James Forsyth in The New Republic:

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s British directors like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach portrayed the upper class as uncaring and contemptuous of the rest of society. These films never made much of an impression–or serious money–on the other side of the Atlantic. However, they were popular enough to affect the cultural climate at home. Then, in 1994, the British movie industry shifted gears and started making the upper class loveable. Why? Because it wanted to make it big on the American side of the pond. Hollywood has had a long love affair with posh Brits; think David Niven, Peter O’Toole, and virtually all the Merchant Ivory films. But this time around the Brits churned out not historical fantasies but contemporary social comedies.

The first of these was the low-budget Four Weddings and a Funeral. The movie cost $6 million to make but grossed $52 million at the U.S. box office alone. It also earned two Oscar nominations, including one for best picture. In the movie, an upper class Brit–played by Hugh Grant–falls in love with an American woman played by Andie MacDowell. Grant’s character was bumbling yet sympathetic, miles from the Leigh and Loach stereotype.

More here.

Jim Erickson in Time Magazine:

Officials and business leaders meeting in New Delhi could not have asked for more auspicious news as they gathered last week for the World Economic Forum’s annual India Economic Summit. While the three-day event was in progress, the Bombay Stock Exchange’s Sensex index hit all-time highs. That milestone was followed by the cheering news that the Indian economy grew at an 8% rate during the quarter ending Sept. 30, underscoring once-moribund India’s claim to being the fastest-growing free-market democracy in the world.

There’s a reason, however, that the boast requires qualifiers. Undemocratic, not-so-free-market China continues to set the economic pace with GDP growth exceeding 9%—a fact that seemed to dampen enthusiasm in New Delhi in the face of otherwise encouraging circumstances. In Asia, “China is clearly the leader of the flock,” conceded India’s Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram. “India is still just part of the flock.” That chronic inferiority complex is rooted in industrial policy envy. China maintains a big advantage over India in sectors such as manufacturing, said Chidambaram, because its central government dictates “with brutal efficiency” such initiatives as the construction of commerce-greasing infrastructure projects.

More here.

What do these two little epiphanies add up to? Only this: The different ends of this or that aspect of modernism or modernity that many of us proclaimed, rightly or wrongly, over the last three decades might have blinded us, at least in part, to one narrative, perhaps the grandest of all, that continues unabated, even unabashed: the narrative of modernization. What might count as a dialectical engagement, critical yet non-nostalgic, resistant yet utopian, with its most important manifestations today? Neither a new “new vision,” I imagine, nor old-school practices that pretend nothing has changed. In the new year I hope some artists will point a way forward.

more in Artforum here.

“Taste has no system and no proofs”—this much we know. But some 40 years after the critic Susan Sontag made this and other observations on the good, the bad, and the in-between, the times have a-changed: Irony and camp have recast taste as an ethical shell game and we feel no guilt celebrating things that are, in the parlance of VH1, Awesomely Bad. But are there still songs that qualify as “bad”? Consider the Los Angeles hip-hop quartet the Black Eyed Peas. Their current single, “My Humps,” is one of the most popular hit singles in history. It is also proof that a song can be so bad as to veer toward evil.

more from Slate here.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think a reader unacquainted with [African-American] folklore can properly understand your work?

ELLISON

Yes, I think so. It’s like jazz; there’s no inherent problem which prohibits understanding but the assumptions brought to it. We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even “Little Red Riding Hood.” The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life. I noticed, incidentally, that the Germans, having no special caste assumptions concerning American Negroes, dealt with my work simply as a novel. I think the Americans will come to view it that way in twenty years–if it’s around that long.

more from the Paris Review here.

From The Guardian:

After his life as a crime reporter in a Canadian city took a turn for the worse, Jeremy Mercer decided to head for Paris, where he happened upon the city’s most famous bookshop, the legendary Shakespeare and Co. In Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs, Mercer describes the time he spent living in the bookshop, the people he met and his relationship with the shop’s octogenarian owner. Here he chooses his 10 favourite bookshops from around the world.
“Bookstores are sanctuaries. Places to lose yourself, escape the harsh demands of daily life, find new ways to dream and new sources of inspiration. I love all booksellers; anybody who helps spread the word is doing noble work. But my favourite bookstores are the small eccentric independents run by passionate and usually slightly mad book lovers. These are some of the best.”

More here.

From Science:

Seniors don’t need to do everything the health magazines recommend to stay fit. A new study with older women shows that either snoozing right or maintaining a good social network is enough to reduce levels of an inflammatory compound linked to bad health.

It’s well known that lifestyle characteristics such as sleep and relationships can affect health. For example, seniors who sleep badly or have few close friends and relations generally have more health problems and die younger than their peers. But what’s behind the trend? Previous research indicates than an inflammatory molecule in the body called IL-6 is present at high levels in people who sleep badly. Just as high cholesterol puts one at risk for heart disease, high IL-6 increases the risk of a variety of ailments associated with age, such as heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and arthritis.

More here.

Paul Celan’s reception in America has always been connected to his status as the great Holocaust poet, the poet who showed that, Adorno’s caveat notwithstanding, it was possible to write poetry, even great poetry in the German language, after Auschwitz. As “poet, survivor, Jew” (the subtitle of John Felstiner’s groundbreaking study of 1995), Celan became the iconic poet for advanced theory, his elusive lyrics endlessly mined for their post-Holocaust wisdom by Continental philosophers from Hans-Georg Gadamer to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. The result, ironically, has been to place Celan in a kind of solitary confinement, a private cell in which his every “circumcised word” (Jacques Derrida’s term in his essay “Shibboleth for Paul Celan”) can be examined for its allegorical weight and theological import, even as, Pierre Joris suggests in the superb introduction to his new Selections, its actual poetic forms and choices are taken for granted. “Perhaps the greatest risk for the reading of Celan in our time,” writes Charles Bernstein, “is that we have venerated him, in the process of removing him not only from his own time and place, but also from our own poetic horizon. . . . a crippling exceptionalism has made his work a symbol of his fate rather than an active matrix for an ongoing poetic practice.”

more from the Boston Review here.

In the California Literary Review, an interview with Mary Roach, author of Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.

The Near Death Experience is something that seems to have happened to many people. How do people describe the experience? Are scientists investigating this? What are the results so far?

There are a few core elements of the NDE, as researchers call it: floating up above yourself, whooshing down a tunnel, moving toward a light, seeing dead loved ones who often tell you “it’s not your time.” The experience is pretty universal, though there’s often a unique cultural overlay: for instance, a man in China was told “there’s been a clerical error,” rather than “it’s not your time.” A truck driver sped down “a tailpipe” rather than a tunnel.

A team of cardiologists and psychiatrists at the University of Virginia are taking a simple, rather elegant approach to trying to find out whether people who have these experiences are hallucinating or are actually leaving their bodies. They’ve got a laptop computer taped, flat open, on top of the highest cardiac monitor in an operating room, such that the only way you could see what’s on the screen would be if you were floating up by the ceiling. You can’t see the image (one of several rotating images, randomly chosen) from down below. Patients are interviewed after they leave the OR, to see if they report having seen anything. So far, none of the patients has had an NDE, but the project had only just begun when I was there.

It is the vocabulary one expects from a French intellectual in the first years of the Fifth Republic: oblivion, the abyss, la mort. There’s a quest for authenticity, with the writer claiming “sincerity” as his ultimate aim. The war years loom large, even as the nation settles into an era of prosperity. But instead of the heroic existentialist writer holding the line against nothingness, we encounter a beguiling magician, a brilliant prankster preoccupied with word games and puzzles, a master illusionist with an introspective bent: Georges Perec, that inimitable amalgam of Kafka and the daily crossword, whose sensibility spans opposing poles of profundity and artifice. Among the ghosts of twentieth-century novelists that still haunt us, his takes its place as the group’s ingenious poltergeist, albeit one with a rather melancholy aura. The unruly shrub of hair, the sly grin, the tender, somewhat sad gaze: Perec figures as the impish wordsmith confronting a fathomless void, as if Sartre had cloaked himself in the guise of Pierrot.

more from Bookforum here.

From Scientific American:

More than one in 500 children have some form of autism, according to the Centers for Disease Control. All autistic children suffer from an impaired ability to communicate and relate to others, but some of them are able to socially interact to a greater degree than their peers. A recent study of a group of these so-called high functioning autistics suggests the neurological basis for their social impairment.

Neuroscientist Mirella Dapretto of the University of California Los Angeles and her colleagues surveyed the brains of 10 autistic children and an equal number of nonautistic children as they watched and imitated 80 different faces displaying either anger, fear, happiness, sadness or no emotion. By measuring the amount of blood flowing to certain regions of the children’s brains with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, the researchers could determine what parts of the brain were being used as the subjects completed the tasks. The autistic children differed from their peers in only one respect: each showed reduced activity in the pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus–a brain region located near the temple.

More here.

From The New York Times:

SEATTLE – Addressing 275 of the world’s most brilliant scientists, Bill Gates cracked a joke: “I’ve been applying my imagination to the synergies of this,” he said. “We could have sorghum that cures latent tuberculosis. We could have mosquitoes that spread vitamin A. And most important, we could have bananas that never need to be kept cold.” They laughed. Perhaps that was to be expected when the world’s richest man, who had just promised them $450 million, was delivering a punchline. But it was also germane, because they were gathered to celebrate some of the oddest-sounding projects in the history of science.

More here.

Steve Coll in The New Yorker:

Osama bin Laden’s old school—the Al Thagher Model School—sits on several dozen arid acres lined by eucalyptus trees, whose branches have been twisted by winds from the Red Sea. The campus spreads north from the Old Mecca Road, near downtown Jedda, the Saudi Arabian port city where bin Laden spent most of his childhood and teen-age years. The school’s main building is a two-story rectangle constructed from concrete and fieldstone in a featureless modern style. Inside, dim hallways connect two wings of classrooms. In bin Laden’s day—he graduated in 1976—there was a wing for middle-school students, and another for the high school. Between them is a spacious interior courtyard, and from the second floor students could lean over balcony railings and shout at their classmates below, or pelt them with wads of paper. Most Al Thagher students, including bin Laden, were commuters, but there were a few boarders; they lived on the second floor, as did some of the school’s foreign teachers. It was in this upstairs dormitory, a schoolmate of bin Laden’s told me, that a young Syrian physical-education teacher led an after-school Islamic study group for a few outstanding boys, and it was there, beginning at about age fourteen, that bin Laden received his first formal education in some of the precepts of violent jihad.

More here.

Brian Handwerk in National Geographic News:

Lee and Berkeley colleague Robert Szema wrote on the state of animal-eye optics research in a recent issue of the journal Science.

In his lab, Lee is refining three-dimensional polymer structures that can mimic the components of an eye, from lenses to light receptors. He believes soft, flexible polymers may be the key to replicating natural sight systems that outperform their mechanized competition.

“Many, many biologists have studied animals’ eyes,” Lee said. “Some of those studies are decades old. But they didn’t have the tools to make the artificial structures that are now possible.

“[Now is] really a good time to figure out how to make complex three-dimensional structures, like compound eyes.”

More here.

Martin Filler in the New York Review of Books:

Great architects are often blamed for the sins of their copyists. The twentieth century’s most influential master builder, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, saw his daring reduction of the tall building into glass skin and steel bones debased by postwar developers who quickly grasped how profitable that formula could be if stripped of his fine materials and exquisite details. In the 1960s, the pervasiveness of inferior versions of Mies’s designs incited Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown to advocate, in such books as Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas as well as in their own buildings, a richer vocabulary of historical and vernacular allusions; but opportunistic postmodernists perverted their ideas into mere styling tips.

Frank Gehry is the latest to suffer that galling form of flattery. The global ballyhoo that surrounded the debut of his Guggenheim Museum Bilbao of 1991–1997 presaged an outbreak of hideous imitations. Yet Gehry’s idiosyncratic expressionism cannot be mimicked with as much facility as Mies’s minimalism or Venturi and Scott Brown’s mannerism. Indeed, the onus of plagiarism lies most heavily on Gehry himself, as each new client expects the next Bilbao. Gehry’s influence has been less specific in its effects on architectural style but no less significant: the example of Bilbao has encouraged establishment patrons to award commissions to a younger generation of experimental architects whom they never would have considered before. And none of them has benefited more from Gehry’s impact than Santiago Calatrava, architecture’s newest superstar.

More here.

Arno Rafael Minkkinen. Self-portrait, Prague, Czechoslovakia,1989.

More here.

Current Exhibition.

Amir Hadad writes for Haaretz.com about the transformation of Matisyahu Miller into the first ultra-Orthodox reggae singer :

“I was 16, I looked like a hippie, I wasn’t into Judaism. I was into music, reggae, Bob Marley, girls. My parents wanted me to travel. They signed me up for this three-month program and paid for it, and that’s how I got to the Alexander Muss High School in Hod Hasharon. The way it worked there was that in the morning you learn about Judaism, about Israel, and in the evening they switched to more general topics and the rest of the time they take you on all kinds of little trips within Israel, to a different place each time, so you’ll feel Israel. It wasn’t something religious. It was more about connecting to your Jewish roots, getting to know Israel a little.

“After a few weeks,” continues the man formerly known as Matthew Miller, “they took us to Mount Scopus to look at the view of Jerusalem. The people who take you there know very well why they’re doing it. It has a big effect on a person to go up to this place, to overlook Jerusalem from above. It sounds a little corny, I know, but it totally does the job. You stand up there, overlooking this incredible city, and you sing `Jerusalem of Gold’ and something big moves in your heart. It was the first time that I felt my soul, that I really felt it. I felt God.”

Thus began the transformation of a non-religious Jewish boy from a wealthy New York suburb to the world’s first and most successful ultra-Orthodox reggae singer, known today as Matisyahu Miller”

More here

“A leading neuropsychologist explains how he adapted his best-selling book on the brain, soul and ‘self’ for a theatre audience.”

Paul Broks in The Guardian:

I have never bargained with the Prince of Darkness but I do get drawn into wrangles over the soul. They are mostly benign but one woman came to the brink of physical assault. It was during a talk I gave at a literary festival. She told the organisers she just wanted to shake me by the lapels. What had I done to upset her? I’d said that studying brain function and working with brain-damaged people had led me to certain views about the nature of personal identity; that neuroscience had no place for the soul; that the human brain was a storytelling machine, and that the self was a story.

I said that our deepest intuitions about what it means to be a person are based on an illusion. There is no inner essence, no ego, no observing ‘I’, no ghost in the machine. The story is all and, moreover, the story is enough. It was nothing personal. I’ve reeled off my litany of self-annihilation ad nauseam since Into the Silent Land was published. Sometimes I feel like shaking myself by the lapels.

The book explores love, loss and personal transformation through neurological case stories and speculative fiction. But if the scientific assault on the soul is one of its themes, so too is the limitation of science.

More here.

Carlin Romano in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

To English literary theorist Terry Eagleton, [Slavoj] Zizek stands as “the most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in Europe in some decades.”

To Rebecca Mead of the New Yorker, however, “always to take Slavoj Zizek seriously would be to make a category mistake.” His appeal, she wrote, is “accessible absurdity,” a Seinfeldian attention to the “minutiae of popular culture.”

Zizek’s style is to juxtapose highly theoretical notions like Marx’s surplus value or Jacques Lacan’s “big Other” with the down-and-dirty “readings” of pop culture familiar from cultural studies. As critic Scott McLemee, a close Zizek observer, has noted, the famously verbose lecturer once explained “the distinctions between German philosophy, English political economy, and the French Revolution by reference to each nation’s toilet design.”

When people speak (and they do) of Zizek’s reputation preceding him, much of that rep – or rap – comes from articles on him by three American journalists over the years: Robert Boynton’s astute 1998 Lingua Franca profile, Mead’s 2003 New Yorker portrait (headlined “The Marx Brother”), and the “Zizek Watch” conducted a while back by McLemee, now a columnist for Inside Higher Education.

More here.

Jane and Michael Stern review Walter Gratzer’s book in the New York Times:

To eat is basic instinct; how to do it correctly worries humans more than sex. So “Terrors of the Table” is a perfect title for this story of nutritional doctrine’s tyranny up to modern times when, in Walter Gratzer’s words, fear of cholesterol has “supplanted the Devil as the roaring lion who walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” Gratzer, a biophysicist at King’s College, London, who previously put a human face on science in “Eurekas and Euphorias: The Oxford Book of Scientific Anecdotes,” reels out a historical pageant of science and pseudoscience teeming with remarkable characters who have advanced (and retarded) knowledge about what makes humans thrive.

The faddists on soapboxes are especially amusing, including vegetarians who denounce eating meat as ungodly and an anti-vegetarian cleric who answers that God attached white tails to rabbits to make them easier targets. Gratzer asserts that fashion, not science, rules contemporary diet advice, and he enjoys eviscerating the “gruesome” Duke rice diet, the “probably dangerous” Scarsdale diet and the “grossly unbalanced” Atkins diet.

More here.  [There is also a slide show which includes the picture of Dr. Robert Atkins above.]