Melissa Del Bosque in The Texas Observer:

That’s when he heard the yowling.

It was a high-pitched wail, like infants crying, coming from inside the Cherokee. Garcia peered inside the blue crates. There were no bundles of cocaine, no kilos of marijuana. Instead, he saw six tiny tiger cubs peering back at him. It turned out they were endangered Bengal tiger cubs (four white and two orange) bound for a private animal dealer in Mexico.

Garcia could do little. The tiger smugglers hadn’t committed a state crime. You might think it’s illegal to buy or sell an endangered tiger cub in Texas, but it isn’t. For $500, you can buy an orange Bengal tiger and tie it up in your yard, no questions asked (a white tiger will cost you $5,000). It’s all perfectly legal in Texas.

More here.

///

A Nostlagist’s Map of America
Agha Shahid Ali.

The trees were soon hushed in the resonance

of darkest emerald as we rushed by

on 322, that route that took us from

the dead center of Pennsylvania.
………………

(a stone marks it) to a suburb ten miles

from Philadelphia. “A hummingbird”,

I said, after a sharp turn, then pointed

to the wheel, still revolving in your hand.
………………

I gave Emily Dickinson to you then,

line after line, complete from heart. The signs

on Schuylkill Expressway fell neat behind us.

I went further: “Let’s pretend your city
………………

is Evanescence – There has to be one –

in Pennsylvania – And that some day –

the Bird will carry – my letters – to you –

from Tunis – or Casablanca – the mail
………………

an easy night’s ride – from North Africa.”

I’m making this up, I know, but since you

were there, none of it’s a lie. How did I

go on? “Wings will rush by when the exit
………………

to Evanescence is barely a mile?”

the sky was dark teal, the moon was rising.

“It always rains on this route”, I went on,

“which takes you back, back to Evanescence,
………………

your boyhood town”. You said this was summer,

this final end of school, this coming home

to Philadelphia, WMMR

as soon as you could catch it. What song first
………………

came on? It must have been a disco hit,

one whose singer no one recalls. It’s six,

perhaps seven years since then, since you last

wrote. And yesterday, when you phoned, I said,
………………

“I knew you’d call,” even before you could

say who you were. “I am in Irvine now

with my lover, just an hour from Tuscon

and the flights are cheap.” “Then we’ll meet often.”
………………

For a moment you were silent, and then,

“Shahid, I’m dying”. I kept speaking to you

after I hung up, my voice the quickest

mail, a cracked disc with many endings,
………………

each false: One: “I live in Evanescence

(I had to build it, for America

was without one). All is safe here with me.

come to my street, disguised in the climate
………………

of Southern California. Surprise

me when I open the door. Unload skies

of rain from distance drenched arms.” Or this:

“Here in Evanescence (which I found – though
…………………………

not in Pennsylvania – after I last

wrote), the eavesdropping willows write brief notes

on grass, then hide them in shadows of trunks.

I’d love to see you. Come as you are.” And
…………………………

this, the least false: “You said each month you need

new blood. Please forgive me, Phil, but I thought

of your pain as a formal feeling, one

useful for the letting go, your transfusions
…………………………

mere wings to me, the push of numerous

hummingbirds, souveniers of Evanescence

seen disappearing down a route of veins

in an electric rush of Cochineal.”

///

From The National Geographic:

Put it this way: The universe is a tough nut to crack.

Go back a little more than a century to the late 1800s, and look at the field of physics: a mature science, and rather complacent. There were those who believed there wasn’t much more to do than smooth out some rough edges in nature’s plan. There was a sensible order to things, a clockwork universe governed by Newtonian forces, with atoms as the foundation of matter. Atoms were indivisible by definition—the word comes from the Greek for “uncuttable.”

But then strange things started popping up in laboratories: x-rays, gamma rays, a mysterious phenomenon called radioactivity. Physicist J. J. Thomson discovered the electron. Atoms were not indivisible after all, but had constituents. Was it, as Thomson believed, a pudding, with electrons embedded like raisins? No. In 1911 physicist Ernest Rutherford announced that atoms are mostly empty space, their mass concentrated in a tiny nucleus orbited by electrons.

Physics underwent one revolution after another. Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905) begat the general theory of relativity (1915), and suddenly even such reliable concepts as absolute space and absolute time had been discarded in favor of a mind-boggling space-time fabric in which two events can never be said to be simultaneous. Matter bends space; space directs how matter moves. Light is both a particle and a wave. Energy and mass are inter- changeable. Reality is probabilistic and not deterministic: Einstein didn’t believe that God plays dice with the universe, but that became the scientific orthodoxy.

More here.

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

Renée Michel is the dumpy, nondescript, 54-year-old concierge of a small and exclusive Paris apartment building. Its handful of tenants include a celebrated restaurant critic, high government officials and members of the old nobility. Every day these residents pass by the loge of Madame Michel and, unless they want something from her, scarcely notice that she is alive. As it happens, Renée Michel prefers it that way. There is far more to her than meets the eye.

Paloma Josse also lives in the building. Acutely intelligent, introspective and philosophical, this 12-year-old views the world as absurd and records her observations about it in her journal. She despises her coddled existence, her older sister Colombe (who is studying at the École normale supérieure), and her well-to-do parents, especially her plant-obsessed mother. After careful consideration of what life is like, Paloma has secretly decided to kill herself on her 13th birthday.

These two characters provide the double narrative of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and you will — this is going to sound corny — fall in love with both.

More here.

Via Sean Carroll, in the LA Times:

David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 tome “Infinite Jest,” was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the Claremont Police Department, said Wallace’s wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find her husband had hanged himself.

Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in such books as “Girl with Curious Hair” and “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.” In 1997, he received a MacArthur “genius” grant.

Geoff Brumfiel in News at Nature:

Physicists rejoiced this week at the successful test of their massive new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva, Switzerland. But some 450 kilometres south-east — and making a lot less of a hullabaloo about things — another major physics experiment is working to recover from a debilitating accident.

The Virgo gravity-wave interferometer, an €80 million (US$114 million) experiment located outside of Pisa, Italy, has been incapacitated by a vacuum failure for most of the summer, and is expected to stay out of commission for a month or two to come. Much of the lost time, though, would not have been used for observations anyway; downtime was already scheduled to allow an upgrade of the machine, and that work has gone on in parallel with the necessary repairs. “We were lucky because of the timing,” says Francesco Fidecaro, Virgo’s spokesperson and a physicist at the University of Pisa.

Virgo is one of a handful of detectors worldwide searching for gravity waves, vibrations in the fabric of space-time created by the motion of extremely massive objects such as black holes. The L-shaped detector splits a laser beam in two and sends the parts down each of its three-kilometre arms. At the end of the two arms, the beams are reflected back into the central tower. After several trips down the arms and back, the beams are recombined, creating an interference pattern of light and dark lines that is extremely sensitive to the lengths of the arms.

Have we become, in some ways, even less tolerant? Margot Canaday in The Nation:

In Dishonorable Passions, William Eskridge offers the first comprehensive history of sodomy law in America. Eskridge is a historian and a law professor at Yale who also wrote a brief that was cited repeatedly in Kennedy’s opinion, and the energy in the book barrels toward Lawrence. It’s hard, really, to imagine how it could be otherwise, especially as the Lawrence decision provides Eskridge with a gay civil rights story that has a beginning and an end (such stories being fewer and farther between than you might realize). In writing from the vantage point of Lawrence and gay civil rights, Eskridge treats sodomy in a way that mirrors our culture’s treatment of sodomy more generally. Both make it fundamentally about homosexuality. But sodomy, as Eskridge told the Court–and also tells readers–technically isn’t about homosexuality at all. Rather, it’s about sex without procreative possibility (which can be hetero as well as homo sex). Because sodomy has come to be seen as emblematic of homosexuality, however, much of the career of sodomy law in modern America has been a command performance as something other than what it really is. And that is what allowed historians–called upon to show that policing homosexual behavior was not, in fact, the time-honored tradition conservatives claimed it to be–to assume center stage in Lawrence. All those years in the archives: who knew they would matter so much?

Take the scholarship on the colonial era, with which Eskridge begins his account. During the 1600s, the American colonies adopted sodomy (or “buggery”) laws that prohibited bestiality as well as anal sex between either a man and a woman or between two men. (New Haven Colony was rare in including sexual acts between women as part of its sodomy prohibition.) Punishment–which included death–was draconian, but the laws were very rarely enforced. Historians know of less than ten executions for sodomy throughout the seventeenth century. Of those few, almost all involved assault or sex with animals. These laws were not directed in any particular way toward homosexuality. Indeed, they couldn’t be–the idea that there was a type of person who was a homosexual didn’t even emerge until the late nineteenth century, a result of urbanization, industrialization and the development of medical/sexological discourse. But while these laws weren’t about discouraging homosexuality per se, their architects sought to regulate sexual behavior more generally by steering sexuality toward procreative marriage; protecting women, children and weaker men from assault; and maintaining public order and decency.

Eighteenth-century Americans were even less likely to police sodomy than their seventeenth-century forebears.

Hughes in the Guardian:

By now, with the enormous hype that has been spun around it, there probably isn’t an earthworm between John O’Groats and Land’s End that hasn’t heard about the auction of Damien Hirst’s work at Sotheby’s on Monday and Tuesday – the special character of the event being that the artist is offering the work directly for sale, not through a dealer. This, of course, is persiflage. Christie’s and Sotheby’s are now scarcely distinguishable from private dealers anyway: they in effect manage and represent living artists, and the Hirst auction is merely another step in cutting gallery dealers out of the loop.

If there is anything special about this event, it lies in the extreme disproportion between Hirst’s expected prices and his actual talent. Hirst is basically a pirate, and his skill is shown by the way in which he has managed to bluff so many art-related people, from museum personnel such as Tate’s Nicholas Serota to billionaires in the New York real-estate trade, into giving credence to his originality and the importance of his “ideas”. This skill at manipulation is his real success as an artist. He has manoeuvred himself into the sweet spot where wannabe collectors, no matter how dumb (indeed, the dumber the better), feel somehow ignorable without a Hirst or two.

Actually, the presence of a Hirst in a collection is a sure sign of dullness of taste. What serious person could want those collages of dead butterflies, which are nothing more than replays of Victorian decor? What is there to those empty spin paintings, enlarged versions of the pseudo-art made in funfairs? Who can look for long at his silly sub-Bridget Riley spot paintings, or at the pointless imitations of drug bottles on pharmacy shelves? No wonder so many business big-shots go for Hirst: his work is both simple-minded and sensationalist, just the ticket for newbie collectors who are, to put it mildly, connoisseurship-challenged and resonance-free.

Alex Cooley in EurasiaNet:

At a recent special panel on the Georgian crisis convened at the Bled Strategic Forum, European foreign ministers and representatives of international organizations lamented that they had failed to adequately engage Georgia’s unresolved or “frozen conflicts.” Since the early 1990s, the international community effectively ignored the disputes between Tbilisi and Abkhazia and South Ossetia, allowing tensions to fester until in early August the disputes escalated into a six-day war between Georgia and Russia. Russia’s subsequent recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia independence has legally challenged Georgia’s very territorial integrity and sovereign boundaries.

While much of the West struggles to enforce a precarious ceasefire and formulate a common response to Russia’s actions, it is worth considering the exact sovereign forms that might govern Georgia in the near future. Three options – indefinite occupation, formal partition or international administration – are possible; though all three pose risks, the internationalization option, the least discussed thus far, may offer the best blueprint for stabilizing the region and eventually resolving status issues.

Under the first and most likely scenario, Abkhazia and South Ossetia will remain recognized by Russia and a handful of other countries, such as Nicaragua, that wish to curry favor with Moscow. We could refer to this as the “Cyprus model.” [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. Under this arrangement, Russia ensures the dependency of the breakaway territories by stationing a permanent military contingent and keeping the de facto governments isolated from Georgia. In the case of Cyprus, the Turkish military intervention of 1974 was followed by a relatively stable three decades, during which a sizable contingent of Turkish troops was stationed in the self-proclaimed Turkish Northern Republic of Cyprus (TRNC). During this time the sequestered TRNC languished, while the Greek-Cypriot part of the island developed rapidly, culminating in its admission to the European Union 30 years later.

One entrance to the Other Museum stands behind the massive skeleton of the giant ground sloth. Another is opposite the crocodiles. For the building that houses the public galleries of London’s Natural History Museum also houses an entirely different museum — a working museum, where the aim isn’t public edification or entertainment but the care, cataloging and description of millions of different life-forms, both extinct and extant, as well as thousands of different minerals. An inventory of the planet.

The offices, laboratories, libraries and vast storerooms of the Other Museum are wrapped around the public galleries like ivy on a fence. The storerooms house about 80 million specimens, from whale skeletons and jars of mites to stacks of pressed flowers and meteorites. The offices house a collection of — judging by Richard Fortey’s entertaining memoir, “Dry Storeroom No. 1” — extremely eccentric scholars.

more from the NY Times here.

From The Telegraph:

“And the Taj Mahal. How was the Taj Mahal?” Amanda asks Elyot at a particularly sticky moment in Noël Coward’s Private Lives. “Unbelievable,” Elyot replies, “a sort of dream.” Ever since the Emperor Shah Jahan’s tomb for his favourite wife, Mumtaz, was completed in Agra around 1648, people have tried and failed to describe it without resorting to cliché. More often than not they have fallen back on poetic evocations, such as Tagore’s “teardrop on the cheek of time”, while Edward Lear gave up entirely, suggesting that “descriptions of this wonderfully lovely place are simply silly, as no words can describe it”.

The Taj Mahal is nevertheless one of the most instantly recognisable buildings in the world, endlessly painted and photographed, and currently welcoming an average of 8,000 visitors a day. Giles Tillotson’s sprightly account of its structure and history, the stories that have accumulated around it and the impression it has made on tourists down the centuries is a welcome addition to Profile’s “Wonders of the World” series. These books are not only architectural monographs; they are equally concerned with what buildings mean, and few structures have meant more different things to people than the Taj Mahal. It is traditionally seen as a symbol of love, built by a grieving emperor who spent the last eight years of his life gazing on his wife’s tomb from a balcony of the palace where he had been imprisoned by his usurping son.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Now, in the tradition of “Dispatches,” with the publication of Dexter Filkins’s stunning book, “The Forever War,” it seems the journals of the brave correspondents assigned to the Middle East will take their place as the pre-eminent record of America’s late-imperial adventures, the heart of these heartless exercises in disaster, maybe some consolation to those maimed and bereaved in them.

It is not facetious to speak of work like that of Dexter Filkins as defining the “culture” of a war. The contrast of his eloquence and humanity with the shameless snake-oil salesmanship employed by the American government to get the thing started serves us well. You might call the work of enlightening and guiding a deliberately misguided public during its time of need a cultural necessity. The work Filkins accomplishes in “The Forever War” is one of the most effective antitoxins that the writing profession has produced to counter the administration’s fascinating contemporary public relations tactic. The political leadership’s method has been the dissemination of facts reversed 180 degrees toward the quadrant of lies, hitherto a magic bullet in their never-ending crusade to accomplish everything from stealing elections to starting ideological wars. Filkins uses the truth as observed firsthand to detail an arid, hopeless policy in an unpromising part of the world. His writing is one of the scant good things to come out of the war.

More here.

When I think of the jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus (1922–79), the word “canvas” comes to mind, for a couple of reasons. Non-visual artists who create works broad in scope are often said to work “on a large canvas,” a phrase that certainly applies to Mingus’s compositions. And his works bring to my mind’s eye—I have just realized this—an image that is very much like a painted canvas, a wide, Jackson Pollock–like work: abstract, full of energy and simultaneous happenings, dark here, humorous there, turbulent, explosive. The strapping Mingus was no stranger to fistfights, sometimes drawn in by racial slights, real or imagined, that no doubt recalled for him the abuse he suffered at the hands of benighted teachers in his youth. His humor is evident in his works as well as in many of their titles, notably “Bemoanable Lady,” “The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers,” and the prize winner—a riff on the title of the jazz standard “All the Things You Are”—”All the Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother.” He dealt with his feelings about racism in intellectual/compositional as well as physical ways, titling one of his works “Fables of Faubus,” after the segregationist Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus, and another “Meditations on Integration,” also known simply as “Meditations.” Recently, the bassist’s widow, Sue Mingus, discovered tapes containing performances of those two works—each a half-hour in length—along with other tunes recorded at a 1964 concert at Cornell University. In 2007 Blue Note released the recordings as a two-CD set, under the title Charles Mingus Sextet with Eric Dolphy-Cornell 1964.

more from Threepenny Review here.

Robyn Creswell in The National:

One of the few passions shared by Adonis and his daughter, as it emerges over the course of these conversations, is a conviction that there is something deeply, even pathologically wrong, with Islam. (Adonis is, in general, ambiguous as to whether by “Islam” he means “Islam in itself” or “Islam as interpreted by its orthodoxy”: in fact, his writings tend to make a distinction between these two meanings impossible.) For Esber, who strikes one as a fiercely opinionated if not especially well-informed observer, Islam is first of all a culture of political and sexual repression: “Let’s say that religion exacerbates frustration,” she argues, in a typical exchange. “Men are sexually frustrated in the Arab world, you can see it by the way they look at you! So they get what they can, but sneakily, of course.”

For Adonis, the problems are somewhat more complicated, though only somewhat. The great flaw in Islamic culture, according to his account, is its lack of that hoary French principle, laïcité: “Here precisely lies the problem with Islam,” Adonis tells Esber. “The Muslims refuse to effect this separation [between Church and State]. Hence, the despotic character of their religion. Islam seeks to foist its laws on everyone.” A further problem is Islam’s lack of any concept of “the individual” – another fêted achievement of the Enlightenment – which Islam subsumes, to the point of disappearance, in the community of believers (umma).

More here.

Protestant Irish-born 99 years ago, Bacon grew to be the most famous British painter of the latter half of the 20th century. Myth, rumour and anecdote about his life have come to dominate discussion of his art, in the same way that his art fed on the litter of medical illustrations, books of nature photography, cricket annuals, newspaper clippings and gay body-building comics that he tramped underfoot in his midden of a studio, now rebuilt in Dublin. All those published conversations with David Sylvester, the hilarious drunken TV interview with Melvyn Bragg, John Maybury’s biopic with Derek Jacobi, and the appearance of Bacon paintings in the credits to Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris – all these things add to the intensity of Bacon’s painted scream. Aaaaarghhhh.

But it is a hollow cry. Francis Bacon was a pasticheur, a mimic. He ended up imitating himself. It was a kind of method acting. His career took off in the 1940s and with a few exceptions his best work was behind him by the mid-1960s. Walk through this show and feel the disengagement – yours as well as his – setting in. This latest retrospective, which will travel, among other places, to the Prado in Madrid, is as uneven and overstretched as the artist himself was. Bacon died suddenly in Madrid in 1992. Velázquez will kill him there again, when the show comes to town – but then Velázquez kills everyone.

more from The Guardian here.

The man whom the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Board of Trustees voted to hire yesterday as the museum’s next director is not an art world power broker. He is something infinitely more interesting. In selecting Thomas P. Campbell, the curator responsible for the titanic exhibitions of Renaissance and Baroque tapestry mounted at the Metropolitan in recent years, the Board of Trustees has rejected all the usual suspects. They have made a brave and brilliant choice. They have put their trust in a man who knows how to bring the most rarified artistic achievements before an avid, heterogeneous museum-going public. And that is what running a museum ought to be about. Of course, even people who remember standing awestruck before the gloriously woven narratives in the 2002 show, “Tapestry in the Renaissance,” will probably not know Campbell’s name. But that is going to change–and change very fast. There are many reasons to believe that this 46-year-old curator who has just been elevated to the most powerful museum job in the United States is destined to do great things.

more from TNR here.

Brian Greene in The New York Times:

THREE hundred feet below the outskirts of Geneva lies part of a 17-mile-long tubular track, circling its way across the French border and back again, whose interior is so pristine and whose nearly 10,000 surrounding magnets so frigid, that it’s one of the emptiest and coldest regions of space in the solar system. The track is part of the Large Hadron Collider, a technological marvel built by physicists and engineers, and described alternatively as heralding the next revolution in our understanding of the universe or, less felicitously, as a doomsday machine that may destroy the planet.

After more than a decade of development and construction, involving thousands of scientists from dozens of countries at a cost of some $8 billion, the “on” switch for the collider was thrown this week. So what we can expect? The collider’s workings are straightforward: at full power, trillions of protons will be injected into the otherwise empty track and set racing in opposite directions at speeds exceeding 99.999999 percent of the speed of light — fast enough so that every second the protons will cycle the entire track more than 11,000 times and engage in more than half a billion head-on collisions.

The raison d’être for creating this microscopic maelstrom derives from Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc2, which declares that much like euros and dollars, energy (“E”) and matter or mass (“m”) are convertible currencies (with “c” — the speed of light — specifying the fixed conversion rate). By accelerating the protons to fantastically high speeds, their collisions provide a momentary reservoir of tremendous energy, which can then quickly convert to a broad spectrum of other particles. It is through such energy-matter conversion that physicists hope to create particles that would have been commonplace just after the big bang, but which for the most part have long since disintegrated. Here’s a brief roundup of the sort of long-lost particles the collisions might produce and the mysteries they may help unravel.

More here.

///
Elsewhere
Derek Walcott

(For Stephen Spender)

Somewhere a white horse gallops with its mane
plunging round a field whose sticks
are ringed with barbed wire, and men
break stones or bind straw into ricks.

Somewhere women tire of the shawled sea’s
weeping, for the fishermen’s dories
still go out. It is blue as peace.
Somewhere they’re tired of torture stories.

That somewhere there was an arrest.
Somewhere there was a small harvest
of bodies in the truck. Soldiers rest
somewhere by a road, or smoke in a forest.

Somewhere there is the conference rage
at an outrage. Somewhere a page
is torn out, and somehow the foliage
no longer looks like leaves but camouflage.

Somewhere there is a comrade,
a writer lying with his eyes wide open
on mattress ticking, who will not read
this, or write. How to make a pen?

And here we are free for a while, but
elsewhere, in one-third, or one-seventh
of this planet, a summary rifle butt
breaks a skull into the idea of a heaven

where nothing is free, where blue air
is paper-frail, and whatever we write
will be stamped twice, a blue letter,
its throat slit by the paper knife of the state.

Through these black bars
hollowed faces stare. Fingers
grip the cross bars of these stanzas
and it is here, because somewhere else

their stares fog into oblivion
thinly, like the faceless numbers
that bewilder you in your telephone
diary. Like last year’s massacres.

The world is blameless. The darker crime
is to make a career of conscience,
to feel through our own nerves the silent scream
of winter branches, wonders read as signs.

From The Arkansas Testament
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987)

///

Kai Wright in The Root:

It’s difficult to remember just how ho-hum the political stakes felt in the 1990s, a time when our country’s prosperity and stability made leadership seem secondary to things like ideology, faith and personality. People who came of age in that era could still debate deep, academic questions like whether history is shaped by the person or the moment, whether great times or great leaders define us. Back then, there was nothing to force the scary question of what happens when leaders crumble amid great crises. On the seventh anniversary of Sept. 11, we don’t have to speculate. The 9/11 anniversary will inevitably prompt many to take stock of George W. Bush’s soon-ending tenure. For many, his presidency will be cast in the moment those planes crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and by the high-stakes political battles that followed that frightening morning. But the most crucial lessons of both 9/11 and the Bush presidency lie in neither national security nor partisan politics.

The most urgent truth for us to understand is that the Bush era has been defined by our president’s steadfast refusal to be in command and by our nation’s collective unwillingness to value real leadership. As we finally end our white-knuckle ride with Bush, we must realize that our future turns on our ability to differentiate between someone seeking to take power and someone committed to lead.

More here.