A Neanderthal wandering around Chelsea might feel at home at Michael Heizer’s show — but then again, he might not. The forms in Mr. Heizer’s eight “stone sculptures” will seem familiar to him, as they are near-exact reproductions of Stone Age tools, a range of Paleolithic and Neolithic implements from disparate parts of the world. But the function could not be more remote. Pointed up with precision from minute user-friendly originals, (made by and for the hand, the tools were an inch or so long) these have been blown up to as much as 16 feet, to confound the hardiest neanderthal.

“Prismatic Flake” (1989) is the longest at 197 inches; some kind of cutting device in its original usage, it is suspended on a steel base, an open cube with welded bracket supports. The sheer, elongated form has the graceful menace of a Samurai sword. Like the other tools, it is reconstructed in modified concrete around a hollow interior. Whatever one’s response to the works aesthetically, technically they are a tour de force.

more from artcritical here.

In The Nation, Liza Featherstone on the class action suit against Random House for James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.

Back when watching Bill O’Reilly was still fun — before he became a creepy, obsessive nativist — I enjoyed a feature called “The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day.” (He’s become such a sour, humorless ideologue that this segment now falls flat.) Allow me to steal the concept for a moment. Today’s most ridiculous item, hands-down, is the report that readers are suing James Frey — the author of the (partly) invented rehab memoir A Million Little Pieces — and his publisher, Random House, for “defrauding” them. Even sillier, Random House has reached a settlement with these whiny opportunists, and any reader who can show proof of purchase will receive a refund for the full retail price of the book ($23.95 for the hardcover, $14.95 for the paperback). The plaintiffs’ lawyers who scored this one must be laughing their heads off and planning their next Ibiza vacation.

Talk about “frivolous lawsuits.” Stunts like this give a bad name to class action suits that seek to redress genuine wrongs, like race or sex discrimination in the workplace, or pollution. The action against Random House also reflects an absurdly consumerist attitude toward reading: when the book — or author — isn’t what you expected, demand your money back! Bob Woodward presents himself as a crusading muckraker — can I get a refund for the book in which he acts as a mouthpiece for the Bush Administration? And how about all those novels and memoirs that are billed by publishers as “poignant” and “evocative” when they’re actually tedious tripe? Can we send in our receipts for those, too?

Whenever Roald Dahl’s stories come into a conversation, someone will mention, with laughter and a kind of horrified amazement, “William and Mary”, in which the brain and single, lidless eye of a once-domineering, tobacco-hating husband are experimentally preserved with the help of an early life-support invention. Visiting William in the lab, his widow-wife, Mary, lights a cigarette and blows smoke into his furious eye. “I just can’t wait to get him home,” she says. Over the 45 years of his career as a writer, Dahl’s fictions changed in tone, subject and audience, but the points of view of both characters in “William and Mary” typify his approach. The writer’s stare is unblinking, and most of his tales are irritants, provocations. Fantastic as Grimm, neat as O Henry, heartless as Saki, they stick in the mind long after subtler ones have faded: incredible (literally), unforgettable and vengefully funny.

more from Guardian Books here.

Ian Buruma addresses questions of political philosophy, moral accountability and mass psychology in the most rigorous possible way: journalistically. In books on topics as varied as English national character, German and Japanese war guilt and the Chinese diaspora, he has deftly combined interviewing and reflection. This proves a fruitful way to approach the murder, in 2004, of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the subject of his new book. A Dutch-born Islamist named Mohammed Bouyeri was infuriated by “Submission,” a film van Gogh had made with the Somali-born feminist and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali about the treatment of women under Islam. So one morning, as van Gogh was riding his bike to work, Bouyeri shot and stabbed him to death. Buruma, who was born in the Netherlands in 1951 and has lived mostly abroad since 1975, is less interested in the details of the killing than in what followed: the ideologies vindicated or discredited, the prejudices revealed and the doubts cast on the workability of what only 10 years ago was considered Europe’s most easygoing society.

more from the NY Times here.

From The Washington Post:

You’re sitting in the center of the fabulousness. The stinky old Fulton Fish Market is gone, and cobblestone streets are lined with boutiques and $1 million condos with floor-to-ceiling windows, and the sky is that razor blue.

Almost like that day.

Five years ago, this neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, a few blocks from the twin towers, was covered in half a foot of gray ash. Now, Jason Lowney, 28, and Patrick Darragh, 24, down drinks and talk that emphatic guy talk, and Sept. 11 feels pretty distant. “People thought downtown would be a ghost town,” says Lowney, a husky and dark-haired insurance adjuster. “I think it’s stronger .”

More here.

From BBC News:

Experts at the BA Festival of Science, in Norwich, heard that vaccines could be created against the molecules which trigger allergies. The scientist leading the research – Dr Ronald van Ree, from Amsterdam University – said a vaccine with no side effects was in sight.

About one in 70 people have an allergy to foods such as peanuts or shellfish. New genetic engineering techniques are being tested to reduce the effect of the proteins in food that cause adverse – sometimes fatal – reactions. It is hoped that scientists will be able to make the molecules safe enough to use in drugs that fight food allergies via the immune system.

These would be used in conjunction with compounds designed to reduce inflammation – one of the most dangerous effects of allergic reactions.

More here.

From Slate:

Downtown New York after the attacks.

More here.

Self Portrait, by Jennifer Prevatt, 2006.

See more of Jennifer’s work at Society, 2104 8th Avenue (at 114th Street).

See Zeina Assaf’s work at EmcArts, 127 West 122nd Street.

Saturday, September 9, 2006 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
& Sunday, September 10, 2006, 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Much more information about the many participating artists and venues here.

To mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Slate asked novelists, artists, journalists, and other thoughtful people a question: What work of art or literature has helped you make sense of the attacks and the world after them?

Harold Bloom, Haneif Qureshi, Jane Smiley, and others respond:

Reza Aslan, author, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam 
Landscapes of the Jihad, by Faisal Devji, a professor at the New School. The book is an erudite analysis of the rise of jihadism as almost a new kind of “sect” within Islam—one that combines mystical and traditional elements of Islam with a sophisticated globalization effort based on an ethical, rather than political, worldview…

More here.

John Gravois in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Each fall thousands of graduate students from foreign countries make the pilgrimage to American research universities. For past generations, that pilgrimage has often been a prelude to lives and careers here. But for Mr. Mahale, as for more and more Indian students, the United States isn’t so much the land of opportunity (there is plenty of that in Mumbai), as it is the land of leverage, of certain well-defined comparative advantages. Graduate education is still one of them.

Going to America was only a rite of passage into the Indian technical elite. But what Mr. Mahale may not have fully realized that night was that it was not a rite of passage he was making alone. The same technologies of travel and communication that have made it possible for Western corporations to set up shop abroad have allowed international-student associations to establish more and more sophisticated campus niches in the United States.

On the other end of Mr. Mahale’s flight, another group of Indians was ready to receive him — a close-knit, well-organized network of fellow graduate students who had staked their claim in North Carolina so well, it sometimes felt like they had never left India.

More here.

3QD friend Edward B. Rackley reports from Africa in his blog, Across the Divide:

I’m presently working here on child rights violations committed by the government, its various bodies–particularly its forces of order–and by insurgent groups. The sheer quantity of documented violations boggles the mind, and are enough to declare the prospect of childhood in Burundi a lethal undertaking. If the man in blue isnt raping or killing the little folk, they’re dying from diahrrea or a fever for lack of basic health care.

Independent experts appear to agree that Burundi is a tragic place. The Happy Planet Index, published by the New Economics Foundation, an economics thinktank in the UK, recently rated Burundi 176 out of 178 of the world’s (un)happiest countries. Zimbabwe and Swaziland took the last two spots.

Yet the country is ravaged in seemingly countless other ways, many of which are undocumented by the national press, local human rights bodies or their international equivalents. This week, however, Human Rights Watch and the Burundian Association pour la Protection des Droits Humains et des Personnes Détenues (APRODH) released a 75-page report, “A High Price To Pay: The Detention of Poor Patients in Hospitals,” documenting how Burundian hospitals detain hundreds of indigent patients, sometimes in inhumane conditions.

More here.

From BBC News:

The channel said it showed al-Qaeda leaders “preparing for the attacks and practising their execution”. Bin Laden is seen walking outdoors in a mountainous area wearing a dark robe and white head gear. The broadcast came four days before the fifth anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks. The footage also shows the al-Qaeda leader meeting senior figures Ramzi Binalshibh and Mohammed Atef in what al-Jazeera said were the mountains of Afghanistan.

Binalshibh was captured in 2002 and Atef was killed by a US air strike in Afghanistan in late 2001. The BBC’s Adam Brookes in Washington says it appears to be a meeting held just a few days before the 9/11 attacks took place. He says that although there will be little current intelligence to be gleaned from the videotape, the images and their ghostly quality serve as reminders of the intricacy and potency of the 9/11 plot.

Al-Jazeera also showed a tape said to be of the new al-Qaeda leader in Iraq urging Iraqis to join with insurgents.

More here.

From MSNBC:

The latest study from Canada reports that 17- to 18-year-old males have a slight edge in IQ, based on an analysis of more than 100,000 SAT scores. But even the researcher behind the study acknowledges that the findings don’t represent the final word on gender and intelligence. Past studies have tended to declare the gender intelligence contest a virtual tie, with men rating higher in spatial ability (for example, reading a map) and women having an edge in verbal ability (using a varied vocabulary).

In their analysis, Rushton and Jackson interpreted the SAT results from both the math test (where males do better) and the verbal test (where females do better), focusing on 145 questions that seemed to emphasize general intelligence – also known as the “g factor.” “The g factor really is the active ingredient, if you will, that permeates all types of intelligence,” Rushton told me. Rushton cites an easy example of the difference between a low-g and a high-g task. First, think of the last four digits of your phone number. That’s low-g. Now, think of them in reverse order. That’s high-g. “It is a real cognitive load for everybody,” Rushton said.

More here.

Although scientists have been committing their memoirs to paper for centuries, there seems to be a difference in tone between memoirs written in the twentieth century and those that came before. Earlier memoirs describe a world where science was still largely an amateur activity—literally, one pursued out of love—rather than a profession. In their memoirs, Joseph Priestley, Charles Darwin, and others demonstrate a sentiment about science rather than any distinct scientific personality. That sentiment was infused with an abiding wonder and fascination with the natural world—not wholly devoid of ambition, of course, but also bounded by a humility that came from their respect for the vast amount that was, and would remain, unknowable. The ambition to be the known discoverer of new truths about nature was concealed, in large measure, in the stylistic modesty of the student, a modesty in tune with the culture of the age. Present, too, was an idealism that perhaps could only be nurtured in an age of amateur science, still filled with a healthy appreciation for the power of chance. Not long before his death in 1727, Isaac Newton touched on this sentiment when he wrote, “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

more from The New Atlantis here.

Egyptians have a wonderful variety of nonverbal expressions. My favorite is the exclamation, “yeah-eh,” with a stress on the “eh,” which is roughly synonymous with “wow!” And as with “wow” there is something boyishly sincere about saying “yeah-eh,” although Egyptians of all ages do it. Toward the end of our night at the Sheraton one of Mahfouz’s friends related, at full volume, a conversation he had with an old-timer from the film industry. They were trying to decide who was the best screenwriter of all time. During the fifties and sixties Mahfouz wrote many scripts for the great Egyptian director Salah Abu Seif. Everybody could see where this story was headed, but the friend drew it out. Who do you think this old-timer said was the greatest ever, he shouted? Was it x, y, or z? Mahfouz was silent, not even indicating he had heard the question. Well, it wasn’t any of those guys. The greatest ever, according to this old-timer (and he would know), was … Naguib Mahfouz! Mahfouz’s eyebrows shot up over the rims of his dark glasses. “Yeah-eh!” he exclaimed, genuinely surprised.

more from n+1 here.

O.K., here’s my idea: Maybe it’s time for Bob Dylan to shift from writing more songs to writing more books. Chronicles, the first volume of his memoirs, was brilliant; Modern Times, the new album, a wildly overhyped disappointment. I don’t want him to stop singing and playing, just spend more time writing Chronicles-level prose rather than giving us more of the doggerel verse of Modern Times—songs that only hard-core Bobolators could praise. “Bobolators,” you might recall, is the phrase I coined for the sycophants who lavished praise on his leadenly pretentious film Masked and Anonymous (The Observer, July 28, 2003). It marked the moment of my exile from Bob-land, the Dylan-industrial complex restricted to those who never say an unkind word.

more from Ron Rosenbaum at the NY Observer here.

BLVR: How long were you writing before Edisto was published? Can you remember some of the things you were working on?

PP: I wrote figments of Edisto in college as early as 1972. Scruff Taurus wrote a column called “Fighting About Writing” in the school newspaper I edited. I did sketches of him beating up members of the English department there, and used them to try to charm the professor I eventually would model the Doctor on. It worked. She said the writing was good. I said the things were a joke, cartoons. She said she knew that but the prose was strong. Here was the birth of the literary mother. She soon found out I had not read Faulkner and, appalled, gave me her copy of Absalom, Absalom! That is the birth of the literarily mothered boy.

This writing and some more that would become the early stuff of Edisto was stolen in a roofing truck in San Antonio around 1976. I envisioned my pages blowing about the desert at Eagle Pass, Texas, where I imagined the truck being taken into Mexico. I think I had about forty pages, the first three chapters of the book, when I met Barthelme in 1981. He said, “You’ve thought about this a bit.” “Yes.” “You’ll settle down. You’re just nervous. Give me all you’ve got.” He was referring to a certain ersatz-Faulkner alignment things had taken. The book was then taking more literally the Doctor’s desire that her son sound like a writer, perhaps specifically like those whose books she had given him.

more from The Believer interview here.

Imagine calling two pets, one a dog, the other a cat. Asking a dog to do something is an amazing experience. You say, “Come here, Fido,” and Fido looks up, pads over, puts his head in your lap, and wags his tail. You’ve had a direct communication with another species; you and Fido are sharing a common, fairly literal language. Now imagine saying, “Come here, Snowflake” to the cat. Snowflake might glance over, walk to a nearby table, rub it, lie down, and look at you. There’s nothing direct about this. Yet something gigantic and very much like art has happened. The cat has placed a third object between you and itself. In order to understand the cat you have to be able to grasp this nonlinear, indirect, holistic, circuitous communication. In short, art is a cat.

more from jerry salz at the Village Voice here.

In the London Review of Books:

As every schoolchild knows by now, a new book by Zizek is supposed to include, in no special order, discussions of Hegel, Marx and Kant; various pre- and post-socialist anecdotes and reflections; notes on Kafka as well as on mass-cultural writers like Stephen King or Patricia Highsmith; references to opera (Wagner, Mozart); jokes from the Marx Brothers; outbursts of obscenity, scatological as well as sexual; interventions in the history of philosophy, from Spinoza and Kierkegaard to Kripke and Dennett; analyses of Hitchcock films and other Hollywood products; references to current events; disquisitions on obscure points of Lacanian doctrine; polemics with various contemporary theorists (Derrida, Deleuze); comparative theology; and, most recently, reports on cognitive philosophy and neuroscientific ‘advances’. These are lined up in what Eisenstein liked to call ‘a montage of attractions’, a kind of theoretical variety show, in which a series of ‘numbers’ succeed each other and hold the audience in rapt fascination. It is a wonderful show; the only drawback is that at the end the reader is perplexed as to the ideas that have been presented, or at least as to the major ones to be retained. One would think that reading all Zizek’s books in succession would only compound this problem: on the contrary, it simplifies it somewhat, as the larger concepts begin to emerge from the mist. Still, one would not have it any other way, which is why the current volume – which, with its companion The Ticklish Subject (1999), purports to outline the ‘system’ as a whole (if it is one), or at least to make a single monumental statement – inspires some apprehension.

More here.

“Nothing succeeds like excess” should have been the personal motto of King Louis XIV of France. His long reign (1643-1715) was a triumph of overstatement in everything from the flowerbeds at Versailles, whose plants were changed every day, to the royal breakfasts, where the monarch gorged on a banquet large enough to have nourished several families for a week. Flattery, on a scale undreamt of since the days of Nero or Caligula, sustained a dual epiphany of the god-king, either as a benign Apollo charioted amid pasteboard clouds at the climax of a court ballet, or as warrior Mars astride a caracoling charger, trampling Flanders and the Palatinate beneath its hooves.

Splash, dash and panache, however, were not quite so much Louis’s style where women were concerned. Among several arresting aspects of Antonia Fraser’s book is the paradox which reconciles one of history’s most image-conscious rulers with a more reserved individual, capable of loyalty and discretion in affairs of the heart and not a complete stranger to emotion. Louis was a tyrant, with all the selfishness intrinsic to his position, but he was never a monster, and women were plainly drawn to him by something stronger than the banal magnetism of absolute power.

more from Literary Review here.