It’s a terrible way to start a story about Christmas

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

ScreenHunter_01 Dec. 18 21.28 The first sentence of A Christmas Carol is “Marley was dead: to begin with.” It's a terrible way to start a story about Christmas. But A Christmas Carol isn't great because it's a great story. In fact, A Christmas Carol is a flimsy story. The characters are mostly clichés. Scrooge is a parody of miserly behavior. He is not only against Christmas, he is against love. He is also against charity, kindness, and even heat, preferring to keep his coal locked up rather than warm the office with it. Scrooge lives in darkness and gloom. “The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold.”

In contrast, Tiny Tim — the blessed little cripple and son of Scrooge's employee — seems to bear no resentment to the world at all. His love for everyone knows no bounds, despite the fact that Scrooge has done everything in his power to keep the Cratchit family in misery. God bless us, every one, and so forth.

Then Scrooge has some bad gravy, a nightmare about three ghosts, and he spends Christmas Day in a hysterical fit sending turkeys all about the city and giving everyone raises. He's so happy not to be dead (as the third ghost suggested he soon would be) that he has a chuckling fit and bursts into tears, perhaps having gone insane. An unbelievable asshole but a day ago, Scrooge is now the picture of human kindness. I, for one, don't buy it.

More Scroogish stuff here.



the man formerly known as Claus Beck-Nielsen

Portrait.1245747382

In 2009 we were in Denmark witness to a rather unusual and spectacular literary incident. The Danish author Claus Beck-Nielsen declared himself dead in 2001. A year later he was resurrected as the nameless director of the art factory Das Beckwerk, the mission of which was to continue the life and work of Claus Beck-Nielsen. In 2003, accompanied by the performance artist Thomas Skade-Rasmussen Strøbech, he journeyed to Iraq under the name “Nielsen” with the stated aim of establishing democracy in the war-ravaged country. Their trip resulted in a series of newspaper articles and TV programmes. Subsequently, the man formerly known as Claus Beck-Nielsen wrote the book Selvmordsaktionen (The suicide mission, 2005) about the journey. In 2006 the pair travelled together again with a similar project, this time to the USA; Suverænen (The sovereign) was published in 2008, with Das Beckwerk credited as the author. The book, which is promoted as a novel, is largely about Thomas Skade-Rasmusse, and describes among other things elements of his friend’s private life. Skade-Rasmussen, who, to make things even more confusing, also works under a number of pseudonyms, sued Das Beckwerk in 2009; in his opinion, the man formerly known as Claus Beck-Nielsen had invaded his private life and made public sensitive and private information. Confused? With good reason. Essentially, a fictional character is suing the novel’s author! This has never before been seen in Denmark – and probably nowhere else either.

more from Andreas Harbsmeier at Eurozine here.

mina loy’s pseudonymania

MinaLoy422

Mina Loy is not Myrna Loy. While the actress Myrna Loy starred in the “The Thin Man” films, the Modernist poet Mina Loy was busying herself with the avant gardes of Italian Futurism, Dada, and to a lesser extent American Surrealism. The confusion is recurrent. Yes, their names are similar and yes, they were contemporaries, but the mix-up makes an even deeper sense given the two Loys’ shared elegance, and the Platonic rightness of imagining the poet ordering and lining up a sequence of martinis while in the company of William Powell. In point of fact, Mina Loy was not even Mina Loy. Born in England as Mina Gertrude Löwy, our Loy dropped the “w” and the umlaut early, undoubtedly a step in becoming what Marjorie Perloff calls a “deracinated cosmopolite”—she would spend the least amount of time in the country of her birth, opting instead for Germany, Italy, Mexico, France, and finally the United States. While Myrna Loy played on screen with Asta the pedigreed dog, our Loy played with a mongrel language, and she started those games with her name. In her poems she would call herself Imna, Nima, Anim, Ova, and Gina, and later in life her autograph’s surname read Lloyd. One of her fiercest advocates, Roger Conover, refers to Loy’s “pseudonymania.”

more from Jessica Burstein at Poetry here.

Friday Poem

Telephoning in the Mexican Sunlight

Talking with my beloved in New York
I stood at the outdoor public telephone
in Mexican sunlight, in my purple shirt
Someone had called it a man/woman
shirt. The phrase irked me. But then
I remembered that Rainer Maria
Rilke, who until he was seven wore
dresses and had long yellow hair,
wrote that the girl he almost was
“made her bed in his ear” and “slept him the world.”
I thought, OK this shirt will clothe the other in me.
As we fell into long-distance love talk
a squeaky chittering started up all around,
and every few seconds came a sudden loud
buzzing. I half expected to find
the insulation on the telephone line
laid open under the pressure of our talk
leaking low-frequency noises.
But a few yards away a dozen hummingbirds,
gorgets going drab or blazing
according as the sun struck them,
stood on their tail rudders in a circle
around my head, transfixed
by the flower-likeness of the shirt.
And perhaps also by a flush rising into my face,
for a word — one with a thick sound,
as if a porous vowel had sat soaking up
saliva while waiting to get spoken,
possibly the name of some flower
that hummingbirds love, perhaps
“honeysuckle” or “hollyhock”
or “phlox” — just then shocked me
with its suddenness, and this time
apparently did burst the insulation,
letting the word sound in the open
where all could hear, for these tiny, irascible,
nectar-addicted puritans jumped back
all at once, as if the air gasped.

by Galway Kinnell

What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?

Peter Singer published this three years ago yesterday, in the New York Times Magazine:

ScreenHunter_03 Dec. 18 11.45 What is a human life worth? You may not want to put a price tag on a it. But if we really had to, most of us would agree that the value of a human life would be in the millions. Consistent with the foundations of our democracy and our frequently professed belief in the inherent dignity of human beings, we would also agree that all humans are created equal, at least to the extent of denying that differences of sex, ethnicity, nationality and place of residence change the value of a human life.

With Christmas approaching, and Americans writing checks to their favorite charities, it’s a good time to ask how these two beliefs — that a human life, if it can be priced at all, is worth millions, and that the factors I have mentioned do not alter the value of a human life — square with our actions.

More here.

Concerning EM Forster

From The Telegraph:

Kermodestory_1541871f EM Forster was once asked why he wasn’t more open about being homosexual, even at the cost of living abroad. After all, the French novelist André Gide had done it. Forster’s answer came quickly: “Gide hasn’t got a mother.” It’s a beautifully Forsterian answer, funny, glum and putting human considerations in front of ethical principles. Forster attempted high ethical debate in his novels, but discovered a human story could almost always make him think twice. Frank Kermode has turned a series of Cambridge lectures on Forster into a short but instructive book, adding a series of unordered reflections on aspects of Forster, which he calls a “causerie”. There is no key to Forster, apart from the general one of being an English liberal, and always being ready to retreat from and apologise for most intellectual positions. Which is a fairly unassailable intellectual position, as someone in the act of apology is always in.

Forster is caught for all time in his comments on the death of D H Lawrence. T  S Eliot found them inadequately serious: “Unless we know exactly what Mr Forster means by ‘greatest’, ‘imaginative’ and ‘novelist’, I submit that this judgment is meaningless.” Forster wrote that he, indeed, couldn’t explain what he had meant by the words and moreover couldn’t explain what ‘‘exactly’’ meant. Eliot, he said, “duly entangles me in his web”, but “there are occasions when I would rather be a fly than a spider and the death of D H Lawrence is one of these”. It’s a marvellous comment, both genuinely humble and a terrific stroke of one-upmanship.

More here.

The year in science

From MSNBC:

Ape Top breakthrough: It took 15 years for researchers to reconstruct the skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, an apparent human ancestor unearthed in Ethiopia in 1994. The results were surprising: Ardi's image didn't look like a cross between an African ape and early hominids such as Australopithecus afarensis (represented by another famous skeleton, nicknamed Lucy). Rather, her skeleton was structured for upright walking as well as climbing, with long, curving fingers suited for grasping tree branches.

The message was that apes as well as humans have changed significantly since Ardi's heyday to adapt to their particular evolutionary niches. Anyone who still thinks that “humans evolved from apes” will have to shift their paradigm.

….

The other nine: Science doesn't rank the other items in its list of top 10 breakthroughs – but here they are, as they were listed in the journal.

Pulsars in the gamma-ray sky: NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveals a new wave of pulsars.

How plants get a rush: Scientists are learning how ABA receptors help plants get through stressful times.

Mock monopoles spotted: An elusive phenomenon, involving materials that have only a north or a south magnetic pole, is created in the lab using special materials. Magnetic monopoles have figured in the debate over the Large Hadron Collider's safety as well as in episodes of “The Big Bang Theory.”

The stuff of longevity: Drugs such as rapamycin are being targeted for animal studies that eventually could lead to life extension for humans.

Our icy moon revealed: NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite crashes into the moon to find fresh evidence of water ice.

The return of gene therapy: Gene therapy has suffered setbacks over the past 20 years, but this year researchers reported success in treating maladies such as X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy, Leber's congenital amaurosis and “bubble boy” disease.

Graphene takes off: Single-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms are the hot new thing in materials science, potentially opening the way for graphene transistors that can outdo silicon.

Hubble reborn: The Hubble Space Telescope gets its final scheduled upgrade from shuttle astronauts and emerges working better than ever.

First X-ray laser shines: SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source was fired up for the first time in April, beginning a series of experiments that will use X-rays to probe structures on the atomic scale. Check this item to look back at my tour of SLAC while the LCLS was under construction.

More here.

And what if we had 16 fingers?

Richard Dawkins in New Statesman:

ScreenHunter_02 Dec. 18 11.28 If you have overdosed on Darwin this anniversary year, the great man himself is partly to blame: he was inconsiderate enough to publish On the Origin of Species when he was exactly 50. The resulting coincidence of sesquicen�tennial with bicentennial was bound to excite the anniversary-tuned antennae of journalists and publishers. Anniversaries are arbitrary, of course, dependent on the accident of our having ten fingers. If we had evolved with eight instead, we would have to suffer centenaries after only 64 (decimal) years, and style gurus would prate about the changing fashions of octaves instead of decades.

Incidentally, it is not far-fetched that we might have evolved a different number of fingers. The pentadactyl limb (five digits on each) has become a shibboleth of vertebrate zoology, and even animals such as horses (which walk on their middle fingers and toes) or cows (two digits per limb) have lost the extra digits from a five-fingered ancestor. But the lungfish-like group of Devonian fishes from which all land vertebrates are descended included species with seven (Ichthyostega) or eight (Acanthos�tega) digits per limb. If we were descended from Acanthostega, instead of from an unsung five-fingered cousin of the same fish, who knows what feats of virtuosity pianists might now perform with 16 fingers? And would computers have been invented earlier, because hexadecimal arithmetic translates more readily than decimal into binary?

Historical accidents of this sort are rife, contrasting with the illusion of good design to provide some of our most convincing evidence that evolution happened.

More here.

Twitlit: The twitterature revolution

Tim Walker in The Independent:

Twitterature_276564t This Christmas, among the Harry Potter parodies and pub-quizzable miscellanies that litter the humour shelves in Waterstones, you'll find at least four titles that were either “crowdsourced” on Twitter, or written in chapters of 140 characters or less.

The World According to Twitter: Crowd-sourced Wit and Wisdom from David Pogue (and His 350,000 Followers) is the work of The New York Times technology writer Pogue, who asked his Twitter followers questions ranging from “What's your greatest regret?” to “What's the best bumper sticker you've seen lately?”, then collected the best of their responses and published 2,524 of them in book form.

“Compose the subject line of an email message you really, really don't want to read,” goes the first request. The responses include “To my former sexual partners, as required by law” and “Your Dad is now following you on Twitter”. To the prompt “Add 1 letter to a famous person's name; explain”, witty users replied with “Malcolm XY: Civil rights activist, definitively male”, and “Sean Penne: Starchy, overcooked actor/activist”.

More here.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

A Magic Number?

Catherine Clabby in American Scientist:

ScreenHunter_01 Dec. 18 10.58 Imagine how useful it would be if someone calculated the minimum population needed to preserve each threatened organism on Earth, especially in this age of accelerated extinctions.

A group of Australian researchers say they have nailed the best figure achievable with the available data: 5,000 adults. That’s right, that many, for mammals, amphibians, insects, plants and the rest.

Their goal wasn’t a target for temporary survival. Instead they set the bar much higher, aiming for a census that would allow a species to pursue a standard evolutionary lifespan, which can vary from one to 10 million years.

That sort of longevity requires abundance sufficient for a species to thrive despite significant obstacles, including random variation in sex ratios or birth and death rates, natural catastrophes and habitat decline. It also requires enough genetic variation to allow adequate amounts of beneficial mutations to emerge and spread within a populace.

More here.

something beautiful that might have been

Nazi-occupied-paris-wwii1

Millions and millions of lives were lost in the war, many of them under terrible circumstances. And millions have been lost since then. But it is the destruction of one precious life, of an extraordinary young woman whom we have come to know through her most intimate thoughts, that brings out the full horror of this ghastly waste. Of all the entries in her journal, one sticks in my mind more than any other. It was written on October 25, 1943. Hélène is gripped by anxiety at the thought that she might not be there when her fiancé returns:

But it is not fear as such, because I am not afraid of what might happen to me; I think I would accept it, for I have accepted many hard things, and I'm not one to back away from a challenge. But I fear that my beautiful dream may never be brought to fruition, may never be realized. I'm not afraid for myself but for something beautiful that might have been.

more from Ian Buruma at the NYRB here.

flies in cloudy amber

John-and-Myfanwy-Piper-at-001

The Pipers were an exciting looking couple, he tall and thin with the ascetic physiognomy of an Old Testament prophet, she with the schoolgirl athlete’s body and Dutch doll face poeticized by John Betjeman. Between them, in half a century of married life, they did very many things very well, producing pictures and stained glass, books and magazines, operas and ballets; they brought up four children, travelled and ran a famously hospitable household and productive garden on “simple life” principles. When they met at Ivor Hitchens’s seaside cottage in Suffolk in 1934, Piper was a committed member of Ben Nicholson’s avant-garde Seven and Five group and had started to write book and exhibition notices for the Saturday Review. Already in his thirties and married to a fellow art student, with a spell in the family firm of solicitors behind him, he was in a hurry to get on with the business of being an artist; lately down from Oxford, Myfanwy Evans had returned to London where her father had a chemist’s shop in Jermyn Street. Their courtship produced Axis, a magazine devoted to abstract art, and a future together as highbrow modernists seemed assured until Piper was sent as an official war artist to paint Coventry Cathedral and other damaged or threatened buildings.

more from Ruth Guilding at the TLS here.

Thursday Poem

A Busy Man Speaks

Not to the mother of solitude will I give myself
Away, not to the mother of art, nor the mother
Of the ocean, nor the mother of the snake and the fire;
Not to the mother of love,
Nor the mother of conversation, nor the mother
Of the downcast face, nor the mother of the solitude of
death;
Not to the mother of the night full of crickets,
Nor the mother of the open fields, nor the mother of Christ.

But I will give myself to the father of righteousness, the
father
Of cheerfulness, who is also the father of rocks,
Who is also the father of perfect gestures;
From the Chase national Bank
An arm of flame has come, and I am drawn
To the desert, to the parched places, to the landscape of
zeros;
And I shall give myself away to the father of righteousness,
The stones of cheerfulness, the steel of money, the father of
rocks.

by Robert Bly

from Contemporary American Poetry;
Penguin Books, 1962

Logic made fun

From Salon:

Book Of the most celebrated graphic novels recently published, R. Crumb's illustrated version of the Book of Genesis is atypically serious and David Mazzucchelli's “Asterios Polyp” is the most artistically sophisticated, but “Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth,” by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou (illustrated by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna), is surely the most fun. This comes as a bit of a surprise, since the book's subject — analytical philosophy's search for the foundations of mathematics in the early 20th century — is hardly the stuff that frolics are made of. Still, amusement and cerebration, mixed in exactly the right proportions, can result in a delightful cocktail; Jostein Gaarder's fantasy novel cum philosophy primer, “Sophie's World,” proved how popular the blend can be, and “Logicomix” has followed its example onto the bestseller lists.

What “Logicomix” niftily demonstrates is how well the graphic novel form is suited to mounting sprightly explanations of abstract concepts. Thinkers often employ concrete metaphors as tools to convey difficult ideas — the “infinite hotel” of mathematician David Hilbert, for example, an establishment that, although full, always has room for another guest. In “Logicomix,” Hilbert's paradox is further visualized by a character checking into an actual hotel and drawing arrows on the posted floor plan. That character is the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the scene is played for laughs with Russell's bemused new bride shaking her head and a German porter exclaiming “They are crazy, these Britons!”

More here.

South Asian Threat? Local Nuclear War = Global Suffering

From Scientific American:

Nuke Why discuss this topic now that the cold war has ended? Because as other nations continue to acquire nuclear weapons, smaller, regional nuclear wars could create a similar global catastrophe. New analyses reveal that a conflict between India and Pakistan, for example, in which 100 nuclear bombs were dropped on cities and industrial areas—only 0.4 percent of the world’s more than 25,000 warheads—would produce enough smoke to cripple global agriculture. A regional war could cause widespread loss of life even in countries far away from the conflict.

Regional War Threatens the World
By deploying modern computers and modern climate models, the two of us and our colleagues have shown that not only were the ideas of the 1980s correct but the effects would last for at least 10 years, much longer than previously thought. And by doing calculations that assess decades of time, only now possible with fast, current computers, and by including in our calculations the oceans and the entire atmosphere—also only now possible—we have found that the smoke from even a regional war would be heated and lofted by the sun and remain suspended in the upper atmosphere for years, continuing to block sunlight and to cool the earth. India and Pakistan, which together have more than 100 nuclear weapons, may be the most worrisome adversaries capable of a regional nuclear conflict today.

More here.

The 9th Annual Year in Ideas

From the New York Times Magazine:

ScreenHunter_02 Dec. 17 10.10 Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas. Like a magpie building its nest, we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity, which, when collected and woven together, form a sort of cognitive shelter, in which the curious mind can incubate, hatch and feather. Unlike birds, we can also alphabetize. And so we hereby present, from A to Z, the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world. To offer a nonalphabetical option for navigating the entries, this year we have attached tags to each item indicating subject matter. We hope you enjoy.

More here.

What Is the Speed of Thought?

Carl Zimmer in Discover:

ScreenHunter_01 Dec. 17 10.07 Morse’s invention debuted just as researchers were starting to make sense of the nervous system, and telegraph wires were an inspiring model of how nerves might work. After all, nerves and telegraph wires were both long strands, and they both used electricity to transmit signals. Scientists knew that telegraph signals did not travel instantaneously; in one experiment, it took a set of dots and dashes a quarter of a second to travel 900 miles down a telegraph wire. Perhaps, the early brain investigators considered, it took time for nerves to send signals too. And perhaps we could even quantify that time.

The notion that the speed of thought could be measured, just like the density of a rock, was shocking. Yet that is exactly what scientists did. In 1850 German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz attached wires to a frog’s leg muscle so that when the muscle contracted it broke a circuit. He found that it took a tenth of a second for a signal to travel down the nerve to the muscle. In another experiment he applied a mild shock to people’s skin and had them gesture as soon as they felt it. It took time for signals to travel down human nerves, too. In fact, Helmholtz discovered it took longer for people to respond to a shock in the toe than to one at the base of the spine because the path to the brain was longer.

More here.

The Confessions of a Groveling Pakistani Native Orientalist

Pervez Hoodbhoy in CounterPunch:

Pervez-Hoodbhoy Here ye, Counterpunch readers! The victory of Native Orientalists – the ones which the late Edward Said had warned us about – is nearly complete in Pakistan. It has been led by “the minions of Western embassies and Western-financed NGOs” and includes the likes of “Ahmad Rashid, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Najam Sethi, Khaled Ahmad, Irfan Hussain, Husain Haqqani, and P.J.Mir”. Thus declares Mohammad Shahid Alam, a professor of Pakistani origin who teaches at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachussetts. [CounterPunch, 2 Dec 2009]

I ought to be thrilled. Now that I am a certified foreign-funded agent/orientalist/NGO-operator who “manages US-Zionist interests”, a nice fat cheque must surely be in the mail. Thirty six years of teaching and social activism at a public university in Pakistan – where salaries are less than spectacular – means that additions to one’s bank balance are always welcome.

But what did I do to deserve this kindness?

More here.