combined with the absurd and prosaic real.  All purported maturity aside, the Times needs Namco Bandai and Scott W.: they are the bolt of electricity that vivifies it.  A dark resurrection indeed.

See other Dispatches here.

Bruce Nauman. 3 Heads Fountain (3 Andrews). 2005.

Resin, epoxy, tubing.

More on this influential artist here, here, and here.

Joseph Kahn in the New York Times Book Review:

Mr. Chen and Ms. Wu describe the publication of their book as having been “compared to a clap of thunder.” The statement, like the book, is brassy. But they were prescient. China’s peasant problem has burst into the open with a surge of rural protests that have made the country look less politically stable than at any time since the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy uprising in 1989. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s top adviser on rural problems said in an interview in 2004 that he kept a copy by his bedside to remind himself of the task ahead.

The two spent three years traveling the countryside in Anhui province in central China. They were only a few hundred miles from Shanghai, the glittering commercial center on the coast, but experienced poverty and frustration that they argue grew worse throughout the 1990’s.

They collected a dozen anecdotes of operatic pungency. A village chief murders the man who tries to audit the village books. A township leader conspires to get rich by forcing peasants to plant mulberry trees, for which he sells the seeds. A mendacious county Communist Party boss concocts an excuse to send armed troops to crush a tax revolt.

More here.

Josh Braun in Seed Magazine:

Though a sudden agreement gave hope for peace in Darfur, the lack of support from small anti-government groups, the spillover of refugees into Chad and the opposition of the central government to UN peacekeepers mean that the conflict drags on. Lost in discussions about ending the Sudanese government’s attacks on its people, however, is the acknowledgment of how the dispute began: Darfur may well be the first war influenced by climate change.

In recent years, increasing drought cycles and the Sahara’s southward expansion have created conflicts between nomadic and sedentary groups over shortages of water and land. This scarcity highlighted the central government’s gross neglect of the Darfur region—a trend stretching back to colonial rule. Forsaken, desperate and hungry, groups of Darfurians attacked government outposts in protest. The response was the Janjaweed and supporting air strikes.

More here.

Nelofer Pazira in the Toronto Star:

They hadn’t seen anything like it — a film about their own town projected onto a big screen. In the background yawned the infamous 52-metre-high empty niche where once the larger of two standing Buddhas in Bamiyan looked upon the valley. The Taliban destroyed the pair of statues five years ago.

For centuries this valley has been the crossing path of monks, travellers, tourists, invading armies and wanderers — the once-famous Silk Road, connecting China to the Mediterranean Sea, passed through here.

But never before had a film — a documentary film about the Buddha statues, declared a UNESCO heritage site after they’d been turned to rubble — been shown here.

More here.

John Lee Anderson in The New Yorker:

This spring, a friend of Castro’s, a veteran Party loyalist, told me that the Cuban leader was angustiado—literally, “anguished”—over his advancing years, and obsessed by the idea that socialism might not survive him. As a result, Castro has launched his last great fight, which he calls the Battle of Ideas.

Castro’s goal is to reëngage Cubans with the ideals of the revolution, especially young Cubans who came of age during what he called the Special Period. In the early nineties, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought a precipitous end to Cuba’s subsidies, and the economy imploded. The crisis forced Castro to allow greater openness in the island’s economic and civil life, but he now seems determined to reverse that. In a speech last November, Castro said, “This country can self-destruct, this revolution can destroy itself.” Referring to the Americans, he said, “They cannot destroy it, but we can. We can destroy it, and it would be our fault.” And in May, during an angry, seven-hour televised panel discussion that he convened to protest his appearance on the Forbes list of the world’s richest leaders (the magazine estimated his net worth at nine hundred million dollars), Castro said, “We must continue to pulverize the lies that are told against us. . . .This is the ideological battle, everything is the Battle of Ideas.”

More here.

Carlos Rojas in The Naked Gaze:

In an intriguing hypothesis sketched out in Plagues and Peoples (1976), William McNeill speculates that Europe’s 14th century Black Death plague may have had its origins in the Eurasian Steppes, where the virus may have been endemic among the region’s burrowing rodents for centuries before finally being transmitted to China, then the middle East and Europe by horse-riding Mongols as they established the Mongol Empire (1206-1368).

Although many scholars (including Graham Twigg, Susan Scott, and Christopher Duncan) now question whether the Black Death was actually a case of bubonic plague, or any bacterial disease, or was even necessarily any single disease at all, it is nevertheless acknowledged that the last world-wide pandemic of bubonic plague (known as the “third pandemic”) did in fact have its origins in central China before eventually spreading to Hong Kong in 1894, and then (like the SARS outbreak threatened to do a century later) on to trading ports around the world. While the worst of the 1894 Hong Kong epidemic was controlled relatively quickly, the global pandemic which it precipitated dragged on for decades, and was not officially conquered (according to the WHO) until 1959.

More here.

Umberto Eco writes for The Guardian on “on why we should beware mad scientists” :

“…Symmes believed that at the north and south poles there were two apertures that led to the interior of the globe. He attempted to raise funds for an exploration of the polar regions to locate these entrances. The Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences still has a wooden model he used to explain his theories…

…It is widely rumoured on the internet that the hollow earth theory was taken seriously by top-ranking Nazis who believed in the occult sciences. In some circles of the German navy it was purportedly believed that the hollow earth theory would make it easier to pinpoint the exact position of British ships because, if infrared rays were used, the curvature of the Earth would not have obscured observation.”

More Here

The Register about futuristic visions becoming reality

“Tom Cassin, head of the technology, media and telecommunications practice at Deloitte, predicts that although we won’t be watching holographic TV or travelling to work in flying cars by 2010, “technology [in the future] will be far more involved in our everyday lives than ever before”. Cassin has outlined the growing use of technology in several scenarios, such as in the classroom, through entertainment, and while travelling…

While the concept of personal flying machines may still be far off, we may get the chance to walk up walls if transatlantic aerospace and defence company BAE Systems has anything to do with it. The firm is currently working on what the media has dubbed “Spiderman suits”, which will allow soldiers of the future to scale sheer vertical surfaces.

Referred to as “infantry climbing suits” by the company, they are reportedly made from a material that closely mimics the feet of a gecko lizard. Gecko feet are themselves covered with hairs so tiny they merge with the very molecules they touch.

Dr Jeff Sargent, a research physicist at BAE Systems’ Advanced Technology Centre in Bristol told reporters: “We wanted to mimic this ability…We have made a small amount of this material and we have demonstrated that it will stick on glass surfaces to demonstrate that it’s got some potential.

“Having a Spiderman glove is a long way down the road, but in principle, you might have something like that,” he added”

Tony Smith writes for The Register:

“British boffins have built a digital picture frame that adapts its image to suit the mood of the viewer. Dubbed ’empathic art’, the interactive image responds visually to eight distinct facial expressions.

Created by a team from the UK’s University of Bath computer science department with the help of workers from the Boston University – Massachusetts not Lincolnshire – the rig pairs an LCD panel with a webcam trained on the viewer’s face. Software extrapolates the viewer’s expression, and matches it against a series of facial patterns to yield two scores: pleasure and arousal.”

From The New York Times:

The Overachievers By Alexandra Robbins. I was sick of college talk. Sick of reciting the names of the schools my 16-year-old has visited, which ones she liked best, and why. Sick of listening to other parents do the same. Sick of discussing the finer points of the new SAT, class rank and recommendation letters. Sick of the chatter about Opal Mehta, the fictitious Harvard applicant and heroine of a recent plagiarized novel. So sick of it all that I was considering a ban on extrafamilial college talk from now until spring, when my daughter will finally belong to someone’s class of 2011.

Then I read “The Overachievers,” which is almost nothing but college talk. Alexandra Robbins profiles eight students at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md., in-depth over three semesters in 2004 and 2005; they talk about college. She pans wide to include overachievers across the country; they talk about college. She consults experts on college. She surveys the literature about college. She calls for new ways of thinking about college, preparing for college, and applying to college. I couldn’t get enough of it.

More here.

From Al Ahram: The late Eqbal Ahmad interviews Hassan Nassrallah in 1998:

Inside the Imam Al-Mehdi School in Ouzai, a Lebanese village near the Israel-Lebanon border, seven coffins lay in a row. Outside, men were preparing for their burial when a small convoy of cars arrived bearing among others the secretary-general of Hizbullah, the largest armed party which has for 15 years resisted Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. In the coffins lay the Hizbullah fighters who had fallen in past battles. They were among the 40 Lebanese “prisoners”, dead and alive, who came home on that day, 26 June 1998, in exchange for the remains of an Israeli soldier.

Sayed Hassan Nasrallah entered the hall in solemn dignity accompanied by Jawad, his teenage son. He stopped before each coffin and offered the Fatiha (the Muslim equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer) until he reached the one marked 13. He beckoned an aide and spoke to him in a whisper. The aide summoned two workers of the Islamic Health Association, a Hizbullah outfit. They opened the coffin exposing a body wrapped in a white shroud. Sheikh Nasrallah’s eyes closed, his lips trembled as he offered the Fatiha. Slowly, he bent over and tenderly stroked the head of Hadi Nasrallah, his eldest son who was 18-years-old when he died in battle on 13 September. Jawad, the younger son stood still and pale next to his father. A deep silence fell on the room while his right hand rested on his son’s chest. It was broken by the clicking of a reporter’s camera but promptly returned when Sheikh Nasrallah looked up in cold surprise.

Our primary objective has been resistance to Israeli occupations. I993 was a watershed of sorts as Israel’s invasion then, and our resistance to it, brought us national legitimacy that made even Christians accept Hizbullah as an authentic national force. As for our ideological mission, to be Islamic in Lebanon entails the Islamisation of the Muslim individual and community, its values and way of life.”

Given the centrality of resistance against Israel to Hizbullah’s programme and party structure, we raised a question about the scope and future of armed resistance. What will happen when Israel withdraws from Lebanon which, in view of its recent demarche, may in fact occur? “We shall not accept a withdrawal based on Israeli conditions. Liberation cannot be conditional. Israel committed aggression, it occupies our land, it is our sacred right to resist, and this resistance shall continue until it withdraws.”

Does this principle apply to Palestine also, and to the Golan Heights? “The strategies of Syria and Lebanon are linked. As for the Palestinians, if their leaders compromise there is little we can do. We cannot substitute for their leadership. If they decide to resist we shall be on their side.”

What then is your vision of Palestine? “We wish for the liberation of the Palestinian people among whom we count Jews, Muslims and Christians.”

More here. (Thanks to Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy).

Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times Magazine:

Mothers with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, pass it along to their newborns at birth 25 to 30 percent of the time, and in poor countries, some half a million babies a year are born with H.I.V. But the rate of transmission can be cut to 14 percent with a simple and cheap program: H.I.V.-positive mothers take a single pill of an antiretroviral called nevirapine when they begin labor, and their newborns are given nevirapine drops.

At the Alexandra Health Center and University Clinic in South Africa, pregnant women can get nevirapine free. The antenatal clinic is a complex of low brick buildings on a pretty hospital campus in the middle of the township of Alexandra, a bleak neighborhood on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The clinic has a doctor only on Thursdays, but an advanced midwife and two nurses attend a crowd of patients every day. I had been in South Africa for four days when I visited the clinic, and I had already seen the stigma that AIDS still carries in the country — those dozens of funerals every Saturday in the townships? Oh, say family members, it was asthma, or tuberculosis, or “a long illness.” I thought I understood how powerful denial could be. But I was unprepared for what Pauline Molotsi, a registered nurse at the clinic, told me.

About twice a week, a woman who has tested H.I.V.-positive begins labor at the clinic but refuses to take the nevirapine that might save her baby’s life. “She says, ‘Oh, no, I’m not positive,”’ Molotsi told me.

More here.

Jonathan Yardley reviews And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails by Wayne Curtis, in the Washington Post:

“Rum has always had a distinctly American swagger. It is untutored and proud of it, raffish, often unkempt, and a little bit out of control. The history of rum tends toward the ignoble, many times pleasingly so. . . . Rum, in short, has been one of those rare objects in which America has invested its own image. Like moonglow, the life of America is reflected back in each incarnation of rum.”

This may seem a strange claim for a nation with as strong a history of militant temperance and Prohibition as ours, yet there's more than a little truth to it. Rum was invented in the Americas — probably, though not certainly, in Barbados — and quickly became an important part of the diet in the American colonies, where consumption of alcoholic beverages was very high. Rum and slavery were intertwined, both in the slave trade and on plantations where rum was made. “Demon Rum” became a shibboleth of the temperance movement, and rum itself became one of the most widely consumed alcoholic drinks once Prohibition forced drinkers into speakeasies or onto ships bound for Cuba. During World War II, rum and Coca-Cola “became the de facto national drink of many of the troops,” and now the mojito is one of the most popular drinks among the fashionable young people who are bringing new life into the country's old cities.

More here.

This is from a blog which collects To-Do lists. They are going to be published as a book in 2007 by Simon and Schuster. Some of them are very funny. I reproduce two below:

I guess the To-Do part in this one is meeting this perfect guy (click to enlarge):

Many more lists here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

John Noble Wilford has a long, interesting article in today’s New York Times on the rehabilitation of the alchemist. Once the icon of the bad old days before the scientific revolution, alchemy has been emerging in recent years as more of a proto-science. Indeed, a fair number of the heroes of the scientific revolution were dyed-in-the-wool alchemists. Robert Boyle, one of the founders of chemistry, wanted to reform alchemy, not destroy it. He chased after the philsopher’s stone for his whole life. Many of his papers were destroyed in the eighteenth century because they were loaded with discussions of alchemy–which by then had acquired its bad reputation. Boyle’s legacy had to be protected.

Wilford reported from a recent meeting of historians of chemistry in Philadelphia. From his report (as well as this one from the New York Sun and this one from Chemical and Engineering News), it seems as if the meeting neglected one of the most interesting sides of alchemy: its role in the history of bio-chemistry. Alchemists believed that the life was the greatest transmutation of all, and they believed that the philsopher’s stone would serve as the ultimate medicine. While a lot of alchemists dealt in Kevin-Trudeau-style hogwash, some did important work.

More here.

Joshua Roebke, who, while scolding others for sensationalizing Einstein’s romantic life, was unable to restrain himself from giving his article the title “Einstein in Lust,” in Seed Magazine:

On July 10th, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem made nearly 3,500 sealed pages of Albert Einstein’s personal correspondence public. Some of the more salacious content in the letters—once deemed “too private for release”—has generated a maelstrom of coverage on blogs and newspapers worldwide.

“Phys-sex Genius” wrote the headline wizards at the New York Post. Fox News, another Murdochian outlet, posted a story by on-air personality Neil Cavuto to its website, titled, “Albert Einstein: Genius, Stud Muffin.” “E = Einstein, the galactic womanizer,” quipped The Sunday Times, UK. “Albert Einstein, sex-fiend” wrote the popular blog Boing Boing. Even a member of the extended Seed family, the ScienceBlog Pure Pedantry, included a post with the title, “Scientific Pimp.”

The press and public latched onto the letters’ scant mentions of Einstein’s infidelity like it was the last branch on a long fall.

More here.

From The Village Voice:

Laurie Cumbo first stumbled into the BAM battle at a public meeting in October 2002, held to address the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s plans for a new “mixed-use cultural district” in Fort Greene, on the edge of Downtown Brooklyn. Cumbo had heard that BAM’s Local Development Corporation planned to lure various arts organizations into their proposed district with offers of subsidies. She was interested in what this venerable performing-arts institution might offer her fledgling museum, the Museum of Contemporary Diasporan Arts (MOCADA).

The cultural district was originally envisioned as an area larger than Manhattan’s Lincoln Center that would cut a 10-by-three-block zigzag through Downtown Brooklyn and the heart of Fort Greene. BAM and the BAM LDC are formally separate entities, but the LDC is chaired by Harvey Lichtenstein, who was BAM’s executive director for 32 years before founding the LDC in 1998. In 2001, he secured a $50 million matching grant from ex-mayor Giuliani. But initial meetings between Lichtenstein and Bloomberg’s deputy mayor, Dan Doctoroff, were held behind closed doors. According to community activist Patti Hagan, “[Residents] thought that the BAM LDC was just one of these government entities that was remaking Fort Greene without any input from the people who live there— basically white people coming in and saying to a black community, ‘We know what’s best for you.’ ”

More here.

From The Guardian:

Amartya Sen had a parallel experience, when as a child he witnessed an unknown man stumbling into the garden of his parent’s house, bleeding heavily and asking for water. Sen shouted for his parents, and his father took the man to a hospital, where he died of his injuries. The victim was a Muslim day-labourer who had been stabbed by Hindus during the riots that occurred in Bengal in the last years of the British Raj. Sen continues to be not only horrified but also baffled by the communal violence he witnessed at that time. As he puts it in Identity and Violence: “Aside from being a veritable nightmare, the event was profoundly perplexing.” Why should people who have lived together peaceably suddenly turn on one another in years of violence that cost hundreds of thousands of lives? How could the poor day-labourer be seen as having only one identity – as a Muslim who belonged to an “enemy” community – when he belonged to many other communities as well? “For a bewildered child,” Sen writes, “the violence of identity was extraordinarily hard to grasp. It is not particularly easy for a still bewildered elderly adult.”

Identity and Violence is his attempt to overcome that bewilderment.

More here.

“As Robert Pirsig has his second novel Lila reissued, John Freeman meets the author who for decades has been a thorn in the side of academic philosophers.”

From the London Times:

Robert Pirsig has a bone to pick with philosophers. As his era-defining memoir Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance levitated up the bestseller lists in 1974, all he heard from them was grumbling.

This story of a father-son motorcycle trip across America was just a skeleton of a philosophy, they said. What exactly was this “metaphysics of quality” he kept talking about? And who was he to tell them about it? Seventeen years later Pirsig gave his answer and it came in the form of a 500-page novel, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. Now, at last, the thinkers of the world had something to tinker with. Their response? “Silence. They have just given me zero support and great hostility,” Pirsig says on the eve of the novel’s reissue in Britain.

“It’s just they don’t say anything.” Now, Pirsig believes that he has one last shot at explaining his philosophy to the public, and if it means coming out of seclusion, so be it.

More here.