From The New York Times:

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships. He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

He is one of the role models in Dan Ariely’s new book, “Predictably Irrational,” an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. General Xiang Yu was a rare exception to the norm, a warrior who conquered by being unpredictably rational. Most people can’t make such a painful choice, not even the students at a bastion of rationality like the MIT, where Dr. Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics. In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy (and they weren’t even asked to burn anything). The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go.. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it’s good to keep options open.

More here.

James Brown. Untitled.

Thanks to Kuniko and Cliff Weber for introducing me to this artist, who is so obscure I cannot find anything worth linking to about him on the internet.

PD Smith at Kafka’s Mouse:

Do the houses once lived in by famous writers tell us anything about their work? After the Great War, Virginia Woolf and her husband paid £700 for Monk’s House in the Sussex village of Rodmell. It’s a simple, weather-boarded cottage beside a country lane.

Behind it was a garden and an orchard of overgrown pear and apple trees, with views over the flats of the Ouse valley. When they bought it, Monk’s House had no bath, no toilet, no hot water and just brick floors. Its previous owner had gone mad and starved himself to death. Virginia wrote: “We went to Rodmell, and the gale blew at us all day; off arctic fields; so we spent our time attending to the fire.” One morning they had to get up at 4 am to chase mice out of their bed. Today, few would put up with such conditions. But not Virginia; she loved the cottage and her “soft grey walks” in the surrounding countryside.

More here.

Francis Wilkinson in Discover:

As a former chairman of George W. Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics, Leon Kass is well acquainted with controversy, and with the treacherous terrain at the nexus of science and politics. The council, tasked with advising the president on such hot-button issues as stem cell research and cloning, has sometimes been dismissed as a vehicle for the right wing of the Republican Party. But although some of his views comport with those of hard-liners, Kass, a physician with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, is hard to pigeonhole. “I do not come from a school of thought, nor do I have an ideology,” he says.

An old-fashioned moralist, he holds some views that are remarkably unfashionable—even premodern. He still employs the term bastard to describe the children of unwed parents, and he has written despairingly about the loss of “female modesty” in our culture. At the same time, he has misgivings about the effects of global capitalism and believes in integration, tolerance, and inclusiveness. In the end, what really rankles many scientists is Kass’s belief that society has a duty to regulate research, and his frequent warnings about the dehumanizing effects of some technologies.

The recommendations of the Council on Bioethics, though substantive and scholarly, have by and large not been put into practice by policymakers, and the group’s prominence has faded as the debate about stem cell research has ground to a standoff. Kass left the council in September and currently is a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, where his office is a few paces from Lynne Cheney’s. He sat down with DISCOVER to reflect on his tenure and discuss his beliefs, his influences, and his concerns for the future.

More here.

Emily Wax in the Washington Post:

Like a lot of young Indian couples, they met on a matrimonial Web site and within a matter of weeks were picking out the wedding invitations, reserving the horse-drawn carriages and having the bride fitted for a pearl- and gold-encrusted sari.

Judging by his online profile, the groom was suitable and eager to be a good spouse: a quiet, stay-at-home kind of guy who never drank and worked as a successful software engineer. Perfect, thought the bride, a shy 27-year-old computer engineer.

Too perfect, according to Bhavna Paliwal, one of India’s wedding detectives, who are being hired here in growing numbers to ferret out the truth about prospective mates.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Mohsin Hamid in Time:

It has been some time since I was as happy as I was on the night after Pakistan’s Feb. 18 general election. Mine was perhaps a reckless joy, temporarily distracting me from the very real troubles that Pakistan faces. But as I spoke to friends and acquaintances, both here in London and in my hometown of Lahore, I realized that the sense of euphoria I was feeling was widespread.

Pakistan is sometimes described by the international media as the most dangerous place on the planet. That has always seemed to me to be an irresponsible exaggeration: there are other countries whose citizens are far more likely to die of violent causes. But certainly Pakistan is a troubled land, suffering from illiteracy, poverty, terrorism and the bite of rapidly increasing prices, especially of food. The Feb. 18 election has not solved those problems. Yet Pakistanis are justified in allowing themselves a sigh of relief. Indeed, the entire world should be breathing a little easier now, for Pakistan suddenly looks a lot less frightening than it did.

More here.

I Know a Man
Robert Creeley

As I sd to my

friend, because I am

always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his

name, the darkness sur-

rounds us, what

can we do against

it, or else, shall we &

why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for

christ’s sake, look

out where yr going.

Leonard Bernstein set Broadway on fire in 1957 with “West Side Story,” a jazzed-up version of “Romeo and Juliet” in which the Capulets and Montagues were turned into Puerto Rican Sharks and American Jets. It was the most significant musical of the postwar era — and the last successful work that Bernstein wrote for the stage. His next show, 1976’s “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” closed after seven performances. For the rest of his life he floundered, unable to compose anything worth hearing.

What happened? Stephen Sondheim, Bernstein’s collaborator on “West Side Story,” told Meryle Secrest, who wrote biographies of both men, that he developed “a bad case of importantitis.” That sums up Bernstein’s later years with devastating finality. Time and again he dove head first into grandiose-sounding projects, then emerged from the depths clutching such pretentious pieces of musical costume jewelry as the “Kaddish” Symphony and “A Quiet Place.” In the end he dried up almost completely, longing to make Great Big Musical Statements — he actually wanted to write a Holocaust opera — but incapable of producing so much as a single memorable song.

more from the Wall Street Journal here.

Actual Czechs are eminently practical, nothing magical or mystical about them, as befits the people who drink the most beer in the world. Their most curious feature, which they keep to themselves and of  which the tourists know nothing, is a collective sense of  humor. Consider Jára Cimrman, by popular opinion the greatest Czech who ever lived. A few years ago a Czech TV channel asked its audience to name the most beloved native son. Jára Cimrman came first, ahead of Václav Havel, founding president Masaryk, and the Emperor Charles IV. Even the fact that Cimrman was explicitly disqualified in advance did not hurt his chances. This year, when a popular Internet site angled for an alternative to the current President Václav Klaus, Cimrman, disqualified again, came second. An obvious handicap was the fact that he was allegedly last seen alive in 1914.

Jára Cimrman is, of course, a fictitious character, the brainchild of a small group of writers and actors. In the Czech version of Wikipedia he is introduced as “one of the greatest Czech playwrights, poets, musicians, teachers, adventurers, philosophers, inventors” and many other things. Some of his achievements include inventing the Paraguayan puppet show, almost becoming the first man to reach the North Pole (he apparently missed it by seven meters), and conducting a voluminous correspondence with George Bernard Shaw, who never deigned to respond.

Well, that’s funny enough, but the most striking thing about Cimrman is the favor he has found with his people.

more from Poetry Magazine here.

The Academy Award nominees are a worthy but scattered bunch this year, and anyone who confidently tells you they know what’s going to happen is not to be trusted. I, by contrast, make a bid for your confidence by openly acknowledging that my guesses are entirely uneducated, and you could probably fare well by betting against them in your office Oscar pool.

The good news is that, with a few exceptions, the Academy seems to have screwed up less than usual. 2007 was a very strong year for film, and the Oscar nominees do a solid job of reflecting this. If there’s a major complaint to be made this year, it’s with the abstruse rules that govern eligibility in certain categories–in particular, best score and best foreign-language film. In the former category, Jonny Greenwood’s stunning, vital, utterly original score for There Will Be Blood was deemed ineligible for containing too many bits of music not written for the film, ensuring the ludicrous outcome that by far the best score of the year is not even nominated. The foreign film category is an even sorrier sight, with the year’s most celebrated offerings (Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days; Persepolis; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Lust, Caution; La Vie En Rose; The Orphanage; etc.) not making it, for one reason or another, to the “short list” of nine films from which the five finalists were chosen. (The foreign film rules, which are particularly convoluted, are explained here.) I’d especially like to put in a plug for Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, which I saw too late to include in my end of the year list, but would have belonged near the top. It is a marvel of cinematic intimacy, grim and unsparing yet not without hope. If The Lives of Others, the 2006 spellbinder about life behind the Iron Curtain, captured the institutional oppressions of totalitarian rule, Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days captures the ways in which it turns people into their own oppressors.

more from TNR here.

In the summer of 2003, as part of that year’s Lincoln Center Festival, members of the public were offered a guided walk around selected New York sites, beginning on Roosevelt Island and ending in the Chrysler Building. As they proceeded from site to site, they were invited to keep an eye out for angels. And at certain sites they did indeed get to see angel-actors, some with wings, some without, some gazing into the distance, some sleeping. At other sites there were merely traces of past angelic visits: feathers, for example.

The event was the brainchild of the British theater director Deborah Warner. In its first version, dating back to 1995 and as yet sans angels, it was set in a huge abandoned nineteenth-century London hotel; its goal was to evoke ghostly presences from the building’s past. In 1999 Warner presented a revised version with angels added. For the angels, said Warner, she was indebted to Rilke. “There’s a wonderful quote from Rilke which says that angels are uncertain if they are walking amongst the living or the dead.” In 2000 the revised version was exported to Perth, capital of Western Australia.

Responses of participants in the Angel Project varied widely. According to some, the presence of otherworldly beings changed the nature of their gaze, aestheticizing their view of the city. Others dismissed the project as mere Disneyfication, exploitation of a millenary craze for angels. Yet others were deeply moved. “They cried a lot,” said Warner, looking back on the 1999 London performance. “We put angels up at the top of the empty floors of the Euston Tower watching over London. And again, people’s response, terribly, terribly emotional. I think it’s about loss of innocence.”

Among visitors to the 2000 Angel Project was the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, in Perth to take part in the city’s arts festival. Nooteboom’s novel Lost Paradise, published in the Netherlands in 2004, draws heavily on recollections of that visit, as we shall see.

more from the NYRB here.

From ellafitzgerald.com:

Dubbed “The First Lady of Song,” Ella Fitzgerald was the most popular female jazz singer in the United States for more than half a century. In her lifetime, she won 13 Grammy awards and sold over 40 million albums. Her voice was flexible, wide-ranging, accurate and ageless. She could sing sultry ballads, sweet jazz and imitate every instrument in an orchestra. She worked with all the jazz greats, from Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Nat King Cole, to Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Goodman.

Ella Jane Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Va. on April 25, 1917. Her father, William, and mother, Temperance (Tempie), parted ways shortly after her birth. Together, Tempie and Ella went to Yonkers, N.Y, where they eventually moved in with Tempie’s longtime boyfriend Joseph Da Silva. In 1932, Tempie died from serious that injuries she received in a car accident. Ella took the loss very hard. After staying with Joe for a short time, Tempie’s sister Virginia took Ella home. Shortly afterward Joe suffered a heart attack and died, and her little sister Frances joined them.

Unable to adjust to the new circumstances, Ella became increasingly unhappy and entered into a difficult period of her life. Her grades dropped dramatically, and she frequently skipped school. After getting into trouble with the police, she was taken into custody and sent to a reform school. Living there was even more unbearable, as she suffered beatings at the hands of her caretakers. Eventually Ella escaped from the reformatory. The 15-year-old found herself broke and alone during the Great Depression, and strove to endure. Never one to complain, Ella later reflected on her most difficult years with an appreciation for how they helped her to mature. She used the memories from these times to help gather emotions for performances, and felt she was more grateful for her success because she knew what it was like to struggle in life.

In 1934 Ella’s name was pulled in a weekly drawing at the Apollo and she won the opportunity to compete in Amateur Night. Ella went to the theater that night planning to dance, but when the frenzied Edwards Sisters closed the main show, Ella changed her mind. “They were the dancingest sisters around,” Ella said, and she felt her act would not compare.

Once on stage, faced with boos and murmurs of “What’s she going to do?” from the rowdy crowd, a scared and disheveled Ella made the last minute decision to sing. She asked the band to play Hoagy Carmichael’s “Judy,” a song she knew well because Connee Boswell’s rendition of it was among Tempie’s favorites. Ella quickly quieted the audience, and by the song’s end they were demanding an encore. She obliged and sang the flip side of the Boswell Sister’s record, “The Object of My Affections.”

In the band that night was saxophonist and arranger Benny Carter. Impressed with her natural talent, he began introducing Ella to people who could help launch her career. Fueled by enthusiastic supporters, Ella began entering – and winning – every talent show she could find. In January 1935 she won the chance to perform for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House. It was there that Ella first met drummer and bandleader Chick Webb. Although her voice impressed him, Chick had already hired male singer Charlie Linton for the band. He offered Ella the opportunity to test with his band when they played a dance at Yale University. “If the kids like her,” Chick said, “she stays.”  Despite the tough crowd, Ella was a major success, and Chick hired her to travel with the band for $12.50 a week.

During this time, the era of big swing bands was shifting, and the focus was turning more toward bebop. Ella played with the new style, often using her voice to take on the role of another horn in the band. “You Have to Swing It” was one of the first times she began experimenting with scat singing, and her improvisation and vocalization thrilled fans. Throughout her career, Ella would master scat singing, turning it into a form of art. In 1938, at the age of 21, Ella recorded a playful version of the nursery rhyme, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” The album sold 1 million copies, hit number one, and stayed on the pop charts for 17 weeks. Suddenly, Ella Fitzgerald was famous.

Perhaps in search of stability and protection, Ella married Benny Kornegay, a local dockworker who had been pursuing her. Upon learning that Kornegay had a criminal history, Ella realized that the relationship was a mistake and had the marriage annulled. While on tour with Dizzy Gillespie’s band in 1946, Ella fell in love with bassist Ray Brown. The two were married and eventually adopted a son, whom they named Ray, Jr.

At the time, Ray was working for producer and manager Norman Granz on the “Jazz at the Philharmonic” tour. Norman saw that Ella had what it took to be an international star, and he convinced Ella to sign with him. It was the beginning of a lifelong business relationship and friendship. Under Norman’s management, Ella joined the Philharmonic tour, worked with Louis Armstrong on several albums and began producing her infamous songbook series. From 1956-1964, she recorded covers of other musicians’ albums, including those by Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, the Gershwins, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, and Rodgers and Hart. The series was wildly popular, both with Ella’s fans and the artists she covered.

“I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them,” Ira Gershwin once remarked.

Ella also began appearing on television variety shows. She quickly became a favorite and frequent guest on numerous programs, including “The Bing Crosby Show,” “The Dinah Shore Show,” “The Frank Sinatra Show,” “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Tonight Show,” “The Nat King Cole Show,” “The Andy Willams Show” and “The Dean Martin Show.” Unfortunately, busy work schedules also hurt Ray and Ella’s marriage. The two divorced in 1952, but remained good friends for the rest of their lives.

On the touring circuit it was well-known that Ella’s manager felt very strongly about civil rights and required equal treatment for his musicians, regardless of their color. Norman refused to accept any type of discrimination at hotels, restaurants or concert halls, even when they traveled to the Deep South. Once, while in Dallas touring for the Philharmonic, a police squad irritated by Norman’s principles barged backstage to hassle the performers. They came into Ella’s dressing room, where band members Dizzy Gillespie and Illinois Jacquet were shooting dice, and arrested everyone.

“They took us down,” Ella later recalled, “and then when we got there, they had the nerve to ask for an autograph.”

Norman wasn’t the only one willing to stand up for Ella. She received support from numerous celebrity fans, including a zealous Marilyn Monroe. “I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt,” Ella later said. “It was because of her that I played the Mocambo, a very popular nightclub in the ’50s. She personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him – and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status – that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman – a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it.”

Outside of the arts, Ella had a deep concern for child welfare. Though this aspect of her life was rarely publicized, she frequently made generous donations to organizations for disadvantaged youths, and the continuation of these contributions was part of the driving force that prevented her from slowing down. In 1987, United States President Ronald Reagan awarded Ella the National Medal of Arts. It was one of her most prized moments. France followed suit several years later, presenting her with their Commander of Arts and Letters award, while Yale, Dartmouth and several other universities bestowed Ella with honorary doctorates.

By the 1990s, Ella had recorded over 200 albums. In 1991, she gave her final concert at New York’s renowned Carnegie Hall. It was the 26th time she performed there. As the effects from her diabetes worsened, 76-year-old Ella experienced severe circulatory problems and was forced to have both of her legs amputated below the knees. She never fully recovered from the surgery, and afterward, was rarely able to perform.

On June 15, 1996, Ella Fitzgerald died in her Beverly Hills home. Hours later, signs of remembrance began to appear all over the world. A wreath of white flowers stood next to her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and a marquee outside the Hollywood Bowl theater read, “Ella, we will miss you.” After a private memorial service, traffic on the freeway was stopped to let her funeral procession pass through. She was laid to rest in the “Sanctuary of the Bells” section of the Sunset Mission Mausoleum at Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, Calif.

 

From The Guardian:

If Hanif Kureishi’s new novel has a fault, it is that its secondary characters are often so full of life that they upstage the principals and this is a fault for which most writers would cheerfully kill. The hero, Jamal, is not only in a reflective profession – he’s a Freudian analyst – but also at a stage of midlife limbo. He’s still involved with his 12-year-old son Rafi (‘We touch fists and exchange the conventional middle-class greeting, “Yo bro – dog!”‘), but on terms of armed truce at best with his estranged wife, Josephine. No wonder the eye of the reader, that magpie, is drawn to Jamal’s rough diamond of a sister, Miriam, overweight and much pierced (‘parts of her face resembled a curtain rail’), reigning over the semi-criminal disorder of her council house, as she starts a relationship with her polar opposite, Jamal’s prissy yet wild intellectual friend Henry, a famous lapsed theatre director. From one point of view, she is the supreme distillation of various brands of bad news into a single prospective partner. On the other hand, as ‘a Muslim single mother with a history of abuse’ who has few taboos and ‘sees straight to the centre of things’, she’s practically perfect.

In addition to his practice, Jamal has a reputation as a writer of case studies, presumably of an Adam Phillips variety, aphoristic and philosophical (‘Why do you want to fail? Why is pleasure hard to bear?’). Paradox comes with the territory, since the territory is the human mind, secreting paradox incessantly. At one stage of his past, for instance, Jamal wanted to be with a woman he didn’t want, a seemingly heartless television producer, out of mourning for lost love.

More here.

Over at bloggingheads.tv, John Horgan and Joshua Knobe discuss experimental philosophy.

In the TNR, Amartya Sen and Niall Ferguson debate Ferguson’s Empire. Sen’s original piece:

When the East India Company undertook the battle of Plassey and defeated the Nawab of Bengal, there were businessmen, traders, and other professionals from a number of different European nations already in that very locality. Their primary involvement was in exporting textiles and other industrial products from India, and the river Ganges (or Hughly, as it is more often called in that part of India), on which the East India Company had its settlement, also had (further upstream) trading centers and settled communities from Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Prussia, and other European nations.

Being subjected to imperial rule is not the only way of learning things from abroad, no matter how necessary such learning may be. When the Meiji restoration established a new reformist government in Japan in 1868 (which was not unrelated to the internal political impact of Commodore Perry’s show of force in the previous decade), the Japanese went full steam into learning from the West, sending people for training in America and Europe, and making institutional changes that were clearly inspired by western experience. They globalized themselves voluntarily. They were not coercively globalized by others. The shaking of India, too, could have come in non-colonialist ways.

Ferguson’s response:

I quite agree, and have said myself, that any assessment of the costs and benefits of British rule in India needs to make the counterfactual(s) explicit. No one claims India would have stood still if there had been no 1757. With all due respect, however, Professor Sen’s counterfactual of “Meiji India” lacks plausibility. Though I have often heard it argued, the notion seems to me utterly far-fetched that India could have adopted the Japanese route to economic and political modernization.

Sen again:

am glad that Ferguson agrees that India would not have stood still even in the absence of British conquest. But then he says: “Sen’s counterfactual of ‘Meiji India’ lacks plausibility.” “Meiji India”? But that surely is an idea of Ferguson’s, not mine. What I had, in fact, said was: “It is not easy to guess with any confidence how the history of the subcontinent would have gone had the British conquest not occurred. Would India have moved, like Japan, toward modernization in an increasingly globalizing world, or would it have stayed resistant to change, like Afghanistan, or hastened slowly, like Thailand?”

Even after overlooking that misattribution, it can, however, be asked whether Ferguson should be so sure that India could have done little of the kind that Japan did.

Gil Greengross reviews Rod Martin’s Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach in Evolutionary Psychology (you just know that sexual selection is going to be in there):

Due to the complexity of the topic, it is not surprising that hundreds of theories, varying in specificity, have been offered to explain humor. Evolutionary explanations are no exception. Although it is widely accepted that humor has an evolutionary origin, how it evolved and what evolutionary purpose it served is far from clear and is heatedly debated (Gervais and Wilson, 2005; Polimeni and Reiss, 2006). No one has yet proposed a comprehensive theory of humor, and a unitary theory may not even exist, as different aspects of humor may have different origins and purposes.

Take, for example, one of the most common explanations for the adaptive function of humor, known as the “false alarm” theory. The idea gained recent popularity after it was put forward by the famous neuroscientist Ramachandran, although it was known for at least two decades (Chafe, 1987; Ramachandran, 1998). This theory holds that when facing an ambiguous event, laughter serves as a signal to other members of the group that the perceived threat or anomaly is in fact unimportant. Using a stereotyped vocalization such as laughter helps others to determine the non importance of the event. Thus, they should not allocate energy towards it. Whereas this theory has intuitive value and can explain certain aspects of humor (for example, why laughter is contagious), it is not hard to find examples that do not quite fit. One of the open secrets among humor researchers is that most laugher comes in response to trivial comments. Despite the tendency to focus on analyzing jokes, they comprise only a small portion of what humor is. Thus, the importance of humor in a social context goes far beyond the narrow definition that the “false alarm” theory seeks to explain.

But the social aspect of humor is only one lens through which it can be viewed. As Martin notes, a complete understanding of humor also involves developmental, cognitive, personality and other aspects as well.