In the Nation, Elaine Blair reviews Vladimir Sorokin's novel The Queue:

The Queue, which is being published for the first time in the United States, is set in an enormous line that forms one summer afternoon in the 1980s in Moscow, a line that about 2,000 people eventually join, over the course of two days, in order to have a chance to buy–something. It's never entirely clear what they're so eager to buy. In one of the novel's running jokes, Sorokin keeps hinting at different kinds of items. At first the goods seem to be shoes from Yugoslavia (or possibly Czechoslovakia or Sweden), then jeans from the United States, then suede jackets from Turkey. Certainly they are imports: the Soviet versions of all these things could be bought in a store without much queuing, but their shoddiness was a familiar, insulting and inescapable fact of Soviet life. David Remnick recalls in Lenin's Tomb, his book about the fall of the Soviet Union, an exhibit he attended in 1989 at Moscow's Exhibition of Economic Achievements. Mounted in the frank spirit of glasnost, it was called “The Exhibit of Poor-Quality Goods” and featured “ruptured shoes, rusted samovars, chipped stew pots, unraveled shuttlecocks, crushed cans of fish, and, the show-stopper, a bottle of mineral water with a tiny dead mouse floating inside.” One could blame perverse incentives, mismanaged supply chains and bureaucratic corruption for this state of squalor; but two customers in Sorokin's queue hit upon a more straightforward explanation while comparing American and Soviet economies: “They have to work their asses off over there, but here if you come drunk to work it's no big deal.”

The Queue is written entirely in dialogue, composed of bits of conversations that take place among the people waiting in line.

Peter Bebergal makes his case over at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies:

The rational, and quite reasonable, skepticism regarding religious belief is also in its way discouraging. As we try to imagine a human culture that is devoid of religion, we are also envisioning a human culture that is devoid of something essential to the preservation of the very culture we hope to prolong. That essential something is the irrational.

As a skeptic and rationalist myself, I am often embarrassed to have to admit that I spend considerable time cultivating those irrational aspects of myself, aspects that might look on the outside very much like religion. But this cultivation has revealed to me that what we call religion these days is just as responsible for putting the kibosh on the irrational as is the rationalists and empiricists in our midst. Both rationalists and the religious see religion as what Tim Dean in his recent post featured here calls “prescriptive,” unable to ask “why” as deeply as science. Faith trumps why, the religious might say, and whatever I cannot glean from holy texts I will chalk up to God and all his works as a mystery to behold. (Sadly and disappointingly the final episode of Battlestar Galactica opted for this very solution. It seems fiction is often more likely to find a God in the machine than even the most evangelical religious believers.)

The kind of religion that Dean finds problematic is not irrational at all, however. For the believer, the human personhood of the embryo is wholly rational, resting on the immutable, divine law. This kind of spiritual belief is only one small aspect of the religious imagination, a broad palette that at its root is not rational, and should not be critiqued with the same tools we use to judge those who believe in creationism and saddle-wearing triceratops. We cannot lump convictions about personhood with mythological cosmogonies.

Truth is, I blame religion for this confusion.

Daniel Cloud in Project Syndicate:

Military strategists have known for centuries that there is, and can be, no final science of war. In a real struggle over things that actually matter, we must assume that we are up against thinking opponents, who may understand some things about us that we don’t know about ourselves. For example, if profit can be made by understanding the model behind a policy, as is surely the case with the models used by the United States Federal Reserve, sooner or later so much capital will seek that profit that the tail will begin to wag the dog, as has been happening lately.

The truth is that such models are most useful when they are little known or not universally believed. They progressively lose their predictive value as we all accept and begin to bet on them. But there can be no real predictive science for a system that may change its behavior if we publish a model of it.

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How can an article that is almost a confession, written in a melancholy tone of voice, in which sorrow and joy are intertwined, an article in which there exists remorse for harm done to the other, in which the author sees herself not as someone who proclaims the “last truth”, nor as someone who considers her “interpretation of the truth” to be “the only possible, genuine and just” one, but demands only that the truth be found, that the truth be faced, believing only in its sobering effect, as she once believed, despite the personal consequences, when telling the incontestable truth about “her environment” – how can such an article provoke that amount of fury, that amount of cynicism, such a torrent of sickly sweet pathos, all trying to “defend our cause”. I see reasons for such reactions in our perception of the “others”, who are not allowed to see us as we are, but only as we want to be. And we are, according to the tiny mirror in which we look at ourselves, “a dignified and creative nation, proud of its history” (the last two decades are part of that history too, whether we like it or not, ergo we should be proud of them too), we are blessed with (blessed by God of course) “great sensibility for the arts”.

more of the debate at Eurozine here.

Design pioneer, neo-futurist, and novelist Bruce Sterling reflects on Half-life’s tug-of-war between human hope and failure in The Sleep of Reason, an essay the gallery commissioned to accompany the exhibit. In it, Sterling portrays Rockman as an alligator at a watering hole. “Though he is known for the searing clarity of his paintings, there are things below the waterline that he does not paint,” Sterling writes. “He decided, as an act of deliberate will, to maintain his amphibious ambiguity. An ambiguity about the boundary of man and animal. An ambiguity about the borders of nature and artifice. Of art, of science.” Rockman started this series two years ago, before the current economic crisis. So while the work has an uncanny timeliness to it, it’s almost as if he had the foresight to know this moment would not call for another Manifest Destiny — or any other detailed illustration of our failings. Half-life has just enough of the good stuff, enough reminders of the beauty and hope of humanity to hang a life raft on.

more from Seed here.

Gordy Slack in Salon:

In his new book, “Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons From the Biology of Consciousness,” Noë attacks the brave new world of neuroscience and its claims that brain mechanics can explain consciousness. Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Francis Crick wrote, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” While Noë credits Crick for drawing popular and scientific attention to the question of consciousness, he thinks Crick's conclusions are dead wrong and dangerous. Noe's conversational style is gentle, attentive and easygoing. But, in true philosopher fashion, he also picks his words deliberately, as if stepping off the path of right thinking would result in some tragic plummet into the abyss of illogic.

In San Francisco there's a brain gym where members exercise their brains with “neurobic” software. A sign outside the place reads: “You Are Your Brain!” It has become almost a mainstream notion now. But the subtitle of your book begins “Why you are not your brain.” What's wrong with the “You are your brain” view?

It's one thing to say you wouldn't be you if not for your brain, that your brain is critical to what you are. But I could say that about your upbringing and your culture, too. It's another thing entirely to say that you are your brain. I don't reject the idea that the brain is necessary for consciousness; but I do reject the argument that it is sufficient. That's just a fancy, contemporary version of the old philosophical idea that our true selves are interior, cut off from the outside world, only accidentally situated in the world. The view I'm attacking claims that neural activity is enough to explain consciousness, that you could have consciousness in a petri dish. It supposes that consciousness happens inside the brain the way digestion occurs inside the GI tract. But consciousness is not like digestion; it doesn't happen inside of us. It is something we do, something we achieve. It's more like dance than it is like digestion.

More here.

Joseph O'Neil in The New York Times:

Submerged for years in a murk of international literary diplomacy and scrupulous academic exertion, “The Letters of Samuel Beckett” has finally surfaced; and an elating cultural moment is upon us. It is also a slightly surprising moment. Beckett, in his published output and authorial persona, was rigorously spare and self-effacing. Who knew that in his private writing he would be so humanly forthcoming? We always knew he was brilliant — but this brilliant? Just as the otherworldliness of tennis pros is most starkly revealed in their casual warm-up drills, so these letters, in which intellectual and linguistic winners are struck at will, offer a humbling, thrilling revelation of the difference between Beckett’s game and the one played by the rest of us. (Beckett played tennis, incidentally.)

This volume (three more are promised) auspiciously begins with two notes from Beckett to James Joyce, in the second of which (from April 1929) this 23-year-old lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris politely briefs the maestro on the distinction between the infinitive and substantive forms of a Greek phrase. Rather more forebodingly, the volume ends with a letter, dated June 10, 1940, regarding a billiards game the following Friday. Rain checks were presumably issued, because Friday was the day the Germans occupied Paris. In the years between these missives, Beckett has abandoned an academic career; published a handful of essays, a book of poems, a study of Proust, stories (“More Pricks Than Kicks,” 1934) and a novel (“Murphy,” 1938); and bounced between Ireland, England, France and Germany, engaged in what he hopefully describes, in a job application, as “private study and composition” — i.e., not very much at all. For the most part, then, we are concerned with a portrait of the artist as an unsettled, underemployed and relatively unknown young man.

More here.

In A Part of Speech Less Than One, his first collection of essays, Joseph Brodsky tells a story of a day in the gulag when the guards challenged the prisoners to a wood chopping competition. One inmate asked what would happen if he refused. (I've given away my copy of the collection, or more properly, given away my third copy to a third someone, so I'm paraphrasing in a prose far less compelling than the original–meaning both an excuse and a recommendation that you read the essay.) The guards apparently replied, then you don't eat. The competition starts, and the prisoner get to chopping until lunch, when all go to eat save the man who asked the question. He continues to chop and not only through lunch. He chops through dinner and through much of night, and over this time the guards move from ridiculing this odd act of defiance to watching in horror and eventually turning away.

Read more »

A sea change underway: in the Des Moines Register:

The Iowa Supreme Court this morning unanimously upheld gays’ right to marry.

“The Iowa statute limiting civil marriage to a union between a man and a woman violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution,” the justices said in a summary of their decision.

The court rules that gay marriage would be legal in three weeks, starting April 24.

The court affirmed a Polk County District Court decision that would allow six gay couples to marry.

The ruling is viewed as a victory for the gay rights movement in Iowa and elsewhere, and a setback for social conservatives who wanted to protect traditional families.

The decision makes Iowa the first Midwestern state, and the fourth nationwide, to allow same-sex marriages. Lawyers for Lambda Legal, a gay rights group that financed the court battle and represented the couples, had hoped to use a court victory to demonstrate acceptance of same-sex marriage in heartland America.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Martin Kippenberger was a wreck. When he finally died at 44, he'd so beaten himself up with drink and bad living that the grave must have been a relief. The show currently on view at MoMA, “Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective,” is something like a catalogue of everything Kippenberger had been doing in the years before he finally expired. There are doodles on scraps of paper and delicate water color scenes, announcement cards and his collections of music. There are sculptures created through the arrangement of assorted pieces of used and modified furniture and full-scale oil works on canvas. Everything is represented, from the offhand gesture to the fully intentional work. Kippenberger, it seems, could not stop making art. Yet, he rarely seems to have been pleased by that state of affairs. The theme of shame appears throughout. Kippenberger was sometimes ashamed to be Kippenberger. Thus two of his now famous dunce-in-the-corner sculptures titled, “Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself.” In these sculptures, a clothed mannequin stands, head bowed, in the corner.

There is also, of course, a note of defiance in those sculptures. This defiance, this ability to revel in his own shame comes out most majestically in the series of self-portraits he completed in the late 1980s. Clothed in what seems to be a large diaper, the fat and disheveled Kippenberger lumbers around the canvas like some prehistoric beast hastening its own extinction. That was Kippenberger — poignant and pathetic and always able to extort a chuckle from his otherwise horrified public.

Over at UK Gay News:

More than 100 prisoners in Iraq are facing execution – and some of them are believed to have been convicted of a ‘gay crime’, the UK-based Iraqi-LGBT group revealed this afternoon.

According to Ali Hili of Iraqi-LGBT, the Iraqi authorities plan to start executing them in batches of 20 from this week. There is, said Mr. Hili, at least one member of Iraqi-LGBT who are among those to be put to death.

And the London-based group, which believes that a total of 128 executions are imminent, is calling on the UK Government, international human rights groups and the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva to intervene “with due speed” to prevent “this tragic miscarriage of justice” from going ahead.

“We have information and reports on members of our community whom been arrested and waiting for execution for the crimes of homosexuality,” Mr Hili told UK Gay News.

“Iraqi-LGBT has been a banned from running activities on Iraqi soil,” he revealed, adding that he believes that there could be as many as five convicted and sentenced for belonging to Iraqi-LGBT.

The NYT Magazine profile of Freeman Dyson and his dissent position on climate change has provoked a lot of responses from the science blogosphere. John Conway over at Cosmic Variance:

I am not convinced at all that in 10 years we can “Repower America” and eliminate fossil fuels. And the rest of the world certainly won’t. That doesn’t mean we should not try, should not do research into new, non-carbon-based energy sources, expand our use of renewable, clean energy. We should! I am just very skeptical that it could be done even if it became the #1 national priority. It seems to me to violate physics itself, not to mention basic economic facts. Twenty years? Thirty? Eventually it will be clear to every one that we don’t really have a choice.

Read more »

Was Shakespeare a hottie? Was Homer a hunk? John Milton: six-pack abs? Dante: hot or not? You would think, from recent coverage of the portrait newly claimed to be of Shakespeare (a claim front-paged by the New York Times early last month) that these are valid literary questions rather than evidence that the culture of celebrity has irretrievably corrupted literature. Fortunately, the Times story was written by the redoubtable John Burns, who included a good dose of skepticism. Nonetheless, the piece did quote the promotional brochure that is to accompany an exhibition of the “newly discovered” Shakespeare portrait that opens at the Stratford-on-Avon Shakespeare Center on April 23, the bard’s birthday. The quotation tells us everything that is wrong with Shakespearean biography—indeed, with most literary biography—and reminded me of the recent profoundly clueless sexsational controversy over the singularity of Hitler’s testicle.

more from Slate here.

Try this: Gazing straight ahead (as you will no doubt at some point be urged to do if you start hanging out with Trevor and Ryan Oakes for any length of time these days), extend your right arm straight out to your side, perpendicular to your gaze, your hand in a fist, your thumb pointing upward, starting out from behind your ear and now slowly arcing the arm forward. (The Oakes boys, that is: identical twins, just past twenty-five years old, both artists, now living in New York City but before that from out of West Virginia.) At first you won’t see the upraised thumb, of course, but presently, there it will appear, at the periphery of your vision. Keep moving your arm forward until the thumb’s extended out there straight in front of your face at the center of your gaze; now with your left hand extended, thumb up, hand off the arcing transit, as it were, continuing along until eventually that thumb disappears behind your other ear. The thing is (as the Twins will explain with earnest enthusiasm and at quite considerable length), there was only a short part of that transit where you were seeing the thumbs with both eyes and hence with any sort of depth perception. Through most of the rest of the experiment, your nose was blocking the vision from out of one, and then the other, eye. And yet your brain, your visual cortex, was weaving the scene into one continuous, undifferentiated experience. (“Pretty cool, no?” By now the Twins will have veritably lit up with boyish enthusiasm.)

more from VQR here.

Is the American west a place or an idea? This is the question at the heart of an exhibition of photographs that opened last week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and of the book that accompanies it. The answer, of course, is both: geographically, it is the part of the United States west of the Mississippi; metaphorically, it is synonymous with freedom, escape, enterprise, individualism and all manner of new starts. In this, it reflects many qualities that Americans claim as their birthright. From the mid-19th century the belief in “Manifest Destiny” – that it was God’s will that Americans should occupy the country all the way to the Pacific – drove the gradual colonisation from the east, including the driving out of Native Americans and annexing of land for farming, mining, the building of railways and, later, nuclear test sites, military bases and chemical waste dumps. This exhibition looks at how the idea of the west took hold, even as the land that had inspired it was being plundered and destroyed, and suggests that photography has been one of the principal motors of that exchange.

more from The Guardian here.

Robert Appelbaum in The International Literary Quarterly:

What’s all the fuss about? That was my question. To listen to Londoners, in the past twenty years the city had become a world capital of cuisine, its best restaurants on par with the best anywhere, its ethnic restaurants the envy of Europe. Encouraged by the flourishing of farmer’s markets, a new ethic of organic and locally sourced produce and animal products, and an infrastructure of food obsession, featured daily on television, the print media, and the Internet, its food culture was said to be vibrant, innovative, even world-shaking. The Guide Michelin for restaurants has for the first time devoted a whole volume to it, making it only the fourth city to be so documented, after Paris, New York, and San Francisco, and causing not a few outbursts of superbia among the locals.¹ Indeed, I have heard well travelled Londoners say they prefer their home town to Paris, which is too much of a museum to their taste. There are no new ideas in Paris, the feeling goes, nothing but the tried and true – steak frites and moules frites and, if you’re lucky, a very old cassoulet. In London, by contrast, just about anywhere you go you are going to be served the next new thing – and very likely by a Frenchman, who has fled his homeland for more fertile kitchens.

More here.

From Nature:

Slurping up cold streams of star fuel, some of the Universe's first galaxies got fat quickly, new observations suggest. The findings could overturn existing models for the formation and evolution of galaxies that predict their slow and steady growth through mergers.

Researchers using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii have identified five distant galaxy clusters that formed five billion years after the Big Bang. They calculated the mass of the biggest galaxy in each of the clusters and found, to their surprise, that the ancient galaxies were roughly as big as the biggest galaxies in equivalent clusters in today's Universe. The ancient galaxies should have been much smaller, at only a fifth of today's mass, based on galaxy-formation models that predict slow, protracted growth. “That was the reason for the surprise — that it disagrees so radically with what the predictions told us we should be seeing,” says Chris Collins of Liverpool John Moores University in Birkenhead, UK. Collins and his colleagues publish the work today in Nature.

More here.

Ken Rogoff in The Korea Times:

A huge struggle is brewing within the G-20 over the future of the global financial system. The outcome could impact the world ― and not only the esoteric world of international finance ― for decades to come.

Finance shapes power, ideas, and influence. Cynics may say that nothing will happen to the fundamentals of the global financial system, but they are wrong. In all likelihood, we will see huge changes in the next few years, quite possibly in the form of an international financial regulator or treaty.

Indeed, it is virtually impossible to resolve the current mess without some kind of compass pointing to where the future system lies.

The United States and Britain naturally want a system conducive to extending their hegemony. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has recently advanced the broad outlines of a more conservative financial regulatory regime.

Even critics of past U.S. profligacy must admit that the Geithner proposal contains some good ideas.

Above all, regulators would force financiers to hold more cash on hand to cover their own bets, and not rely so much on taxpayers as a backstop.

Geithner also aims to make financial deals simpler and easier to evaluate, so that boards, regulators, and investors can better assess the risks they face.

While the rest of the world is sympathetic to Geithner's ideas, other countries would like to see more fundamental reform.