From The New York Times:

If I were Donald Rumsfeld’s son, I’d give him “Horse Soldiers” for Father’s Day. During his tenure as George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Rumsfeld championed a mode of warfare that relied on limited numbers of soldiers armed with high-tech equipment and backed by precise, devastating air power. The Rumsfeld doctrine clashed with the Powell doctrine, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s theory that wars are best won with overwhelming ground forces, specific political goals and a clear exit strategy. Rumsfeld carried the day, and has left us in a hell of a fix in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Back in early 2002, though, Rumsfeld’s idea looked pretty good. In late 2001, small units of elite Special Forces soldiers, working with C.I.A. operatives and Air Force bombers, joined forces with Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance to defeat the country’s ruling Taliban. They didn’t need tanks and 100,000 troops. They rode into battle on horses. Doug Stanton tells the story of that brief shining moment in “Horse Soldiers,” a rousing, uplifting, Toby Keith-singing piece of work. This isn’t Afghanistan for those who enjoy (I use the word loosely) Iraq through the analytical lens of a book like “The Assassins’ Gate,” by George Packer. It’s for those who like their military history told through the eyes of heroic grunts, sergeants and captains. Think of Stephen E. Ambrose’s “Band of Brothers” or Stanton’s own best seller, “In Harm’s Way,” the story of the survivors of the cruiser Indianapolis, which sank in shark-infested waters during World War II.

More here.

Paterson
William Carlos Williams

Sunday in the Park
1. (a fragment)

Walking —

look down (from a ledge) into this grassy
den
(somewhat removed from the traffic)
above whose brows
a moon! Where she lies sweating at his side:

She stirs, distraught,
against him—wounded (drunk), moves
against him (a lump) desiring,
against him, bored .

flagrantly bored and sleeping, a
beer bottle still grasped spear-like
in his hand .

while the small, sleepless boys, who
have climbed the columnar rocks
overhanging the pair (where they lie
overt upon the grass, besieged—

careless in their narrow cell under
the crowd’s feet) stare down,
from history!
at them, puzzled and in the sexless
light (of childhood) bored equally,
go charging off .

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Friedrich Hayek described it as “one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by men”. The sociologist Georg Simmel noted that it “means more to us than any other object of possession because it obeys us without reservation”. Yet if some marketing gurus are to be believed, its pre-eminent position in the psychology of consumers is on the wane. The object in question is money. It is not just the lending of money that is in crisis. A variety of business models are emerging which look set to challenge the previously unquestioned role of monetary prices in the relationship between retailers and consumers. Where products are intangible or experiential in nature, it is these models that look set to survive the current bout of creative destruction sweeping the high street. The eyeballs of London commuters are now fought over by the distributors of free newspapers, London Lite and Thelondonpaper. Radiohead released their highly acclaimed album In Rainbows, on a pay-what-you-want basis via their website. Michael O’Leary of Ryanair has said that his goal is to offer all flights for free in the future. Google terrifies various publishing and software industries by making free what was previously sold, probing the limits of copyright. Examples such as these have led Chris Anderson, business guru and editor of Wired magazine, to declare that “$0.00 is the future of business”.

more from The Liberal here.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you’ll find it. It’s there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film. After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades—even if it’s now close to aesthetic kudzu. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984” is less a critical survey of a highly influential aesthetic than a feel-good class reunion. Rather than opt for scholarship and tough choices, curator Douglas Eklund cultivated a gang’s-all-here coziness. It’s a huge show, with hundreds of objects, books, posters, films, and videos, and works by 30 artists. Had a museum outside New York originated a show this baggy, it’s doubtful that the Met would have had anything to do with it. (Though it’s fantastic that the fuddy-duddy Met is finally thinking about recent art. It needs to do so, more often and better.) But if you do pick your way through this hodgepodge, you’ll find a spirited introduction to a lively moment. In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction.

more from New York Magazine here.

“The difference between poets and novelists is this,” writes the poet Randolph Henry Ash to the poet Christabel LaMotte in A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession, “that the former write for the life of the language—and the latter write for the betterment of the world.” In Byatt’s novel this has the glint of irony: a fictional poet contemplating his independence from the medium in which, unbeknown to himself, he exists. But it also contains the germ of a modern stereotype. The idea that poets and novelists possess separate and incompatible temperaments, like fortune-tellers and pharmacists, that poets are preoccupied with language (“for the life of the language”) while novelists are engrossed by society (“for the betterment of the world”), is a commonplace—perhaps also a consequence—of the paced battlements of the contemporary literary world. In this account, poets and novelists are not merely working at different kinds of writing. Their minds also work differently. Poets are introspective, miniature, and self-fascinating (“I am the personal,” Wallace Stevens declares in “Bantams in Pine-Woods”). Novelists are expansive, systematic, prone to looking through other people’s mail. Novelists are hardy gossips, bred to realism. Poets are post-Romantic waifs of imagination. Poets’ thoughts move cyclically, in rich depths of metaphor, while novelists’ thoughts accumulate in a straight line.

more from Poetry here.

From MSNBC:

They're making antimatter at the Large Hadron Collider?! That little jolt of reality is what sets the plot in motion for “Angels & Demons,” Hollywood's follow-up to “The Da Vinci Code.” The good news is that you don't have to worry about an antimatter bomb blowing up the world. Physicist Michio Kaku says so. The better news is that the antimatter being made at Europe's CERN physics lab is used for good, not for evil. The physicists who do real-life research with antimatter and other exotic substances see “Angels & Demons” not as a threat but as an opportunity. CERN is just one of the scientific institutions to capitalize on the “science behind the story.”

The US/LHC research group has organized an entire lecture series around the movie, including virtual lectures you can watch on the Web. And at 1 p.m. ET next Tuesday, the National Science Foundation will present a Webcast featuring CERN's director-general, Fermilab's Boris Kayser and Nobel-winning physicist Leon Lederman – who literally wrote the book on “The God Particle.” CERN has been through this before, back in 2000 when “Da Vinci” author Dan Brown's book version of “Angels & Demons” came out. “The hits on our public Web site went up by more than a factor of 10, and I guess this will happen again now that the movie is coming out,” said Rolf Landua, who led the research team for the ATHENA antimatter-making experiment at CERN.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

When Zhao Ziyang, the former Chinese premier who in 1989 had opposed using military force against student protesters, died four years ago, China's top leaders formed an “Emergency Response Leadership Small Group,” declared “a period of extreme sensitivity,” put the People's Armed Police on special alert and ordered the Ministry of Railways to screen travelers heading for Beijing. If this is how the men who rule China reacted to Zhao's death at home, how then will they respond to the posthumously published “Prisoner of the State,” a book in which Zhao repeatedly attacks the stonewalling and subterfuge (and sycophancy, mendacity, buck-passing and back-stabbing) of people whose allies and heirs remain in power today?

Whatever the fallout, one element will likely stay constant: This same group of men — mostly from a set of quarreling families bound together by common interests and long used to surviving turmoil and 180-degree policy shifts — will remain in power. Like a seal on a rolling ball, they are good at staying on top.

More here.

This Saturday, if you're interested:

It doesn’t really come as a surprise that Chris Marker is a devoted inhabitant of the virtual world Second Life. After all, one could call the playful French filmmaker and multimedia artist’s kitty—and alter ego—Guillaume-en-Egypt a trailblazing avatar (when asked for pictures of himself, he offers images of the cat instead). Now Marker, who rarely interacts with the public, will give a live guided tour of his Second Life archipelago, Ouvroir, and museum, in a special event at the Harvard Film Archive this Saturday, May 16. Of course, Marker will appear only in the form of his Second Life avatar, who will meet and converse with moderating avatars Haden Guest, the director of the archives, and Naomi Yang, of Exact Change Press (publishers of Marker’s important CD-ROM Immemory). At the end of the tour, he will also take questions from an audience avatar. The interaction will be screened live at the archive’s theater, and the event also includes projections of other Marker video and film pieces.

Read more »

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

With the new Star Trek out, it’s long past time (as it were) that we laid out the rules for would-be fictional time-travelers. (Spoiler: Spock travels to the past and is Kirk’s grandfather.) Not that we expect these rules to be obeyed; the dramatic demands of a work of fiction will always trump the desire to get things scientifically accurate, and Star Trek all by itself has foisted half a dozen mutually-inconsistent theories of time travel on us. But time travel isn’t magic; it may or may not be allowed by the laws of physics — we don’t know them well enough to be sure — but we do know enough to say that if time travel were possible, certain rules would have to be obeyed. And sometimes it’s more interesting to play by the rules. So if you wanted to create a fictional world involving travel through time, here are 10+1 rules by which you should try to play.

0. There are no paradoxes. This is the overarching rule, to which all other rules are subservient. It’s not a statement about physics; it’s simply a statement about logic. In the actual world, true paradoxes — events requiring decidable propositions to be simultaneously true and false — do not occur. Anything that looks like it would be a paradox if it happened indicates either that it won’t happen, or our understanding of the laws of nature is incomplete. Whatever laws of nature the builder of fictional worlds decides to abide by, they must not allow for true paradoxes.

Barry Schwabsky in The Nation:

“On Saturday, September 30, 1967,” as artist Robert Smithson was careful to specify, he embarked on a trip from New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal to his hometown. He was about to undertake what in his now-famous text he would call “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” (It's not clear whether the piece should be called an essay or a story; perhaps it's best to call it an artwork made of writing and pictures.) The monuments in question were things like concrete abutments for a highway under construction and a pumping derrick connected to a long pipe. As he stepped off the bus at his first monument, a bridge connecting Bergen and Passaic counties across the Passaic River, Smithson noticed that “Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an overexposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a series of detached 'stills' through my Instamatic into my eye. When I walked on the bridge, it was as though I was walking on an enormous photograph that was made of wood and steel, and underneath the river existed as an enormous movie film that showed nothing but a continuous blank.”

Writing in a tone derived in part from the deceptive objectivity of the French nouveau roman (he quotes from Mobile, Michel Butor's collage-travelogue of the United States) and in part from British new-wave science fiction (he entertains himself on the bus ride with the New York Times and Brian Aldiss's dystopian sci-fi novel Earthworks), Smithson evokes a vacant reality made only of “memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.” Critics fascinated with Smithson's apparently post-Duchampian idea that banal objects become art simply by being looked at a certain way–that “a great artist can make art by simply casting a glance,” as he would write a year later–have often overlooked the way Smithson framed his saturnine view of postindustrial culture through the eye of the camera.

The new nuke porn is hard-core, more graphic and full-frontal than the Cold War version of the genre. Instead of the anticipatory excitement (Fail-Safe, Strangelove) or the post-coital tristesse (On the Beach) of First Era nuke porn, we get real-time blast-burns and melting flesh. There was always an erotic component to apocalyptic literature—those end-of-the-world sects were notorious for their doom-fueled orgiastic behavior—but I always wondered why most nuke porn was about looking forward to the approaching act or looking back on its consummation but rarely about looking directly at it. Yes, Strangelove ended with a suite of stock footage of mushroom clouds exploding (to the strains of “We’ll Meet Again”), but while we saw the explosions there, we never confronted face to face—in the way film and fiction can—the actual experience of being inside a nuclear blast. (The most notable exception being, of course, the few seconds of—did it happen or was it averted?—nuking footage in Terminator 2. Remember the playground scene where the nuke turns the frolicking moms and kids into scary X-rays?* It’s a key transition between the old nuke porn and the new.) But now the genre has entered a new era—an era of looking “directly at it”—a fact that didn’t really register with me until I read Whitley Strieber’s airport novel, Critical Mass, in which we get the nuke porn equivalent of the “money shot.” You know Strieber, right? Mr. Airport Extreme. He’s the auteur of what some might see as another strange form of porn, those alien-abduction fantasies that feature anal probes. He was among the first to bring UFO abductions complete with probes into the airport “bookstore.”

more from Slate here.

Here
Octavio Paz

My steps along the street
resound
in another street
in which
I hear my steps
passing along this street
in which

Only the mist is real

from: Octavio Paz – The Collected Poems 1957-1987
carcanet Press Ltd. Manchester, Great Britain, 1988

Aqui
Octavio Paz

Mis pasos en esta calle
Resuenan
en otra calle
donde
oigo mis pasos
pasar en esta calle
donde

Sólo es real la niebla

She was the only daughter of a Swiss banker, and one of the richest and cleverest young women of her generation in Europe. She wrote among much else one celebrated novel— Corinne, or Italy (1807)—which invented a new heroine for her times, outsold even the works of Walter Scott, and has never been out of print since. She personally saved at least a dozen people from the French revolutionary guillotine. She reinvented Parisian millinery with her astonishing multicolored turbans. She dramatically dismissed Jane Austen as ” vulgaire.” She snubbed Napoleon at a reception. She inspired Byron’s famous chauvinist couplet, “Man’s love is of his life a thing apart,/’Tis woman’s whole existence.” And she once completely outtalked the poet Coleridge at a soirée in Mayfair. For these things alone she should be remembered. Though married to the handsome Swedish ambassador (or possibly because she was so married), she took numerous lovers, and had four children, the most brilliant of whom—a girl, Albertine—was certainly illegitimate. She had a running and highly personal vendetta with Bonaparte, who hated bluestockings and once leaned over and remarked leeringly on her plunging cleavage: “No doubt, Madame, you breast-fed your children.” He followed this up by censoring her books for being anti-French, actually pulping one of them in mid-printing (On Germany), and exiling her from France on at least three separate occasions between 1803 and 1812.

more from the NYRB here.

The murder of Julius Caesar was a messy business. As with all assassinations, it was easier for the conspirators to plan the first blow than to predict what would happen next – never mind to have an exit strategy in reserve, should things go wrong. At a meeting of the Senate on the Ides of March in 44 BC, Tillius Cimber, a backbencher, gave the cue for the attack by kneeling at Caesar’s feet and grabbing his toga. Then Casca struck with his dagger; or tried to. Clumsily missing the target, he gave Caesar the chance to stand up and defend himself by driving his pen (the only instrument he had to hand) into Casca’s arm. This lasted just a few seconds, for at least twenty reinforcements were standing by, weapons at the ready, and quickly managed to dispatch their victim. But they had no time to take careful aim, and several of the assassins found themselves wounded by the ancient equivalent of friendly fire. According to the earliest surviving account, by the Syrian historian Nicolaus of Damascus, Cassius lunged at Caesar, but ended up gashing Brutus in the hand; Minucius missed too, and struck his ally Rubrius in the thigh instead. “There must have been a lot of blood”, as T. P. Wiseman crisply remarks in Remembering the Roman People.

more from the TLS here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Cancer is a tough enemy. Against most diseases, the human immune system is a stalwart defender, equipped with a huge arsenal of molecular weapons to fight off bacteria, viruses, and all sorts of other harmful foreign invaders. But cancer flies under the radar: created by the body, it is camouflaged by familiar proteins the system has learned to view as harmless. The relatively new field of cancer immunotherapy seeks to resolve this quandary by retraining the body’s defenses to seek out and destroy cancer cells it would normally pass by. So far, the vaccines and therapies developed using this approach typically involve removing cells from a patient’s body, programming them externally, and then reinjecting them. At that point, the hope is that the cells will travel to the lymph nodes and activate tumor-fighting killer T-cells. “But there are limitations with that protocol,” says Omar Ali, a postdoctoral fellow and a principal collaborator with Mooney. “Specifically, when you inject the cells back into the patient, many of them—which you have spent so much time programming—will die.” Once trained outside their natural environment, Ali says, the cells have trouble readjusting to the body, leaving only 1 to 2 percent to mobilize cancer-fighting T-cells.

Mooney’s team has solved this problem by finding a way to deliver cancer therapy from within. Mooney had been working with biomaterials and implantable systems in his research for years, stimulating blood-vessel growth and bone regeneration using small subcutaneous disks: just the kind of device that might allow researchers to recruit immune cells and activate more efficient attacks on the cancer.

More here.

From Salon:

The cellphone grows more wondrous and indispensable to us every day. Talking is the least of it. We text and Tweet our heads off, send photos, watch TV shows, play video games. But in Japan, imperium of the future where all the above is old hat, the keitai (cellphone) has further spawned a wildly successful, populist fiction genre. Keitai shosetsu, the so-called cellphone novel, has been touted (in the pages of the New Yorker, among other places) and reviled (by Japanese literati) as the first narrative mode of the txt msg age — the herald of a written-word future bent by wireless telecom's powers.

I'm the first and only American author who's written for Japanese cellphones (and with literary intentions at that). A happy lesson in old-fashioned technique, it was a sobering one about our brave new cyber-world's eternal essential: interactivity. Most of the auteurs of keitai shosetsu are Japan's vast demographic of girls and 20-something young women, who thumb out ultra-lurid, mawkish teen romances on their cellphone keypads in scraps of manga-like dialogue, skimpy action, texting slang and emoji (emoticons). They post these skeletal pseudo-confessions in installments, under cute pseudonyms, on dedicated Web sites like Magic i-land and Wild Strawberry where they can be read for a low fee.

Astronomically popular (chiefly among millions of Japanese teen girls), “thumb novels” are much decried as trash for yahori (slow learners, i.e., half-literates). And over recent years this subculture has stormed Japanese commercial book publishing. In 2007 — keitai shosetsu's annus mirabilis –half the top 10 fiction bestsellers in the shrinking Japanese book market originated on cellphones. Overall list-topper “Love Sky,” by the self-styled “Mika,” has sold 2. 9 million copies in tandem with its sequel, which ranked third.

More here.

Patrick Harrison on Michael Hardt (via bookforum):

As the rest of the speakers greeted each other on stage with warm effusions and European pecks on the cheek, literary critic Michael Hardt, the sole American-born speaker at the London conference, stood apart from the crowd. With folded arms, he gazed out not just into but somehow beyond the audience of the packed lecture hall.

Hardt's behavior seemed to be a defensive performance of self-sufficiency, as if to pre-empt his inevitable failure to fit in with the rest of the “glittering array of Continental academic rockstars,” as Terry Eagleton put it, that had assembled that weekend for the conference titled “On the Idea of Communism.” Nearly the entire emerging canon of (mostly male) contemporary Continental philosophers—including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière, Eagleton, and Antonio Negri, Hardt's mentor and collaborator—as well as their translators and champions in the English-language academy and a few other European notables less well known outside the Continent joined Hardt at the conference. Hardt's reputation has always been doubled by a secret tendency to diminutivize him in relation to Negri—his more famous (or notorious), frequently jailed co-author on Empire and Multitude—and it was hard not to regard Hardt in this light when one saw him onstage next to the old masters. Yet he seemed even more out of place among the rest the other scholars who, Eagleton quipped, had “married in” to the elite circles of Continental philosophy, a group that included the two Badiou scholars—Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward—who joined Hardt in the first panel of the conference.

Ironically, what separated Hardt from the rest of the speakers at the conference was his distinctly American desire for everybody to get along.

Jeanette Winterson on Italo Calvino in the Times:

At the end of Italo Calvino's novella The Baron in the Trees, Cosimo, who travels only from tree to tree and never comes down from the world that he prefers to the world that presses its claims, finds himself near death. A host of noisome courtiers and curious peasants swarm under the canopy of the forest, waiting for him to submit to gravity's insistence. At the final moment, when all seems done and he must fall, an air balloon flies over the forest, trailing a rope. Guido makes one last leap. He catches the rope and disappears.

Calvino was a writer who preferred to disappear. He did not enjoy talking about himself, finding that the facts of life were a kind of Medusa's stare, as he puts it in his essay Lightness, published in 1985.

He used his fiction to escape himself, and the weight of the world. This was not by any means escapism; it was his answer to the eternal question: What is reality?

Calvino began as a political writer and journalist. He was born in San Remo in 1923 and published his first novel in 1947. The Path to the Nest of Spiders is socio-realism – the one and only book of that kind that he wrote – and the only work of his that he regretted. When a writer regrets something that he or she has written, if it is fiction, it is always, paradoxically, because the piece of work feels untrue.

Neil Malhotra and Yotam Margalit in Boston Review:

The media coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal made extensive reference to Madoff’s ethnic and religious background and his prominent role in the Jewish community. Because the scandal broke at a time of great public outcry against financial institutions, some, including Brad Greenberg in The Christian Science Monitor and Mark Seal in Vanity Fair, have reported on its potential to generate a wave of anti-Semitism.

This concern makes good sense. In complex situations such as the current financial crisis, where the vast majority of us lack the relevant expertise and information, biases and prejudices may play a significant role in shaping public attitudes. To evaluate just how large a role, we conducted a study (part of a larger survey of 2,768 American adults) in which we explored people’s responses to the economic collapse and tried to determine how anti-Semitic sentiments might relate to the ongoing financial crisis.

In order to assess explicit prejudice toward Jews, we directly asked respondents “How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?”

I’m just reproducing Andrew Sullivan’s post below. Takes two seconds to send a letter.

What can one say about the Philadelphia Inquirer’s decision to hire a war criminal whose legal work was so awful in government that the Justice Department Office Of Professional Responsibility had to conduct a deep and apparently damning investigation of it. Well: over to a columnist whose work is published on the same press:

While Yoo is a free man who is thus free to utter his detestable viewpoints on any public street corner, the Inquirer has no obligation to so loudly promote these ideas that are so far outside of the mainstream. People should write the Inquirer — [email protected] — or call the newspaper and tell them that torture advocates are not the kind of human beings who belong regularly on a newspaper editorial page, officially sanctioned. Journalists here in Philadelphia or elsewhere who wish to strategize on where to take this next should email me at [email protected]. As an American citizens, I am still reeling from the knowledge that our government tortured people in my name. As a journalist, the fact that my byline and John Yoo’s are now rolling off the same printing press is adding insult to injury.

more from The Daily Dish here.