Low Buzz May Give Mice Better Bones and Less Fat

From The New York Times:

Bone All he does is put mice on a platform that buzzes at such a low frequency that some people cannot even feel it. The mice stand there for 15 minutes a day, five days a week. Afterward, they have 27 percent less fat than mice that did not stand on the platform — and correspondingly more bone. While some scientists are enthusiastic, others are skeptical. The mice may be less fat after standing on the platform, these researchers say, but they are not convinced of the explanation — that fat precursor cells are turning into bone.

“Bone is notorious for ‘use it or lose it,’” Dr. Rubin said. “Astronauts lose 2 percent of their bone a month. People lose 2 percent a decade after age 35. Then you look at the other side of the equation. Professional tennis players have 35 percent more bone in their playing arm. What is it about mechanical signals that makes Roger Federer’s arm so big?”

At first, he assumed that the exercise effect came from a forceful impact — the pounding on the leg bones as a runner’s feet hit the ground or the blow to the bones in a tennis player’s arm with every strike of the ball. But Dr. Rubin was trained as a biomechanical engineer, and that led him to consider other possibilities. Large signals can actually be counterproductive, he said, adding: “If I scream at you over the phone, you don’t hear me better. If I shine a bright light in your eyes, you don’t see better.”

Over the years, he and his colleagues discovered that high-magnitude signals, like the ones created by the impact as foot hits pavement, were not the predominant signals affecting bone. Instead, bone responded to signals that were high in frequency but low in magnitude, more like a buzzing than a pounding.

More here.

Below the Fold: A World without the Rich

Michael Blim

Can you imagine a world without the rich?

You might say that the rich we have had as long as we have had the poor. As the incredulous swell in an old wine commercial said to the ingénue: “How do you think I got so rich?”

Most Americans today accept the rich as they do death and taxes as another one of life’s annoying basic facts. It is unusual for Americans to realize that we as a society are responsible for their existence. We believe what they tell us. Once again, an old commercial suffices: As John Houseman, bow-tied, and quintessentially the patrician Harvard law professor he once played put it about his client: “At Smith Barney, we make money the old fashioned way – we earn it!”

(Parenthetically, who among the moneychangers would dare run this ad now?)

We need not countenance their existence forever. One need not bring back Stalin to reduce or eliminate the rich. Scandinavian countries do quite well in minimizing their presence. And there is little mystery in how to reduce or eliminate the economic power of the rich. Steeply progressive income taxes, elimination of inherited wealth through estate taxes, and income redistribution along with a robust welfare state can do it.

If Americans examined the deeper damage that the rich do to society, perhaps they might be willing to try cutting the rich down to size.

Let’s look at how the rich damage American society.

First, they burn up resources. Andrew Hacker in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books paid tribute to John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society for its scathing critique of the lifestyles of the rich and its condemnation of how they squandered national resources on personal consumption. These resources, Galbraith argued, could be better put to solving the country’s social problems. As noted above, there are remedies that Americans thus far refuse to apply, and they are as obvious as they are ignored.

Second, the rich corrupt the major institutions of American society. It bears repeating that the rich don’t get rich or stay rich simply by making better widgets and saving the profits from their corporate endeavors. They make legislatures dysfunctional, regulatory authorities their watchdogs, and professions their poodles. They corrupt presidents. They even corrupt each other, as corporate heads are bribed with board positions and in turn protect the interests of the company that bribed them.

Consider their corruption of several essential marketplaces for goods and services. What is the recuperative value of a luxury hotel inside a major hospital, complete with chef and concierge services? That depends, I suppose, on what is being recuperated. In the hospital’s case, they recover money, they claim, and lots of it, when compared to serving those Medicaid-assisted poor and the Medicare-dependent elderly and disabled. Instead of lamenting low Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements, they are pandering to the rich. Often it is for more than just money for services rendered. There are new hospital wings and prestigious care centers and institutes to think about, and who better to hit on but the rich who have just spent a week at the local Plaza Hotel hospital?

If pampering patients makes them get well, then how can it be denied to others? But that isn’t the point of the white glove treatment, is it?

Even as doctors desert careers in internal medicine owing to perceived lower pay and longer hours, other internists open boutiques, shrink their practices to a quarter of their former sizes, and charge $3000 per person annual membership fees (See my column “Is There a Doctor in the House?”). Every time internists create boutiques, they diminish the number of doctors, already declining, that provide medical care for everyone else.

The rich even corrupt careers like hospital administration. A recent Boston Globe story disclosed that the presidents of Boston’s major teaching hospitals make near or over a million dollars each a year (NB: without bonuses added). The last time I checked, hospitals of this sort were non-profit institutions. One would think that the boards of these non-profit hospitals would blanch at paying them a million, if only for fear of bad publicity. Yet, as the boards are composed mostly of very rich people, they by practically class instinct would acknowledge that someone whom they employ with so much responsibility deserves a comparable reward. This, after all, is their divine right to ungodly compensation too, so the divine right must be defended everywhere, or it will eventually obtain nowhere.

The rich corrupt universities. Elite schools become elite schools because they service the elite. If that seems tautological, that’s because it’s causal, not casual. The rich made elite schools with their money, and the payback for their accumulated billions, according to Daniel Golden, Wall Street Journal reporter in his new book The Price of Admission, is legacy admissions for their heirs. The subtitle of his book could be “how George Bush got to Yale,” and perhaps how he managed to actually get “C” grades. (You have heard of the gentleman’s “C” haven’t you?) Golden shows how elite schools take in hefty percentages of legacy undergraduates. He also shows in the case of Duke how the university effectively solicited bribes by admitting rich students with the expectation that endowment money would follow from them and their families.

And we thought we lived in a meritocracy. Horatio Alger was right: the best way to succeed in business is to marry the boss’ doctor – or, it seems, play lacrosse at Dartmouth with his son.

But there is a third and perhaps the most insidious way whereby the rich corrupt American society. They corrupt the nature of society itself by turning their corrupting powers and dubious satisfactions into cultural standards for the rest of America. The great if largely forgotten social critic Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) made this point precisely and with disarming if utterly cynical simplicity. Wealth, Veblen argued, was a source of honor, and thus having it created an invidious distinction. Others emulated the rich to achieve wealth and status. Seeing this, the rich manifest their dominance through conspicuous consumption, which also has the happy effect of controlling and corrupting American institutions, as I have suggested above in the cases of elite higher education and medical care.

Thus, for instance, philanthropy, though universally considered generous and altruistic, has a predatory component. It is, as the French sociologist Marcel Mauss would have noted, a gift that demands reciprocation – in this case power – in return. When Mike Bloomberg gives upwards of a billion dollars to the Johns Hopkins medical colossus, he receives respect in return, and probably influence in the future direction of the institution. Bill Gates, to take another case, is now one of a handful of the world’s most influential people directing global world health initiatives. Warren Buffett has decided that his friend Bill, Gates that is, should use his wealth in Gates-sponsored initiatives too. All of this is done without a whimper about the loss of democratic control of our priorities, and without a whisper of the impropriety of handing over state and in Gates’ case global sovereignty to the rich.

The rich also receive sanction for their wealth and the means by which they made it. Gates’ Microsoft may have been found by the European Community to have used monopoly power to kill off its competition, but this fact is buried on the financial pages. His philanthropy is strictly page one. And the rich actually claim their legitimacy from beyond the grave, a power for which every legacy student at Harvard rejoices. Everyone remembers that the great Andrew Carnegie, either out of soulful suffering or by virtue of his attachment to the strictures of Scottish Protestantism, gave away his total fortune. Those beautiful rural town libraries and several foundations are the result. Few remember how his steel company was responsible for the bloodiest and most lethal counterattack on a union strike in American history. With money, the rich not only predate the rest of society, but also produce a sanctifying grace that absolves their sins.

Go thou and do likewise, the rich can be heard to say. Instead of stripping the rich of their predatory and envy-making wealth, several hundred million Americans put their hopes and dreams into a chase after wealth and an orgy of conspicuous consumption. No more just social order emerges. No, instead the rich and their divine right are affirmed. After all, how can you be against wealth and predatory power if you chase it? Millions of American lives are wrecked in emulating the rich and pursuing their path. Millions more may not emulate the rich, but the rich and their wannabees economically and socially run them over anyway in the great chase for wealth and power. The poor, the working classes, hell, everyone in the bottom four fifths of American society are exploited by the rich at the same time they are upbraided for falling behind. You’d have to be a swell not to notice that the rich create a standard of living that only the rich can afford.

Ponder this and this observation of Thorstein Veblen’s:

“The fact that the usages, actions, and views of the well-to-do leisure class acquire the character of a prescriptive canon of conduct for the rest of society, gives added weight and reach to the conservative influence of that class. It makes it incumbent upon all reputable people to follow their lead. So that, by virtue of its high position as the avatar of good form, the wealthier class comes to exert a retarding influence upon social development far in excess of that which the simple numerical strength of the class would assign it. Its prescriptive example acts to greatly stiffen the resistance of all other classes against any innovation….” (Penguin Books, 1994, 200)

Feel stuck?

‘Gut gemacht, Rex!’

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

Do they give acting awards to dogs? Perhaps they should in the case of the television program Inspector RexKommissar Rex—an amazing German Shepherd (or series of Shepherds) who helps the Criminal Bureau solve murder mayhem in Vienna. See Rex get jealous when a woman comes onto the home ground of his detective owner. Watch in amazement as Rex uncovers evidence in the grounds of Schönbrunn. Laugh when Rex steals yet another ham roll from one of the detectives who is slow on the uptake that this is one extremely clever canine. Invariably, Rex is told he is wonderful somewhere towards the end of each episode. Which he is. 

Yes, the plots are are often absurd, and no dog can be that clever. However, this is a  show that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than an entertainment. It is warm bath television that is enjoyable without getting into Derrick territory, my favourite police series, which seemed to cram an amazing amount of metaphysical speculation into its hourly format.

Some people start foaming at the mouth the moment you indicate that you are not going to spend your entire life getting saddle sore with Sontag or become spellbound before the latest speculations of the Four Strawmen of the Atheistoclypse. Will & Grace. Cue a thousand put-downs. The Sound of Music. Could anything be more banal.

Popular culture can provoke the worst kind of snobbery in some. We know that nuns didn’t stop the advance of the Nazis by mucking around with engine parts, just as we are perfectly well aware that people don’t suddenly burst into song with orchestral accompaniment in the Austrian alps. However, we accept the aesthetic boundaries within which various genres operate, and enjoy them for what they have to give. I might regard Wagner as one of the most interesting representatives of Western civilisation, but I certainly don’t want to go around listening to Wagner all day. I couldn’t think of anything worse. ‘Edelweiss’, and its kind, it must be, more than occasionally.

Oliver Hirschbiegel, who directed some episodes of Inspector Rex, went on to direct Der Untergang, the compelling film about Hitler’s last days with a magnificent ensemble cast led by Bruno Ganz. And I have heard more than a few people admit to the cataclysmic effect their first encounter with The Sound of Music had on them. In other words, there is no gap between the varieties of irreligious experience. The Hegel reader can fall for the nonsensical intellectual blather that’s about these days; the ABBA aficionado may be reading Moby-Dick. So far, so obvious.

The digital spread of culture has been a good thing, despite those who want to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that all cultural product prior to circa 1995 was marvellous. Yes, there’s a lot of indulgence about now, the price to be paid for the new freedoms, but there are still some who try to ignore the fact that culture has become democratised for the first time in history. They don’t like it, but that’s too bad because it’s going to happen at any rate. Serious culture has to earn its stripes, and if people get off on a sitcom rather than listening to some music of the Darmstadt School, that is a choice made freely by free citizens. The fact that I don’t like a great deal of contemporary culture, think that it sells the human condition short, or is simply product manufactured to make money, is really neither here nor there, just as some names in the present cultural diaspora do nothing for me—they can take care of themselves. However, the worst thing is to go around in a state of high seriousness all the time insisting that one must get through on a diet of severities that would mortify a saint.   

‘A crazy planet full of crazy people, / Is somersaulting all around the sky. / And everytime it turns another somersault, / Another day goes by. / And there’s no way to stop it, / No, there’s no way to stop it, No, you can’t stop it even if you tried. / So, I’m not going to worry, / No, I’m not going to worry, / Everytime I see another day go by.’ 

‘No Way To Stop It.’ One of the best songs in The Sound of Music, cut from the film version, but containing the kind of common sense you won’t find in the Solemn Times Weekly or Preaching To The Unconverted Standard.

In the contemporary imagination Salzburg may turn out to be be the place where Julie Andrews sang Maria rather than the city that sent Mozart packing. But you can still visit the place where Mozart lived in Vienna and dwell upon the mystery of greatness. It’s not exactly secret knowledge, yet. 

? . . . !

Bring in my German Shepherd now. . . .

Nice dog. How do you solve a problem like Maria? With some Nietzsche, perhaps? 

Stop licking me. But, oh well, why not.

Amazingly enough, Rex had transformed himself—Tardis assisted— and was now beside me, sitting just in front of the large Anselm Kiefer painting that had taken over my loungeroom wall. You can imagine how taken aback I was.

But then, even more amazingly, Rex began to speak and, what’s more, in perfect English, which is a bit odd for an Austrian German Shepherd, you’ll agree. A poem.

                        Happy is he who has loved,
                        She who has known the hour
                        Of earth’s inexplicable marvels
                        And is content not to want more.

Incredible. (But . . . aren’t marvels explicable these days?)

Oh, that is good Rex. You wonderful dog. I was so stunned I could say nothing more.

But I thought, ‘Gut gemacht, Rex!’

Rex recites his poem hereabouts. 0′ 54”

A Fan’s Notes On The 2007 World Series

MVP Mike Lowell and the Boston Red Sox poured down hurt on the Colorado RPapelbonockies in the wretched World Series that ended in last night’s mercy killing Game 4 Sweep. Outside of Red Sox Nation, it was surely one of the dullest of Series in recent memory, the sum total of high drama amounting to the pitchers’ duel in Game 2, about two innings in Game 3, and, to be charitable, the final few innings of Game 4. Boston fans, during the 13-1 battering in Game 1, probably took a sort of Imperial Roman delight in feeding God’s Baseball Team to the lions. (The Rockies look for players with “character” and once hosted an event called “Christian Family Day” at Coors Field). The Rockies might be God’s Team, but remember what the Big Guy did to his own Son, after all. As for the Sox, they’re a pretty secular religion: Fenway’s ballpark organ played “Halleluiah” after Carlton Fisk’s 12th-inning Game 6 Homer in 1975.

The diehard Red Sox fan believes in his or her heart of hearts that if the score is 13-1 in the ninth that they will still lose, or that if the Sox are up 3-0 in the Series the other team will come back even though it is impossible. Tragedy, after all, is older than Christianity, and Fenway Park, as everyone knows, was built before the birth of Jesus. Fans of small market teams should enjoy or even pity rather than fear and loathe Red Sox Nation in their new ill-fitting dominance. Red Sox fans are now a little bit like lottery winners whose minds might teeter into self-destruction amidst so much inexplicable success. They’ll need counseling for post-post traumatic stress. The Sox are in their revolutionary Bolshevik stage: Their red banners have overthrown the joyless autocrats of Yankee Stadium, the power has shifted their way, and they are still honeymooning, no longer underdogs and not yet developed into fully-fledged bullies.

But, then again, see it the Sox Way. Manny Ramirez, asked about the improbability of the Sox getting to this Series at all after being down 3-1 to Cleveland, said, “Who cares? It’s not like the end of the world.” Manny is a Zen Master. Manny Being Manny reminds me of that old commercial for beauty products which said: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” Sox closer Papelbon Riverdances in his underwear on the field and sits in the dugout between innings he is pitching in a trance of semi-permanent psychosis. The bullpen clangs spoons and bottles in rhythm on walls and each other. Knuckleballs, dreadlocks, an undone hex, a manual scoreboard and a cranky old ballpark at home. What’s not to love, seriously?

Papelbon1Sure, the contemporary game is a model of conglomerate capitalism, in which not a monopoly but a consortium of big-time corporations squeeze out the competition, buy up anyone who threatens to beat them, and use sheer weight to crush smaller enterprises. Moneyball, the raiding of small market clubs, the bulldozing success of the big payroll teams. The small markets essentially becoming farm-teams, a minor league within the Bigs in which promising youngsters audition in Oakland and Florida for jobs in other cities. In some ways, the Red Sox fan is like the irrational Republican voter described by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas. He or she maintains a fervid belief in the underdog status of a dominant corporation, and is made to feel like helping “the little guy” by shoveling cash into the pockets of multimillionaires. Boston and New York: Not Red and Blue exactly, but a lot like the two-party electoral system.

2007’s World Series MVP Lowell and Boston pitching star Josh Beckett, of course, were on the 2003 Florida Marlins, who beat the New York Yankees at home in the Championship: Somebody up in Boston took note of that series. It’s intriguing to trace out the fortunes of the members of that Marlins team, and realize how many of those players have given propulsion to the playoff bids of other teams since then. I think of those Marlins in part because they were the team that benefitted from the Bartman Play that kept my Cubs out of the 2003 World Series. (Governor Jeb Bush offered asylum in Florida to Bartman, a Cubs fan who accidently spoiled a key out trying to catch a foul ball in the stands.) Your 2003 World Champion Florida Marlins! Catcher Ivan Rodriguez, who made his major league debut and threw out two base runners on the same day he was married, went to the World Series with the Detroit Tigers after leaving the Marlins. Juan Encarnacion won another world series with St. Louis. Derrek Lee helped my Cubs win the NL Central this year. Juan Pierre, who holds the record for lowest strikeout percentage among active baseball players, and Brad Penny, a 2007 All-Star, both went to the Dodgers and even so the team can do nothing in the sluggish smog. Carl Pavano had one of those terrible Yankee pitching experiences that don’t work out. Ramon Castro became a Met, along with, eventually, Luis Castillo, a lifetime .294 hitter who was at bat during the Bartman Fiasco. Dontrelle Willis stayed in Florida, and this year he didn’t seem very happy there (surely the Red Sox should acquire his services as soon as practicable). The fact that all these players – Beckett, Lowell, Rodriguez, Encarnacion, Lee, Pierre, Penny, Pavano, Castro, Castillo, and Willis – were on the same small market team at the same time is wholly remarkable, the fact that the team was in Florida is even more remarkable, and the fact that this particular roster scattered with such velocity and haste after winning the Championship is more than remarkable, it’s sad. Connie Mack did the same thing to  his Philadelphia Athletics when he needed money, back in the day.

De_3975I digress, but researching whatever happened to the 2003 Florida Marlins was how I managed some of the dullest, open-laptop innings in postseason baseball for the last ten years. Something about baseball seems to invite all sorts of unsatisfying analogies, templates imposed upon a game that in truth cannot mean anything. Manny is right on the literal level – Who Cares? If He is There, we must hope God does not, he has bigger Fish to fry than answering Rockies prayers, although a sports-distracted Fan-God could be a powerful mechanism for explaining the current state of world affairs. But Manny’s “Who Cares?” is not a fan’s statement, it’s too cosmic and impartial, it’s too calm and wonderful, too blissed out, too correct, too perfect. Who Cares? Then why did we throw so many hours away watching this season? What exactly were we watching or waiting for? Gerald Early wrote in his essay “House of Ruth, House of Robinson,” in The Culture of Bruising, that baseball is a game “inextricably bound to story.” Franklin Foer wrote a witty book about How Soccer Explains the World. How Baseball Explains America has already been done very well by Ken Burns and Co., and, on a more literary level, by Don DeLillo in Underworld, amongst myriad examples. We care, so we make the game mean something it probably doesn’t, except that it does, because it means something to us, right?

THE BIBLIODYSSEY BOOK: AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL K

First3images_2

All photos courtesy of BibliOdyssey. Click on single images to be taken to the page on which the image appears. Paired and triple images are numbered, with links appearing at the end of the article.

By Elatia Harris

Bibliocover_3 It’s going on 3 a.m., and — quickly! — you need to look at something unfamiliar, striking and truly well presented. Wouldn’t hurt if it were beautiful too.  Oh, just for a minute. You know you shouldn’t get into a whole new Internet thing at this hour.  But you must be optically seduced – you must be!  And then you will sleep.  First, however, some 12th century Egyptian maps that utterly disresemble any known terrain, some delicate German drawings from the 1830’s of Radiolaria and other single-celled organisms, a bit of Chinese garden architecture, various illustrated cosmologies, an engraving of a giant tuba dominating a Flemish townscape…  No doubt about it — you can only be headed for BibliOdyssey, one of the world’s best-loved art blogs.  Earlier this month, the BibliOdyssey book came into being, published in London by FUEL, with a foreword by Dinos Chapman. It’s a big, beautiful book — not just a triumph of the blog-to-book genre, but a triumph, period.  And it’s so exciting to so many that this may well not be the first you’ve heard of it.

Maninhat_3 BibliOdyssey is the brainchild of Paul K, who lives in Sydney, Australia, and prefers to remain in the background: he is the curator, BibliOdyssey is the show.  In lieu of an author photo, Paul sent me the print on the right. Some know him better by his screen name, peacay, or his initials, PK, but nobody knows much. I first made his acquaintance in my pioneering days of image capture; I didn’t know how to pull an image off the Internet, and Paul told me how the thing was done.  Of this art, Paul is the master, and his meticulous care in matters of attribution is one of the BibliOdyssey hallmarks. If you like an item of the “visual Materia Obscura,” as Paul calls it, that you see on BibliOdyssey, then you will always be able to find out where it came from, and many other precise things about it too. Paul is not an art historian specializing in prints who’s showing you what he knows, but the searcher and discoverer of the images he puts up. Even though a post may take 10 days to a month to prepare, he writes about his finds with a distinctly un-gushy sense of having made a fresh haul. It’s an engaging, conversational style of writing that carries over into the book. And, I might add, a style an art history instructor could employ to keep visual culture newbies from feeling bogged down in class.

Apropos the publication of the book, Paul and I emailed about the evolution of the blog from its early days in 2005 to its present form, about the passionate nature of the search for images and the surprises involved, about shifting gears to write the book, and about his sense of mission in creating so much beauty and interest, post after long luminous post, four or five times a week.

ELATIA HARRIS:  I’ll start with the obvious question — How did you get the idea for BibliOdyssey? Were you looking for specific kinds of images from the get-go?

PAUL K: One way or another, all roads do lead to the Metafilter (Mefi) community. I had some time on my hands, first in Vietnam, then back here in Sydney, and I was busily looking around for weird and wonderful material to post to Mefi. There were a couple of posts I did  — on the outsider artist Charles Dellschau and the polymath Athanasius Kircher — that really sparked my interest in the eclectic visual material to be found online. There was also a curiosity about blogging in general — why was it such a popular thing? I didn’t want to outstay my welcome at Mefi by continually posting about esoteric engravings and the suchlike, so corralling them at my own site proved to be the logical alternative.

EH: There used to be a line in your About section — “If it looks like I know anything, the mirrors are working.”  It looks like you know a lot.  Could you comment on special knowledge needed for putting up BibliOdyssey?

PK: I arrived with enthusiasm and maybe that was enough to hide my ignorance, at least initially. I have a deep respect for many sites out there that scan, aggregate and/or upload obscure artistic material and I’ve learned a lot by observing their various approaches. One art site I followed closely early on, Giornale Nuovo  — which, incidentally, has discontinued operation as of this week — I considered to have an exemplary overall style and that probably had a positive affect on the way BibliOdyssey has developed over time. But I read widely across the web and am always watching and assessing a lot of people who have excellent technical, artistic or writing talents, so my education — on many levels — never ceases.

That line about the mirrors was meant as a humorous defense of course. I didn’t want people to make the mistake of thinking they had found some kind of authority. I eventually removed the line from the site, not because I particularly felt that I had made any great progress, but because the joke wears a little thin after a while.

Anotherpair

EH: So, if there was no very focused preparation, were there influences?

PK: Probably two major influences that bear on the way I approach things. One is a science degree and the other is Joyce’s Ulysses.  Science teaches a person to be a critical thinker and to search for essential features and the truth without regard to prejudices. It’s a background that lets me scan 40 websites, for instance, and quickly identify the salient points and the most reliable sources. Ulysses teaches me that there is abundance in the commonplace and to have a sense of humor in the process of discovery.

So, more explicitly, I rely upon a continuous curiosity and attention to detail to overcome my lack of knowledge and background in all things of an artistic and historical nature.

EH: There was a sort of admiring criticism leveled at Monet –“Only an eye, but what an eye,” I think it went. Do you relate to that?

PK: Isn’t the quote from Cézanne actually? — “His was only an eye, but what an eye!”  And I thought it was not a criticism at all, but an incredible compliment, implying that with his regular human vision he was able to see in a visionary way.

In any event, I relate to why Cézanne would be so deeply affected by Monet, yes. Do I think it relates at all to me or to BibliOdyssey. No. Absolutely not. I seriously do not believe that I have any great eye for identifying beautiful or wonderful or amazing images, or at least, no more than the next person. If I post a series of images from a certain artist, I am quite confident that most other people would make the same or similar choices. The only thing I’ll concede — and this really runs the gamut in terms of unearthing any depth of psychology to the background and practicalities of BibliOdyssey — is that I devote the time and have built up a familiarity with the institutions and to a lesser degree, art history.  My eye has been honed by experience.

EH: What does it feel like to conduct these long, fruitful searches and haul in all these fantastic images?  I want to know a bit about the sorting process, also about the emotional quality of what you’re doing.

PK: I’m not sure I’d call them long and fruitful. The fruit is sporadic at best. I have to scan a lot of rhubarb to find the strawberries!

There are varying levels to the sifting process. First it’s about finding images in numbers that are rare, odd, unusual or have visual qualities that catch my eye or set them apart. At this stage I’m just happy that the net is full. I’m not really looking deeper at the detail or the artistic beauty, save for its initial impact from a quick scan.

Next it’s about extracting, cleaning up  (if needed), cropping, assembling and picking out a selection to post. Looking into the background, reading around, writing and compiling everything for an entry on the site takes from hours to days to sometimes weeks.

Nowhere in this chain of tasks do I have time to be particularly moved, or just contemplate the images in wonder.  That part really comes for me in the same way it does for everybody else, when I return to the site and wander around without time constraints or the self-imposed pressure of constructing a post.

EH:
You’re used to surprising everybody with what you put up.  Reading the comments, I see that people are often amazed by your finds. But are you knocked for a loop by what you find pretty often, too?

PK: Absolutely. Not every day perhaps, but regularly and significantly – it’s like the serendipity one experiences wandering around an antiques store. I’m unencumbered by a background in the trade so each new trinket holds a special worth both because of its inherent beauty or novelty and also because I wasn’t aware of its existence.

I suppose 10% of all the images posted continually take my breath away when I see them – they astonish me for their imaginative and artistic magnificence and I hope they always will. That’s not to suggest that I don’t like the other 90% of course, but there’s a certain number for which the allure never abates.

Apair

EH: Would I be asking for a trade secret if I wanted to know why the images on BibliOdyssey are always so clear and sharp and radiant? I’ve never seen anyone do it better so it must take all night…

PK: Just staying with the antiques thought, I always try to remember the restorer’s maxim – ‘Do as little as is necessary.’  So I don’t use Photoshop and I only use a small paint program sometimes to downplay age- related damage and stains, particularly near faces. In truth, the image quality is very varied. Other than that, I would suggest that you are being fooled by the beauty of the underlying picture. Success!

EH: How did the idea for the book come about? Did it feel like a natural segue or did you have to be sold on it?

PK: FUEL Design came up with the idea and made a tentative contact. I said I was not averse to the concept but I didn’t think it was necessarily feasible. They allayed my initial concerns by gently encouraging us to take some small steps to see what would happen. So it was probably not a natural progression for me at the very beginning. But my familiarity with the institutions the images came from, and their keepers, meant that the terrain we had to traverse was immediately in my area of experience.

EH: I like it that these images have come full circle – didn’t most of them start out in books?

PK: You’re suggesting that the site concentrates on book art and in fact that’s not quite the case. The spectrum covered is actually print art. That ranges from book illustrations to posters to art books to watercolor sketch albums and all in between — yes, the boundaries are a little fuzzy. It just so happens, quite naturally, that book art — old engravings and  whatnot — is the predominant material. Funnily enough I didn’t know they were the boundaries of the site from day one. I had a notion it would be in that general region, but when the site was posted to Mefi it was described as being a ‘compendium of the printed image’ and I took that as a cue.

EH: You mention a science degree in your background – yet you’ve set yourself an art historical/curatorial task, haven’t you? Do you sweep the archives in a pretty democratic fashion?

PK: It’s the scientific mind at work in the field of art really. I’m not in the habit of attaching labels such as ‘high art’ or otherwise, so the democracy you see on the blog is really a product of combing through all the relevant material and saving what I find attractive. I have an acreage – print art – and I try to be assiduous in plowing all its constituent parts. You may well describe it as attempting to assess the visual scope of culture but that’s not essentially where I come from.  I’m looking for the outlandish, the intriguing, the bizarre, the beautiful, the breathtaking — if, from a sociological viewpoint, that accumulation represents a certain aspect of human artistic history, that is not a characterization with which I would vehemently disagree.

But I would point out that the Web archives are themselves undemocratic. I can count on one hand the number of posts I’ve made about African art for example. So at best we have a curator’s skewed tastes applied to an inherently disproportional online representation of human artistic cultures. I have expended a lot of energy attempting to overcome or at least reduce that sort of bias. Alas, I am not a magician.

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EH: I and many others who follow BibliOdyssey think you’ve done something stupendous. It’s hard to imagine it coming totally out of the blue  — is there any way one might say the child was the father of the blogger? Or of the writer of the book?

PK: I had a tremendous ability to become passionately absorbed in whatever I was doing back then – sports, stamp-collecting, reading. I’m an all or nothing kind of guy, always have been.

One of the things that stands out about both the blog and book is that they involve, for the most part, subjects that are outside of my areas of experience. That has been a big part of the attraction: I knew little coding, knew little about blogs in a practical sense, knew little about art, hadn’t formally studied history, and my science background concentrated on the theoretical and experimental of course, so there wasn’t so much emphasis on studying the illustrations as artistic pieces. This whole thing from blog birthing to book making has essentially been about some guy educating himself, but in a very public way.

EH: I’ve heard writers say they write not to be writing, but to be read – I’d have to agree with that.  And you can’t be happy blogging into the uncaring air, can you?  Are you pleased with the sense of audience you get?

PK:
I like  — no, that’s wrong  — I need to know that people visit and think that what’s occurring on the site is being curated well and that the content is interesting or enjoyable or wonderful  — take your pick of descriptions. Comments are only one facet of the feedback. Site statistics, citations on other sites and correspondence are the backbone of assessing how the site is perceived. As long as people visit, getting few or no comments would be of secondary concern. But if there were no comments and few visitors, then it would mean that it had become too narrowly self-indulgent. I don’t feel that is likely: the cusp of science, history and art — the domain of the print world, really — is too rich a vein and my capricious whims too significant an influence for lack of variety to become an issue methinks.

EH: And you never worry about running out of material – or do you?

PK: Were all the world’s museums, libraries and galleries to stop digitizing books today, I’m not so sure I could systematically extract the already existing worthwhile morsels of visual materia obscura in my lifetime. That’s one of the satisfyingly frustrating enjoyments — the scope of activity in sifting and collecting in the digitized print world is as large as I want, so that the concepts of perfection or completion are irrelevantly abstract.

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EH: Having created and maintained the blog for just over 2 years, how do you see the meaning of the book? It’s a beautiful object, and that’s plenty — but I guess I’m talking about the larger meaning.

PK: You’ll allow that in many ways, meaning comes after the process. There never really was a master guiding principle while we toiled away getting the book project off the ground, or if there was, it was this notion of being respectful to the digital and hard copy elements contributing to the project – truthfulness, proper attribution, accuracy as to facts and fair representation.

There is – for me – no great thesis to be plumbed here, but I suspect that this book is a challenge to the notion that the digital and print mediums are separable entities. You may wish to attach a greater meaning to the “blog about books turned into a book” trope, but I think that’s just a simple chain of irony.

If I must I suppose I would grant that the book is most meaningful as an invitation to discovery. It offers a broad range of accessible material from a large number of repositories and I hope people become motivated to pick up a book or turn on a computer to learn more.

EH: Could you guess which might be the more lasting – blog or book?

PK: We think of these fragile relics being given a new lease of life and protection on the Internet, which is true to an extent, but the ultimate irony in this circular book-to-web-to-book escapade is that the BibliOdyssey book may well outlast the digital files from which it was derived.

EH: It’s taken me years to think of a digital file as having the reality of hard copy… What could happen now?

PK: Well, preservation of digital documents is turning out to be a more complex and costly exercise than the best practices applied to the comparatively robust originals, which have somehow managed to survive wars, weather and the passage of time. The Internet is in its infancy yet its stored resources are already at risk. Websites disappear every day, technologies and file formats change and impose upgrade requirements to maintain compatibility, data integrity and retrieval assurance.

The BibliOdyssey book becomes — inadvertently, in these circumstances — a snapshot overview or sampling of the online cultural resources available at this moment in history. An artifact of our illustrated digital times.

For myself, during the practical development of the book, I was generally less concerned with the big picture and more preoccupied with developing respectful relationships with these wonderful digital repositories and carefully researching the backgrounds. It was a project, a labor of convoluted love and a hard copy back up of my little obsession.

Yetanotherpair

EH: I saw that FUEL asked Dinos Chapman, an enfant terrible of the British art world in the 90’s, to write the foreword.   What did you make of that?

PK: I don’t want to talk about Dinos Chapman’s foreword. I would rather people who get hold of the book discover his writing without my tainting it with a comment or description. If you know Dinos Chapman and the work he and his brother have produced, you will know to expect the…unexpected.

EH: I had quite a fabulous time selecting illustrations for this article from almost 800 long pages of BibliOdyssey posts, most with 12 to 15 or more radiant images of stuff I didn’t know existed – there was nothing I didn’t want to use. But if you were asked to tell someone who’d never seen it about BibliOdyssey – the blog or the book – how would you describe it so that they’d know if they wanted to be involved?

PK: Hm. Take one part circus, one part diorama and one part tutorial. Add comfy chair and blend. Readers can expect a visual parade of science and alchemy, manuscript illumination, absurdist woodcut, ethnographic history and imaginary beings. It’s at once  a kaleidoscope of contrasting imagery and a survey of the illustrative output of humanity across half a millennium. If you aren’t intrigued or amazed by a wide spectrum of eclectic images then you don’t want this book, you want an imagination.

EH: Absolutely!!! Thanks!

                                                      
LINKS TO BIBLIODYSSEY PAGES with info about illustrations for this article (you will have to scroll to find the precise image.)

1. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2007/08/manuscript-decoration.html
2. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/11/concept-of-mammals.html
3. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/search?q=thornton
4. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/07/snips.html
5. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/10/iakov-chernikhov.html
6. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/01/religious-triumvirate.html
7. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/search?q=arabic
8. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/search?q=murray+gell-mann
9. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/search?q=denys+brown
10. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2007/04/splintered-remainders.html
11. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/search?q=palenque
12. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/11/engineering-renaissance.html
13. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/12/pochoir-insects.html
14. http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2007/02/erik-nitsche-graphic-design.html

SEE ALSO Phantom of the Optical, an article about Paul K by Damien S.B. English in Edutopia.
http://www.edutopia.org/phantom-optical

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Zajal, think hip-hop, rap and toasting

Ed Emery in Le Monde Diplomatique:

Lebanon’s Ghada Shbeir won the BBC Radio 3 World Music Awards this June and, with them, the West discovered Muwashshah, an Arab versified musical form that was previously known just to a handful of scholars. The Palestinian singer Reem Kilani has also helped Britain discover this music, which exists alongside a related form known as Zajal. Like Muwashshah, it is a strophic poetic form much loved and prized by Arabs the world over.

Although it is sung and has music, Zajal is not often performed in the West, for simple reasons: it is an art of poetic duelling in which two poets challenge each other with improvised verses, and each has to respond in kind. It is performance art, emulative poeteering between men. It is not a free-for-all, but takes place within established conventions. Think hip-hop, rap, Jamaican dancehall and toasting.

Since its performance depends on text, it needs an audience who can understand its meanings, cross-references, puns and interplays. And feedback from the audience – appreciative noises, rhythmic clapping and repeating of sung refrains – is necessary for its poets to perform their art, so Zajal could not easily transfer to the alienated spaces of the World Music stage.

Comments on Gregory Clarks’ A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

Samuel Bowles offers some interesting remarks (in the October 19th issue of Science):

Clark’s thesis is that the industrial revolution occurred when and where it did (England, late 18th century) because from 1250 on wealthy Englishmen passed their distinctive values of diligence, patience, and prudence on to their children who were more numerous and became wealthier than the children of other families (who lacked these values), the result being a gradual spread of these values in the population, eventually accounting for England’s take off. The following data and reasoning amplify points made in the review and suggest some empirical shortcomings of the thesis…

5. If parent-child personality similarity is due entirely to parent child transmission – whether genetic or cultural – it will dissipate rapidly, accounting for a very modest correlation of traits over 4 or more generations. Clark’s argument concerns fathers and sons. We assume that mating assortment can be ignored, given the evidence Clark offers for “great social mobility and fluidity… in medieval England” (p. 161). Let the intergenerational correlation of a trait be r. Then if genes are not involved and the only direct influence of vertical cultural transmission on sons is by fathers (not grandfathers, etc.), the correlation across n generations is r^(n -1).

Krugman on the Chances for Universal Health Care

Ezra Klein interviews Krugman in The American Prospect:

EK: And why do you think there’s slight better than even odds that we can get it? Why will this time succeed when so many others failed?

PK: First, there’s a progressive movement where there wasn’t one before. Clinton came in when the Democratic Party was basically an uncoordinated coalition of people with their own special interests. There is a real progressive movement now. They’ve learned something from the debate. And health care itself, a lot of the sense of crisis over health care in ’92 was because the economy was in recession, and things got better on the health care front and the economy recovered even as Clinton was trying to get plan through. This time around private health insurance has been declining even in the midst of economic recovery, so the crisis is that much deeper. And because of the progressive movement, the Democrats have more or less coalesced on a plan. LBJ passed Medicare in July of ’65 because he hit the ground running and knew what he wanted. Clinton didn’t give his first speech on health care until September ’93. This time around, we hope, if it’s a Democrat in the White House, that he or she will be much closer to the position that Johnson was in when he passed Medicare.

A Review of Oliver Sacks’ Musicophila: Tales of Music and the Brain

Anthony Gottlieb in the NYT Book Review:

[Sacks’] new collection starts quite literally with a bolt from the blue, when a 42-year-old surgeon, Tony Cicoria, was struck by lightning in 1994. Cicoria’s heart apparently stopped, but he was resuscitated, and a few weeks later he was back at work. Everything seemed normal until this fan of rock music was suddenly seized by a craving for classical piano music. He bought recordings, acquired a piano and began to teach himself to play. Then his head began to be flooded with music that seemed to come, unstoppably, from nowhere. Within three months of his electrocution, Cicoria had little time for anything other than playing and composing.

A dozen years later, Cicoria is still an extreme musicophiliac but has no desire to investigate his own condition with the finer-tuned forms of brain scanning that are now available. He has come to see his condition as a “lucky strike.” The music in his head is, he says, “a blessing … not to be questioned.” (He was certainly lucky not to be killed. Standing in thunderstorms cannot yet be recommended as a new answer to the old question of how to get to Carnegie Hall.)

Thanks to the willingness of others to be scanned, though, we now know that musicians’ brains are different.

Facebook Electoral Segmentation and Target Political Marketing

Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber:

Republican Internet consultant Patrick Ruffini points to this fascinating resource for figuring out the raw numbers of liberal, moderate and conservative Facebook users interested in a specific issue. Don’t try to create a flyer or whatever – just go to the “targetting” section, type the topic that you are interested in into the keywords section, and see how the numbers change whether you click Liberal, Moderate and Conservative (there’s further microtargeting of cities etc available too). For example, about 2,520 self-declared liberal Facebook users declare blogging as one of their interests, as opposed to 1,320 moderates and 1,100 conservatives. 5,180 liberals show the good taste to declare My Bloody Valentine as one of their favourite bands, as opposed to 1,120 moderates, and only 340 conservatives. Less obviously, the number of liberals (7,300) and conservatives (7,580) who like bluegrass music is about the same1. Obviously, treat these numbers with extreme caution; there is no way that Facebook users are a random sample of the population 2, but still, this promises much idle entertainment.

If the World Could Write . . .

From The Washington Post:

War_2 Though Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma helped teach Tolstoy how to describe battle, most of War and Peace might be likened to a compact version of Balzac’s multi-volume Com¿die humaine. In these pages an old man’s heirs connive over his fortune. Parents strive to marry off their worthless children for money and status. Couples form and break up, young girls attend balls, their admirers quarrel and duel, fortunes are lost at cards, babies are born, families face social or financial ruin, and the most cherished dreams are dashed. The book never flinches from showing us deliberate cruelty, repeated heartbreak and survivor guilt.

While his villains never change, only worsen, Tolstoy’s heroes evolve, deepen, see more clearly into the nature of things. Society, the novelist believes, corrupts us because it is built on falsity and pretense, on role-playing and the acceptance of the unreal. It’s all opera. Only the very young and the very holy can ignore the pervasive artificiality. “As with all people, the moment she looked in the mirror, her face assumed a strained, unnatural, bad expression.” However, those chastened by suffering or allowed ecstatic moments of insight may sometimes escape the world’s meretricious allure.

As its title suggests, the novel examines two opposing realms, alternative paths through life. Tolstoy repeatedly contrasts war and peace, the artificial and the natural, erotic torment and family happiness, the city and the country, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Germanic military tactics and Slavic submission to the force of history, intellectual complexities and Christian simplicities, this world and the next.

More here.

Decisions, Decisions…

From Science:

Decisions_2 Who hasn’t agonized over a major decision in life, whether to accept a job offer, move house, or perhaps switch research fields? We are confronted with a multitude of decisions on a daily basis. Many decisions are trivial and can be dealt with in seconds. However, others may have wider ramifications and can be excruciatingly complicated. In the past few years, our understanding of the underlying processes of decision-making has progressed markedly. This neuroscience special issue highlights some of the most exciting developments in this area.

Koechlin and Hyafil review recent experimental studies that provide new insights into the function and connectivity of the anterior prefrontal cortex, which forms the apex of the executive system underlying decision-making. The authors propose an original model of the anterior prefrontal function and provide a theoretical framework for addressing major unresolved issues and guiding future research on decision-making and higher cognition.

More here.

an enormous, astonishing figure

Hughes2

For Hughes, poetry was a matter of archetypes and of dreams transcribed — the account here, years later, of the dream which inspired ‘The Thought-Fox’ is mesmerising. A powerful spirit, he confidently engaged with the ouija-board which has destroyed less committed minds, and took professional advice from his spirit guide, called Pan. (Apparently, Pan gave him the numbers for the pools draw, one number out from top to bottom). He thought, as these letters and Birthday Letters clearly imply, that poetry, once written, creates as much as inspires a situation, and he may have been right. Crow, that terrifying statement of nihilistic madness, was not, as we all thought, driven by the terrible suicide of his lover Assia Wevill and her murder of their daughter, Shura; it was finished on the day before Assia’s final act.

more from The Spectator here.

lessing

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Lessing, in the course of more than 50 books, has become an “epicist of the female experience,” the Nobel committee said, who “with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”

Her books have plumbed the deep divide across which men and women talk at each other, the painful racial fractures and stultifying suburbia of colonial Africa, the earnestness and silliness of Communism, the ways in which passion still skulks in an aging woman’s heart. She has been alternately adored by feminists for her acute chronicles of what it means to be intelligent and frustrated and female, and reviled by them for renouncing, not a little imperiously, much of what they hold dear.

more from the LA Times here.

music and the brain

Oliver_sacks

Urban legend has it that when a patron fell ill in Carnegie Hall and the call went out for a doctor in the house, half the audience stood up to help. Perhaps the concert was a medical benefit; more likely, it never happened. But there does seem to be no shortage of doctors who are musical, at least in New York, and one of them is Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and author, who has now combined two of his passions in one book.

In his earlier collections of clinical tales — most famously in “Awakenings” (1973) and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” (1985) — Sacks presented with compassion, sensitivity and learning what, in coarser hands, might have been freak shows of the mind. The genre could have been an exploitative sideshow: a parade of misfits whose brains have been weirdly affected by disease, trauma, congenital defect or medical treatment. But Sacks is adept at turning neurological narratives into humanly affecting stories, by showing how precariously our worlds are poised on a little biochemistry. The result is a sort of reverse-engineering of the soul.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Pervez Hoodbhoy on the Civil War in Pakistan

Over at ZNet:

An overwhelming majority of Pakistan’s citizens do not want harsh strictures imposed on their personal liberties. They do not want enslavement of their women, their forced confinement in the burqa, or for them to be denied the right to education. Instead, they want a decent life for themselves and their children. They disapprove of Islam being used as a cover for tribal primitivism. But there is little protest.

We must understand this. Why is there no mass movement to confront the extremist Taliban of Miramhah and Waziristan, or the violence-preaching extremist mullah in Mingora, Lahore or Islamabad? This is because ordinary people lack the means and institutions to understand, organise, and express their values and aspirations. We do not yet have the democratic institutions that can give politics meaning for ordinary people. Depoliticising the country over the decades has led to paying this heavy price.

To fight and win the war against the Taliban, Pakistan will need to mobilise both its people and the state. The notion of a power-sharing agreement is a non-starter; the spectacular failures of earlier agreements should be a lesson. Instead, the government should help create public consensus through open forum discussions, proceed faster on infrastructure development in the tribal areas, and make judicious use of military force. This is every Pakistani’s war, not just the army’s, and it will have to be fought even if America packs up and goes away.

It may yet be possible to roll back the Islamist laws and institutions that have corroded our society for over 30 years and to defeat our self-proclaimed holy warriors.

Guardian America

Guardian America launched last Tuesday. Over at Comment is Free, Michael Tomasky discusses this American cousin of the British paper:

So what is Guardian America, what makes a British newspaper think that Americans will want to imbibe its view of America and the world, and why, having decided to undertake such an improbable project, would the paper place it in my hands? Fine questions. Let’s explore.

The journalistic shorthand version is that Guardian America is the US-based website of the Guardian newspaper of London and Manchester, which will combine content produced in the UK and around the world with content that we originate here to create a Guardian especially tailored to American readers. I am sometimes asked what, or who, this means we will try to be “like”; the questioner wants an American reference point the better to slot this project into a known category. The only answer is that we will try to be like … the Guardian.

Which means what?