All Muriel Spark’s novels are fiercely composed and devoutly starved. Her brilliantly reduced style, of “never apologise, never explain”, seems a deliberate provocation: we feel compelled to turn the mere crescents of her characters into round discs. But while some of her refusal to wax explanatory or sentimental may have been temperamental, it was also moral. Spark was intensely interested in how much we can know about anyone and in how much a novelist, who most pretends to such knowledge, can know about her characters. Lest this seem like an abstract preoccupation, observe how beautifully she pursues this inquiry in her best-loved work. By reducing Miss Brodie to no more than a collection of maxims, Spark forces us to become Brodie’s pupils. In the course of the novel we never leave the school to go home, alone, with Miss Brodie. We surmise that there is something unfulfilled and even desperate about her, but the novelist refuses us access to her interior. Brodie talks a great deal about her prime, but we don’t witness it, and the nasty suspicion falls that perhaps to talk so much about one’s prime is by definition no longer to be in it.

more from James Wood at Guardian Unlimited Books here.

The quarrel between philosophy and literature has been around so long that even Plato referred to it in “The Republic” as “ancient.” The rivalry not only has a history as old as Western civilization itself. It also circles around one of the deepest questions of all: which gives the truest perspective on human life? Is philosophy’s sublimely abstract distance — the view, as Spinoza put it, sub specie aeternitatis (under the guise or form of eternity) — the optimal place from which to glean essential truths? Or can they be yielded up only within the vivid intimacy of experience — if not the immediate experiences of our own lives, then the mediated experiences that narrative art affords? Does the view sub specie aeternitatis, in leaving out all the good stories, miss those large truths that are wrested out of the unexpected twists and turns that make us susceptible to love’s abandonment and grief’s annihilation? It is a good question, and Plato’s highhanded way of trying to resolve it in favor of philosophy — going so far as to recommend banishing poets from utopia — has fortunately not laid it to rest. Robert Hellenga’s sweet and lovely new novel, “Philosophy Made Simple,” may appear far removed from the quarrelsome old rivalry. But as Plato warned, appearances can be deceptive.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

In the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Karen Armstrong on religion and immortality:

Religion is about transformation; by ritual and ethical practice we become fundamentally different. Religion is not about preparing for the beatific vision in Heaven; it is also about living a fully human life in this world. By becoming one with these paradigmatic figures, losing our flawed, everyday selves in their perfection, we too can become perfect and inhabit an eternal dimension even in this world of pain and death.

Like any other religious truth, immortality must become a present reality. It is liberation from the constraints of time and space, and from the limitations of our narrow horizons. It involves a profound realization that the deepest core of our being is inseparable from what has been called God, nirvana, brahman, or the Dao. Like any myth, it is a program for action. The traditions teach us how to effect this radical internal transformation; they cannot tell us what this immortal state is, because it is so different from our normal consciousness that it is ineffable, but they provide us with a method that will help us to change. Unless we put that method into practice, we are in no position to say whether we have an immortal self or not. Immortality is not a matter of waiting for the next life, but in perfecting our humanity here and now.

Not many of the world religions are as preoccupied with Heaven, Hell, and judgment as Christianity and Islam; these faiths absorbed much of the apocalyptic vision of Zoroastrianism, which was unique in the ancient world. Many of the great sages were wary of speaking about the afterlife. The afterlife has never been a major preoccupation in Judaism. St. Paul told his converts, “Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man what things God has prepared for those that love him.” When asked whether a Buddha who had achieved the enlightenment of nirvana continued to exist after his death, the Buddha replied that this was an improper question, because we have no words to describe this state. It was, therefore, pointless to discuss it.

The IMF finds itself with apparently little to do these days, in the Economist.

Apart from generating reams of analysis, the fund’s job is to furnish foreign exchange to countries that have temporarily run short. It can call on about $220 billion of hard currency in the first instance. That sounds like plenty. But some of its former customers now have big, shiny fire-engines of their own. South Korea, for example, has $217 billion in its vaults. Between them, eight East Asian countries (Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and South Korea) command reserves worth about ten times the IMF total. These countries have even begun to pool a small fraction of their combined hoard, under what is called the Chiang Mai Initiative.

Lately no one has been calling on the fund’s own supply. Brazil and Argentina have both repaid their debts. Only Turkey and Indonesia still owe it money on any scale. Quiet times are lean times for the IMF. Like any bank, it covers its running costs (which will amount to over $900m in the year to April 2007) from the interest it earns on its loans. But this financing model “is no longer tenable”, Mr de Rato’s report says. By its own projections, the IMF will live beyond its means by almost $300m in 2009-10. The belt-tightening this implies has not gone down well with staff, who show little taste for the austerity they are notorious for prescribing to others.

There are lots of ways to plug this gap (the fund sits on 103m ounces of gold, for example). But is the fund worth the price?

In Nature:

It seems that nothing stays the same: not even the ‘constants’ of physics. An experiment suggests that the mass ratio of two fundamental subatomic particles has decreased over the past 12 billion years, for no apparent reason.

The startling finding comes from a team of scientists who have calculated exactly how much heavier a proton is than an electron. For most purposes, it is about 1,836 times heavier. But dig down a few decimal places and the team claims that this value has changed over time.

The researchers admit that they are only about 99.7% sure of their result, which physicists reckon is a little better than ‘evidence for’ but not nearly an ‘observation of’ the effect. If confirmed, however, the discovery could rewrite our understanding of the forces that make our Universe tick.

This is not the first time physicists have suspected physical constants of inconstancy.

In 1937, the physicist Paul Dirac famously suggested that the strength of gravity could change over time. And arguments about the fine-structure constant, [alpha] , have raged for years (see ‘The inconstant constant?’). The fine-structure constant measures the strength of the electromagnetic force that keeps electrons in place inside atoms and molecules.

In openDemocracy, is media consolidation leading Mexican democracy the way of Italy’s and Russia’s?

A key battleground is the electronic media, which has been able to increase its power and wealth thanks to privileges granted by Vicente Fox’s administration. Mexico’s media barons decided to turn the electoral contest to their advantage by exploiting the vulnerability of candidates who depend on airtime to circulate their ideas and proposals (together, Televisa and TV Azteca command more than 95% of Mexico’s television audience). True, it makes sense in strict business terms that the broadcasting industry seeks to defend its investments, but the method it chose and the political reception it received were alike scandalous: these giant corporations prepared a bill that was presented before a complicit, ignorant and/or frivolous house of representatives.

The bill, which made countless concessions to the ambitions of the media barons, was presented to the lower house in December 2005. The noteworthy, the incredible, the banana of it is that representatives from all political parties approved it unanimously – in seven minutes! The public learned only later that most of the legislators who voted for it had not even read, much less understood, a piece of legislation so crucial to Mexican modernity.

The document was sent to the upper house; by that stage, growing opposition to the law across Mexican society meant that senators could no longer hide behind their ignorance. Among the protestors were government agencies that regulate media; the main electoral authority; public and cultural media; academics and civil-society organisations; and a handful of professional politicians. Even the Mexican office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights released statements reminding people that the law violated international agreements signed by Mexico.

Time to rewrite the history of contemporary journalism? Most recent discussion of that history has been about the New Journalism, the New New Journalism, memoir fictionalizing and “truthiness” in general. Important, but something’s been happening that somehow hasn’t been given due recognition: the rise of a revivified “journalism of ideas,” writing about thinking. Not thinking as in punditry, but thinking about fundamental things, those things that run deeper than political allegiances and positions: thinking about the nature of human nature and human society, the nature of the cosmos, the nature of the mind itself (thinking about factors that underlie all politics). The kind of writing about ideas that once found a home at a now-dead magazine called Lingua Franca and has since—with the assistance of many talented Lingua Franca alumni, both writers and editors—succeeded in changing the face of serious journalism for the better.

more from the NY Observer here.

There is a paradox about the current bout of media atheism. It is producing a great deal of sound and fury, but most ordinary, fair-minded people I talk to find it increasingly lacking credibility. Richard Dawkins has produced two films suggesting that religion, not the love of money, is the root of all evil and he has a new book on the subject out later in the year. Daniel Dennett has been touring the broadcasting studios plugging his book, Breaking the Spell, about the evolutionary origins and purpose of religion, and Lewis Wolpert has just written a book about believing six impossible things before breakfast.

Yet for all the polemic and literary fireworks, all this remains a show to watch rather than a serious engagement with the truth. This is because of four fundamental failures.

more from The Observer here.

The exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines’, which opened recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is a glorious testament to the artist’s explosive, proto-Pop vision. It traces the decade (from 1954 to 1964) when the artist broke through the picture plane to embrace the flux and flotsam of everyday life. While Rauschenberg’s unbridled creative energy and paradigm-shattering gestures cannot be disputed, what struck me about the exhibition was how quaint the work seems today. The faded newsprint, old paisley fabrics, rusting wires and shabby plumage of taxidermied birds made the three-dimensional collages look like relics; emblems of a once radical moment when the real world promised to penetrate and forever alter the aesthetic realm. But it was less the physical condition of the works than the attitude they conveyed that made me think about their ultimate failure to change anything beyond the inventory of materials available for image- or object-making. Artists no longer had merely to represent the world; they could now actually use it as fodder for their work. The world, however, stayed pretty much the same.

At approximately the same time that Rauschenberg was mating tyres and angora goats with splattered paint in New York a group of artists, filmmakers and theorists in Europe were also contemplating the intersection of art and life, but to more critically engaged political ends.

more from Frieze here.

Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If anything like that turned up,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.

True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.

Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’d had enough of dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggles to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.

Hence the indispensable
silver lining,
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,
good names restored, greed daunted,
old maids married off to worthy parsons,
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,
seducers scurrying to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted,
pride humbled, wounds healed over,
prodigal sons summoned home,
cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly
in the last.

from Poetry Magazine.

For me, two of the most pungent, original works of the 1920s — if one has to single out works that epitomize its contradictory artistic concerns — are Max Ernst’s Oedipus Rex (1922) and Otto Dix’s 1924 portfolio of 50 engravings dealing with War in all its stunning terror. On the one hand, we have a painting whose meaning is somewhat obscure — but not entirely, for Oedipus Rex is the hero of Sophocles’ tragedy — and on the other hand we have an avalanche of images whose meaning is horrifically clear. Dix surrounds us with the violence of war — the trench warfare of the First World War, in which he served, and whose brutality he witnessed first-hand. His images are as fantastic as they are factual — expressionistically fierce and journalistically precise — making them all the more nightmarish. There is an air of uncanniness to Dix’s pictures that makes them more than records of an inhumane event. He takes us behind the scene of war — the parades and speeches and rationalizations — putting us right in the trenches, where the obscene ugliness of battle becomes self-evident. We are attacked by storm troopers wearing gas masks, encounter corpses, almost become entangled in barbed wire, and sit knee-deep in mud and filth: “you are there, whether or not you want to be,” Dix’s confrontational, morbid images shout. They document a highly contagious social pathology which can claim us as its victim at any moment. The gloom of his scenes — they are marvels of black and white, and above all acid gray — conveys a hopeless state of mind as well as the atmosphere of a society bent on destroying itself.

more from artnet magazine here.

Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times:

No one was more prescient about the problems that could ensue from the present Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq than Gen. Tony Zinni, the former commander in chief of United States Central Command (Centcom) and Mr. Bush’s former envoy to the Middle East. His central theory is that the world changed not on Sept. 11, 2001, but in 1989, with the end of the cold war, which created seismic changes (comparable to those left in the wakes of World War I and World War II) and a dangerous new environment of global instability. “We expected a new world order of peace and prosperity,” he writes of the collapse of the Soviet Union. “We could not have been more wrong. Instead of global peace and prosperity, all the snakes came out, with consequences that are still unfolding.”

Change and flux, he reminds us, accelerated in the closing decade of the 20th century and the opening years of the 21st. Globalization held out the promise of worldwide economic development but also threatened to increase economic inequalities and feelings of exploitation on the part of the third world. At the same time, old ideas of sovereignty were being challenged by a proliferation of “non-state entities” (like terrorist networks and drug cartels), while old ideas of nationalism were being challenged by religious, ethnic and tribal identities.

More here.

From Ms. Magazine:

Feminist Majority Foundation president Eleanor Smeal came together with Nobel Peace Laureates Jody Williams (1997) and Shirin Ebadi (2003) yesterday to call for a peaceful resolution to tensions between the U.S. and Iran. Williams, an American, and Ebadi, an Iranian, declared in a joint statement, “We demand that our governments not resort to armed violence and instead negotiate a solution to the increasing crisis.”

The night before, Williams and Ebadi were awarded the FMF’s Global Women’s Rights Award, alongside Laureates Betty Williams (Ireland, 1977) and Rigoberta Menchu Túm (Guatemala, 1992). The annual Award, given in memory of Eleanor Roosevelt and presented this year by Salma Hayek, honors women who embody Roosevelt’s courage, spirit and resolve in their own achievements on behalf of women and peace worldwide.

More here.

Joseph Cirincione in Foreign Policy on rising tensions with Iran.

Does this story line sound familiar? The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. secretary of state tells congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The secretary of defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism. The president blames it for attacks on U.S. troops. The intelligence agencies say the nuclear threat from this nation is 10 years away, but the director of intelligence paints a more ominous picture. A new U.S. national security strategy trumpets preemptive attacks and highlights the country as a major threat. And neoconservatives beat the war drums, as the cable media banner their stories with words like “countdown” and “showdown.”

The nation making headlines today, of course, is Iran, not Iraq. But the parallels are striking. Three years after senior administration officials systematically misled the nation into a disastrous war, they could well be trying to do it again.

Nothing is clear, yet. For months, I have told interviewers that no senior political or military official was seriously considering a military attack on Iran. In the last few weeks, I have changed my view. In part, this shift was triggered by colleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran.

Meanwhile, Philip Anderson (Physics Nobel Laureate), Michael Fisher (Wolf Laureate), David Gross (Nobel Laureate), Jorge Hirsch (Professor of Physics), Leo Kadanoff (National Medal of Science), Joel Lebowitz (Boltzmann Medalist), Anthony Leggett (Nobel Laureate), Eugen Merzbacher (President, American Physical Society, 1990), Douglas Osheroff (Nobel Laureate), Andrew Sessler (President, American Physical Society, 1998), George Trilling (President, American Physical Society, 2001), Frank Wilczek (Nobel Laureate), and Edward Witten (Fields Medalist) have sent a letter to President Bush. (Via Cosmic Variance.)

Dear Mr. President:

Recent articles in the New Yorker and Washington Post report that the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran is being actively considered by Pentagon planners and by the White House. As members of the profession that brought nuclear weapons into existence, we urge you to refrain from such an action that would have grave consequences for America and for the world.

1800 of our fellow physicists have joined in a petition opposing new US nuclear weapons policies that open the door to the use of nuclear weapons in situations such as Iran’s. These policies represent a “radical departure from the past”, in the words of Linton Brooks, National Nuclear Security Administration director. Indeed, since the end of World War II, US policy has considered nuclear weapons “weapons of last resort”, to be used only when the very survival of the nation or of an allied nation was at stake, or at most in cases of extreme military necessity.

Conservative American columnist Daniel Pipes concludes a recent article for the New York Sun on Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the following words: “The most dangerous leaders in modern history are those… equipped with… a mystical belief in their own mission. That, combined with his expected nuclear arsenal, makes him an adversary who must be stopped, and urgently.” As evidence of Ahmadinejad’s mysticism Pipes cites the fact that he believes in Mahdaviat, the ‘second coming’ of the ‘Mahdi’, an Islamic version of the Messiah. Such radical religious beliefs, held by the leader of a powerful nuclear state, Pipes argues, will have ominous consequences. No doubt he is right. But if Pipes is concerned about the rise of powerful nuclear-armed men who believe in the second coming, he might have looked a little closer to home. Forget Iran. The mainstay of religious radicalism and mainstream occultism, is the United States, and America already has the bomb. More than one.

Consider these statistics: 95 per cent of Americans believe in God; 86 per cent believe in Heaven; 78 per cent believe in life after death; 72 per cent believe in angels; 71 per cent believe in Hell; 65 per cent believe in the Devil; 34 per cent believe that the Bible is inerrant. But then again only 40 per cent believe they have actually had contact with the dead (source Kosmin and Lachman and The Economist).

more from The New Humanist here.

Consider that, in December 2001, former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani explained that “the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.” On the other hand, if Israel responded with its own nuclear weapons, it “will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.” Rafsanjani thus spelled out a macabre cost-benefit analysis. It might not be possible to destroy Israel without suffering retaliation. But, for Islam, the level of damage Israel could inflict is bearable–only 100,000 or so additional martyrs for Islam.

And Rafsanjani is a member of the moderate, pragmatic wing of the Iranian Revolution; he believes that any conflict ought to have a “worthwhile” outcome. Ahmadinejad, by contrast, is predisposed toward apocalyptic thinking. In one of his first TV interviews after being elected president, he enthused: “Is there an art that is more beautiful, more divine, more eternal than the art of the martyr’s death?” In September 2005, he concluded his first speech before the United Nations by imploring God to bring about the return of the Twelfth Imam. He finances a research institute in Tehran whose sole purpose is to study, and, if possible, accelerate the coming of the imam. And, at a theology conference in November 2005, he stressed, “The most important task of our Revolution is to prepare the way for the return of the Twelfth Imam.”

more from TNR here.

This week in Slate.com, Tyler Cowen, from Marginal Revolution, has a few reports on his visit to New Orleans.

Last month I spent a week in Louisiana studying economic development, or in this case redevelopment. The institutional roots of cultural success—whether it be Mozart, Michelangelo, or Louis Armstrong—are a long-standing research interest of mine, and I wanted to see how New Orleans might lay the groundwork for economic recovery and future cultural innovation. But in Louisiana I found that the various factions arguing about how to rebuild are too focused on finding “the right” master plan. A better approach is to support good institutions and freedom of contract so that many private plans can come to fruition.

Many economists have suggested it is not worth rebuilding New Orleans at all. But they belie their own discipline by not asking, “At what price?” Hurricanes or no hurricanes, the devastated areas in New Orleans remain more valuable than most parts of the world, if only because they lie in a famous U.S. city. At some price, people will want to work and live there. City planners simply need to acknowledge that this price is lower than it used to be.

Philip Roth is the great recorder of Darwinian Man – “unaccommodated man”, who is no more than “a poor, bare, forked animal”, as old King Lear observed. Roth has understood what it means to be a conscious creature, driven by sexual desire towards the death of the body, nothing more. He called an earlier novel The Dying Animal, taking his title from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, in which the poet describes his soul as “sick with desire/And fastened to a dying animal . . .”

Roth’s characters inhabit a truly post-religious world, in which we do not have immortal souls, only sick, lively desire, and the dying of the animal. The title of this new, bleak tale is taken from a mediaeval morality play in which Everyman, the human soul, is called by Death to appear before God’s judgement seat. He is deserted by his strength, discretion, beauty, knowledge and five wits, leaving only his Good Works to speak for him at the end. Hugo von Hofmannsthal reworked the play in 1911 for the Salzburg Festival, where it is still performed. Timor Mortis conturbat me is an ancient cry, but it sounds different in a world where the Four Last Things – death, judgement, heaven and hell – have been reduced to one, or maybe one and a half.

more from The New Statesman here.

Editing and rearranging the large mass of his early prose, Yeats tried to bring into coherence a diffuse body of writing. The pieces which were first collected in The Celtic Twilight were largely concerned with Irish folklore. These detailed, and occasionally meandering, reports from what Yeats considered the front line of racial memory and pagan religious instinct were deliberately distinct both in tone and procedure from the already established methods of the folklorist. The young Yeats’s prose is highly wrought, and yet this style is at the service of no real argument. It is important to the effect of The Celtic Twilight that its first-person voice should be identified as that of a young modern poet, importing much un-Victorian primitivism and mystery into contemporary writing; beyond that, larger patterns of coherence (and even smaller ones) are neglected. Ghosts abound, but not as the agents of philosophical instruction or religious apocalypse. “Drumcliff and Rosses”, Yeats writes of his own home ground, “are choke-full of ghosts”, adding a catalogue which seems to tire of its own effects: “By bog, road, rath, hillside, sea-border they gather in all shapes: headless women, men in armour, shadow hares, fire-tongued hounds, whistling seals, and so on”. Just in case his readers might baulk at the last item (having taken the others in their stride), Yeats tops this off with “A whistling seal sank a ship the other day”. The supernatural is everywhere, but its meaning and intentions (if any) are generally inscrutable. One anecdote tells of how the Devil approaches two women as a lover: he offers a lift to one; she refuses, and he vanishes.

more from the TLS here.

“One might speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it,” the philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote. “That predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim unfulfilled by men, and also a realm in which it is fulfilled: God’s remembrance.” Frydlender (like Benjamin) is a secular Jew, and his vision is quite reasonably a dark one, yet there is also in his pictures a faint yearning for redemption, as if by knitting together moments otherwise lost to history he might help make a broken world whole again.

His second New York show includes pictures taken in various Israeli venues–a makeshift nightclub, for example, with Elvis enshrined on the wall, where a middle-aged crooner serenades a room half filled with Tel Avivan slackers. The spliced images make the club’s floor curve like a boat’s hull–a Noah’s ark or ship of fools, carrying the tattered remnants of a counterculture.

more from the Village Voice here.