Life in Austria seems to be competing with literature. Since late April, we have been learning with horror and fascination how Josef Fritzl lured his daughter Elisabeth into a carefully designed, soundproofed cellar (for which he had secured planning permission), kept her there for twenty-four years, and sired seven children on her; of these, one died, three lived in the cellar, and three, still more incredibly, appear to have been deposited on the family’s doorstep in Amstetten and adopted by Fritzl and his wife as foundlings. This immediately recalls the case of Natascha Kampusch, who escaped two years ago from her eight-year captivity in Vienna. But to anyone familiar with Austrian literature it also calls up a host of literary reminiscences.

“Tourmaline is dark, and this story is very dark”, begins the story “Turmalin” (1852, revised 1853) by the great prose writer Adalbert Stifter. The porter in a semi-ruinous city mansion dies by falling off a ladder; the neighbours enter the cellar where he has lived, and find it inhabited by a tame jackdaw and a teenage girl with a swollen head and a barely intelligible manner of speaking.

more from the TLS here.

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Translating Apollinaire
bpNichol

Icharrus winging up
Simon the Magician      from Judea    high in a tree,
everyone reaching for the sun

                       great towers of stone
built by the Aztecs, tearing their hearts out
to offer them, wet and beating

                        mountains,
cold wind, Macchu Piccu hiding in the sun
unfound for centuries

cars whizzing by, sun
thru trees passing, a dozen
new wave films, flickering
on drivers’ glasses

flat on their backs in the grass
a dozen bodies slowly turning brown

sun glares off the pages, “soleil
cou coupé”, rolls in my window
flat on my back on the floor
becoming aware of it
for an instant

Nichol’s series: Translating Tranlating Apollinair

//

From Scientific American:

There’s new hope for the more than 7 million American women (and their partners) who long for a child and are plagued by infertility. Australian researchers have developed a method for screening embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) to select the ones that have the best shot of developing into healthy babies. The process, reported in Human Reproduction, utilizes DNA fingerprinting (an assessment of active genes in a given cell) to boost the success rate of IVF and lower the chances of risky multiple births by identifying which of several five-day-old embryos are most likely to result in pregnancy The new method, which will replace unproved alternatives such as choosing embryos based on their shape, is likely to up the success of women becoming pregnant and lower their chances of having multiple births.

In IVF, eggs from a woman are fertilized by male sperm in a Petri dish and allowed to grow for five days until they become blastocysts consisting of about 50 to 65 cells. Because there are currently no precise methods for selecting viable embryos, couples typically choose to implant multiple blastocysts to enhance  their chances of conceiving, which may also result in multiple pregnancies. According to the study, about 42 percent of women who go through in vitro fertilization today become pregnant; of those, 32 percent give birth to twins, triplets or even more babies,  according to the Centers for Prevention and Disease Control.

More here.

From Nature:

The average day of the average sloth isn’t so different from yours or mine, it seems. It goes something like this: 8 a.m.: wake up; 6 p.m.: dinner; 11 p.m.: bed.

Although that schedule doesn’t sound too hectic, it is a lot more activity than was previously expected from sloths. Studies of captive sloths had suggested that the animals slept for almost 16 hours a day. But the first recordings of brain activity from wild animals show that the actual figure is less than 10 hours. “I was astonished — I expected minor differences, but six hours a day is a very big difference,” says the study’s lead author, Niels Rattenborg of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany. The finding shows that the amount that animals sleep in the lab might not reflect how much shut-eye they get in the wild. And it suggests that comparisons of the sleeping patterns of different species need to take into account many different behaviours and environmental factors.

More here.

Damon Linker in TNR:

Who would now deny that the political ascendancy of the religious right has been bad for the United States? Its destructive consequences are plain for all to see. It has polarized the nation. It has injected theological certainties into public life. It has led political leaders to invest their aims and their deeds with metaphysical significance. It has made America a laughingstock in the eyes of the educated of the world. And it has encouraged devout believers to think of themselves as agents of the divine, and their political opponents as enemies of God.

So much for the political damage. What about the consequences for religion itself? The strongest arguments for separating church and state–including the classic ones advanced in the writings of John Locke, accepted by America’s constitutional framers, and codified in the First Amendment–have always emphasized that separation benefits religion as well as politics. The secular political order of the United States not only helps to ensure the perseverance of limited government; it also permits religion to thrive, uncorrupted by political ambition and petty partisanship.

Chartres cathedral is a marvel but also a mystery. Nobody knows who designed it or what they were trying to express. Begun in 1200 and finished in 1226, it was the crowning example of the gothic style and marked, Philip Ball suggests in this lucid and resplendent book, a shift in the way the western world thought about God, the universe and man’s place in it. Romanesque churches with their vast walls and narrow windows had been dark and inward-looking, and signified, he argues, monastic seclusion. Chartres changed all that. Its walls were diaphanous membranes of glass set in cobwebs of stone. On the outside, flying buttresses propped them up to prevent them collapsing under the soaring vaults of the roof. It was “transparent logic”, a celebration of the light of reason, banishing the old gloom, and progressing from an age when God was feared to one where his works could be understood.

That, at any rate, is the theory.

more from the Times Online here.

There’s no excuse for the behavior of Burma’s leaders, but history offers an explanation that goes beyond sheer autocratic barbarism. As friendly as the Burmese can be to Western tourists, they have reason to be suspicious about their neighbors and outside powers — they have been sandwiched between empires in India and China; subjugated and exploited by Great Britain; devastated by Japan (and the Allies) during World War II; and vulnerable in the second half of the 20th century to meddling by Thailand, rogue Chinese nationalists, and other factions and interests. Hand in hand with that xenophobia goes a fierce pride: For much of their history they’ve been not just survivors, but builders of a Burmese empire that, at its zenith in the mid-11th century, controlled a large chunk of mainland Southeast Asia.

Made in Burma, the junta reflects Burmese characteristics that won’t necessarily go away once it’s removed. Consider the junta’s seemingly laughable reliance on omens and lucky numbers to set government policy, whether it involved moving the capital or changing the currency. In July 1947, a few months before independence, Burma’s Cabinet resigned en masse because it discovered that the day when most of its members had taken the oath of office was “inauspicious.”

more from The Atlantic Monthly here.

Nick Harvey in The New Statesman:

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something … transgendered? If you are an Indian in need of some luck on your wedding day you could do no better than seek the blessing of one of the country’s estimated 200,000 male to female transsexuals or “hijras”.

Hijras have a recorded history of more than 4,000 years. Ancient myths bestow them with special powers to bring luck and fertility. Yet despite this supposedly sanctioned place in Indian culture, hijras face severe harassment and discrimination from every direction. Deepa is a 72 year old hijra living in Mumbai: “Nobody says, “I’d love to be a hijra!” Not if they know what happens to us. But what else can we do? A hijra has a man’s body, but the soul is a woman.”

Something, however, is beginning to alter in the traditional Indian mindset as right now there seems to be both subtle and appreciable changes taking place in terms of how this group are being treated and recognised by mainstream society. Over the last few months India has seen its first transgender fashion model, a transgender television presenter and in the recent Bollywood epic Jodhaa Akbar a hijra, instead of hamming up the usual comic role, was portrayed as a trusted lieutenant of the female lead.

Not every literary scholar is so pessimistic, but most would agree that the field’s vital signs are bad, and that major changes will be needed to set things right.

Though the causes of the crisis are multiple and complex, I believe the dominant factor is easily identified: We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.

I think there is a clear solution to this problem. Literary studies should become more like the sciences.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

John Perry elaborates:

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

[H/t: Lindsay Beyerstein]

Via Crooked Timber, Raymond Geuss remembers Richard Rorty, in Arion:

When I arrived in Princeton during the 1970s my addiction to tea was already long-standing and very well entrenched, but I was so concerned about the quality of the water in town that I used to buy large containers of allegedly “pure” water at Davidson’s—the local supermarket, which seems now to have gone out of business. I didn’t, of course, have a car, and given the amount of tea I consumed, the transport of adequate supplies of water was a highly labor-intense and inconvenient matter. Dick and Mary Rorty must have noticed me lugging canisters of water home, because, with characteristic generosity, they developed the habit of calling around at my rooms in 120 Prospect, often on Sunday mornings, offering to take me by car to fill my water-bottles at a hugely primitive and highly suspicious-looking outdoor water-tap on the side of a pumphouse which was operated by the Elizabethtown Water Company on a piece of waste land near the Institute Woods. This pumphouse with its copiously dripping tap was like something out of Tarkhovski’s film about Russia after a nuclear accident, Stalker, and the surrounding area was a place so sinister one half expected to be attacked by packs of dogs in the final stages of radiation sickness or by troops of feral children who had been left by their parents to fend for themselves while the parents went off to the library to finish their dissertations. On one of those Sunday mornings in that insalubrious, but somehow appropriate, landscape, Dick happened to mention that he had just finished reading Gadamer’s Truth and Method. My heart sank at this news because the way he reported it seemed to me to indicate, correctly as it turned out, that he had been positively impressed by this book. I had a premonition, which also turned out to be correct, that it would not be possible for me to disabuse him of his admiration for the work of a man, whom I knew rather well as a former colleague at Heidelberg and whom I held to be a reactionary, distended wind-bag.

From The Telegraph:

The story is Miracle at St Anna, drawn from the novel of the same name by American author James McBride. Recounting the deeds of four “Buffalo Soldiers” from the US Army’s Negro 92nd Division, who are trapped behind enemy lines in Tuscany, the book is like a Roman mosaic, piecing together different narratives to reveal the complex moral landscape of war. Lee is using native actors, speaking their native tongues, and in the scene we have just witnessed English, German and Italian rattled around the room. Of the American actors, the best known is Derek Luke, who was excellent in Phillip Noyce’s apartheid film Catch a Fire and also starred in Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs.

At first glance, a war film might seem an unusual departure for Lee. The 57-year-old director has tackled a number of genres in his 20-year career, but he forged his reputation by tackling issues – many of them controversial – that affected modern-day African-American communities. With films such as School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever and Clockers, he studied conflict within the black community, interracial tension, interracial sex and the horrors of the drug trade. “Actually, people don’t realise that it was the return of the black soldiers from the Second World War that laid the foundations for the civil rights movement,” he says. “There was a new militancy happening, and at the various training bases around the country you had violent outbreaks. And these negro soldiers had guns, too, so they weren’t going to take too much!”

More here.

From Scientific American:

For a long time, scientists certainly expected the anatomical differences among animals to be reflected in clear differences among the contents of their genomes. When we compare mammalian genomes such as those of the mouse, rat, dog, human and chimpanzee, however, we see that their respective gene catalogues are remarkably similar. The approximate number of genes in each animal’s genome (about 20,000 or so) and the relative positions of many genes have been fairly well maintained over 100 million years of evolution. That is not to say there are no differences in gene number and location. But at first glance, nothing in these gene inventories shouts out “mouse” or “dog” or “human.” When comparing mouse and human genome, for example, biologists are able to identify a mouse counterpart for at least 99 percent of all our genes.

In other words, we humans do not, as some once assumed, have more genes than our pets, pests, livestock or even a puffer fish. Disappointing, perhaps, but we’ll have to get over it. If humans want to understand what distinguishes animals, including ourselves, from one another, we have to look beyond genes.

More here.

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The Mushroom
Robert Bly

This white mushroom comes up through the duffy
lith on a granite cliff, in a crack that ice has widened.
The most delicate light tan, it has the texture of a rubber
ball left in the sun too long. To the fingers it feels a
little like the tough heel of a foot.

One split has gone deep into it, dividing it into two
half-spheres, and through the cut one can peek inside,
where the flesh is white and gently naive.

The mushroom has a traveller’s face. We know there
are men and women in Old People’s Homes whose souls
prepare now for a trip, which will also be a marriage.
There must be travellers all around us supporting us whom
we do not recognize. This granite cliff also travels. Do we
know more about our wife’s journey or our dearest friends’
than the journey of this rock? Can we be sure which
traveller will arrive first, or when the wedding will be?
Everything is passing away except the day of this wedding.

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For those of you who haven’t notice, fafblog, perhaps the greatest blog in the history of the blogosphere, returned on April 1st after a long hiatus. Fafnir:

FAFBLOG: Wow, Hillary Clinton, right here on our little blog! Well, we don’t want to waste your time so let’s cut to the chase! Why should we vote for you for president?
HILLARY CLINTON: One word, Fafnir: experience. I have thirty-five years of experience working for change, building a list of accomplishments so lengthy and impressive no one else even knows what they are. Why, I could go on for hours just about the policies I advanced as First Lady, from critical legislation like the Mumble-Something Act to my efforts to bring peace to the troubled region of Upper McDonaldland.
FB: And millions of Americans still enjoy the benefits of your successful health care plan in some distant parallel universe!
CLINTON: That’s right, Fafnir. No one has more experience failing to fix health care than me. I worked in the White House for eight years failing to fix health care, and as president I’ll make failing to fix health care my number one priority.
FB: Well that sounds pretty good, Hillary Clinton, but what if I wanna vote for someone with even more experience, like John McCain or Zombie Strom Thurmond or Andrew Jackson’s collection of antique spittoons? Those spittoons have been in the White House for a long time an I hear they got a formidable command of foreign policy.
CLINTON: Ha haaa! Well you know, anyone off the street with a scary black pastor can talk about change, but it takes a fighter to fight for change. And I’m a fighter. I’m tough. And if you lived my life you’d be pretty darn tough too. I mean, I had to go to Wellesley. That was my safety school. But I was strong anyway and I endured. And as president I’ll fight the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry and the health care industry, just as soon as they stop giving me millions of dollars!
FB: That’s that no-nonsense down-to-business style I like about you, Hillary Clinton! You don’t just talk about change. You talk about how much you don’t just talk about change!

Over at Cosmos, Robin McKie looks at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor:

Recreating the fusion process clearly offers great rewards, but it is not an easy task – to say the least. In particular, the business of containing a cloud of plasma that has been heated to around 100 million degrees Celsius has taxed the imaginations of a great many scientists. You can’t hold super-hot matter in an old bathtub, after all. In the end, it took the ingenuity of Russian scientists Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov, working at Moscow’s Kurchatov Institute in the late 1950s, to come up with the answer: the tokamak.

The key feature of a tokamak is its central chamber which is shaped like a giant, hollow doughnut or torus, and which gives the device its name. Abbreviating the Russian ‘TOroidalnaya KAmera v MAgnitnykh Katushkakh’ results in ‘tokamak’, or its similar English equivalent, TOroidal CHAmber in MAgnetic Coils (tochamac). Powerful electric currents are passed through coils that wind round the doughnut-shaped chamber and through the plasma inside it, creating a twisting magnetic field that holds the super-hot plasma in a tight, invisible grip.

However, massive amounts of electricity are needed to create this unseen container, and to date, far more energy has been spent powering-up tokamaks than has been released through the resulting fusion of atoms. For example, JET soaks up 25 megawatts of electrical power to generate only 16 megawatts of fusion power. However, ITER – which will be the biggest tokamak reactor ever built when completed – is scheduled to have an output of 500 megawatts for an input of only 50 megawatts of electricity.

Barbara Ehrenreich in The Nation:

A mere decade ago Francis Fukuyama fretted in Foreign Affairs that the world was too dangerous for the West to be entrusted to graying female leaders, whose aversion to violence was, as he established with numerous examples from chimpanzee society, “rooted in biology.” The counter-example of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the first of head of state to start a war for the sole purpose of pumping up her approval ratings, led him to concede that “biology is not destiny.” But it was still a good reason to vote for a prehistoric-style club-wielding male.

Not to worry though, Francis. Far from being the stereotypical feminist-pacifist of your imagination, the woman to get closest to the Oval Office has promised to “obliterate” the toddlers of Tehran–along, of course, with the bomb-builders and Hezbollah supporters. Earlier on, Clinton foreswore even talking to presumptive bad guys, although women are supposed to be the talk addicts of the species. Watch out–was her distinctly unladylike message to Hugo Chávez, Kim Jong-Il and the rest of them–or I’ll rip you a new one.

There’s a reason it’s been so easy for men to overlook women’s capacity for aggression. As every student of Women’s Studies 101 knows, what’s called aggression in men is usually trivialized as “bitchiness” in women: men get angry; women suffer from bouts of inexplicable, hormonally-driven, hostility. So give Clinton credit for defying the belittling stereotype: she’s been visibly angry for months, if not decades, and it can’t all have been PMS.

But did we really need another lesson in the female capacity for ruthless aggression?

In the NYT:

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

Via Cosmic Variance, over at UC Riverside (also see here):

Imagine owning an automobile that can change its engine to suit your driving needs – when you’re tooling about town, it works like a super-fast sports car; when you’re hauling a heavy load, it operates like a strong, durable truck engine. While this turn-on-a-dime flexibility is impossible for cars to achieve, it is now possible for today’s computer chips.

A new, patent-pending technology developed over the last five years by UCR’s Frank Vahid, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, called “Warp processing” gives a computer chip the ability to improve its performance over time. The benefits of Warp processing are just being discovered by the computing industry. A range of companies including IBM, Intel and Motorola’s Freescale have already pursued licenses for the technology through UCR’s funding source, the Semiconductor Research Corporation.

Here’s how Warp processing works: When a program first runs on a microprocessor chip (such as a Pentium), the chip monitors the program to detect its most frequently-executed parts. The microprocessor then automatically tries to move those parts to a special kind of chip called a field-programmable gate array, or FPGA. “An FPGA can execute some (but not all) programs much faster than a microprocessor – 10 times, 100 times, even 1,000 times faster,” explains Vahid.