Wladyslaw Reymont’s “The Comedienne”

89 At the excellent website, Polish Writing, a look at and full text of the story:

The provincial actors of Poland are sometimes colloquially called “comedians,” as distinguished from their more pretentious brethren of the metropolitan stage in Warsaw. The word, however, does not characterize a player of comedy parts. Indeed, the provincials, usually performing in open air theatres, play every conceivable rôle, and as in the case of Janina, the heroine of this story, the life of the Comedienne often embraces far more tragedy than comedy.

Wladyslaw Reymont is the most widely known of living Polish writers. The Academy of Science of Cracow nominated him for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is the author of numerous novels dealing with various phases of everyday life in Poland, many of them translated into French, German, and Swedish. The Comedienne is the first of his works to appear in English.

Reymont himself was a peasant, rising from the bottom until to-day the light of his recognized genius shines in the very forefront of the Slavic intellectuals.



Changing Iran

Ganji3 Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow interviews Iranian dissident journalist Akbar Ganji in The Boston Review:

As a supporter of the 1979 revolution, what did you expect from it? Did it turn out differently than you thought it would?

The discourse of the 1979 Revolution was about justice, independence, and anti-imperialism. As a consequence of the Cold War and the Third World ideological thinking of this period, the United States was viewed as the source of all the social and political problems facing our society. In those days, social justice meant either the just rule of Ali, the first Shia Imam in the 7th century, or Soviet-style socialism.

The 1979 revolution did not bring about liberty, democracy, or human rights; it did not even fulfill its promise of social justice. The class gap is about the same today, if not worse. The political repression is greater than it was before the revolution. This is because the Pahlavi regime only repressed political opposition, but the Islamic Republic continues to repress the entire spectrum of cultural, social, and political activity.

In my view, the most important achievement of the revolution is that it turned the masses into agents of historical change and highly politicized them. The 1979 revolution demanded political independence and the end of external interference in Iran’s domestic affairs. In this sense Iran has become independent, but globalization processes have made possible many new forms of foreign interference that affect Iran.

As If the Impending Tequila Shortage Wasn’t Already Bad Enough

Hamish Johnston over at the Physics World blog comes across this paper by Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga, Victor M. Castano in arXiv.

Tequila is a wide-known alcoholic beverage, granted origin denomination since 1982, eight year are necessary to grow and cultivated this agave.  When the agave plant from which tequila is produced is ready to be processed, it is cooked with vapor and under pressure and the juice is extracted, fermented and distilled twice to obtain a solution with 55 % of alcohol content. Then, the alcoholic solution is diluted with distilled water to obtain a final product (38 to 43 % alcohol content) and finally, aged in different containers, depending on the tequila kind desired.  As we shall see in what follows, tequila, or at least some types of it, present naturally the adequate atomic composition to achieve a proper diamond nucleation.

The Unit and Level of Selection

Elliott Sober reviews Samir Okasha’s  A Philosopher Looks at the Units of Selection Evolution and the Levels of Selection in RedOrbit:

Samir Okasha’s wonderful new book, Evolution and the Levels of Selection, is a philosophical examination of the conceptual framework that MLS [multilevel selection] theory deploys. Lewontin’s early formalism may give the impression that the idea of selection occurring at different levels of organization is straightforward and that the difference between group and individual selection is transparent The complexities that have become visible since the 1970s show otherwise. One complication arises in connection with the Price equation. Consider this simple example: There are two groups of zebras, one composed entirely of fast zebras, the other entirely of slow ones. Suppose the fast group is less likely to go extinct. According to the Price equation, in this situation there is group selection and no individual selection, because all the variance in fitness is between groups. But surely it is possible that the groups differ in fitness just because there is individual selection for running fast. Selection at the individual level can create a fortuitous benefit for the group (as George Williams put it). The Price equation is unable to recognize this. Biologists have coped with this problem in different ways-for example, by invoking the statistical techniques of contextual analysis and by employing a methodology called neighborhood analysis. Okasha skillfully analyzes the Price equation’s strengths and limitations and these more recent attempts to do better.

Another complication that arose as MLS theory developed was that there really are two types of MLS. In discussions of the evolution of altruism, a group’s fitness is usually defined as the number of offspring organisms the group produces. But one can also conceive of group fitness in terms of the number of daughter groups (regardless of size) the group produces. This second type of MLS has been important in discussions of species selection and of major evolutionary transitions. Both concepts raise questions about what heritability at the group level means, and here again Okasha does much to clarify what is at stake.

Tuesday Poem

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Painting_picasso_mirror_4Song of the Mirror Maker
Juan Manuel Roca

I make mirrors:
To horror I add more horror.
To beauty more beauty.
I take the moon of quicksilver by the street:
The sky reflects in the mirror
And the roofs dance
Like a painting from Chagall.
Whenever the mirror enters into another house
It will efface the known faces,
Since the mirrors don’t talk about their past,
They don’t delate old residents.
Some people construct jails,
Bars for cages
I make mirrors:
To horror I add more horror,
To beauty more beauty.

Painting: Girl Before a Mirror, Pablo Picasso

Was it jokes that defeated Communism?

From The Telegraph:

Commy Poor Mr Gorbachev. Every time he met Ronald Reagan at a summit, he was subjected by the American President to a stream of Russian jokes. Or rather, to be precise, Soviet jokes – the point of which was always to satirise some aspect of life under communism. What made it worse was that some of them really were very funny. like the one, for example, about the man who goes to buy a car in Moscow, pays for it, and is told by the salesman that he can collect it on a particular date in 10 years’ time. The buyer thinks for a moment and then asks: ‘Morning or afternoon?’ The salesman, astonished by the question, asks: ‘What difference does it make?’ And the buyer answers: ‘Well, the plumber is coming in the morning.’

As Gorbachev was well aware, these jokes had not been manufactured by some sinister department of the CIA; they were real ones, as told by real Russians. He was probably also aware that although people in the West told jokes about the frustrations of ordinary life, there was no such thing as a whole category of jokes about the capitalist system as such. If there had been, we can be sure that his aides would have been feeding them to him, contributing to an ever-escalating jokes race between the superpowers. For some commentators in the 1980s, the existence of this type of humour in the communist world took on a profound significance. It demonstrated the indomitable nature of the human spirit under oppression; the fact that communism produced such a huge quantity of jokes showed how hugely oppressive it was; and the stubborn persistence of this humour played a major role in undermining Soviet rule. In the end, they said, communism was laughed out of existence.

More here.

Eyes Bloodshot, Doctors Vent Their Discontent

Sandeep Jauhar in The New York Times:

Doc “I love being a doctor but I hate practicing medicine,” a friend, Saeed Siddiqui, told me recently. We were sitting in his office amid his many framed medical certificates and a poster of an illuminated lighthouse that read: “Success doesn’t come to you. You go to it.” A doctor in his late 30s, he has been in practice for six years, mostly as a solo practitioner. But he told me he recently had decided to go into partnership with another cardiologist; his days, he said, will be “totally busy.”

“Your days aren’t busy enough already?” I asked. The waiting room was packed. He had a full schedule of appointments, and after he was done with his office patients, he was going to round at two hospitals. He smiled wanly. “Just look at my eyes.” They were bloodshot.

“This whole week I haven’t slept more than about six hours a night.”

I asked when his work usually got done.

“It is never done,” he replied, shaking his head. “See this pile?” He pointed to five large manila packages on a shelf above his desk. “These are reports I still have to finish.”

As a physician, I could empathize. I too often feel overwhelmed with paperwork. But my friend’s discontent seemed to run much deeper than that. Unfortunately, he is not alone. I have been hearing physician colleagues voice a level of dissatisfaction with medical practice that is alarming.

More here.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Confessions of an Illegible Woman

by Jennifer Cody Epstein

I’ll admit it: my writing sucks.

This may seem a surprising confession for a newly-published novelist. And, thankfully, it is not the conclusion most reviewers of my book seem to have reached. (I’ve counted, and the words most often used seem to be luminous and vivid—and who am I to argue?)

My handwriting, however, is another story entirely. On a one-to-ten neatless scale it falls somewhere at negative six; a mix between Sanskrit and toddler scribble. Actually, probably more on the Sanskrit side; the last time I wrote an “a” for my literacy-aspiring toddler to copy she wrinkled her brow and scowled: “What is that, Mommy?”

It hasn’t always been this way. Throughout gradeschool and junior high my penmanship was never stellar, but it was at least as recognizable as English. American, even—particularly during that phase when I, like every other self-respecting female preteen, dotted her i’s with little hearts. When I passed notes my friends understood my comparisons between Mr. Muldoon and a tree frog. And when I wrote out papers, they were legible enough to be graded–unfortunately, not always to my benefit.

Somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, though, it all fell apart. My letters began to slant and slide and collide. They obeyed no perceivable rule or ruler in size, angle or slope; they refused to stay between prescribed lines. Cursive was even worse; my script simply refused to loop and lace in the prescribed manner. Eventually, print and cursive simply merged, producing the bastard offspring that is my present script. Foreign languages fared no better; Italian, Latin and Spanish all came out equally atrociously. Even foreign writing systems didn’t help; after 10+ years studying Japanese my tree characters still look like people, or sometimes rice.

In the golden age of the computer, thank goodness, illegibility has become less of a debilitating condition. Keyboards are, after all, the cosmetic surgeons of scrawl; they take even the most misformed of b’s, d’s and (my worst infringement) f’s, and re-shape them into perfect specimens. When I do fall back on longhand it’s generally for people too polite to admit they can’t read it–or else already well-acquainted with it’s indecipherability: my mother-in-law routinely calls (albeit in gales of laughter) to request translations of my thank-you notes. Beyond that, however, few have needed to know the truth: that I’m a writer who can’t write worth a damn.

Somewhat unexpectedly, though, becoming a published author has changed all that. It entails doing something I’d never thought about before: signing books. Lots of books. Often for total strangers, who have invested 26 whole dollars in them. Sometimes, as gifts.

I had my first inkling (pun intended) of trouble shortly before the official release date: my publisher called me in to sign some sixty editions of The Painter from Shanghai. A first-editions book club had requested them—presumably on the (mistaken) assumption that my signature would add some sort of value. I opened the first with trepidation.

“Where do I sign?”

“Oh—uh, here, I guess,” replied the assistant, pointing to a small (actually, quite small for a scrawler) space between title and byline.

“Do I use all three names?”

“Whatever you feel comfortable with.” He gave me a strange look. “Sometimes authors cross out the byline, too.”

I pondered this a moment. Crossing out the byline seemed just setting myself up for failure, implying (as it did) that I could write my own name better than Norton. Which, of course, I could not. In fact, the more I studied the lovely Fairfield font they’d chosen, the more inadequate I began to feel.

“Do you need another pen?” the assistant prompted.

“Uh, no. That’s ok.” Taking a deep breath, I put pen to page. “Shit.” My first signature now started with a smudge. I held it up apologetically, like a customer in a store who had just ruined something that they hadn’t paid for (which, in a sense, I guess I had). “I’ll pay for this one.”

“No, no,” he protested. “It’s unique. I’m sure they’ll love it.”

I squinted at the blot, trying to decide whether I should avoid it, write over it or try to integrate it into my scrawl. In the end I opted for the latter, semi-attaching it to the j that more or less looks like a bent, upside-down fishhook. Now one with kelp, or perhaps an unfortunate jellyfish, on its point. The assistant, clearly wearying of my neediness, began busying himself with the other books. I forced myself to finish the job: Jennifer Cody Epstein. I did stay between the lines. But as I’d expected, it looked nothing like the byline. I immediately imagined a first-edition clubbie opening up to it and exclaiming, in fury, “What the hell is this?”

The next 59 signatures were only marginally better (though thankfully there were no further blots). Still, I couldn’t help but feel, as I scrawled determinedly on (some left-slanting signatures, some right, a few undecidedly going in both directions), that same, vague unease I usually feel signing legal documents, hoping that no one notices I have no real grip on my own name. (This has actually happened to me in Hong Kong; the bank I used while living there would frequently call me in to verify that I wasn’t committing bank fraud on myself.) That same fear also had a lasting impact on my wedding; I was so worried about scrawling outside the prescribed lines on my Ketubah that my signature came out roughly three millimeters in height, four in length. (“What the hell is this?” my husband of five minutes exclaimed.)

Still, there’s nothing illegal about a sloppy signature—at least, not that I’m aware of. So what, exactly, am I so worried about? That if people see my dreadful script on this luminous book, it will somehow belie my luminosity? That my signature will, Toto-like, tear back the curtain on my talents and reveal the bald, fat little reality that, well, I suck? And—hold on! If our writing really tells us about ourselves, what exactly does mine say about me, anyway?

To find the answer, I went to Lifelong Learning Excellence Inc. and took their handwriting analysis test. Online; so you know it’s accurate (here’s the link: http://WWW.HWA.ORG/SelfEval.shtml). Using their criteria, I deduced the following: The sharpness of my hand is quite sharp, the general slant tends to vary a bit, and slope is (sic) slightly upwards slope to it.

And here, apparently, is what that tells people: You have some hesitance to accept your power, and sometimes vacillate between “I’m great.” and “I’m not okay.” All in all, It’s perhaps confusing to be Jennifer Epstein, huh? (Well, yes. Yes, it is.)

Furthermore: You probably have some questions about who you are and have some trouble being stably consistently YOU. And lastly: You probably have quite a bit of difficulty letting go of things and could be prone to digestive disorders due to your unwillingness to seek peace and quiet.

Excellent. So according to Lifelong Learning Excellence, my writing broadcasts to the world—or at least, to my readers–the fact that I have chronic indigestion.

Somewhat more enlightening was the fact that—at least, according to certain studies—there is a genetic component to handwriting; that as with so much else (humor, shopping habits, annoying laughs) hard-wiring predetermines our behavior in ways both macro and micro. As an adoptee (yes, I am illegitimate as well as illegible—but that is an entirely different blog) questions about nature versus nurture have always fascinated me. Handwriting in particular—at least, since the day ten years ago that I received a registered mail tag back from a letter I’d sent to my biological father. To date, the letter remains unanswered. But that signature spoke volumes to me: it scrawled, sprawled, sloped and collided. In fact, it looked just like mine.

In retrospect, I suppose that that sprawling half-line of longhand is as reassuring as it is disconcerting. It seems to say that, neat or sucky, my writing is what it is—and whatever it says about me will have to stand. In any event, it seems unlikely to change; despite my best efforts my inscriptions and John Hancock continue to confound those around me. One friend did, indeed, reject a signed copy she’d been planning on gifting on the grounds that the signature simply sucked. (“What the hell is that?”) Another reader, buying the book for his wife, looked over my note with obvious puzzlement. “Uh—her name is Christine,” he said. “And the book club I asked you to note is actually called the ‘Best Ever Book-Club.’”

“I know,” I said, apologetically. “That’s what I wrote.”

We looked at each other a moment, and I held my breath, half-expecting him to demand another copy, another try. In the end, though, he just shrugged.

“Ok,” he said. “I’ll pass along the message.”

Utopia on the sidewalk

P D Smith

For a time, in the summer of 1933, the scientist who invented the first weapon of mass destruction – poison gas – was staying in the same genteel Georgian square in London’s Bloomsbury as the man who would play a key role in the creation of the atomic bomb.

Russell_square_london_2008Fritz Haber was a broken man. He was suffering from chronic angina and had been forced out of the research institute to which he had devoted his entire life. For a proud man, it was a deeply humiliating experience. To friends, the 64-year-old German chemist admitted feeling profoundly bitter. Einstein, who had just renounced his German citizenship, wrote him a pointed letter saying he was pleased to hear that “your former love for the blond beast has cooled off a bit”. Haber had only months to live. Exiled by the country he had tried to save during World War I with his chemical superweapon, he spent his last days wandering through Europe.

In July 1933 he visited London, staying at a hotel on Russell Square in Bloomsbury while he explored the possibility of working in England. He met Frederick G. Donnan, a tall and rather dashing professor of chemistry at nearby University College London, who sported a black eyepatch. During World War I, Donnan had worked on the production of mustard gas. Now he was attempting to arrange a fellowship for Germany’s leading chemical warfare expert.

That summer, another scientist who had fled Hitler’s Germany was also living in Russell Square. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist who had been working in Berlin for the past decade, had brought his two suitcases to the Imperial Hotel in April. It was less costly than Haber’s hotel, the Russell, but for the scientist who had once declared that “there is no place as good to think as a bathtub”, what made the hotel irresistible were its famous Turkish baths.

Both hotels overlooked the elegant gardens of Russell Square, designed in the previous century by Britain’s foremost landscape designer, Humphry Repton. The British Museum and Library, University College London, and the London School of Economics were all within a fifteen-minute walk. T. S. Eliot (the “Pope of Russell Square”) worked in his garret office at number 24 for the publisher Faber & Faber, and in nearby Gordon Square was the fine Georgian townhouse where Virginia Woolf had once lived.

Szilard was essentially running the Academic Assistance Council (later the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning), an organisation he had helped found which dedicated itself to helping academics fleeing from the Nazis. His work for the AAC was unpaid. Szilard was living off earnings from patents which he held jointly with his close friend Albert Einstein. At the end of the 1920s, two of the greatest minds on the planet had applied their combined brain power to the problem of designing a safe refrigerator. Unfortunately, no one ever kept their groceries cool in an Einstein-Szilard fridge. But their invention of a liquid metal refrigeration system was later used to cool nuclear reactors.

Politically, the nationalist Haber and the socialist Szilard had little in common. However, unlike scientific purists such as Ernest Rutherford, for whom knowledge was its own reward, both men were enthralled by the idea of science as power. Neither Szilard nor Haber had set out in their careers intending to create new weapons. But both scientists played key roles in developing a new generation of scientific superweapons. Haber thought that chemical weapons would make him the saviour of his country. Szilard, an internationalist fired by an idealistic vision of how science should transform human life and society for the better, wanted to save the world with atomic energy and create Utopia.

Cans_festival_leake_street_2008_1 What might these two refugee scientists have said to each other if they had met while walking through the neatly manicured gardens of Russell Square, just outside their hotels? Fritz Haber was at the end of his career, disowned by his country and thrown out of the institute he had founded by the Nazis. He was at the end of his life. Haber was a shadow of the dynamic man he had once been. Every few steps, he had to pause and catch his breath. By contrast, Leo Szilard, the budding nuclear physicist, was 35 years old, his figure still slim and youthful. He would have been striding past through the square, perhaps on his way to see his and Haber’s mutual friend, Professor Donnan at UCL.

Throughout 1933, Szilard worked tirelessly and selflessly on behalf of his fellow refugee academics. His daily routine at the Imperial Hotel began with breakfast in the plush restaurant, followed by a leisurely and extended soak in a bath – the only luxury the decidedly non-materialistic Szilard permitted himself. It was not uncommon for him to spend three hours in a tub, awaiting Archimedean inspiration. However, it was not in the bath that Leo Szilard had his Eureka! moment in 1933, but on Southampton Row, one of the main roads running into Russell Square.

Late on the morning of September 12, 1933, Szilard was reading The Times in the foyer of the Imperial Hotel. An article reported Ernest Rutherford’s speech on how subatomic particles might be used to transmute atoms. Rutherford was quoted as saying “anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine”. Leo Szilard frowned as he read these words. Moonshine! If there was one thing in science that made Szilard really angry, it was experts who said that something was impossible.

Szilard always thought best on his feet. So he went for a walk. Many years later in America, Szilard would recall this moment, as he walked through Bloomsbury, pondering subatomic physics and Rutherford’s comments. “I remember,” said Szilard, “that I stopped for a red light at the intersection of Southampton Row.” The London traffic streamed by, but he scarcely noticed the vehicles. Instead, in his mind he saw streams of subatomic particles bombarding atoms.

As the traffic lights changed and the cars stopped, the physicist stepped out in front of the impatient traffic. A keen-eyed London cabby, watching Szilard cross, might have noticed him pause for a moment in the middle of the road. Szilard may even have briefly raised his hand to his forehead, as if to catch hold of the beautiful but terrible thought that had just crossed his mind. For at that moment Leo Szilard saw how to release the energy locked up in the heart of every atom, a self-sustaining chain reaction created by neutrons:

“As I was waiting for the light to change and as the light changed to green and I crossed the street, it suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction… In certain circumstances it might become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction, liberate energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs. The thought that this might be in fact possible became a sort of obsession with me.”

I know Russell Square well. It’s one of my favourite parts of London. I often walked through it on my way to classes, first as a graduate student, then while lecturing at UCL. Two hundred years after its paths were first laid and its trees planted, the gardens have now been restored to their former glory. It is a leafy haven of peace amidst the noise of the metropolis.

While researching Doomsday Men, which tells the story of Szilard and Haber, I often worked at the University of London Library in the impressive art deco Senate House which overlooks Russell Square. Its foundation stone was laid in June 1933 and during the war George Orwell worked here in the Ministry of Information, an experience that provided the model for his fictional “Ministry of Truth” in 1984. On the way to the library each morning, I walked through the square and was often struck by the thought that Szilard and Haber had passed under these very trees seventy years earlier. Indeed, a stone’s throw from here Szilard realised how to release the energy of the atom. In a sense, the road to Hiroshima’s destruction begins here in this elegant Georgian square.

Sketches_of_hg_wells_from_1912 Strangely enough, a literary scientist also discovered the secret of releasing the atom’s energy while working in this part of London. In H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free (1914), the scientist Holsten succeeds in “tapping the internal energy of atoms” by setting up “atomic disintegration in a minute particle of bismuth”. This explosive reaction, in which the scientist is slightly injured, produces radioactive gas and gold as a by-product. The quest of the alchemists is over – gold can now be created on demand. But Holsten has also discovered something far more valuable than even gold: “from the moment when the invisible speck of bismuth flashed into riving and rending energy, Holsten knew that he had opened a way for mankind, however narrow and dark it might still be, to worlds of limitless power”. When Holsten realises the implications of what he has found, his mind is thrown into turmoil. Like Szilard, he goes for a walk to think things through.

What is astonishing is that Holsten makes his discovery in Bloomsbury in 1933, the very year in which Szilard walked down Southampton Row and had his Eureka moment. The significance of this coincidence in time and space was not lost on Leo Szilard. Indeed, the similarities between the two scientists are striking. Both the fictional and the real scientist were born at the beginning of the atomic age, Holsten in the year X-rays were discovered, 1895, and Szilard in the year radium was discovered, 1898. Szilard had read Wells’s novel in 1932. It is clear that he regarded it as prophetic, and frequently referred to it in relation to key moments in both his life and the discovery of atomic energy. He shared Holsten’s dreams and his nightmares.

My knowledge of these historical moments has given this genteel London square a special resonance for me. I’ve often sat on the grass while taking time out from research and wondered what other meetings or Eureka moments have occurred in this green urban space. The square has gained a whole new dimension for me. It is not just a few trees and flower beds surrounded by some over-priced townhouses. It has a history, its own unique time-scape, one charged with global significance. A scene in a great scientific tragedy unfolded on this urban stage. And who knows how many minor domestic dramas have also been acted out in the shade of its trees. I became so fascinated by the secret histories of urban spaces like Russell Square that I even wrote a book proposal on the subject.

I was powerfully reminded of these themes recently when reading The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life, edited by Gyan Prakash and Kevin Kruse (Princeton 2008). This is an excellent collection of essays by scholars who are united in the view that cities are not inert containers for social, political and economic processes, but historically produced spaces that shape, and are shaped by, power, economy, culture, and society. They want to replace Rem Koolhaas’s post-modern notion of a Generic City “free from history”, by investing urban spaces with a new sense of place and history, within a context of global change.

Cans_festival_leake_street_2008_3 As Gyan Prakash rightly says, cities “are the principal landscapes of modernity”. Streets and sidewalks, parks and squares, tube trains and buses – these are the everyday settings for “dynamic encounters and experiences”. Despite globalization, our urban experiences still depend on “local lifeworlds”, rich with memories and imagination. The Spaces of the Modern City is a fascinating attempt to map the poetics of the urban everyday – from the liminal spaces of racially mixed neighbourhoods in London of the 1950s, the Situationists in West Berlin during the 60s, to Tokyo’s extraordinary Street Science Observation Society in the 1980s.

In 2008, Homo sapiens became an urban species. This year, for the first time in the history of the planet, more than half the population – 3.3 billion people – are city dwellers. Two hundred years ago only 3 per cent of the world’s population lived in cities, a figure that had remained fairly stable (give or take the occasional plague) for the last thousand years.

The experience of living in cities is universal. It crosses continents, cultures and even time. Urbanism is not a western phenomenon. The ideal of the global village was first glimpsed in cities seven thousand years ago, in today’s Iraq. As one historian has written: “A town is always a town, wherever it is located, in time as well as space.”

I believe cities are our greatest creation as a species. They embody our unique ability to imagine how the world might be, and to realise those dreams in brick, steel, concrete and glass. For our species has never been satisfied with what Nature gave us. We are the ape that builds, that shapes our environment. We are the city builders – Homo urbanus.

Shanghai Undoubtedly, urban planners face some daunting challenges in the coming years. About a billion city dwellers are homeless or living in squatter towns without adequate access to clean water. That’s a sixth of the planet’s entire population. Indeed, until recently more people died in cities than were born in them. Thomas Malthus, in his Essay on the Principles of Population (1803), said that half of all children born in Manchester and Birmingham died before the age of three.

Problems remain, but cities are more popular than ever. By 2030, sixty percent of people will be urbanites. Across the world from Shanghai to São Paulo, people are flocking to the cities – to buy and sell, to find work, to meet lovers and like-minded people, to be where it’s all happening. For like magnets, cities have always attracted creative people from both the arts and the sciences.

So next time you’re strolling down the street and you notice some guy who is lost in thought, don’t forget – he could be the next Leo Szilard, chasing visions of scientific Utopia on a dusty urban sidewalk.

Monday Poem

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Blue under Blue
Jim Culleny

We were sitting on a bench under blue
under the bush of a willow admiring her garden when
I saw an Indigo Bunting but didn’t know it when I did.

Look, I said,
a bluebird on the wall!

No, the fabulous near-turquoise of it,
its deep and tiny beyond-blueness makes it
an Indigo Bunting,
she said, if it’s
anything at all.

It hopped, mysterious as one of the angels some say exist
and took off fluttering more beautifully than
the idea of fluttering

fluttering for real

took off into wisteria
like the idea of flying
(cubed at least).

Who thought that up, the flying?
-not to mention the wisteria,

I said. Truth is

that’s what we were both feeling
just then, seeing an Indigo Bunting
so blue under blue under willow
from our bench.

//

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Is Grand Theft Auto IV Inspired by Al-Qaida?

01020116383500 Yassin Musharbash in Der Speigel:

Islamist forums are abuzz with a new theory: The designers of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV, they say, were inspired by killing methods developed by al-Qaida. But did the idea for the car bombs and suicide attacks in the game really come from Osama bin Laden?

For user “Abd al-Wahhab,” it is obvious. It isn’t just military men all over the world who are studying the murderous methods employed by the terror group al-Qaida. Rather, designers, developers and graphic artists in the video game world, he argues, have realized that “al-Qaida is a killing school.”

His theory: The wildly successful video game Grand Theft Auto IV (more…) was inspired by the tactics used by Osama bin Laden’s terror group. It is an idea “Abd al-Wahhab” first posted on a large discussion forum used by cyber-jihadists and al-Qaida sympathizers not long ago. He is convinced of his theory, arguing that the video game “shows the power and effectiveness of these tactics.”

Žižek on Tibet and China

Slavoj Žižek responds to his critics in the LRB

When I was a young student in socialist Yugoslavia, criticism of the regime was dismissed by those in power as ‘Western propaganda’. It was always enough to say threateningly: ‘We know whom such reasoning serves.’ To my surprise, the critics of my letter on Tibet and China rely on the same manoeuvre: my statements are dismissed with the claim that they repeat Chinese propaganda (Letters, 5 June). But I base my claim that Tibet before 1949 was an oppressive and corrupted feudal society on by far the best and most extensive study of the Tibetan legal system, Rebecca Redwood French’s The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet (1995), which has absolutely nothing to do with Chinese propaganda.

If it were the custom to dedicate letters, I would dedicate mine to the Tibetan exile settlements in Mundgod and Bylakuppe in southern India. All the media attention is on upper-class Dharamsala: nobody – the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere included – talks about the destitute thousands in these two larger camps.

A Natural Basis for Musical Consonance?

Phillip Ball in Nature News:

What was avant-garde yesterday is often blandly mainstream today. But this normalization doesn’t seem to have happened to experiments in atonalism in Western music. A century has passed since composer Arnold Schoenberg and his supporters rejected tonal organization, yet Schoenberg’s music is still considered by many to be ‘difficult’ at best, and a cacophony at worst.

Could this be because the dissonances characteristic of Schoenberg’s atonal compositions conflict with some fundamental human preference for consonance, embedded in the very way we perceive musical sound? That’s what his detractors have sometimes implied, and it might be inferred also from a new proposal for the origins of consonance and dissonance advanced in a paper by biomathematicians Inbal Shapira Lots and Lewi Stone of Tel Aviv University in Israel, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface 1.

Shapira Lots and Stone suggest that a preference for consonance may be hard-wired into the way we hear music.

Joseph Stiglitz on the Oil and Food Crises

Over at The Guardian’s Comment is Free:

The world needs to rethink the sources of growth. If the foundations of economic growth lie in advances in science and technology, not in speculation in real estate or financial markets, then tax systems must be realigned. Why should those who make their income by gambling in Wall Street’s casinos be taxed at a lower rate than those who earn their money in other ways? Capital gains should be taxed at least at as high a rate as ordinary income. (Such returns will, in any case, get a substantial benefit because the tax is not imposed until the gain is realised.) In addition, there should be a windfall profits tax on oil and gas companies.

Given the huge increase in inequality in most countries, higher taxes for those who have done well – to help those who have lost ground from globalisation and technological change – are in order, and could also ameliorate the strains imposed by soaring food and energy prices. Countries, like the US, with food stamp programmes, clearly need to increase the value of these subsidies in order to ensure that nutrition standards do not deteriorate. Those countries without such programmes might think about instituting them.

Two factors set off today’s crisis: the Iraq war contributed to the run-up in oil prices, including through increased instability in the Middle East, the low-cost provider of oil, while biofuels have meant that food and energy markets are increasingly integrated. Although the focus on renewable energy sources is welcome, policies that distort food supply are not. America’s subsidies for corn-based ethanol contribute more to the coffers of ethanol producers than they do to curtailing global warming.

Why it’s never father’s day on stage

From The London Telegraph:

Lear The rise of the birth-attending, nappy-changing, self-sacrificial new man is not an archetype that playwrights tend to celebrate much. Indeed, in the theatre it’s almost never a happy father’s day. Drama often being about conflict, and conflict often being between paternal authority and rebellious youth, there are relatively few plays and musicals around that say, “Thanks, Dad, I love you loads”. And even fewer operas. So this Father’s Day say it with a tie, a bottle or a pair of socks but don’t say it with theatre tickets. Unless, of course, you calculate that a trip to the West End might encourage your father to see the error of his ways.

“At least two fathers have already been reduced to a state of sobbing,” says David Calder, currently playing King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe and receiving stricken dads backstage afterwards. The lesson they’re taking from Lear is simple: that even if they’re kings, fathers cannot boss their children around with impunity. “Lear makes the mistake all human beings make: he believes that because he thinks it, others will think it,” says Calder. “He wants everybody at his feet, writing gooey poems about how wonderful a father he is. He is self-obsessed. It’s a one-way street. ‘I give out the goodies and you fall on the floor and thank me.'”

More here.

What Kind of father am I?

James McConkey in The American Scholar:

Mcconk2 In this exploration of my past for whatever understanding it can give me of my present self—probably my final attempt, though I’ve believed that before—I’ve touched upon questions beyond my competence to answer. But the issues of chance, genetic inheritance, the relation between fathers and sons, and the debate between determinism and free will, important to human meaning as they are, fade into insignificance before the most encompassing paradox that I know: death, that great opponent of life and ultimate victor over it, is also responsible for all the values of life that we struggle to rescue from it. Without mortality—that is, if we lived forever, uncaring of the ticking of clocks—would we have need of religion, of families with children for a new generation, of dreams for a better future? Wouldn’t scientists lose their urgency to discover, artists to create? Without my ever-keener awareness of Jean’s and my mortality, I certainly wouldn’t be writing this account in my 87th year. And what about love? As lyrical expressions, sonnets typically represent the poet’s personal emotions. One sonnet in particular, by Shakespeare, moves both Jean and me; I liked it as a graduate student, but not in the way I do today. The first-person narrator acknowledges that life, like a fire, is consumed by the source nourishing it, and tells his beloved in the concluding couplet, “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

That’s the best summation I’m capable of making.

More here.

Sunday Poem

///
republic
D.A. Powell

soon, industry and agriculture converged
                            and the combustion engine
sowed the dirtclod truck farms green
                                          with onion tops and chicory

mowed the hay, fed the swine and mutton
                            through belts and chutes

cleared the blue oak and the chaparral
                                          chipping the wood for mulch

back-filled the marshes
                            replacing buckbean with dent corn

removed the unsavory foliage of quag
                                          made the land into a production
made it produce, pistoned and oiled
                            and forged against its own nature
and—with enterprise—built silos
                                          stockyards, warehouses, processing plants
abattoirs, walk-in refrigerators, canneries, mills
                                                      & centers of distribution

it meant something—in spite of machinery—
                            to say the country, to say apple season
though what it meant was a kind of nose-thumbing
                                                      and a kind of sweetness
                            as when one says how quaint
knowing that a refined listener understands the doubleness

Read more »

Saturday, June 14, 2008

fort, dreiser, metaphor

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According to Jim Steinmeyer’s perceptive and entertaining new biography, “Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural” (Tarcher/Penguin: 332 pp., $24.95), some of the 25,000 metaphors found their way into his tenement-based pulp fiction and “The Outcast Manufacturers” (1909), his only novel. A sailor’s forehead has “[e]xactly five wrinkles in it, as if it had been pressing upon banjo strings.” One woman possesses a “nose like a tiny model of a subway entrance; nostrils almost perpendicular and shaped like the soles of tiny feet.” Steinmeyer writes that Fort would often tinker with the metaphor as it was unfolding, as if “continually whispering into the reader’s ear”: “[S]he flushed a little — flushes like goldfish in an aquarium, fluttering in her globe-like, colorless face — goldfish in a globe of milk, perhaps — or goldfish struggling in a globe of whitewash, have it.”

Of these metaphors, Dreiser wrote: “It was amazing, the force or beauty of these sentences.” But Fort would soon burn this priceless hoard, as he turned from fiction to a new sort of writing, requiring the assembly of a different kind of hoard.

more from The LA Times here.