Sheila Melvin reviews The Moon Opera by Bi Feiyu, translated by Howard Goldblatt, in The National:
As the spacecraft Apollo 11 hurtled toward the moon in July 1969, ground control made an unusual request to the three veteran astronauts aboard. It is recorded on the NASA transcript: “Houston: Among the large headlines concerning Apollo this morning there’s one asking that you watch for a lovely girl with a big rabbit. An ancient legend says a beautiful Chinese girl called Chang-o has been living there for 4,000 years. It seems she was banished to the moon because she stole the pill for immortality from her husband. You might also look for her companion, a large Chinese rabbit, who is easy to spot since he is only standing on his hind feet in the shade of a cinnamon tree. The name of the rabbit is not recorded.”
Lunar Module Pilot: “OK, we’ll keep a close eye for the bunny girl.”
Not long after this exchange the lunar module landed on the Sea of Tranquillity, Neil Armstrong uttered “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, and the jocular request was forgotten – except in the Chinese-speaking world, where Chang’e (as her name is now generally spelt) has been venerated and adored for millennia, especially by women.
While teaching English in Taiwan in the early 1990s, I was stunned when a passing reference to Armstrong’s moonwalk unleashed a deluge of scorn from a large class of telecommunications bureaucrats. Neil Armstrong was no hero, and he ought never dare show his face in Taiwan, my students – nearly all women – told me emphatically. When I asked why, the class responded in near unison: He didn’t find Chang’e!
While U.S. intelligence officials have spent more than seven years searching fruitlessly for Osama bin Laden, UCLA geographers say they have a good idea of where the terrorist leader was at the end of 2001 — and perhaps where he has been in the years since.
In a new study published online today by the MIT International Review, the geographers report that simple facts, publicly available satellite imagery and fundamental principles of geography place the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks against the U.S. in one of three buildings in the northwest Pakistan town of Parachinar, in the Kurram tribal region near the border with Afghanistan.
“If he's still alive, he honestly could be sitting there right now,” said Thomas W. Gillespie, the study's lead author and an associate professor of geography at UCLA. “It is still the safest tribal area and city in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of northwest Pakistan and one of the only tribal areas that the U.S. has not bombed with its unmanned Predators.”
Trust in financial matters and politics is not a local narrative, yet it has hardly anything common with the universal one. I might say that over the past twenty years the deficit of trust in capitalism and democracy has grown significantly and in parallel. What makes it more difficult to understand the source of this deficit of trust is that the causes of the financial crisis and the disenchantment with politics are not identical in old and new democracies. The same anti-capitalist or neo-liberal statements have a different meaning and completely different consequences in Paris and in Budapest. We have to grab these terms by the neck in all their formal identity, by means of their dictionary form so to speak, in order to see clearly the levels on which a fundamental link exists between different uses of language, as well as the different directions they take as a result of the differences in meaning, or the processes that are taking place mutually, with both the old and new democracies unknowingly generating problems because of mutual misunderstandings.
Laughter was always a favourite device of ancient monarchs and tyrants, as well as being a weapon used against them. The good king, of course, knew how to take a joke. The tolerance of the Emperor Augustus in the face of quips and banter of all sorts was still being celebrated four centuries after his death. One of the most famous one-liners of the ancient world, with an afterlife that stretches into the twentieth century (it gets retold, with a different cast of characters but the same punchline, both in Freud and in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea), was a joking insinuation about Augustus’ paternity. Spotting, so the story goes, a man from the provinces who looked much like himself, the Emperor asked if the man’s mother had ever worked in the palace. “No”, came the reply, “but my father did.” Augustus wisely did no more than grin and bear it. Tyrants, by contrast, did not take kindly to jokes at their own expense, even if they enjoyed laughing at their subjects. Sulla, the murderous dictator of the first century BC, was a well-known philogelos (“laughter-lover”), while schoolboy practical jokes were among the techniques of humiliation employed by the despot Elagabalus. He is said to have had fun, for example, seating his dinner guests on inflatable cushions, and then seeing them disappear under the table as the air was gradually let out.
The author of many novels, including the brilliant and disturbing Season of Migration to the North, is dead. In the BBC:
Anwar Hamed, the acclaimed author's former BBC Arabic Service colleague, says he bestrode the world of Arabic literature like a colossus.
“Literary critics of all schools agree that Tayeb Salih conquered the world just as Mustafa Said, the hero of his novel, The Season of Migration to the North, conquered the streets, bars and academic institutions of Europe.Yet he did not leave behind the stereotypical image of Sudan, his was a wondrous desert world haunted by mysteries, secrets and romantic tales.”
Salih's characters, immersed in local colour, were able to speak a language easily understood by his readers even those who could not get to grips with the rural Sudanese expressions he used.
In The Wedding of Zein and Dumat Wad Hamed, Salih conveys the atmosphere of a Sudanese village with such vitality that the characters seem like three dimensional people.
In the Season of Migration to the North, he deliberately focuses on the contradictions innate in the social and moral convictions held by his society.
In all his works, Salih's unique talent for building characters, weaving the background against which they live and revealing their social origins shines through the dialogue that reverberates with life, even when it is immersed in local details.
Dammit I'm mad. Evil is a deed as I live. God, am I reviled? I rise, my bed on a sun, I melt. To be not one man emanating is sad. I piss. Alas, it is so late. Who stops to help? Man, it is hot. I'm in it. I tell. I am not a devil. I level “Mad Dog”. Ah, say burning is, as a deified gulp, In my halo of a mired rum tin. I erase many men. Oh, to be man, a sin. Is evil in a clam? In a trap? No. It is open. On it I was stuck. Rats peed on hope. Elsewhere dips a web. Be still if I fill its ebb. Ew, a spider… eh? We sleep. Oh no! Deep, stark cuts saw it in one position. Part animal, can I live? Sin is a name. Both, one… my names are in it. Murder? I'm a fool. A hymn I plug, deified as a sign in ruby ash, A Goddam level I lived at. On mail let it in. I'm it. Oh, sit in ample hot spots. Oh wet! A loss it is alas (sip). I'd assign it a name. Name not one bottle minus an ode by me: “Sir, I deliver. I'm a dog” Evil is a deed as I live. Dammit I'm mad.
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
The convenience of the high trees! The air's bouyancy and the sun's ray Are of advantage to me; And the earths face upward for my inspection.
My feet are locked upon the rough bark. It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly – I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads –
The allotment of death. For the one path of my flight is direct Through the bones of the living. No arguments assert my right:
The sun is behind me. Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this.
The Emancipation Proclamation consists of two executive orders issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. The first one, issued September 22, 1862, declared the freedom of all slaves in any state of the Confederate States of America that did not return to Union control by January 1, 1863. The second order, issued January 1, 1863, named the specific states where it applied. The Emancipation Proclamation was attacked at the time as freeing only the slaves over which the Union had no power. This was an exaggeration: the Proclamation went into immediate effect in at least part of every CSA state except Tennessee and Texas, and brought freedom to thousands of slaves the day it went into effect. In addition, it committed the Union to ending slavery, which was a controversial decision even in the North. Lincoln issued the Executive Order by his authority as “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy” under Article II, section 2 of the United States Constitution. The proclamation did not free any slaves of the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, or Delaware. In West Virginia, only the slaves in Jefferson County, which was added to the state late in 1863, were freed under the Proclamation, all the other counties being exempted. The state of Tennessee was also exempted, as were some listed counties of Virginia and parishes of Louisiana already under Federal control.
However, in other Union-occupied areas of CSA states besides Tennessee, the Proclamation went into immediate effect and slaves were freed at once on January 1, 1863. This Union-occupied zone where freedom began at once included “areas in eastern North Carolina, the Mississippi Valley . . . the Tennessee Valley of northern Alabama, the Shenandoah Valley, a large region of Arkansas, and the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina” Although some counties of Union-occupied Virginia were exempted from the Proclamation, “the lower Shenandoah Valley, and the area around Alexandria” were not. Hearing of the Proclamation, more slaves quickly escaped to Union lines as the Army units moved South. As the Union armies conquered the Confederacy, thousands of slaves were freed each day until nearly all (approximately 4 million, according to the 1860 census) were freed by July 1865.
If you watch TV, read magazines or surf the Web, you have probably encountered advertisements urging you to exercise your mind. Various brain fitness programs encourage people to stay mentally limber by giving their brain a daily workout—doing everything from memorizing lists and solving puzzles to estimating the number of trees in Central Park. It sounds a bit gimmicky, but such programs may have a real basis in neurobiology. Recent work, albeit mostly in rats, indicates that learning enhances the survival of new neurons in the adult brain. And the more engaging and challenging the problem, the greater the number of neurons that stick around. These neurons are then presumably available to aid in situations that tax the mind. It seems, then, that a mental workout can buff up the brain, much as physical exercise builds up the body.
The findings may be particularly interesting to intellectual couch potatoes whose brains could benefit from a few cerebral sit-ups. More important, though, the results lend some support to the notion that people who are in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease or who have other forms of dementia might slow their cognitive decline by keeping their minds actively engaged.
It’s a New Neuron! In the 1990s scientists rocked the field of neurobiology with the startling news that the mature mammalian brain is capable of sprouting new neurons. Biologists had long believed that this talent for neurogenesis was reserved for young, developing minds and was lost with age. But in the early part of the decade Elizabeth Gould, then at the Rockefeller University, demonstrated that new cells arise in the adult brain—particularly in a region called the hippocampus, which is involved in learning and memory. Similar reports soon followed in species from mice to marmosets, and by 1998 neuroscientists in the U.S. and Sweden had shown that neurogenesis also occurs in humans [see “New Nerve Cells for the Adult Brain,” by Gerd Kempermann and Fred H. Gage; Scientific American, May 1999].
Europe's particle physics lab, Cern, is losing ground rapidly in the race to discover the elusive Higgs boson, or “God particle”, its US rival claims.
The particle, whose existence has been predicted by theoreticians, would help to explain why matter has mass.
Finding the Higgs is a major goal of Cern's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
But the US Fermilab says the odds of its Tevatron accelerator detecting the famed particle first are now 50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best.
Both machines hope to see evidence of the Higgs by colliding sub-atomic matter at very high speeds. If it exists, the Higgs should emerge from the debris.
The LHC has been out of action since last September when an accident damaged some of the magnets that make up its giant colliding ring.
Project leader Lyn Evans conceded the enforced downtime might cost the European lab one of the biggest prizes in physics.
More here. [Photo shows the control room of the CDF detector facility at the Tevatron.]
One way to appreciate the slowness of your perception is to compare it to the speed of mechanical devices. Take this incredible, sobering “anatomy of a crash,” as described in an Australian magazine and echoed on Tom Vanderbilt’s blog. With fine-grained temporal resolution, it analyzes what happens when a stationary Ford Falcon XT sedan is struck in the driver’s door by another vehicle traveling at 50 kilometers per hour:
0 milliseconds – An external object touches the driver’s door. 1 ms – The car’s door pressure sensor detects a pressure wave. 2 ms – An acceleration sensor in the C-pillar behind the rear door also detects a crash event. 2.5 ms – A sensor in the car’s centre detects crash vibrations. 5 ms – Car’s crash computer checks for insignificant crash events, such as a shopping trolley impact or incidental contact. It is still working out the severity of the crash. Door intrusion structure begins to absorb energy. 6.5 ms – Door pressure sensor registers peak pressures. 7 ms – Crash computer confirms a serious crash and calculates its actions. 8 ms – Computer sends a “fire” signal to side airbag. Meanwhile, B-pillar begins to crumple inwards and energy begins to transfer into cross-car load path beneath the occupant. 8.5 ms – Side airbag system fires. 15 ms – Roof begins to absorb part of the impact. Airbag bursts through seat foam and begins to fill. 17 ms – Cross-car load path and structure under rear seat reach maximum load. Airbag covers occupant’s chest and begins to push the shoulder away from impact zone. 20 ms – Door and B-pillar begin to push on front seat. Airbag begins to push occupant’s chest away from the impact. 27 ms – Impact velocity has halved from 50 km/h to 23.5 km/h. A “pusher block” in the seat moves occupant’s pelvis away from impact zone. Airbag starts controlled deflation. 30 ms – The Falcon has absorbed all crash energy. Airbag remains in place. For a brief moment, occupant experiences maximum force equal to 12 times the force of gravity. 45 ms – Occupant and airbag move together with deforming side structure. 50 ms – Crash computer unlocks car’s doors. Passenger safety cell begins to rebound, pushing doors away from occupant. 70 ms – Airbag continues to deflate. Occupant moves back towards middle of car. Engineers classify crash as “complete”. 150-300 ms – Occupant becomes aware of collision.
The last line is the zinger. Early studies by Benjamin Libet suggest that the last line should perhaps read as high as 500 ms, although others, such as Daniel Dennett, have correctly pointed out that it is impossible to measure the moment of onset of conscious experience, so the exact timing will never be known.
My former Ph.D. advisor David Z Albert, and Rivka Galchen, in Scientific American:
Our intuition, going back forever, is that to move, say, a rock, one has to touch that rock, or touch a stick that touches the rock, or give an order that travels via vibrations through the air to the ear of a man with a stick that can then push the rock—or some such sequence. This intuition, more generally, is that things can only directly affect other things that are right next to them. If A affects B without being right next to it, then the effect in question must be indirect—the effect in question must be something that gets transmitted by means of a chain of events in which each event brings about the next one directly, in a manner that smoothly spans the distance from A to B. Every time we think we can come up with an exception to this intuition—say, flipping a switch that turns on city street lights (but then we realize that this happens through wires) or listening to a BBC radio broadcast (but then we realize that radio waves propagate through the air)—it turns out that we have not, in fact, thought of an exception. Not, that is, in our everyday experience of the world.
We term this intuition “locality.”
Quantum mechanics has upended many an intuition, but none deeper than this one. And this particular upending carries with it a threat, as yet unresolved, to special relativity—a foundation stone of our 21st-century physics.
More here. [Photo shows David Albert in a rather typical expository moment.]
From the recovery.gov website which went live yesterday as the The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act went into effect:
Welcome to Recovery.gov
Recovery.gov is a website that lets you, the taxpayer, figure out where the money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. There are going to be a few different ways to search for information. The money is being distributed by Federal agencies, and soon you'll be able to see where it's going — to which states, to which congressional districts, even to which Federal contractors. As soon as we are able to, we'll display that information visually in maps, charts, and graphics.
On Our Way: Read the Bill
The President recently signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. Read the full bill here.
More here. And here's President Obama introducing the site:
We hardly ever see the moon any more so no wonder it's so beautiful when we look up suddenly and there it is gliding broken-faced over the bridges brilliantly coursing, soft, and a cool wind fans your hair over your forehead and your memories of Red Grooms' locomotive landscape I want some bourbon/you want some oranges/I love the leather jacket Norman gave me and the corduroy coat David gave you, it is more mysterious than spring, the El Greco heavens breaking open and then reassembling like lions in a vast tragic veldt that is far from our small selves and our temporally united passions in the cathedral of Januaries
everything is too comprehensible these are my delicate and caressing poems I suppose there will be more of those others to come, as in the past so many! but for now the moon is revealing itself like a pearl to my equally naked heart ///
Gamal Nkrumah looks at the American University of Cairo Press's ambitous plans to translate Egyptian and Arabic texts into English, and argues that, despite their best efforts, they are falling into bed with imperialism, in Al-Ahram (via signandsight):
We haven't mentioned latest star that AUC Press is enthusiastically promoting as heir to their beloved Mahfouz — Alaa Al-Aswany, author of the best-seller The Yacoubian Building and its sequel Chicago. Like Mahfouz, he is an irreverent social critic. Like Mahfouz he is more popular with Western readers than with his own compatriots.
The AUC Press might not intend to be a Trojan Horse for US imperialism. But nonetheless, neocolonialism inevitably seeps in to the its activities here in Egypt, as Sadat's widow's memoirs and the rather tawdry critique of contemporary Egypt mentioned above demonstrates. After all, who selects the so- called treasures of Egyptian culture to “export”? It is Americans and American-trained Egyptians, who invariably reflect what liberal Americans would like to see Egypt as, to see Egypt become, as the McDonalds and Hollywood culture flood Egypt and deluge Egypt's past? There is no separating culture, economics and politics, alas, despite the best of intentions of the albeit well-meaning and highly sympathetic AUC Press staff.
Says Daniel Pipes, of all people: “Naguib Mahfouz is one of those authors, like Norman Mailer or Salman Rushdie, whose biography and political views sometimes overshadow his fiction. Although Mahfouz fills a decidedly smaller stage than Mailer or Rushdie (the Arab- speaking world rather than the English-speaking one), he dominates it far more thoroughly than any novelist here.” But the so-called sages of Stockholm are notorious for dishing out their prizes, especially the literary one, for spurious political reasons, and the fact that Mahfouz, the first Arab to get one, was considered by the Islamists an apostate is no coincidence. The fact that Mahfouz is the jewel in the AUC's crown is also no coincidence. It's he who made them and they, in turn, who made him. The relationship is in an uncanny manner the mirror image of Egyptian-American relations in all their complexity.
As you’ve probably heard, there’s a new regime taking over on January 20. And however much appointments like Larry Summers and Robert Gates contradict the Obama brand’s principal selling point, “Change!” (about which LBO can only say, “We told you so!”), it must be admitted that the likely stimulus program looks half decent in both size and content. It’d be nice to see some social spending and redistribution too, but it’s no surprise that this gang isn’t proposing that. Infrastructure spending, green energy, and aid to state and local governments are all good things, and will have a salutary economic effect, too.
But there are some contradictions to consider, aside from personnel vs. campaign slogans. One is financing. Almost everyone assumes that the U.S. will have little trouble raising hundreds of billions for its bailout and stimulus schemes. What if it finds selling all those bonds a little rough? Could the U.S. be someday perceived as a credit risk like Italy, only much bigger? Say this forces interest rates up—what would this do to the private economy, finanical and real? This is not likely to happen, but it’s not at all impossible.
And then there are the contradictions that credit resolved for a while. Much of the restoration in corporate profitability from the early 1980s through the late 1990s—a trend that sagged in the early 2000s, then returned, though not as magnificently as before—came from squeezing labor harder—wage cutting, union busting, outsourcing, and the rest of the familiar story. All this constrained purchasing power in an economy that thrives on mass consumption. What wage incomes couldn’t support got a lift from borrowing—credit cards first, then mortgages. The credit outlet is now shut, and will be for quite a while, forcing consumption to depend on wage income, which is shrinking. Capital will want to squeeze labor harder to restore profitability, but consumption won’t have credit to help it out.
You could argue that this is exactly what the U.S. needs in orthodox terms: to invest more and consume less.
Slavery in the United States began soon after English colonists first settled Virginia in 1607 and lasted as a legal institution until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865. Before the widespread establishment of chattel slavery, much labor was organized under a system of bonded labor known as indentured servitude. This typically lasted for several years for white and black alike, and it was a means of using labor to pay the costs of transporting people to the colonies.[1] By the 18th century, court rulings established the racial basis of the American incarnation of slavery to apply chiefly to BlackAfricans and people of African descent, and occasionally to Native Americans. A 1705 Virginia law stated slavery would apply to those peoples from nations that were not Christian.[2] In part because of the success of tobacco as a cash crop in the Southern colonies, its labor-intensive character caused planters to import more slaves for labor by the end of the 17th century than did the northern colonies. The South had a significantly higher number and proportion of slaves in the population.[1] Religious differences contributed to this geographic disparity as well.
From 1654 until 1865, slavery for life was legal within the boundaries of much of the present United States.[3] Most slaves were black and were held by whites, although some Native Americans and free blacks also held slaves; there were a small number of white slaves as well. The majority of slaveholding was in the southern United States where most slaves were engaged in an efficient machine-like gang system of agriculture. According to the 1860 U.S. census, nearly four million slaves were held in a total population of just over 12 million in the 15 states in which slavery was legal.[4] Of all 8,289,782 free persons in the 15 slave states, 393,967 people (4.8%) held slaves, with the average number of slaves held by any single owner being 10.[4][5] The majority of slaves were held by planters, defined by historians as those who held 20 or more slaves.[6] Ninety-five percent of black people lived in the South, comprising one-third of the population there, as opposed to 2% of the population of the North.[7] The wealth of the United States in the first half of the 19th century was greatly enhanced by the labor of African Americans.
It was the first day of spring with gusts of a cold wind blowing strongly as I walked down Mariahilfer Strasse in Vienna. It so happened that I overheard the conversation of three youngsters walking along. They spoke in Serbian about an event where also some Bosniaks and Croats were present. What drew my attention was not their language per se, you hear plenty of it in the subway and the streets of Vienna nowadays. It was an expression one of them used. “I did not expect there to be so many people who speak our language,” he said. It was apparent to me that by “our language” he did not mean one particular language such as Serbian, Bosnian or Croatian. On the contrary, the point was that the young man said “our language” on purpose, i.e. instead of naming that language by its proper name which would have been the politically correct thing to do. This is because “our language” is usually the expression refugees and immigrants – or, for that matter, a mixed group of people from former Yugoslavia meeting abroad – use as the name for their different languages of communication.
Pakistani novelists writing in English – long overshadowed by literary giants from neighbouring India – are now winning attention and acclaim as their country sinks into violence and chaos. Tales of religious extremism, class divides, dictators, war and love have come from writers who grew up largely in Pakistan and now move easily between London, Karachi, New York and Lahore. Since the publication of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist two years ago, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a new wave of Pakistani fiction is earning critical acclaim at home and around the world.
Last year came Mohammad Hanif's first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes – a dark comedy about the Islamic fundamentalist rule of General Zia ul Haq in the 1980s – and Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil, which is set in modern Afghanistan. Two keenly anticipated works are due out in the UK in the coming weeks: Kamila Shamsie's fifth, and reputedly finest, novel, Burnt Shadows, and a collection of short stories by Daniyal Mueenuddin, who was compared with Chekhov when some of the tales were previously published in the New Yorker. “Some of us have been writing for many years but suddenly we've had four or five novels coming out together and that's created a buzz,” said Shamsie, whose latest work is an ambitious story that starts off in Second World War Japan and moves to post-9/11 Afghanistan. “Indian writing has been established for 25 years or more, since Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie's book, published in 1981). Pakistani writing is very much in its infancy.
As the spacecraft Apollo 11 hurtled toward the moon in July 1969, ground control made an unusual request to the three veteran astronauts aboard. It is recorded on the NASA transcript: “Houston: Among the large headlines concerning Apollo this morning there’s one asking that you watch for a lovely girl with a big rabbit. An ancient legend says a beautiful Chinese girl called Chang-o has been living there for 4,000 years. It seems she was banished to the moon because she stole the pill for immortality from her husband. You might also look for her companion, a large Chinese rabbit, who is easy to spot since he is only standing on his hind feet in the shade of a cinnamon tree. The name of the rabbit is not recorded.”
