On January 23, 1895, after the withdrawal of his Guy Domville to make way for a new play by Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Henry James seemed to be determined that his failure in public would result in the creation of immortal work. He confided to his notebook: “I take up my old pen again––the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself––today––I need say no more. Large & full & high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.”
In The Mature Master, the second volume of his biography of James––the first, The Young Master, appeared in 1996––Sheldon M. Novick notes what happened next in James’s notebooks. After a gap marked by a set of x’s, James wrote: “I have only to face my problems.” Then, after more x’s, he added: “But all that is of the ineffable—too deep and pure for any utterance. Shrouded in sacred silence let it rest.” Then more x’s. What could James possibly have meant here?
more from Bookforum here.
It is a year since the death of my friend Alexander Litvinenko, a year since I sat at his bedside as his condition deteriorated rapidly under the affects of the Polonium contaminating his body.
His death was devastating for his family, not least his wife Marina and father Walter who have campaigned fearlessly for his killers to be brought to justice.
Perhaps unsurprisingly the appalling personal consequences of Sasha’s death for his wife and young son in London have been lost in the ensuing narrative invoking the intrigue and espionage of a modern day spy-thriller.
more from The New Statesman here.
The young marine lit a cigarette and let it dangle. White smoke wafted around his helmet. His face was smeared with war paint. Blood trickled from his right ear and the bridge of his nose. Momentarily deafened by cannon blasts, he didn’t know the shooting had stopped. He stared at the sunrise. His expression caught my eye. To me, it said terrified, exhausted and glad just to be alive. I recognised that look because that’s how I felt too. I raised my camera and snapped a few shots.
With the click of a shutter, Marine Lance Corporal James Blake Miller, a country boy from Kentucky, became an emblem of the war in Iraq. The image would change two lives – his and mine.
more from The Observer Review here.
Robert Zemeckis uses performance capture – where movements in three dimensions are captured through digital sensors on a body-suit worn by the actor and reworked on computer; a technique familiar from Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The effect is more natural than CGI – though the characters’ eyes remain rather glassy – and it retains the likeness of the actor, while permitting considerable enhancement or uglification. Ray Winstone (Beowulf) loses twenty-five years in the first half of the film, and gains a superbly sculpted body. Sir Anthony Hopkins as Hrothgar becomes a paunchy, debauched Welsh sot, and Angelina Jolie, a surprise casting for Grendel’s Mother, is a slinky seductress whose other-worldly curves exploit the lust for sex and power in generations of local kings. The writers have taken considerable liberties with both plot and characterization: Hrothgar presides over a Heorot reminiscent of a rugby club in the heart of the Valleys (it takes about a minute and a half for the first ripe belch of the film to be heard); Wiglaf is Beowulf’s faithful right-hand man throughout, rather than his youthful companion in the final battle, and is consequently rather grizzled when his turn for kingship comes. Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy in the noisy, action-packed spectacular effects of the fights. Grendel in particular, half-foetus, half-corpse with the flayed skin of a Gunther von Hagen figure, is both grotesquely terrifying and pitiable; the fear evoked in the poem when the monster realizes that he has met his match, and his miserable death in the mere are brilliantly realized. The dragon, too, has a splendid golden hide, as if crusted with lumps of ore, while the Scandinavian skaldic term for gold as “fire in the water” underlies the aesthetic of the haunted mere where Grendel and his mother live.
more from the TLS here.
From the Aperture Foundation:
Over the past eight years, photographer Justin Guariglia has slowly but surely won the trust of the notoriously secretive warrior monks of the Shaolin Temple, a unique Chinese Buddhist sect dedicated to preserving a form of kung fu referred to as the “vehicle of Zen.” With the blessing of the main abbot, Shi Yong Xin, Guariglia has earned the full collaboration of the monks to create an astonishing, empathic record of the Shaolin art forms and the individuals who consider themselves the keepers of these traditions. It is the first time the monks have allowed such extensive documentation of these masters and their centuries-old art forms—from Buddhist mudras to classical kung fu—in their original setting, a 1,500-year-old Buddhist temple.
More here. [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]
From BBC News:
Scans reveal that being paid more than a co-worker stimulates the “reward centre” in the male brain. Traditional economic theory assumes the only important factor is the absolute size of the reward. But researchers in the journal Science have shown the relative size of one’s earnings play a major role. In the study, 38 pairs of male volunteers were asked to perform the same simple task simultaneously, and promised payment for success. Both “players” were asked to estimate the number of dots appearing on a screen. Providing the right answer earned a real financial reward between 30 (£22) and 120 (£86) euros. Each of the participants was told how their partners had performed and how much they were paid.
Using magnetic resonance tomographs, the researchers examined the volunteers’ blood circulation throughout the activities. High blood flow indicated that the nerve cells in the respective part of the brain were particularly active. A wrong answer, and no payment, resulted in a reduction in blood flow to the “reward region”. But the area “lit up” when volunteers earned money, and interestingly showed far more activity if a player received more than his partner. This indicated that stimulation of the reward centre was not merely linked to individual success, but to the success of others.
More here.
From The New York Review of Books:
Bissell begins The Father of All Things with an epigraph from Exodus:
The waters returned and covered the chariots and the chariot drivers, the whole army of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea; not one of them remained.
The moral of this verse (echoing the title of Tobias Wolff’s great war memoir (In Pharaoh’s Army) is that nobody completely returns from a war, especially a lost one. Bissell goes on to show how the whirlwind of Vietnam separated its combatants from the reasonable expectations of human experience. At a later point he invokes the words of the writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, who knew quite a bit about wars:
A person who has lived through a great war is different from a person who never lived through any war. They are two different species of human beings. They will never find a common language, because you cannot really describe the war, you cannot share it, you cannot tell someone: Here, take a little bit of my war.
Bissell begins his story by reconstructing the April day in 1975 when Saigon fell to the Communists as it was experienced by his father in the family home in Escanaba, Michigan. He himself was only one year old at the time but he has learned enough since to try to reconstruct what happened, while admitting that he has had to imagine parts of the story. Former Marine John Bissell has become a banker in Escanaba with a troubled family life and something like a weakness for the bottle. He gets drunk on the day of the fall of Saigon and speaks on the phone with some of the men he fought beside in Vietnam. Many years later father and son travel to the scenes of John Bissell’s recollections. In the company of a moody Vietnamese guide and a driver they travel around the country, seeing Danang, Nha Trang, and the Citadel at Hue among other places that figure in the history of the Marine Corps’ Vietnam deployment. Tom Bissell evokes the two men’s contemporary adventures with some memorable descriptions—frequently all the more powerful because they confront the limits of description.
More here.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
From The Economist:
Three decades of effort have been expended on string theory, which includes gravity but at the expense of having the universe inelegantly sprout hidden dimensions. Other potential avenues, such as loop quantum gravity, are also proving untidy. That a theory of everything might emerge from geometry would be neat, but it is a long shot.
Nevertheless, that is what Garrett Lisi is proposing. The geometry he has been studying is that of a structure known to mathematicians as E8, which was first recognised in 1887 by Sophus Lie, a Norwegian mathematician. E8 is a monster. It has 248 dimensions and its structure took 120 years to solve. It was finally tamed earlier this year, when a group of mathematicians managed to construct a map that describes it completely.
Dr Lisi had been tinkering with some smaller geometries. Soon after reading about this map, however, he realised that the structure of E8 could be used to describe fully the laws of physics. He placed a particle (including different versions of the same entities, and using particles that describe matter and those that describe forces) on most of the 248 points of E8. Using computer simulations to manipulate the structure, he was able mathematically to generate interactions that correspond to what is seen in reality.
More here.
From CBC News:
“Infants prefer an individual who helps another to one who hinders another, prefer a helping individual to a neutral individual, and prefer a neutral individual to a hindering individual,” the Yale University psychology researchers report in the edition of Nature to be published Thursday.
“The findings reported here constitute the first evidence that young infants’ social preferences are influenced by others’ behaviour towards unrelated third parties,” they say. The findings show humans make social evaluations at a much younger age than previously thought.
Kiley Hamlin and colleagues tested groups of babies, either six or 10 months old, to see how they evaluated individuals based on how the individuals acted toward others.
More here.
Speaking of populism, Abbas Milani looks at Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in the Boston Review:
The regime in Iran today is deeply divided, and tensions between different factions have recently intensified. Moreover, of the two-dozen clerics who have dominated Iranian politics since the 1979 revolution, the youngest are septuagenarians. The “spiritual leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, is known to suffer from cancer, and there is no clear heir apparent to his mantle. Many of the younger clerics in Iran, particularly among the advocates of Ayatollah Sistani’s quietist version of Shi’ism, have been more openly critical of the regime’s interpretation of Shi’ism. According to the quietist school, an Islamic government is a government of god on earth; obeying its words and commands is incumbent on all citizens and leaves no room for error. Until the “return” of the twelfth Imam, then, no such government can be created. In the meantime, according to Ayatollah Sistani and others in this school, the duty of the clergy is simply to supervise the moral life of the flock. This view is in direct conflict with Ayatollah Khomeini’s activist version of Shi’ism, which holds that the clergy can and must seize power any time the opportunity avails itself.
An even larger number of those working with the regime, particularly among the thousands of often-Western-educated mid-level managers, are increasingly aware that the status quo is untenable. As the economy continues to falter, and as radicals like Ahmadinejad seek more stringent enforcement of Islamic laws—by, for example, charging more than 160,000 women in the past two months of being insufficiently veiled—it is easy to imagine the emergence of a grand coalition, consisting of technocrats within and outside the regime, disgruntled reformists, quietist clerics, members of the Iranian private sector, women demanding equality, students, democratic parties, and labor unions, all willing to compromise in favor of a better society. That coalition, joined by Iran’s civil society organizations and even members of the Diaspora, could come together on a program of building a more democratic republic, free of the despotic power of the guardian-jurist. Prudent U.S. policy—principled, unconditional negotiations with the regime in Tehran on all outstanding issues, and continuing insistence on the democratic and human rights of the Iranian people—can help expedite the formation of such a coalition.
“A spectre is haunting the world: populism. A decade ago, when the new nations were emerging into independence, the question asked was: how many will go Communist? Today, this question, so plausible then, sounds a little out of date. In as far as the rulers of the new states embrace an ideology, it tends more to have a populist character.”[1] This observation was made by Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner forty years ago. A period of time long enough for “populism” first to disappear and then to re-emerge as the global phenomenon it is today. Now, like then, the significance of populism cannot be doubted, though now, like then, it is unclear just what populism is.
On the one hand, the concept of “populism” goes back to the American farmers’ protest movement at the end of the nineteenth century; on the other, to Russia’s narodniki around the same period.
more from Eurozine here.
Scott Atran at Edge:
More here.
Between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Ted Hughes did his National Service in the RAF. Writing from RAF West Kirby, in the Wirral, to a friend, Edna Wholey, in 1949 – characteristically there is no date on the letter – he exults in the wild weather:
Edna, I’ve seen rain and I tell you this isn’t rain, – a steady river, well laced with ice, tempest and thunder, covers all this land, and what isn’t concrete has reverted to original chaos of mud water fire and air. Morning and evening its one soak and the sun’s more or less a sponge, and lately comes up frozen quite stiff.
This love of chaos, motion, process, which is the energy of his best poems, and often makes them resemble action paintings, is brought to a halt by the strong stresses on the last three words so that the stretched perception is completed.
more from the LRB here.
Crime fiction flourishes in hard times. The fiction reflects the times, and the times color the fiction. There is a rawness in the pulp stories, even those by “literary” writers such as Chandler and Hammett, that is not due entirely to the exigencies of the marketplace. At their best, and even, perhaps, at their worst, these yarns express something of the unforgiving harshness and dauntless optimism of life in America in the decades between the wars. Of course, the plots are almost uniformly absurd. As Penzler writes:
It was a black-and-white world in the pulps, a simple conflict between the forces of goodness and virtue and those who sought to plunder, harm, and kill the innocent. In the pages of the pulps, and between the covers of this book, Good is triumphant over Evil. Perhaps that is the key to the enormous popularity they enjoyed for so many years.
Who can wonder at such popularity, given the low, dishonest decades in which the pulps sold by the millions?
more from Bookforum here.
From Edge:
While conventional wisdom tells us that things are bad and getting worse, scientists and the science-minded among us see good news in the coming years. That’s the bottom line of an outburst of high-powered optimism gathered from the world-class scientists and thinkers who frequent the pages of Edge, in an ongoing conversation among third culture thinkers (i.e., those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.)
What Are You Optimistic About? Why?
Richard Dawkins:
I am optimistic that the physicists of our species will complete Einstein’s dream and discover the final theory of everything before superior creatures, evolved on another world, make contact and tell us the answer. I am optimistic that, although the theory of everything will bring fundamental physics to a convincing closure, the enterprise of physics itself will continue to flourish, just as biology went on growing after Darwin solved its deep problem. I am optimistic that the two theories together will furnish a totally satisfying naturalistic explanation for the existence of the universe and everything that’s in it including ourselves. And I am optimistic that this final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue deathblow to religion and other juvenile superstitions.
More here.
From The Guardian:
On the morning of March 11 2004, as thousands of commuters made their way to work, 10 bombs packed with nails and dynamite exploded on four trains heading into central Madrid. The blasts killed 191 people and injured nearly 1,800. It was the worst Islamist terrorist attack in European history. Clara Escribano, who was travelling to work when her train was torn apart in one of the attacks, still lives with the memory. “I have a film of that day constantly playing in my head,” she said. “I still haven’t been able to get on a train. In fact, I cannot even walk on the same side of the road as the station where I got on the train.”
The events of 11-M, as the attacks are known in Spain, initially divided the country along political lines. The bombings were carried out just three days before a general election, which saw the incumbent conservative Popular party (PP) of José María Aznar defeated by the Socialist PSOE led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. From the moment the attacks took place, the PP argued that they were the work of the Basque separatist group Eta; Mr Aznar went so far as to phone national newspaper editors, assuring them this was the case. Despite evidence soon emerging of a van containing detonators linked to the attacks and a recording of verses from the Qur’an, the PP stuck to its line.
More here.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Saul Smilansky, author of 10 Moral Paradoxes, over at Ethics Etc.:
While each of the questions of my four previous posts in this series could be answered fairly decisively, this question is naturally more open. So I will be able to give only some indication as to why moral paradoxes matter, and why investigating them further should be worthwhile. But there is another reason why it is difficult to speak here with confidence: moral paradoxes, in the strict sense (as we explicated their nature in the first post) have been almost completely neglected. To the best of my knowledge, my recent book 10 MORAL PARADOXES is only the third book ever on this topic, at least within analytic philosophy (the predecessors, in a broad sense, being Derek Parfit’s REASONS AND PERSONS which introduces various paradoxes, and the late Gregory Kavka’s MORAL PARADOXES OF NUCLEAR DETERRENCE; both of them from the 1980s).
The neglect of moral paradoxes is important, and seeing this will at once give us the first reply as to what moral paradoxes might be able to teach us. The importance of paradoxes in other areas of philosophy (epistemology, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of science and so on) is manifest, with hundreds of books and papers available and more coming out all the time. While there are many survey articles, special journal issues, and numerous collections of papers devoted to paradox in these areas, and indeed often to some individual paradoxes, there is nothing similar concerning moral paradoxes. So something very ODD is going on here: either moral paradoxes are just as important within morality as logical or epistemic paradoxes are to philosophical logic and epistemology – in which case, the neglect of moral paradoxes is outrageous.
Tony Judt in the NYRB:
We live in an economic age. For two centuries following the French Revolution, Western political life was dominated by a struggle pitting left against right: “progressives”—whether liberal or socialist—against their conservative opponents. Until recently these ideological frames of reference were still very much alive and determined the rhetoric if not the reality of public choice. But in the course of the past generation the terms of political exchange have altered beyond recognition. Whatever remained of the reassuring fatalism of the old left narrative —the inspiring conviction that “History” was on your side—was buried after 1989 along with “real existing socialism.” The traditional political right suffered a related fate. From the 1830s through the 1970s, to be on the right meant opposing the left’s account of inevitable change and progress: “conservatives” conserved, “reactionaries” reacted. They were “counterrevolutionary.” Hitherto energized by its rejection of now-defunct progressive convictions, the political right today has also lost its bearings.
The new master narrative—the way we think of our world—has abandoned the social for the economic. It presumes an “integrated system of global capitalism,” economic growth, and productivity rather than class struggles, revolutions, and progress. Like its nineteenth-century predecessors, this story combines a claim about im-provement (“growth is good”) with an assumption about inevitability: globalization—or, for Robert Reich, “supercapitalism”—is a natural process, not a product of arbitrary human decisions. Where yesterday’s theorists of revolution rested their worldview upon the inevitability of radical social upheaval, today’s apostles of growth invoke the analogously ineluctable dynamic of global economic competition. Common to both is the confident identification of necessity in the present course of events. We are immured, in Emma Rothschild’s words, in an uncontested “society of universal commerce.” Or as Margaret Thatcher once summarized it: There Is No Alternative.
Katha Pollitt in The Nation:
[O]nce a devout Muslim, now an atheist and feminist firebrand, Hirsi Ali brooks no compromise with religion, religious-based customs or the notion of a community organized around religious identity. “Enlightenment fundamentalist” is a rather unfair term, actually: isn’t the whole point of the Enlightenment to rely on reason and empiricism, not, like fundamentalists, the revealed truth of a sacred text? As I said in my last column, I admire Hirsi Ali, despite her conservative associations (she’s a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute) and lone-wolf style. Not every feminist has to be a social worker or a grassroots organizer. I’ll bet plenty of women, Muslim and not, have been given courage by her books and example. Just to speak out is a feminist act. Still, it’s probably the case that once you’ve described yourself as a nonbeliever, believers aren’t going to take your view of their faith too seriously: you’ve written yourself out of the story. This would be true even if you had an encyclopedic grasp of your religion, which Hirsi Ali does not.
Because he wants to see Muslim immigrants well integrated in a Europe that currently marginalizes them, [Ian] Buruma is interested in world-famous philosopher Tariq Ramadan, who says he wants to create a modern Islam, an Islam for Muslims in the West, an Islam that would provide an alternative to the jihadist fire-breathers attractive to the disaffected young. For his profile of Ramadan in The New York Times Magazine, Buruma was attacked at tremendous length and with staggering ferocity in The New Republic by Paul Berman, who thinks Ramadan is a dangerous apologist if not a covert jihadist. Certainly (as Buruma would agree) Ramadan is no friend of women’s rights. One of the more troubling charges against him is that he has called for a moratorium on stoning of unchaste women–not a ban. Ramadan justified his wording by arguing that Muslims wouldn’t accept a total ban. But somehow one expects a bit more leadership from the man who wants to guide millions of European Muslims–who don’t, after all, practice stoning. Buruma himself famously described Ramadan as a cultural conservative, the Muslim equivalent of Jerry Falwell on social issues. Beside the important question of whether Falwellian values are a good thing, there’s also the question of whether they make for the peaceful civic relations Buruma wants.
