Suddenly you are looking in his eyes. Officially, they’re brown, but for you they’ll always be blue. He is speaking in a soft, seductive voice. Glory if you follow, eternal shame if you don’t. Rome or Death. In a moment, your destiny shifts. Incredibly, you have volunteered. You are given a red shirt, an obsolete rifle, a bayonet. You are taught to sing a hymn full of antique rhetoric recalling a magnificent past, foreseeing a triumphant future. You learn to march at night in any weather and over the most rugged terrain, to sleep on the bare ground, to forgo regular meals, to charge under fire at disciplined men in uniform. You learn to kill with your bayonet. You see your friends killed. You grow familiar with the shrieks of the wounded, the stench of corpses. If you turn tail in battle, you will be shot. Those are his orders. If you loot, you will be shot. You write enthusiastic letters home. You have discovered patriotism and comradeship. You have been welcomed by cheering crowds, kissed by admiring young women. Italy will be restored to greatness. From Sicily to the Alps, your country will be free. Then, with no warning, it’s over. A politician has not kept faith. An armistice has been signed. Your leader is furious. You hardly understand. Rome is still a dream. Your group disbanded, you receive nothing: no money, no respect, no help in finding work. But, years later, when he calls again, you go. You will follow him to your death.

more from The New Yorker here.

There are “two sorts of truth,” Niels Bohr wrote, “trivialities, where opposites are obviously absurd, and profound truths, recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth.”(1) Are Neo Rauch’s pictures of Germany trivially or profoundly true? Is Rauch a true dialectician, “living with live opposites,” or is he indulging in nihilistic absurdity? Does he picture the German Geist of Yesterday or the German Geist of Today? Does he represent or misrepresent Germany? Rauch’s works are allegories of German history, but is their ironical pessimism its whole story? These questions haunt Neo Rauch’s art, enriching its significance.

Let’s get more specific: Is Verrat (2003) merely absurd or is it ingeniously dialectical? The contradiction between the violent foreground figures and the seemingly peaceful background buildings — between the expressive action of the former and the inexpressive passivity of the latter — is clearly absurd. But does each also convey a profound truth about Germany? Do they convey the profound split in the German mentality? They are conflicting parts of the same picture, but the “good” upper part does not seem to know what is occurring in the “bad” lower part. The people in the buildings are silently sleeping, undisturbed by the shooting going on in the No Man’s Land below — or else afraid to do anything about it. The opposites turn away from each other, refuse to respond to each other, and this turning away, this indifference of disavowal, is the unwholesome whole truth. Each half not fully conscious of the other half is the truth of their opposition.

more from Kuspit on Neo Rauch here.

Surely this is not how Orson Welles imagined it would end. According to the chronology appended to Peter Bogdanovich’s This Is Orson Welles, on Oct. 5, 1985, Welles spent the day on the set of Transformers: The Movie, giving voice to Unicron, a villainous, planet-eating planet. On Oct. 10, he was dead. The man’s first feature film had been Citizen Kane; his last was an animated movie based on a line of toy robots.

Of course, by 1985 Welles was a long way from Rosebud. His most visible role at that point was as a pitchman for Paul Masson wine, a responsibility he does not seem to have always discharged ably. He’d also recently cut the voiceover for the Revenge of the Nerds trailer. But it would be a mistake to lump Transformers in with Welles’ other regrettable late-career moves. Though a modest film compared with Michael Bay’s blockbuster out today, the original Transformers is the better film. And for a certain subset of Americans—boys who were 9 in 1986—it was every bit as shocking as War of the Worlds had been for Grandma and Grandpa.

more from Slate here.

When A.E. Housman failed his final examinations at Oxford he went to London to work as a clerk in the Patent Office. After ten years of that, he was appointed, at the age of 33, to the chair of Latin at University College London. In his application for the job he very properly drew attention to his Oxford failure. Not, you might think, a glowing CV, especially as he couldn’t claim any teaching experience. Yet these manifest disadvantages failed to deter the electors to the chair. They had their own criteria of eminence and saw that Housman was already one of the few. He would, before very long, be called the greatest Latinist of his age, to be named in the same breath as Bentley and Porson and Housman’s famous German contemporary Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.

He was usually quite modest about his claims: ‘I wish they would not compare me to Bentley . . . I will not tolerate comparison with Bentley. Bentley is alone and supreme.’ However, ‘they may compare me with Porson if they will.’ He was willing, that is, to be compared only with the runner-up for the title of greatest English classical scholar. Ordinary readers, even if they have a bit of Latin, can have little notion of what it means to know it well; those who, in their day, did know it well were ready to appoint a young man with a record of academic failure to the most influential Latin chair outside Oxford and Cambridge.

more from Frank Kermode at the LRB here.

Crime fiction is driven by death, but the guaranteed survival of the detective counters the morbidity of the form. So it’s unsettling beyond the usual effects of the genre to read a book by a writer who has recently died.

The shadow of mortality and mourning that is a basic requirement of mysteries is doubled in the case of End Games, Michael Dibdin’s 11th novel about the Italian cop Aurelio Zen, because the advance copies began to circulate just after the news of the writer’s death on March 30, nine days after his 60th birthday.

more from The Guardian here.

In Jewcy, Michael Weiss offer three sets of “poseurs” vs. “real deal” leftists and starts a discussion that, er, takes strange turns.

When Karl Marx famously said that events and figures appear twice, first as tragedy, then as farce, he might have been referring to today’s glut of hand-me-down Marxist kitsch. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, pseudo-radicals had long prostituted the socialist revolutionary tradition as a cheap reference for bumper sticker fatuities. The revolution will not be televised. Yes, well, it wasn’t ever supposed to be. The situation is even worse now that so-called “anti-globalization” activists blithely don Che Guevara t-shirts yet think Das Kapital – the most pro-globalization text ever written – is the latest post-punk sensation out of Hamburg.

Fascism in its worst, most medieval form is once again an ideological menace, and indigence has kept apace with exploding populations that are still too fettered by venal regimes to benefit from the market economy. It’s vital that there are socialists and social democrats in our midst serious about helping the working class, rescuing victims of genocide, and establishing parliamentary democracy on the ruins of lethal dictatorships. The left owes it to itself to identify and root out today’s species of buffoonish and sinister politicos claiming Marxist discipleship but demonstrating only moral and philosophical poverty. What follows is a troika of the worst poseur Marxists—faux-cialists, if you like—plus three world leaders who are actually literate in radical politics and willing to put their knowledge to good use.

Can cell phones improve access to finance in the Third World? Kabir Kumar of the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor on NPR’s All Things Considered:

In developing nations, many people still do not have bank accounts — but they do have cell phones.

Now, a group with the World Bank is trying to develop a way to allow poor people to use their cell phones to save and transfer money.

Kabir Kumar of the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor talks to Debbie Elliott about the project.

From Nature:

A seven-year-old girl in Canada might one day give birth to her genetic half-sibling. The girl’s mother has donated her own eggs to give the child, who was born with a disease that affects her ovaries, the chance to have children of her own. Melanie Boivin, a 35-year-old lawyer from Montreal, secured legal permission for the move after realizing that her daughter, Flavie, could not have children without donor eggs. Flavie has Turner syndrome, a rare condition in which one of the X chromosomes is missing, causing ovaries to malfunction.

The unprecedented legal agreement means that the eggs could remain frozen for 20 years, until Flavie decides to start a family of her own. If she uses the eggs and has a successful pregnancy, the resulting baby will be her half-sister or -brother. Mothers have previously acted as surrogates for their daughters, giving birth to their own grandchildren.

More here.

From The New York Times:

“Back to life” or “visitation” dreams, as they are known among dream specialists and psychologists, are vivid and memorable dreams of the dead. They are a particularly potent form of what Carl Jung called “big dreams,” the emotionally vibrant ones we remember for the rest of our lives. Big dreams are once again on the minds of psychologists as part of a larger trend toward studying dreams as meaningful representations of our concerns and emotions. “Big dreams are transformative,” Roger Knudson, director of the Ph.D. program in clinical psychology at Miami University of Ohio, said in a telephone interview. The dreaming imagination does not just harvest images from remembered experience, he said. It has a “poetic creativity” that connects the dots and “deforms the given,” turning scattered memories and emotions into vivid, experiential vignettes that can help us to reflect on our lives.

Grief itself is transformative. It is a process of disassembly. The bereaved must let go of the selves they were, as well as the loved ones they have lost. The dreams we have while grieving are an important part of that process.

More here.

Walter Crump. Northern Avenue Bridge I.

Omniscope photograph.

More here & here.

Posted by Sughra Raza.

At the Third Annual 3 Quarks Ball…

That’s Mr. Meis in the photo at our 2nd Annual bash.

Not all the details are completely worked out yet, but the party will be bigger and better than ever, with an amazing live band, in addition to drinks/dancing/DJs, and this year it will be in Manhattan (most likely on the upper west side). So reserve this date, and more details will be forthcoming:

9 pm, Saturday, August 25, 2007^*

*This also seems a good time to let 3QD readers know that my wife Margit Oberrauch and I and our cat Frederica Krueger will be moving to Italy at the end of August. We will be living in the South Tyrol in the very north of Italy (a German speaking region–wünschen Sie mir Glück mit meinem Deutsch) just a few kilometers south of the Austrian border in a small alpine village. 3QD should remain unaffected by our move, and we will be back in New York City well in time for the Fourth Annual 3 Quarks Ball. This is just a sabbatical.

Jonathan Dee in the New York Times Magazine:

When news broke on May 8 about the arrest of a half-dozen young Muslim men for supposedly planning to attack Fort Dix, alongside the usual range of reactions — disbelief, paranoia, outrage, indifference, prurience — a newer one was added: the desire to consecrate the event’s significance by creating a Wikipedia page about it. The first one to the punch was a longtime Wikipedia contributor known as CltFn, who at about 7 that morning created what’s called a stub — little more than a placeholder, often just one sentence in length, which other contributors may then build upon — under the heading “Fort Dix Terror Plot.” A while later, another Wikipedia user named Gracenotes took an interest as well. Over the next several hours, in constant cyberconversation with an ever-growing pack of other self-appointed editors, Gracenotes — whose real name is Matthew Gruen — expanded and corrected this stub 59 times, ultimately shaping it into a respectable, balanced and even footnoted 50-line account of that day’s major development in the war on terror. By the time he was done, “2007 Fort Dix Attack Plot” was featured on Wikipedia’s front page. Finally, around midnight, Gruen left a note on the site saying, “Off to bed,” and the next morning he went back to his junior year of high school.

More here.

Roald Hoffman in American Scientist:

As I write this, a Philadelphia jury is learning some chemistry as it ponders a lawsuit brought by the makers of Equal (Merisant) against Splenda’s manufacturers (McNeil Nutritionals). The jury members will also be probing our attitudes toward the natural and the unnatural, parsing words and getting at the essence of advertising.

It’s about money, of course: the $1.5 billion market for artificial sweeteners. Equal’s share of the market has fallen; Splenda’s has risen dramatically, to 62 percent of the U.S. market. Equal’s Merisant accuses Splenda’s McNeil Nutritionals of gaining its edge by misleading consumers into thinking Splenda was somehow natural. Splenda’s ads say “made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar.”

First the facts: Ordinary “sugar,” whether from sugar cane or beets, is sucrose, whose structure is shown on the facing page. Equal’s active ingredient, aspartame, has a clearly different molecular structure from sucrose. Why it tastes sweet (much sweeter per gram than sugar), or to state it a different way, how artificial sweeteners work their biochemical legerdemain on our taste buds … that is a fascinating story. We now know the receptors involved and understand roughly how it can be that the receptor proteins respond to the diversity of chemical structures represented in sweeteners.

More here.

Tibor Fischer in The Telegraph:

Like me, you probably don’t associate the traffic lights on Southampton Row with the end of the world.

But it was while waiting there in 1933 that the Hungarian polymath Leó Szilárd conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, and thus the creation of the atomic bomb. Szilárd is one of a generation of exceptional Hungarian scientists and artists that Kati Marton examines in The Great Escape, a study of nine Hungarian Jews who fled their homeland.

Four of the scientists – Szilárd, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller – also feature prominently in PD Smith’s Doomsday Men, which lays out the science of superweapons and their depiction in literature and cinema.

Why Hungary exported so much talent in the 1930s is hard to explain.

The emancipation of the Jews in the Austro- Hungarian Empire and the ruthless gimnázium system are standard suggestions, but it was very odd how one small country produced so many Nobel Prizewinners in one swoop – and then practically nothing. Szilárd was especially gifted.

More here.

Thomas Urban in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. (Translated in Sign and sight.):

So Ryszard Kapuscinski was at it as well! The famous reporter and prize-crowned author, whose books on the Orient, Africa, Latin America and the Soviet Union have been translated into numerous languages, also wrote reports for the SB, the Polish secret police, under the code name ‘Vera Cruz’ and ‘Poet’. He is the last in a line of intellectuals who have recently been outed as informers: the novelist Andrzej Szczypiorski, the poet Zbigniew Herbert, the novelist, poet and dramatist Henryk Grynberg, and one of the greatest narrators of Jewish suffering and founder of the famous Wroclaw mime theatre Henryk Tomaszewski. The philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman was even an officer in the secret police during the Stalin era, and kept very quiet about it.

The Kapuscinski case has added fuel to the Polish debate on lustration, the process of x-raying its citizens for evidence of secret police involvement. And there we were thinking it had all come to an end, with the recent decision of the constitutional court to squash great sections of the lustration law which the ruling Kaczynski twins were trying to push through. Now only civil servants can be subjected to examination, not, as the government intended, journalists of all types, from editors of local rags, to political chat show hosts. Foreign commentators celebrated the court’s verdict as an end to the witch hunt – ignoring the thousands of informers and opportunists in the media, writers’ associations and universities who stand to profit from the decision, including names that are famous in Germany.

I didn’t know of this case of another “informant”, but it seems oddly poetic, no pun intended:

The poet Zbigniew Herbert, who died in 1998, even succeeded in elegantly duping the SB. He filled his reports, for example, with interpretations of the poems of the Nobel Prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz, who lived in exile and was hated by the regime, as well as long-winded cultural-philosophical observations which undoubtedly went well over the heads of the leading officers. It was his resistance against an insensate system. And he never harmed or betrayed anyone.

From The Washington Post:

America’s basic founding myth describes us as a people selected by Providence to found a new world of liberty and hope, not just for ourselves but for the entire human race.

This myth of American exceptionalism has led to self-deception as well as a moral progress. On the Fourth of July we one can tell the traditional story that “all men are created equal,” or the counter-story of a constitution that treated slaves as three-fifths of a person, broken treaties with native inhabitants, and a doctrine of manifest destiny used to legitimize aggression against Mexico. As Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, points out in her thoughtful, and well-written bookessay, both stories may be true at the same time. In a nation held together by ideas rather than ethnicity, fierce debates over values “have driven our history forward. Democracy once meant suffrage only for propertied white men. At the dawn of the Revolution, liberty meant slavery for 20 percent of the population. Equality once meant segregated schools. And justice has often not been for all. Successive groups and generations of Americans have challenged the meaning and the implementation of these values — calling on our government to make good its promises and also disputing precisely what was promised.”

More here.

From The National Geographic:

As of 1995 only 17 percent of Earth’s land remained free of direct human influence, as seen in this map of the vast networks of shipping lanes and roads that crisscross the planet.

“On average, the net benefits to humankind of domesticated nature have been positive,” the authors write in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Science. For instance, leaps and bounds in agriculture have increased food supplies and made for easy access to energy-rich, easily stored grains.

More here.

Saifedean Ammous in his blog, The Saif House:

On my news feed, a few days ago, next to each other were two items that demonstrate two incredible, and not all too unrelated, phenomena that tell you a lot about America today.

New Orleans Pursues Foreign Aid
Washington to Increase Military Aid to Israel

As New Orleans struggles to rebuild itself, and the Federal money that was supposed to fund this rebuilding is trickling far slower than it was promised, President Bush announced an increase in the aid package to Israel and secured it for the next ten years.

More here.  [In the photo, Jenin, in the West Bank, is on the left; New Orleans is on the right.]

John E. Uhl in his personal blog:

The stage production of recent performances only exacerbates the turgid subject matter, overpowering the viewer (who already had enough to look at during the Funeral tour, when the Arcade Fire was seven somberly dressed musicians) with more lights, horn players, neon reproductions of the new album cover, amplified megaphones and tiers of video screens that replicate and magnify every note and movement of the performers — presumably a kind of comment on advertising and surveillance in the age of terror that succeeded only in making me dizzy (and sick of looking at the performers).

More here.

Here’s the idea:

Television is a one-to-many technology, where one entity controls the flow of content out to many individuals. Companies use the 30 second spot, or short television commercial, to entice consumers to the products or services they offer for sale. “30 second spot” takes this icon of controlled corporate communication and flips it on its head.

In this ART(inter)ACTION version, artists, especially those who have little access or few outlets for the distribution of their work, are invited to talk about an artwork and why it is of value.

“30 second spot” acknowledges the current explosion of media channels, where audiences are splintering off in dozens of directions, watching TV shows on iPods, watching movies on videogame players and listening to radio on the Internet. In this case, the local art gallery becomes an additional media channel, advertising artworks in an open and eclectic format.

More here.  [Thanks to Zeina Assaf.]