Fan
………………
My hand wants to hold the book
And the book to hold it
To be its prolongation
It rounds off my being in the story
In each of the pages
Returns to the beginning
I see how it is beside me always.
The books that wait for me to return
To them
The books that adopt different colors
Those that shine in our words
Those that pale into oblivion
Those that jump all over the house
Those that open all their pages
Like umbrellas
The fans that break letters on the wind
Those that, like flower vases,
Are on every table.

by Margarita Cardona
translation: Laura Chalar

Abanicos
……………………
Mi mano quiere sostener el libro
Que la sostenga
Ser su prolongación
Concreta mi ser a la historia
En cada una de sus páginas
Vuelve al principio
Veo cómo me acompaña siempre.
Los libros que esperan que vuelva
Sobre ellos
Los libros que toman diferentes colores
Los que brillan en nuestras palabras
Los que palidecen olvidados
Los que saltan por toda la casa
Los que como paraguas abren
Todas sus páginas
Los abanicos que rompen letras por el viento
Los que como floreros
Están en todas las mesas.

From PhysOrg:

A worldwide survey of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries included questions about happiness and income, and the results reveal that while life satisfaction usually rises with income, positive feelings don't necessarily follow, researchers report.

“The public always wonders: Does money make you happy?” said University of Illinois professor emeritus of psychology Ed Diener, a senior scientist with the Gallup Organization. “This study shows that it all depends on how you define happiness, because if you look at life satisfaction, how you evaluate your life as a whole, you see a pretty strong correlation around the world between income and happiness,” he said. “On the other hand it's pretty shocking how small the correlation is with positive feelings and enjoying yourself.”

The Gallup World Poll conducted surveys on a wide range of subjects in a representative sample of people from 132 countries from 2005 to 2006. The poll used telephone surveys in more affluent areas, and door-to-door interviews in rural or less-developed regions. The countries surveyed represent about 96 percent of the world's population, the researchers report, and reflect the diversity of cultural, economic and political realities around the globe. This “first representative sample of planet earth,” the authors wrote, “was used to explore the reasons why 'happiness' is associated with higher income.” The researchers were able to look at a long list of attributes of respondents, including their income and standard of living, whether their basic needs for food and shelter were met, what kinds of conveniences they owned and whether they felt their psychological needs were satisfied.

More here.

From Science:

What can you do to make your kids smarter? Keeping them healthy might help. A new study suggests that worldwide differences in intelligence can be explained by disparities in infectious disease. The researchers found that countries most heavily affected by infectious diseases generally had the lowest average IQs. They propose that these illnesses hinder children's brain development, though their conclusion is gathering mixed reviews. The new research relies on data first published in 2002 in a controversial book called IQ and the Wealth of Nations. In the book, psychologist Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster in the United Kingdom and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen of the University of Tampere in Finland searched the published literature to come up with measures of average IQ for 81 countries. They also estimated IQ for another 104 countries by averaging the IQs of nearby nations. Hong Kong topped the list, with an average IQ of 107. The authors argued that national differences in IQ at least partly explained differences in national wealth. In 2006, they expanded the data to include IQ measurements from 113 countries and new estimates for 79 more.

Several groups have attempted to explain the pattern. In the new study, Christopher Eppig, a Ph.D. candidate in biology at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and his colleagues propose that low IQ is tied to the toll of infectious diseases. Their idea, which the researchers call the “parasite-stress hypothesis,” is that children who contract “parasites,” which they define to include everything from intestinal worms to bacteria and viruses, devote more energy to fighting off infection. As a result, they have less energy available for brain development. Countries where infectious diseases are prevalent, Eppig and colleagues argue, will have lower intelligence.

Picture: In this map, countries shaded purple have the highest average IQ. Those shaded dark red have the lowest IQ—and, typically, the highest incidence of infectious disease.

More here.

Occasional 3QD contributor and insanely diehard, lifelong football fan Saifedean Ammous has arrived in South Africa for the World Cup. He'll be posting his coverage of the championship at a blog he has created for the purpose: The Long Ball to Freedom. Here's a taste of his initial reports:

The stadium looked glorious. It is a true feat of architectural genius, and the atmosphere inside was electric. As I mentioned earlier, the journey from and to the stadium was very pleasant, short and fun.

And I finally got to see the vuvuzelas in action. Now, I’d gotten plenty of headache watching the World Cup on TV, but was willing to be open-minded about them. At Chris’s insistence, I even tried blowing one of the things. But when I got to the stadium my mind was made up: those evil spawns of the devil must be banned! They are an awful monstrosity. They sound like death getting raped. But it isn’t the noise or loudness that is the worst thing about these horns, it is that they have subdued the wonderful football atmosphere of the games.

An integral part of every game and every major footballing occasion is the crowd. They chant, sing, boo, react to the players and spur the players on. With the vuvuzela, all of that is lost. All you can hear all throughout the game is the incessant droning sound of helicopters spraying pesticide. Whatever happens on the pitch, the drone remains the same. It gets louder at times, quiter at others, but the tone is itself. All the singing, chanting, booing and cheering is drowned away. This is a real pity. I would have loved to hear the thousands of Mexicans and Argentines chant and sing throughout that exciting game.

More here. [Saif is leftmost in photo.]

Rivka Galchen in the New York Times Book Review:

He lived most of his life with his mother. He loved detective and adventure novels. (His first story in English was published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.) Though he started to go blind in his 30s, he never learned to read Braille. And in his later years he made some unappealing political remarks about being happy that, following the military overthrow of the Perón government, “gentlemen” were again running the country. (Perón, to be fair, had “promoted” Borges from head of the National Library to head of poultry inspection.) Such remarks are perhaps why he never won the Nobel.

But perhaps Borges’s most glorious and provocative “fault” was that he lived to be 86 and never wrote a novel. “It is a laborious madness, and an impoverishing one,” he wrote, in the introduction to a 1941 collection of his short stories, “the madness of composing vast books. . . . The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.”

More here.

Mark Ambinder in The Atlantic:

As the U.S. struggles to manage its efforts to influence opinion about Al Qaeda abroad, Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula has produced its first English-language propaganda magazine.

It's called “Inspire,” and you can read parts of it below. A U.S. official confirmed that the pages correspondent to the version its open-source collectors had obtained.

“Inspire” includes a “message to the people of Yemen” directly transcribed from Ayman Al-Zawahari, Al Qaeda's second in command, a message from Osama Bin Laden on “how to save the earth,” and the cover includes a quotation from Anwar Al-Awlaki, the American born cleric who is believed to be directly connected to the attempt to destroy an airplane over Detroit by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Day. (The director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, made that disclosure at a security forum in Aspen, CO, Fox News reported.)

The table of contents teases an interview with the leader of AQAP who promises to “answer various questions pertaining to the jihad in the Arabian Peninsula.” It includes a feature about how to “make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom.”

More here.

In February 1998, at the age of 91, Philip Johnson, the godfather of modern architecture, who 40 years earlier had collaborated with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe on the iconic Seagram Building, in Manhattan, traveled to Spain to see the just-completed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. He stood in the atrium of the massive, titanium-clad structure with its architect, Frank Gehry, as TV cameras from Charlie Rose captured him gesturing up to the torqued and sensually curving pillars that support the glass-and-steel ceiling and saying, “Architecture is not about words. It’s about tears.” Breaking into heavy sobs, he added, “I get the same feeling in Chartres Cathedral.” Bilbao had just opened its doors, but Johnson, the principal apostle of the two dominant forms of architecture in the 20th century—Modernism and Postmodernism—and the design establishment’s ultimate arbiter, was prepared to call it on the spot. He anointed Gehry “the greatest architect we have today” and later declared the structure “the greatest building of our time.”

more from Matt Tyrnauer at Vanity Fair here.

I’m noticing a new approach to artmaking in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I’m seeing it blossom and bear fruit at “Greater New York,” MoMA P.S. 1’s twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent. It’s an attitude that says, I know that the art I’m creating may seem silly, even stupid, or that it might have been done before, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t serious. At once knowingly self-conscious about art, unafraid, and unashamed, these young artists not only see the distinction between earnestness and detachment as artificial; they grasp that they can be ironic and sincere at the same time, and they are making art from this compound-complex state of mind—what Emerson called “alienated majesty.” The best of the work at “Greater New York” pulses with this attitude. The worst of it is full of things that move, light up, or make noise, all frantic enough to make you feel like you’re at a carnival rather than a museum. I yearned to see more art here that demands that you stop and be still, like painting, of which there is very little. Instead, the curators—Connie Butler, Neville Wakefield, and Klaus Biesenbach, the museum world’s unofficial czar these days—favor things that are “about” painting, like Dave Miko’s canvas propped on a little shelf with drips painted on the wall behind it, carrying the heavy-handed title Lonely Merch Guy. (When will everyone get over the ossified idea that painting’s particular alchemy is suspect? Bad dogma!)

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

Christopher Hill, to whose memory these volumes are dedicated, had a lot of time for Gerrard Winstanley. The Digger leader figures prominently in all of Hill’s major works on the revolutionary years of the seventeenth century, and in particular in his classic study, The World Turned Upside Down. That book examined the “other revolution”, the one that “might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic”. On this view, Winstanley emerges as something of a hero, an embodiment of the radical potential of the 1640s: the Diggers, said Hill, “have something to say to twentieth-century socialists”. The World Turned Upside Down is a book, and an image, that continues to exert a considerable hold over those interested in the countercultural potential of the revolution, as even the most cursory web search reveals. Revisionist historians, by contrast, have tried to cut the English revolution down to size or to cast it in its own terms. In so doing, they naturally also cast a critical eye over the reputation and contemporary significance of its radical heroes. In Winstanley’s case, this led to an emphasis both on the strangeness of his thought for twentieth-century socialists and on the fact that he was a Digger leader only briefly in a long and, in many other ways, very respectable life.

more from Michael Braddick at the TLS here.

Sad news via Owen Bowcott in The Guardian:

The author and polemicist Christopher Hitchens yesterday announced he was cutting short a promotional book tour in order to undergo chemotherapy treatment.

There were reports that the the British-born writer, who was a heavy smoker until giving up several years ago, had been diagnosed with cancer.

In a statement issued by his US publisher, Twelve, the 61-year-old said: “I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my oesophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice.”

The firm gave no further details other than asking for his privacy to be respected. Hitchens launched a high profile book tour last month to promote his memoir Hitch-22, which tackles subjects ranging from the Middle East and Zimbabwe to his friendships with prominent writers including Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis. The volume has already entered the bestseller lists.

More here.

On a balmy and humid Saturday night, June 5th, we left our apartment on Kikar Masarik Square in Tel-Aviv and walked down to Yitzhak Rabin Square, only 5 minutes away. Recalling our youthful days at similar anti-war and peace marches, we eyed the crowd anxiously. We soon realized that we were joining the crowd, whose size would eventually grow to 6,000 and sponsored by the Israeli Peace Movement (Shalom Ahshav), at the gathering spot of the Israeli Communist Party (Hadash): I noticed many young Arabs carrying the hammer and sickle, along with girls, Israeli or Palestinian, with their khaffiyas, chanting in Hebrew and Arabic as a distinguished looking elderly Arab gentleman addressed that part of the crowd. As the sea of red flags surges around us, I suppressed a tear: Such a sight is hardly visible in any European capital. I recalled all those Jewish communist militants of Europe who gave their lives for an ideal that was hollowed out by history. “Wie eine Trane im Ozean,” I mused –like a tear in the Ocean– recalling that beautiful novel of Mannes Sperber, documenting the decimation of a generation of militants by Stalin and party purges even before the gas chambers reached them. But here now before me were their children and grandchildren, not in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest and Moscow, but in Tel-Aviv.

more from Seyla Benhabib at Reset here.

The political novel – the urgent, morally committed depiction of conflicts and tragedies – flourished during the 1930s and 1940s, amid depression, fascism and total war, when Soviet communism was the socialist star on an otherwise darkening horizon. This era spawned some of the finest political fiction and drama we have known: Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, André Malraux, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus were all writing at full throttle. In my opinion, the cold war – and the fiction it created – begins in the 1930s with the Spanish civil war. Young writers made the pilgrimage to Republican Spain and some of them died. Orwell escaped death by a whisker, as a bullet passed through his neck. Malraux led an air squadron and produced a novel of electric expressionism, Man’s Hope (1937). Hemingway settled down to the measured, crafted story-telling of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). But if anti-fascism was the point of departure for all these writers, they would soon divide over the nature of the Stalinist intervention in Spain. Dos Passos, the most formally innovative of all interwar novelists, chose to turn Adventures of a Young Man (1939) into a howl of protest against communist chicanery. Orwell himself went for a mix of autobiography and reportage in Homage to Catalonia (1938), an indictment of Stalinist tactics in which he talked himself out of Left Book Club patronage and into embittered isolation.

more from David Caute at The New Statesman here.

When people talk about “natural storytellers,” they are probably paying an unintended compliment to the unnatural. They mean that such writers are unnaturally gifted in artifice; that, better than the rest of us, they can draw us in, sound a voice, shape a plot, siphon the fizz of suspense. Yet the compliment is not merely inverted, since even freakish mastery of such tricks does not account for those impalpable gifts—the tremor of presence on the page, the overflow of vitality—which rival the abundance, even gratuitousness, of nature itself. The English writer David Mitchell belongs to this returning army of nature. Lavishly talented as both a storyteller and a prose stylist, he is notable for his skill and his fertility. Without annoying zaniness or exaggeration, he is nevertheless an artist of surplus: he seems to have more stories than he quite knows what to do with, and he ranges across a remarkable variety of genres—conventional historical fiction, dystopian sci-fi, literary farce. “Cloud Atlas” (2004), his best-known novel, features six interlocked and rotating novellas, each completely different from its neighbor: the journal of an American notary, travelling by boat from Australia to America in the eighteen-fifties; the letters of a young bisexual English composer, sent in the nineteen-thirties to a college friend; a slice of nineteen-seventies paranoid political thriller, in which a young California journalist takes on a sinister energy corporation.

more from James Wood at The New Yorker here.

From Standpoint:

Vladimir Nabokov was starting his career as a writer when he found himself in Berlin. “It is clear, for one thing, that while a man is writing, he is situated in some definite place; he is not simply a kind of spirit, hovering over the page…Something or other is going on around him.” The short 1934 novel Despair from which this quote comes is already heavily self-ironising compared with the stories of the previous decade. But like them it is studded with incidental Berlin experiences, from the shape of the city's S-Bahn train line on the map to the comedy of a German misspeaking English. “I suppose only the pest. The chief thing by me is optimismus.” If Nabokov's Berlin was in his head, it was nevertheless not invented.

He lived from 1932-37 with his wife and son at Nestorstrasse 22, in the smart, quiet residential area of Wilmersdorf, comparable with London's Chelsea. The unfussy mansion block was his first real home after the curtailed teenage years in Russia. The previous decade in Berlin had been a series of removals from one rented address to the next after his father was shot dead by Bolshevik agents in 1922. “That flat of ours in one of those newfangled houses built in the modern, boxlike, space-cheating, let-us-have-no-nonsense style…” So the imagined author of Despair commented as his creator moved in. The building was dull with an awkward tower in brick and glass towering up at its helm. The protagonist of Nabokov's next big project, The Gift, dwelling in Agamemnonstrasse, thought that the boring architect of his block had suddenly gone mad. After the war, these leafy streets had to be raised from the rubble. (Tiny bronze plaques mark their 1954 resurrection). The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov lived here, 1932-37, it says, but you could easily pass by that dim bronze plaque from 1999, fading into a brownish façade.

More here.

From MSNBC:

“Eclipse,” opening June 30, is the third big-screen adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's “Twilight” series of vampire romance novels. The stories revolve around the tangled relationship between the human Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and the vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). Heartthrob vampires are, of course, fictional creatures drawn from a rich history of myth and reality. Click ahead to learn more.

Bloodsucking humans in medieval times

This 16th-century woman, whose remains were excavated during an archaeological dig near Venice, apparently had a brick shoved into her trap because she was thought to have a thirst for human blood. Scholars trace the myth that humans rise from the dead and suck the blood of others to medieval ignorance about how diseases spread and bodies decompose. When mass graves were re-opened during epidemics to deposit fresh corpses, the diggers often encountered older, bloated bodies with blood seeping out of their mouths — conditions that scientists now know result from the buildup of gases in decomposing organs. In earlier times, however, this was regarded as a sign that the corpses were drinking the blood of others. Medieval Italians thought that the only known way to kill the undead was to stick a brick in their mouths so that they would starve, according to Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist and anthropologist at Florence University. This skull with a mouthful of brick, he said, is “evidence of exorcism against a vampire.”

More here.

Vaughan Bell in Mind Hacks:

Frontiers in Neuroscience has an amazing scientific article that has collected all the studies that have recorded what happens when the brain is electrically stimulated in living patients. It's like a travel guide to the unnaturally active brain.

As you might expect, science generally takes a dim view of researchers cracking open people's skulls just to see what happens when bits of their brain are stimulated, hence, almost all of these studies have been done on patients who are undergoing brain surgery but have agreed to spend a few minutes during the operation to report their experiences for the benefit of neuroscience.

This procedure is also essential in some forms of brain surgery to make sure the surgeons avoid essential areas. For example, in some cases of otherwise untreatable epilepsy the surgeons track down the 'foci' or trigger area, and can often stop seizures completely just by removing it.

However, if an area is heavily involved in speech production, you wouldn't necessarily want to give up being able to talk for the sake of being seizure free, so surgeons will open the skull, wake you up, and then ask you to speak while stimulating the areas they are considering removing. They can map your speech areas by seeing when you can't speak as the areas are stimulated, and hence, know what areas to avoid.

More here.

John Lancaster in National Geographic:

The Taliban would not be amused. On a sunny winter afternoon in Lahore, the local culturati have turned out in force for the annual show at the National College of Arts. In the main courtyard young men and women mingle easily, smoking and sipping from cans of Red Bull. Some of the men sport ponytails, and one has a pierced eyebrow.

Nearby is a life-size sculpture of a couple hold­ing hands on a swing. Inside, the image of a male torso, viewed from one angle, morphs into a female breast. Yet there is no mistaking the stamp of the subcontinent. Women wear tra­ditional thigh-length tunics over their jeans, and some cover their hair. There are also miniature paintings, which traditionally might capture a hunting scene; here they portray other scenes, as in one bold depiction of a bearded cleric reclining on a couch in front of a bombed-out school.

The jumble of styles and influences—the stew of peoples and faiths Rudyard Kipling captured so vividly in his novel Kim—is a hallmark of Lahore, Pakistan's second largest city and capital of Punjab Province. The wealthiest and most populous of the country's four provinces, Punjab is where East meets West and everything in between. Even the brutal and bloody partition of British India in the mid-20th century could not destroy Punjab's cosmopolitan brio.

But the Taliban and its allies are doing their best.

More here, including a lovely photo gallery.