In the future, international divisions and rivalries will be a thing of the past. Or so science fiction often predicts. The bridge of the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek, for instance, is a commendably multiracial place (and not all of those races are from Earth, either); and there are any number of SF novels that prophesy a world government, a kind of super UN with legislative powers. In publishing terms, however, science fiction is not quite so freely cross-cultural. Rights for English-language SF novels are frequently sold abroad in non-English-speaking territories, but the traffic is mostly one-way. Rare is the foreign-language SF novel that is imported into an anglophone country, against the prevailing current.

more from James Lovegrove at the FT here.

Today U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker struck down Proposition 8, ruling that gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry. Proposition 8 was a 2008 ballot initiative that banned gay marriage in California. Both sides had said that, should they lose, they intended to appeal the ruling. Walker’s decision is expected to be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then up to the U.S. Supreme Court. On a day that will find many gay rights activists celebrating, we look to the books that have provided a richer understanding of the joys and challenges particular to gay life. 20 classic works of gay literature

more from the LA Times here.

One of the first sights that greeted immigrants in New York, right after the Statue of Liberty, was a prune sandwich. The offending object appeared on the menu in the vast dining hall at Ellis Island, and it served as a warning that food was going to be a cultural struggle in this strange land. Keeping faith with their native cuisines, the newcomers made a series of counteroffers — sauerkraut, spaghetti, borscht — that changed the national palate forever. Jane Ziegelman tells this story exuberantly in “97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement.” Highly entertaining and deceptively ambitious, the book resurrects the juicy details of breakfast, lunch and dinner (recipes included) consumed by poor and working-class New Yorkers a century and more ago. It could well have been subtitled “How the Other Half Ate.” The address is a conceit. Ninety-seven Orchard Street was a Lower East Side tenement building, constructed in the 1860s, that at different times housed the five families in the book: the Glockners (German), the Moores (Irish), the Gumpertzes (German Jewish) the Rogarshevskys (Lithuanian-Russian Jewish) and the Baldizzis (Italian). It is now the location of the Tenement Museum, where Ziegelman, the founder and director of a multiethnic cooking program for children, is in charge of a new culinary center.

more from William Grimes at the NYT here.

From The Guardian:

Terry Breverton selects some of literature's most memorable farewells, from Samuel Johnson to James Joyce

LORD BYRON 1788 – 1824
‘Come, come, no weakness; let’s be a man to the last!’

Byron was attended by two young doctors on his death bed in Missolonghi.

Faced with the terrible problem of treating a world-famous figure for an illness which neither knew anything about, they fell back on the usual treatment of the time – to bleed the patient and so reduce his fever. Byron resisted, saying that there had been 'more deaths by lancet than by the lance', but gave in when warned that the disease could ‘deprive him of reason'. The weakened poet sank into unconsciousness and died under his terrified doctors' hands. After the autopsy the doctors blamed each other for the death

More here.

From PhysOrg:

New research published today, Friday, 6 August, in IOP Publishing's Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, describes how the researchers from the Center of Excellence 'Cognitive Interaction Technology' at Bielefeld University, Germany, have built an artificial bee eye, complete with fully functional camera, to shed light on the insects' complex sensing, processing and navigational skills.

Consisting of a light-weight mirror-lens combination attached to a USB video camera, the artificial eye manages to achieve a field of vision comparable to that of a bee. In combining a curved reflective surface that is built into acrylic glass with lenses covering the frontal field, the bee eye camera has allowed the researchers to take unique images showing the world from an insect's viewpoint.

More here.

Limits

Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table,
There must be one which I will never read.

There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.

There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.

And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.

by Jorge Luis Borges

Today, text messaging has eclipsed the telephone call to become the most frequent form of communication among U.S. teenagers. The average adult spends more than 18 hours per week on the Internet. Ipsos Reid recently reported a 35% decrease in e-mail received, but it’s really a shift in consumption to emerging communications platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and various Instant Messengers. Facebook users send an average of 16 messages inside of that platform each week. Those using MSN Messenger or Blackberry Messenger are sending even more messages on a weekly basis. There’s no question that technology has overrun our lives. Over the past century, the world has welcomed technological ‘progress’ with arms wide open and we’re living with the clicking, dinging, anxiety-inducing deluge of it. But a creative backlash is underway, helping human beings cope with the avalanche of data that passes in front of most of us every day through the use of computers and cell phones. Slow food, the back-to-the-land movement, and groups like letter writing clubs are being formed by a new subculture: the 21st century luddite, wielding fountain pen and notebook, and some checking e-mail from the public library a mere hour per week. Dolen and Fedoruk think this movement is more than a blip on the technological continuum.

more from Christina Crook at The Curator here.

American theater is a one-party town, a community of like-minded folk who are all but unanimous in their strict adherence to the left-liberal line. Though dissenters do exist, they are almost never heard from in public, and it is highly unusual for new plays that deviate from the social gospel of progressivism to reach the stage, whether in New York or anywhere else. All this explains why David Mamet, America’s most famous and successful playwright, caused widespread consternation two years ago when he published an essay in the Village Voice called “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’” in which he announced that he had “changed my mind” about the ideology to which he had previously subscribed. Having studied the works of “a host of conservative writers,” among them Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, Thomas Sowell (whom he called “our greatest contemporary philosopher”), and Shelby Steele, Mamet came to the conclusion that “a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.” For the most part, members of the American theater community responded to the publication of “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’” in one of two ways. Some declared that Mamet’s shift in allegiance was irrelevant to the meaning of the plays on which his reputation is based. Others claimed to have suspected him of being a crypto-conservative all along, arguing that the essay merely proved their point.

more from Terry Teachout at Commentary here.

A few years ago, the photographer Rhea Karam was standing on the edge of a vacant lot in Hamra, taking pictures for a series about the urban landscape of Beirut. The space, surrounded by tall buildings on three sides with a street running along the fourth, was full of garbage. An expensive black sedan pulled up alongside Karam. A woman of a certain age – and of a certain type who would be affectionately or derisively addressed as tante (auntie) – cracked open one of the car’s windows and bombarded Karam with abuse. “How dare you take pictures of this trash!” she shouted. “In a city as beautiful as this, how dare you focus on such ugliness?” Karam was shocked but also amused. The woman had misread the situation. Karam had no intention of photographing ugliness. She was aiming, instead, for a radiant burst of graffiti on the far wall. Still, beyond missing the point by a laughably wide margin, the woman’s anger was instructive. For her, the party at fault was not a population that wantonly litters and recklessly pollutes its own environment on a daily basis. Nor was it a widespread culture of impunity that regards trash collection as a task beneath the dignity of the local citizenry, relegated instead to an army of migrant workers. No, at fault here was a young artist who deigned to document a few self-evident facts, which is symptomatic of how Beirutis see their city not as it is but how they want it, imagine it, or remember it to be. In Beirut, the politics of seeing often demand a willful and selective blindness, backed up by baseless rhetoric. Say Beirut is beautiful and beautiful it will be. Never mind the ample evidence supporting the contrary point of view, that Beirut is just as often dirty, ugly and vulgar, or beautiful only to those wealthy enough to afford a blight-blocking view.

more from Kaelen Wilson-Goldie at The National here.

Every day, at three in the afternoon, I make a trip down the Danube. To travel from Germany’s Black Forest to Romania’s Black Sea takes a matter of minutes, so I try to enjoy myself as much as possible. I sink into a cushy armchair, rev up the stereo and embark on an epic voyage. “Information on the water levels of the Danube River, in centimeters,” the familiar voice on Horizont, the Bulgarian National Radio, announces with the deepest solemnity before reading out the relevant hydrographical values, first in Bulgarian and then in Russian and French. Vienna: 310 (+3); Mohács: 415 (+7); Novi Sad: 162 (-13); Vidin: 380 (+40); Giurgiu: 220 (0). The captains of river vessels can easily map a course on the Internet, but the daily radio bulletin has remained a fixture in my life. For many years, listening to the fluctuations in the water levels of the Danube was the closest I could get to traveling abroad. Regensburg, Passau, Linz, Vienna: these names mesmerized me. Even places like Bratislava and Budapest, comrades in arms against the decadent West, had the ring of myth to a boy growing up in Bulgaria. Remembering his childhood in the Bulgarian river port of Ruschuk (now Ruse), Elias Canetti wrote, “There, the rest of the world was known as ‘Europe,’ and if someone sailed up the Danube to Vienna, people said he was going to Europe.” If people in Canetti’s immediate circle, at the beginning of the twentieth century, still had the occasional opportunity to waltz up to the palaces of the Habsburgs and back, however, the “Europe” I imagined in the 1980s existed only in a galaxy far, far away. To travel up the river as a tourist during the cold war required visas, special permissions, bureaucratic ballast. To swim across it, a negligible distance of a few hundred meters, was to risk both drowning and the bullets of border guards. For nearly fifty years the Danube was a demolished bridge, a liquid roadblock. The wall may have been in Berlin, but the truly impassable one was an invisible dam on the Danube, somewhere between Vienna and Bratislava.

more from Dimiter Kenarov at The Nation here.

In the preface to his translation of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, Marcel Proust wrote that while some people decorate their rooms with things that reflect their taste, he preferred his room to be a place “where I find nothing of my conscious thoughts, where my imagination is thrilled to plunge into the heart of the not-me.” Anyone who has stood looking at Proust’s reassembled cork-lined bedroom at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris—his armchair, his pigskin cane, his brass bed—and tried, unsuccessfully, to feel kinship with his spirit would be relieved to know that he had such a desultory relationship to his personal possessions. These remnants of Proust’s physical life survive because of the obsessive quest of one man: Jacques Guérin, a perfume magnate and bibliophile who rescued Proust’s effects from a fate worse than oblivion—destruction at the hand’s of Proust’s sister-in-law, Marthe. In Lorenza Foschini’s new book, Proust’s Overcoat, the author tells the story of how Guérin discovered and claimed, piece by piece, what was left of Proust’s belongings, elegantly teasing out the relationship between family dynamics and property. Foschini also highlights the role of objects and spaces in Proust’s work, allowing us to see In Search of Lost Time through a different lens. The result is an oblique kind of literary criticism, a material commentary on one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century.

more from Lauren Elkin at Artforum here.

Michelle Sieff argues for considering ideology in political assessments of Hamas', in The Forward:

Why do the debates over the morality of Israel’s responses to Hamas never seem to produce a consensus? A debate broke out last year after Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and another after the publication of the Goldstone Report. Recently we have found ourselves in the midst of yet another debate in the wake of Israel’s botched raid on the Free Gaza flotilla, this time about the justice of Israel’s blockade.

But these arguments never seem to arrive at a conclusion, and that’s because, at bottom, the disagreement touches on a philosophical divide over international human rights law, with an establishment view on one side and, on the other, an emerging insurgent view, with each side screaming past the other.

Earlier this year, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, presented the establishment view to a reporter from The New Republic. The reporter asked Roth why Human Rights Watch did not issue judgments on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s public threats against Israel’s existence. Roth responded: “Let’s assume it is a military threat. We don’t take on governments’ military threats just as we don’t take on aggression, per se. We look at how they behave. So, we wouldn’t condemn a military threat just as we wouldn’t condemn an invasion — we would look at how the government wages the war.”

It is indeed true that the laws of war judge the methods used in fighting the war but not the goals that motivate the combatants. The Goldstone Report, which used the laws of war to assess Israel’s actions in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, lambasted many of the tactics deployed against Hamas and accused Israel of committing possible “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.”

But the laws of war are only one portion of human rights law. And many perfectly reasonable people have soured on the notion that the laws of war should be the only measure by which Israel’s actions against Hamas are assessed, precisely because these laws do not allow us to take into account Hamas’s goals.

Making the Universe

–for Scarlett

Together we
created constellations

placed a star
just … here.

Another … there.

Formed Orion.
The Great Bear.

Bettlejuice flowed
from our fingers.

You knelt
in prayer

golden curls
cascading over your shoulders

you the perfect
cherub.

“Our Father who art
in Heaven …”

You prayed with
all the might of being
3 and a bit

10 packets later of day-glow stars
we had set the Universe to right.

by Donal Dempsy

Raza Rumi in Himal Southasian:

It is not a coincidence that the earliest novels of the Subcontinent dealt with the intense and memorable characters of ‘nautch girls’. Essentially a colonial construct, a nautch girl referred to the popular entertainer, a belle beau who would sing, dance and, when required, also provide the services of a sex worker. The accounts on the marginalised women from the ‘dishonourable’ profession are nuanced, concurrently representing the duality of exploitation and empowerment.
Long before feminist discourse explored and located the intricacies of sex workers’ lives and work, male novelists during the 18th and 19th centuries were portraying the strong characters of women in the oldest profession. Stereotypes of the hapless and suffering prostitute rarely find mention in texts from that time, but one early novel, written in Urdu, is Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa’s Umrao Jan Ada. While the Lucknow-based poet Ruswa is said to have persuaded Umrao to reveal her life history, many critics have surmised that the narrative was authored by Umrao herself. The tone and candour of the story suggests that Umrao played a significant role in drafting this semi-documentary piece.

Umrao’s woes originated in a typical patriarchal mould. As a young girl, she was kidnapped by a hooligan and sold to a Lucknow kotha (a high-culture space also operating as a brothel) managed by Khanum Jan. This act was the hooligan’s way of seeking revenge against Umrao’s father, who had testified against him. At the kotha, an erudite, elderly maulvi transformed Umrao into a civilised poet-cum-entertainer, educating her in the arts and culture. Her seeking knowledge and acquiring confidence to handle a predominantly male world takes place within this space. Thus, the tale of exploitation turns into a narrative of self-discovery.

An archetypal courtesan steeped in Avadhi high culture and manners, Umrao Jan Ada comes across as a voice far ahead of her times. In her frank conversations with Ruswa, Umrao explains how a sex worker’s only friend is money. The realisation that a dancing girl would be a fool to jeopardise her livelihood by giving her love to a man was a clear expression of her empowerment. The plain rejection of wifehood in Umrao Jan’s worldview was directly rooted in the decision not to trade independence for an institutionalised relationship, despite the respectability that such an association might offer. The empowerment of Umrao is in many ways linked to her profession. In an age where women were completely dependent on men for financial and social sustenance, sex work emerged as a safety valve for her existence. And Umrao remains contemptuous of courtesans who leave their position of power and independence, and subject themselves to the whims of respectable men who may or may not reciprocate by according them social respect.

More here.

From Science:

People playing a simple video game can match, and even surpass, the efforts of a powerful supercomputer to solve a fiendishly difficult biological problem, according to the results of an unusual face-off. The game isn't Pac-Man or Doom, but one called FoldIt that pushes people to use their intuition to predict the three-dimensional (3D) structure of a protein. When it comes to solving protein structures, scientists usually turn to x-ray crystallography, in which x-rays shining through a protein crystal reveal the location of atoms. But the technology is expensive and slow and doesn't work for all proteins. What scientists would love is a method for accurately predicting the structure of any protein, while knowing nothing more than the sequence of its amino acids. That's no small task, considering that even a moderately sized protein can theoretically fold into more possible shapes than there are particles in the universe.

To get around that problem, computer programs focus on which shapes require the least amount of energy—and thus which ones the protein is most likely to adopt. But these programs must rely on intense computing to make any headway. One of the most powerful, Rosetta@home, was created by David Baker, a molecular biologist at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle. The program distributes its calculations to thousands of home computers around the world, automatically sending the results back to Baker's lab. (It runs on the same “distributed computing” architecture as the SETI@home search for alien life.) The entire network is capable of nearly 100 trillion calculations per second, dwarfing most supercomputers. Two years ago, Baker wondered whether humans might help Rosetta@home do better. Although the program is impressively good at solving the first 95% of the folding of a protein, putting the correct finishing touches on a molecule often stumps it. People complained to Baker by e-mail that it was frustrating to watch the program flail around on their computer screens when the necessary final tweaks were sometimes obvious to the human eye.

More here.

In an influential article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington sum up experiments aimed at discovering the neural basis of decision-making. In one set of experiments, researchers attached sensors to the parts of monkeys’ brains responsible for visual pattern recognition. The monkeys were then taught to respond to a cue by choosing to look at one of two patterns. Computers reading the sensors were able to register the decision a fraction of a second before the monkeys’ eyes turned to the pattern. As the monkeys were not deliberating, but rather reacting to visual stimuli, researchers were able to plausibly claim that the computer could successfully predict the monkeys’ reaction. In other words, the computer was reading the monkeys’ minds and knew before they did what their decision would be. The implications are immediate. If researchers can in theory predict what human beings will decide before they themselves know it, what is left of the notion of human freedom? How can we say that humans are free in any meaningful way if others can know what their decisions will be before they themselves make them?

more from William Egginton at The Opinionater here.

Kafka died in 1924, twenty years before the start of the Cold War, but he understood the absurdities of life under totalitarian rule better than many of the protagonists in the conflict. The accuracy of Kafka’s insight was admitted even by the Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács, an abject Stalinist who denigrated the Czech writer for deviating from the tenets of ‘progressive humanism’. Appointed Minister of Culture in Imre Nagy’s government during the Hungarian Revolution, Lukács was arrested by the Soviets and transported to a castle in Romania, where he and the other prisoners lived at times as visiting dignitaries and at others as criminals. After some days of this treatment, David Caute tells us, Lukács commented, ‘So Kafka was a realist after all!’ Politics and the Novel During the Cold War is the continuation and completion of several decades of writing and thinking about the role of intellectuals in the grand political conflicts of the twentieth century. First published in 1973, Caute’s The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism remains the most enduring work on the subject. Formidably learned, it is full of absurdist vignettes. Describing the visit to China of the ninety-year-old Hewlett Johnson (the Red Dean of Canterbury), which Chou En Lai had facilitated by providing a special plane complete with bed and oxygen mask, Caute writes: ‘This hugely tall figure with the puffs of white hair billowing over his ears stood on stage with the minute, masked members of the Peking Opera, clapping with them, smiling, clapping …’.

more from John Gray at Literary Review here.

I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and summon the emergency services. They arrived with great dispatch and behaved with immense courtesy and professionalism. I had the time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup equipment, but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady. Within a few hours, having had to do quite a lot of emergency work on my heart and my lungs, the physicians at this sad border post had shown me a few other postcards from the interior and told me that my immediate next stop would have to be with an oncologist. Some kind of shadow was throwing itself across the negatives.

more from Hitch at Vanity Fair here.

What makes things meaningful? Is it the mere indication that something meaningful is, in fact, present? Is it the attention we then invest in it? Is it our capacity to subsequently rationalize that experiential phenomenon into a communicable verbal analog: to describe it in words? Is it in the act of communication? Such questions have been inherent to the act of artmaking since prehistory but began breaking surface in the 20th century, nowhere more elegantly than in the work of L.A. painter/photographer John Baldessari, whose retrospective exhibit “Pure Beauty” is up at LACMA through September 12. Having debuted at London’s Tate Modern last year, it will movie to NYC’s Metropolitan Museum later in the fall. A perfect example of Baldessari’s eloquence on these philosophically pointed matters is his series of Commissioned Paintings from 1969, a group of identically formatted canvases, each with a centered, more-or-less photorealistically rendered image of a finger indicating a feature in the environment — often a smudge or stain on a surface — with a caption below by a professional sign painter, reading “A Painting by Patrick X. Nidorf O.S.A.” or “A Painting by Anita Storck.”

more from Doug Harvey at the LA Weekly here.