In fact, despite what the bloggers themselves believe, the future of literary culture does not lie with blogs — or at least, it shouldn’t. The blog form, that miscellany of observations, opinions, and links, is not well-suited to writing about literature, and it is no coincidence that there is no literary blogger with the audience and influence of the top political bloggers. For one thing, literature is not news the way politics is news — it doesn’t offer multiple events every day for the blogger to comment on. For another, bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve. The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals.

Still, it is important to distinguish between the blog as a genre and the Internet as a medium. It is not just possible but likely that, one day, serious criticism will find its primary home on the Web. The advantages — ease of access, low cost, potential audience — are too great to ignore, even if our habits and technology still make it hard to read long essays on the computer screen. Already there are some web publications — like Contemporary Poetry Review (cprw.com), to which I occasionally contribute — that match anything in print for seriousness of purpose. But there’s no chance that literary culture will thrive on the Internet until we recognize that the ethical and intellectual crotchets of the bloggers represent a dead end.

more from The NY Sun here.

Purcell’s ways of making sense—and eventually pictures—of her collections vary almost as much as the things themselves, systems of classification resembling those in Borges’s imagined Chinese encyclopedia. Some of her items take on meaning by juxtaposition. A mummified cat and a pitted one of concrete go together with pitted volcanic stones, because such stones falling from the sky were once called “lynx stones,” and their sulfuric odor was like cat piss. Or do the stones and the concrete cat go together with the piece of wormholed bread from France as “Things that have holes”?

An overarching category (if Purcell’s extreme nominalism can permit such a thing) is the category of the sublimely diminished, things that, as she says, are bereft of their original potential yet still familiar. “I have chipped these things from the matrix of the almighty thingness of our all-American world, and, as I did not stop to mourn their demise, why not revel now in their inevitable disintegration?”

more from Boston Review here.

From MSNBC:

Scientists  investigating a mysterious ailment that killed many of the nation’s honeybees are concentrating on pesticides and a new pathogen as possible culprits, and some beekeepers are already trying to keep their colonies away from pesticide-exposed fields. After months of study, researchers are finding it difficult to tie the die-off to any single factor, said Maryann Frazier, a senior extension associate in Penn State University’s entomology department. “Two things right now … that are really keeping us focused are the pathogen and the role of pesticides,” Frazier said.

Hackenberg, 58, trucks his bees around the country for pollination — from oranges in Florida to blueberries in Maine. He was the first beekeeper to report the disorder to Penn State researchers last fall, having lost nearly 75 percent of his 3,200 colonies. He said he is convinced pesticides, and in particular a kind of pesticide called neonicotinoids, were harming his bees.

More here.

From Science:

Giving feels good.
The brain’s reward center lights up on an MRI image when subjects give money to charity. You don’t need to donate to charity to feel all warm inside. Researchers have found that even when money is taken from some people involuntarily, they feel good about the transaction, as long as the funds go to a good cause. The findings may force economists to rethink just what guides our response to taxes and other financial decisions.

The behavior under the microscope is altruism, which refers to concern for the well-being of others. Sometimes this manifests as a “warm glow” associated with the act of giving. In that case, economists speculate, the act is not entirely selfless because the giver makes the donation in order to feel good. But economists have also proposed that not all warm glows are self-interested. Some people may have positive emotions wash over them just from witnessing good deeds. This is called “pure altruism,” and it may be motivating society’s biggest givers.

More here.

Mikita Brottman in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

As an undergraduate, I liked to annoy the dons at St. Hilda’s College by turning up at my tutorials in a leather biker jacket, a miniskirt, ripped fishnet stockings, and Doc Marten boots. My hair (which has never recovered) was crimped and sprayed into black and pink spikes. “Épater le bourgeois” was the idea, I suppose. I never identified myself as a goth, nor do my own students today who dress in a similar way, but they’d probably accept the term as a fair description of their style and sensibility, as, in retrospect, would I.

Now, of course, I realize the dons at St. Hilda’s had seen it all before. Goth style has been around since the 1970sif not in full bloom, then in hints and gestures, from dyed black hair and pale makeup to Doc Martens, crushed velvet, black nail polish, and fingerless gloves. When I was at college, we added Crazy Color hair streaks and motorbike leathers; my own students add body piercing and tattoos. Goth obviously emerged from punk, but punk didn’t last. The same is true of most subcultures: Hippies are old hat; skinheads have come and gone; grunge is yesterday’s news. Why does goth alone remain undead?

That question is one of many considered in two new books on the subject: Contemporary Gothic, by Catherine Spooner (Reaktion Books), and Goth: Undead Subculture, edited by Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby (Duke University Press). Both books situate the goth movement as a post-punk phenomenon, emerging from the socioeconomic decline of late 1970s Britain.

More here.

Conrad McCallum in The Toronto Star:

Since hunter-gatherer times, men have relied not on DNA swabs but on a little-understood calculus of physical resemblance to decide whether to invest in little Emma or Ethan. In the infant’s upper face and eyes, the skeptical pater familias looks for clues.

Comedian Chris Rock probably went through a similar mental process after a Georgia woman claimed he fathered of a child she had 13 years ago. Ditto Larry Birkhead and Howard K. Stern when they first saw Anna Nicole Smith’s baby daughter, Dannielynn, born last September. Birkhead, after DNA testing, was determined the biological dad and won custody of his little look-alike following Smith’s death last February.

The latest study, done early this year by Brock University psychology professor Anthony Volk, show cues of genetic relatedness are more important to men than women. He showed photos of infants’ faces to male and female subjects, and asked them to make hypothetical adoption choices. In the journal Evolutionary Psychology, Volk reported that men reacted more positively to children with facial traits resembling them, while women’s decisions were influenced more by healthy looks.

More here.

In the files of the Atlas Group, an “imaginary foundation” co-created and administered by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad “whose purpose is to collect, produce, and archive documents of the Lebanese civil wars,” there are nearly one hundred black-and-white photographs chronicling the wreckage of a fraction of the 3,641 car bombs set off in Lebanon between 1975 and 1991. “The only part that remains intact after a car bomb explodes is the engine,” Raad writes in the introduction to My Neck Is Thinner than a Hair (2005). “Landing on balconies, roofs or adjacent streets, the engine is projected tens and sometimes hundreds of meters away from the original site of the bomb.” The photographs depict not the grisly crime scenes, splayed bodies, and bloodied streets but rather the helpless aftermaths of these punctual murders; men stand around the hulks of destroyed vehicles, some of them still aflame. The inert shells of twisted metal, harmless, only hint at the carnage the photographers have failed to capture.

more from Bookforum here.

It is still not even a week since Rorty’s death last Friday. Here’s a brilliant short piece by him, from Eurozine:

I shall be developing this theme of the irrelevance of philosophy to democracy in my remarks. Most of what I shall say will be about the situation in my own country, but I think that most of it applies equally well to the European democracies. In those countries, as in the US, the word “democracy” has gradually come to have two distinct meanings. In its narrower, minimalist meaning it refers to a system of government in which power is in the hands of freely elected officials. I shall call democracy in this sense “constitutionalism”. In its wider sense, it refers to a social ideal, that of equality of opportunity. In this second sense, a democracy is a society in which all children have the same chances in life, and in which nobody suffers from being born poor, or being the descendant of slaves, or being female, or being homosexual. I shall call democracy in this sense “egalitarianism”.

More here.  [Thanks to Helmut at Phronesisiacal.)

Mission accomplished. The Museum of Modern Art’s wide-open, tall-ceilinged, super-reinforced second floor was for all intents and purposes built to accommodate monumental installations and gigantic sculptures, should the need arise. It has arisen.

The artist everyone assumed MoMA was thinking of was the raja of weight and steel, Richard Serra. Sundry MoMA muckety-mucks, including the late great curator Kirk Varnedoe, said the new building was designed with Serra in mind. At Serra’s opening dinner, the president of MoMA’s board of trustees, Marie-Josée Kravis, mused to a crowd of more than 500, “Richard, we built this for you.” It’s as if they’re all saying, Never mind all the rest of you artistic dwarfs.

more from New York here.

Recently, the Polish government attempted to strip Bronisław Geremek of his seat in the European Parliament, to which he had been elected in 2004. The Parliament immediately voted to condemn the Polish government’s action. One of Poland’s most distinguished public figures, Geremek was a leader of Solidarity and a former political prisoner of the Communist regime. As foreign minister from 1997 to 2000, he was responsible for Poland’s accession to NATO. The Polish government tried to have him dismissed because Geremek had refused to sign a declaration that he had not been a secret police agent during the Communist years.

more from the NY Review of Books here.

In Slate, Tyler Cowen reviews Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan:

Before the discovery of Australia, it was generally assumed that swans were always white. Suddenly, black swans turned up, unsettling people’s expectations. In his new book, The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb asks why this discovery seemed so surprising. And in response he argues that it is because we are hard-wired to find order in randomness, to turn scattered points into a coherent narrative, and to expect identified patterns to last forever. We become emboldened by our successes, and we think that we achieved control or at least can see what is coming next. The search for patterns and order can be a dangerous trap, distracting us from “the impact of the highly improbable,” to cite the book’s subtitle. Taleb, a long-standing financial analyst and investor, is the author of Fooled by Randomness, a book about our tendency to mistake luck for skill. In The Black Swan, he preaches a bracing sermon in favor of an angst-ridden, but socially beneficial, plunge into wrestling with the unknown.

The Black Swan works best as an advice book. In part, that’s because the unpredictable is most undervalued in our personal lives. Too many of us are caught up in routine, or a “status quo bias,” as it is labeled by economists and psychologists. We are afraid to move house or change jobs or even to imagine alternative paths. It is disquieting to think we might be making bad choices, so we close off options and we shut down self-critical reasoning, whether subconsciously or by active choice. For instance, we’re likely to buy certain commercial products simply because they are familiar and therefore comforting; that is why branding and advertising so influence consumers.

Via ghostman at Microscopically Fictitious:

Part 1:

Part 2:

From BBC News:

A close-up view of the human genome has revealed its innermost workings to be far more complex than first thought.

The study, which was carried out on just 1% of our DNA code, challenges the view that genes are the main players in driving our biochemistry. Instead, it suggests genes, so called junk DNA and other elements, together weave an intricate control network. The work, published in the journals Nature and Genome Research, is to be scaled up to the rest of the genome. The Encyclopaedia of DNA Elements (Encode) study was a collaborative effort between 80 organisations from around the world. It has been described as the next step on from the Human Genome Project, which provided the sequence for all of the DNA that makes up the human species’ biochemical “book of life”.

More here.

From Nature:

Researchers in China have unearthed the bones of a gigantic bird-like dinosaur, dwarfing anything else in its category. Alive, the beast is thought to have been 8 metres long, 3.5 metres high at the hip and 1,400 kilograms in weight — 35 times as heavy as its next largest family members and 300 times the size of smaller ones such as Caudiperyx. It has been classified as a new species and genus: Gigantoraptor erlianensis. The find is detailed this week in Nature.

The evolution of bird-like features had long been thought to be accompanied by a decrease in size, meaning the smaller the species, the more bird-like it is likely to be and vice versa. The new discovery shows that isn’t necessarily true. Gigantoraptor had long arms, bird-like legs, a toothless jaw, and probably a beak. There are no clear signs as to whether it was feathered. However, judging from its close affinity to other dinosaurs known to have been feathered, Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing speculates that it was.

The largest animal known to have had feathers is the extinct Stirton’s thunder bird, which weighed in at 500 kilograms.

More here.

Darcy Argue once aptly described Paris Hilton to me as a World Wrestling Federation character who’s managed to escape into the real world and grab everyone’s attention. It has now grabbed that of Christopher Hitchens in Slate who compares the media attention to ones seen during lynching (via Lindsay, who has a response to Hitchens):

So now, a young woman knows that, everywhere she goes, this is what people are visualizing, and giggling about. She hasn’t a rag of privacy to her name. But this turns out to be only a prelude. Purportedly unaware that her license was still suspended, a result of being found with a whiff of alcohol on her breath, she also discovers that the majesty of the law will not give her a break. Evidently as bewildered and aimless as she ever was, she is arbitrarily condemned to prison, released on an equally slight pretext and—here comes the beautiful bit—subjected to a cat-and-mouse routine that sends her back again. At this point, she cries aloud for her mother and exclaims that it “isn’t right.” And then the real pelting begins. In Toronto, where I happened to be on the relevant day, the Sun* filled its whole front page with a photograph of her tear-swollen face, under the stern headline “CRYBABY.” I didn’t at all want to see this, but what choice did I have? It was typical of a universal, inescapable coverage. Not content with seeing her undressed and variously penetrated, it seems to be assumed that we need to watch her being punished and humiliated as well. The supposedly “broad-minded” culture turns out to be as prurient and salacious as the elders in The Scarlet Letter. Hilton is legally an adult but the treatment she is receiving stinks—indeed it reeks—of whatever horrible, buried, vicarious impulse underlies kiddie porn and child abuse.

I cannot imagine what it might be like, while awaiting a prison sentence for a tiny infraction, to see dumb-ass TV-addicted crowds howling with easy, complicit laughter as Sarah Silverman (a culpably unfunny person) describes your cell bars being painted to look like penises and jokes heavily about your teeth being at risk because you might gnaw on them. And this on prime time, and unrebuked. Lynching parties used to be fiestas, as we have no right to forget, and the ugly coincidence of sexual nastiness—obscenity is the right name for it—and vengefulness is what seems to lend the savor to the Saturnalia. There must be more than one “gossip” writer who has already rehearsed for the day that Paris Hilton takes a despairing overdose. And what a glorious day of wall-to-wall coverage that will be!

Poetry goes to the backwater to refresh itself as often as it goes to the mainstream, a fact that partly explains the appeal of Les Murray, the celebrated “bush bard” of Bunyah, New South Wales, Australia. The son of a poor farmer, Murray, who was not schooled formally until he was nine, is now routinely mentioned among the three or four leading English-language poets. Because in Murray’s poetry you learn, for example, that there exists such a thing as the “creamy shitwood tree,” he has been mistaken for a neutral cartographer of far-flung places. But the key to Murray, what makes him so exasperating to read one minute and thrilling the next, is not landscape but rage. “How naturally random recording edges into contempt,” Murray writes, identifying the poles of his own combustible poetic temperament.

more from The New Yorker here.

Taylor’s book is a vivid, comprehensive account of how the Berlin Wall came about, of the repulsive or inspiring events which took place along it during its 28-year life, and of its eventual fall in 1989. He backs this narrative with a summary of Prussian and Berlin history leading up to the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, a close study of the devious postwar struggles within the ruling Socialist Unity Party under Walter Ulbricht and then Erich Honecker, and an account of developing East-West relations before, during and after the great ‘Berlin Crisis’ of 1958-61.

When he is telling stories, Taylor is at his best. He makes compulsive reading, for instance, when he traces the process by which the first spontaneous and idealistic Fluchthelfer (‘escape helper’) groups formed in 1961 became slowly entangled in all kinds of moral and practical dilemmas. Should they carry guns and shoot back when fired on? They began to do so, but lost much Western sympathy when GDR border guards were killed. Should they raise money for expensive tunnels by striking coverage deals with American TV networks or Axel Springer’s right-wing press empire? They eventually did, but getting into bed with journalists sometimes compromised their security as well as their public image. Should they convert the whole effort into a commercial undertaking, in which the escapers were obliged to pay for freedom – and in hard currency? By the late 1970s, the price had reached something like £5000 a head.

more from the LRB here.

This leads to the loss of one of the great comforts of modern urban life, not accounted for in the vast sociological literature on anomie: the fraternity of solitude. Sometimes you eat dinner alone; sometimes you do your grocery shopping alone; often you’ll ride the bus alone. At such times, in a city, there are always other people who are dining alone, shopping alone, sitting in their bus seats alone, in exactly the same situation. The fraternity of solitaries is always there for you to join. Pynchon imagined a society of “Inamorati Anonymous,” solitary anti-love and anti-company people who send letters through a secret network, simply to assure one another they are there. Go into a restaurant now, sit near a fellow single diner, and you will see him dial his cell phone during the appetizer and talk through to dessert. The only choices you have are to pull out your own phone or listen in.

From literature to advertising, we’ve developed a cultural style of ceaseless babbling. Never mind the endless self-interruptions and elaborations of needlessly footnoted fiction, talking copyright pages, and the rest; we got used to that, and it was sort of in the spirit of a warning. But even Burger King has now stolen the text-happy style of McSweeney’s, so you are fed grease by some whimsical garrulous spirit of the paper sack and the napkin.

more from the boys at n+1 here (so young to think like such old men).

Howard Freil in ZNet:

Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University on June 8, 2007, despite votes in favor of tenure by the school’s Political Science Department and a college-level personnel committee. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, tenure was opposed by the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the University Board on Promotion and Tenure, and the university president, Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, the ultimate decision-maker in the case, who reportedly told the Chronicle that he found “no compelling reasons to overturn” the tenure board’s recommendation.

In addition, Holtschneider reportedly told the Chronicle that he “decried the outside interest the case had generated” and stated for the record: “This attention was unwelcome and inappropriate and had no impact on either the process or the outcome of this case.” While the outside interference was both inappropriate and probably unprecedented, due on both counts to the prolifically public opposition to Finkelstein’s tenure by Harvard Law School’s Alan Dershowitz, it seems implausible that Dershowitz’s campaign had no impact at DePaul on the final decision to deny tenure to Finkelstein.

Because few assistant professors with books published by at least three major publishers (in this case the University of California, W.W. Norton, and Verso) are denied tenure, and because even fewer with such books, a vote of support from their department, and glowing student evaluations, are denied tenure, it is difficult to imagine that anything other than outside interference, almost all of it from Dershowitz, led to the denial of Finkelstein’s tenure at DePaul.

From the Political Compass website, via Microscopically Fictitious:

In the introduction, we explained the inadequacies of the traditional left-right line.

If we recognise that this is essentially an economic line it’s fine, as far as it goes. We can show, for example, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot, with their commitment to a totally controlled economy, on the hard left. Socialists like Mahatma Gandhi and Robert Mugabe would occupy a less extreme leftist position. Margaret Thatcher would be well over to the right, but further right still would be someone like that ultimate free marketeer, General Pinochet.

That deals with economics, but the social dimension is also important in politics. That’s the one that the mere left-right scale doesn’t adequately address. So we’ve added one, ranging in positions from extreme authoritarian to extreme libertarian.

Both an economic dimension and a social dimension are important factors for a proper political analysis. By adding the social dimension you can show that Stalin was an authoritarian leftist (ie the state is more important than the individual) and that Gandhi, believing in the supreme value of each individual, is a liberal leftist. While the former involves state-imposed arbitary collectivism in the extreme top left, on the extreme bottom left is voluntary collectivism at regional level, with no state involved. Hundreds of such anarchist communities exisited in Spain during the civil war period

You can also put Pinochet, who was prepared to sanction mass killing for the sake of the free market, on the far right as well as in a hardcore authoritarian position. On the non-socialist side you can distinguish someone like Milton Friedman, who is anti-state for fiscal rather than social reasons, from Hitler, who wanted to make the state stronger, even if he wiped out half of humanity in the process.

The chart also makes clear that, despite popular perceptions, the opposite of fascism is not communism but anarchism (ie liberal socialism), and that the opposite of communism ( i.e. an entirely state-planned economy) is neo-liberalism (i.e. extreme deregulated economy).

The usual understanding of anarchism as a left wing ideology does not take into account the neo-liberal “anarchism” championed by the likes of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and America’s Libertarian Party, which couples law of the jungle right-wing economics with liberal positions on most social issues. Often their libertarian impulses stop short of opposition to strong law and order positions, and are more economic in substance (ie no taxes) so they are not as extremely libertarian as they are extremely right wing. On the other hand, the classical libertarian collectivism of anarcho-syndicalism ( libertarian socialism) belongs in the bottom left hand corner.

In our home page we demolished the myth that authoritarianism is necessarily “right wing”, with the examples of Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot and Stalin. Similarly Hitler, on an economic scale, was not an extreme right-winger. His economic policies were broadly Keynesian, and to the left of some of today’s Labour parties. If you could get Hitler and Stalin to sit down together and avoid economics, the two diehard authoritarians would find plenty of common ground.

Economic Left/Right: -5.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.38

More, including the test, here.

UPDATE: I posted this on a lark, and sure enough, quickly got a (deserved) scolding from Cosma Shalizi. I am just copying his usefully informative comment here:

This one has been around, as a Libertarian recruiting tool, since at least the early bronze age (when I encountered it in high school). There are about a zillion problems; the late, lamented Chris Lightfoot came up with a substantially better alternative, along with an explanation of why the political compass test is unsatisfactory. (I wrote about Lightfoot’s test in November 2003, and was late to the party even then.)

And in case you’re interested, here are my results from Chris Lightfoot’s survey:

1	left/right	-7.0408 (-0.4238)
2	pragmatism	+4.5748 (+0.2754)