Deanna Isaacs in the Chicago Reader:

The latest Chicago stage production to head for New York hasn’t exactly been high profile at home. Though it’s had three runs here over the last two years, Theater Oobleck’s The Strangerer managed to fly under the radar of the lead critics at the local mainstream papers. Playwright Mickle Maher says the dailies’ big guns never made it to the show, which leaves it nicely positioned as an “underground” hit. That’s always sexy.

And the critics who did make it pretty much raved their heads off, with words like “brilliant” and “hilarious” leaping from their keyboards. Still, when The Strangerer opens July 13 at the Barrow Street Theatre in lower Manhattan, it may face a little marketing challenge. The play’s an odd duck: a take on the Albert Camus novel The Stranger (last read by most of us in high school) wedded to a fictionalized presidential campaign debate—minus the current candidates. In The Strangerer, it’s 2004 and George Bush is facing John Kerry while Jim Lehrer moderates. When I posted news of the New York gig to the Reader’s Onstage blog, a commenter was moved to remark that the idea “just doesn’t seem timely.”

More here.  [Thanks to Bryon Giddens-White.] NYC performance info here.

Woe to the musician who can actually play his or her instrument. In that direction ridicule lies. Ridicule by reason of excessively long solos, of leaden grooves, of unpleasant facial posturing so as to simulate profundity.

In this regard: consider the plight of Gentle Giant. They are among the most reviled of prog-rock outfits from the ’70s. They made concept albums; they were heavily influenced (or so it was said) by the French Renaissance writer Rabelais; they were all capable of playing recorders; and, after the advent of punk, they tried to sell out and make New Wave albums. If all that were not bad enough, they started life as a soul band (Simon Dupree and the Big Sound), electing to go prog in 1969.

It would seem impossible to defend Gentle Giant, and yet that is what I mean to do.

more from The Believer here.

Marie-Thérèse de Bourbon, the daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, is one of the most tragic characters in modern history. Orphaned by the French revolution and released only after three years of harsh imprisonment, she remains an icon for French royalists to this day. After the Bourbon restoration in 1814, she became the leading female figure at court for almost 20 years, exercising considerable political power. Yet no adequate biography of her exists in French, let alone in English.

No reading of the story of Marie-Thérèse’s early sufferings can fail to shock. By the age of 17, she had witnessed brutal mob violence, her father, mother and aunt had gone to the guillotine, and her 10-year-old brother had died in prison of malnutrition and tuberculosis, in a cell littered with his own excrement. To add to her psychological torment, nobody bothered to inform her that her mother was dead for almost two years. Eventually released from captivity in December 1795, she was reunited with the remnants of her family in Russia, marrying her cousin, the duc d’Angouleme, in 1799.

more from The Sunday Times here.

He’s drunk, he’s high, he’s mournful, he’s masochistic and he makes great art. It could be a lot of painters throughout art history and now, according to HBO, which is premiering director Jeff Stimmel’s 63-minute-long documentary The Art of Failure, it’s Chuck Connelly. What this film unintentionally reveals is that, contrary to cliché, Connelly is not an oil-based genius because he is psychotically living through constant pain; he is in pain precisely because making arresting images in paint is so easy for him. When Chuck is out of the studio, everything else is difficult.

In rather conventional “art brut” passages, we see Chuck alienate his wife, hire a doppelganger to pretend he is Chuck, fill his living room with his naked lesbian series, smoke joints, visit Warhol’s grave, and generally act out like a vicious Chucklehead. Intermittently, Connelly grins with idiotic sweetness. Then, mirabile dictu, we see Chuck turn out a toadlike green self-portrait, a masterpiece, in 50 seconds, with sympathetic play-by-play commentary from Artnet Magazine’s own Walter Robinson.

more from Artnet here.

Todd Ackerman and Eric Berger in the Houston Chronicle:

Dr. Sherwin Nuland, medicine’s best-known historian, was visiting with Dr. Michael DeBakey three years ago when the then-96-year-old surgeon left the room to attend to some business.

Taking advantage of the moment to tour the room’s extensive collection of memorabilia — the honors, photographs and mementos from an illustrative career that spanned eight decades — Nuland stopped to reflect on two antiquarian charts of the history of medicine.

“As I studied the charts, it occurred to me that no face on them was any more important in the history of medicine than DeBakey himself,” said Nuland, a retired surgeon at the Yale University School of Medicine and author of Doctors: The Biography of Medicine. “I can’t think of anyone who’s made more of a contribution to the field of medicine.”

Michael Ellis DeBakey — internationally acclaimed as the father of modern cardiovascular surgery and considered by many to be the greatest surgeon ever — died Friday night at The Methodist Hospital in Houston. He was 99.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul. And Bhaisaheb, did you know him?]

From The New York Times:

Max retrieves Frisbees. He gobbles jelly beans. He chases deer. He is — and this should be remembered when discussions of cases like his blunder into the thickets of cognitive ethology, normative psychology and intraspecies solipsism — a good dog. A 3-year-old German shepherd, all rangy limbs and skittering paws, he patrols the hardwood floors and wall-to-wall carpets of a cul-de-sac home in Lafayette, Calif., living with Michelle Spring, a nurse, and her husband, Allan, a retired airline pilot. Max fields tennis balls with his dexterous forelegs and can stand on his hindquarters to open the front door. He loves car rides and will leap inside any available auto, even ones belonging to strangers. Housebroken, he did slip up once indoors, but everybody knows that the Turducken Incident simply wasn’t his fault. “He’s agile,” Allan says. “He’s healthy. He’s a good-looking animal.” Michelle adds, “We love him to death.” That is why they had no choice, she says. The dog simply had to go on psychoactive drugs.

More here.

///

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends  
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

......--William Carlos Williams 

.........................................
This is Just To Say

I have eaten 
the plums 
that were 
in the icebox

and which
you were probably 
saving
for breakfast

forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

......--William Carlos Williams 

 Apology

Forgive me
for backing over
and smashing
your red wheelbarrow.

............................

It was raining
and the rear wiper
does not work on
my new plum-colored SUV.
................................
I am also sorry
about the white
chickens.

.................................
......--F.J. Bergman

Arifa Akbar in The Independent:

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children has been fêted by the literary world for nearly three decades. Yesterday the public showed their appreciation, voting it the greatest Booker Prize winner of them all.

The novel was selected from a long-list of 41 previous Booker winners, and had been the bookies’ favourite on a shortlist of six nominated to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the prize.

Announcing the winner, Victoria Glendinning, the chairman of the judging panel that picked the shortlist, urged the organisers to allow the public to choose the Booker winner every year. This, she said, would encourage people to read more.

It is the third Booker Midnight’s Children has picked up since it first won the award in 1981, having also been judged the Booker of Bookers for the award’s 25th anniversary.

More here.

The father of the conservation movement found his calling on a visit to the California wilderness.

Tony Perrottet in Smithsonian Magazine:

The naturalist John Muir is so closely associated with Yosemite National Park—after all, he helped draw up its proposed boundaries in 1889, wrote the magazine articles that led to its creation in 1890 and co-founded the Sierra Club in 1892 to protect it—that you’d think his first shelter there would be well marked. But only park historians and a few Muir devotees even know where the little log cabin was, just yards from the Yosemite Falls Trail. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, for here one can experience the Yosemite that inspired Muir. The crisp summer morning that I was guided to the site, the mountain air was perfumed with ponderosa and cedar; jays, larks and ground squirrels gamboled about. And every turn offered picture-postcard views of the valley’s soaring granite cliffs, so majestic that early visitors compared them to the walls of Gothic cathedrals. No wonder many 19th-century travelers who visited Yosemite saw it as a new Eden.

More here.  [This post is dedicated to my friend Tamuira Reid, who happens to be John Muir’s grand-daughter.]

Via Andrew Sullivan:

Douglas Rushkoff in Edge:

This focus on the individual, and its false equation with democracy, began back in the Renaissance. The Renaissance brought us wonderful innovations, such as perspective painting, scientific observation, and the printing press. But each of these innovations defined and celebrated individuality. Perspective painting celebrates the perspective of an individual on a scene. Scientific method showed how the real observations of an individual promote rational thought. The printing press gave individuals the opportunity to read, alone, and cogitate. Individuals formed perspectives, made observations, and formed opinions.

The individual we think of today was actually born in the Renaissance. The Vesuvian Man, Da Vinci’s great drawing of a man in a perfect square and circle—independent and self-sufficient. This is the Renaissance ideal.

It was the birth of this thinking, individuated person that led to the ethos underlying the Enlightenment. Once we understood ourselves as individuals, we understood ourselves as having rights. The Rights of Man. A right to property. The right to personal freedom.

The next renaissance (if there is one)—the phenomenon we’re talking about or at least around here is not about the individual at all, but about the networked group. The possibility for collective action. The technologies we’re using—the biases of these media—cede central authority to decentralized groups. Instead of moving power to the center, they tend to move power to the edges. Instead of creating value from the center—like a centrally issued currency—the network creates value from the periphery. 

More here.

The odds that a potentially devastating space rock will hit Earth this century may be as high as one in 10. So why isn’t NASA trying harder to prevent catastrophe?

Gregg Easterbrooke in The Atlantic:

Breakthrough ideas have a way of seeming obvious in retro­spect, and about a decade ago, a Columbia University geophysicist named Dallas Abbott had a breakthrough idea. She had been pondering the craters left by comets and asteroids that smashed into Earth. Geologists had counted them and concluded that space strikes are rare events and had occurred mainly during the era of primordial mists. But, Abbott realized, this deduction was based on the number of craters found on land—and because 70 percent of Earth’s surface is water, wouldn’t most space objects hit the sea? So she began searching for underwater craters caused by impacts rather than by other forces, such as volcanoes. What she has found is spine-chilling: evidence that several enormous asteroids or comets have slammed into our planet quite recently, in geologic terms. If Abbott is right, then you may be here today, reading this magazine, only because by sheer chance those objects struck the ocean rather than land.

Abbott believes that a space object about 300 meters in diameter hit the Gulf of Carpentaria, north of Australia, in 536 A.D. An object that size, striking at up to 50,000 miles per hour, could release as much energy as 1,000 nuclear bombs.

More here.

The Greeks worshipped it; the Aztecs were a little more conflicted.

Sam Anderson in New York magazine:

The popular history of a humdrum object—that faddish genre in which the most boring items on your dining-room table (salt, cod, potatoes, bananas, chocolate) are revealed to be secret juggernauts of profound social change—has recently become so popular that it’s probably time for someone to write a popular history of it. If I were forced, I’d diagnose the trend as yet another symptom (like $4 gas or home foreclosures) of our current flavor of late-phase capitalism—a commercialism so far advanced we’ve begun transferring historical glories from our leaders (Napoleon, Churchill, Gandhi) to our products, so that we find ourselves surrounded by greatness in every aisle of Whole Foods. I’d also add, if forced, that the genre’s wild success seems to predict its own obsolescence: The conclusion that everything is integral to the history of everything is perilously close, in the end, to no conclusion at all.

True to form, Iain Gately’s new book, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol, posits its subject as the lifeblood of the world. Booze has presided over executions and business deals and marriages and births. It inspired the ancient Greeks to invent not only democracy but comedy and tragedy. It helped goad America’s Founding Fathers into revolution.

More here.

Gérard Gavarry’s work is one of contemporary French literature’s best-kept secrets. That this should be so here in the United States is no surprise, granted that his books have not yet found their way into English translation—though Dalkey Archive Press will soon remedy that, with translations of Hop là! un deux trois and Façon d’un roman. The fact that Gavarry is not more broadly known in France is more perplexing, however, for the kind of writing that he has practiced for the last twenty-five years or so is bold, original, and innovative. It is as richly deserving of attention as that of any of Gavarry’s contemporaries, yet it has not appealed to a general readership, nor has it received its share of critical ink. One of the reasons for this may lie in what I feel to be Gavarry’s cardinal virtue: his writerly mobility. Reading through his work, it shortly becomes clear that he is unwilling to tread upon ground that he has already traversed, and that he is committed to producing books that come to us anew, each one deploying different narrative strategies and putting a variety of questions on the table for our consideration. The diversity of theme and approach in his books is most invigorating indeed, but it also makes them hard to categorize according to the conventional taxonomies that many critics (and indeed many general readers) rely upon in order to make their way through contemporary literature.

more from Context here.

In Shakespeare what is apparently a small matter is actually often a big deal made seemingly small only because it is happening at pace. The moment of a decision in Macbeth, of a death in Lear: they are no sooner there than gone, with hardly time for the thing to sink in. Says poor Phebe in As You Like It, at the sight of what she takes to be an angry but beautiful young man: ‘Faster than his tongue/Did make offence his eye did heal it up.’ ‘Faster’: that’s why such things strike with disproportionate emotional violence – they are big matters contained within a small space, more than one thing happening fast at a single instant. The conceptualisation comes along afterwards, like the old nurse reporting to an impatient young Juliet: slow, belated and heavy.

I believe that the conceptual language with which we talk about Shakespeare is not very good, because it is far too much after the event. In fact I also believe that, in general, our thinking about what goes on so invisibly, so microscopically in the mind, is cumbersome and restrictive. The enemy is paraphrase, the loss of original experience within a second-hand normalising language. Whereas Shakespeare at the moment of formulation offers the great creative example of what the human mind can do.

more from Literary Review here.

In a packed lecture hall at Columbia University in 1958 — or so the story goes — the eminent physicist Wolfgang Pauli was presenting a radical new theory. In the audience was Niels Bohr, another eminent physicist, who, at lecture’s end, stood up and announced: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

“Crazy enough” is no doubt a thought that occurred to Stanford theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind when he came up with his holographic principle — an idea that has recently gained traction in the physics community. The principle, which states that our universe is a three-dimensional projection of information stored in two dimensions at the boundary of space, certainly ranks as crazy. But is it crazy enough?

After reading Susskind’s entertaining new book, “The Black Hole War,” you may decide that, yes, the holographic principle may well be on the good side of crazy. But before he gets to the holographic principle, Susskind gives an explanation, both lucid and enjoyable, of why black holes are so crucial to the future of physics and to any eventual reconciliation of relativity and quantum mechanics.

more from the LA Times here.

Richard Brody’s “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard” is a story of transformation, a painstaking account of a lifelong artistic journey. Now we know how one of the greatest of all filmmakers — the man who so radically changed cinema in 1959 with his debut feature, “Breathless” — became an intolerable gasbag. That probably wasn’t Brody’s aim in writing this exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, critical biography. As Brody, a film critic and editor at The New Yorker, makes clear in the preface, he still believes in Godard’s relevance, claiming that the resolutely not-retired filmmaker, who has lived in Rolle, Switzerland, for the past 30 years, continues to work “at an extraordinarily high level of artistic achievement.”

That’s a lovely, optimistic sentiment, but one that much of Godard’s post-1967 output doesn’t deserve: Empty shadowboxes like “First Name: Carmen” (1983) or “Notre Musique” (2004) seem designed to alienate viewers rather than draw them closer, which is what happens when any artist begins to live entirely inside his or her own head. It’s the artists we love best who are most capable of disappointing us, and anyone who has taken pleasure in the boldness of the movies Godard made from 1959 through 1967 — he produced an astonishing 15 full-length features in that period, beginning with “Breathless” and including “Contempt,” “Pierrot le Fou” and “Weekend” — would have to know that pain is part of love. If we didn’t, how carefully could we have been watching his movies in the first place?

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

///
In 2003 was the 50th anniversary of the Watson and Crick paper.

Nature magazine commissioned some articles on the occasion, and asked me to write a poem. I had trouble, wrote 3 poems which seemed to head nowhere. Until I went with a friend on a brief trip to Ticino, wandered on an alp, and saw some wonderful blue butterflies. I immediately thought of Nabokov, and the poem took shape.

The poem also owes something to Inger Christensen’s wonderful “Sommerflugledalen,” translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied as “Butterfly Valley: A Requiem”. Zloczow is the small town in then Poland, now Ukraine (Zolochiv) where I was born and survived the war.

A postscript: Nature didn’t like it. Neither did Science.
–Roald Hoffmann

A post postscript: Nature and Science may not have liked the poem, but I do.
–Jim C.

……………………………………………………………………………………..

Code, Memory
Raold Hoffman

—Alcman, they say, called Mnemosyne big-eyed, since we see the past by our thinking

Walk in, to a Ticino alp’s
wild strawberry midsummer,
see the blues flit, conjure up

a young Russian with a net.
Elsewhere, by lamplight,
one you loved can look

at the old photos and say
“you smile like your father,
he also wore a cap.”

The way lit up in ’53, 
two young men just willing
a model into being. Walk,

toward them, past a monk
tending peas, on to stains,
agar plates and centrifuges,

come, walk by the light
of signals from within, past 
x-shaped diffraction patterns; 

on, past ’53, heady
with the logic of splice
and heal, the profligate

wonder of polymerases,
into denominable bounty,
down this biochemical

rope trick of a molecule,
its rings’ sticky signposts
tied to a backbone (chain,
chain, chain, she sings)
run —  of sugars, unsweet,
and phosphate triads.

There, there’s memory’s lair, 
the inexpungable trail 
of every enzyme that worked,

and those that did but
for a while, every affair
the senses had with a niche,

the genes turned off
as we came out of water,
what worked, what nearly killed –

the insinuating virus, code
immured in coiled softness,
coopted symbiotes. Move,

for here wiggling and collision
gauge shape, down necklaces
of meaning interrupted 

by stutters, the ons, offs,
intent, a tinkerer’s means
to function (that escapes us),

on, to difference, earthy life,
its dendral arms hazarding
berry and you, to the butterfly

that lights on torn up earth
in Srebrenice and Złoczów,
that flies to the far place

love obstinately chose.
An Alp… is to be climbed;
they did, our mid-century

helixeers. But oh, an alp
is also a sweet shoulder
of a mountain, that meadow

reaching for snowline, the place
where men drive cattle, rest,
move higher.  An alp is clover,

a place to feed, and watch
another blue, now the morning
glory’s winding grasp and

climb. The word sings, in alp
and alkaline phosphatase
and DNA, in nuanced refrain;

this side of memory, of a world
that was; and one that will be.

Thanks to 3QD reader Jason Williams

//

This is a whole series of articles, slide-shows, videos, and other material relating to the singularity. This is from the article “Waiting for the Rapture” by Glenn Zorpette in IEEE Spectrum:

Bear that history in mind as you consider the creed of the singularitarians. Many of them fervently believe that in the next several decades we’ll have computers into which you’ll be able to upload your consciousness—the mysterious thing that makes you you. Then, with your consciousness able to go from mechanical body to mechanical body, or virtual paradise to virtual paradise, you’ll never need to face death, illness, bad food, or poor cellphone reception.

Now you know why the singularity has also been called the rapture of the geeks.

The singularity is supposed to begin shortly after engineers build the first computer with greater-than-human intelligence. That achievement will trigger a series of cycles in which superintelligent machines beget even smarter machine progeny, going from generation to generation in weeks or days rather than decades or years. The availability of all that cheap, mass-­produced brilliance will spark explosive economic growth, an unending, hypersonic, tech­no­industrial rampage that by comparison will make the Industrial Revolution look like a bingo game.

At that point, we will have been sucked well beyond the event horizon of the singularity. It might be nice there, on the other side—by definition, you can’t know for sure. Sci-fi writers, though, have served up lots of scenarios in which humankind becomes the prey, rather than the privileged beneficiaries, of synthetic savants.

But the singularity is much more than a sci-fi subgenre. A lot of smart people buy into it in one form or another—there are versions that dispense with the life-everlasting stuff. There are academic gatherings and an annual conference at Stanford. There are best-selling books, audiotapes, and videos. Scheduled for release this summer is a motion picture, The Singularity Is Near, starring the actress Pauley Perrette and a ­gaggle of aging boffins who’ve never acted in a movie.

More here.  And here is the whole report.