From The New York Times:

ONE OF THE PERKS of being a psychologist is access to tools that allow you to carry out the injunction to know thyself. I have been tested for vocational interest (closest match: psychologist), intelligence (above average), personality (open, conscientious, agreeable, average in extraversion, not too neurotic) and political orientation (neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian). I have M.R.I. pictures of my brain (no obvious holes or bulges) and soon will undergo the ultimate test of marital love: my brain will be scanned while my wife’s name is subliminally flashed before my eyes.

Last fall I submitted to the latest high-tech way to bare your soul. I had my genome sequenced and am allowing it to be posted on the Internet, along with my medical history. The opportunity arose when the biologist George Church sought 10 volunteers to kick off his audacious Personal Genome Project. The P.G.P. has created a public database that will contain the genomes and traits of 100,000 people. Tapping the magic of crowd sourcing that gave us Wikipedia and Google rankings, the project seeks to engage geneticists in a worldwide effort to sift through the genetic and environmental predictors of medical, physical and behavioral traits.

More here.

Note the weird association of Osama bin Laden with post-modernists and Ralph Nader by Dalia Mogahed and Jeffrey Goldberg.

Mattias Hagberg interviews Mike Davis in Eurozine:

In Ireland, my favourite journalistic justification for this bloodbath came from my old mate Kevin Myers. “The death toll from Gaza is, of course, shocking, dreadful, unspeakable,” he mourned. “Though it does not compare with the death toll amongst Israelis if Hamas had its way.” Get it? The massacre in Gaza is justified because Hamas would have done the same if they could, even though they didn’t do it because they couldn’t. It took Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times’s resident philosopher-in-chief, to speak the unspeakable. “When does the mandate of victimhood expire?” he asked. “At what point does the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews cease to excuse the state of Israel from the demands of international law and of common humanity?” I had an interesting time giving the Tip O’Neill peace lecture in Derry when one of the audience asked, as did a member of the Trinity College Dublin Historical Society a day later, whether the Northern Ireland Good Friday peace agreement – or, indeed, any aspect of the recent Irish conflict – contained lessons for the Middle East. I suggested that local peace agreements didn’t travel well and that the idea advanced by John Hume (my host in Derry) – that it was all about compromise – didn’t work since the Israeli seizure of Arab land in the West Bank had more in common with the 17th-century Irish Catholic dispossession than sectarianism in Belfast. What I do suspect, however, is that the split and near civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority has a lot in common with the division between the Irish Free State and anti-treaty forces that led to the 1922-3 Irish civil war; that Hamas’s refusal to recognise Israel – and the enemies of Michael Collins who refused to recognise the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the border with Northern Ireland – are tragedies that have a lot in common, Israel now playing the role of Britain, urging the pro-treaty men (Mahmoud Abbas) to destroy the anti-treaty men (Hamas).

more from The Independent here.

///
…somewhere in the sands of the desert
a shape with lion body and the head of a man,
a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
is moving its slow thighs…
………………………………..W.B. Yeats

They Feed They Lion Grow
Philip Levine

Out of burlap sack, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion Grow.

Out of the gray hills
out of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion Grow.

Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
“Come home, Come home!” From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
They repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion Grow.

From the sweet glue of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
of the hams the thorax of caves,
From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels.
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion Grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
//

On a second reading of a poem that has wowed us, we might grow even more interested, but we start to sober up. For my own part, initial admiration for a single poem often tempts me into a vocabulary I would rather avoid. The Australian poet Stephen Edgar’s poem “Man on the Moon” can be found in his collection Other Summers, or—more quickly, and for free—in the selection devoted to his work in the Guest Poets section of my website, clivejames.com. With a single reservation, I think it is a perfect poem, although “perfect” is an adjective I would rather not be caught using. The word just doesn’t convey enough meaning to cover, or even approach, the integrity of the manufacture. I knew that already on a first reading. But on a second reading, I begin to know how I knew it:

Hardly a feature in the evening sky As yet—near the horizon the cold glow Of rose and mauve which, as you look on high, Deepens to Giotto’s dream of indigo.

Giotto is dreaming of indigo because he couldn’t get enough of it: in his time it was a pigment worth its weight in gold. Edgar is always good on facts like that. I could write a commentary picking up on such points, but it wouldn’t say why the poem is perfect, or almost so. The obvious conclusion is that I don’t need to say that. But I want to, because a task has been fudged if I don’t. There are plenty of poems full of solid moments, but the moments don’t hang together even by gravity. So why, in this case, do they cohere?

more from Poetry here.

There are still further opportunities for you to put some play into your phrasing. Press one part of speech into service as another, as Don DeLillo does in “She was always maybeing” (an adverb has been recruited for duty as a verb) and as Barry Hannah does in “Westy is colding off like the planet” (an adjective has been enlisted for verbified purpose as well). A variation is to take an intransitive verb (the sort of verb that can’t abide a direct object) and put it in motion as a transitive verb (whose very nature it is to enclasp a direct object). That is what Fiona Maazel is up to with the verb collide, which abandoned all transitive use ages ago, in her sentence “Often, at the close of a recovery meeting, as we make a circle and join hands, I’ll note the odds of these people finding each other in this group; our sundry pasts and principles; the entropy that collides addicts like so many molecules.” Or take some standard, overworked idiomatic phrasing—such as “It turned my stomach”—and transfigure it, as Barry Hannah does in “I saw the hospital in Hawaii. It turned my heart.” Or rescue an ordinary, overtasked verb from its usual drab business and find a fresh, bright, and startling context for it, as Don DeLillo manages with speaks in “You will hit traffic that speaks in quarter inches” and as Barry Hannah does with the almost always lackluster verb occurred in “… a single white wild blossom occurred under the forever stunted fig tree.…” You can also choose to prefer the unexpectable noun, as Diane Williams does with history in “We can come in out from our history to lie down” and as Sam Lipsyte does with squeaks in “Home, we drank a little wine, put on some of that sticky saxophone music we used to keep around to drown out the bitter squeaks in our hearts.” Or you can choose a variant of a common word, a variant that exists officially in unabridged dictionaries but has fallen out of usage—if, that is, you have reason enough for doing so.

more from The Believer here.

Last year, for the first time ever, computer and video game sales might have outstripped music and DVD sales combined, helped in large part by games like Guitar Hero: World Tour, Rock Band 2, Wii Music, Rock Revolution, Boogie Star, Pop Star Guitar and Ultimate Band. This has made some in the horny-handed “proper” musician community squeal like stuck pigs. Real rockers who can actually play guitar, like Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger, have complained that games like Guitar Hero are rubbish because they’re not real. And because hitting buttons on a Guitar Hero guitar is a lot easier than learning to play a real guitar. Which is, apparently, really hard. As American rocker you’ve never heard of (and boyfriend of Jennifer Aniston) John Mayer explains: “Guitar Hero was devised to bring the guitar-playing experience to the masses without them having to put anything into it … it makes it easy for untalented people to pretend they are good.” In other words “real” guitarists like Mayer want to keep rock stardom like a sort of medieval guild, where entrance is only granted to those willing to suffer the tedium, frustration and savagely blistered fingers of an arduous apprenticeship – years that could surely be better spent miming songs, dressing up in your mum’s clothes and practising some really cool moves in the mirror.

more from The Guardian here.

In September 2006, an excerpt of Susan Sontag’s diaries, edited by her son, David Rieff, was published in the New York Times magazine, and that night I went to a dinner party where a woman poet in her 50s exhaled a sigh of disgust. Sontag is shown in her 20s, cutting a swath through literary hedges in Paris and New York and reeling from heartbreaking affairs with women. The poet’s hands were balled into fists behind a wedge of cheesecake: “The point is to feed tabloid hunger — expose Sontag as a lesbian and mindlessly ambitious.” The poet was huffy because Sontag’s private life was being revealed at all and because the disclosures included striving and queerness. She was trying to protect Sontag from herself, which is what Sontag mostly tried to do by keeping buttoned up about her personal affairs. In her essays and fiction, she depicted sexual longing as an untamable force, trailing the twist and tang of bliss and self-destruction, but she did not write about how she lived in her body. She wrote a book about illness without discussing her own experience of cancer, and she meditated on homosexuality without speculating on how being gay had shaped her life. In veiling both the sexual body and the ill body, she generated something of an eros of concealment.

more from the LA Times here.

SUSANN COKAL in The New York Times:

The box, the simple box, may be the art form of the 21st century. With or without its sixth wall, it promises a mystery; when its contents (or lack thereof) are displayed, some deeper mystery often remains. Past masters like Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp have inspired new generations of artists to fill rectangular solids with an assortment of found objects. Depending on your taste and perspective, this is either a form of sculpture or a short step up from the elementary-school diorama. The box is thus the darling of both the Tate Modern and the community amateur show: the bricolage celebrates vision rather than craft, suggesting to some that art is effortless, to others that it’s inscrutable. Meaning seems either elusive or all too obvious.

Gabriel Collins, the narrator of Stacey D’Erasmo’s new novel, “The Sky Below,” imagines his life as a series of such containers. He begins with the boxes and wrapping paper from which his mother builds elaborate mini-cities during his New England childhood; graduates in adolescence to shoeboxes full of pilfered knickknacks, “the kinds of things that would never be missed, that were treasure only to me”; and later embarks on a career as an artist. The objects he thinks of pasting into his works are varied and often grotesque: shreds of balloons, a belt buckle, teeth, hair, watch gears, a bottle of his own mucus, “pop-up line drawings” of male organs and sketches of 9/11.

More here.

Naomi Klein in The Guardian:

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era”. The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause – even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for “the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions” and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. “The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves … This international backing must stop.”

More here.

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

…the U.S. (and the editors of the New York Times and Washington Post) insist that there is a sanity and rationality to sending one of the world’s most powerful armies into a giant refugee camp to rend the flesh and crush the bones of those who stand in its way — whether in defiance or by being unlucky enough to have been born of the wrong tribe and be huddling in the wrong place. By fighting its way to their citadel, they would have us believe, Israel can destroy Hamas and usher in a golden age of peace. Or, to borrow from the casual callousness of Condi Rice during the last such display of futile brutality, we are witnessing, again, the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Israel failed in 2006, just as in 2002 and 1982. This time, they tell us, will be different.

And then the horror unfolds, as it always does — the hundreds of civilians butchered as they cowered in what they were told were places of safety, mocking Israel’s torrent of self congratulation over its restraint and its brilliant intelligence — and the hopelessly out-gunned enemy manages to survive, as he does every time. And by surviving, grows stronger politically. No matter how many are killed, the leaders targeted by Israel’s military are endlessly regenerated in the fertile soil of grievance and resentment born of the circumstances Israel has created. Circumstances it has created, but which it, and its most fervent backers refuse to acknowledge, much less redress.

Arafat is dead and gone. So are Sheikh Yassin, and Rantissi. And Abbas al-Musawi, and Imad Mughniyeh. Israel’s ruthless efficiency at killing the leaders of Palestinian and Lebanese resistance groups is second to none, and yet, no matter who it kills, there are always thousands more, ready to declare, “I am Spartacus”. That’s because those who step up to lead these organizations are acting not out of personal ambition — leadership in Hamas is a death sentence. The endless stream of Palestinians willing to sacrifice themselves in the role, then, is a symptom of the condition of their people. And Israel’s leaders know this. Asked when running for Prime Minister a decade ago what he’d have done if he’d been born Palestinian, Ehud Barak — the man directing the current operation in Gaza — answered bluntly, “I’d have joined a terror organization.”

More here.

From the AFP:

The United Nations on Friday cited witnesses saying Israeli forces moved about 110 Palestinians into a house, told them to stay inside, and later shelled it repeatedly, killing about 30 people.

The Israeli army said it had no knowledge of such an incident but was investigating.

The UN report said that “according to several testimonies, on 4 January Israeli foot soldiers evacuated approximately 110 Palestinians into a single-residence house in Zeitun (half of whom were children) warning them to stay indoors. Twenty-four hours later, Israeli forces shelled the home repeatedly, killing approximately 30.”

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) called the events in the Gaza City neighbourhood “one of the gravest incidents since the beginning of operations” by Israeli forces in Gaza on December 27.

“Those who survived and were able walked two kilometres to Salah Ed Din road before being transported to hospital in civilian vehicles. Three children, the youngest of whom was five months old, died upon arrival at the hospital,” OCHA said.

Israeli military spokeswoman Avital Leibovich said: “From initial checking, we don't have knowledge of this incident. We started an inquiry but we still don't know about it.”

Rescuers from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society were only able to reach the area on Wednesday after waiting four days for Israel to allow them safe passage.

More here.

//
God's Acrostic
Jaqueline Osherow

What if the universe is God's acrostic?
He's sneaking bits of proverbs into seismic variations;
Abbreviating psalms in flecks of snow.
Try to read them, says a comet,

If you dare.
Fine print. What you've been waiting for.

Twisted in the DNA of marmosets:
Hermetic feedback to your tight-lipped prayer.
Examine indentations left by hailstones in the grass;

Unearth their parallel soliloquies;
Note, too, the shifting patterns in the shibboleths
Initiating each communication.
Verify them. Don't take my word.
Eavesdrop on the planets in the outer spheres; they may
Reverse the letters' previous direction.
Silence, as you might imagine, has no bearing here.
Episodes of stillness—however brief—must be

Interpreted as unheard
Sounds,

Gaps that, with any luck, you'll fill in later—
Or so you tell yourself, acknowledging
Delusion's primal status in this enterprise.
Still, that's no reason to slow down.

Abandonments are howling out around you:
Cast-off lamentations from the thwarted drops of rain
Reduced to vapor on their struggle down;
Observe, at the very least, their passing.
Sanctify them. Don't succumb
To anything less potent than a spelled-out
Invitation to rule a not yet formulated nebula.
Calm yourself. You'll hear it come.
//

When Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush met at the White House in June, they concluded that Hamas’s violent ousting of Fatah from Gaza – which brought down the Palestinian national unity government brokered by the Saudis in Mecca in March – had presented the world with a new ‘window of opportunity’.[*] (Never has a failed peace process enjoyed so many windows of opportunity.) Hamas’s isolation in Gaza, Olmert and Bush agreed, would allow them to grant generous concessions to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, giving him the credibility he needed with the Palestinian people in order to prevail over Hamas. Both Bush and Olmert have spoken endlessly of their commitment to a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but it is their determination to bring down Hamas rather than to build up a Palestinian state that animates their new-found enthusiasm for making Abbas look good. That is why their expectation that Hamas will be defeated is illusory.

more from a 2007 article in the LRB here.

2009 marks the bicentennial of Edgar Allan Poe, arguably the most famed and influential writer in American history. Not only does his work entirely limn the culture, but he also created no fewer than two genres of popular fiction — mystery and modern horror — almost single-handedly. Virtually anyone in the U.S. can recite his poetry (a few lines here and there, at least). His personal life and ambitions inform the clichés of the starving writer in his garret and that of the mad genius. And it’s nigh impossible for someone to graduate from an American high school without having read him. Poe was also a player of hoaxes, a plagiarist, had a substance abuse problem, and couldn’t keep a roof over his head. Poe was a proponent of slavery, the worst sort of would-be social climber, and married a 13-year-old girl in his cousin Virginia Clemm. None of this information is new, of course — these fun facts are probably the answers to a fill-in-the-blank quiz given each year in some sixth-grade classroom in Ohio. The problem is that Poe has been so completely taught that he is very rarely read with the eyes of a reader.

more from The Smart Set here.

From The Guardian:

Here's a book perfectly timed for the season of self-flagellation. The cover shows the face of a woman who has been gorging on chocolate, the shameful evidence trickling from her vampiric lips. It's an image calculated to make anyone who has over-indulged of late, in whatever way, commit to a regime of monkish abstinence. Enough of sex, drugs and profiteroles: now's the time for fasting and press-ups. And where better to start than with a sermon on the sins of the flesh?

Disappointingly, however, Paul Martin doesn't believe that pleasure need be bad for us. In fact, his book ends with a list of recommendations for the wily hedonist – ways to enjoy ourselves without feeling guilty about it. Far from condemning the pursuit of pleasure, Martin shows how unavoidable it is: encoded in our minds and genes. And rather than rail against the licentiousness of contemporary life, he commemorates the sensation-seekers of centuries past, whose excesses make our own seem tame in comparison. Though he doesn't deny the dangers of addiction, his account of drug use down the ages quietly defuses tabloid hysteria. Cannabis? Queen Victoria took it to relieve her period pains. Cocaine? Freud prescribed it to patients and used it himself for relief from migraines. Opium? The users range from Marcus Aurelius to Robert Louis Stevenson. Alcohol? Churchill routinely drank a bottle of champagne a day, whereas Hitler was teetotal – nuff said.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

It's often said that we now live in a quizzing age – something to do with all the information we're bombarded with and can't use in any other way. Yet for some of us, this isn't a new development. In my own childhood, quizzes figured so prominently that, while other boys dreamed of becoming train drivers, firemen or footballers, I hoped that one day I might get to say “Fingers on the buzzers, please” to people who were not members of my family (and who actually had buzzers).

The chance came in 1998 when I was asked to write and present Radio 4's literary quiz show, The Write Stuff. Many of the questions that follow are based on or inspired by the 11 series we've recorded since then – but none requires you to have heard, or heard of, the programme. All you need is some literary knowledge, or even just literary interest.

QUESTIONS

1 Which literary character's first words to whom are: “How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive?”

2 Who was the first British writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature – in 1907, if that helps?

3 What's the only book for children by James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming?

4 Who is the only person to have been both shortlisted for the Booker Prize and to have played a girlfriend of Ken Barlow's in Coronation Street?

5 What did Jane Austen's father do for a living?

More here.

Founding contributor and friend of 3QD, Marko Ahtisaari, in Joi Ito's Freesouls:

“Sometimes one must stop and sit by the roadside, and wait for the soul to catch up.” −African proverb

For me, and certainly for many many others, Joi Ito is the model of the intelligent, social traveler. Whenever we think of Joi, we wonder what interesting city he might be in today, what great people he must be sharing a meal with, or whose photographic soul he is freeing at this very moment. But in the end we know we can always follow his digital traces online, and find the answers.

Tokyo today, San Francisco tomorrow, Amsterdam next week. And now playing: the first verse of Airport City by Giant Robot, singing a scene of cosmopolitan jet speed:

“Career is alright thank you for asking
Short notice no time for packing
Shuttle to the terminal traveling light
Last on the plane timing is right”

Right now−seated as I am in business−lounge suburbia in the airport city of Heathrow, waiting for the flight home to finally board (not having quite the right timing à la Giant Robot)−right now seems a fitting time to reflect on the joy of travel, but also to imagine how much better it can get. In many ways, I want to celebrate the world that travel brings to me, as well as how happy I am to be going home.

More here. Also see “Dopplr appoints Marko Ahtisaari as CEO.”