3quarksdaily

Friday Poem

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Happiness
Meg Batemen

Often have I seen them come together,
two old friends, two crofters,
who after a brief murmured greeting
will stand wordlessly together,
side by side, not facing each other,
and look out on the land whose
ways and memories unite them,
breathe in the air, and the scent of
tobacco and damp and lamb scour,
in the certain knowledge that talk
would hamper that expansive communion,
break in on their golden awareness
of all there is between them.

-with thanks to Neil

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Toileachas
Meg Batemen

‘S tric a chunnaic mi iad a' tighinn ri chèile,
dithis seann eòlach, dithis chroitearan,
is às dèidh dhaibh an latha a bheannachadh
seasaidh iad còmhla gun fhacal tuilleadh,
taobh ri taobh, chan ann aghaidh ri aghaidh,
is iad a' coimhead a-mach air an talamh
a chumas na fhilltean an uile chuimhne,
a' tarraing anail is cùbhraidheachd
tombaca, fuaradh is spùt nan uan,
‘s an t-eòlas ac'gun cuireadh cainnt
bacadh air a' chomanachadh òrbhuidh ud,
gum briseadh i a-staigh air am mothachadh
air na th'ann de dhualchas eatarra

-le taing do Niall


From Fair Wind/Soirbheas (Polygon, 2007)

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Nikita Lalwani

From Guardian:

The Booker longlisted author of Gifted on Indian comics, shaping emotion through writing, and reading with a lazy eye.

What was your favourite book as a child and why?
The Borrowers. It mixed reality and fantasy so closely, and the characters' struggle for autonomy is similar to being a child in an adult world. All that delicious hoarding, and the painful ending when the Ratcatcher smokes the Borrowers out of their home - you didn't need to understand Holocaust metaphors to know that something horrific was going on.

I also was a great fan of the Amar Chitra Katha series of Indian comics, in which epics like the Mahabarata became pictorial wonders - featuring Sadhus who meditated in dense forests for decades at a time, and chariot-riding Gods and Goddesses in constant dialogue with mortal counterparts. Luscious stuff.

More here.

Experiment Marathon Reyjavik

From Edge:

Beginning May 15, Edge travels to Iceland for the Reykjavik Arts Festival, which will reprise the Edge Formulae of the 21st Century project, presented last October at the Serpentine Gallery, London, by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of the Serpentines Exhibitions and Programmes. That World Question Center project was a response to Obrist's question: "What Is Your Formula? Your Equation? Your Algorithm?"

One of the highlights of the Reykjavik Arts Festival will be the Experiment Marathon Reykjavík, an exhibition and program of related events organized by the Reykjavík Art Museum and the Serpentine Gallery, London. Lasting from 15 May through August 17, the focus of the project is experimentation. The RAM [Reykjavik Art Museum] will become a laboratory in which leading artists, architects, film-makers, and scientists will create an environment of invention through a series of installations, performances and experimental films.

Additionally, previous related projects will be presented as archives within the exhibition. The exhibition and related events are curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, London, in collaboration with artist Ólafur Elíasson.

More here.

For a New Hatikvah: Israel At 60

Caelum Moffatt reflects on this the 60th anniversary of Israeli independence/the Palestinian Nakba,
in MIFTAH:

Following the Second World War, the holocaust and the termination of the British Mandate, UNCSOP passed Resolution 181 in November 1947 which called for a partition of the British Mandate into two bilateral states – Israel and Palestine. Even with a quarter of a decade of immigration and colonization, Jews still only comprised 30% of the population and owned just 7% of the land. Despite these facts, the state of Israel would be granted 55% of the former British Mandate. A war ensued firstly between Palestinians and Jews, then later between Arabs and Israelis after Israel had claimed independence on May 14, 1948.

The Arabs were defeated and by the time the armistice lines were drawn in July 1949, Israel had extended its territory to 78% of historic Palestine. 800,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes, 530 villages were destroyed and 86% of the Palestinians who now fell within the 1949 armistice lines were displaced. Of the 14% that remained, 70% of their land was confiscated or made inaccessible to them.

According to UNRWA estimates, there are presently 5.5 million refugees spread across 58 camps in the occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

These have been replaced by some 5.5 million Jews living in Israel flourishing in freedom, prosperity and international acceptance in what can only be described as obstinate blindness and pure disregard for the brutality they employed and still adopt today in order to sustain their existence. They maintain that their actions are justified after being subject to worldwide contempt, suffering years of persecution and anti-Semitism. It is as if their unwavering resolve to achieve their goal supersedes Palestinian claims and relegates them to the unfortunate byproduct or obstacle standing in the way of their destiny.

A Tale of Two Revolutions

Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian on the legacies of 1968 and 1989:

During the Velvet revolution of 1989 I spied an improvised poster in a Prague shop window. It showed "68" spun through 180 degrees to make "89", with arrows indicating the rotation. Nineteen sixty-eight and 1989: a tale of two revolutions. Or at least, two waves of what many called revolution at the time. A 40th anniversary this year, a 20th next. Which of the two will be most memorialised? And which actually changed more?

Nineteen sixty-eight will be hard to beat in the commemoration stakes. Already, more ink has flowed recalling that year than did blood from the guillotines of Paris after 1789. Reportedly more than 100 books have been published in France alone about the revolutionary theatre of May 68. Germany has had its own beer-fest of the intellectuals; Warsaw and Prague have revisited the bitter-sweet ambiguities of their respective springs; even Britain has managed a retrospective issue of Prospect magazine.

The causes of this publicistic orgy are not hard to find. The 68ers are a uniquely well-defined generation all across Europe - probably the best defined since what one might call the 39ers, those shaped for life by their youthful experience of the second world war. Having been students in 1968, they now - at or around the age of 60 - occupy the commanding heights of cultural production in most European countries. Think they're going to pass up a chance to talk about their youth? You must be joking. Not important, moi?

Smoke furl and boiling ashes darken day

Via Andrew Sullivan, pictures from an volcanic eruption in Chile. More here.

Steampunk Gains, er, Steam

Ruth La Ferla in the NYT:

If steampunk has a mission, it is, in part, to restore a sense of wonder to a technology-jaded world. “Today satellite photos make the planet seem so small,” Mr. Brown lamented. “Where is the adventure it that?” In contrast, steampunk, with its airships, test tubes and time machines, is, he said, “sort of a dream , the way we used to daydream. It’s like part of your childhood’s just bursting forward again.”

For some of its adherents, steampunk also offers a metaphoric coping device. “It has an intellectual tie to the artists and artisans dealing with a world in turmoil at the time of the industrial revolution,” said Crispen Smith, a Web designer and photographer in Toronto, and a partner in a steampunk fashion business.

Now, as in the late 19th century, “we have to find a way to deal with new ethical quandaries,” Mr. Smith said, alluding to issues like cloning, the dissemination of information and intellectual property rights on the Web.

Steampunk style is also an expression of a desire to return to ritual and formality. “Steampunk has its tea parties and its time-travelers balls,” said Deborah Castellano, who presides over salonconvention.com, which organizes neo-Victorian conventions. “It offers an element of glamour that some of us would otherwise never experience.”

Thursday Poem

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In 1969, Song of Lawino was published. It is written in the style of a traditional Acholi song. It is an Acholi wife's lament about her college-educated husband, who has rejected Acholi traditions and ideas for Western ones. Much of Lawino's anger is directed at her husband's lover who embodies these Western values and customs, and who she contrasts with herself.

In Song of Ocal, her husband responds to her, decrying what he perceives as Africa's backwardness, and extoling the virtues of European society and ideas. Lawino and Ocal's debate reflects the discourse taking place at the time in African societies about the implications of adopting Western culture and ideals. Other works, including Song of A Prisoner (1971) and Song of Malaya (1971) are written in the same poetic style.

Okot p'Bitek has been criticized by other African writers, including Ngugi wa Thiong'o, for not adequately addressing the underlying causes of Africa's problems. Okot, however, believed that his work, like all good African literature, dealt honestly with the human condition and had "deep human roots."   More.

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Transalation by Taban lo Liyong:

Lawino is a female voice, taking issue with her husband whom she witnesses imitating a European culture which is destroying a more deeply rooted African culture. The text is a deeply philosophical meditation on the subject of its original subtitle: 'The Culture of Your People You Do Not Abandon'. The translator is the distinguished Sudanese writer Taban lo Liyong, and colleague and friend of the author. His translation was twenty-two years in the making and began as a collaborative project with the author. Although the text was once translated into English by the author himself, lo Liyong asserts the need for a reworking from the original Acholi, since the author only loosely wrote an English version as a reaction, to satisfy an English speaking audience, and gave prominence to the parts which were most easily rendered into English.

Lo Liyong reproduces the original as faithfully as possible, attempting to convey the intricacies, nuances and thoughts of the whole text in a rhythmic English which suits the original discourse. He further intends his translation of the classic as an assertion of the need to engage with, and reflect upon the primacy of African languages and culture in a new era of cultural and linguistic dominance.  —The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry


Excerpts from
The Song Of Lawino
Okot p'Bitek

1. My Husband’s Tongue Is Bitter

Husband, now you despise me
Now you treat me with spite
And say I have inherited the stupidity of my aunt;
Son of the Chief,
Now you compare me
with the rubbish in the rubbish pit,
You say you no longer want me
Because I am like the things left behind
In the deserted homestead.
You insult me
You laugh at me
You say I do not know the letter A
Because I have not been to school
And I have not been baptized

You compare me with a little dog,
A puppy.

My friend, age-mate of my brother,
Take care,
Take care of your tongue,
Be careful what your lips say.

First take a deep look, brother,
You are now a man
You are not a dead fruit!
To behave like a child does not befit you!

Listen Ocol, you are the son of a Chief,
Leave foolish behavior to little children,
It is not right that you should be laughed at in a song!
Songs about you should be songs of praise!

Continue reading "Thursday Poem"

greil marcus on 68

From the sightlines in Berkeley, California, where I lived then and live now, I recall 1968 as a year of horror and bad faith... With the Vietnam War all but rolling back across the Pacific to poison the United States itself, it was as if people turned to spectacular lies and glamorous trivialities to hide from themselves the fact that their imaginations had turned to ice. Truly enormous events taking place elsewhere did not travel. Word of the Prague Spring arrived only in fragments, and no speaker stood up to put the pieces together. News of the massacre of scores - no, hundreds - of students in Mexico City was suppressed so profoundly, it would take 40 years for the facts to come out of the ground. But few if any looked; curiosity withered; people were swept up in their own vanity. The faces of those who said no were smug in their automatic righteousness.

more from The New Statesman here.

naomi's shock

Klein combines her critical analyses of the corporate economy with a naive celebration of ‘joyous’ populism, democracy and mass movements. The cynical abuse of democratic slogans by the Bush administration gives her no pause. She defends her idealised picture of democratic movements from critical scrutiny, in the time-tested way, by making sure we cannot see them in action. Anti-immigrant xenophobia, hostile as it is to the free-market model that she, too, opposes, is never mentioned as a genuine expression of democratic populism. Wasn’t there majority white support for the dispossession of New Orleans’ black community after Katrina? And wasn’t there majority Russian support for Putin’s wars in Chechnya? Isn’t the ordinary citizen’s fear and hatred of otherness as malicious a force as the corporate profiteer’s insatiable greed?

She claims that economic ‘reform’ in 1990s Russia was ‘one of the greatest crimes committed against a democracy in modern history’, thwarting an ‘authentic democratic revolution’. Here she is making the same mistake of which she rightly accuses Friedman. She is confusing the absence of obstacles with the presence of preconditions. Authentic democracy will not spontaneously emerge simply because tyranny has been knocked down and all the ‘distortions’ have been removed. Klein might defend herself by saying that the ‘democracy’ she apotheosises is exclusively a democracy of protest, never a democracy of governance, and therefore invulnerable to criticism for unfairness, stupidity or abuse of power. But this response would not sit well with her understandable but unrealistic hope that ordinary citizens around the world will soon ‘become the authors of their national destinies, at last’.

more from the LRB here.

debating orientalism

So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique angle in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a hypercritical version of British and, more generally, of Western achievements. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies. Above all, Orientalism licenses those academics who are so minded to think of their research and teaching as political activities. The drudgery of teaching is thus transformed into something much more exciting, namely “speaking truth to power”.

It is unlikely that the two books under review, both of which present damning criticisms of Said’s book at length and in detail, will change anything. Daniel Martin Varisco is a professor of anthropology who has specialized in Yemeni agriculture. It is perhaps because of this that he takes exception to Said’s “textualism” and his consequent neglect of anthropology, sociology and psychology. Varisco has a multitude of other charges to bring against Orientalism and he is able to draw on an astonishingly long list of witnesses for the prosecution, including Sadiq Jalal al-’Azm, Bryan Turner, Malcolm Kerr, Ziauddin Sardar, Bernard Lewis, Nadim al-Bitar, Victor Brombert, Ernest Gellner, Jane Miller, John Sweetman, John Mackenzie and many others.

more from the TLS here.

In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

Nathan Myhrvold met Jack Horner on the set of the “Jurassic Park” sequel in 1996. Horner is an eminent paleontologist, and was a consultant on the movie. Myhrvold was there because he really likes dinosaurs. Between takes, the two men got to talking, and Horner asked Myhrvold if he was interested in funding dinosaur expeditions.

Myhrvold is of Nordic extraction, and he looks every bit the bearded, fair-haired Viking—not so much the tall, ferocious kind who raped and pillaged as the impish, roly-poly kind who stayed home by the fjords trying to turn lead into gold. He is gregarious, enthusiastic, and nerdy on an epic scale. He graduated from high school at fourteen. He started Microsoft’s research division, leaving, in 1999, with hundreds of millions. He is obsessed with aperiodic tile patterns. (Imagine a floor tiled in a pattern that never repeats.) When Myhrvold built his own house, on the shores of Lake Washington, outside Seattle—a vast, silvery hypermodernist structure described by his wife as the place in the sci-fi movie where the aliens live—he embedded some sixty aperiodic patterns in the walls, floors, and ceilings. His front garden is planted entirely with vegetation from the Mesozoic era. (“If the ‘Jurassic Park’ thing happens,” he says, “this is where the dinosaurs will come to eat.”) One of the scholarly achievements he is proudest of is a paper he co-wrote proving that it was theoretically possible for sauropods—his favorite kind of dinosaur—to have snapped their tails back and forth faster than the speed of sound. How could he say no to the great Jack Horner?

More here.

How Boys Become Boys (and Sometimes Girls)

From Scientific American:

In research that could give doctors a way to reassign sex in cases of unclear gender, scientists report this week that they have figured out why some children with genes that should make them boys are instead born as girls. The study, published in Nature, explains why some embryos with X and Y chromosomes—which should be born as male—develop ovaries and eventually become girls.

The key is whether a gene called Sox9, involved in formation of the testes, is active. "There are a surprisingly large number of cases where this process goes wrong," says Robin Lovell-Badge, a biologist at London's MRC National Institute for Medical Research, who estimates that this phenomenon could effect up to 1 in every 20,000 genetic males. "Maybe one could treat some of these sex reversal or intersex cases after birth by manipulating whether Sox9 is active or not. This is all speculation but it's possible."

If Sox9 is somehow switched on in a genetic female—an embryo with two X chromosomes—it causes male gonads to form; if it fails to turn on in males, the cells it controls will become follicle cells, which mature into ovaries.

More here.

all the glass

By the lights of many in the international art world, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke are the leading painters of our day, though it’s hard to find anyone who will declare them equally great. (I’m an exception.) Their careers are intertwined by biography and circumstance. Both are from the former East Germany: Polke, who is sixty-seven, left with his family when he was twelve; Richter, seventy-six, fled, after fitful success in state-run art programs, in 1961, just before the Wall went up. They met at the seminal Düsseldorf Art Academy and, in 1963, collaborated in a brief, trenchant movement that responded to American Pop art with painted imagery drawn from magazine and newspaper ads and photographs, family snapshots, cheap fabric designs, and other desultory sources, which Richter adapted with deadpan gravity and Polke with sardonic élan. A jokey photographic print by Richter, from 1967, shows them sharing a bed in Antwerp. (Their host for a show there had provided scanty accommodations.) They ascended to prominence in the early nineteen-eighties—stunning American art circles, which had been largely oblivious of creative doings in Germany—as twin masters who dramatically expanded the resources and resonances of painting, an art dismissed as moribund by most of that time’s avant-garde. Each has made visually glorious, conceptually seismic pictures. Both live and work in Cologne. But their differences are profound. Richter, reflective and deliberate, is a family man of temperate tastes and orderly habits. His studio is one of two elegant rectilinear buildings—the other is his house—in a large, walled, lushly gardened compound. Polke, restless and impulsive, is an unreconstructed bohemian, inhabiting cluttered expanses in a shabby industrial building.

more from The New Yorker here.

the sixties

'You don't understand,' an American history professor once said to me of the 1960s, wagging an avuncular finger. 'You had to be there.' Coming from somebody who had spent his life studying the nineteenth century, it seemed a particularly silly thing to say. But then, as Gerard DeGroot points out in a thoughtful introduction to his new book, there are many people for whom the myth of the Sixties has become 'something sacred', a totem of high-minded idealism regularly invoked as a reprimand to our own supposedly cynical age. 'In no other period of history', he writes, 'has canon been allowed so freely to permeate analysis.'

Books celebrating the youthful idealism of the late Sixties are ten a penny, particularly across the Atlantic, so it is refreshing to read one that takes a mercifully clear-sighted view of the decade. DeGroot does remember the period, but only just: his earliest childhood memory is of the morning after Kennedy beat Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, when he peered up into the California sky, hoping to see Yuri Gagarin's capsule over San Diego. Surely too young to have been caught up in the hedonism of the Summer of Love, he has set himself a deceptively simple task. He has no overarching thesis, no axe to grind: instead, he simply gives us sixty-seven independent essays, rich in anecdote and character, many of them elegantly ripping apart the stereotypes of popular mythology.

more from Literary Review here.

The result, of course, was disaster

In 1904, the Heidelberg chemist Wilhelm Weichardt made a sensational announcement. He promised a utopia in which men would never grow weary, but would be transformed into industrious and tireless machines. Weichardt thought that fatigue was caused by the accumulation of toxins in the blood, and he harvested a concentrated version of this poison from rats that he drove to death by strenuous exercise. As the toxins built up, he observed, the rats descended into a kind of "narcosis" or "stupor," before slowing to a "complete standstill." In his laboratory, Weichardt worked on an antibody. He called the resulting miracle drug—his vaccine against fatigue—antikenotoxin.

In The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (1990), Anson Rabinbach explains how, after 1870, the religious discourse against acedia or sloth was taken up and replaced by the burgeoning scientific study of fatigue. Fatigue, Rabinbach argues, was considered both a physical and moral disorder: it "replaced the traditional emphasis on idleness as the paramount cause of resistance to work. Its ubiquity was evidence of the body’s stubborn subversion of modernity." In the eighteenth century, idleness had been presented by artists such as Hogarth as the antithesis of industry; in the nineteenth century, fatigue was considered a similar failure—it represented the refusal of the body and mind to keep up with the demands of modern labor. Maurice Keim, one of the first of these nineteenth-century theorists, wrote that "we flee [fatigue] by instinct, it is responsible for our sloth and makes us desire inaction."

more from Cabinet here.

About Vengence and the Virtues of a Modern State

Jared Diamond looks at tribal justice in The New Yorker:

Though we might wonder how Daniel’s society came to revel in killing, ethnographic studies of traditional human societies lying largely outside the control of state government have shown that war, murder, and demonization of neighbors have been the norm. Modern state societies rate as exceptional by the standards of human history, because we instead grow up learning a universal code of morality that is constantly hammered into us: promulgated every week in our churches and codified in our laws. But the differences between the norms of states and of Handa clan society are not actually so sharp. In times of war, even modern state societies quickly turn the enemy into a dehumanized figure of hatred, only to enjoin us to stop hating again as soon as a peace treaty is signed. Such contradictions confuse us deeply. Neither pacific ideals nor wartime hatreds, once acquired, are easily jettisoned. It’s no wonder that many soldiers who kill suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. When they come home, far from boasting about killing, as a Nipa tribesman would, they have nightmares and never talk about it at all, unless to other veterans.

Then, too, for Americans old enough to recall our hatred of Japan after Pearl Harbor, Daniel’s intense hatred of the Ombals may not seem so remote. After Pearl Harbor, hundreds of thousands of American men volunteered to kill and did kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese, often in face-to-face combat, by brutal methods that included bayonets and flamethrowers. Soldiers who killed Japanese in particularly large numbers or with notable bravery were publicly decorated with medals, and those who died in combat were posthumously remembered as heroes. Meanwhile, even among Americans who had never seen a live Japanese soldier or the dead body of an American relative killed by the Japanese, intense hatred and fear of Japanese became widespread. Traditional New Guineans, by contrast, have from childhood onward often seen warriors going out and coming back from fighting; they have seen the bodies of relatives killed by the enemy, listened to stories of killing, heard fighting talked about as the highest ideal, and witnessed successful warriors talking proudly about their killings and being praised for them. If New Guineans end up feeling unconflicted about killing the enemy, it’s because they have had no contrary message to unlearn.

happening

In many ways, Allan Kaprow, father of the “Happening,” was the most important artist of the ’60s — at least as important as his household-branded comrade Andy Warhol. Warhol critiqued the commodification of art from way, way inside, and insisted to the end on the primacy of the image. But Kaprow, emerging from a hardcore New York School abstract-painting milieu, took an almost diametrically opposite path.

Forging a unified field theory out of his seemingly disparate Hans Hoffman apprenticeship, American Povera assemblages and participation in the formative social nexus of the Fluxus movement — John Cage’s legendary late-’50s class in music composition at the New School for Social Research — Kaprow operated as the postmodern missing link, personifying the historically bowdlerized continuity between Abstract Expressionist painting and the farthest reaches of the subsequent avant-garde, leaving behind not only recognizable imagery but the very notion of a tangible art object.

more from the LA Weekly here.

A Virtual Berlin Wall, Or The Cold War as Guided Tour

In Der Spiegel Online:

In the early 1990s, the Wall was hacked away by souvenir hunters and parts of it were sold or donated to raise money for charity. Most of it was ground down into 310,000 tons of gravel for building roads to reunite the eastern and western halves of the city. Millions of people have a piece -- real or fake -- of the Berlin Wall gathering dust in their homes. The United Nations, the CIA and the Vatican all own a piece of Wall.

The rush to tear down the hated landmark in the 1990s was understandable, but Berlin's government has realized that the city may have been overzealous in ridding itself of what remains its biggest tourist attraction. It has launched an information drive to help keep memories of the Wall alive among Germans and to raise awareness of Cold War division among younger generations who have only known a united Germany.

As part of that campaign, Berlin introduced an interactive multimedia guide on May 1 in the form of a hand-sized computer which traces the path of the Wall and provides GPS navigation to help pedestrians and cyclists find the few intact stretches of the Wall that remain.

The device, similar to those handed out in museums, uses audio and video footage to tell the story of the Wall from when it was hastily erected in August 1961 to stop an exodus of people from Soviet-held communist East Berlin. The Wall turned West Berlin, controlled by the United States, Britain and France, into an isolated enclave inside East Germany.

Mordecai Richler Biography

Kevin McGoogan reviews Reinhold Kramer's Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain in The Globe and Mail:

Reinhold Kramer, an English professor at Brandon University, has scoured the Richler archive at the University of Calgary. He has made excellent, almost invasive use of letters, notes and two unpublished manuscripts - a 1950s novel called The Rotten People and a 1970s memoir, Back to Ibiza - to show how Richler drew on his own life in creating his fiction.

By adding a few interviews with family members, and drawing on an oral biography by Globe and Mail writer Michael Posner and a scholarly study by Victor Ramraj, Kramer has produced a meticulous, prodigiously detailed biography. As the subtitle suggests, it highlights the writer's lifelong engagement with Orthodox Judaism and his triumphant emergence as a secular humanist.

Those who followed Richler closely, chuckling at his antics, savouring his victories, will enjoy reliving old favourite moments. Yes, yes, let's go again to the movie premiere of Duddy Kravitz, when the wife of the late Samuel Bronfman congratulated Richler from on high: "You've come a long way for a St. Urbain Street boy." And the author responded: "And you've come a long way for a bootlegger's wife."

Defining Life

I'm not so sure if this is any improvement on Dawkins' definition.  Steve Davis in Secular Web Kiosk:

In 1943 the eminent physicist Erwin Schrodinger gave a series of lectures in Dublin that were later published in book form under the title What is Life? Its success was considerable as it kick-started the new field of molecular biology, but Schrodinger deliberately avoided an investigation into a definition of life, believing that the time was not ripe.

In more recent times, Fred Adams, professor of physics at Michigan University, in The Origins of Existence--How Life Emerged in the Universe, wrestled manfully with this question, but he eventually concluded that "Achieving a universal definition of life is unquestionably of fundamental importance, but no such definition has yet been forthcoming."[1]

There is a noticeable reluctance among scientists to grapple with this question of life. All are happy to speculate about the conditions that need to exist for life to originate, but none seem inclined to actually define life itself. In The Selfish Gene, for example, Richard Dawkins devoted a page or so to explaining the conditions necessary for its origin, then stated that "At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident."[2] He then went on to speculate about the further development of this molecule that he calls a replicator, but failed to explain to his readers what life actually is. A strident critic of Dawkins, Professor Gabriel Dover, in his wonderfully quirky but scientifically illuminating Dear Mr. Darwin, described the conditions necessary for life from a galactic viewpoint, but like Dawkins he omitted a definition.[3] Professor Freeman Dyson, another critic of selfish gene theory, in his excellent Origins of Life, did go so far as to provide the characteristics of life, as did Fred Adams, but these characteristics provide a description, not a definition. These approaches seem to typify the attitude of the scientific community to what appears to be perceived as a difficult subject, but as we press on I hope to show that perception to be misplaced.

On South African Literature and Becoming Human

Zakes Mda in The Boston Review:

When J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians was published in 1980, it marked a literary paradigm shift. Until then conventional wisdom dictated that South African novels could bear witness to the truth of apartheid only through realism. Whereas South African dramatists had developed over several decades a highly stylized and experimental theater that drew from both African performance modes and European models, fiction writers stubbornly stuck to a faithful reproduction of South African experience. Reflecting realist aesthetic commitments, and ignoring the mix of experimentalism and political engagement in South African theater, they held that art was not for its own sake, but a weapon in the struggle for freedom and human betterment.

Then came Coetzee.

Waiting for the Barbarians upset the expectations of many readers and critics who had grown accustomed to documentary representations of South Africa from the country’s interpreters. The novel was seen as the height of self-indulgence: life under apartheid demanded that writers create a translucent window through which the outside world could see authentic oppression. Some critics claimed that Coetzee’s use of allegory was an escape from South African reality because the novel, set in a nameless empire and lacking specificity of locale and period, was susceptible to an ahistorical and apolitical reading. The question of the author’s political commitment was raised not only in response to this novel but all his subsequent ones. Even Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer weighed in that Coetzee’s work, and indeed Coetzee himself, abhorred all political and revolutionary solutions. While acknowledging that Coetzee’s work was magnificent, and commending his superb and fearless creative energy, she rapped him on the knuckles for a mode of storytelling that kept him aloof from the grubby and tragic events of South Africa.

Wednesday Poem

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Love Song
Julie King

My father is dying, and my mother
has never been so in love. It's not

over death she's swooning;
it's the sweetness that has softened

him. She lotions and socks his feet, shaves
his cheeks so he's fresh for their evening

date in the dusk-quilted bed, the oxygen
tank murmuring in the background.

As she fine-tunes the tubes in his nostrils,
she smooths his wisps, sighs, "Oh, sweetheart."

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Extra Pounds a Boon?

From Science:

For most overweight people, excess fat sits in one of two areas: deep inside the abdomen (visceral fat) or around the hips and legs (subcutaneous fat). Researchers have recognized for some time that visceral fat is the greater evil. People with lots of it are much more prone to diabetes, heart disease, and other problems than people with excess subcutaneous fat. But it's not clear exactly why. Is the fat itself different, or does its location in the body matter?

To probe this question, C. Ronald Kahn, director of obesity research at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, and his colleagues devised a relatively simple experiment. They transplanted fat in 42 naturally plump, healthy mice. The mice were divided into four groups that underwent different types of operations. In some, the researchers added visceral or subcutaneous fat to the abdomen. In others, they tucked visceral fat or subcutaneous fat under the animals' flanks, the rough equivalent to the hips. Thirteen other animals formed a control group; they were operated on but didn't receive extra fat.

Kahn's team found some surprising benefits to subcutaneous fat. Mice with subcutaneous fat transplanted into their abdomen gained only about 60% of the weight packed on by the control group, which, like most mice, continued to expand. These transplant recipients also had better glucose and insulin levels. The mice that got extra subcutaneous fat in subcutaneous areas also fared better than controls, although not as well as the first group.

More here.

Rome: Nadal vs. . . . Octavian?

Our own Asad Raza writing for Tennis:

This week TENNIS.com will be featuring one of our blog regulars, Asad Raza, who is in Rome for the men's Italian Open. He'll be writing here a couple times, on the home page, and over at Pete's as well—he's got this thing covered. Here's his first post.

Hi Steve,

As you know, today is first day of the Internazionali BNL d'Italia, also known as the ATP Masters Roma, the Internazionali del Foro Italico, the Italian Open, and simply as Rome, which is what I like to call it. I touched down a couple hours ago, promptly discovering that Richard Gasquet's horrow show of a season continues. But you gotta feel great for Luis "Mucho Lucho" Horna, an undersized warrior who always leaves it all out on the court, win or lose. [Insert mandatory reference to Roman gladiators here.] Homeboy Andreas Seppi took out another Frenchman, Fabrice Santoro, but the Roman papers are touting the chances of Simone Bolelli, for some reason (he's photogenic?).

It strikes me that Rome is currently the second most important tennis tournament to take place on the European continent, after Roland Garros. The fall indoor tournaments, Paris-Bercy and Madrid, take place too late in the year to determine much more than the scuffle for the last few spots in the year end Master's Cup. That prestigious grass-court tourney, Wimbledon, is actually held on an island just off the coast of France. The other two European Masters tournaments, Monte Carlo and Hamburg, mark the beginning and the end of the clay season's run-up to Roland Garros, but Rome is its beating heart.

More here.

Science and the Apocalypse: On Large Hadron Collider Induced Fears

Philip Ball in news@nature.com:

When in the late 1960s Soviet scientists mistakenly thought they had found a new, waxy form of pure water called polywater, one scientist suggested that it could ‘seed’ the conversion of all the world’s oceans to gloop — a scenario memorably anticipated in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, in which the culprit was instead a new form of ice. Super-viruses leaked from research laboratories are a favourite source of rumour and fear — this was one suggestion for the origin of AIDS. And nanotechnology was accused of hastening doomsday thanks to one commentator’s fanciful vision of grey goo: replicating nanoscale robots that disassemble the world for raw materials from which to make copies of themselves.

In part, the appeal of these stories is simply the frisson of an eschatological tale, the currency of endless disaster movies. But it is also noteworthy that these are human-made apocalypses, triggered by the heedless quest for knowledge about the Universe.

This is the template that became attached to the Faust legend. Initially a folk tale about an itinerant charlatan with roots that stretch back to the Bible, the Faust story was later blended with the myth of Prometheus, who paid a harsh price for daring to challenge the gods because of his thirst for knowledge. Goethe’s Faust embodied this fusion, and Mary Shelley popularized it in Frankenstein, which she explicitly subtitled ‘Or The Modern Prometheus’. Roslynn Haynes, a professor of English literature, has explored how the Faust myth shaped a common view of the scientist as an arrogant seeker of dangerous and powerful knowledge⁷.

Reflections on Suharto

Benedict Anderson in the New Left Review:

I visited Surakarta in the spring of 1972, after the Suharto government had discovered that I had entered the country by roundabout methods and had informed me that I would be deported. After some negotiations, I was allowed two weeks to wind up my affairs and say farewell to friends. I took to the road with my Vespa and stopped briefly in Surakarta for a meal in the city’s pleasant amusement park. In those days, young ‘white’ men on Vespas who could also speak Indonesian fluently were a real curiosity, so my table was quickly surrounded by locals. When the topic of the mausoleum came up, I asked my new acquaintances what they thought of it. After an awkward silence, a skinny, intelligent old man replied, in Javanese: ‘It’s like a Chinese tomb.’ Everyone tittered. He had two things in mind: first, that in contrast to Muslim tombs, even those of grandees, which are very simple, Chinese tombs are or were as elaborate and expensive as the socially competitive bereaved could afford. Second, in the post-colony, many Chinese cemeteries had been flattened by bulldozers to make way for ‘high-end’ construction projects by the state and by private realtors, speculators and developers.

During the long noontide of the Suharto dictatorship, from the 1970s to the early 90s, three things happened to the mausoleum. It was gradually filled, almost to bursting, with the remains of Tientje’s para-aristocratic relations, but none of Suharto’s; it was heavily guarded by a unit of the Red Beret paratroopers who had organized the vast massacres of the Left in 1965–66; and it became a tourist attraction, especially for busloads of schoolchildren, so that it was always crowded with village women selling T-shirts, baseball caps, snacks, drinks and plaited bamboo fans. One thing did not happen: even after Tientje joined her relations not long before the Crash of 1997, the mausoleum never became sacred or magically powerful. After I was finally allowed back into the country in 1999, I often went to observe the site. No paratroopers, no busloads of children, only a desperate handful of vendors, a melancholy caretaker and the smell of a decaying building that had already endured a quarter of a century of annual monsoons. It remains to be seen what will happen to the place now that Suharto has finally joined his wife. To paraphrase Walter Abish: how Chinese is it?

Boghiguian and Tagore and the Relationship Between Egypt and India

Gamal Nkrumah in al-Ahram:

Anna is a personal friend. She is fond of Anwar El-Sadat, and I am more inclined to consider Gamal Abdel-Nasser my hero. Yet, we are in total agreement that Egypt and India share much in common, and we are both captivated by the subcontinent and its plethora of cultures. Boghiguian, one of Egypt's leading artists, is devoting her next exhibition to the memory of the years when Egypt and India laboured under the yoke of British rule. She is mad as hell when she thinks she has reason to be. She is fascinated by India, and by the greatest of the subcontinent's artistic luminaries -- Rabindranath Tagore, the "Myriad-Minded Man".

Anna Boghiguian becomes foil to the primped-perfect vacuousness of Cairene life. Forgive me, from now on she is no longer Anna, she is Boghiguian. This is a time of composition.

Nobody can accuse Boghiguian of being too pusillanimous, or so it seems in her lighter moments. Her works are bold and bohemian. Most Egyptians are ambivalent at best about India, not so with Boghiguian. Tagore was the subject of a reality document. A certain amount of speculation surrounds Boghiguian's work. There are bid rumours and whispers in these paintings. You can see clearly that the walls have ears.

Boghiguian, a Boadicea of the Cairene cultural scene, is not making squillions. Boghiguian's paintings are the 21st century perspectives presented in 20th century costumes. The inspiration for her exhibition was a visit she paid to the Jorasanko district of north Calcutta where the Tagore family mansion is located, today it is a museum. Any visit to the Thakur Bari, the Tagore House, is an experience of immense ramifications. On canvas, she explored the relationship between Tagore and the celebrated Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawqi, between Egypt and India through the interactions between the two men.

The Roots of the Crisis

Via Delong, Jeffrey Sachs at Comment is Free:

Today's financial crisis has its immediate roots in 2001, amid the end of the Internet boom and the shock of the September 11 terrorist attacks. It was at that point that the Fed turned on the monetary spigots to try to combat an economic slowdown. The Fed pumped money into the US economy and slashed its main interest rate - the Federal Funds rate - from 3.5% in August 2001 to a mere 1% by mid-2003. The Fed held this rate too low for too long.

Monetary expansion generally makes it easier to borrow, and lowers the costs of doing so, throughout the economy. It also tends to weaken the currency and increase inflation. All of this began to happen in the US.

What was distinctive this time was that the new borrowing was concentrated in housing. It is generally true that lower interest rates spur home buying, but this time, as is now well known, commercial and investment banks created new financial mechanisms to expand housing credit to borrowers with little creditworthiness. The Fed declined to regulate these dubious practices. Virtually anyone could borrow to buy a house, with little or even no down payment, and with interest charges pushed years into the future.

As the home-lending boom took hold, it became self-reinforcing. Greater home buying pushed up housing prices, which made banks feel that it was safe to lend money to non-creditworthy borrowers. After all, if they defaulted on their loans, the banks would repossess the house at a higher value. Or so the theory went. Of course, it works only as long as housing prices rise. Once they peak and begin to decline, lending conditions tighten, and banks find themselves repossessing houses whose value does not cover the value of the debt. 

poetry and the age

Jarrell wasn’t about to start tailoring what he thought was good so as better to suit this fellow, but to read Poetry and the Age is to watch a man trying to talk to him anyway. Jarrell’s intervention—and looking back fifty-odd years, it can only be described as such—was personal and relentless. While other critics affected authority, he embraced subjectivity; while others embraced a vocabulary accessible only to themselves, Jarrell could be lyrically colloquial. In Randall Jarrell and His Age, Stephen Burt describes Jarrell’s distinction as a poet: “He made the process . . . of being personally affected by what one reads, continually manifest in his prose style.” Jarrell’s style is humorous, anecdotal, occasionally mean, full of elaborate metaphors and long, shambolic sentences that employ the comma and semicolon like a man raising his finger to pause the audience as their hands go up with questions. “You can’t put the sea into a bottle,” he writes of Marianne Moore, “unless you leave it open at the end, and sometimes hers is closed at both ends, closed into one of those crystal spheres inside which snowflakes are falling on to a tiny house, the house where the poet lives—or says that she lives.”

This is not just impressionistic reviewing; it is imaginative reviewing, which seeks through a few key (but strangely controversial assumptions—that poetry refers to a world outside itself and that readers live in that world—to draw readers to the work itself.

more from Bookforum here.

they chose nixon over the abyss

And yet one doesn’t have to excuse Nixon’s many sins to wonder whether his mix of ruthlessness, self-interest, and low cunning might have been preferable to some of the alternatives on offer. Perlstein depicts a country on the edge of a civil war—a nation in which columnists openly speculated that America might embrace a de Gaulle–style man on horseback, or find a “President Verwoerd” (the architect of South African apartheid) to install in the Oval Office. It was a political moment when the old order could no longer govern, and the new order wasn’t ready. The kids who screamed for Goldwater and McGovern would grow up to be responsible Reagan­ites and Clinton­ians, but back then they had only idealism, not experience, and Nixonland is an 800-page testament to the dangers of idealism run amok.

In this climate, the voters didn’t choose Nixon over some neoconserva­tive or neoliberal FDR; no such figure was available. They chose Nixon over an exhausted establishment on the one hand—nobody seems more hapless in Nixonland than figures like Hubert Humphrey and Nelson Rockefeller—and the fantasy politics of left and right on the other. They chose Nixon over the abyss.

more from The Atlantic Monthly here.

Tuesday Poem

///
Letter to America
Francisco Alarcón

pardon
the lag
in writing you

we were left
with few
letters

in your home
we were cast
as rugs

sometimes
on walls
though we

were almost
always
on floors

we served
you as
a table

a lamp
a mirror
a toy

if anything
we made
you laugh

in your kitchen
we became
another pan

even now
as a shadow
you use us

you fear us
you yell at us
you hate us

you shoot us
you mourn us
you deny us

and despise
everything
we

continue
being
us

America
understand
once and for all:

we are
the insides
of your body

our faces
reflect
your future

//

psychogeographies

WE ARE ALL familiar with the rough geography of the United States - the slash of the Rocky Mountains between two great coastlines, the bulge of Maine, the Florida peninsula, the Great Lakes, set in the heartland.

But what about the country's psychogeography? You know, the great river of extroversion that flows roughly southeast from greater Chicago to southern Florida? Or the vast lakes of agreeableness and conscientiousness that pool together in the Sun Belt, especially around Atlanta? Or the jagged peaks of neuroticism in Boston and New York?

It's time to learn.

Psychologists have shown that human personalities can be classified along five key dimensions: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. And each of these dimensions has been found to affect key life outcomes from life expectancy and divorce to political ideology, job choices and performance, and innovation and creativity.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Authors launch literary festival in cities of the West Bank

From The Guardian:

Roddy Doyle, Esther Freud, David Hare and Ahdaf Soueif will this week launch the first international literary festival in the occupied Palestinian territories. Seventeen British, American, Indian and Arab authors will visit four West Bank cities for the inaugural Palestinian Festival of Literature, subtitled: "The power of culture and the culture of power."

Soueif, one of the festival's organisers, said they had invited "authors who we really liked, and who showed a concern for the world in general". Others taking part include the Scottish writer Andrew O'Hagan and Pankaj Mishra, who is Indian, as well as the British-Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub, and the American-Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad. They will work with Palestinian writers at events in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Jenin and Bethlehem.  Soueif said that the lack of Israelis taking part was not deliberate, but added: "I'm resistant to this idea of always having to twin, that every time you talk about Palestine you have to invite an Israeli, or vice versa. They aren't twinned."

More here.

Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

“Why are humans so smart?” is a question that fascinates scientists. Tadeusz Kawecki, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Fribourg, likes to turn around the question. “If it’s so great to be smart,” Dr. Kawecki asks, “why have most animals remained dumb?” Dr. Kawecki and like-minded scientists are trying to figure out why animals learn and why some have evolved to be better at learning than others. One reason for the difference, their research finds, is that being smart can be bad for an animal’s health.

Learning is remarkably widespread in the animal kingdom. Even the microscopic vinegar worm, Caenorhadits elegans, can learn, despite having just 302 neurons. It feeds on bacteria. But if it eats a disease-causing strain, it can become sick. The worms are not born with an innate aversion to the dangerous bacteria. They need time to learn to tell the difference and avoid becoming sick. Many insects are also good at learning. “People thought insects were little robots doing everything by instinct,” said Reuven Dukas, a biologist at McMaster University.

More here.

Those Chickens: The Economic Crisis and America’s Poor and Struggling

Michael Blim

It’s better to be rich – hardly a surprising claim.

But it is devastating to be poor, and this period of economic crisis it is deadly to be poor.

The effects of the crisis have been charted in many ways. There has been barely concealed panic on Wall Street. Big banks have wobbled, and many wallowed in debt. Many have taken on as much capital as anyone will lend them, as well as selling off big chunks of their equity. A major brokerage house failed, and was saved by the Federal Reserve Board.

On Wall Street, record numbers of people in the finance industry are being let go.

On Main Street, states and municipalities, as well as state authorities that back borrowings for universities, public schools, and public housing corporations, are having trouble selling their bonds.

Then there are the homeowners whose economic troubles triggered in part the crisis –apart from a financial sector whose blood lust for ever higher profits created the mess in the first place.

Who are the homeowners? Hard to know. Though you can learn a lot about the latest cure for something on the news every night, followed or preceded by drug commercials selling you pharmaceuticals, the efficacy of which seems to boil down to a smiley face and chocolate Labrador, you can’t learn much about endangered homeowners. A reporter may find one of the 7.2 million of families at risk of losing their home, but the bigger frame amidst the family’s well-earned tears is lost. Try as they might, or try as they don’t, the news industry presents a fuzzy picture. Who are these folks in trouble?

They are many: the 7.2 million households comprise 28% of all American households with mortgages. They owe $332 billion in loans, and 2.2 million have lost or will lose their houses without a federal remedy, according to the Center for Responsible Lending. A majority is white, but a disproportionate number of blacks and Latinos are vulnerable too. For instance, among whites, 17% have sub-prime mortgages; the figure is 55% for blacks.

I have come to the conclusion that only a specialist can understand what the Congress and the Executive are proposing for remedies. It is transparent, however, that they have done nothing yet to assist these vulnerable families.

(Parenthetically, where were the Federal Reserve, financial regulators and the Congress when the crisis had begun to show itself in October, 2006? Where are the US attorneys and the Attorney Generals of 23 states, all of whom are equipped with statutory authority to stop predatory lending and impose civil, as well as in some cases criminal penalties on perpetrators?)

Banks made greater profits on sub-prime loans because they could charge working class and near-power households more for their mortgages. They sold them in packages at higher prices to customers eager for extra profits. Everybody made out – except those purchasing the mortgages. Disaster was just around the corner.

Not even the poor without homes, I expect, would want these troubles. Yet, the poor along with those caught up directly in the sub-prime emergency face even rougher times ahead. Inflation is back. For the past five months, headline inflation, that is, everything we consume, has been 4% above the comparable period last year. Even the so-called core inflation rate, that is what we consumer minus food and energy, has been running at 2% for the last seven months.

I have written about how economic policymakers are attached to a measure – core inflation – that having dropped food and fuel seriously under-estimates the increased burdens on typical American households. (See my column, September, 2007)

But an interesting analysis by Neil Irwin and Alejandro Lazo of the Washington Post (March 21, 2008) suggests how even headline inflation misses a much higher increase in the cost of living. Their analysis of government data shows consumer prices for basics has risen 9% since 2006, and now costs a family making $45,000 a year an extra $972. The poor and near poor consume the basics too.

Fearful that the economic roof was falling in, Congress and the Executive agreed to a stimulus package. The idea is that American families need to keep the economy going by spending money.

Don’t put a down payment on the Prius yet. Individuals will receive up to $600 and couples $1200 depending upon income. Families with children will receive $300 for each child.

These are the upper limits. Being poor entitles you to no more than this, despite inflation and diminished or nonexistent employment opportunities.

Without employment, you may not get the money, even if you are poor because you are unemployed. You must have filed a tax return several weeks back and have declared at least $3000 in income. To get the check, Social Security and Veterans benefits, and low income wages count. But to qualify you must have income, a curious requirement when the easiest definition of poverty is the absence of it.

Thanks to the Clinton welfare “reform” act of 1996, welfare recipients are eventually cut off from further assistance, job or no job. The result a little over ten years later is that 20% of low-income mothers are without work or welfare benefits, a figure that has doubled since the 1996 law. How do they qualify for the “stimulus?”

It’s movie we have all seen before, I know. But the ending is meaner than usual: when times get tough, we make it tougher on the poor, near-poor, and the working class.

Once more:

7.2 million families holding sub-prime mortgages, disproportionately lower-income, black and Latino are in danger of losing their little bit of the American Dream.

37 million poor people (the definition of poverty for a family of 4 is an income of less than $20,000) can receive $600 a person and $300 per child if they have an income already. If not, then not.

In a society without justice such as ours, poor people, people with one foot out of poverty, and the working class are experiencing a crisis only guessed at on Wall Street where all the mischief began. Those becoming stricken by the crisis -- they indeed are the chickens that are coming home to roost. Only for them, it is simply for delivery to Tyson’s.

Monday Poem

///
On finding a lifelong friend and lover while reading
Martin Buber in a diner—

Over the Counter
Jim Culleny

I lean from behind Buber while
Thou serveth me caffein and smile.

I know my elbows rest upon the sky.
O! the blue formica shines.

I see your red cheeks blare
in oval frame of hair.

Arthur stares me down.
He's an angry, sad, old,
ruddyfaced lecher. Alone.

He imagines you his young lover.
He pushes baked haddock past
tired lips.

The chrome coffee pitcher
belches water vapor.

It rises to your eyes
and there they are, cloud bourn,
as the brown liquid drops my buzz.

My soles float over the counter rail.

Never weaned from fantasy
I want to nail down my shoes,
not wanting to trust romance:
fool's paradise. I say

love cool reason. Do it alone. No.

Oh, I'd love to do it right.
To give it up. Free
the hawks and doves and be slave
only to discovery.

///

Perceptions: ambiguities of reality

Robin Rhode. Still from "Untitled, Harvest". 2005.

Digital animation.

More here and here.

Marcotte on Her New Book It's a Jungle Out There

Jill Filipovic interviews Amanda Marcotte on her new book It's a Jungle Out There, in AlterNet:

Jill Filipovic: What inspired you to write It's a Jungle Out There in the first place?

Amanda Marcotte: Well, with the very personal nature of blogs I get a lot of questions on how to fight back against sexism on a personal, day-to-day level. I also live in a red state, albeit in a blue city in a red state, so I felt like I had a unique perspective on how to confront the sexism that's still out there, since I feel like I get it more often than a lot of other feminists do. I came up with a survival guide, a la The Zombie Survival Guide. I thought that it would just be a fun book for feminists to read and have a laugh at the unending sexism we address on a daily basis.

JF: Is the book aimed at nonfeminists too?

AM: I tried to address the issue of women who don't call themselves feminists but who are in fact feminists by kind of making fun of the whole debate. If you're afraid to call yourself a feminist, it's probably an unfounded fear. So I would hope that women who don't like sexism but who are still scared to call themselves feminists read this and walk away identifying themselves more accurately. But there are other books that address the issue more thoroughly, so I didn't want to deal with it too much.

One Step Closer to Iron Man

In Scientific American:

The prospect of slipping into a robotic exoskeleton that could enhance strength, keep the body active while recovering from an injury or even serve as a prosthetic limb has great appeal. Unlike the svelt body armor donned by Iron Man, however, most exoskeletons to date have looked more like clunky spare parts cobbled together.

Japan's CYBERDYNE, Inc. is hoping to change that with a sleek, white exoskeleton now in the works that it says can augment the body's own strength or do the work of ailing (or missing) limbs. The company is confident enough in its new technology to have started construction on a new lab expected to mass-produce up to 500 robotic power suits (think Star Wars storm trooper without the helmet) annually, beginning in October, according to Japan's Kyodo News Web site.

CYBERDYNE was launched in June 2004 to commercialize the cybernetic work of a group of researchers headed by Yoshiyuki Sankai a professor of system and information engineering at Japan's University of Tsukuba. Its newest product: the Robot Suit Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL) exoskeleton, which the company created to help train doctors and physical therapists, assist disabled people, allow laborers to carry heavier loads, and aid in emergency rescues.

Croatia as Tragedy

Gregor Dotzauer in Taggesspiegel (translated over at signandsight):

When an angel first whispered in his ear that Central Europe would end in tragedy, it is impossible to say, after all the angels which have populated Delimir Resicki's poems. They feed him with clever and terrible words and if possible both at the same time. "If you have matches / then it its easy / to find a needle in a haystack," they whisper to him for example, although the sinisterness of these lines is sapped by the daylight. At first glance, the Central European tragedy which Resicki is evoking here has something ghostlike about it. Perhaps it travels invisibly with the Bora, the Jugo or the Maestra, the three great winds which blow across Croatia. Or it hides behind the sun which floods the whole country from cave to coast, right down into the drowned valleys of the Adriatic. Beyond the showy Baroque that dazzles the visitor in Zagreb reigns the misery of the pre-fab high-rise, and beyond the elegant Roman ruins of Pula lurks a provincial narrowness you wouldn't want to cross. But these things are not inescapable, as long as you can still find respite in Zagreb's parks, or among a pile of books in a sofa of the art cafe Cvajner, once a bank of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with the intent not to rise again until next summer arrives.

So where is the tragedy? Is it heralded by the two German estate agents who in the queue at the airport shamelessly deliberate the most efficient way of coaxing the locals out of their houses while they forge plans to conquer Belarus and Ukraine because Croatia, as the mercenaries ensure one another, is the gateway to the entire East? Or does it manifest itself in the Russians who roll up with their coffers of cash to get their hands on private islands, as Tito did with Brioni, before EU regulations interfere? Or is it revealed in the skirmishes which border on bitter comedy, where politicians continue to slug it out as if, a decade after Franjo Tudjman's death, the leaden nationalism of the first post-Yugoslavian president was still alive, while all around the consumer world glitters in every capitalist brand and colour?

Is a Quiet Revolution Underway at the IMF?

Augustin Carstens in Project Syndicate:

As the turmoil swirling through global financial markets continues, there is a growing realization that global economic problems require global solutions and improved global governance. This March, amid the latest financial twists and turns, a significant achievement in this regard went largely unnoticed: an agreement by the executive board of the International Monetary Fund on a new quota formula and increases in quotas for under-represented members, particularly emerging-market and developing countries.

With that move, the IMF gave these countries a stronger voice in the main international organization charged with ensuring financial stability – and thus in the global economy itself. The decision, taken after nearly two years of highly technical and sometimes arcane negotiations, involved a set of measures that change the way quotas (which determine voting power in the IMF) are distributed.

Of course, at the end of the day, the total shift in voting power from developed to developing countries was only about 2.7%. So why is it important?

American Dreamers

William Hogeland on Pete Seeger, William F. Buckley, Jr., and public history in the Boston Review:

Buckley and Seeger share, along with fake-sounding accents and preppie backgrounds, a problem that inspires forgetfulness, falsification, and denial in their supporters. Fired by opposed and equally fervent political passions, both men once took actions that their cultural progeny find untenable.

But these two men—their careers strangely linke