willy james and the ‘third style’

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Robert Frost once remarked that the poet E. A. Robinson “remained content with the old-fashioned way to be new,” and the same could be said of the intellectual figure Frost admired most as a student at Harvard, William James. Indeed, this willingness to be new in the most old-fashioned of ways no doubt continues to obscure James’s legacy for many modern readers. As with Robinson (and even more so with Frost), James’s modernity is too often lost in the fog of intellectual mannerisms that “read” as late-Victorian: his commitment to experience (as opposed to theory or a theoretical model of experience), his interest in addressing popular audiences, his fascination with and defense of varieties of religious experience, and perhaps above all, his strenuous individualism. Thankfully, James has long had his defenders who have, especially since the mid-1960s, steadily pointed to the singular modernity of the man and his work. Robert D. Richardson’s new intellectual biography is a welcome addition to this body of work. Full of insight and written with impressive command of the astonishingly wide range of materials that went into the peculiar and truly lifelong education of William James, Richardson’s William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism may well provide the best one-stop introduction to James’s life and work we now have. If Richardson’s volume lacks some of the added breadth of R.W.B. Lewis’s magisterial The Jameses, it makes up for that by providing unexpected depth in its tracking of the many sources that fed the Jamesian stream and by offering an impressively detailed account of the fascinating relationship between James’s decidedly unstable emotional life and the zig-zag development of his thought.

more from William James Studies here (via TPM).

indian naipaul

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Naipaul is wide of the mark in his claim that most Indians today in the US ‘wish to shake India off’ and would rather ‘make cookies and shovel snow’ than deal with their Indian past. On the contrary: these are communities which often greatly admire Naipaul, share his roots in various sorts of neo-Hinduism, claim insistently that Islam is a worldwide threat, agitate over school textbooks in California which state that Hinduism is chaotically polytheistic, and wear surgical masks when they visit India and their relatives, who stir tea with their forefingers. For, ironically, ‘Indianness’ is the chief element in the cultural capital of such groups, as it is for Naipaul himself. On the distant other side, Protestantism beckons, but most Protestantism does not go together with cultural métissage; it is pretty much an all-or-nothing deal. Further, Indians living outside India have, it is well known, been rather racist when it comes to other people of colour, and the anti-black rhetoric that pervades Naipaul’s writings (including the first chapter of this book) is once again only symptomatic of a larger malaise that extends from East Africa to New Jersey. So, in the end, there is a reason why we should be grateful that Naipaul exists. With his clarity of expression and utter lack of self-awareness, he provides a window into a world and its prejudices: he is thus larger than himself. This book, like his others, should be read together with those of Munshi Rahman Khan for a deeper understanding of the Indian diaspora and its ways of looking, feeling and suffering.

more from the LRB here.

empson

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The first time John Haffenden saw William Empson he was reading his poetry not very aloud in Trinity College, Dublin. A “woman cried out with exasperation from the back of the hall, ‘Speak up, you silly old fool’”. For some who then cringed, the embarrassment was later relieved by discovering that the woman was the poet’s wife, Hetta, eventually Lady, Empson. (Others may have curled further in on themselves when they realized they had been admitted without warning into the family circle and its lively ways.) Her bravura intimacy at this moment, her carelessness of what other people thought, shared in his own cordially unbuttoned manner amid the “farcically rigid convention” of academic exchange. For Empson usually required no encouragement to speak up. He had been answering the call “to speak up against the dead weight of the fashions of two generations” since his Winchester College days when, as Haffenden puts it, he was “not loth to blazon his opinions” in the school debating society, impelled by “a natural scepticism . . . to speak up for unorthodoxy and subversion”.

more from the TLS here.

James Watson’s foot-in-mouth gene

From MSNBC:

Watson Watson talks in sputters and clicks, and delights in being outrageous, as I discovered when I visited him in Cold Springs Harbor for my book, “Masterminds: Genius, DNA and Quest to Rewrite Life.” Ushered into an office where his Nobel prize hung close by a girly calendar featuring a buxom woman that looked more appropriate for a mechanics shop, he was soon informing me that some people are born with less intelligence than others – and that those people should have their genes altered, if such a thing becomes possible. At the same meeting he called surreal painter Salvador Dali (he painted “Homage to Watson and Crick” in 1963) a fascist, denigrated women scientists as being more “difficult” than men and refused yet again to acknowledge that a long dead geneticist named Rosalind Franklin made a crucial discovery leading to Watson and Crick’s famous discovery.

Anyone who has worked with him has a Watson story about his imperiousness. Yet he also was a major player in a number of scientific efforts over the decades, not the least of which was his crucial backing of the Human Genome Project in the early 1990s. He was appointed as the first head of the project in 1990 – only to be fired in 1992 after he insulted then director of the National Institutes of Health, Bernadine Healy, and refused to follow her directions and those of Congress.

More here.

Optimism brain regions identified

From Nature:

Brain People have a propensity to be optimistic, expecting to live longer and be healthier than the population average. Elizabeth Phelps and her colleagues from New York University ran into this so-called ‘optimism bias’ when they set out to investigate what happens when people imagine emotional events in the past and future. They had volunteers think about events such as winning an award, or the end of a romantic relationship, and at the same time they scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. But the researchers hit on a problem. The volunteers were not good at imagining bad things happening to them. They would even turn relatively neutral events, such as getting a haircut, into positive things. So the team changed their focus: they decided to look at the brain areas involved in the optimism bias instead. The group asked people to imagine positive and negative events that had either happened in the past or might happen in the future. Then, the volunteers rated their levels of optimism (as a general personality trait) using a standard psychological test.

Imagining positive events in the future was accompanied by activity in two areas of the brain that usually regulate how emotion affects memory and decisions: the amygdala, buried deep within the brain, and the front portion of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which sits just behind the eyes. Conversely, activation in both these areas dropped below average when the volunteers thought about future negative events. The more optimistic people considered themselves to be, the greater the activity in the ACC.

More here.

america grows up

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In February, 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson rhapsodized about young America, “the country of the Future,” as “a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.” That May, Samuel F. B. Morse telegraphed the message “What hath God wrought,” from Washington to Baltimore, overthrowing, in one electric instant, the “tyranny of distance.” The next month, a railroad from Boston reached Emerson’s home town of Concord, Massachusetts. Less than a year later, in the spring of 1845, by which time the Boston railroad had snaked its way to Fitchburg, forty miles west, and telegraph wires had begun to stretch across the continent like so many Lilliputian ropes over Gulliver, Emerson’s eccentric friend, the twenty-seven-year-old Henry David Thoreau, dug a cellar at the site of a woodchuck’s burrow on a patch of land Emerson owned, on Walden Pond, about a mile and a half outside town. (Thoreau had lived in Emerson’s house, as his handyman.) He borrowed an axe, and hewed framing timbers out of white pine. “We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation,” Thoreau later wrote, from the ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin he built over that cellar, at a cost of twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents.

more from The New Yorker here.

the discovery of france

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At the time of the French Revolution of 1789, only about half of the population of that country knew French, and bilingualism was common. France continued to accommodate a myriad of tongues right through the 19th century: Flemish, Provençal, Gascon, Catalan, Basque, and so on, and many dialects and patois, as well as extraordinary variation in spoken language within regions. The diversity wasn’t merely lingual: A variety of pre-Christian religious beliefs and superstitions, worldviews and ways of life flourished simultaneously in the more provincial countryside beyond Paris. Even the legal order varied greatly: In addition to the difference between regions influenced by customary law — essentially northern France — and Roman law, a variety of local systems of justice survived intact, each system bringing along with it a strong sense of belonging to one of the myriad petites patries of the hexagon.

more from The NY Sun here.

Floating Utopias

The very talented China Mieville in In These Times:

Freedomship

Freedom is late.

Since 2003, a colossal barge called the Freedom Ship, of debatable tax status, should have been chugging with majestic aimlessness from port to port, a leviathan rover with more than 40,000 wealthy full-time residents living, working and playing on deck. That was the aim eight years ago when the project first made headlines, confidently claiming that construction would start in 2000.

A visit to the “news” section of freedomship.com reveals a more sluggish pace. The most recent messages date from more than two years ago, forlornly explaining how “scam operations” are slowing things down but that “[t]hings are happening, and they are moving fast.” Meanwhile, the ship is not yet finished. Indeed, it is not yet started. Despite this, Freedom Ship International Inc. has been startlingly successful in raising publicity for this “floating city.” Much credulous journalistic cooing over “the biggest vessel in history,” with its “hospitals, banks, sports centres, parks, theaters and nightclubs,” not to mention its airport, has ignored the vessel’s stubborn nonexistence.

Freedom Ship’s website claims that the vessel has not been conceived as a locus for tax avoidance, pointing out that as it will sail under a flag of convenience, residents may still be liable for taxes in their home countries. Nonetheless, whatever the ultimate tax status of those whom we will charitably presume might one day set sail, much of the interest in Freedom Ship has revolved precisely around its perceived status as a tax haven.

On the Epistemology of Faith

Phillip H. Wiebe reviews John Bishop’s Believing by Faith:

Bishop revives the idea advanced by William James more than a century ago of following one’s passions in religion when intellectual issues cannot be decided. Bishop offers a sophisticated statement of the conditions necessary for a responsible act of “taking as true” some claim for which evidence is incomplete or ambiguous, and in the course of so doing not only engages some recent interpretations of faith in James’s famous “The Will to Believe,” but also clarifies recent advocacy of the view that belief in the existence of God can be properly basic. He describes the book as arising out of an attempt to examine alternative concepts of God to the classical one in which God is considered to be the “supernatural, omnipotent, omniscience, omnibenevolent Creator ex nihilo” — the omniGod” (p. ix). Although he keeps classical theism in view, Bishop attempts to set out conditions for embracing virtually any theistic stance. His frequent reference to evangelical Christian faith, which requires putting faith in God as revealed in Jesus the Christ, suggests that he expects this version of theism to be familiar to his readers. Evangelical Christianity arouses strong passions — for and against — and it is often presented by adherents as something one might “believe by faith,” so it serves Bishop’s objectives. I will return to this topic.

One of the merits of Bishop’s work is his drawing attention to the felt difference in human experience between such broadly cognitive-affective states as taking a claim to be true in practical reasoning, and other related states of mind such as believing a claim, trusting it, and accepting it (35-41). His discussion of the limited circumstances under which we can generate beliefs lends credence to the view that a central concept in understanding religious commitments is holding claims as true, rather than believing them. Bishop’s phenomenological analysis of human acts belonging to religion adds to the knowledge of ourselves as unique, natural agents. Bishop is not the first to draw attention to important distinctions embedded in facile uses of such terms as ‘faith’ and ‘believe’, but his remarks strike me as especially insightful. The title of the book might lead one to expect an articulation of religion using these overused terms, but he does so without them. “Believing by faith” is not an effort expended in order to “make oneself believe” some claim for which the evidence is inconclusive, but consists of taking a claim to be true for practical purposes. This is the fideism that Bishop defends for those he describes as “reflective believers,” that is, people who are interested in justifying their religious acts.

What the Fossil Record Tells Us About Climate Change

David Biello in Scientific American:

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Roughly 251 million years ago, an estimated 70 percent of land plants and animals died, along with 84 percent of ocean organisms—an event known as the end Permian extinction. The cause is unknown but it is known that this period was also an extremely warm one. A new analysis of the temperature and fossil records over the past 520 million years reveals that the end of the Permian is not alone in this association: global warming is consistently associated with planetwide die-offs.

“There have been three major greenhouse phases in the time period we analyzed and the peaks in temperature of each coincide with mass extinctions,” says ecologist Peter Mayhew of the University of York in England, who led the research examining the fossil and temperature records. “The fossil record and temperature data sets already existed but nobody had looked at the relationships between them.”

Pairing these data—the relative number of different shallow sea organisms extant during a given time period and the record of temperature encased in the varying levels of oxygen isotopes in their shells over 10 million year intervals—reveals that eras with relatively high concentrations of greenhouse gases bode ill for the number of species on Earth. “The rule appears to be that greenhouse worlds adversely affect biodiversity,” Mayhew says.

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

Barbara Ehrenreich in The Nation:

I’ve never been able to explain Halloween to the kids, with its odd thematic confluence of pumpkins, candy and death. But Halloween is a piece of pumpkin cake compared to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which commences today. In this special week, organized by conservative pundit David Horowitz, we have a veritable witches’ brew of Cheney-style anti-jihadism mixed in with old-fashioned, right-wing anti-feminism and a sour dash of anti-Semitism.

A major purpose of this week is to wake up academic women to the threat posed by militant jihadism. According to the Week’s website, feminists and particularly the women’s studies professors among them, have developed a masochistic fondness for Islamic fundamentalists. Hence, as anti-Islamo-Fascist speakers fan out to the nation’s campuses this week, students are urged to stage “sit-ins in Women’s Studies Departments and campus Women’s Centers to protest their silence about the oppression of women in Islam.”

Leaving aside the obvious quibbles about feminist pro-jihadism and the term “Islamo-Fascism,” which seems largely designed to give jihadism a nice familiar World War II ring, the klaxons didn’t go off for me until I skimmed down the list of Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week speakers and found, incredibly enough, Ann Coulter, whom I last caught on TV pining for the repeal of women’s suffrage. “If we took away women’s right to vote,” she said wistfully, “We’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream; it’s a personal fantasy of mine.”

Is Stephen Colbert Breaking Electoral Laws?

Juliet Lapidos in Slate:

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TV satirist Stephen Colbert told his audience on Oct. 16 that he would “seek the office of the president of the United States.” Over the next few days, he signed papers to get on both the Democratic and Republican primary ballots in South Carolina, and he unveiled a campaign Web site. If the Comedy Central host follows through with his bid and continues to use his show for political self-promotion, does he risk violating election law?

Yes. The Federal Election Commission prohibits corporations from making “any contribution or expenditure in connection with a federal election.” A “contribution” includes “anything of value,” including airtime. Thus each time Colbert promotes his candidacy on The Colbert Report, he’ll be accepting an illegal “in kind” contribution from Comedy Central’s parent company, Viacom. The FEC does exempt news programs (including satires like the Report) from the “in kind” airtime ban, but not if a political party, political committee, or candidate (like Colbert) controls the show’s content.

Chavez and the New Latin American Socialism

Geoffrey Hawthorn in the LRB:

It is a distinctively Latin American story. Yet a comparison does come to mind. Thucydides said of Pericles, the political general who extended the ‘ancient liberty’ in Athens in the 440s and 430s BC, that he had ‘advantages in abundance’. Indeed he reported Pericles himself as having told the Athenians that he had them all: an ability to see what to do, the capacity to expound it to an audience, unimpeachable patriotism, and an indifference to personal gain. Pericles was a rich patrician from a distinguished line. Chávez, part criollo, part Indian, part African (the three constituencies of the Venezuela that Bolívar described), shares his gifts. He is the son of a poor primary-school teacher in the provinces; he joined the army, he says, to play baseball in the military leagues. Athens had a wide empire, whose tribute it had to strain to maintain. Chávez has oil, which once he had managed to wrest Petróleos de Venezuela away from directors who favoured American buyers and their own pockets (eventually firing them on television in terms borrowed from baseball), he has not had to defend against anyone. And the tribute of the markets (the US remains the largest) meanwhile rose from $9 a barrel in 1999 to more than $60 in 2006 and touched $80 this summer. Both Pericles and Chávez, however, can be seen to have been carried away by their own success. Pericles insisted that Athens could win against Sparta; yet his very insistence suggested that he knew the risks, and was anxious.

Chávez is showing something of the same anxiety.

Where the Jihad Lives Now: Pakistan

From Newsweek:

Pakistan_400x200_slah Today no other country on earth is arguably more dangerous than Pakistan. It has everything Osama bin Laden could ask for: political instability, a trusted network of radical Islamists, an abundance of angry young anti-Western recruits, secluded training areas, access to state-of-the-art electronic technology, regular air service to the West and security services that don’t always do what they’re supposed to do. (Unlike in Iraq or Afghanistan, there also aren’t thousands of American troops hunting down would-be terrorists.) Then there’s the country’s large and growing nuclear program. “If you were to look around the world for where Al Qaeda is going to find its bomb, it’s right in their backyard,” says Bruce Riedel, the former senior director for South Asia on the National Security Council. The conventional story about Pakistan has been that it is an unstable nuclear power, with distant tribal areas in terrorist hands. What is new, and more frightening, is the extent to which Taliban and Qaeda elements have now turned much of the country, including some cities, into a base that gives jihadists more room to maneuver, both in Pakistan and beyond.

In recent months, as Musharraf has grown more and more unpopular after eight years of rule, Islamists have been emboldened.

More here.

Broccoli for Your Skin?

From Science:

Broccoli Eat your vegetables, they say, but a new study might make you want to rub them on your skin instead. The paper shows that an ingredient extracted from broccoli can help prevent sunburn damage. The researchers hope that the findings will eventually lead to a new type of sun protection that perks up the body’s own defenses. Ultraviolet (UV) radiation and many chemical compounds cause oxidative damage to our DNA, which can lead to cancer. Humans have a natural defense system to break down these oxidizing agents, but UV radiation doesn’t kick it into high gear. That’s why cancer researchers have been looking for ways to activate these natural antioxidants.

Broccoli and related vegetables produce a compound called sulforaphane that is known to do just that.

More here.

godless selfgods

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When Johann Gottlieb Fichte read the Critique of Pure Reason in 1791, he was so excited that he set out for Königsberg to visit the famous Immanuel Kant. But what he found there was an old, disinterested man who sent him back home. There, in exactly five weeks, Fichte wrote “An Attempt at a Critique of all Revelation,” sent it to Kant, who was suitably impressed and found a publisher for him. For fear of censorship, the book appeared anonymously. The critics at the “Allgemeinen Literatur” newspaper in Jena wrote that anyone who knows even a bit of Kant will recognise that this new work can only be from him. Kant explained in a letter to the editor that a certain Fichte, and not he, was the author. And so he became famous overnight.

Rüdiger Safranski’s fabulous book on Romanticism doesn’t only consist of such stories but it so smoothly combines philosophical analysis with anecdotal perspective, and so gracefully switches between profound reflection and biographical wit, that we are presented with a genuine rarity: exciting German intellectual history. “Romanticism. A German affair.” That’s the title. It refers to both the epoch which lasted an astonishingly brief 30 years as well as the ongoing influence of Romantic thought and its often dangerous mutation into the political realm. In 1798, Novalis wrote, “In giving the entirety a higher value, the usual an element of secrecy, the well-known the value of the unknown and the finite the appearance of infinity, I romanticise.” This preamble to the Romantic constitution was to be fatally radicalised later by dark ideologies and their masters. Goebbels used the term “steely romantic.” And Safranski sees in Ernst Jünger “the warmongering version of the Dionysian,” which plays an instrumental role in Nietzsche (also a Romantic renegade).

more from Sign and Sight here.

sex in the park

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Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographs of Japanese having sex at night in Tokyo’s public parks, which ran at the Yossi Milo gallery in New York and now moves to the Doug Udell gallery in Vancouver on November 22, are revelatory in much the same way. They would simply be tawdry and exploitive if they weren’t also, like the Craig saga, so odd and funny. The behavior they record has to my knowledge never been recorded before on film. In an essay that accompanies a reissue of The Park, the long out of print book that for most people has been the only source until now about Yoshiyuki and his work, the critic, Vince Aletti, calls them “among the strangest photographs ever made”.

Taken between 1971 – 1979 at a time when sex all over the world was more crazy-casual than it is now, the pictures show both straights and gays getting their rocks off under trees and on the bare ground. Yoshiyuki shot with infrared film and a discreet electronic flash so that he himself was all but invisible. The figures loom in the foreground as bright smears, their limbs entangled and eyes glowing monster-like from the tiny explosions of light. Faint traces of the city can be seen in the distance in a few pictures. But civilisation is for the most part beyond the frame, as black night swallows the actors in primeval darkness.

more from The Guardian here.

Some Contemporary Electoral Statistics

Via Paul Krugman, who via Nicholas Beaudrot, Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey draws our attention to an startling statistic–in the United States there are more players of World of Warcraft than there are farmers:

They send a reporter to literally Middle America, and surprise, discover that they don’t much care for them Hollywood movies. Suuuurrr-prise!

But one chunk of this report, to me, is symptomatic of a larger issue that grinds my molars.

ANDERSON: We stopped by the Lebanon [Kansas — ed.] hotspot, Ladow’s Market, where one local told us Hollywood just can’t relate to a farming way of life.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They’ve never been back in here to know what it’s like to actually have to make a living doing this.

You know what, Unidentified Male? You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to have to make a living farming. NOBODY DOES.

For chrissake, only 17% of Americans live in rural settings anymore. Only 2 million of those people work on farms or ranches (USDA figures). Hell, only ten percent of the average farm family’s income even comes from farming anymore (did you know that? I didn’t. Funky)…

Four million people in the US play World of Warcraft. And yet, do I ever hear:

ANDERSON: We stopped by the gates of Ogrimmar in Durotar, on the east coast of Kalimdor, where one local told us Hollywood just can’t relate to the level-grinding life.

UNIDENTIFIED ORC: They’ve never been back here, questing Razormane or Drygulch Ravine, y’know … or farming for Peacebloom and Silverleaf. They’re out of touch.

No. No I do not.

Of many of these palyers can’t vote. [H/t: Dan Balis.]

Dynastic Voyage

From The New Yorker:

Dynasty Shortly after Hillary Rodham Clinton declared her candidacy for President last winter, Roger Cohen, writing in the International Herald Tribune, declared that “a delicate problem confronts her that few people are talking about: almost two decades of dynastic domination of American politics.” Well, they’re talking about it now. “Forty per cent of Americans have never lived when there wasn’t a Bush or a Clinton in the White House,” a recent Associated Press story, by Nancy Benac, begins. “Talk of Bush-Clinton fatigue is increasingly cropping up in the national political debate,” Benac goes on. “If Hillary Clinton were to be elected and reëlected, the nation could go twenty-eight years in a row with the same two families governing the country.

If anything, the dynastic dynamic has picked up speed in the past half century or so. It reached a perfect storm in 1962, when Massachusetts voters filled the Senate seat vacated by John F. Kennedy, grandson of Congressman and Mayor John F. Fitzgerald and son of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, when he was elected President—the very seat that, in 1952, J.F.K. had wrested from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., who was a great-great-great-grandson of Senator George Cabot, a grandson of the Senate titan Henry Cabot Lodge, and a son of George Cabot Lodge, who, though himself a poet, married a Frelinghuysen. (Are you following this?) The 1962 Democratic nominee for senator was, of course, Edward Moore Kennedy, then thirty years old. His Republican opponent was—wait for it—another George Cabot Lodge, this one a son of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and a great-great-great-great-grandson of, etc. Nor was that all. There was a third-party “peace” candidate, too, a professor of European history at Harvard: H. Stuart Hughes, grandson of Charles Evans Hughes, Governor of New York, Chief Justice of the United States, and 1916 Republican Presidential nominee. During a primary debate, Kennedy’s opponent for the Democratic nomination told him that if his name were just Edward Moore his candidacy would be a joke.

More here.