The rioting in Budapest in October 2006 following Ferenc Gyurscány’s “lying speech” woke up the outside world to the existence of deep divisions in Hungarian society. At first, the international press was only to happy to see the “parallel” between the demonstrations and the 1956 revolution, a version of events put forward by the demonstrators themselves. Later, when it emerged that many belonged to the far-Right, there was a shrill cry of disapproval, then attention moved elsewhere. But a new controversy around a monument to the ’56 revolution shows that political antagonism in Hungary, played out via historical symbols, shows no sign of abating. If commentators in Hungary are talking about a “civil war mentality” in the country, then that is something Europe needs to understand better. Eurozine asks Hungarian journalists, authors, and publishers how it has come to this.

more from Eurozine here.

Clad in milquetoast shirtsleeves, combat-style Bermudas, and the unshowered film of day-old hangovers, the young men go about their Hollywood business with the same haughty unconcern that pervades their overslept lives. These are the new crusaders of cool. They are perpetually late to meet with representation, to accept graft, to sign hedge-fund-sized checks, and to slip into bed with stargazing young actresses. They are late to everything except success, their laissez-faire nonchalance a testament to the fuck-off patois of a generation. These insolent pop pilgrims provide a window into the machismo-fueled fantasy world of meteoric laziness. They are a scruffy gaggle of would-be pizza boys reluctantly poised to plant their half-finished Betsy Ross into the terra firma of the aught decade.

more from McSweeney’s here.

From The London Times:

Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy was considered by T. S. Eliot to be “the highest point that poetry has ever reached or ever can reach”. While in his A Defence of Poetry Shelley declared: “Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a language in itself music and persuasion out of chaos of inharmonious barbarisms . . . he presided over the resurrection of learning.”

But such plaudits were not always forthcoming. For years Dante was largely unknown to English audiences. Certainly there are references to him in Chaucer, who had learnt of “the greate poete of Ytallie” on diplomatic missions to Italy in the 1370s. But English readers did not have much stomach for his ghastly tales of journeys through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. “Good sire, namoor of this!” cried Chaucer’s knight after the monk had shared some of Dante’s more gut-churning travails with his fellow pilgrims. So for the next 400 years Dante was hardly known except by the few who saw his fresco in the Duomo in Florence while travelling Europe.

How, then, did this 14th-century Florentine poet come to have such an influence on later generations of artists and poets, particularly the Romantics and the PreRaphaelites?

More here.  Note: This post is dedicated to my daughter Sheherzad Raza Preisler who memorized the entire 146 lines of the XXXIII Canto from Dante’s Paradiso when she was not quite 9 years old.

Haider Rizvi at OneWorld:

NEW YORK, Aug 31 (OneWorld) – It is one of the most affluent countries in the world, but sill millions of people in the United States find it very difficult to put a nice meal on their dinner table. Nationwide, more than 36 million people, or nearly 13 percent of the total population, lived in poverty last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau report released this week.
Among those officially considered “poor,” over one third are children, most of them non-white minorities such as African Americans, Latinos, and Asians.

The data reveals continued inequality and concentration of wealth in the United States, with the top 20 percent of households receiving over 50 percent of the nation’s income, while the lowest 20 percent got just a little over 3 percent.

“The impact of race, ethnicity, and gender is extremely disturbing,” notes Roberta Spivek of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization involved in numerous campaigns for economic and social rights.

According to the data, more than 8 percent of non-Hispanic whites, about 10 percent of Asians, over 20 percent of Hispanics, and some 24 percent of African Americans are “poor.”

Although the Hispanic poverty rate went down by about 1 percent last year, African Americans and non-White Hispanics are still about three times more likely than whites to be poor.

Single mothers figure among the nation’s poor who suffer the most. “Being a single mother has an alarming effect,” Spivek noted, reflecting on the gender-specific aspect of the numbers.

More here.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

Twelve-thirty on a beautiful summer day, and the chicken committee Garden of Happinessof the City Chicken Project is meeting at the Garden of Happiness, in the Crotona neighborhood of the Bronx. The chicken committee is devoted to the proliferation of egg-laying chickens in the outer boroughs, giving hens to people and having them raise the birds in community gardens and eat and even sell the eggs (“passing on the gift,” as this is called in the project), and thereby gain experience of chicken, eggs, and community—or fowl, food, and fellowship, as one of the more alliterative-minded organizers has said. It is the pet program of Just Food, a small organization that is administered by a startlingly young-looking woman named Jacquie Berger, who is silently monitoring the proceedings.

The Garden of Happiness is a sunny community garden with vegetable plots, a chicken coop, a corrugated-tin shed, and a few chairs beneath a grape arbor, where the chicken committee is meeting. The chicken committee is a lot more committee than chicken, its deliberations filled with references to “existing chicken situations” and “pursuit of newer egg opportunities,” and the slightly skeptical neighborhood people have to be gently won over by the carefully beaming professionals. They provide the nudging, let’s-get-back-on-track counsel that chicken-caring community organizers have to give potentially disorganized community chicken-carers.

More here.

Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

Among many metrics available to track the skeptical movement is the ascension of four books to the august heights of the New York Times best-seller list—Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (Viking, 2006), Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great (Hachette Book Group, 2007) and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)—that together, in Dawkins’s always poignant prose, “raise consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one. You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral and intellectually fulfilled.” Amen, brother. I suggest that we raise our consciousness one tier higher for the following reasons.

Positive assertions are necessary. Champion science and reason, as Charles Darwin suggested: “It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follow[s] from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science.”

More here.

From the Royal Academy of Arts magazine:

On Good Friday this year, in the company of a small group of travellers, I went to visit a warehouse on an industrial estate in Bridlington, East Yorkshire. The object of our pilgrimage was not this nondescript structure but the painting that it briefly sheltered. There, on the far wall, hung the largest picture that David Hockney RA has ever created – perhaps the most sizeable ever to be painted in the open air. This was a first for the artist, who had never before seen his entire work assembled together.

The subject of the Big Picture is one of several spots in the landscape west of Bridlington where he has been working. It consists principally of an immense net of interconnecting twigs and branches. That is what Hockney was gazing at so hard, as he contends it is only by looking very long and hard that you begin to understand what you are seeing. ‘A picture this size just has to be of certain kinds of subject. Nature is one, because there is an infinity there that we all feel.’

More here.

It is said that in his latter years A L Rowse used to enter the Common Room at All Souls with the self-trumpeting assertion, ‘You’re all fools, and I am not.’ Like Rowse, Germaine Greer was a first-class Elizabethan scholar in her youth. But in this bold ‘late’ study she adopts an alarmingly similar tone. Rowse himself is excoriated for having ‘the temerity to exercise his imagination’, even though this is something that Greer has the temerity to do at all times. Scattergun assaults on shadow-squadrons of other scholars – sometimes named (‘the likes of Anthony Holden’, ‘Burgess and most of his ilk’, ‘Greenblatt and his ilk’) and sometimes unnamed (‘bachelor dons’, ‘those nineteenth-century schoolmasters’, ‘the Shakespeare wallahs’) – explode violently like Tourette tics. At times Greer seems almost to wallow in her own spleen.

more from Literary Review here.

I’ve been sitting at the dinner table in Jack Mapanje’s lounge for more than an hour. The mug of tea his wife brought in is cold, the plate of biscuits half gone, but my list of questions is growing rather than shrinking. I explain that we’ll have to stop for a moment while I change over the tape recorder, and the exiled Malawian poet throws his head back and lets out a booming laugh. “It’s very boring to answer yes or no,” he says.

There’s been little as straightforward as that so far today. A conversation with Mapanje loops around like one of the poems from his Forward-prize-nominated collection, Beasts of Nalunga, full of colourful stories, brisk changes of tone, and laughter. Every now and then he picks up a book from the table in front of him to refer back to one of his poems. “I think I put it better here,” he says, peering through glasses perched on the end of his nose as he searches for the required passage.

more from The Guardian here.

My zealously churlish response: At the acme of his celebrity, I thought Kerouac a purveyor of frenzied fakery, of pseudo-mystical junk; and I do not depart now from the intelligent judgment of my youth. Nowadays, “On the Road” can perhaps count as a document of a sentimental overwrought underdone subliterate zonked-out shamanistic onanistic fool-ridden era, when saccharine blockheads posed as transcendent Blake-heads, when stupor was mistaken for Buddha . . . . but what the hell, let it count for any old thing! — as long as you don’t call it literature.

— Cynthia Ozick

more from The LA Times here.

From Science:

There’s no news like bad news. The tabloids are full of accidents, gory murders, and mayhem, and people eat it up. But there may be a silver lining, at least for seniors. A new study finds that the human brain reacts less strongly to emotionally negative stimuli as we age, in effect making us more responsive to all things positive and less responsive to the dark and dismal. This bolsters a growing body of evidence showing that aging changes how the brain reacts to emotional stimuli.

Much of the media exploits what psychologists call the “negativity bias”: our tendency to pay more attention to the bad than to the good. This bias plays a role in a wide range of cognitive areas, making a headline about a murder more attention grabbing than one about a marriage, for example. However, in recent years, research has revealed that as we get older our emotional responses to the world around us become more positive and that the stereotype of the “grumpy old man” may actually be a myth. A number of studies have found that older people typically report a higher sense of well-being than younger people.

More here.

Jim Lewis in The New York Times:

Good morning and please listen to me: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and “Tree of Smoke” is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop.

“Tree of Smoke” doesn’t feel like a Denis Johnson novel, not at first, anyway. He has a fondness for the oracular mode, and he often pitches his rhetoric in a register unavailable to most contemporary writers: Isaiah among the lumpenproletariat. It’s his natural form of address, but it can sometimes be exhausting. An earlier novel, “Already Dead” (1997), started out wild and ended, 435 pages later, unhinged. “Tree of Smoke” is cannier: it begins like a very good novel by someone else, and by the time you realize how demanding it has become, it’s too late.

Sentences like this start flashing past: “She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.” What a thing to say, but the book is moving on. Two drunken soldiers, one of them an amputee, have a long, inane conversation, during which the disabled one announces, “My invisible foot hurts.” Later, the other soldier weeps “like a barking dog.” The lines roll like billiard balls with weird English on them, they spin and skid, often just after their last comma, and then they plunge into their pockets with a crack.

More here.

Morris Dickstein in Critical Mass:

Literary journalism has always been the bastard child of serious criticism and ‘real’ journalism, the hard stuff, you know, about serial killers and five-alarm fires along with local politicians and U. S. Senators. Book review editors often have difficulty convincing their bosses that the news about books is in the books themselves, not in mega-buck contracts, bestseller chitchat, and profiles of famous authors. Truly conscientious reviewers are not exactly a beloved breed: authors sensitive to criticism detest them, publishers would love to coopt them, and academics rarely respect those who write for a wider public, not for other scholars. Yet book reviewing is where talented young critics often get their start. It encourages them to be generalists, keeping in touch with contemporary writing. It forces them to write quickly and clearly and to put flesh on their arguments, eschewing the abstract jargon of many professionals. And it contributes to a cultural conversation otherwise dominated by hot TV shows, blockbuster movies, and media-manufactured celebrities.

More here.

From Rolling Stone:

In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi reports on how President George W. Bush-appointed contractors in Iraq are exploiting American tax dollars. Here, Taibbi narrates a video exploring the grim details of the situation even further.

Go here for the video.

Two years ago this week, we lost much of New Orleans, as the Gulf was battered by Katrina. As Karen Ballentine pointed out:

[T]he key difference between 911 and Katrina: both Manhattan and D.C. recovered from the terrorist attacks on 911. But the nation did not.

With Katrina, on the other hand, the nation got over it, but the victims, the dead, their loved ones, their comunities, especially the poor African Americans of the lower ninth, as well as the working people all along the gulf…they did not.

Since Katrina, I’ve spent plenty of time in Houston, where I am from and where many of the dispalced have been relocated, to get the sense that they are the new Oakies for many Americans. But the city fights to recover. In The Nation:

The word “will” comes up constantly in the Lower Ninth Ward now; We Will Rebuild is spray-painted onto empty houses; “it will happen,” one organizer told me. Will itself may achieve the ambitious objective of bringing this destroyed neighborhood back to life, and for many New Orleanians a ferocious determination seems the only alternative to being overwhelmed and becalmed. But the fate of the neighborhood is still up in the air, from the question of whether enough people can and will make it back to the nagging questions of how viable a city and an ecology they will be part of. The majority of houses in this isolated neighborhood are still empty, though about a tenth of the residents are back, some already living in rehabilitated houses, some camped in stark white FEMA trailers outside, some living elsewhere while getting their houses ready. If you measured the Lower Ninth Ward by will, solidarity and dedication, from both residents and far-flung volunteers and nonprofits, it would be among the best neighborhoods in the United States. If you measured it by infrastructure and probabilities, it looks pretty grim. There are more devastated neighborhoods in New Orleans and neighboring St. Bernard Parish, let alone Mississippi and the Delta, but the Lower Ninth got hit hard by Katrina. Its uncertain fate has come to be an indicator for the future of New Orleans and the fate of its African-American majority.

Nicholas Mosley is thought of as an important but almost incomprehensible novelist. For 60 years, he has tapped away like some mad cryptographer, transmitting messages in an unknown code. Occasional successes—Accident was made into a film, Hopeful Monsters won the 1990 Whitbread prize—have heartened but not distracted him. I recently met Mosley—whose books are being published in new editions by Dalkey Archive Press—in his basement flat in north London. Aged 84, he seldom goes out. His voice sounds tired; sometimes it trails off into silence. Yet the occasional flash of the eye and whooping laugh betray inextinguishable high spirits.

more from Prospect here.

He styled himself as the “King of Cats,” which is also the title of his only self-portrait. It shows a spoilt, imperious creature of the oldest, irresistible aristocracy, a “King of those regions that will remain forever unknown to my gloomy contemporaries,” as the young painter once said of himself.

The cat has, of course, always been the heraldic animal of this prince, ever since Rilke added a preface to the little picture book Balthus made as a boy. It is the tale of the mysterious, seductive cat “Mitsou”, which appears out of nowhere and disappears into nowhere. It is a creature one remembers as one might an apparition that appeared in a voluptuous Sunday afternoon dream. Hence the poet’s reassuring words at the end of his short preface: not the cat, but Balthus exists.

more from Sign and Sight here.

On a sunny Wednesday last November, 16 students sat around a University of Chicago seminar table with two unpublished typescripts in front of them. The students were taking a course on the philosopher Leo Strauss, and “politics and policy” was the day’s topic. “In some ways it was easy to select the readings for this subject,” announced Nathan Tarcov, a professor of political science, “because Strauss wrote almost nothing about practical politics. I had to scrounge to find much of anything.”

The typescripts—two speeches Strauss delivered in the 1940s—left plenty of questions unanswered. They didn’t lay out in perfect clarity Strauss’s opinions on practical politics; they hinted at them. But Tarcov hoped they would correct what he saw as one of academia’s most sensational urban myths: the notion that Leo Strauss—though he’d died in 1973—was responsible for the rise of America’s neoconservatives and even for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

more from The Chicago Reader here.

From Science:

Microorganisms such as bacteria enjoy swapping genes, and the trades have made a big difference in how they’ve evolved. Now new research suggests that bacteria are also easygoing about passing genes on to more complex organisms. The findings have researchers rethinking the prevalence of interspecies gene transfer and its role in evolution; they may also change the way geneticists filter out bacterial “contamination” when they sequence a new genome.

So-called lateral gene transfer is ubiquitous among bacteria–they can acquire antibiotic resistance by swapping genes with species that have evolved it–but transfers between bacteria and multicellular organisms were thought to be rare. Some of the few known cases involve genes from parasitic bacteria called Wolbachia, which infect 20% to 75% of insects, as well as other invertebrates. The parasitic bacteria live within their hosts’ cells, including the germ cells that give rise to eggs, and in past studies scientists found its genes in the genomes of two worm and insect hosts.

However, according to microbiologist Julie Dunning Hotopp of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, common wisdom holds that these transfers are uncommon, and so genetic sequences from bacteria like Wolbachia are considered to be contamination when they’re found in insect genomes. Suspecting that their treatment as contaminants was masking transfers’ true frequency, Dunning Hotopp and her colleagues screened animal genetic databases for Wolbachia sequences. Reporting online 30 August in Science, the team found them in three wasp and four worm species. In the wasps, the DNA was a 96% match to each wasp’s resident Wolbachia strain.

More here.