///
A Man Doesn’t Have Time in his Life
Yehuda Amichai

A man doesn’t have time in his life

to have time for everything.

He doesn’t have seasons enough to have

a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes

Was wrong about that.
………………………….

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,

to laugh and cry with the same eyes,

with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,

to make love in war and war in love.

And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,

to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest

what history

takes years and years to do.
………………………….

A man doesn’t have time.

When he loses he seeks, when he finds

he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves

he begins to forget.
………………………….

And his soul is seasoned, his soul

is very professional.

Only his body remains forever

an amateur. It tries and it misses,

gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,

drunk and blind in its pleasures

and its pains.
………………………….

He will die as figs die in autumn,

Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,

the leaves growing dry on the ground,

the bare branches pointing to the place

where there’s time for everything.

///

From The Washington Post:

Headlines give us the general outline of the complicated choices women face today and of a range of abuses that have become increasingly routine. But a new batch of summer novels adds texture and context to these reports of troubled lives. These aren’t made-for-TV movies in print. They’re chilling explorations of psychic distress with a clear message: Times are not easy. A new range of pressures puts women and girls at risk. Reading these literary dispatches is no picnic. But there are substantial pleasures in the artful ways these authors tell it like it is for too many young women.

HOW FAR IS THE OCEAN FROM HEREBy Amy Shearn Shaye Areheart. 305 pp. $23

Amy Shearn’s idiosyncratic narrator and the damaged children she befriends anchor this tantalizing novel about a surrogate mother who has second thoughts just weeks before her due date. At eight months pregnant, Susannah Prue takes off from Chicago heading for the Pacific Ocean. After four days, her car breaks down, forcing her to pull into the seedy Thunder Lodge motel. The child’s expectant parents panic when she doesn’t return calls, but she’s off the radar.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Within hours of his demise in 1955, Albert Einstein’s brain was salvaged, sliced into 240 pieces and stored in jars for safekeeping. Since then, researchers have weighed, measured and otherwise inspected these biological specimens of genius in hopes of uncovering clues to Einstein’s spectacular intellect. Their cerebral explorations are part of a century-long effort to uncover the neural basis of high intelligence or, in children, giftedness. Traditionally, 2 to 5 percent of kids qualify as gifted, with the top 2 percent scoring above 130 on an intelligence quotient (IQ) test. (The statistical average is 100. See the box on the opposite page.) A high IQ increases the probability of success in various academic areas. Children who are good at reading, writing or math also tend to be facile at the other two areas and to grow into adults who are skilled at diverse intellectual tasks.

Most studies show that smarter brains are typically bigger—at least in certain locations. Part of Einstein’s parietal lobe (at the top of the head, behind the ears) was 15 percent wider than the same region was in 35 men of normal cognitive ability, according to a 1999 study by researchers at McMaster University in Ontario. This area is thought to be critical for visual and mathematical thinking. It is also within the constellation of brain regions fingered as important for superior cognition. These neural territories include parts of the parietal and frontal lobes as well as a structure called the anterior cingulate.

More here.

Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance:

So here are my judgments for the likelihoods that we will discover various different things at the LHC — to be more precise, let’s say “the chance that, five years after the first physics data are taken, most particle physicists will agree that the LHC has discovered this particular thing.” (Percentages do not add up to 100%, as they are in no way exclusive; there’s nothing wrong with discovering both supersymmetry and the Higgs boson.) I’m pretty sure that I’ve never proposed a new theory that could be directly tested at the LHC, so I can be completely unbiased, as there’s no way that this experiment is winning any Nobels for me. On the other hand, honest particle phenomenologists might be aware of pro- or con- arguments for various of these scenarios that I’m not familiar with, so feel free to chime in in the comments. (Other predictions are easy enough to come by, but none with our trademark penchant for unrealistically precise quantification.)

• The Higgs Boson:  95%.  The Higgs is the only particle in the Standard Model of Particle Physics which hasn’t yet been detected, so it’s certainly a prime target for the LHC (if the Tevatron doesn’t sneak in and find it first). And it’s a boson, which improves CERN’s chances. There is almost a guarantee that the Higgs exists, or at least some sort of Higgs-like particle that plays that role; there is an electroweak symmetry, and it is broken by something, and that something should be associated with particle-like excitations. But there’s not really a guarantee that the LHC will find it. It should find it, at least in the simplest models; but the simplest models aren’t always right. If the LHC doesn’t find the Higgs in five years, it will place very strong constraints on model building, but I doubt that it will be too hard to come up with models that are still consistent. (The Superconducting Super Collider, on the other hand, almost certainly would have found the Higgs by now.)
• Supersymmetry:  60%. Of all the proposals for physics beyond the Standard Model, supersymmetry is the most popular, and the most likely to show up at the LHC. But that doesn’t make it really likely. We’ve been theorizing about SUSY for so long that a lot of people tend to act like it’s already been discovered — but it hasn’t.

And the rap:

Penguin asked six authors–Charles Cummings, Toby Litt, Kevin Brooks, Nicci French, Matt Mason, and Mohsin Hamid–to take the first line of one of six books–The 39 Steps, Haunted Dolls House, Fairy Tales, Thérèse Raquin, Hard Times, 1001 Nights, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland–a tell a short story in a new media format over 6 weeks.  This odd project is worth exploring.  From Charles Cummings’ “The 29 Steps,” taking the first line from The 39 Steps, and told with the aid of Google Maps:

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

The title of How Fiction Works promises so much that it almost crosses over, like Harold Bloom’s Genius, into self-parody. And yet, if any modern critic could pull off such an outlandish feat of analytic strength, it would be Wood. He’s already proved himself to be our most consistently powerful analyst of how fiction works on a local level—author by author, text by text, word by word—so you’d expect him to be equally good on how fiction works in the abstract. Readers looking for the final unveiling of an airtight Woodian system, however, will be disappointed. Although the book makes some big argumentative noises—about, for instance, the relationship between fiction and “the real” (italics decidedly not mine)—it progresses not through closely reasoned chapters but through 123 numbered sections grouped around themes (Character, Dialogue, Flaubert). These sections range from a few lines to a few pages, and they skip quickly from novel to novel and anecdote to anecdote—a form that scatters what might have been the work’s argumentative force. (You might even say, again if you were in that special kind of mood, that Wood’s critical method is Chekhovian: He renounces the inhumanly streamlined “plot” of continuous argument in order to wander from detail to detail in search of epiphanic flashes.)

more from New York Magazine here. (h/t Asad)

If you want to go where people are reading Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper, Nafisi has admonished, “go to Iran”. Go to Iran, I would add, if you want to discover where people are reading Jürgen Habermas, Isaiah Berlin, Leszek Kolakowski and Immanuel Kant. “There have been more translations of Kant into Persian in the past decade than into any other language”, reports Vali Nasr , “and these have gone into multiple printings”. Abdollah Momeni, the leader of Iran’s most prominent student-activist group (Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat), claims Habermas as his chief inspiration. The speeches and writings of Akbar Ganji, Iran’s leading dissident, are peppered with references to Kant, John Stuart Mill and Albert Camus.

Indeed, there are often “more vibrant resonances of ‘Continental’ thought” in countries like Iran, notes the political philosopher Fred Dallmayr, “than can be found in Europe today”.

more from The Liberal here.

Toward the end of the Sakuntala, the most famous of the three surviving plays by Kalidasa–the poet usually considered the finest in ancient India–the hero Dushyanta offers this poignant self-analysis:

Like someone staring at an elephant
who says, “There is no elephant here,”
and who then, as it moves away,
feels a certain doubt
and later, seeing its footprints,
is certain: “An elephant
has been here”–
such are the subtle
workings of my mind.

Or of any mind–the rueful king speaks for all of us. We almost always miss the elephant in front of us. By the time we make our retrospective deduction from the footprints, it’s usually too late.

more from TNR here.

From The Guardian:

Since we all became globally-connected, various attempts have been made at changing how we read. Consider hypertext fiction, such as Geoff Ryman’s 253 and the new concept of the “wovel”, as discussed here a few weeks ago. Now, there’s another injection of technology into reading, through the virtual worlds of Second Life. “What if, in addition to reading a book, we could actually visit the locations we read about?” ask the creators of Literature Alive! an academic project which encourages teaching online. I’m not a Second Life user. I’ve visited once or twice out of curiosity, back when it was touted as the future of the internet. But since reality set in, I’ve kept my distance. Still, I was intrigued by the thought of wandering through Dante’s Inferno, Edgar Allen Poe’s house and Alice ‘s Looking Glass (“Peering around the bend you see … Hmmm what do you see? Your curiosity overwhelms you and you …. you …”)

The locations are certainly impressive, if somewhat bewildering, and a great deal of work is evident. Some random clicking brings up explanatory videos, notes, and the work itself. To further explore the idea of literature online, a conference was held yesterday (to be repeated tomorrow). With an emphasis on academic use, Beth Ritter-Guth or, as she is in Second Life, Desideria Stockton, delivered the keynote address. Essentially her argument comes down to the issue of active rather than passive learning and she insisted students’ work was marked as rigorously as any other academic work.

More here.

From Scientific American:

As Dolly matured, the cloning technology that created her—called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT)—grew into a rich research enterprise. Scientists hoped to eventually be able to take a patient’s cell, place its nucleus into an unfertilized human egg and then harvest embryonic stem cells to treat intractable conditions such as Parkinson’s disease. But the first human clinical trial continues to seem remote, with embryonic cloning constrained by a federal funding ban, deeply controversial ethical issues and technical challenges. In mid-May safety concerns led the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to put on hold a bid by Geron Corporation in Menlo Park, Calif., to conduct trials on patients who have acute spinal cord injury.

Now the 64-year-old Wilmut is one of several high-profile scientists who remain loyal to SCNT in concept but are leading a wholesale charge out of the field and into an alternative technology. That other approach, first demonstrated in 2006 by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, restores adult cells back to an embryonic­like state called pluripotency, in which they regain the ability to develop into any kind of cell. Any well-appointed lab can apply the comparatively straightforward technique. “It’s really easy—a high school lab can do it,” says Mahendra Rao, who heads up the stem cell and regenerative medicine business at Invitrogen, a life sciences corporation based in Carlsbad, Calif. Yamanaka’s approach also enables scientists to leap over nuclear transfer’s egg supply problems and sidestep qualms about destroying human embryos.

More here.

Andy Warhol was born eighty years ago today.

Arthur C. Danto in The Nation a couple of years ago:

Ric Burns’s four-hour documentary on Andy Warhol’s career, which aired on PBS’s American Masters Series and is now showing at New York’s Film Forum, opens with a priceless piece of footage. Andy, in sunglasses, is being interviewed in front of a few of his Brillo boxes by an earnest someone, while an insider in a business suit looks on, smirking.

“Andy,” she asks, “the Canadian government spokesman said that your art could not be described as original sculpture. Would you agree with that?” Warhol answers, “Yes.” “Why do you agree?” “Well, because it’s not original.” “You have just then copied a common item?” “Yes.” The interviewer gets exasperated. “Why have you bothered to do that? Why not create something new?” “Because it’s easier to do.” “Well, isn’t this sort of a joke then that you’re playing on the public?” “No. It gives me something to do.”

This riotous exchange must have taken place about a year after Warhol’s celebrated–but commercially not so successful–exhibition of what the film’s narrative calls “grocery boxes” at Manhattan’s Stable Gallery in April 1964.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his excellent Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

Thinking about the genesis and consequences of the Iraq War and the recently passed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that authorizes wholesale wiretapping, I recalled a relevant party game I once wrote about. The game, described by philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in his book “Consciousness Explained,” is a variant of the familiar childhood game requiring that one try to determine by means of Yes or No questions a secretly chosen number between one and one million.

In Dennett’s more interesting and suggestive game, one person, the subject, is selected from a group of people at a party and asked to leave the room. He is told that in his absence one of the other partygoers will relate a recent dream to the other party attendees. The person selected then returns to the party and, through a sequence of Yes or No questions about the dream, attempts to accomplish two things: reconstruct the dream and identify whose dream it was.

The punch line is that no one has related any dream. The individual partygoers are instructed to respond either Yes or No to the subject’s questions according to some completely arbitrary rule. Any rule will do, however, and may be supplemented by a non-contradiction clause so that no answer directly contradicts an earlier one. The Yes or No requirement can be loosened as well to allow for vagueness and evasion.

The result is that the subject, impelled by his own obsessions, often constructs an outlandish and obscene dream in response to the random answers he elicits.

More here.

From Philosophy Now, reprinted over at richarddawkins.net:

It came as a pleasant surprise to me when I learned – around age twelve or thirteen – that not all the delicious and unspeakable thoughts of my childhood had to be kept private. Some of them were called ‘philosophy’, and there were legitimate, smart people who discussed these fascinating topics in public. While less immediately exciting than some of the other, still unspeakable, topics of my private musings, they were attention-riveting, and they had an aura of secret knowledge. Maybe I was a philosopher. That’s what the counselors at Camp Mowglis in New Hampshire suggested, and it seemed that I might be good at it.

My family didn’t discourage the idea. My mother and father were both the children of doctors, and both had chosen the humanities. My mother, an English major at Carleton College in Minnesota, went on for a Masters in English from the University of Minnesota, before deciding that she simply had to get out of Minnesota and see the world. Never having been out the Midwest, and bereft of any foreign languages, she took a job teaching English at the American Community School in Beirut. There she met my father, Daniel C. Dennett Jr, working on his PhD in Islamic history at Harvard while teaching at the American University of Beirut. His father, the first Daniel C. Dennett, was a classic small town general practitioner in Winchester, Massachusetts, the suburb of Boston where I spent most of my childhood. So yes, I am Daniel C. Dennett III; but since childhood I’ve disliked the Roman numerals, and so I chose to court confusion among librarians (how can DCD Jr be the father of DCD?) instead of acquiescing in my qualifier.

My father’s academic career got off to a fine start, with an oft-reprinted essay, ‘Pirenne and Muhammed’, which I was thrilled to find on the syllabus of a history course I took as an undergraduate. His first job was at Clark University. When World War II came along, he put his intimate knowledge of the Middle East to use as a secret agent in the OSS, stationed in Beirut. He was killed on a mission, in an airplane crash in Ethiopia in 1947, when I was five. So my mother and two sisters and I moved from Beirut to Winchester, where I grew up in the shadow of everybody’s memories of a quite legendary father. In my youth some of my friends were the sons of eminent or even famous professors at Harvard or MIT, and I saw the toll it took on them as they strove to be worthy of their fathers’ attention.

Peter Marcuse in In These Times:

The protests of 1968 — symbolically, the occupation of the Columbia University buildings, the student uprisings in Paris and the street protests in Berlin — are now in danger of being denigrated as the actions of spoiled, confused, if not neurotic, students and rebellious youth who were “finding” themselves in making trivial demands of their uncomprehending and benevolent societies.

An April 23 op-ed by Paul Auster in the New York Times calls 1968 “the year of the crazies.” Another op-ed, by Jean-Claude Guillebaud, on May 24, calls the protesters “useful idiots,” and the current attention on them a “frenzy of nostalgia.”

In the process, the serious changes brought about by the events of ‘68, the substance of the protests, the reasons for the discontent, and the desire for change, are either ignored or superciliously dismissed as childish daydreams.

Even Slavoj Žižek, in the July issue of In These Times, quotes with approval French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s comment about the students of ‘68: “As revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one.”

That that much was, in fact, achieved is beyond doubt.

The Columbia protests stopped both military research at the university and the construction of a gym in a park that was seen by Harlem and its black residents as an insult by a rich, dominant institution.

Internationally, the ‘68 protests changed the character of post-war politics, helped end the Vietnam War, and legitimized concerns about peace, welfare and democracy beyond the prevailing mainstream consensus.

Evgeny Morozov in openDemocracy (or openDemokratia):

One of the first cartoons to travel across the Russian blogosphere on the day of Solzhenitsyn’s death depicts the famed writer swirling in a dirty Soviet toilet. Next to him hangs a roll of toilet paper made of US dollars. [I’m not putting in the cartoon–RV.] “The first circle” reads the caption, alluding to his eponymous novel.

Anti-Solzhenitsyn comments accompany posts featuring the cartoon, click here for Russian: “Thanks all! We’ve done it: almost all the time our opinion’s been getting more clicks than the chorus of tearful praise-mongering for Solzhenitsyn organised by the remaining liberals and hard-core Putinists..When a vicious dog dies, the whole street rejoices – isn’t that what you’d expect?)”

The cartoon and the Solzhenitsyn-bashing that followed it easily became one of the most discussed posts on the Russian Internet that day; pro-Solzhenitsyn bloggers launched their own campaign to clear his name of accusations. Thousands of comments followed, in what may seem like a great exercise in online deliberation.

Under closer scrutiny, however, most of those comments reveal a nation that is still at pains to define itself. As Russians ponder the complex fate of their controversial writer-and their long history of authoritarianism, they still prefer to oversimplify their past rather than acknowledge it in full.

Did Solzhenitsyn collaborate with the authorities? Did he spy on his camp-mates? Was he on CIA’s payroll? Did he sympathize with the Nazis? Is he to blame for the fall of the Soviet system? Did he have any moral right to tell the country what to do, given his own possibly tainted experience in the camps?

Those are all complex questions in need of well-researched and well-considered answers; the thousands of comments on Russian blogs produced very few satisfactory candidates. But not because the commentators haven’t tried – they did – but simply because online polemics rarely produce new factual evidence.

In the Economist (via bookforum):

Corey Fincher, of the University of New Mexico, has a different hypothesis for the origin of religious diversity. He thinks not that religions are like disease but that they are responses to disease—or, rather, to the threat of disease. If he is right, then people who believe that their religion protects them from harm may be correct, although the protection is of a different sort from the supernatural one they perceive.

Mr Fincher is not arguing that disease-protection is religion’s main function. Biologists have different hypotheses for that. Not all follow Dr Dawkins in thinking it pathological. Some see it either as a way of promoting group solidarity in a hostile world, or as an accidental consequence of the predisposition to such solidarity. This solidarity-promotion is one of Mr Fincher’s starting points. The other is that bacteria, viruses and other parasites are powerful drivers of evolution. Many biologists think that sex, for example, is a response to parasitism. The continual mixing of genes that it promotes means that at least some offspring of any pair of parents are likely to be immune to a given disease.

Mr Fincher and his colleague Randy Thornhill wondered if disease might be driving important aspects of human social behaviour, too. Their hypothesis is that in places where disease is rampant, it behoves groups not to mix with one another more than is strictly necessary, in order to reduce the risk of contagion. They therefore predict that patterns of behaviour which promote group exclusivity will be stronger in disease-ridden areas. Since religious differences are certainly in that category, they specifically predict that the number of different religions in a place will vary with the disease load. Which is, as they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the case.

If Tom Stoppard were to update his Russian trilogy to take in the sweep of the 20th century, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn would have to take centre stage. Soldier, physicist, dissident, religious thinker, historian, novelist, playwright, poet, gulag prisoner and unwilling exile, Solzhenitsyn experienced the whole Russian gamut. His lifespan alone—December 1918 to August 2008—seems to define a Russian century, a rough hundred years of agony and muddle, defeat and hope. The Russian intellectual scene of which Solzhenitsyn was the iconic figure during his lifetime is defined by an arrogant hope for a grand Russian future. It never goes away: you can force it underground, harness it to party discipline, even banish it abroad, and still it reappears, holding on to the view that Russian history, people and destiny are like some special field of philosophy in which the hardest problems are still not solved, but will be one day—and then the world will see.

more from Prospect Magazine here.

Turner’s singular emergence as a young painter in the late eighteenth century was not a random occurrence, nor is he an isolated or anomalous figure. His untimeliness is paradoxically and necessarily the product of a specific interval in time, a period of perhaps four or five decades between the Revolution of 1789 and the failures of 1848. It was a brief interregnum, a privileged and never to be repeated window onto the raw outlines of a stunning new realm of possibilities. Apprehensible to Turner and some of his peers were a boundless earth, unforeseen multitudes, and flows of wealth, charged with forces and destinies at once terrifying and wondrous. To position Turner in this way has nothing to do with labeling him a “poet of industrialization” because he painted a few steamboats or a train. Rather, he had a piercing if inchoate sense that there had been a rift or swerve in time itself. To understand his project means thinking him as part of a constellation that includes William Blake, Géricault, Toussaint-Louverture, Marx, Melville, Balzac, Robert Owen, and others—individuals who, within the vertiginous falling away of familiar stabilities and certainties, saw revelatory flashes of what would (or could) follow in the wake of a new universal humanity on the one hand and the invisible and deracinated powers of capital on the other.

more from artforum here.

Clearly we’re not dancing the way we did even five years ago. What happened?

It’s not that dancing is vanishing. In one sense, it is more popular than ever. On television, this year there have been no fewer than four dance shows: “Dancing with the Stars,” “So You Think You Can Dance,” “America’s Best Dance Crew,” and “Step It Up & Dance.” On the Internet, YouTube’s No. 1 “top favorite” video of all time is the goofy “Evolution of Dance.”

But it’s no coincidence that as dancing explodes in popularity on TV, it’s harder to find at bars and the average party. What’s popular on these shows and clips isn’t dancing – it’s second-hand dancing. These people are dancing so we don’t have to.

more from The Boston Globe here.