Testimonial
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Back when the earth was new

From Science:

Think “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” applies only to the military? This too happens in the sciences, at all levels, from academia and industry to professional societies. Below are some of the ways that lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgender scientists conceal part of their identity and the resources that this “invisible” army uses to thrive…

For many years, Juan (not his real name) led a double life. Many of his college friends knew his secret, but few did at the company where he was doing his internship. At office functions, he had to employ acts of subterfuge so as to not be found out. Juan is a gay male. “I’m 28 now, and everyone’s expecting a wife or a girlfriend,” he says. “If I bring my boyfriend along, I will say to him ‘by the way, this is important’ and then he knows that we are to be ‘friends.’” At the same company’s Christmas party he brought along a female professor. His boss got drunk at the party and started congratulating him for dating her.

“I couldn’t correct him, because he’s my boss,” he recalls.

More here.

The Mencken revival has proved so durable largely because its subject planned it that way. Mencken—who worked as a reporter, theater-fiction-music critic, newspaper columnist, magazine editor, memoirist, and linguist—catalogued and stockpiled his unpublished and uncollected writing in a conscious effort to assist future editors and biographers in the exploitation of his back pages. He also instructed his estate to stagger these papers like timed charges, dropping them in 1971, 1981, and 1991. These bursts kept biographers and anthologists busy and focused anticipation on the next blast from the archives. What’s more, all this publishing activity has kept Mencken’s name in the news and very much alive in book reviews. My Life as Author and Editor (1993), which revealed the casual anti-Semitism and racism in Mencken’s private papers, added to his notoriety and reignited the debates over his legacy.

more from Jack Shafer at Bookforum here.

Greek tragedy, Jean-Pierre Vernant wrote, presents its protagonists as objects of debate, not examples of good conduct or even heroes deserving of sympathy; the same can be said of characters in epic, like Helen. Laurie Maguire’s literary biography of Helen of Troy makes us face up to moral ambiguities as it tracks the most beautiful woman in the world across time and across media, from Homer to Hollywood, as her subtitle has it. Since historians can find no trace of the real Helen on a coin, a stone or in a factual document, the search for her leads only to dreams and fantasies. Bettany Hughes attempted an archaeological quest in her Helen of Troy (2005), but was left wistfully hoping that Helen’s tomb might be discovered one day. Maguire finds traces of Helen of Troy everywhere, far beyond the poems and plays in which she is a character, but an individual Helen disappears, to emerge as the embodiment of a fundamental principle: absolute beauty.

more from Marina Warner at the LRB here.

In her great poem “Questions of Travel”, Elizabeth Bishop outlines the quandary that all long-distance travellers put to themselves at some stage of their journey: “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? . . . Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / in this strangest of theatres?” It’s a good question for an elderly novelist pondering a trip to Africa to revisit some of the places that inspired his earlier work. It’s one that Evelyn Waugh might have asked himself in 1959 as he set off for East Africa; one he might have reiterated as he wrote up his journey in what became A Tourist in Africa (1960) – a book that even the most fervent Waugh admirers consider his laziest and worst. Similarly, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, born in Trinidad in 1932, knight of the realm, laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature, might also have questioned himself in 2008 as he prepared to leave for Uganda and other African countries, West and South, unifying his peregrinations under the vague subtitle “Glimpses of African belief”. In fact, the comparisons with Waugh don’t need to end there: it’s an interesting thought-experiment to look at the two writers’ careers and to consider V. S. Naipaul as a kind of Caribbean Waugh. Both were precocious schoolboys who won scholarships to Oxford. Waugh was a distinctively small man – so is Naipaul: both around five foot, six inches. Both took bad degrees and in the doldrums of their post-Oxford lives half-heartedly attempted suicide (Waugh by drowning, Naipaul by gassing). Their early novels were brilliantly original comic satires before the later work assumed more gravitas and the humour diminished. And in their personas, also, both men reinvented themselves in early middle age and took to wearing masks, masks that eventually “ate into the face”. In these masks they delighted in expressing outrageous, unfashionable, ultra-right-wing opinions and the more the metropolitan intelligentsia howled and railed at them the more gleeful they were. Both men, late in their lives, went to Africa to write a travel book.

more from William Boyd at the TLS here.

Lee Smith over at the Weekly Standard:

Tomorrow the Swedish Academy will announce the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and various sportsbooks, like Ladbroke’s, are laying odds. But since the Swedish academy’s methods for selecting the prize-winner are a mystery to all but its members, those odds reflect almost exclusively the opinions of gamblers, most of whom are rather like the horseplayers who bet their favorite number or color of the jockey’s silks. That is to say, they’re suckers.

Nonetheless, it’s always interesting to speculate on who’ll walk away with the Prize, or whether the academy will do well by literature or merely prove, again, that even Nobel nods. It is unfortunately true that many of the Nobel’s choices have little do with literary merit. Remember that even the linguistically versatile Northern European academics who award the prize read a limited number of languages, the bulk of which are European. If this year they choose Ko Un it’s not because they turn to this poet’s work in the original Korean for solace and inspiration.

That said, the academy’s reputation for selecting writers on account of their political relevance is inflated. The translators, publishers and scholars of relatively unknown authors from timely danger zones – say, the Proust of Yemen, the Yeats of Burma – would like the academy to take account of the political situation that makes their chosen figure significant, but the Swedes rarely comply. To be sure, they named a Chinese émigré, Gao Xingjian, in 2000, and in 2007 they chose Orhan Pamuk in the midst of Ankara’s prosecution of the Turkish novelist for speaking out about the Armenian issue. But consider that it’s been almost a decade since 9/11 and they have yet to name an Arab, passing up the Palestinian favorite Mahmoud Darwish, who died in 2008.

The fact is that as often as not, Stockholm goes against the grain, naming authors that are, to say the least, politically indelicate, like the great VS Naipual, 2001’s winner. In effect, forecasting the Nobel Prize for Literature is less like handicapping the ponies than shooting craps, so let the dice roll.

Suketu Mehta in Saveur:

One night last summer, I made a chile-spiked chili for my family: my parents, my sons, my partner, and her parents. We are all Indian, but while some of us have been steeped in chiles since our births in India, others—like my Chicago-born partner and my Manhattan-born, 15-year-old son—approach the genus capsicum with trepidation. Still others just have a God-given affinity for heat. My 12-year-old son, for example, also a native New Yorker, has been enjoying chiles with his breakfast cereal since infancy. It makes me realize that the world is divided not between rich and poor, or male and female, or East and West, but between those who like spicy food and those who do not.

This was an important meal, the first time I was meeting my partner's parents. Her father likes his food spicy, her mother, less so. I decided to make two versions of the chili: hot and hotter. I prepared it carefully, soaking the beans overnight, chopping the onions and garlic, roasting and grinding the spices. I laid the table with soft linen and fresh lilies and bathed it all in candlelight, to lull everyone into a false sense of security, as if they were going to get something European, flavored with nothing stronger than tarragon. It was a warm evening in Manhattan, and I left the windows open to the breeze from the Hudson River.

When the two pots of chili appeared on the table, my younger son smiled, my older son groaned.

“They're very spicy, be careful,” my parents warned my partner's parents.

“How spicy can they be?” my partner's father scoffed.

Forewarned, my guests commenced to eat. They began with a taste of the lower-voltage version and then, unable to help themselves, switched to the maximum version. Shouting ensued.

From Salon:

A 600-page history of the Islamic Republic of Iran, from its birth in the revolution of 1979 to last year's popular uprising, might sound too weighty for anyone lacking a special interest in that country. It would be a pity, though, if the heft of Scott Peterson's “Let the Swords Encircle Me: Iran — A Journey Behind the Headlines” led general readers to bypass it. Peterson, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, has fashioned recent history into an enthralling saga, infused with suspense and tragedy, and featuring a cast of recurring characters whose unfolding fates offer more than a few surprises.

Peterson most assuredly knows his subject, having visited Iran more than 30 times since 1996, just before Mohammad Khatami's short-lived reformist government won power in an electoral landslide. He's talked to leaders (though the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reneged on a promised sit-down), clerics, apostates and activists, but even more important, he seems to have interviewed every street vendor, shopkeeper, field-tripping teenager and farmer he's ever encountered. In one of the book's most piteous scenes, he tentatively approaches a young man weeping over a grave in a cemetery. A paint factory worker, the man mourned both his beloved brother and the revolution his brother died for, betrayed by the government that claims to be defending it.

More here.

From The New York Times:

A pair of Russian-born physicists working at the University of Manchester in England have won the Nobel Prize in Physics for investigating the remarkable properties of ultrathin carbon flakes known as graphene, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Tuesday. The physicists are Andre Geim, 51, and Konstantin Novoselov, 36. They will split the prize of about $1.4 million.

Graphene is a form of carbon in which the atoms are arranged in a flat hexagon lattice like microscopic chicken wire, a single atom thick. It is not only the thinnest material in the world, but also one of the strongest and hardest. Among its other properties, graphene is able to conduct electricity as well as copper does and to conduct heat better than any other known material, and it is practically transparent. Physicists say that it could eventually rival silicon as a basis for computer chips, serve as a sensitive pollution-monitoring material, improve flat-screen televisions, and enable the creation of new materials and novel tests of quantum weirdness.

More here.

On certain weekday evenings, I leave the visitor parking lot of San Quentin, the decrepit state prison that sits on the edge of the San Francisco Bay, and as I look out at the night sky rising above the Richmond Bridge—an arch of highway sending me home—I seem to be moving across the hinge of a great disproportion. It was the first thing I noted about teaching in prison, the way the impression of the place overtook speech. At first this impression was physical, then moral, and finally emotional. Teaching often facilitates a relationship with one’s own ignorance: only by confronting the limits of my knowledge can I begin to ask questions, begin to imagine how questions will be asked of me. This is a confrontation I have learned to accept readily, as a useful practice, a gentle intellectual and spiritual stretching in the safe and narrowed context of a classroom. But outside the door of the San Quentin classroom is a prison yard, and beyond that, stairways that lead to cellblocks and dorms where thousands of men live literally stacked against each other. I do not understand how to live out there. I don’t have to. But more significantly, I don’t know how to think about what a life there means. For some hours after teaching—sometimes days—I can’t reconcile the scale of my daily existence with the scale of a world which has brought about this other place.

more from Kathryn Crim at Threepenny Review here.

Geert Wilders is slowly but surely making Islamophobia an accepted element of political rhetoric in the Netherlands — and he's got his eyes on the United States, next.

Ferry Biedermann in Foreign Policy:

A handful of people holding umbrellas and white balloons defied the driving rain in the center of Amsterdam one Thursday in September to protest the imminent formation of a government with the support of the anti-immigrant, anti-Islam far right. They listened to a few less-than-rousing speeches and some Muslim-friendly poetry, then they popped the white balloons, “to make some noise,” as one speaker put it, and quietly dispersed. But otherwise, the rise of the far right has hardly caused a ripple in the Netherlands, where the response has been a mixture of equanimity and stunned silence. In Sweden, by comparison, thousands of people took to the streets when the first far-right MPs were elected that same month.

The Dutch coalition deal was done before the end of September, marking the political whitewashing of the previously unacceptable Geert Wilders, the brash, provocative, and peroxide-blond political wunderkind MP, and his right-wing Party for Freedom. He has agreed to lend his support in parliament to a minority government of conservative Liberals and the smaller Christian Democrats. In return Wilders has been given freedom to pursue many of his favorite policy projects, including anti-immigrant measures and several openly anti-Muslim initiatives, including a burqa ban and closer monitoring of Islamic schools.

More here.

Bankers have experienced a dramatic drop in social status thanks to the economic crisis. Humiliating public hearings featuring once mighty bankers in the U.S. Congress, court verdicts and fines against top financial brass have severed the profession of practically all moral authority. And recently the German Bundesbank expelled one of its board members, Thilo Sarrazin, for racist and Islamophobic positions in his book “Deutschland schafft sich ab. Wie unser Land aufs Spiel setzen” (DVA Munchen 2010). It must be quite a relief for the banking profession to see a monument to one of their own unveiled in front of the Nederlandsche bank in Amsterdam, followed by a exhibit opening in the Verzetsmusem, the museum of the Resistance movement. The exhibition, “Wally van Hall, Banker of the Resistance Movement”, places a banker in the role of cultural hero and presents him as an icon of national history decades after this remarkable story sank into collective oblivion. Van Hall (1906-1945) was a Dutch banker who, like many others, continued his work after the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in May 1940, hoping that he would be able to prevent further damage.

more from Dragan Klaic at Sign and Sight here.

It’s International Galileo Year. Four hundred years after the publication of the Pisan-born polymath’s ground-breaking book The Starry Messenger, with its revolutionary description of his telescopic observations of the heavens, Galileo remains a formidable subject to write about. In taking on a figure widely accepted as the father of modern science, any aspiring Galileo biographer needs to master a handful of classical and vernacular languages, as well as possess a formidable grasp of physics, mechanics and geometry as practised by the ancients no less than by Galileo and his contemporaries. Then there is the problem of his 1633 trial for heresy and apparent recantation. It was an event that inspired and troubled Bertolt Brecht so profoundly that his play The Life of Galileo went through three different versions as he struggled to make sense of the moral and political dimensions of the trial. He oscillated between casting his protagonist as antihero and hero, as first Nazism and then the atomic strikes on Japan provided radically divergent contexts within which to view both Galileo’s achievements and their consequences.

more from Jerry Brotton at Literary Review here.

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

by C.P. Cavafy
translation: Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard
from C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems.
Princeton University Press, 1992

More than 40 years later, I still remember the bright sun and the palm trees when we got off the plane. California in 1968 was a magical place, a magnet for those seeking new opportunities or to lose an old identity. The Golden State was allowing the rich to get richer and the middle class to live out the American dream in its pristine state. The public schools and expanding state-university system (two separate systems, in fact) were the envy of the nation. The corruption and Mob influence that had paralyzed many eastern and midwestern states and cities were largely absent. When my parents announced they were uprooting the Glazer family from a cozy suburb of Philadelphia, as 5 million people did from eastern and midwestern towns between 1950 and 1980, the news was met with a mixture of awe (“California…” they would breathlessly whisper) and bewilderment (“But what is there?”). The very act of migrating by plane was itself somewhat grand. In the years before airline deregulation, one dressed up to fly, as if sailing on an ocean liner, and at prices not all that much lower than an ocean voyage’s. And yet those we were leaving behind acted as though we were traveling by caravan, leaving civilization and going into the wilderness.

more from Jennifer Rubin at Commentary here.

George Price was born a Jewish half-breed to parents who kept his Semitic side a secret; lived much of his life an aggressive atheist and skeptic of the supernatural; and died a Christian, twice converted, albeit, to his mind, a defeated one. Several years before he abandoned his career in a mission to shelter and comfort homeless alcoholics, he made a number of extraordinary contributions to evolutionary biology, a field in which he had no training. Educated as a chemist, Price had worked previously for the Manhattan Project on uranium enrichment, helped develop radiation therapy for cancer, invented computer-aided design with IBM and dabbled in journalism. Shortly after Christmas 1974, Price slashed his carotid artery with a pair of tailor’s scissors in his room in a London squat. John Maynard Smith, with whom Price published a paper that applied game theory to natural selection, was one of the few people, along with some of those homeless alcoholics, to attend his funeral. Also present was William Hamilton, the father of kin selection, which proposed that self-sacrificing behavior was able to evolve between related organisms because of the advantages conferred to their shared genes. Price used Hamilton’s ideas about kin selection to derive his own equation, one that could explain selection at multiple levels of organization—the genetic level, as well as among individuals in kin groups and populations of unrelated others. The equation marked a breakthrough in the field: Price had provided a working mathematical model for the emergence of altruism in a theory of the world that took dogmatic self-interest as its first principle.

more from Miriam Markowitz at The Nation here.

Almost twenty years ago Bob Hicok published his first collection of poems, a chapbook called Bearing Witness. It’s a little hard to believe that a poet who in his latest book has a poem entitled “Hope is a thing with feathers that smacks into a window” ever could have been satisfied with that earnest, earlier title. Sure, the movement from simplicity to the witty, complex, and allusive is emblematic of the changes this poet has undertaken over a couple of decades. But there is something else in the earnestness of that early title, a sense that the act of poetry could bear witness—reach out past the merely personal and the purely linguistic—and perhaps even that it should. Behind the more nuanced frame of the recent work, that attitude has continued to inform Hicok’s poems, even as they have become syntactically complex, seriously humorous, and imaginatively demanding. I should disclose, though I do so with some embarrassment, that at the request of the publisher I contributed a particularly fatuous blurb for Bearing Witness. But I remember being genuinely impressed by Hicok’s facility with constructing wildly different personae for his poems.

more from Keith Taylor at Boston Review here.

From Science:

The father of in vitro fertilization (IVF) has won this year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Robert G. Edwards, an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., is the sole winner of the prize. “His achievements have made it possible to treat infertility, a medical condition afflicting a large proportion of humanity including more than 10% of all couples worldwide,” the Nobel Committee wrote, noting that approximately 4 million children have been born following IVF.

Edwards is seriously ill and apparently was unable to take the phone call from the Nobel Committee notifying him of the prize. Göran Hansson, secretary of the 2010 Nobel Assembly, said that he had talked to Edwards's wife, who said she was very happy and was sure Edwards would be as well. In the 1950s, inspired by work that showed that rabbit egg cells could be fertilized in the lab and give rise to offspring, Edwards worked to understand the biology of human egg cells, sperm, and embryos. His research clarified how human eggs mature, how hormones regulate their maturation, and when the eggs can be fertilized by sperm. He also figured out the conditions necessary for sperm to activate and fertilize the egg. In 1969, he and his colleagues managed to fertilize a human egg in a test tube for the first time. But the resulting embryo was fragile and didn't develop. Edwards collaborated with gynecologist Patrick Steptoe, who had developed the technique of laparoscopy to retrieve mature eggs from ovaries. The embryos that resulted from fertilizing those oocytes developed further, but the pair ran into strong opposition to their research, and in 1971, the U.K. Medical Research Council denied their request for further funding. A private donation allowed them to continue their work. Ultimately, in 1978, Louise Brown, the first “test tube baby,” was born. Steptoe died in 1988; because Nobel prizes are awarded to living scientists only, he could not have been included in the prize.

More here.