From The New York Times:

One of the many anecdotes about the fraught relationship between Edmund Wilson and his third wife, Mary McCarthy, dramatizes beautifully the problem of Wilson’s legacy. When Reuel, their son, was 9, he heard McCarthy, for once, praising her former husband. Reuel responded: ”Mommy, you mean my father is a great critic?” He smiled, clearly remembering her previous invectives against his father, and added: ”I always thought he was just a two-bit book reviewer.”

Edmund Wilson was part of a brilliant generation at Princeton. They were too brilliant in some cases to have as much as a first act in their careers; among the rest was F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose final books, ”The Last Tycoon” and ”The Crack-Up,” would be assembled and edited by Wilson. An early essay on Fitzgerald gives some sense of his tone, the quality of his prose and the exacting nature of his judgment. Fitzgerald, he wrote, ”has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given a desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.” ” ‘This Side of Paradise,’ ” Wilson wrote, ”does not commit the unpardonable sin: It does not fail to live. The whole preposterous farrago is animated with life.”

More here.

From BBC World News:

The Lancet says the time for more studies is over and doctors should be bold and honest with patients about homeopathy’s “lack of benefit”. A Swiss-UK review of 110 trials found no convincing evidence the treatment worked any better than a placebo. In 2002, American illusionist James Randi offered $1m to anyone able to prove, under observed conditions in a laboratory, that homeopathic remedies can really cure people. To date, no-one has passed the preliminary tests.

More here.

From The Guardian:

What this smart little book does is unpick some of the pathways by which various meats, fish, fruits and rice came together at particular moments in history to produce, say, a lamb pasanda or even our own particular favourite, chicken tikka masala (“curry”, it turns out, is a generic term that Indians themselves would never use). In 17th-century Goa, for instance, it was the visiting Portuguese who taught the local Indians how to make the exquisite egg and milk-based sweets that have since become part of the fabric of eating on the western seaboard. There again, 300 years later, it comes as a shock to learn that Indians of all castes were indifferent to the pleasures of tea-drinking until the beginning of the 20th century. It was only when their British rulers insisted that they try it for themselves, sweetening the experience with the promise of all the money that was to be made from this new cash crop, that the subcontinent gave itself over to the cup that cheers.

More here.

From The New York Times:

But perhaps most of all there was shame, a deep collective national disbelief that the world’s sole remaining superpower could not – or at least had not – responded faster and more forcefully to a disaster that had been among its own government’s worst-case possibilities for years. “It really makes us look very much like Bangladesh or Baghdad,” said David Herbert Donald, the retired Harvard historian of the Civil War and a native Mississippian, who said that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s destructive march from Atlanta to the sea paled by comparison. “I’m 84 years old. I’ve been around a long time, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Around the nation, and indeed the world, the reaction to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation stretched beyond the usual political recriminations and swift second-guessing that so often follow calamities. In dozens of interviews and editorials, feelings deeper and more troubled bubbled to the surface in response to the flooding and looting that “humbled the most powerful nation on the planet,” and showed “how quickly the thin veneer of civilization can be stripped away,” as The Daily Mail of London put it. (Picture from The London Times).

More here.

The US space agency’s robotic rover Spirit has sent back a partial panoramic view from the summit of “Husband Hill” at Gusev Crater on Mars.

Spirit was still sending down data that makes up the colour 360-degree picture when Nasa held a news conference.

more from the BBC here.

From Stanley Kaufmann at TNR.

Broken Flowers. Bill Murray, as usual, presents a man who has looked upon the world and found it dubious. Going back now to visit five women he knew some twenty years earlier, one of whom may have had a son by him, he finds surprises and non-surprises. Jim Jarmusch wrote and directed intelligently. (Reviewed 9/5/05)

Junebug. A young Chicago woman, an art dealer, visits her husband’s rustic North Carolina family. She and they discover–or reveal–new areas in themselves. Flawlessly acted, Junebug was directed by Phil Morrison without sentimentality but with true feeling. (9/12/05)

more here.

Chávez’s rising profile and focus on his needy northern neighbors is no doubt getting under the skin of his nemesis President Bush, whom Chávez regularly refers to as “Mr. Danger.” The Bush administration has always been suspicious of Chávez, who is tight with Cuban leader Fidel Castro and in 2000 became the first democratically elected head of state to visit Saddam Hussein since the Gulf War. Washington’s barely concealed glee when a coup briefly deposed Chávez three years ago certainly didn’t help. After Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice fingered Chávez as a “negative force” in Latin America during her confirmation hearings, the Venezuelan retorted that “the most negative force in the world today is the government of the United States.”

more from Slate here.

From MSNBC:

Now that the storm has passed, Earth-imaging satellites are getting a better fix on the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. The QuickBird satellite, operated by Colorado-based DigitalGlobe, got a clear shot of New Orleans on Wednesday and posted before-and-after views on its Web site. QuickBird’s “after” view, captured from a 280-mile-high (450-kilometer-high), sun-synchronous polar orbit, shows dark floodwaters over highways and even the downtown golf course, as well as the water surrounding the Louisiana Superdome. We’ve created an interactive viewer that labels the landmarks and lets you switch quickly between the before and after views.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Is aging necessary? Are the wrinkles and gray hair, weakening muscles, neurodegeneration, reduced cardiovascular function, and increased risk of cancer that afflict organisms toward the end of their lives inevitable? Or are these age-related changes part of a genetic program that can be altered? Molecular biologists experimenting with organisms such as yeast, roundworms, fruit flies, and mice have found that they can dramatically extend life span by tweaking single genes. The altered organisms don’t just live longer, they age more slowly, in many cases retaining youthful characteristics even after normal individuals have died. More remarkable, the genetic manipulations that cause these changes seem to work through a common pathway across all species. This suggests that if there is a program that controls aging, it must be ancient indeed: in evolutionary terms, yeast and mammals diverged about a billion years ago.

More here.

Love him or hate him or care not a whit, there’s no question that Clement Greenberg was one of the smartest and most interesting people writing on art for a generation. As Hilton Kramer (no slouch himself) once remarked “The thing about Clem was, you didn’t have to agree with him to find him the most interesting writer around.”

The following site is a great resource for all things Clement Greenberg.

There’s an interesting comparison between good writing on art and not so good writing on art. It’s available by comparing Arthur Danto’s recent essay on Smithson with Peter Schjeldahl’s. The peices actually make some similar points. But in the end, one learns so much from Danto whereas from Schjeldahl it’s just … nothing.

Danto at The Nation:

The Whitney show succeeds, I think, in projecting a portrait of the artist as a restless demiurge whose basic genre was the monument, though none of his monuments can fit the space at the disposal of curators. The museum ought to be saluted for celebrating a figure who sought to invalidate the premises on which the idea of that institution rests. I would add that Smithson has become the beau idéal of young artists, more than Picasso, more than Duchamp the kind of figure they aspire to be–anti-institutional, in touch with the environment, hospitable to myth and ritual, alive to the poetry of the wilderness, ambitious in his desire to touch the public through a vision of monumentality that throws the world of the shopping mall and the parking lot into a moral perspective. In that respect the show tells us something about where we are. Spiral Jetty is a critique of modern life as entropy. The rest belongs to the scholars.

Schjeldahl at The New Yorker:

As a figure of freedom, temerity, and lyrical prophecy, Smithson stirs nostalgia among artists and others in the art world, which, for all its wealth and popularity, feels increasingly constricted, faltering, and prosaic. That nostalgia is like a yearning for a lost frontier, troubling the sleep of care-worn suburbanites. Smithson’s example suggests not only that anything can be art but that anyone, with proper fire in the belly, can become a great artist, even without being much good at it. This fit of romance won’t last. It will count again that the works that are on display at the Whitney are drab and tedious. But, for a while, thoughts of Smithson will continue to fuel a present, perhaps eventually fruitful, mood of burning dissatisfaction.

From the October 2001 issue of Scientific American:

“New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh–an area the size of Manhattan–will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldn’t go very far.

A direct hit is inevitable.”

(Related and of interest, Sidney Blumenthal in Der Spiegel.  Also to editorialize, if this the result of the disaster preparation that this administration has been effectively charged with in the aftermath of 9/11, then it seems to have failed big time in one of its basic responsibilities. )

(Hat tips: Linta, Roop and Beth Ann)

From Despardes:

In 1956 there were only 244 madrassas in Pakistan. Recent estimates range from 13,000 to 15,000 with an enrolment of 1.5 to two million (unpublished report by Dr Saleem Ali, Islamic Education and Conflict: Understanding the Madrassahs of Pakistan). The syllabi taught in those traditional madrassas was woefully archaic since much of it was based on assumptions that the earth was flat and the sun and moon rotated around it, while the stars were fixed lights in the seven-tier heaven. The laws and moral values taught also corresponded to a static worldview that made any notion of progress beyond the severely segregated societies of the 7th to 12th centuries impossible to grasp, much less accept. (Picture from Islam.online).

More here.

From BBC News:

The scientists say the information is a milestone in the quest to discover what sets us apart from other animals. A comparison shows chimps and humans to be almost 99% identical in the most important areas of their “life codes”. The team tells Nature magazine that future research will tease out the significance of the few differences.

The study shows that our genomes are startlingly similar. We differ by only 1.2% in terms of the genes that code for the proteins which build and maintain our bodies. This rises to about 4%, when non-coding or “junk” DNA is taken into account. The long-term goal of the project is to pinpoint the genetic changes that led to human characteristics such as complex language, walking upright on two feet, a large brain and tool use.

More here.

From the Federal Reserve Bank of New York:

“Recent concerns about the transfer of U.S. services jobs to overseas workers have deepened long-standing fears about the effects of trade on the domestic labor market. But a balanced view of the impact of trade requires that we consider jobs created through the production of U.S. exports as well as jobs lost to imports. A new measure of the jobs gained and lost in international trade flows suggests that the net number of U.S. jobs lost is relatively small—2.4 percent of total U.S. employment as of 2003.”

From The Guardian:

Conspiracies are profoundly satisfying. They solve every problem, explain everything difficult and give form and shape to things that are otherwise untidily complicated. They provide the easy answer. Why did something bad happen? Because bad people conspired against the good who would otherwise have conquered. Usually, the theory reverses an incontrovertible but (to the conspiracy theorist) inconvenient fact. It is a growing state of mind that, once it takes hold, spreads easily from small things to big beliefs. It needs a firm rebuttal, even when it invades relatively unimportant-seeming things – such as was Shakespeare really Shakespeare?

This week the latest sample arrives with great media fanfare. Viscountess Clare Asquith’s book Shadowplay: the Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare – featured on the Today programme, no less – promotes the conspiracy theory that Shakespeare used his plays secretly to promote the outlawed Catholic faith. If the Da Vinci Code strikes at Catholicism, here the Catholics strike back by laying claim to the greatest writer of them all.

More here.

From Scientific American:

The misuse and overuse of antibiotics has led to the rise of so-called superbugs–bacteria that have developed a resistance to widely used antibiotics and pose a threat to public health. Scientists have thus been investigating alternative treatment options. At a presentation given yesterday at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C., researchers unveiled one such candidate: a novel type of antibiotic that has shown promise against bacteria that survive in the face of conventional medications.

More here.

This intriguing and still developing project is worth a regular visit.

“Some artists, all over the globe were asked to share their personal window.  They made a few minutes field recording from their everyday soundscape.  At one geographic point, at one moment,
they catched the sound environment from their window  and made a picture of it.  The main idea is close to one of movement, ubiquity, immobile tourism.

How to share one’s very own identity when confronted to other places?  The window, just as the browser’s window, becomes the access onto other dimensions (space, time, sound), and proposes as a new platform.  At that very, fixed, moment, the frozen picture becomes one object of sharing.”

(Hat tip: Sneh)

From The Edge:

UNINTELLIGENT DESIGN: (SCOTT ATRAN:) In recent days President Bush has echoed conservative religious calls to give belief in intelligent design equal time with evolutionary theory in public schools. If heeded, this would debase both religion and science by muddling and weakening their different missions.

SHOW ME THE SCIENCE:

“The proponents of intelligent design use an ingenious ploy that works something like this,” writes Tufts philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, and author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. “First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist’s work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a “controversy” to teach.” To date, scientists have held back with regard to engaging the proponents of “intelligent design” on the battlefield of scientific discourse, reasoning being that by simply having a discussion, the ID crowd gains a respectable platform for their views.

More here.

Bud Parr of litblog Chekhov’s Mistress here follows the vitriol poured on the newish Penguin Dante in English, an anthology of translations introduced by Eric Griffiths of Cambridge University and edited by Griffiths and Matthew Reynolds. Harvard’s Helen Vendler gave Dante in English a royal thrashing in the LRB, focusing especially on Griffiths’ Introduction, which is really a long essay. Parr’s notes are useful:

Vendler concludes: “It is acutely disappointing to see a new presentation of Dante that seems, at least to me, so false to the spirit of the author.” She takes on Griffiths’ “desperation…that nobody will pay any attention to Dante unless he is jazzed up in contemporary slang.”

Well, there’s nothing like a transatlantic Harvard-Cambridge Dante scholar’s grudge match. I take it Vendler and Griffiths aren’t chums, although this sort of tedious light aggressive banter, of course, afflicts intellectual life at Cambridge UK just as much as at Cambridge MA. By reputation, Griffiths can dish it out as well as take it – indeed, he’s very much known as a maverick, but he is also regarded by many students as an invigorating and memorable teacher; perhaps he’ll respond. As to why this volume so upset Vendler, who is known to avoid writing bad reviews, it’s not super clear.

Vendler is probably wrong to claim that Griffiths has a wholesale “patronising attitude towards religion.” Griffiths’ book The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry was cited in Geoffrey Hill’s collection of essays, Style and Faith, and Hill is a poet who takes religion rather seriously, to put it mildly. You practically have to have a degree in religious studies to understand Hill – his brilliant book-length poem The Triumph of Love is almost as supersatured with obscure religious references as William Gaddis’ The Recognitions.

As a sidebar, it’s interesting to note that there could hardly be two more different poets than Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney, Vendler’s own contemporary poet of choice. It’s intriguing but probably fanciful to imagine that all this might be seen as two strong and poetically irreconcilable intellectual constellations (Vendler/Heaney, Griffiths/Hill) locking horns. That said, it would also be difficult to find two critics more different than Vendler and Griffiths. Vendler tends toward the straightforward, like Heaney, and sometimes, unlike Heaney, the obvious – she’s said that “the work of criticism is a patriotic impulse of a sort” (Ugh), and “when you’re in a state of perplexity, sadness, gloom, elation, you look for a poem to match what you are feeling” (OK, but there’s surely a little more to it). Griffiths, on the other hand, like Hill, is a dense thicket of British wit. You can see this in the passage that Vendler singles out as supposedly abusive to religion:

Even today, if you walk round an old but still serving church, you may light on a rich jumble: the statue of a saint whose cult has subsided, lacking an arm; a pile of cyclostyled pastoral letters; plasticene oxen, asses and cribs; the various wherewithal of flower-arrangers; in my experience, there is also often (usually behind the altar along with inexplicable quantities of papier-mâché) a mineral-water bottle containing a virulently green liquid.

I find this funny and actually rather loving in an odd way, although its relation to Dante is a bit tangential; Vendler is not amused, and preempts a possible response by wondering in her conclusion if Griffiths would find her review “pedantic and humorless”. My description of it would be a characteristic misunderstanding of tone. To twist something Pynchon says in Gravity’s Rainbow, there is an Atlantic of some sort between Vendler and Griffiths.

For what it’s worth, I personally think there ought to be a ten-year moratorium on new English translations of Dante, which are really a kind of cottage industry at this point, perhaps by-product of American poets being forced to learn other languages during their graduate studies. Indeed, it seems to me that since poetry has largely lost its cultural place our prominent poets are better known for their translations than their own work. On a less frivolous note, Mr. Parr suggests The Poet’s Dante, which has translations by Borges and Eliot as well as Merwin and Pinsky, as an alternative or complement to Dante in English.