There was lightning and there was rain. The sky above the meadowlands was on fire. What does it all mean, I wonder? Who was mad at whom? Was it a matter of old gods railing against new gods? Another Gigantomachia? Why did so much water fall that night? Why did the heavens pour down their rage as the little Roman, Mark Sanchez, was mounting a triumphant drive toward the end zone just before the half? Something great, some massive force objected to the possibility of The Jets scoring a touchdown just at that point. Some Titan, some Olympian, some Norse spirit of old had put his or her foot down. A field goal we can deal with, said the force, but a touchdown is absolutely unacceptable. And so the heavens were opened and the floods fell from the sky, and the light streaked across the horizon, and the thunder shook the earth. And Mark Sanchez did throw an incomplete pass. We cannot rule out the possibility that the Old Man is in league with forces beyond our ken. Brett Favre turned forty-one the day before the game. In football years he may as well be Methuselah. He may as well be seven hundred and eighty and two years. Who begat this old man, anyway? And who begat the man who begat him? Old people from the South. Old souls from a town called Kiln, which sounds like a place that was founded before the Bronze Age. Not surprising at all when you watch the Old Man play. Brett Favre hurls the football like it is a prehistoric lump of dirt in a game whose rules were forgotten with the drying up of the last tar pit.

more from me at The Owls here.

The great Benoît Mandelbrot has passed away, in Wired:

It has yet to be confirmed by the mainstream media, but it seems that Benoît Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry and one of the most famous mathematicians of all time, has passed away about a month shy of his 86th birthday.

I had the rare and amazing privilege of hearing Mandelbrot speak when he came to visit my high school about 20 years ago. Even at my science-and-technology high school, most of the students didn’t know much about Mandelbrot, but I’d been fascinated by fractals for years and had brought a copy of his seminal work The Fractal Geometry of Nature for him to autograph, and we chatted for a few minutes. I was a bit starstruck — I was 16 or 17 at the time — but I recall that he asked me what kind of fractal-related work I’d done, and showed genuine interest when I told him that I’d played around a lot with the Mandelbrot Set and some variations on the Sierpinski Gasket. In retrospect, I realize this could not possibly have been of much interest to him, but he took a few minutes to make me feel like an intelligent human being because a mathematical genius wanted to hear about what I was working on.

[Image via Wikimedia Commons]

Update: the NYT obituary can be found here.

by Fred D'Aguiar

What is it, Gay Talese is asking, about sports? It occupies a messy, emotional territory in which we embrace, and, just as easily, discard, heroes. “It’s not just losing the game,” Talese reflects, voice etched with the soft syllables of southern New Jersey, where he was born in 1932. “You lose the game enough, or get knocked out enough, you lose your job.” There’s an empathy in his bearing, a recognition of the challenges facing ballplayers, many of whom, “feel more at home on the grassy fields and hotel lobbies and locker rooms than they do in the suburban houses that most of them will begin to share next week with their wives and children” as he wrote in “On the Road, Going Nowhere, With the Yankees,” a New York Times piece about the end of the 1979 season.

more from David L. Ulin at the LAT here.

“So what’s happened to our Jews?” the agronomist Koryako asks his neighbors, grinning slyly. “Children, old men — I haven’t glimpsed a Jew all day. It’s as if they’d never existed. And only yesterday they were all coming back from the market with 12-kilo baskets!” The Jews are indoors today because the Nazis have occupied their Ukrainian town. It is June 1942, a year into the campaign to exterminate the Soviet Union’s Jewish population. Thirty-three thousand people, nearly all Jews, have been killed at Babi Yar. Another 20,000 are dead in Berdichev, birthplace of the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman. In his short story “The Old Teacher,” published in 1943 as the mass killings were still under way and before the world comprehended their extent, Grossman draws a vivid portrait of Koryako’s unnamed town on the eve of genocide as it “lay stifling, gripped by something foul and dark. Something vile had awoken; stirred by the Nazis’ arrival, it was now reaching toward them.” Accompanying the Red Army as a war correspondent, Grossman knew the foul and dark all too well. He would eventually spend more than a thousand days at the front, composing articles and stories and gathering material for “Life and Fate,” the greatest Russian novel of the war.

more from Ken Kalfus at the NYT here.

In the rush to sum up the career of Arthur Penn, the American film director who died recently at 88, journalists tended to focus on the same two themes. In one, Penn was important primarily because of the role of his best-known film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), as the harbinger of a new level of graphic violence in the movies, setting a bar soon to be raised by the likes of Sam Peckinpah in The Wild Bunch (1969) and Stanley Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange (1971). In the other theme, Penn helped pave the way for a cinematic Golden Age in the 1970s, in which Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and other American directors found room to pursue their most searingly personal visions, featuring a rogue’s gallery of outlaws and outsiders from Howard Beale to Travis Bickle. There are problems with both characterizations. One is that American cinema prior to 1967 was far from a pacifist affair. The Western, the gangster movie and film noir were often startlingly violent genres in which the hail of bullets that finally finished off Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker would have been notable but hardly unique.

more from at Kevin Nance at Obits here.

From The Guardian:

Even the genuine Twainisms recycled in countless self-help books – “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter” – aren't his best. I think I know why. Popular psychology, these days, is a strikingly earnest field; acerbic wit is largely the preserve of cynics who scoff at self-help. It's bizarre: all these grinning gurus preaching happiness, yet without much sense of humour. Twain proved that needn't be so: you can dispense real, uncynical life-wisdom, and still be hilarious.

Twain had little time for platitudes. Take “The early bird catches the worm”: “Don't be fooled… I once knew a man who tried it. He got up at sunrise & a horse bit him.” (He preferred getting up with the lark: “If you get the right kind of a lark… you can easily train him to get up at half past nine.”) Instead, he offered plenty of advice that research would later support, or that pop psychologists would borrow: “You will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did”; “Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time”; “Courage… is mastery of fear – not absence of fear” (aka Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway). His satirical “advice to youth”, quoted in the recent collection Mark Twain's Helpful Hints For Good Living, is perfectly wise: “Always obey your parents, when they are present… Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humouring that superstition.” He leant towards pacifism, but mocked the holier-than-thou: “I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.”

Twain's wisdom was hard-won – he watched two of his three daughters die – and he was far more than a maxim machine: a novelist, a champion of women's rights and the abolition of slavery. But laughter, he knew, wasn't some optional extra. “Humour is the great thing,” he wrote. “The saving thing.” He died the day after Halley's Comet came closest to earth in 1910, having predicted as much: “I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it… The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'”

More here.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in The New York Times:

What gives the quickening of life to this elegiac novel and takes the place of the unlikely laughter of “The History of Love”? The feat is achieved through exquisitely chosen sensory details that reverberate with emotional intensity. So, for example, here is George Weisz describing how, when his clients speak of their lives before the war, “between their words I see the way the light fell across the wooden floor. . . . I see his mother’s legs move about the kitchen, and the crumbs the housekeeper’s broom missed.” Those crumbs are an artist’s true touch. They demonstrate how Krauss is able, despite the formidable remove of the central characters and the mournfulness of their telling, to ground “Great House” in the shock of immediacy.

Krauss has taken great risks in dispensing with the whimsy and humor that she summoned for her tragic vision in “The History of Love.” Here she gives us her tragic vision pure. It is a high-wire performance, only the wire has been replaced by an exposed nerve, and you hold your breath, and she does not fall.

More here.

Alex Clark in The Guardian:

The stories that adults invent for children – whether they're designed as entertainment, diversion, education, balm or a mixture – come with a built-in dramatic irony. Not only does the teller have control of a particular narrative, how it proceeds and, perhaps most significantly, how and when it ends, but they will usually have a more developed understanding of what a story is in the first place, and know the approximate coordinates of the border between reality and fiction. But that kind of knowledge, as Salman Rushdie suggests in this engrossing and fantastical fable, loses its lustre if you stop believing in the stories you're telling; at which point, an injection of childlike innocence might be exactly what you need.

Luka and the Fire of Life comes to us 20 years after Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written shortly after the pronouncement of the fatwa against Rushdie. Haroun was partly a response to the monstrousness of his enforced withdrawal from the world and partly a gift for his son Zafar, who had asked him to write something that children might enjoy reading. Its central story – a boy who must enter a magical realm and defeat malevolent forces on his storyteller father's behalf – is repeated in Luka and the Fire of Life, which has been written for Rushdie's younger son, Milan, who rather understandably wanted his own book.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

I never know what I'm supposed to be paying attention to when I go to the symphony. In general, wherever I go, I lapse all too easily into sociology, and I start thinking about the posture and the haircuts and the accents of people around me when what I'm supposed to be doing is listening to what they're saying. But at the symphony, where I know so little about what is really at stake, where I am so unskilled in making that judgment learned audiences so love to make as to whether or not the evening's interpretation is a successful one, my reversion to sundry reflexions on anything and everything but the music is almost automatic.

Most recently, I found myself watching Anne-Sophie Mutter playing a violin piece composed specially for her by Sophia Gubaidulina. It was good. I liked it. If anyone was 'off' that evening, I certainly didn't notice, but this may be because I was preoccupied with all sorts of ridiculous and improbable thought experiments, one of which is still with me days later. I tried to imagine, namely, what it would be like if, somehow, I was sent out on stage with a violin in my hands. What could I do? Absolutely nothing. The internal wiring of my body –the neurons and the nerves and the muscles– simply has not been configured so as to enable me to even pretend for a second that I can play a violin. But look at Anne-Sophie Mutter's body. Is it so different? It is a woman's body, but it is not in respect of that difference that she is a violinist and I am not. Where is the difference, then? The difference, obviously, is in the way we were shaped and tendered over the course of years. Her violinist-body and my slouching, contemplative, wholly non-musical body were shaped over the course of many years of handling, of dressage.

Now we're getting close to what I actually wanted to talk about: not music, but the humanities, and the state of higher education in general.

More here.

Melody Dye in Child's Play:

What is experimental philosophy and is it new? How does the language we speak both encode and subsequently shape our moral understanding? How can manipulating someone’s linguistic expectations change their reasoning? And what can we learn about all these questions by productively plumbing the archives of everyday speech?

For those who are not familiar, Joshua Knobe is an up-and-coming ‘experimental philosopher’ at Yale, and is well-known for his experimental work looking at how we interpret a person’s actions depending on linguistic context. The idea underpinning his approach is that we can better understand philosophical concepts if we look at how people use and respond to them in practice. Many of these experiments focus on intentionality : i.e., in what contexts do we say that a person acted intentionally, and in what contexts unintentionally? Based on these findings, Josh wants to claim that he has discovered something ‘deep’ about the nature of theory of mind, intentional action, and moral judgment. But has he? I’d argue that he’s discovered something about how we use certain words and what we take them to mean. Is that deep? Perhaps! Read on — and you tell me.

More here.

From Nature:

Human societies progress in small steps just as biological evolution does, according to a study of the structure and language of societies in South East Asia and the Pacific Ocean.

“One of the big debates in anthropology has been whether there are any recurring patterns or processes in the way societies change over time,” says Tom Currie of University College London, who led the study published in Nature today¹. He and his team wanted to know whether societies increase in complexity through a limited number of different forms — from tribe, to chiefdom, state and empire — or whether different societies each have their own pattern. Their analysis, which uses quantitative methods borrowed from genetics, supports a popular model of political evolution which suggests that societies show a gradual increase in complexity. But the data also back up another theory — societies can decrease in complexity, too, either by the same pattern of small steps or by bigger crashes.

More here.

From Edge:

Three years ago, Edge collaborated with The Serpentine Gallery in London in a program of “table-top experiments” as part of the Serpentine's Experiment Marathon . This live event was featured along with the Edge/Serpentine collaboration: “What Is Your Formula? Your Equation? Your Algorithm? Formulae For the 21st Century.” Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator of the Serpentine, has invited Edge to collaborate in his latest project, The Serpentine Map Marathon, Saturday and Sunday, 16 – 17 October, at Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AR (Map). The multi-dimensional Map Marathon features non-stop live presentations by over 50 artists, poets, writers, philosophers, scholars, musicians, architects, designers and scientists. The two-day event takes place in London during Frieze Art Fair week. The event features maps by Edge contributors, and an Edge panel of Lewis Wopert, Armand Leroi, and John Brockman, on Sunday (17 October) 1:15pm-2:15pm. This page is a work-in-progress. We are posting Edge Maps as they are received. Click on images to enlarge or click here to begin slide show.

Picture: A somewhat fanciful depiction of a multiverse consisting of a background empty spacetime giving birth to baby universes, as proposed in my 2004 paper with Jennifer Chen. Artwork by Jason Torchinsky. Sean Carroll: Theoretical Physicist, Caltech; Author, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ulitmate Theory Of Time.

More here.

Elegy Asking That it be the Last

for Ingrid Erhardt, 1951-1971

by Norman Dubie
from The Mercy Sent: Collected and New Poems
Copper Canyon Press, 2001

A groundbreaking exhibition about Adolf Hitler opens in Berlin tomorrow, the first time since the war that a major museum has explored the relationship between the Führer and the German nation. Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime, at Berlin’s German Historical Museum, has been praised for smashing taboos and opening afresh the debate about how Hitler managed so successfully to seduce a nation. “Whether we like it or not he remains our strongest trademark,” said Karl Schnorr, a 68-year-old retired engineer at the preview. “Maybe it’s time we shook him off, but first we need to understand how we fell for him so utterly.” The opening coincides with a study published this week in which one in 10 Germans professed they would like a “Führer” figure to “govern Germany with a hard hand”, while 35% said they considered the country to be “dangerously overrun” with foreigners.

more from Kate Connolly at The Guardian here.

Can history come to an end? Arthur Danto has written of art entering a “post-historical” phase; he believes that the history of modern art as moving toward a state of abstraction has been fulfilled—indeed, internally exhausted. Since the 1960s, this particular “narrative,” as he calls it, has come to an end, even as the art world continues to exist, even to flourish. Although I don’t like the phrase “post-historical,” I think Danto is right. I had not, however, considered this idea in relation to history understood in its traditional sense as the actions of great men and nation building. But, a few weeks ago, the unnerving thought that this kind of history had come to an end confronted me. My husband and I were standing at the busiest traffic circle in Paris, the Place de L’Etoile, in front of the Arc de Triomphe, which, as I learned from the guidebook that I was reading aloud to him, was the largest triumphal arch in the world (165 feet tall), which meant that it was larger than any of the ancient triumphal arches still standing in Rome that were undoubtedly its inspiration. Reading that Napoleon dreamed of erecting a triumphal arch to the glory of the French army in 1806 following their victory at Austerlitz—a dream that would not be realized until 1836 when the arch was completed two decades after Napoleon’s final defeat and exile—did not surprise me. But I thought our guidebook was off the mark when it described the project as “grandiose” and attributed it to Napoleon’s “megalomania.” Instead, as I told my husband, raising a triumphal arch that would surpass in scale and magnificence the triumphal arches of antiquity was testimony to the hold of the ancients (especially the Romans) on the imagination and aspirations of modern people living before the twentieth century.

more from Rochelle Gurstein at TNR here.

My admiration for some of Benjamin’s writing, the elegance of his thinking and his language more than anything else, has accompanied me throughout my intellectual life. And this in spite of the irreparable damage I probably inflicted upon myself during my period of obsessive Benjamin reading. Because the confusion of his thinking exponentially propelled my own confusions to new heights, for many years. When you read Benjamin, you must learn to strictly separate admiration and criticism. The history of his influence is suitabably paradoxical. Benjamin’s writing, which was almost exclusively intended to be scientific in method, makes strict claims to the truth, even when it takes the form of aphorism, feuilleton, literary critique or memoir. But Benjamin today enjoys the level of worldwide adoration that is otherwise reserved for poets in Eastern Europe. He is quoted so extensively, his photograph reproduced so often, he is the subject of so many prominent congresses and meticulous exhibitions that you would be forgiven for thinking he was Germany’s leading poet. This misleading (oft kitschifying) treatment of a man who throughout his life regarded himself as a theorist, is most unusual for literary life in the west. At the very least it demands an explanation.

more from Stephan Wackwitz at Sign and Sight here.