The Forgetting of The Great War and Its Consequences

Edward G. Lengel in The Washington Post:

As we observe Memorial Day, a hard truth remains: Americans haven’t forgotten about the doughboys [of WWi or ‘The Great War’]. We just didn’t want to hear about them in the first place. The war’s last and greatest battle involving U.S. soldiers, fought in the Meuse-Argonne region of eastern France during the autumn of 1918, sucked in more than 1 million U.S. troops and hundreds of airplanes and tanks. Artillery batteries commanded by men such as the young Harry S. Truman fired more than 4 million shells — more than the Union Army fired during the entire Civil War. More than 26,000 doughboys were killed and almost 100,000 wounded, making the clash probably the bloodiest single battle in U.S. history. But as far as the American public was concerned, it might as well never have taken place. “Veterans said to me in their speeches and in private that the American people did not know anything about the Meuse-Argonne battle,” Brig. Gen. Dennis Nolan wrote years later. “I have never understood why.”

Back then, civilians justified their indifference by claiming that the veterans refused to share their stories. In reality, the ignorance was self-imposed.

Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin offers some thoughts (see also interesting discussion following the post).

[I]n the long run, the absence of this most bloodily futile of wars from historical memory has been a huge boon to the war party. With a historical memory of war dominated by the “Good War” against Hitler and the Axis, it’s unsurprising that Americans have been much more willing than the citizens of other democratic societies to accept war as part of the natural order of things.

In Europe by contrast, the Great War and its consequences are still ever-present, and the Second World War is correctly seen as the inevitable product of the First.

After Many Years, A New but Nastier Round of V. S. Naipaul vs. Derek Walcott

20080602feud Daniel Trilling reports on Derek Walcott’s salvos against V. S. Naipaul, in The New Statesman:

The setting of the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica was idyllic, the content less so. On the second day, the Nobel Prize-winning Caribbean poet Derek Walcott premiered a stinging attack in verse on his contemporary (and fellow Nobel laureate), the Trinidadian-born novelist V S Naipaul.

“I’m going to be nasty,” announced Walcott at the end of an enthusiastically received reading session, and proceeded to read “The Mongoose”, a long, vituperative poem which opened with the couplet: “I have been bitten. I must avoid infection/Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.”

The poem launches a savagely humorous demolition of Naipaul’s later novels Half a Life and Magic Seeds: “The plots are forced, the prose sedate and silly/The anti-hero is a prick named Willie.” Further on, Walcott expresses disbelief that this latter-day Naipaul can be the same author as the one who wrote the masterpiece A House for Mr Biswas.

The motivation for this attack seems to be a mix of the personal and the political. Walcott criticises newspaper editors for indulging Naipaul’s controversial public persona.

Here is an extract from Walcott’s poem, “The Mongoose”:

So the old mongoose, still making good money
Is a burnt out comic, predictable, unfunny
The joy of supplements, his minstrel act
Delighting editors endorsing facts
Over fiction, tearing colleagues and betters
To pieces in the name of English letters
The feathers fly, the snow comes drifting down
The mongoose keeps its class act as a clown
It can do cartwheels of exaggeration
Mostly it snivels, proud of being Asian
Of being attached to nothing, race or nation
It would be just as if a corpse took pride in its decay

Monkeys Think, Moving Artificial Arm as Own

From The New York Times:

Brain190 Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday. The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology. Scientists expect that technology will eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives. The findings suggest that brain-controlled prosthetics, while not practical, are at least technically within reach.

In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand or a robot on a treadmill. The new experiment goes a step further. In it, the monkeys’ brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own, refining its movement as it interacted with real objects in real time. The monkeys had their own arms gently restrained while they learned to use the added one.

More here.

Geniuses and the Men Hidden Inside Them

Eric Ormsby reviews Einstein & Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius by Silvan Schweber, in The New York Sun:

In four photographs of Albert Einstein, taken over a 30-year span between 1911 and 1942 and reproduced in Silvan Schweber‘s “Einstein & Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius” (Harvard, 432 pages, $29.95), he positions himself, whether in a group or alone, so that his left hand is caught by the camera. He holds that hand in a distinctive gesture, with his thumb and forefinger joined to form a little ellipse. Though he tends to face away from the camera, as though indifferent to appearances, he is clearly at pains to keep that left hand visible. The gesture is as much a signal as a symbol.

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In “Einstein & Oppenheimer,” his unusual exercise in comparative biography, Mr. Schweber, an emeritus professor of physics and the history of ideas at Brandeis, explains that Einstein adopted the gesture from Hindu and Buddhist practices. Both the Hindu god Vishnu and the Buddha himself are often portrayed with their left hands in this posture; known in Sanskrit as the vitarka gesture, it represents “compassionate teaching” as well as, for Buddhists, the union of wisdom and method. In Einstein’s case, it serves as a sign not of the public figure he had become but of the man hidden within.

More here.

Thursday Poem

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Ginza Samba
Robert Pinsky

A monosyllabic European called SaxImage_sax_player_2
Invents a horn, walla whirledy wah, a kind of twisted
Brazen clarinet, but with its column of vibrating
Air shaped not in a cylinder but in a cone
Widening ever outward and bawaah spouting
Infinitely upward through an upturned
Swollen golden bell rimmed
Like a gloxinia flowering
In Sax’s Belgian imagination

And in the unfathomable matrix
Of mothers and fathers as a genius graven
Humming into the cells of the body
Or cupped in the resonating grail
Of memory changed and exchanged
As in the trading of brasses,
Pearls and ivory, calicos and slaves,
Laborers and girls, two

Cousins in a royal family
Of Niger known as the Birds or Hawks.
In Christendom one cousin’s child
Becomes a “favorite negro” ennobled
By decree of the Czar and founds
A great family, a line of generals,
Dandies and courtiers including the poet
Pushkin, killed in a duel concerning
His wife’s honor, while the other cousin sails

In the belly of a slaveship to the port
Of Baltimore where she is raped
And dies in childbirth, but the infant
Will marry a Seminole and in the next
Chorus of time their child fathers
A great Hawk or Bird, with many followers
Among them this great-grandchild of the Jewish
Manager of a Pushkin estate, blowing

His American breath out into the wiggly
Tune uncurling its triplets and sixteenths–the Ginza
Samba of breath and brass, the reed
Vibrating as a valve, the aether, the unimaginable
Wires and circuits of an ingenious box
Here in my room in this house built
A hundred years ago while I was elsewhere:

It is like falling in love, the atavistic
Imperative of some one
Voice or face–the skill, the copper filament,
The golden bellful of notes twirling through
Their invisible element from
Rio to Tokyo and back again gathering
Speed in the variations as they tunnel
The twin haunted labyrinths of stirrup
And anvil echoing here in the hearkening
Instrument of my skull.

//

Genome Institute Chief to Step Down

From Science:

Collins Francis Collins, the physician-scientist perhaps best known for piloting the human genome project, is stepping down as director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in Bethesda, Maryland. Collins said today that he will leave on 1 August to write a book and explore other opportunities, which might include getting involved in the presidential campaign or taking a nonprofit position.

Collins, 58, took the helm of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) NHGRI in 1993 as it was gearing up to sequence the human genome, then a controversial $3 billion proposal. The quest heated up when a private company, Celera, jumped in, spurring fierce competition. Both public and private efforts published a rough draft in 2001 and the full sequence was completed in 2003. Under Collins, the institute also advanced the sequencing of the genomes of many model organisms, from yeast to the platypus, that have spurred the study of evolution at a molecular level. Collins championed the public sharing of genome data and pushed for legislation to protect people against discrimination based on their genes. A law codifying that protection was signed by President George W. Bush last week. Collins told reporters today that his time at NIH has been “marvelous,” despite the recent slump in the NIH budget, which he says has made it “much tougher.” However, his reasons for leaving have nothing to do with NIH leadership or budget; he says that it is simply the fact that “the time seems right” to explore job possibilities with more freedom than if he were still in a federal position.

More here.

Rauschenberg’s fascination with the objects of the world

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Id_ic_meis_bed_ap_001_2The simplest way to explain what Rauschenberg did is to say that he made the canvas three-dimensional and worldly. Or to put it another way, he thought of the canvas as something you could walk inside and inhabit. There’s a famous quote that has come to define Rauschenberg’s practice. It goes, “I operate in the gap between art and life.”

There’s a piece by Robert Rauschenberg that now lives at the MoMA. It’s called “Bed” (1955). It isn’t exactly a painting and it isn’t exactly a bed. There are bed elements — an actual sheet, a pillow, a quilt. Rumor has it that these bed elements were once the very things that Rauschenberg slept on. But there are painting elements as well. First of all, it is framed and up on the wall. Secondly, there’s the paint, smeared and splattered mostly around the top half of the work.

Arthur Danto, the art critic for The Nation, makes an insightful point about these early works (Rauschenberg called them Combines). He notes that Rauschenberg felt a need to arrange a bunch of objects and then to throw paint over them. It is as if he is still under the thrall of paint, convinced that it is the paint itself that is making the difference between art and not-art. But he’s also trying to cure himself, and by extension the art world dominated by painterly Modernism, of this addiction. Slowly he realized that he didn’t need the paint at all. He became indifferent to its authority. Even when he came back to paint and painting throughout his career, he did so as a free man.

More here.

‘My daughter deserved to die for falling in love’

Reading this made me nauseous. Afif Sarhan and Caroline Davies in The Observer:

640pxno_love_svgFor Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. ‘If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,’ he said with no trace of remorse.

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British soldier in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city’s Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. ‘They are men and know what honour is,’ he said.

Rand, who was studying English at Basra University, was deemed to have brought shame on her family after becoming infatuated with a British soldier, 22, known only as Paul.

She died a virgin, according to her closest friend Zeinab. Indeed, her ‘relationship’ with Paul, which began when she worked as a volunteer helping displaced families and he was distributing water, appears to have consisted of snatched conversations over less than four months.

More here.  [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

Tricking the Tongue

28flavor600 In the NYT (also see the video):

“You pop it in your mouth and scrape the pulp off the seed, swirl it around and hold it in your mouth for about a minute,” he said. “Then you’re ready to go.” He ushered his guests to a table piled with citrus wedges, cheeses, Brussels sprouts, mustard, vinegars, pickles, dark beers, strawberries and cheap tequila, which Mr. Aliquo promised would now taste like top-shelf Patrón.

The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum, is native to West Africa and has been known to Westerners since the 18th century. The cause of the reaction is a protein called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes in contact with acids, according to a scientist who has studied the fruit, Linda Bartoshuk at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste. Dr. Bartoshuk said she did not know of any dangers associated with eating miracle fruit.

During the 1970s, a ruling by the Food and Drug Administration dashed hopes that an extract of miraculin could be sold as a sugar substitute. In the absence of any plausible commercial application, the miracle fruit has acquired a bit of a cult following.

Scratching the Surface: Five claycourt myths

Our own Asad Raza in Tennis magazine:

2008_05_28_clay_articleThe claycourt season has reached its championship round: the French Open.  As most in the world of tennis begin their capaigns at Roland Garros, it’s a good time to investigate some of the myths surrounding la terre battue.

No. 1: Claycourt tennis is for claycourt “specialists,” who disappear once the game switches to the grass of Wimbledon and the hardcourts of the U.S. Open Series.

This, more than any other long-held belief about the red stuff, is now a myth.  Rafael Nadal, the dominant clay player of this–and perhaps any–era, has singlehandedly destroyed this perception by appearing in the last two Wimbledon finals.  The world’s second-best clay player, Roger Federer, also happens to have won the last five Wimbledons and four U.S. Opens.

Beyond them, the next three highest-ranked men’s players in the world–Novak Djokovic, Nikolay Davydenko, and David Ferrer–are excellent clay-court players as well.  And in women’s tennis, the surface specialization that once beset men’s tennis doesn’t exist: the best player of the last year, recently retired Justine Henin, won four of the last five French Opens.

For today’s top players, prowess on clay is the norm, not the exception.

No. 2: Playing on clay means attacking players must change their tactics.

Djokovic, Davydenko, Andy Roddick, and others in Rome were asked how they adapted their games from hardcourts to red clay.  Not a single one said making they made tactical changes, other than the occasional dropshot: instead, all mentioned increased patience and wiser shot selection.

More here.

lawler’s eye

Lawler080602_560

At a 2007 Guggenheim panel, Richard Prince declared, “It was my job to, kind of, shoot the sheriff,” presumably implying that he was the slayer of photography, unmasking the grammar of images. But these aesthetic elements were caught in a crossfire in the seventies; what happened wasn’t the work of a lone gunman, and one of the sharpest shooters of all was Louise Lawler.

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory, Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors’ homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage. All the while, she’s revealed how the installation of artworks is never neutral. Lawler photographed Jasper Johns’s White Flag hanging over a collector’s bed, Jeff Koons’s $80 million Rabbit near someone’s refrigerator, a woman casually gesturing with a Picasso sculpture in hand, a Gerhard Richter nude resting on its side on a museum floor, and Warhols galore in auction houses, art fairs, apartments, and galleries.

more from New York Magazine here.

adorno: latter-day Melanchthon

Adorno2

Throughout his productive life, Adorno sought to mobilize the powers of aesthetic negation against the hypocrisies of bourgeois rectitude. In this respect, his studies during the early ’20s with the Vienna School’s Alban Berg proved to be of lasting value. Like his teacher Schoenberg, Berg was an exponent of atonality. In Adorno’s view, dissonance alone, and not pleasing harmony, gave the lie to modern society’s illusions of fulfillment and wholeness. It is no small irony, then, to observe that on his return to Germany, Adorno became a vigorous advocate of Enlightenment. These were the values that, during their twelve-year reign of terror, the Nazis had destroyed. (Goebbels once ob­­served that with Hitler’s accession to power, the year 1789 had been effaced from history.) In pathbreaking essays such as “Education Toward Maturity and Responsibility” and “Education After Auschwitz,” Adorno repeatedly advocated the Kantian precept of moral autonomy. He realized that only by nurturing the values of autonomous citizenship could one effectively guard against the dangers of a totalitarian relapse: “The single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz is autonomy, if I might use the Kantian expression: the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not cooperating.” In his conduct and activities as a critical intellectual, Adorno, to his credit, realized that Nazism’s success in Germany was the result of failed, rather than excessive, Enlightenment. Only by reversing the standpoint of Dialectic of Enlightenment—i.e., the radical Nietzschean critique of Enlightenment that the book embraced—did Adorno succeed during the ’50s and ’60s in becoming a latter-day Melancthon: a Praeceptor Germaniae.

more from Bookforum here.

a new kind of history

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UNTIL RECENTLY, IF you were a historian and you wanted to write a fresh account of, say, the Battle of Leyte Gulf in World War II, research was a pretty straightforward business. You would pack your bags and head to the National Archives, and spend months looking for something new in the official combat reports.

Today, however, you might first do something very different: Get online and pull up any of the unofficial websites of the ships that participated in the battle – the USS Pennsylvania, for example, or the USS Washington. Lovingly maintained by former crew members and their descendants, these sites are sprawling, loosely organized repositories of photographs, personal recollections, transcribed log books, and miniature biographies of virtually every person who served on board the ship. Some of these sites even include contact information for surviving crew members and their relatives – perfect for tracking down new diaries, photographs, and letters.

Online gathering spots like these represent a potentially radical change to historical research, a craft that has changed little for decades, if not centuries.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Wednesday Poem

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A Blind Woman
Ted Kooser

She had turned her face up into
a rain of light, and came on smiling.

The light trickled down her forehead
and into her eyes. It ran down

into the neck of her sweatshirt
and wet the white tops of her breasts.

Her brown shoes splashed on
into the light. The moment was like

a circus wagon rolling before her
through puddles of light, a cage on wheels,

and she walked fast behind it,
exuberant, curious, pushing her cane

through the bars, poking and prodding,
while the world cowered back in a corner

//

The Red Pill: 10 Films Guaranteed To Blow Your Mind

Ian MacKenzie in Brave New Traveler:

Screenhunter_02_may_28_1214

My English teacher once told me that good short stories were the ones that spoke to universal truths.

These were the stories that go beyond mere characters and their antics through an imaginary universe. They offer an insight into the human condition: what is life? what is truth? what is reality?

The same could be said for memorable films. Only films convey their meaning in a more sensory way – using both audio and visual elements to enter the mind of the viewer.

And perhaps even shift your perspective.

The following 10 films are chosen because they shed light on the forces at work within our lives, this very moment. They use satire and metaphor to approach the truths that would otherwise be too difficult to understand, or too terrifying to comprehend.

Most of all, these films challenge you to wake up.

More here.

The Rebellion Within

From The New Yorker:

Rebel Last May, a fax arrived at the London office of the Arabic newspaper Asharq Al Awsat from a shadowy figure in the radical Islamist movement who went by many names. Born Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, he was the former leader of the Egyptian terrorist group Al Jihad, and known to those in the underground mainly as Dr. Fadl. Members of Al Jihad became part of the original core of Al Qaeda; among them was Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant. Fadl was one of the first members of Al Qaeda’s top council. Twenty years ago, he wrote two of the most important books in modern Islamist discourse; Al Qaeda used them to indoctrinate recruits and justify killing. Now Fadl was announcing a new book, rejecting Al Qaeda’s violence. “We are prohibited from committing aggression, even if the enemies of Islam do that,” Fadl wrote in his fax, which was sent from Tora Prison, in Egypt.

Fadl’s fax confirmed rumors that imprisoned leaders of Al Jihad were part of a trend in which former terrorists renounced violence. His defection posed a terrible threat to the radical Islamists, because he directly challenged their authority. “There is a form of obedience that is greater than the obedience accorded to any leader, namely, obedience to God and His Messenger,” Fadl wrote, claiming that hundreds of Egyptian jihadists from various factions had endorsed his position.

More here.

Phoenix Descends Onto a Strange Land

From Science:

Mars The countdown was excruciating: 7 minutes to landing–or annihilation. “Altitude 2000 meters.” Falling at more than 200 kilometers per hour with its parachute open, the $420 million Phoenix lander plummeted toward the martian surface. “One thousand meters. Lander separation detected.” One hurdle cleared, but Phoenix’s ill-fated predecessor, Mars Polar Lander (MPL), had passed that one too. “Five hundred meters, 400, 250, … 80, … 40.” Thrusters now blazing, Phoenix was slowing, but MPL had messed up at just this point, prematurely cutting off its thrusters while still 40 meters up, obliterating itself on red terrain. “Thirty meters, 27, 20, 16, … touchdown signal detected.” Cheers and applause erupted at mission control. “The Phoenix has landed! The Phoenix has landed!”

“Our 7 minutes of terror is going to be followed by 3 months of joy,” Phoenix project manager Barry Goldstein of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said at a press briefing yesterday, the day after the landing.

Although the landing was gratifying, it wasn’t quite a perfect 10. Phoenix nearly overshot its targeted landing ellipse, coming down on the edge of the 60-kilometer-long target zone near its far end. That was because, for reasons yet to be determined, its parachute detached 7 seconds later than planned. But the craft still found exactly what scientists had spent years looking for: a parcel of land that is as flat as a tabletop, a rock-littered vista with only a handful of mission-ending boulders in sight, and a crinkling of the surface at the landing site that speaks of the much-sought-after ice just beneath the surface.

The one real surprise in the early hours of the mission came from the icy crinkling, says Phoenix team member Raymond Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. From orbit, the surface of the northern polar landing area appears to have a crazy-quilt patterning. Seasonal temperature cycling creates this “polygonal” design through the expansion and contraction of unseen ice just below the soil surface. Given the average polygon size of 5 meters seen from orbit, researchers had inferred a depth to the ice of about 5 centimeters. But from the landed Phoenix, smaller polygons are evident as well, perhaps 2 to 3 meters in size. That means that the area could be colder–or the ice dirtier or shallower–than expected, says Arvidson.

More here.

Gimme that Old-Time Irreligion

Norman Levitt in Skeptic:

Irreligion_cover_2The very first thing I did in drafting this review was to Google Chester Alan Arthur. I trust my readers will recall the name, if only after a bit of head-scratching, as that of one of the most obscure and unmemorable of American presidents, a run-of-the-mill New York politician who attained to the highest office in the land by virtue of the assassination of his almost equally obscure predecessor, James A. Garfield, who picked the party wheel-horse Arthur as his running mate for reasons now totally forgotten.

What has this to do with John A. Paulos’s recent book Irreligion? It is well known, of course, that some our most eminent presidents—Jefferson, Lincoln, Madison—spurned orthodoxy in religious matters, even to the point of—to use Paulos’s convenient title—irreligion. This, of course, is sufficiently embarrassing to our fundamentalist ayatollahs that they have been furiously rewriting history, chiseling away at the facts with all the fury of the restored priests of Amun hacking off Nefertiti’s heretical nose. What interested me more, however, was the question of whether disdain for religion was purely the province of politicians who where gifted intellectuals as well, or whether it was at one point so widespread and socially acceptable that even routine mediocrities, hacks, and tub-thumpers could espouse such views without being banished from public life and high office.

More here.