By the time I arrived in Chicago, my vocation had shifted from fiction to poetry. If I am not mistaken, I was the only one of Leo Strauss’s long-term students who came to him from poetry. I was also virtually uninterested at the time in politics, unlike the majority of Strauss’s students. Instead, I was an avowed meta-physician, who had elaborated a philosophical position partly influenced by T. S. Eliot, one of whose main tenets was that philosophy and poetry are two different languages about the same world. In addition to these intellectual propensities, which most of Strauss’s students regarded as deficiencies, I was undisciplined in the academic sense and spent most of my time writing poetry, with some professional success and with reasonable hopes for future progress. These hopes were sustained by Hayden Carruth, who was then the editor of Poetry Magazine, and Henry Rago, who was about to assume that position, but also by Allen Tate, who taught in the College for a year.

more from Daedalus Magazine (via bookforum) here.

From Seed:

TAIPUSI, China (AFP)—Officials in Inner Mongolia say they have established a living barrier of trees, grass and shrubs wide enough to hold back the Gobi desert and to curb the sandstorms blowing over northeast Asia and hitting the United States.

Taipusi, one of Inner Mongolia’s banners or counties, is at the centre of a project to plant a so-called Green Wall of China, designed to act as a buffer between the expanding desert and Beijing, just 200 kilometres (120 miles) to the south.

Like the original Great Wall, the green wall straddles a patchwork of counties in several northern provinces including arid Hebei and Shanxi.

But unlike the crumbling stone structure, which failed to keep out invading nomads from the north, officials say they believe the new wall will work.

More here.

From Ego Magazine:

Konya, Turkey, November 1244
Face to face stood two strangers, Maulana Jalal al-Din Muhammad Balkhi (Rumi) and Shams al-Din of Tabriz; Rumi, a young demure scholar and Shams, a spiritual wayfarer with a penchant for the uncertain. By the young age of forty, Rumi was a brilliant scholar. Shams, at sixty, was a free-spirited wanderer. The transformation was instant. The sheer opposition of their innate temperament may have been the flicker that caught the coal. By some unverifiable accounts, Shams had initially noticed Rumi in Syria when the latter was 21 years old but had deemed the scholar not yet disposed for their partnership and that he chose to wait for 16 years before approaching him again.

On the streets of Konyathat night, Rumi was on his path home with he came across the strange and hypnotic Shams. The latter, without any introduction, asked him pointed philosophical questions intended to fluster Rumi’s concepts of enlightenment. While Rumi responded, mustering the collective strength and wit of his years of devotion to religion and jurisprudence; the flicker in Shams’ words, his speech, mannerism and conduct compelled Rumi to explore further by inviting the wanderer along and into his home. From that day forward, Shams possessed him. Shams grasped Rumi’s understanding of religion and infused it with a love and devotion that elevated him from scholar to philosopher; He went into seclusion with the stranger, leaving aside all that composed his life – family, students, and disciples. This detachment lasted for three months and inspired him for a lifetime. His heart engulfed his systematic, controlled mind with the message of humanity and oneness with God, a result of his pointed discourses. Rumi’s professorial sermons were replaced with ecstatic soliloquies of God, love and humanity.

More here.

Britta Erickson in The Atlantic:

Contemporary Chinese art is attracting widespread international interest, thanks to the extraordinary prices being paid at auction. Last November, in Hong Kong, Zhang Xiaogang’s Tiananmen Square (1993) sold for $2.3 million, and Liu Xiaodong’s Three Gorges: Newly Displaced Population (2004) sold for more than $2.7 million.

The headline-grabbing sales have been dominated by a handful of Beijing-based painters whose works have a signature look easily recognizable as Chinese. Museums worldwide, though, are beginning to take a much broader interest in the Chinese art scene, exhibiting artists working in a variety of media, from ink painting and sculpture to installations and performance art. Major solo exhibitions—such as those of Huang Yong Ping at Minnesota’s Walker Art Center, Cai Guo-Qiang at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Zhou Tiehai at Tokyo’s Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, and Yang Fudong at the Kunsthalle Vienna—show an increasing appreciation of the breadth of the work being created in China and provide evidence of the rapid integration of Chinese artists into the international art arena.

More here.

From BBC News:

Dr Craig Venter, the man who led the private sector effort to sequence the human genome, has been working for years to create a man-made organism. But constructing a primitive microbe from a kit of genes is a daunting task. Dr Venter says, eventually, these life forms could be designed to make biofuels and absorb greenhouse gases. The publication of the patent application has angered some environmentalists.

The J Craig Venter Institute’s US patent application claims exclusive ownership of a set of essential genes and a synthetic “free-living organism that can grow and replicate” made using those genes. Dr Venter’s team intends to construct an organism with a “minimal genome” that can then be inserted into the shell of a bacterium. By removing genes, one by one, from a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium they identified the minimum number of genes required for this particular organism to replicate, or reproduce, in its controlled environment. They have been able to remove 101 of its 482 genes without killing the bacterium, meaning that 381 were required for replication. But generating a man-made living organism from the bottom up requires much more than just its minimal genome. For example, in order to get the genes to do something, there have to be chemicals to translate the genes into messenger RNA and proteins.

More here.

From my friend Kent Puckett and Derek Nystrom’s conversations with Richard Rorty, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies (www.prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm3.pdf ):

Q: However, many suggest that your work has shaken the dominance of analytic philosophy. Berel Lang wrote the following in 1990 about both your role as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association during its 1979 convention, as well as the influence of your Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, published in that same year: “It may be too much or even yet too early to claim that the landscape of American philosophy, institutionally but to an extent also substantively, would not be the same after the events of 1979; as with most stirrings in the history of ideas, Rorty’s revisionism was undoubtedly symptomatic as well as causal. But there is no question that in the decade between 1979 and 1989 significant changes occurred in the profession of American philosophy—and that Rorty was and remains a central figure in this process.”

RR: I think that’s wrong. No big changes occurred, and I was never a central figure. 1979 looks big to Berel because the unreconstructed Yalies, the ones who hadn’t retooled themselves, were the center of the so-called pluralist movement. Their faction, made up of everybody in American philosophy who wasn’t analytic, got a majority for their candidate for president of the Eastern Division of the APA. My sympathies were with him because he was the underdog, and the analytic establishment was being very arrogant. I was president that year, and I made a crucial parliamentary ruling in his favor. I’ve never been forgiven by the analytic philosophers for that. I’ve also never been liked or trusted by the pluralists. I managed to fall neatly between two stools.

In The Observer:

Fuelled by the postwar economic crises that have ravaged this stretch of west Africa, a lucrative trade in young players is on the rise. Children who have not even finished primary education are being scouted by the major clubs from France, Belgium, Morocco and Tunisia.

An investigation by The Observer in Ivory Coast last week found that Lebanese businessmen in Abidjan, an entrepreneurial community once preoccupied with diamond and timber smuggling, are turning their attention to football, establishing illegal training schools across the country in an attempt to farm the best talent out to some of the Middle East and Europe’s largest clubs.

[H/t: Alex Cooley]

Sad news: Richard Rorty is dead:

Richard Rorty, the leading American philosopher and heir to the pragmatist tradition, passed away on Friday, June 8.

He was Professor of Comparative Literature emeritus at Stanford University. In April the American Philosophical Society awarded him the Thomas Jefferson Medal. The prize citation reads: “In recognition of his influential and distinctively American contribution to philosophy and, more widely, to humanistic studies. His work redefined knowledge ‘as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature’ and thus redefined philosophy itself as an unending, democratically disciplined, social and cultural activity of inquiry, reflection, and exchange, rather than an activity governed and validated by the concept of objective, extramental truth.”

[H/t: Asad Raza]

From The New Yorker:

Just about every biography—and this includes the two latest entries—begins with a description of Clinton’s formative years: her middle-class childhood in Park Ridge, Illinois; her stint as a Goldwater Girl in high school; her arrival, in thick glasses and bell-bottoms, at Wellesley College. Most then rush through her years at Yale Law School, a romantic interlude whose unromantic climax is seventeen years in Arkansas. There follows a discussion of the 1992 campaign, Hillary’s critical role in saving Bill from Gennifer Flowers, and the requisite reflection on the complex nature of their marriage. Sympathetic and unsympathetic biographers alike tend to tell Clinton’s more recent history as a sequence of spectacular humiliations—first Gennifer, then health care, then Monica—followed by even more spectacular recoveries: an office in the West Wing, a seat in the United States Senate, a shot at the Presidency. Along the way, they offer some never before disclosed documents or factoids. As the end approaches, they try to come up with an account of what matters to Hillary and what doesn’t—an explanation of who she truly is. Then, in the very last pages, they acknowledge that the effort probably hasn’t quite succeeded and that the reader is still feeling at sea. As the historian Gil Troy observes in his 2006 biography, “Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady,” the “literature regarding Hillary Rodham Clinton is vast but unsatisfying.” Or, as Gerth and Van Natta put it at the close of their book, “So, who is the real Hillary?” So many pages, so little progress.

More here.

Thousands of apocryphal tales about Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band have been told and retold in the 40 years since the record’s release, but the loveliest is a true one. Immediately following the completion of Sgt. Pepper’s in the wee hours of April 21, 1967, the Beatles decamped from Abbey Road Studios to Mama Cass’ apartment in Chelsea, where they flung open the windows and blasted an acetate of the album into the London morning at top volume. In the surrounding buildings, windows slowly rose in reply, and neighbors leaned out to listen to the Beatles’ newest songs. It’s a delightful image, a metaphor for the flood of joy and wonderment that the four Liverpudlians loosed on the world, and on England in particular—the windows, the minds, that were nudged open by the Beatles’ sonically questing, love-affirming, sad, funny, irrepressibly tuneful music.

more from Slate here.

From MSNBC:

Chimpanzees readily learn and share techniques on how to fiddle with gadgets, new research shows, the best evidence yet that our closest living relatives pass on customs and culture just as humans do. In the wild, chimpanzee troops often are distinct from one another, possessing collections of up to 20 traditions or customary behaviors that altogether seem to form unique cultures. While observing chimpanzees, evolutionary psychologist Antoine Spiteri at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland wanted to help settle the question of whether or not the apes learned such practices by watching others like humans do, as opposed to simply knowing how to perform such behaviors innately.

Spiteri and his colleagues investigated six groups of chimpanzees, each with eight to 11 apes, living in captivity in Bastrop, Texas. The researchers taught a lone chimpanzee from one group one technique for obtaining food from a complex gadget, such as stabbing food with a tool. They next taught one chimp from another group a different technique for extracting food from the same gadget, such as pushing it out down a ramp. Over time, the researchers found each technique for tool use and food extraction spread within each group. In essence, these groups displayed their own unique culture and local traditions.

More here.

A good deal of truth is contained in Richard Rorty’s comment that, in the Middle Ages, God was god; that in the Age of Enlightenment and modernity, reason became god; and that today, in the postmodern age, there is no God. The idol or the god of reason has been shattered. Today, the beloved notion of “rationality”, once one of the most lofty and sacred of terms, conveys little more than a suspect, ambiguous, and modest meaning. Aristotelian reason, Cartesian reason, Kantian reason, Hegelian reason, religious reason, historical reason, dialectical reason, theoretical reason, practical reason, and all the other varieties of reason, have smashed the mirror into a thousand pieces, so as to make it impossible to see any whole and undistorted image reflected in it.

Today when someone speaks of reason, they are referring either to the logical methods of deductive and inductive reasoning, proof and refutation, and so on, or to the products of reason, including philosophy, language, morality, science, and the like. Since these products are all fluid and mutable, it is considered axiomatic in our times that reason changes (or evolves and is infinitely perfectible).

more from Eurozine here.

Larky, fitfully brilliant, as profane as they are aphoristic, Leonard Michaels’s stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries — Grace Paley and Philip Roth. Like theirs, Michaels’s vernacular achieves the level of song. And yet, though much celebrated during his lifetime — Michaels died at 70 in 2003 — his sexually kinetic work is little read today. But perhaps now it will be, with the republication of his work in two new volumes that should bring Michaels to a new generation of readers and remind us of his lasting achievement. “The Collected Stories” includes the full contents of his acclaimed first two volumes, “Going Places” (1969) and “I Would Have Saved Them if I Could” (1975), as well as selections from his later writing, including all the existing Nachman stories. “Sylvia” is a fictionalized memoir, first published in 1992, about Michaels’s first wife, Sylvia Bloch, who committed suicide.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

From wbur.org:

The body of a dancer is celebrated as physical perfection on stage. Long, muscular limbs, executing an almost super-human range of motion help define this form of expression.

Lisa Bufano, a performance artist from Allston (Mass), is challenging that preconception. Bufano is a bilateral below knee and finger amputee, is winning rave reviews in the dance world …

More here.

Sophie Ratcliffe at TLS:

Haruki Murakami: AFTER DARK
Translated by Jay Rubin

We meet the heroine of After Dark in a late-night diner, somewhere in a large Japanese city. The diner is described first. The “unremarkable but adequate lighting”, the “expressionless decor and tableware”, the “innocuous background music at low volume”:
“Everything about the restaurant is anonymous and interchangeable. And almost every seat is filled.
      After a quick survey of the interior, our eyes come to rest on a girl sitting by the front window. Why her? Why not someone else? Hard to say. But, for some reason, she attracts our attention – very naturally. She sits at a four-person table, reading a book. Hooded gray parka, blue jeans, yellow sneakers faded from repeated washing . . . . Little makeup, no jewellery, small, slender face . . . . Every now and then, an earnest wrinkle forms between her brows.”

Gradually, more details about the girl’s late-night vigil are revealed. Her name is Mari, she is in her first year at college specializing in Chinese, and there is trouble at home. With no warning, her elder sister has dropped out of normal existence. Two months earlier, the beautiful Eri declared that she was “going to go to sleep for a while”, and has not woken up.

More here.

An interview with Murakami here.

Larissa MacFarquhar at The Dubliner:

Noam Chomsky has spent no more than a month in Ireland, but he is one of the most influential thinkers in this country. An articulate critic of American Foreign Policy, Chomsky is regularly described – by sources as disparate as the Irish Times and the Socialist Workers Party – as a modern-day saint. Indeed, such is the blanket reverence for Chomsky that you will never read a bad word about him in Ireland. But Noam Chomsky is unique for other reasons too. Some of them aren’t so cute.

On Thursday evenings, Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century and one of the most reviled, teaches a class about politics. There are nearly two hundred students and not enough chairs, so latecomers sit or lie down on the floor. On a recent evening, the students came to hear Chomsky speak about Iraq. He sat with his arms folded, a little hunched over on his stool, and began to talk into a microphone. He was wearing what he usually wears: shirt, sweater, jeans, trainers. His hair curled toward the middle of his neck and looked as though he didn’t pay it much attention. He spoke in a quiet monotone.

“When I look at the arguments for this war, I don’t see anything I could even laugh at,” he said. “You don’t undertake violence on the grounds that maybe by some miracle something good will come out of it. Yes, sometimes violence does lead to good things. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia – that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone. Do we celebrate that every year?”

More here.

Janet Tassel in Harvard Magazine:

Here is an image calculated to ruffle the feathers of all red-blooded Americans:

Consuming on credit, reluctant to go to the front line, inclined to lose interest in protracted undertakings: if all this conjures up an image of America as a sedentary Colossus—to put it bluntly, a kind of strategic couch potato—then the image may be worth pondering.

This charge of unfitness for duty has been laid at our doorstep by the lively young Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, Harvard’s (relatively) new Tisch professor of history and Ziegler professor of business administration. And he is far from done with us: “Consider…the question of peacekeeping. It has become abundantly clear that the United States is not capable of effective peacekeeping—that is to say, constabulary duties.” He clarifies his position:

Unlike most European critics of the United States…I believe the world needs an effective liberal empire and that the United States is the best candidate for the job.…The United States has good reasons to play the role of liberal empire, both from the point of view of its own security and out of straightforward altruism. In many ways too it is uniquely well equipped to play it. Yet for all its colossal economic, military and cultural power, the United States still looks unlikely to be an effective liberal empire without some profound changes in its economic structure, its social makeup and its political culture.

“All I mean,” continues Ferguson in his controversial book Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (2004), “is that whatever they choose to call their position in the world—hegemony, primacy, predominance or leadership—Americans should recognize the functional resemblance between Anglophone power present and past and should try to do a better rather than worse job of policing an unruly world than their British predecessors.”

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

From their freshman year in college they were inseparable pals, once called “the Mutt and Jeff of post-Kantian idealism.” That epithet somehow failed to catch on, even though both were philosophy concentrators and Tom Cathcart ’61 and Daniel Klein ’61 do stand six-foot-five and five-foot-eight, respectively. Both studied with Paul Tillich and Willard van Orman Quine, and took a junior tutorial with classmate and current U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Together they bucked the fashion of Harvard’s philosophy department, which considered existentialism softheaded, and got onto a jag of existential ethics for a time. “We were going around being obnoxious about what was an ‘authentic’ life versus an ‘inauthentic’ life,” says Klein.

Nearly half a century later, those epistemological theories, truth tables, and falsifiable propositions have borne fruit in Cathcart and Klein’s new book, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar…: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes (Abrams). Consider it Philosophy 101 as taught by Jackie Mason. A philosophical fallacy like post hoc ergo propter hoc—assigning a causal role to something simply because it preceded something else—becomes more engaging when illustrated:

A New York boy is being led through the swamps of Louisiana by his cousin. “Is it true that an alligator won’t attack you if you carry a flashlight?” asks the city boy.

His cousin replies, “Depends on how fast you carry the flashlight.”

More here.

Edward Wolff at the Levy Institute:

I find here that the early 2000s witnessed both exploding debt and the middle-class squeeze. While median wealth grew briskly in the late 1990s, it fell slightly between 2001 and 2004, while the inequality of net worth increased slightly. Indebtedness, which fell substantially during the late 1990s, skyrocketed in the early 2000s. Among the middle class, the debt-toincome ratio reached its highest level in 20 years. The concentration of investment-type assets generally remained as high in 2004 as during the previous two decades. The racial and ethnic disparity in wealth holdings, after stabilizing during most of the 1990s, widened in the years between 1998 and 2001, but then narrowed during the early 2000s. Wealth also shifted in relative terms, away from young households (particularly those under age 35) and toward those in the 55–64 age group.

You know something is wrong when you find yourself longing to be lying on a wooden plank in a Gulag barracks. The “residents” of Nazino Island could only wish for the stark comforts and liminal order of a labour camp over the ghastly scenario that played out before them in the early spring of 1933 in Western Siberia. In the middle of the night, they were dumped on a small, barren island in the midst of an icy, roaring river hundreds of miles from civilization. With no food, no shelter, not much for clothing, 6,000 people, plucked from the streets of Moscow a few weeks before, found themselves wondering how their lives had taken this ghoulish and, for most, fatal turn. Nicolas Werth’s Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag recounts a chapter in a horribly train-wrecked experiment in penal reform. Werth sifts the story of Nazino or “Cannibal” Island, from an assortment of Soviet archives to illustrate arguably the worst nightmare of the whole fiendish Gulag enterprise.

more from the TLS here.