Interrogator’s Notebook

We learned to translate minesweeper
from Russian, read a relief map upside down,
empty a man with the least effort possible.

A soldier is an open book when the ink
is his fingertip. Sometimes even the subtle
tricks will do: waking a prisoner every few

minutes, pulling triggers of unloaded revolvers,
smiles that mimic a closing vise. We wrote
about stolen battle plans, officer predilections

and desperate meanderings. But the truth
can only be found inside men and what we do
when no can see our hate and intervene.

The Interrogator’s Notebook is the scariest
tome I know, more frightening when closed.
That means the questions have ended

and another long night begins for captured
troops who warm themselves with shadows
as a roof of desert stars pierce their eyes,

shards of light pulsing beneath the skin.
If God is the purveyor of all things unseen,
we should pray in every language we know.

by Martin Ott

from New Plains Review, Fall 2009

From Edge:

[SEAN CARROLL:] Why does the universe looks the way it does?
This seems on the one hand a very obvious question. On the other hand, it is an interestingly strange question, because we have no basis for comparison. The universe is not something that belongs to a set of many universes. We haven't seen different kinds of universes so we can say, oh, this is an unusual universe, or this is a very typical universe. Nevertheless, we do have ideas about what we think the universe should look like if it were “natural”, as we say in physics. Over and over again it doesn't look natural. We think this is a clue to something going on that we don't understand.

One very classic example that people care a lot about these days is the acceleration of the universe and dark energy. In 1998 astronomers looked out at supernovae that were very distant objects in the universe and they were trying to figure out how much stuff there was in the universe, because if you have more and more stuff — if you have more matter and energy — the universe would be expanding, but ever more slowly as the stuff pulled together. What they found by looking at these distant bright objects of type 1A supernovae was that, not only is the universe expanding, but it's accelerating. It's moving apart faster and faster. Our best explanation for this is something called dark energy, the idea that in every cubic centimeter of space, every little region of space, if you empty it out so there are no atoms, no dark matter, no radiation, no visible matter, there is still energy there. There is energy inherent in empty spaces. We can measure how much energy you need in empty space to fit this data, this fact that the universe is accelerating. This vacuum energy pushes on the universe. It provides an impulse. It keeps the universe accelerating. We get an answer and the answer is 10^-8 ergs per cubic centimeter, if that is very meaningful.

More here. (Note: You can also enjoy watching this intelligent conversation with the brilliant and masterful Dr. Carroll on video)

From The Guardian:

She's 81 and growing frail, but revered author and poet Maya Angelou has lost none of her legendary wisdom and humour. In a rare interview, she explains why she's not about to retire.

During a trip to Senegal, Maya Angelou called Samia, a friend she had made in Paris several years before, and was invited over for dinner. Passing a room where people apparently clung to the wall to avoid standing on the rug, Angelou became incensed. “I had known a woman in Egypt who would not allow her servants to walk on her rugs, saying that only she, her family and friends were going to wear out her expensive carpets. Samia plummeted in my estimation.”

Keen to challenge her host's hauteur, she walked back and forth across the carpet. “The guests who were bunched up on the sidelines smiled at me weakly.” Soon afterwards, servants came, rolled up the rug, took it away and brought in a fresh one. Samia then came in and announced that they would be serving one of Senegal's most popular dishes in honour of Angelou: “Yassah, for our sister from America… Shall we sit?” And as the guests went to the floor where glasses, plates, cutlery and napkins were laid out on the carpet, Angelou realised the full extent of her faux pas and was “on fire with shame”. “Clever and so proper Maya Angelou, I had walked up and down over the tablecloth… In an unfamiliar culture, it is wise to offer no innovations, no suggestions, or lessons. The epitome of sophistication is utter simplicity.” Such is an example of the 28 short epistles that comprise Letter To My Daughter, Angelou's latest book.

More here.

“Wer groß denkt, muß irren. A great thinker is bound to make mistakes,” Board Number One quotes him. Heidegger, the man whose philosophy came very close to the Nazi spirit in the 1930s, is notorious for not apologising for the Holocaust and not removing offensive passages. Accused in his 1929 book on Kant of forcing German philosophy into an alien mould, he insisted postwar on the unaltered text, since “everyone keeps accusing me of force” and “thinking people learn all the better from their mistakes”. If this is one of a number of indirect “apologies”, it seems grudging. Much of the problem was character. He hated confrontation. As his supercritical student Karl Löwith put it: “The natural expression of his face included a working forehead, veiled face, and lowered eyes, which now and then would take stock of a situation with a short and swift glance. If someone temporarily forced him into a direct look by speaking to him, then this extremely disharmonious face, jagging angularly in all its features, would become somewhat reserved, wily, shifting and downright hypocritical…What was natural for it was the expression of cautious mistrust, at times full of peasant cunning.” The emotionally hopeless letters Heidegger wrote to Hannah Arendt, the Jewish political philosopher with whom he fell in love when she was his student, are a key. Evasive in love, he was stubborn in achievement and recalcitrant by nature. Like his semi-literate parents, he was a head-down, uncommunicative type in the old rural mould. The extraordinary thing is that he also gave this stubborn, self-concealing character to truth and philosophised on that basis.

more from Lesley Chamberlain at Standpoint here.

In a noble if melodramatic way, Koestler had once held a sort of dress rehearsal for suicide with Walter Benjamin, as both contemplated being taken alive by the Gestapo. (He kept the pills Benjamin gave him, while the latter swallowed his on the Spanish border a few days later.) By comparison, his own suicide in 1983 was an affair very much lacking in grandeur. His mind and his body were certainly both giving way, but he seems to have allowed or perhaps encouraged his healthy wife, Cynthia, to join him in the extinction. An earlier study by David Cesarani was lurid to the point of sensationalism about Koestler’s callousness toward his wives and other women (to say nothing of other people’s wives). It has been plausibly alleged that in his compulsive seductions—of Simone de Beauvoir, for one—he did not always stop quite short of physical coercion. Scammell does his best to plead extenuation here, but is obviously uncomfortable. Just as many of the people who believe in numinous coincidence and supernatural intervention are secretly hoping to prove that it is they themselves who are the pet of the universe, so many of those who overcompensate for inferiority are possessed of titanic egos and regard other people as necessary but incidental. At least this case is a tragic one when considered as a life story, because it shows us what a noble mind was there o’erthrown.

more from Christopher Hitchens at The Atlantic here.

Does the Netherlands have any great literature to boast of? This question is often put to me when I am abroad. So who then are the doyens of that Dutch literature? Many of the people I talk to are unable to name even a single writer from the Dutch-speaking world. Erasmus, Spinoza, Anne Frank – it appears that none of these are directly associated with the Netherlands, even though Erasmus lived in Rotterdam, Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, and Het achterhuis [The diary of a young girl] was written in an Amsterdam house overlooking a canal. Anyone wishing to sketch a picture of Dutch literature of the past fifty years must look at five major writers: Willem Frederik Hermans, Gerard Reve (both now deceased), Harry Mulisch, Cees Nooteboom, and Hella S. Haasse.

more from Margot Dijkgraaf at Eurozine here.

In the fall of 1976, a newspaper contacted Vladimir Nabokov in his Swiss refuge and asked him which books he had recently read. He responded with three typical titles: Dante’s “Inferno” (in Charles Singleton’s deliciously literal translation), a big, fat book about butterflies and his own work-in-progress, “The Original of Laura.” The latter project had preoccupied him over the summer, despite a serious illness. It was, he told his correspondent, “completed in my mind.” The revisions went on while he was confined to a hospital bed, a febrile process he describes in some detail in his “Selected Letters”: “I must have gone through it some fifty times and in my diurnal delirium kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible.” Here was a description to whet the appetite of every Nabokov fanatic. If that’s how he discussed the book, the actual product had to be beyond imagining. Alas, the author died of congestive bronchitis in July 1977. And although he may have completed “The Original of Laura” in his mind, he had managed to transcribe only a small portion of the book onto index cards.

more from James Marcus at the LAT here.

The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarter­back’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements. The reasoning in “Outliers,” which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle. Fortunately for “What the Dog Saw,” the essay format is a better showcase for Gladwell’s talents, because the constraints of length and editors yield a higher ratio of fact to fancy. Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.

more from Steven Pinker at the NYT here.

Steven Levy in Wired:

Last August, the people who putatively run Twitter — the small crew that three years ago launched the world’s fastest-growing communications medium — announced a relatively minor change in the way the site functions. The tweak would have a small effect on retweeting, the convention by which Twitter users repost someone else’s informative or amusing message to their own Twitter followers. Retweets start with RT, for “retweet,” and usually cite the first author by user ID. And, importantly, retweeters often add a word or two of commentary about the repeated content.

But there was a problem: Twitter itself didn’t invent retweeting; it was created by Twitter users. In a blog post explaining the changes to retweets, the company’s second-in-command, Biz Stone, called them “a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be.” The good news, he said, was that Twitter was building retweets right into the site’s architecture. The bad news was that Project Retweet didn’t make any provision for the commentary that users might like to add.

More here.

Katherine Harrison in The New York Times:

But enough about you, Dear Reader, let’s talk about Philip Roth. Or Nathan Zuckerman or David Kepesh or Mickey Sabbath. Or any of the maddeningly, entertainingly and sometimes tediously self-involved heroes whose lives and loves mirror those of their author. A Roth by any other name would still suffer the affliction identified by O. Spielvogel, the fictional psychiatrist an excerpt of whose imagined article, “The Puzzled Penis,” introduced the reading world to “Portnoy’s Complaint.” A condition marked by “extreme sexual longings,” compulsive sexual behaviors and “overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration,” Portnoy’s complaint outgrew its eponymous novel and manifested itself in one Roth protagonist after another.

Alexander Portnoy sought relief in raw liver, most memorably the piece he “bought one afternoon at a butcher shop and, believe it or not, violated behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson.” But the possibilities and permutations of onanism are limitless. “Into Thin Air,” Part 1 of “The Humbling,” introduces 65-year-old Simon Axler as he descends into a long wallow of doubt, despair and self-pity. “The last of the best of the classical American stage actors,” Axler has suddenly “lost his magic.” “His talent was dead.” Cast as Macbeth and Prospero at the Kennedy Center, he fails so spectacularly at the double bill that he slides into a depression severe enough to frighten off his long-suffering wife.

More here.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Without Thucydides the war (or wars) fought between the Greek states of Athens and Sparta late in the fifth century B.C. would have been no more significant than many another long war (or wars) whose start dates, end dates, causes and characters might (or might not) have been discussed by future historians. Only because of Thucydides' “History of the Peloponnesian War”—with his radical claims of exercising a new rationality and, most grandiloquently, of writing a “thing for all time”—did a typically messy military contest based on money, influence, bloody-mindedness and happenstance become interpreted and reinterpreted as though it were a religious revelation. Communists and anticommunists, leftists and neocons, anti-imperialists and empire builders have all fought to recruit the great Athenian as their ally.

Donald Kagan, a veteran Yale professor of classics and ancient history, has himself taken part in these arguments for almost a half-century. His own four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War is a classic of modern scholarship. Now, with “Thucydides: The Reinvention of History,” Mr. Kagan has produced what reads like the last word on the man, a nuanced and subtle account of a subject that has so often been treated in a spirit of high partisanship. Mr. Kagan stresses that Thucydides, an Athenian naval commander who was exiled in 424 B.C. for losing an important battle in Thrace, was more than just a participant in the conflict that he described. He was also a player in the domestic politics of the war, the “spin” as well as the strategy. Thus “Thucydides: The Reinvention of History” is a book about a long-ago historian's argument with his contemporaries—the tension between facts and what one would like to be facts. “In the important cases examined here,” Mr. Kagan writes, “the contemporary view was closer to the truth than [Thucydides'] own.”

More here. (Note: For Anju and Asad who spoke so eloquently about Thucydides over dinner last weekend.)

Veneer

Give me my hand on his neck and his back to my breast,
my heart ruffling his ribs and their flighty charge.
Give me the sea-grass bristles on his shoulder-blades
and his spine, courteous and pliable to my wrist.

His back is a child’s drawing of seagulls flocked.
I knuckle the air undone by their windward flight
and draw from their dip and rise my linear breath.

Were he standing, my tongue could graze the whorl
at the base of his neck and leave my hand to plane
the small of his close-grained waist.

Were he lying down, I’d crook in the hollow
of him and, with my index finger, slub the mole
at the breech of his back that rounds on darkness
like a knot in veneer: shallow, intricate, opaque.

by Vona Groarke

From: Flight
Publisher: The Gallery Press, Oldcastle, 2002

From The Telegraph:

Writing in his new book, Snapshots in History’s Glare, Gore Vidal begins one paragraph with the words: ‘Despite never having been very social…’. He then proceeds to talk of asking Andy Warhol, Mick and Bianca Jagger and ‘baby Jade’ to visit him and his long time companion, Howard Austen, at their ravishing villa outside Ravello. Our old friends the Newmans [Paul and Joanne, that is]’ used to drop by, the next sentence tells us. So did Lauren Hutton, Susan Sarandon, Rudolf Nureyev, Hillary Clinton, Sting, James Taylor, Leonard Bernstein, Johnny Carson, Bruce Springsteen and many others, as this pictorial memoir bears witness. How exhausting it would all have been if Vidal had actually liked company.

But then Vidal likes to tease, just as he enjoys tearing Truman Capote’s reputation to shreds. One of Capote’s crimes was claiming to have flown, and landed, a plane at the age of 10, which was what Vidal actually had done (Vidal’s father was director of Aeronautics at the Department of Commerce). There are, to prove it, pictures of a golden-haired, white-shorted Gore at the controls. And there are photographs, too, of the young Vidal setting off to war and later frolicking with Tennessee Williams; and of a middle-aged Vidal running for Congress and shooting the breeze with JFK – Vidal shared a stepfather with Jackie Kennedy. Williams told Vidal that JFK had ‘a nice ass’; Vidal told Kennedy who said: ‘Why, that’s very exciting.’

More here.

Isaiah Berlin—renowned liberal theorist, historian of ideas, Oxford don, cultural gadfly—was one of the great raconteurs of his generation. According to Robert Darnton, a professor of history at Harvard University, Berlin holding forth resembled “a trapeze artist, soaring through every imaginable subject, spinning, flipping, hanging by his heels.” But Berlin, who died in 1997, worried about his reputation for rhetorical brilliance. Was he merely a clever talker, a frivolous wit? His letters, many of them collected in Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960, published by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Random House, in Britain in July (and appearing in America in December), reveal a man at times consumed by self-doubt: “I generally think that everything I do is superficial, worthless, glaringly shallow, and could not take in an idiot child,” Berlin wrote to his friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1952. Berlin was a punctilious and prolific correspondent. Like the first volume of his letters, Flourishing: Letters 1928-1946, published in 2004, Enlightening is a hefty tome—845 pages including the index. “I romanticize every place I come to,” Berlin wrote in 1949. “I find: Moscow, Oxford, Ditchley, Harvard, Washington: Each is a kind of legendary world framed within its own conventions in which the characters, suffused with unnatural brightness, perform with terrific responsiveness.” His many correspondents included the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; Katharine and Philip Graham, publishers of The Washington Post; the diplomat George Kennan; the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann; and the literary critic Edmund Wilson.

more from Evan R. Goldstein at The Chronicle Review here.

Old Berliners in the media complained that twenty years ago even the Wetter was better. In 1989, the stars apparently shone down on revelers dancing on the Brandenburger Tor as they tore the wall to pieces. And the next day, when the East Berliners chugged onto the Kurfürstendamm—then the main drag in West Berlin—in their gas-guzzling Trabbies, the sky was blue. Of course, when I flip through photos from the famous day, the newly reunited Berlin of twenty years ago looks as grey as grey can be. Helmut Kohl (the then Chancellor) and Willy Brandt (the Social Democratic Party hero who partially reconciled East and West through his Ostpolitik) stood on a balcony above the Schöneberger Rathaus, in the midst of mist and rain, in front of thousands of people. Yesterday, the sky was perhaps even more unrelenting. Rain fell on a hundred thousand people as they elbowed each other for a view of the big screens that relayed images of the Tor (next to which a puffy Bon Jovi bawled out something about freedom). Although the ceremony seemed designed to rev Germans up, all around me I could hear a burble of other languages. While a kitschy German boy band performed a song about freedom, Spanish students enthusiastically noted how German the whole thing seemed. Americans ordered pizzas to go at a stand nearby; clumps of French tourists debated where to party after the ceremony.

more from Charles McPhedran at n+1 here.

Four hundred years ago, in 1609, Galileo made the first observations with the telescope. The discoveries come out, primary the one that made Galileo promoting the Copernican theory of the Earth’s rotation around the Sun and then to replacing the doctrine concerning the position and the role of the Earth in the space, have been revolutionary non only in terms of scientific development but also in terms of social, technological and economic development, although the strong cultural and religious opposition. Galileo, named as “heretic” by the Catholic Church, was obliged to abjure. Scientific innovation and its dissemination have always played a determinant role in the cultural development of society: but, although the knowledge development is a process that could not be stopped, we can not say the same for what concerns its spread, or better, its accessibility, that is one the main means, if not “the mean”, of democracy. Nevertheless, thanks to the introduction of new technologies and then, thanks to the scientific evolution itself, the transfer and the spread of knowledge have been characterized by an ever greater acceleration. “To know” means “to be able to make a choice”: the word “heresy” originates from Greek and it means “choice”. Then, originally, “heretic” was the person who was able to consider the different options before choosing one. In 2009, European year of Creativity and Innovation, and in our society, defined as the “knowledge society”, at a distance of four hundred years from Galileo’s “heresy”, there is any hope to be “authentically heretic”?

more from Emanuela Scridel at Reset here.

I’ve joined them in my mind somehow, these two, yet Wallace tilted against Updike in the pages of The New York Observer some years ago (and I tilted with him, writing a parallel piece that claimed that the Master was too prolix, too ready to come forward into print with whatever his pen produced). They represented different, in some ways opposing worlds. Wallace was, in a core part of his being, an unassimilated subversive, and what he subverted, over and over, in his exacerbated scenarios, his outlaw fugues, was the vast entrenched order, the what is that Updike chronicled with calm Flemish exactitude. Updike celebrated an assumption about reality that Wallace was in some defining way at odds with. To call it a father/son dynamic would be simplistic, of course, but there are certain elements of that conventional agon, including the son’s will not just to repudiate but to outdo the father. Considering the divergence in their aesthetics—Wallace’s complete lack of interest in the realism that takes surfaces as the outer manifestation of interior forces—the field of engagement would have to be the how as opposed to the what. Which is to say the how of language, style: the sentence. Is it farfetched to think of Wallace’s prose pitching itself in sustained defiance against the philosophical ground of Updike’s, its lightly ironized acceptance of things as they are? The bemused Updike smile endorses a reality, an outlook, that Wallace could not fit himself to, a failure that was bound up, I suspect, with his deepest suffering. Fathers and sons, but also order and chaos.

more from Sven Birkerts at AGNI here.