“Pre-eminent American literary critic Harold Bloom’s twenty-ninth book, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, was officially launched a few hours after this conversation took place in his Manhattan apartment on 26 October 2004.”

Ieva Lesinska in Eurozine:

IL: Do you posess wisdom?

HB: No.

IL: No?

HB: No. If I posesed any wisdom, I would not write a book called Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? I am very unwise, I can asure you. Unwise in all things. I think I am a good teacher of literature, particularly of Shakespeare. At Yale on Wednesdays I give an undergraduate seminar. Of course, I am a one-man department, I divorced the English department back in 1976, I convinced them to reappoint me as a “profesor of absolutely nothing” – I give courses in something called humanities. And on Wednesdays I give a course, year by year, where we read all of Shakespeare together. And on Thursdays I give a course called “The Art of Reading Poetry”. I regard myself as a teacher. I remark in this new book that I have only three criteria for whether a work should be read and reread and taught to others, and they are: aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, and wisdom.

More here.

Andrew Cohen in Newsweek:

Maira Kalman, an illustrator and children’s book author best known for her New Yorker covers, including the popular “Newyorkistan” map of few years ago, told The New York Times she was so taken by the colorful examples used in Strunk and White to illustrate their grammatical points that she wondered why anyone hadn’t illustrated them before.  Thus, her illustrations for the book contain such captions as: “Polly loves cake more than she loves me,” “It was a unique eggbeater,” “None of us is perfect” and “Well, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in.”

Her zeal for the book has since spilled over into the musical realm. She shared her enthusiasm with family friend Nico Muhly, a Juilliard-trained composer who wrote an operatic song cycle based on the book, “The Elements of Style: Nine Songs,” which had its gala premier Oct. 19 in the main reading room of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.

More here.  [The picture is of Nico Muhly, who is also a friend of my family.]

As grad students at NYU prepare to go on strike, Alan Sokal offers some arguments in support.

3) Some red herrings.

We can save a lot of time by recognizing that certain questions are NOT relevant to our current debates.

One question that is NOT relevant (for us as faculty, that is) is whether unionization is in the best interests of grad students. It is an accepted principle of a democratic society that adults are permitted to determine their own interests. (There are at least two reasons for this: people are ordinarily better-informed about their own situation than outsiders are; and people are more likely to have their own interests fully at heart than outsiders are.) Everyone is free to try to persuade others about what their own interests are; but no one is allowed to substitute his or her view of other people’s interests for those people’s own view.

For these reasons, I as a faculty member do not purport to suggest to grad students whether or not they should support unionization — much less whether or not they should strike. I simply support grad students’ right to decide these issues for themselves.

The only valid argument in support of the Administration’s anti-union position would be that, through collective bargaining, the grad students would infringe unfairly on the interests of_other_ segments of the university community — so unfairly, in fact, that the latter’s interests would override the grad students’ democratic rights.

In American Scientist, Sean Carroll reviews Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages and Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds.

A distinctive feature of Warped Passages is the discussion of two different ways of extending physics beyond the Standard Model: the bottom-up, model-building “Harvard” approach; and the top-down, string-theory “Princeton” approach. Both philosophies are interesting and important, and the study of extra dimensions has brought them into close collaboration. The perspective of someone who has been immersed in the details makes the discussion of this dichotomy an especially valuable feature of the book.

Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos, although superficially similar to Randall’s book, actually differs significantly from it. Although Kaku worked on string theory in its early days, he has become well known more recently as a popularizer of physics, and this is evident from the text. Parallel Worlds is not written from the viewpoint of an insider relating developments as they occurred. It is telling, for example, that the bibliography consists solely of other books for a general audience, with no citations of the primary literature. Nonetheless, the presentation is extremely polished, and the discussion is invigorated by the inclusion of numerous interesting and revealing anecdotes about the participants.

Kaku is also very attuned to the fact that what interests the general reader is not always what interests the professional physicist. He is quite willing to discuss the possibility of life on other planets, or even the religious implications of the work he describes.

Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, a jazz orchestra, will be playing tomorrow at CBGB’s.

Wednesday, 02 November, 2005 – 10 PM

CBGB Lounge (313 Bowery)

$10

For those who are curious, you can hear pieces from their last performance, here.

Also in 3 a.m., an excerpt from what seems a little like a contemporary riff on Sei Shonagan, Hillary Raphael’s Backpacker.

most satisfying sex binges

piazza duomo, firenze, italy/ male nurse ginza business hotel, tokyo, japan/ female nurse kruger national park tent, south africa/ jeep driver rice farming collective, guilin, china/ farmer residential tower, new york, usa/ consul general of denmark ramon crater, negev desert, israel/ rescue helicopter pilot roman coliseum, el jem, tunisia/ dog sledder las pirámides, lake atitlán, guatemala/ vision quest guide desert suites, las vegas, nevada, usa/ mc donald’s cashier hut, tromsø, norway/ interpreter

What can be said to spread ecstasy from one person to another? It’s a lost detail, a subtle movement at the center of a million coarse ones. It’s a vibrating wave connecting seemingly unrelated instants in thematically-linked compartments. It’s stepping onto the metro in a new city and eavesdropping on a conversation about someone you know, and remembering the vague miracle of meeting anyone, ever. Ecstasy is recalling something precious lost and not minding at all.

3 a.m magazine interviews Coco Fusco about her performance art, globalization and sex workers.

3AM: Your show works round a real story.

CF: The thing that got me going was that five years ago I was in Australia performing another piece and I was talking to all these artists and critics and I was talking to an artist and I was telling him that I’d done a piece about a year before in which I was in a coffin. He said ‘Do you like to lay dead? And have you heard of this guy from California who went to Mexico and bought a dead woman and had sex with her as performance art?’ I had never heard of this and I thought this was outrageous and appalling and I asked for more details. And he said that he didn’t know very many details but there was some allusion to it in some very trashy book about the art world. I asked for the name of the book and then I ran into the bathroom and wrote in on the back of my hand because I didn’t want him to know that I was really intrigued by this. Then I went back home and found the allusion. It didn’t name the guy but it said that he’d made an audio tape of this thing that he’d wanted to have exhibited in museums. He had gone to this museum director who works in California and he had been horrified and made it known that he would never do it. But he describes the tape in the book. And that was it! Now it turned out that I knew that museum director vaguely so I had to figure out how I was going to approach him twenty years later top talk about this.

Finally, I just sent him an e–mail. He replied saying that he vowed never to mention this guy again and would never do anything to help him in his career because he was so horrified. OK, so he was really affected by this. This guy was from LA, seventies, the body art scene, where all these weirdoes were nailing themselves to cars and shooting themselves and throwing themselves in lockers and doing all sorts of strange things. So I thought I must be able to figure out who he was, someone who knew about this, or had known him and so on. There must be someone who was there who witnessed the confession.

Emma Brockes in The Guardian:

Despite his belief that most journalists are unwitting upholders of western imperialism, Noam Chomsky, the radical’s radical, agrees to see me at his office in Boston. He works here as a professor of linguistics, a sort of Clark Kent alter ego to his activist Superman, in a nubbly old jumper, big white trainers and a grandad jacket with pockets designed to accomodate a Thermos. There is a half-finished packet of fig rolls on the desk. Such is the effect of an hour spent with Chomsky that, writing this, I wonder: is it wrong to mention the fig rolls when there is undocumented suffering going on in El Salvador?

Chomsky’s activism has its roots in his childhood. He grew up in the depression of the 1930s, the son of William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, Russian immigrants to Philadelphia. He describes the family as “working-class Jews”, most of whom were unemployed, although his parents, both teachers, were lucky enough to work. There was no sense of America as the promised land: “It wasn’t much of an opportunity-giver in my immediate family,” he says, although it was an improvement on the pogroms of Russia, which none the less Chomsky can’t help qualifying as “not very bad, by contemporary standards. In the worst of the major massacres, I think about 49 people were killed.”

More here.

E.O. Wilson in The Harvard Magazine:

The adventure that Darwin launched on all our behalf, and which continues into the twenty-first century, is driven by a deceptively simple idea, of which Darwin’s friend and staunch supporter Thomas Henry Huxley said, and spoke for many to follow, “How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that!” Evolution by natural selection is perhaps the only one true law unique to biological systems, as opposed to nonliving physical systems, and in recent decades it has taken on the solidity of a mathematical theorem. It states simply that if a population of organisms contains multiple hereditary variants in some trait (say, red versus blue eyes in a bird population), and if one of these variants succeeds in contributing more offspring to the next generation than the other variants, the overall composition of the population changes, and evolution has occurred.

More here.

Abbas: A “malang” (a Sufi dervish) plays a drum and dances at the shrine of Baba Mekka Shah in Hyderabad. Pakistan, 1988.

From The Dawn:

There can be no compromise on the sanctity of the month of Ramazan, and the public space between sun up and sun down is a no food zone through a voluntary acceptance of the code by the public. There are those amongst us who take upon ourselves the policing function of the public’s morality, and sometimes there are unpleasant tales of people taking the law into their own hands and dealing harshly with people found violating the code. At the end of the day the pursuit of spirituality is a personal affair, and the hijab/veil must reside in the eye of the beholder.
Therein lies the crux of the matter. Ramazan is not just about abstaining from food and drink, for that would be tantamount to starving oneself. Ramazan is about keeping one’s ego in check and becoming holistic people with a healthy self-image, having the capacity of turning their weaknesses into strengths, and always thinking positively and proffering the benefit of the doubt. It’s about inculcating the need to live a balanced life, communicate effectively, and resolve interpersonal conflicts.

More here.

From The London Times:

Winston Churchill’s bodyguard had his share of dangerous moments. But his job gave him a unique insight into the great man’s strengths and flaws — as recently unearthed memoirs reveal. They were together, too, when the war was won. “Ah, the bloody beast is dead,” Churchill said, “elated and with much emphasis”, when he heard of Mussolini’s fate. But when told Hitler was gone, he went to a window and looked out, remaining silent for some time. Thompson asked if he thought Hitler had committed suicide. “That is the way I should have expected him to have died,” he said. “That is what I would have done under the same circumstances.” On VE Day he sent Thompson back to get his cigars before greeting the crowds. “They expect it of me,” he said, the showman to the fore. (Picture)

More here.

From The New York Times:

My mom gave me three essential books on the subject of men. The first, when I was 13, was “On Becoming a Woman.” The second, when I was 21, was “365 Ways to Cook Hamburger.” The third, when I was 25, was “How to Catch and Hold a Man,” by Yvonne Antelle. (“Keep thinking of yourself as a soft, mysterious cat.. . .Men are fascinated by bright, shiny objects, by lots of curls, lots of hair on the head . . . by bows, ribbons, ruffles and bright colors.. . .Sarcasm is dangerous. Avoid it altogether.”)

On my 31st birthday, she sent me a bankbook with a modest nest egg she had saved for me. “I always felt that the girls in a family should get a little more than the boys even though all are equally loved,” she wrote in a letter. “They need a little cushion to fall back on. Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it’s a lie. It’s more of a man’s world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries.”

I thought she was just being Old World, like my favorite jade, Dorothy Parker, when she wrote:

By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying –
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

More here.

From BBC News:

The animals were born several weeks ago at the Laboratory of Reproductive Technology in Cremona. Research leader Prof Cesare Galli said the pigs would help in understanding animal to human organ transplants. Scientists  have now cloned sheep, mice, cattle, goats, rabbits, cats, pigs, mules and dogs. The first horse clone – a Halflinger mare named Prometea – was born at the research laboratory in the summer of 2003. Cow clones have also been produced there. The latest experiment was carried out as part of a European Union project to study stem cells in cloned animals. Stem cells are the body’s master cells, and have the ability to become many different adult tissues.

More here.

Robert Worth in The New York Times:

I FIRST saw the book more than two years ago while wandering down Mutanabi Street in Baghdad, where the booksellers gather on Friday mornings. It was a frayed paperback set among stacks of aging 1980’s magazines and periodicals, the refuse of Iraq’s long intellectual isolation. On the cover was a dim gold sun over sand dunes, and the title: “Arabian Sands” (1959), by Wilfred Thesiger.

“Their hands had been cut off simply because they had been circumcised in a manner which the king had forbidden. I could not forget the twitching face and pain-filled eyes of one gentle, delicate-looking youth. I had been told that when the Amir’s slave hesitated to execute this savage punishment he held out his hand, saying, ‘Cut. I am not afraid.’ “

But it was not the exoticism of Thesiger’s books that lured me. It was almost the opposite: he helped me understand the human roots of the Arab world’s political violence. He had seen that world before it was changed forever by the discovery of oil, and he conveyed the pitilessness of the Arab tribesmen he traveled with, their fierce familial pride, their wild generosity. Above all, Thesiger made me see more in Iraq than a blasted slaughterhouse. If not for him, I might never have returned.

One of the strangest and most wonderful things about Iraq, to Western eyes, is that the ancient past is so interwoven with the present. It’s not just the Babylonian ruins poking up among the housing projects. I have spoken to weeping pilgrims who seemed to make no distinction between the killing of the Shiite martyr Hussein in A.D. 680 and of friends and relatives who died last week. Politicians routinely impugn their rivals as Iranian stooges by calling them Safawees, as if the Safavid empire of Persia (1502-1736) still existed. Insurgents toting AK-47’s openly say they want to bring the country back to the early seventh century.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Novelist Margaret Atwood and Phyllida Lloyd first met in 2002, at the premiere of the opera of Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, directed by Lloyd. Now they have collaborated on a staged reading of Atwood’s latest book, The Penelopiad, a reinterpretation of the Odyssey told by Odysseus’s wife Penelope and her 12 maids (who were hanged by Odysseus on his return) from the underworld where they have languished for centuries. Atwood is to play the part of Penelope.

Margaret Atwood Phyllida and I first talked about staging The Penelopiad last fall, when she was in Toronto directing The Handmaid’s Tale, the opera. I had just finished writing The Penelopiad and Phyllida said she’d like to read it. We agreed it had a theatrical dimension, and when I was next in England we got together to talk it over. Various schemes were suggested, and finally we decided to do this staged reading. It’s not a fully fledged performance and it’s been done on a shoestring. And I’m playing the part of Penelope because I’m cheap – in fact, I’m free.

More here.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

If you wish to be a prophet, first you must dress the part. No more silk ties or tasseled loafers. Instead, throw on a wrinkled T-shirt, frayed jeans, and dirty sneakers. You should appear somewhat unkempt, as if combs and showers were only for the unenlightened. When you encounter critics, as all prophets do, dismiss them as idiots. Make sure to pepper your conversation with grandiose predictions and remind others of your genius often, lest they forget. Oh, and if possible, grow a very long beard. By these measures, Aubrey de Grey is indeed a prophet. The 42-year-old English biogerontologist has made his name by claiming that some people alive right now could live for 1,000 years or longer. Maybe much longer.

More here.

From The Edge:

George Dyson visited Google last week at the invitation of some Google engineers. The occasion was the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann’s proposal for a digital computer. After the visit, Dyson recalled H.G. Wells’ prophecy, written in 1938:

“The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual,” wrote H. G. Wells in his 1938 prophecy World Brain. “This new all-human cerebrum need not be concentrated in any one single place. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else seems to afford an insurance against danger and interruption. It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba.” Wells foresaw not only the distributed intelligence of the World Wide Web, but the inevitability that this intelligence would coalesce, and that power, as well as knowledge, would fall under its domain. “In a universal organization and clarification of knowledge and ideas… in the evocation, that is, of what I have here called a World Brain… in that and in that alone, it is maintained, is there any clear hope of a really Competent Receiver for world affairs… We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself.”

GEORGE DYSON, a historian among futurists, is the author of Darwin Among the Machines; and Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship.

More here.

From despardes:

Several US and Middle East-based Pakistani professionals have joined hands to launch an initiative for conceptualizing cost-effective, indigenous and community-friendly quake-resistant community centers in northern areas of Pakistan. The Jeevey Initiative was launched on Wednesday at a press conference here by Irshad Salim, president of Mamosa Solutions, a New Jersey-based firm. “The initiative will not be a fund raising drive. It is a mental drive. If funds are needed to hire expertise and resources to implement the finalized concept, it will be addressed later,” said Mr Salim.

“The idea is to bring the Pakistani expatriates and their Western colleagues who are interested in this initiative on one platform,” he said. The initiative would allow geographically separated and remote platforms to dock electronically, through the website or correspondences, to develop and create the concept and design and identify ways to fund the cost-effective, quake-proof or quake-resistant community centers, he said.

More here.

From New Scientist:

The hyper-secretive US National Security Agency – the government’s eavesdropping arm – appears to be having its patent applications increasingly blocked by the Pentagon. And the grounds for this are for reasons of national security, reveals information obtained under a freedom of information request.

Most Western governments can prevent the granting (and therefore publishing) of patents on inventions deemed to contain sensitive information of use to an enemy or terrorists. They do so by issuing a secrecy order barring publication and even discussion of certain inventions.

Experts at the US Patent and Trademark Office perform an initial security screening of all patent applications and then army, air force and navy staff at the Pentagon’s Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA) makes the final decision on what is classified and what is not.

Now figures obtained from the USPTO under a freedom of information request by the Federation of American Scientists show that the NSA had nine of its patent applications blocked in the financial year to March 2005 against five in 2004, and none in each of the three years up to 2003.

More here.