Andrew Gelman in The Wichita Eagle:

[T]hough, Kansas has consistently voted Republican for more than 70 years, and a look at exit poll data shows that the richer you are in the state, the more likely you are to vote Republican. In 2004, George Bush received half the vote of low-income Kansans, but more than 80 percent of the vote of those in the state whose incomes were higher than $100,000.

And Kansas is far from unique. Over the past decades, rich voters have remained consistently more Republican than voters on the lower end of the income scale. At the national level, if poor people were a state, they would be “bluer” even than Massachusetts; if rich people were a state, they would be about as “red” as Alabama, Kansas, the Dakotas or Texas. Further data comes from the political contributions of top executives and the richest Americans, who favored Bush over John Kerry 3-to-1 in 2004.

The myth of rich Democrats and poor Republicans is sustained in part by the electoral map, which shows — for real — that Democrats are now winning in the rich states such as Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut. But winning rich states is not the same as winning rich voters.

We’ve been hearing for a while about the cultural divide between Wal-Mart Republicans and Starbucks Democrats. A more accurate description of voters distinguishes more subtly between rich and poor. Among upper-middle-class and rich voters, rich states go Democratic while poor states go Republican. But among lower-income voters, rich and poor states do not vote differently. The differences between “red states” and “blue states” are real, but these differences occur among rich voters, not poor voters.

What is going on? Why is it the rich, not the poor, who seem to be voting based on cultural factors?

With Michael Silverblatt:

Isabel Allende was born in Peru and raised in Chile. Her acclaimed first novel, The House of Spirits, was called “Nothing short of astonishing,” by the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the author of eight novels, most recently Inés of My Soul, mapping the early years of the conquest of the Americas through the experiences of Inés Suárez, a seamstress condemned to a life of toil, who flees Spain to seek adventure in the New World. Allende has also written a collection of stories, four memoirs, and a trilogy of children’s novels. Her most recent memoir, The Sum of Our Days, recalls the last 13 years of family life in the wake of her daughter’s tragic death. Allende uses feminist terms to describe her history of the California Gold Rush. Her writing has always been a stand against patriarchy, her characters the people marginalized by American history: women, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asians.

///
“The laws of the universe regarding love are as useless as
string theory in tying up loose ends, Dude.”
………………………………………..–Roshi B.

The Mathematician in Love
William John Macquorn Rankine

I.

A mathematician fell madly in love
With a lady, young, handsome, and charming:
By angles and ratios harmonic he strove
Her curves and proportions all faultless to prove.
As he scrawled hieroglyphics alarming.

II.

He measured with care, from the ends of a base,
The arcs which her features subtended:
Then he framed transcendental equations, to trace
The flowing outlines of her figure and face,
And thought the result very splendid.

III.

He studied (since music has charms for the fair)
The theory of fiddles and whistles, —
Then composed, by acoustic equations, an air,
Which, when ’twas performed, made the lady’s long hair
Stand on end, like a porcupine’s bristles.

IV.

The lady loved dancing: — he therefore applied,
To the polka and waltz, an equation;
But when to rotate on his axis he tried,
His centre of gravity swayed to one side,
And he fell, by the earth’s gravitation.

V.

No doubts of the fate of his suit made him pause,
For he proved, to his own satisfaction,
That the fair one returned his affection; — “because,
“As everyone knows, by mechanical laws,
“Re-action is equal to action.”

VI.

“Let x denote beauty, — y, manners well-bred, —
“z, Fortune, — (this last is essential), —
“Let L stand for love” — our philosopher said, —
“Then L is a function of x, y, and z,
“Of the kind which is known as potential.”

VII.

“Now integrate L with respect to d t,
“(t Standing for time and persuasion);
“Then, between proper limits, ’tis easy to see,
“The definite integral Marriage must be: —
“(A very concise demonstration).”

VIII.

Said he — “If the wandering course of the moon
“By Algebra can be predicted,
“The female affections must yield to it soon” —
— But the lady ran off with a dashing dragoon,
And left him amazed and afflicted.

Excellent new food and drink magazine. (full disclosure: it was started by my editor at the Smart Set, Jason Wilson and features the writing of my brilliant and lovely and desperately-tragically-wrong-about-way-the-books-should-be-arranged-in-the-apartment wife Stefany Anne Golberg).

The syphilitic dipsomaniac poet Paul Verlaine wrote a most wonderful description of decadence:

I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. It suggests the subtle thoughts of ultimate civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense pleasures. It throws off bursts of fire and the sparkle of precious stones. It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiators, the spring of wild beasts, the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capacity for sensation, as the tramp of an invading army sounds.

Don’t we all want our food to be like bursts of fire and panting gladiators? Proponents of meat-eating often hold decadence up as their banner. They imply that no one who really loved food, who loved life, would decline meat. This puts vegetarians on the defensive. Their bulwark is the claim that meat-eaters are selfish, or that vegetarian food needn’t be (maybe even shouldn’t be) decadent because it is morally superior. But just on the horizon is a vegetarianism all shimmering in purple and gold.

more from Shuffy’s Veg-O-Matic column here.

more from Table Matters here.

An uncompromising NKVD man named Utterly Inadvisabiladze, a brave Soviet spy Dementiy Dogsonov, who’s lost his eye trying to spy on the imperialists through the keyhole, an ideological communist Avdotia Niedoganina, brilliant academician Michurenko (student of Lysurin), and above all Stalin – as always superhumanly intelligent and inhumanly smiling. These are the main characters of a satirical piece by Stanisław Lem, which the author himself for half a century thought missing.

Lem, who gained worldwide recognition for his SF novels, wrote it in the late 1940s, at the height of Stalinism, when people were being imprisoned or even executed for far lesser trespasses. Twenty years later, in the 1960s, writer Janusz Szpotański received a very special literary prize for his unpublished musical satire The Silent and the Honkers – three years in prison.

more from Gazeta Wyborcza here.

The philosopher Bernard Williams once wrote a paper, “The Makropulos Case,” in which he argued that eternal life would be so tedious that no one could bear it. According to Williams, the constancy that defines an eternal self would entail an infinite desert of repetitive experiences, lest the self be so altered as to be emptied of any definition. That is why, in the play by Karel Capek from which Williams takes his title, the three-hundred-and-forty-two-year-old Elina Makropulos, having imbibed the elixir of eternal life since the age of forty-two, chooses to discontinue the regimen, and dies. Life needs death to constitute its meaning; death is the black period that orders the syntax of life.

In “Death with Interruptions” (translated, from the Portuguese, by Margaret Jull Costa; Harcourt; $24), José Saramago, a writer whose long, uninterrupted sentences are relative strangers to the period, has produced a novel that functions as a thought experiment in the Capek/Williams field. (His novel makes no explicit allusion to either.) At midnight on one New Year’s Eve, in a nameless, landlocked country of about ten million inhabitants, Death declares a truce with humanity, a self-interruption, so as to give people an idea of what it would be like to live forever.

more from The New Yorker here.

From The Telegraph:

They say that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the last person to have read everything. By the time he died there were too many books, they suggest, for any single brain to engage with. “They”, as usual, are wrong. There were already millions of books in Europe by the year 1500, just half a century after the first printed page flew from the first press. To read a million books in a lifetime you would have to read 40 a day for 70 years. I couldn’t even smoke half that many cigarettes for half as long before giving up and it takes a lot longer to read a book than to smoke a cigarette, let me tell you.

Philosophers, wits, novelists, cooks, poets, essayists, herbalists, mathematicians, builders, poets and divines had poured out more thoughts in that first 50 years than had been committed to paper or vellum in the previous thousand. And the rate only continued to increase as it approached this century’s dizzyingly insane levels of oversupply. With so much flowing from so many different human brains, who can be bothered to read it? Not I, sir and madam, not I. It’s all I can do to peruse the side of a packet of breakfast cereal without distraction from radio, television or phone. I have no doubt you are in the same case. You would dearly like to suck intellectual and metaphysical juice from the fruity flesh of the world’s best thinkers and writers but the treetops are all out of reach and it would be too much of a fag to go and fetch a ladder. If only someone would pick, pulp and squeeze that fruit for you.

Your wish has been answered. There has never been a collection like Advanced Banter. Look in vain for the obvious, the banal and the platitudinous. On every page you will marvel at “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed”.

A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.
LANA TURNER

Biologically speaking, if something bites you, it’s more likely to be female.
DESMOND MORRIS

A woman is like a tea bag. It’s only when she’s in hot water that you realise how strong she is.
NANCY REAGAN Although sometimes also attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt.

A man can sleep around, but if a woman makes 19 or 20 mistakes she’s a tramp.
JOAN RIVERS

More here.

Mr Kundera, a recluse for decades, insists that he had no involvement in the affair and is baffled by the document. Communist-era records are not wholly trustworthy. But a statement from the Czech archives says it is not a fake; the incident (if it happened) could help explain why Mr Kundera, then in trouble with the authorities, was allowed to stay at university even though he had been expelled from the Communist Party.

True or not, the story echoes themes of guilt, betrayal and self-interest found in Mr Kundera’s own work, such as “unbearable lightness” (dodged but burdensome responsibility). In “The Owner of the Keys”, a play published in 1962, the hero kills a witness who sees him sheltering a former lover from the Gestapo.

As Mr Kundera himself has written so eloquently, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Under totalitarianism, fairy tales good and bad often trumped truth. Some heroes of the Prague Spring in 1968 had been enthusiastic backers of the Stalinist regime’s murderous purges after the communist putsch of 1948.

more from The Economist here.

more from Big Think here.

Martin Kippenberger seems to have been a bit of an asshole. I’m not making a judgment, just an observation. Some of my best friends are assholes. I never actually met Kippenberger during his fabled L.A. sojourns in the early ’90s, but, given his epic drinking and insatiable anti-authoritarianism, we probably wouldn’t have found much to argue about. And Kippenberger’s assholism is no secret — in fact, it was central to his oeuvre, as well as being the reason his work hasn’t received as much attention as it merits. When you do stuff like buy a gray monochrome painting by one of your former art heroes, screw legs into its stretcher bars and display it as a coffee table — as Kippenberger did with a Gerhard Richter in 1987’s Modell Interconti — feelings are going to get hurt.

more from the LA Weekly here.

///
Alexandria, 641 A.D.
Jorge Luis Borges

Since the first Adam who beheld the night
And the day and the shape of his own hand,
Men have made up stories and have fixed
In stone, in metal, or on parchment
Whatever the world includes or dreams create.
Here is the fruit of their labor: the Library.
They say the wealth of volumes it contains
Outnumbers the stars or the grains
Of sand in the desert.  The man
Who tried to read them all would lose
His mind and the use of his reckless eyes.
Here the great memory of the centuries
That were, the swords and the heroes,
The concise symbols of algebra,
The knowledge that fathoms the planets
Which govern destiny, the powers
Of herbs and talismanic carvings,
The verse in which love’s caress endures,
The science that deciphers the solitary
Labyrinth of God, theology,
Alchemy which seeks to turn clay into gold
And all the symbols of idolatry.
The faithless say that if it were to burn,
History would burn with it.  They are wrong.
Unceasing human work gave birth to this
Infinity of books.  If of them all
Not even one remained, man would again
Beget each page and every line,
Each work and every love of Hercules,
And every teaching of every manuscript.
In the first century of the Muslim era,
I, that Omar who subdued the Persians
and who imposes Islam on the Earth,
Order my soldiers to destroy
By fire the abundant Library,
Which will not perish.  All praise is due
To God who never sleeps and to Muhammad,
     His Apostle.

Translated by Stephen Kessler
///

From The New York Times:

The wild, delirious ride that architecture has been on for the last decade looks as if it’s finally coming to an end. And after a visit to the Chanel Pavilion that opened Monday in Central Park, you may think it hasn’t come soon enough. Designed to display artworks that were inspired by Chanel’s 2.55, a quilted chain-strap handbag, the pavilion certainly oozes glamour. Its mysterious nautiluslike form, which can be easily dismantled and shipped to the next city on its global tour, reflects the keen architectural intelligence we have come to expect from its creator, Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born architect who lives in London.

Yet if devoting so much intellectual effort to such a dubious undertaking might have seemed indulgent a year ago, today it looks delusional. It’s not just that New York and much of the rest of the world are preoccupied by economic turmoil and a recession, although the timing could hardly be worse. It’s that the pavilion sets out to drape an aura of refinement over a cynical marketing gimmick. Surveying its self-important exhibits, you can’t help but hope that the era of exploiting the so-called intersection of architecture, art and fashion is finally over.

The pavilion, made of hundreds of molded fiberglass panels mounted on a skeletal steel frame, was first shown in Hong Kong in February. From there it was packed up in 55 sea containers and shipped to Tokyo, closing there in July and heading to New York, where it will be on view through Nov. 9. Chanel is paying a $400,000 fee to rent space in the park and has made a gift of an undisclosed amount to the Central Park Conservancy as part of the deal.

More here. (Note: This is for my nephew Jaffer).

From The Guardian:

Katie Price, eat your heart out. The real celebrity of last week’s Frankfurt Book fair was the Nobel laureate, Günter Grass. He was doing the rounds last week to talk about his new book, Die Box, another voyage into autobiography following 2006’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion). And the 81-year-old author (October 16 was his birthday) was swamped, buried in the attention. Photographers swarmed, fans were tearful to have met him, his publishers, gathered from around the world, were starstruck. Cosily dressed in a brown corduroy suit, nattily matched with a brown jumper, Grass took it all in his stride, happy to fit in a 10-minute chat if he could do it while puffing on his pipe. We headed outside so he could smoke; by the time we made it out of the hall, I had been elbowed and shoved aside by the human train which followed him all over the fair. He chuckled and found a space in which to conduct the interview, done under the eyes of a circle of fans, a couple of ready-to-pounce photographers and his publicist, who helped out when he couldn’t quite express what he was trying to say in his extremely impressive English.

He was good-natured about the attention, but relieved it was almost over. “I only come when I have a reason, and I’m only here for two days, which is enough.” His reason was the recent publication of Die Box, out in August in Germany but not due in English until at least the end of next year. In it Grass takes up the story of his life from where he left it at the end of Peeling the Onion, beginning with the publication of The Tin Drum at the age of 31, which catapulted him to the forefront of European fiction.

More here.

Johann Hari in Slate:

Every day, you handle the deadliest substance on earth. It is a weapon of mass destruction festering beneath your fingernails. In the past 10 years, it has killed more people than all the wars since Adolf Hitler rolled into one; in the next four hours, it will kill the equivalent of two jumbo jets full of kids. It is not anthrax or plutonium or uranium. Its name is shit—and we are in the middle of a shit storm. In the West, our ways of discreetly whisking this weapon away are in danger of breaking down, and one-quarter of humanity hasn’t ever used a functioning toilet yet.

The story of civilization has been the story of separating you from your waste. British investigative journalist Rose George’s stunning—and nauseating—new book opens by explaining that a single gram of feces can contain “ten million viruses, one million bacteria, one thousand parasite cysts, and one hundred worm eggs.” Accidentally ingesting this cocktail causes 80 percent of all the sickness on earth.

More here.

Michael M. Hughes in AlterNet:

The space resembles a clean, warm, but decidedly offbeat living room. The lighting is spare and soft, emanating from two lamps. A bookshelf holds a variety of picture books and well-known spiritual and psychological classics like Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Above the books sits a wooden sculpture of Psilocybe mushrooms. Behind the couch are a Mesoamerican mushroom stone replica and a statue of a serene, seated Buddha. An eye-popping abstract expressionist painting hangs on the wall, an explosion of color and intersecting lines.

This isn’t a metaphysical retreat center in San Francisco, or the Manhattan office of a New Age therapist-cum-shaman. Lundahl’s first psychedelic experience is taking place in the heart of the Behavioral Biology Research Center building at the Johns Hopkins Bayview campus in Southeast Baltimore, in a room affectionately referred to by both the scientists and the volunteers as the “psilocybin room.” She’s taking part in the first study of its kind since the early ’70s — a rigorous, scientific attempt to determine if drugs like psilocybin and LSD, demonized and driven underground for more than three decades, can facilitate life-changing, transformative mystical experiences.

More here.

Rama Lakshmi in the Washington Post:

In a training session at a suburban call center, groups of fresh-faced Indian recruits jettison their Indian names and thick accents and practice speaking English just like the Americans do. They have hesitant conversations with imaginary American customers who complain angrily about their broken appliance or computer glitch.

The instructor writes “35 = 10” on the board, as though he is gifting the recruits with a magic mantra.

“A 35-year-old American’s brain and IQ is the same as a 10-year-old Indian’s,” he explains, and urges the agents to be patient with the callers.

That is a scene from “Hello,” the first Bollywood movie about the distorted and dual lives of India’s 2 million call-center workers. When it debuted this month, many in the audience cheered and laughed at such scenes, which pandered to the reigning stereotypes about those on both ends of the transcontinental, toll-free helpline — the dumb American customer and the smart, but fake, Indian call-center agent.

More here.

Pedro Meyer. Plantation El Centro. California. 1987-1995.

More on this master Mexican photographer here, here, and here.

The T2F gallery in Karachi has an upcoming show of Pedro Meyer’s Heresies Project.