A few days before the Netherlands goes to the polls, Aicha Bennani is riding through the Dappermarkt, an open-air market in east Amsterdam that sells spicy Indonesian food, Moroccan fabrics and products from all around the world. The serious faces of politicians stare down from billboards, marked with the colourful, if confusing, initials of the main parties – CDA, VVD, PvdA – and covered again with bright flyers advertising nightclubs. “We never see the PVV here,” she says, referring to the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party of the populist politician Geert Wilders. “They wouldn’t dare. We have a lot of students and artistic people here and they would just laugh. No, they go to places where there are no Muslims, where they can say what they like.” And with that, she smooths some of her hair back beneath her headscarf and rides off. Bennani is one side of the modern Netherlands, the side that most Amsterdammers are keenest to display. The daughter of Moroccan immigrants, she is a university student living in one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan cities. For the Dutch, tolerance is practically a religion, the embodiment of the local word gezellig which translates as being comfortable with each other, a rubbing along of communities that has historically allowed different religious and political groups to flourish side by side. No religious group comprises more than a third of the population, and no political party has won an outright majority since the First World War.

more from Faisal al Yafai at The National here.

I remember the view from a grave. Cartoon stars spiraled in front of my eyes when I hit the damp soil at the bottom. Up there on the faraway earth, past six feet of square muddy wall, a man and a boy stared down at me—my brothers, Gary and David, both laughing. Until I slipped and fell into the grave, we had been setting up the graveside for a funeral. Gary, 11 years older than I, worked for a funeral home; more than once in our childhood, David and I rode with him to pick up a corpse. I remember coming in the back door of a funeral home around midnight—the glare of fluorescent lights on stainless-steel tables, the smell of antiseptic, and another odor underneath. Only once did I actually zip up a body bag over a dead man’s nose. Once was enough. These mostly forgotten memories returned after I was invited last year to edit an anthology of vampire stories. “Vampire stories?” I repeated. Despite a secret fascination with werewolves—something strikes home for me about the need for anger management to keep you from going all beastly during a crisis—I had never really been a fan of vampires. I wasn’t reading the Twilight books or watching True Blood. I never even read Interview With the Vampire—even though I dated a psychic vampire back in the early 90s—and my Tom Cruise allergy kept me from the movie.

more from Michael Sims at The Chronicle Review here.

Few writers did more to propagate the idea of a singular genius than the young Goethe, yet few can have done more than he to cultivate their relationships to others. As the studies by Rüdiger Safranski and Gustav Seibt remind us, Goethe’s interest in other people often entailed a highly conscious, indeed sometimes stylized, pose that helped him both to place himself in the world and to perfect his art. Whether dealing with writers, scholars, scientists or men of affairs, Goethe knew how to achieve the maximum mutual benefit. That he was so often able to form a productive rapport with the leading figures of his day, notably with Schiller, his only competitor as a writer, and even with the Emperor Napoleon, says much about Goethe’s culture – a self-culture or Bildung which he promulgated in his writing. Intriguingly, both Schiller and Napoleon sought Goethe out, flattered him, and won him over by literary-critical discourse. Anyone who today doubts the value of criticism could do worse than examine these instances. Goethe himself did much to foreground them. He consolidated the public image of the friendship with Schiller by publishing the Goethe–Schiller correspondence, and recorded the meeting with Napoleon in a brief sketch, as in some suggestive references to the man he liked to call “my emperor”.

more from Jeremy Adler at the TLS here.

A couple of months ago, Robin had posted this. Lisa's a friend of ours, and if you can help her, please do by clicking on the ad in the right-hand column. Thanks.

One in four adults in the U.S. suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year—over 57.7 million people. A much smaller share of this group, about 6%, suffer from a severe and persistent mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder or major depression. My friend Lisa Guidetti is working on a documentary on the issue and is looking to raise finishing funds for editing and post production on the film. So check out the trailer if you're interested, and consider helping.

Lisa:

Lavender Hall is a feature documentary about a residential care home housing a wild bunch of irreverent residents with backgrounds from pianist to plastic surgeon. A family-run residential care home in an era of expanding corporate-run facilities, Lavender Hall is an anachronism. So too is its owner, Bill Kopec, with his drill sergeant-like approach to caring for residents. Founded and run by Bill’s mother in the seaside town of Wildwood, NJ, Bill struggled to keep his mother's dream alive after her death. After almost 50 years of caring for incongruous residents, most from Ancora, the local psychiatric institution, Bill Kopec is closing Lavender Hall. He managed the home every weekend on top of being a full-time Executive at Xerox. But with Bill now older than most residents, and no family member willing to take over, the home will be demolished to make way for condos. Numerous Lavender Hall residents battle serious problems. Linda, the youngest resident at 52, is a chronic alcoholic, bi-polar, with an eating disorder. Some, like Joel, have been at Lavender Hall for more than 19 yrs, and at 62 composes and performs dozens of original operettas and musical theatre works, despite his severe autism. This dysfunctional family of 14 residents will be made homeless in 4 months unless their only advocates, Bill Kopec and his daughter Renée, can navigate the medical insurance labyrinth to find them new homes. Lavender Hall is a frequently funny and occasionally disquieting portrait of the oddball residents and their equally eccentric carers. We reveal the challenges of the enduring life on the invisible margins of society, when you are considered either too old or too crazy for anyone to care what you do.

Lavender Hall’s residents represent two growing problems in the US: how to care for an aging population that cannot afford care for themselves, and the lack of support available to those with mental health or addiction problems, many of whom are elderly. Too many are housed in secure psychiatric units instead of having access to supported independent living or residential homes. And upon Lavender Hall’s closing, many of the residents could be re-institutionalized, overmedicated, and placed at the mercy of a system that erodes their independence and control of their lives. Normally off limits to cameras, this film’s unprecedented access to a privately run facility hopes to cross that threshold of crazy and breach that lonely aging divide. But as Debbie the Care Assistant warns, “If you're not crazy when you come in, you're crazy when you leave!”

Marc Hight in The Philosopher's Magazine:

Despite being hailed by the famed Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset as “the most important thinker of the second half of the nineteenth century,” Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) remains an obscure figure to the Anglo-American world. This while notables like Heidegger and Husserl openly recognise their debt to the breadth and depth of Dilthey’s thought.

Dilthey is best known for his defence of the distinction between the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and the natural sciences; a distinction his positivist-minded contemporaries were intent on denying. Yet this defence is best understood as a part of his lifelong goal to provide a secure foundation for the human sciences. These include disciplines like history, psychology, economics and sociology. Dilthey asked what history and psychology and the other human sciences require in order to be done at all. That is, what is required to understand humanity? The individual human sciences are portrayed by Dilthey as inter-related and to some degree inseparable parts of a distinctive way of knowing.

Both a professional philosopher and a practising historian (he acquired some fame for his intellectual biography of Schleiermacher), Dilthey believed that historical reflection was essential to understanding humanity. He also believed that philosophy only has value when serving a practical end. Humans are constantly wrestling with pain, irrational upsets, and questions about meaning in the world. We all have what Dilthey calls a “metaphysical impulse” to find a coherent picture of reality (a Weltanschauung or world view) which addresses these concerns. Religion is one response to this impulse. When the response is governed by critical reflection, we call it “philosophy”. Philosophy thus serves an important role: to produce rules for action and empower those who use it by increasing self-awareness. Various religions and philosophies generate world views which seek to account for the world as we experience it.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

The upward spiral of artificial intelligence looks set to produce machines which are cleverer and more powerful than any humans. What happens when machines can themselves create super-intelligent machines? 'The Singularity' is the name science fiction writers gave to this situation. Philosopher David Chalmers discusses the philosophical implications of this imaginable situation with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.

Listen to David Chalmers on The Singularity

Evgeny Morozov reviews Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, in Boston Review:

The main argument of Cognitive Surplus rests on a striking analogy. Just as gin helped the British to smooth out the brutal consequences of the Industrial Revolution, the Internet is helping us to deal more constructively with the abundance of free time generated by modern economies.

Shirky argues that free time became a problem after the end of WWII, as Western economies grew more automated and more prosperous. Heavy consumption of television provided an initial solution. Gin, that “critical lubricant that eased our transition from one kind of society to another,” gave way to the sitcom.

More recently TV viewing has given way to the Internet. Shirky argues that much of today’s online culture—including videos of toilet-flushing cats and Wikipedia editors wasting 19,000 (!) words on an argument about whether the neologism “malamanteau” belongs on the site—is much better than television. Better because, while sitcoms give us couch potatoes, the Internet nudges us toward creative work.

That said, Cognitive Surplus is not a celebration of digital creativity along the lines of Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman or Lawrence Lessig’s “remix culture.” Shirky instead focuses on the sharing aspect of online creation: we are, he asserts, by nature social, so the Internet, unlike television, lets us be who we really are. “No one would create a lolcat to keep for themselves,” Shirky argues, referring to the bête noire of Internet-bashers, the humorous photos of cats spiced up with funny and provocative captions. “Cognitive surplus” is what results when we multiply our constantly expanding free time by the tremendous power of the Internet to enable us do more with less, and to do it together with others.

Jacob Aron in New Scientist:

IF YOU found a self-replicating organism living inside your computer, your first instinct might be to reach for the antivirus software. If, however, you are Andrew Wade, an avid player in the two-dimensional, mathematical universe known as the Game of Life, such a discovery is nothing short of an epiphany.

When Wade posted his self-replicating mathematical organism on a Life community website on 18 May, it sparked a wave of excitement. “This is truly ground-breaking work,” wrote a fellow Life enthusiast, Adam Goucher, on the website Game of Life News. “In fact, this is arguably the single most impressive and important pattern ever devised.”

A first for the game, the replicator demonstrates how astounding complexity can arise from simple beginnings and processes – an echo of life's origins, perhaps. It might help us understand how life on Earth began, or even inspire strategies to build tiny computers.

The Game of Life is the best-known example of a cellular automaton, in which patterns form and evolve on a grid according to a few simple rules. You play the game by choosing an initial pattern of “live” cells, and then watch as the configuration changes over many generations as the rules are applied over and over again (see “Take two simple rules”).

The rules of the game were laid down by mathematician John Conway in 1970, but cellular automata first took off in the 1940s when the late mathematician John von Neumann suggested using them to demonstrate self-replication in nature. This lent philosophical undertones to Life, which ended up attracting a cult following.

Life enthusiasts have since catalogued an entire zoo of interesting patterns, such as “spaceships” that travel across the grid, or “guns”, which constantly spawn other patterns. But a pattern that spawned an identical copy of itself proved elusive.

Spencer Wells over at Seed:

During my work as a geneticist and anthropologist I’ve been lucky enough to work with people around the world, ranging from senior politicians and the heads of major corporations to hunter-gatherer tribesmen eking out a precarious existence in remote wilderness locations. What has struck me over and over again is the huge amount of change taking place in the world today, regardless of where one lives. Some of this change is good, such as the overall decrease in poverty during the course of my lifetime, or the drop in the birthrate in developing countries. Other things, though, like 9/11 and the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, have not been so welcome though.

Everywhere there is a feeling that the world is in flux, that we are on the brink of a historic transition, and that the world will be fundamentally changed somehow in the next few generations. The pace of technological change is accelerating, and we are all swept up in it. Think of all of the indispensable things in your daily life you have only learned to use in the past decade or so. Email, Google, instant messaging and mobile phones spring to mind immediately, but there’s also hybrid car technology, curbside recycling and social networking sites like Facebook. All have found widespread application only since the mid-1990s, and yet today we can’t imagine living without them. Trying to imagine what the world will be like at the close of the 21st century is nearly impossible.

With all of these amazing technological advances, though, has come a great deal of ancillary baggage.

For the Forty Soldiers of the XII Legion Fulminata

Sift the flour three times:
for fear, forgiveness, faith.

Make a nest in the middle
and pour milk.

Think of frozen Lake Sevasta
embracing martyrs.

Let yeast foam
and bloom a warm flower.

Break the eggs.

Think of ankles and kneecaps
broken by hammers.

And lemon zest,
glowing crowns of saints.

Melt butter.
Think of ice melting on soldier's skin.

Mix with oil and knead
until the dough speaks and breathes.

Breathe.

Pound and throw the dough 100 times.
Torture it.
Tell it to renounce God.

Taste.

Add sugar,
pinch of salt, of patience.

Leave it by the oven to rise, alive.

Make figure eights
shaped like humans,
with heads and bellies
of braided dough.

Brush with beaten egg.

Align the small army.
40 soldiers of the XII Legion Fulminata
go straight into the fire.

Sink them in honey,
sprinkle with chopped walnuts.

Think of the forgotten ones,
known or unknown.

Think of the unindentified,
missing, vanished.

call out their unspoken names.

For them, break apart the macinici cake.
Take a bite of its soft body,
fragrant and sweet.

Ask forgiveness for the wandering,
fugitives, lonely

ones that lived before us
and are gone.

by Claudia Serea

From Guernica:

The esteemed historian and novelist on how there is only one path for the United States in Afghanistan: withdrawal.

Editors’ note: The following talk was given on April 19 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the London Review of Books.

Afghanistan now is at a critical stage. And now I’m very glad to say that the London Review of Books, whose thirtieth anniversary we are commemorating, has over the years published myself and others on this subject, taking essentially a critical stance to this war because, as many of you will recall, it became fashionable all over the world, not just in the United States, to think of Iraq and Afghanistan as two very different wars. Which of course, on one level, they are. But I mean different moral values were placed on these wars by good-thinking people. The Iraq war was a bad war, which should never have happened; that is the view of large numbers of people in the United States today, and always was the view of an overwhelming majority of Europeans. The Afghan war, on the other hand, was meant to be the good war. This was a war where people who attacked the United States on September 11th were based. And therefore they had to be sorted out; the government which gave them refuge had to be toppled and this could only be done militarily. I will just say as a small footnote here that the official 9/11 inquiry said that the Afghan government never formally refused to hand over these people; they just demanded to see the evidence, and said if the evidence was convincing of their involvement they would hand them over. I just say that because the commission of enquiry made a point of noting that.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Chimpanzees may comfort others in distress in ways very similar to how people do, according to what may be the largest study of consolation in animals by far. The new findings in our closest living relatives could help shed light on the roots of empathy in humans. The spontaneous consolation of someone in distress with a hug, a pat on the back or other friendly display of physical contact has been studied in human children as a sign of sympathetic concern for others for decades. This kind of demonstrative empathy is often thought to be a large part of what sets humanity apart from other animals.

To better understand how empathy might have evolved in our lineage, animal behaviorist Teresa Romero of Emory University and her colleagues studied roughly 30 chimpanzees housed outdoors at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Over a span of eight years they documented cases where uninvolved bystanders offered comfort to recent victims of aggression. Whereas most studies on animal consolation typically involve looking into a few hundred cases of conflicts and their aftermaths, “ours is based on an analysis of about 3,000 cases,” Romero says.

Picture: CHEER UP: Chimpanzees spontaneously console others in distress with friendly body contact. Here, an adult male [right] who was screaming loudly after losing a fight with a rival was approached by a juvenile [left] who put an arm around him. Frans B. M. de Waal.

More here.

Clive Thompson in the NYT Magazine:

‘Toured the Burj in this U.A.E. city. They say it’s the tallest tower in the world; looked over the ledge and lost my lunch.”

This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards From the Edge” ), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer?

Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten to the buzzer by the third combatant: Watson, a supercomputer.

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.

With Watson, I.B.M. claims it has cracked the problem — and aims to prove as much on national TV.

Rafia Zakaria in Guernica:

Ali is in America and finds herself in a political conundrum. She is a feminist (as announced by the title of a recent piece run by The New York Times Magazine) but she is at a conservative collective, The American Enterprise Institute, which rarely, if ever, supports feminist concerns. The result resonates with the kind of opportunism seen too often at political think tanks. Hirsi Ali no longer simply suggests that Muslim women renounce their faith completely, but rather that they should look to Christianity instead of Islam for a religious identity. This is because Christianity, unlike Islam, has a “reform” branch that would allow them to ask questions. Unlike earlier writings, in which Hirsi Ali seemed to renounce all faith as a stricture on women’s self-realization, the political environs of the American Enterprise Institute seem to have softened her stance toward at least one faith.

But while she may be in the U.S. (and now a favorite of certain U.S. conservatives), Hirsi Ali remains distant and seemingly uninterested in the efforts of Muslim-American women to redefine their faith. Her book, while poignantly capturing the weight of structural inequalities crippling Muslim women from Somalia to Pakistan, refuses to take seriously the efforts of Western Muslim women who are refusing to let mullahs define Islam. One example of this is the “Pray In movement” launched last year through which groups of Muslim American women have insisted on praying front and center in mosques in non-violent protest against gender segregation. Similarly, this past Friday, June 11th, a Muslim Canadian woman named Raheel Raza led a mixed congregation of men and women at Oxford University in England, going against the stricture that says only men can lead communal prayers. In another reform effort, Laleh Bakhtiar, a scholar at the University of Chicago, has translated the Quran and challenged earlier translations of verses that supposedly allowed for men to “discipline” their wives. The work of all these women, and scores of others in Muslim countries, show the transformation of religious tradition instead of the handing off the task of defining faith to mullahs and religious clerics.

Also in Guernica from 2007, this interview with Hirsi Ali.

“'How can one write music after Auschwitz?' inquired Adorno; and one familiar with Russian history can repeat the same question by merely changing the name of the camp – and repeat it perhaps with even greater justification, since the number of people who perished in Stalin's camps far surpasses the number of German prisoncamp victims. 'And how can you eat lunch?' the American poet Mark Strand once retorted. In any case, the generation to which I belong has proven capable of writing that music.–Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Lecture

Ian Buruma in the NYRB blog:

Much has been written and said about Adorno’s famous declaration that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” I don’t think he meant that no poems should ever be written after the killing. A more likely interpretation of his dictum is that barbarism, of which Auschwitz was the purest example, cannot be the stuff of poetry. There is no poetic meaning to be culled from exterminating millions of people. In fact, there is no meaning in it at all. To call the victims of Nazi mass murder “martyrs,” as is common in the language of Holocaust remembrance in Israel and elsewhere, is to give their deaths a higher meaning. They did not die for their beliefs, after all, or for a cause. (Being born Jewish is neither a belief nor a cause.) Part of the horror of what happened is that innocent people were killed for no reason at all. Auschwitz was a murder factory. Killing was a routine.

Martyrdom also implies that people have a choice in the matter. Christian martyrs, or indeed Muslim suicide bombers, are called martyrs by their communities because they were willing to die for their beliefs. But the fact that victims in the Holocaust had no choice does not mean that they were no longer human. The best accounts of the death camps, in fiction and non-fiction, by authors such as Primo Levi and Imre Kertesz, show that even under the most extreme circumstances human agency is never entirely extinguished. Primo Levi hinted at that, albeit darkly, when he insisted that the best people rarely survived. Survival was a matter of luck, but also of knowing how and when to take care of yourself—and only yourself. When Kertesz, author of Fateless, returned to his native Budapest from Auschwitz and Buchenwald, well-meaning people commiserated by saying he must have gone through hell. It was not hell, he would reply, but a camp made and inhabited by people. And he was not just a passive victim, or some abstract denizen of an imaginary place, but an adolescent, who happened to grow up in Buchenwald. He did not mean to diminish the dreadfulness of that experience, but he wanted people to see that it was still an experience that he lived through. Kertesz insisted on his autonomy, such as it was, precisely because his tormentors had tried everything to take it away from him.

This is why the most successful accounts of the Holocaust have been witness accounts. They restore individuality, they give the victims faces and voices. The alternative is to use suggestion. Poetry—pace Adorno—is ideally suited to this.

J. M. Tyree in The Nation:

“It's not the jokes,” Eddie Waters tells a group of aspiring comedians in Trevor Griffiths's classic play Comedians (1975). “It's not the jokes. It's what lies behind 'em…. When a joke bases itself upon a distortion…and gives the lie to the truth so as to win a laugh and stay in favor, we've moved away from a comic art and into the world of 'entertainment' and slick success.” From the misogynist, nihilist novels of Michel Houellebecq to randy popcorn films like The Hangover and The Ugly Truth, we have recently seen the flowering of a certain strain of humor: noxious, sexist and juvenile, this type of comedy sets itself up as an antisocial fun-zone free from the censure of political correctness, an unsafe space where guys can finally tell the truth about how things really are instead of mouthing the platitudes of gender equality expected of males in mixed company. Reveling in the unacceptable is confused with genuine humor, then further confused with truth-telling in the face of a supposedly dominant feminized culture. There can be no question of the mass appeal here, an analogue in comedy writing to the Tea Party movement, which panders to whatever percentage of white males feel disenfranchised by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. These works provide a solace similar to that proffered by Super Bowl ads like this year's incendiary spot “Man's Last Stand,” for the Dodge Charger, which recommended the hot rod as the appropriate reward for any man enduring the soul-killing cheerlessness of a heterosexual relationship. “I will say yes when you want me to say yes,” the voiceover intones. “I will carry your lip balm,” but “I will drive the car I want to drive.” Anyone who complains is no fun and no fair.

In Comedians, Eddie Waters offers his students an alternative:

A real comedian—that's a daring man. He dares to see what his listeners shy away from, fear to express. And what he sees is a sort of truth about people, and about their situation, about what hurts or terrifies them, about what's hard, above all, about what they want. A joke relieves the tension, says the unsayable, any joke pretty well. But a true joke, a comedian's joke, has to do more than release tension, it has to liberate the will and the desire, it has to change the situation.

Many of our best contemporary comic writers seem to have intuited Waters's lesson. From television shows like The Office and HBO's Eastbound & Down to the stories of George Saunders, Junot Díaz and David Foster Wallace, these writers, like their less able peers, use male narcissism as the foil for their jokes. Yet these writers are neither chauvinists nor nihilists; their depiction of men being men can be vicious, but it is never static or canned. Saunders, Díaz and Wallace are celebrated not only because they broach the unsayable but also because, despite their eagerness to transgress, their work is fundamentally humane.

Sam Lipsyte's fiction oscillates between these comic modes. In the four books he has published in the past decade, readers have witnessed an ongoing war in Lipsyte's comedy between empathy and nastiness. He has skewered the afflictions and affectations of his male protagonists to devastating effect, but he is sometimes unable to generate the escape velocity required to see a world beyond his narrators' self-absorption. Home Land (2004) was a decisive victory for empathy, and for Lipsyte's artistry. His latest novel, The Ask, feels disordered and inchoate by comparison. It's a retreat by a nonpareil comic stylist into the pure but flat art of the vile.

Jesse Tangen-Mills in The Millions:

They begin as teenagers in Mexico in the 1960s, an unprecedented period of turbulence, optimism, violence, vivacity for all of Latin America. In the rash optimism of their youth, they rebel against everything and everyone. They joke about murdering future Noble Laureate Octavio Paz, member of the New Left. They stumble into the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968 (retold in Bolaño´s novella Amulet; something like the Tianamen Square of Latin America); the very same year, socialist Salvador Allende is elected president. In 1970 Argentine former dictator Aramburu is kidnapped and killed by the leftist guerrillas the Montoneros. Three years later, Pinchoet strikes Chile with a military coup. Through Lima and Belano, they peripherally witness the fall of Franco. Finally, they follow the last Latin American leftist movement of the twentieth century to Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas have just claimed victory. Then the Sandanistas sink and the last hope for the Left is gone. From there some go to the Feria de Libros in Madrid, the world of boring book signings and banal book discussions. By the end of the twentieth century, the balls-to-the-wall bravado of avant-garde literature has gone the way of Barnes and Noble. By then our hero Ulises Lima, along with his nonconforming optimism, has also vanished; Belano, like an inverse Che in the Congo with a touch of Rimbaud, wanders through warring Monrovia hoping to die.

In Latin America, literature has always been a part of politics. Colombus’s records are the new world’s first book in Spanish, followed by other conquistadors and later their mendicant colleagues. Before Ronald Regan, Simon Bolivar was considered the great communicator. In fact, name any Latin American leader in the 19th century and chances are they have written a book of grammar or poetry. Likewise, many famous writers become politicians (i.e, Vargas Llosa’s presidential campaign in Peru; Ernesto Cardenal’s position in the Sandanistas). If not, being exiled because of your writing remains a possibility, as it was during the military dictatorships (the –ettis, Uruguayans Benedetti and Onetti suffice as examples). Thus, to write a book about Latin American writers – from the obscure to the famous – is to write a political work. The Savage Detectives is as much a story of a two artists as young men, as it is the trajectory of the Left in the second half of the twentieth century, which Bolaño eulogized in a brilliant speech when he won the Romulo Gallegos.

Sublime Kitchen

……………………..They came to eat the moon again
……………………. The women ate the moon and their bellies grew each month
……………………..They squeezed breast-milk into the moon,
………………………Added the refreshing scent of mint to the roasted moon

I caught a glimpse of her kitchen once
The secretive chirp of the cooks dressed in white
The swirling storm severing the necks of wild ducks
on hundreds of wooden chopping boards
It was a sublime kitchen

……………………. A guest with a child entered
…………………… Mommy, mommy, can I have a glass of tangy star?
……………………..She brought out a drink made of powdered rain cloud
………………………and floated an icy star in it

I caught a glimpse of her kitchen once
The rain cloud of flour mushroomed
and all kinds of dead animals’ blood flowed down the drain
the cries of countless spoons, chopsticks, fingers, toes
got sucked into the dishpan
It was a sublime kitchen

………………It’s time to prepare a midnight meal
…………….. She cracked the moon over the frying pan
…………….. a hole as deep as a fingernail appeared on the moon
…………….. then a flock of birds crawled out from the hole
…………….. with their wings that can be fried
…………….. The flock of birds spread their black wings
…………….. across the sky as the night deepened
…………….. She roasted the wings all night

Slobbered, chewed, licked, burped, chewed and chewed, sucked, tasted, drank, got fed nonstop,
swallowed and shouted Cheers! Eat more! Hey, Over here! One more bottle! Smacked lips, belched,
gagged

Like the lips that never once closed
the buildings on both sides of the street at night
the sound of them being fed the night sky through their huge openings
Everything was sublime

by Kim Hyesoon
from A Glass of Red Wine
publisher Moonhak kwa Jisung-sa, Seoul, 2004
translation Choi, Don Mee

From Science:

Almost all important breakthroughs encounter resistance from other scientists, who have a tendency — justifiable for the most part — to defend the status quo. Some insights are resisted with such intensity that it may take decades before they're widely accepted among scientists. For some, such as HIV, heliocentrism, and evolution, pockets of resistance remain decades or centuries after the war is won.

It follows that if you're determined to take on audacious scientific projects, you need to be ready for the fallout. Scientists committed to incremental advances may work for decades without attracting any enmity. But as soon as your data show that you might be on to something game-changing, be prepared for a new level — and type — of challenge. Are you ready to have the top scientists in your field criticizing your work in journals and dissing you at meetings? Because history shows that the deeper your idea cuts into the heart of a field, the more your peers are likely to challenge you. Human nature being what it is, what ought to be reasoned discussion may turn personal, even nasty.

More here.

From The New York Times:

At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past. Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process. For those who haven’t noticed, the Valley’s most-celebrated company — Google — works daily on building a giant brain that harnesses the thinking power of humans in order to surpass the thinking power of humans. Larry Page, Google’s other co-founder, helped set up Singularity University in 2008, and the company has supported it with more than $250,000 in donations. Some of Google’s earliest employees are, thanks to personal donations of $100,000 each, among the university’s “founding circle.” (Mr. Page did not respond to interview requests.) The university represents the more concrete side of the Singularity, and focuses on introducing entrepreneurs to promising technologies. Hundreds of students worldwide apply to snare one of 80 available spots in a separate 10-week “graduate” course that costs $25,000. Chief executives, inventors, doctors and investors jockey for admission to the more intimate, nine-day courses called executive programs.

Both courses include face time with leading thinkers in the areas of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, energy, biotech, robotics and computing. On a more millennialist and provocative note, the Singularity also offers a modern-day, quasi-religious answer to the Fountain of Youth by affirming the notion that, yes indeed, humans — or at least something derived from them — can have it all. “We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.”

But, of course, one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia.

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