From The New York Times:

We live in noise. The world is a booming, rustling, buzzing place to begin with (though many of us have shut out nature’s clamor), and to that we have added every conceivable vibration of our own making and every possible means of assault, whether it’s the vast, thrumming climate-controlling systems of our sealed buildings or the tiny earbuds nestled against our cochleae. What chance does quiet have against all this? Plenty, it turns out. Sara Maitland has scaled the heights (or is it depths?) of what might be the only frontier humankind will never conquer and cannot, in spite of itself, destroy — silence. Infinite, fathomless, terrifying, uplifting, unknowable, gorgeous silence. It’s difficult to convey the thrill of “A Book of Silence,” an adventure story that doesn’t involve roaring crowds or screaming headlines, doesn’t depict a heroine climbing high mountains or sailing vast oceans, doesn’t chronicle racing pulses or sweaty palms, and yet is every bit as awe-inspiring, death-defying and mind-blowing as any trip up Everest. Rarely have I been so amazed at the splendor of a new landscape unfolding before my eyes, and felt so tense wondering what was going to happen as this intrepid writer pushed her way across the pages.

“A Book of Silence” is a brilliant exploration of something — or is it a nothing? — that right at the start is impossible to define precisely. Is silence the absence of words? Or is it the absence of sound altogether? Is there even such a thing as silence that we can experience? Isn’t there always the swoosh of blood through the body? Is silence dependent on external conditions? Or is it a quality of mind? What would you call the visual effect of something like a Rothko painting?

More here.

Rachel Aviv in The Nation:

Clarice Lispector doted on the ugly, dull and superfluous. Over the course of her fifty years as a novelist, her characters became less intelligent. She began with self-conscious and lonely heroines and moved on to less pensive creatures: dogs, chickens, cockroaches and the smallest woman in the world. The triumph of her career is a dimwitted virgin named Macabéa, who subsists on hot dogs. Macabéa’s “story is so banal that I can scarcely bear to go on writing,” Lispector notes in her finest book, The Hour of the Star, published a few months before her death in 1977. Macabéa works as a typist in Rio de Janeiro but knows the meaning of few of the words she commits to the page. She sleeps in cheap cotton underwear, with her mouth wide open, and then rushes to work in the morning, smiling dumbly at everyone she passes. Her few moments of leisure are spent drinking Coca-Cola–a refreshment she adores “with servility and subservience”–and watching horror films in which women get shot in the heart.

Lispector was fascinated by the possibility of extinguishing self-consciousness; she idealized animals and idiots because they were free of the desire to translate their experiences into words. Macabéa is the perfect fool, whose life has been reduced to a “tiny essential flame”: she does nothing more than exist, without wondering why. Then she gets hit by a car and dies. The novella’s drama derives not from Macabéa’s pitiful story but from Lispector’s struggle to render in full a life so mundane. “I feel so nervous about writing,” she admits, “that I might explode into a fit of uncontrollable laughter.”

Patrick Denman Flanery in the TLS:

Imagine for a moment that John Coetzee is dead. He has left behind a series of notebook entries in preparation for writing the final volume of his memoirs. What kinds of challenges would face a biographer setting out to write a life of this South African-born Nobel Laureate, whose public persona as “J. M. Coetzee”, at least as constructed by the literary press, is characterized by extreme privacy, if not awkwardness? (This is, after all, an author who did not attend either of the ceremonies at which his novels were given the Booker Prize.) Who would such a biographer interview, and what kinds of questions would he ask? More particularly, who might presume to speak about the personal life of an author who has attempted so radically to subvert the idea of literary celebrity in an age that celebrates the confessional?

This is the conceit behind Coetzee’s new book, Summertime, presented as the final volume of his Scenes from Provincial Life trilogy of fictionalized memoirs, which began with Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). The first books both employ a distancing third-person narrator, recounting events in the life of the character John, or “he”. Boyhood is concerned with young John’s life in Worcester and Cape Town in the late 1940s and early 50s, depicting the author as a Europhile child culturally out of place in his homeland. Youth takes John from Cape Town to London in the early 1960s; here he works for IBM, has painful affairs, and, coping with the bleak realities of mid-century England, tries to be a poet. Both books function as explorations into the life of the writer at crucial stages in his aesthetic and intellectual development.

Helen Thomson in New Scientist:

FIVE years ago, Londoner Ashley Revell sold his house, all his possessions and cashed in his life savings. It raised £76,840. He flew to Las Vegas, headed to the roulette table and put it all on red.

The wheel was spun. The crowd held its breath as the ball slowed, bounced four or five times, and finally settled on number seven. Red seven.

Revell’s bet was a straight gamble: double or nothing. But when Edward Thorp, a mathematics student at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, went to the same casino some 40 years previously, he knew pretty well where the ball was going to land. He walked away with a profit, took it to the racecourse, the basketball court and the stock market, and became a multimillionaire. He wasn’t on a lucky streak, he was using his knowledge of mathematics to understand, and beat, the odds.

No one can predict the future, but the powers of probability can help. Armed with this knowledge, a high-school mathematics education and £50, I headed off to find out how Thorp, and others like him, have used mathematics to beat the system. Just how much money could probability make me?

When Thorp stood at the roulette wheel in the summer of 1961 there was no need for nerves – he was armed with the first “wearable” computer, one that could predict the outcome of the spin. Once the ball was in play, Thorp fed the computer information about the speed and position of the ball and the wheel using a microswitch inside his shoe. “It would make a forecast about a probable result, and I’d bet on neighbouring numbers,” he says.

Thorp’s device would now be illegal in a casino, and in any case getting a computer to do the work wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. However, there is a simple and sure-fire way to win at the roulette table – as long as you have deep pockets and a faith in probability theory.

From The Telegraph:

‘Churchill so evidently enjoyed the war that I could never like him,’’ wrote James Lees-Milne, the diarist. ‘‘I merely acknowledge him, like Genghis Khan, to have been great.’’ Max Hastings, a former editor of The Daily Telegraph, has similarly conflicted views about Churchill, readily accepting him as ‘‘one of the greatest human beings of the 20th century, indeed of all time’’, yet also dwelling at great length in this book on his perceived strategic failures and personality defects.

In a sense, Hastings has been researching this book for the 30 years that he has been writing about the Second World War, and the depth of the scholarship shows on every page. It is phenomenally difficult to unearth fresh stories and anecdotes about a man as widely and deeply covered historically as Winston Churchill, yet Hastings succeeds again and again. Few will agree with all his often contentious theories about Churchill, but none can fail to admire his archival tenacity and sheer authorial reach. His chapter on Churchill in Athens in Christmas 1944 is worth the price of the book alone.

More here.

Whispering Pines

If you find me in a gloom, or catch me in a dream
inside my lonely room, there is no in between

Whispering pines, rising of the tide
if only one star shines
that's just enough to get inside

I will wait until it all goes 'round
with you in sight, the lost are found

Foghorn through the night, calling out to sea
protect my only light, 'cause she once belonged to me

Let the waves rush in, let the seagulls cry
for if I live again, these hopes will never die

I can feel you standing there
but I don’t see you anywhere

Standing by the well, wishing for the rains
reaching to the clouds, for nothing else remains

Drifting in a daze, when evening will be done
try looking through a haze
at an empty house, in the cold, cold sun

I will wait until it all goes round
with you in sight, the lost are found

by Robbie Robertson & Richard Manuel

Recordings: The Band (original) here
New by Kelly Hogan here and here
Clip: here

From MSNBC:

What if God is a microbe, and we're just the hosts for the creatures made in Its image? A neuroscientist and self-described “possibilian” offers 40 thought-provoking possibilities for the afterlife in a slim book called “Sum.” The questions that David Eagleman deals with at his day job at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston are already pretty far-out: How do our brains construct reality? Why does our perception of time's flow change? Why do some people “see” music or associate numbers with colors?

But even at work, some of Eagleman's ideas are so far-out they have to be put aside … until he goes home and writes about them. “In some sense, I use my literary fiction as a channel to explore ideas that I come up with during the day,” he told me. For example, consider how the data in your brain determines your identity. “For a long time, there's been this open question of what it would be like to be someone else – or to be something else,” he said. “Once you're John Malkovich, you wouldn't remember what it's like not to be John Malkovich.”

More here.

Liberal spaces within Europe have brought many more Muslim women out of their old confinements Europe is at risk of being 'colonised' by its Muslim populations, argue a number of bestselling new books, acclaimed across the political spectrum. How has such hysteria gone unchallenged? Pankaj Mishra on the 'Eurabia-mongers'.

From The Guardian:

Is Europe about to be overrun by Muslims? A number of prominent European and American politicians and journalists seem to think so. The historian Niall Ferguson has predicted that “a youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonise – the term is not too strong – a senescent Europe”. And according to Christopher Caldwell, an American columnist with the Financial Times, whom the Observer recently described as a “bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties”, Muslims are already “conquering Europe's cities, street by street”. So what if Muslims account for only 3% to 4% of the EU's total population of 493 million? In his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Can Europe Be the Same With Different People in It? – which was featured on Start the Week, excerpted in Prospect, commended as “morally serious” by the New York Times and has beguiled some liberal opinion-makers as well as rightwing blowhards – Caldwell writes: “Of course minorities can shape countries. They can conquer countries. There were probably fewer Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 than there are Islamists in Europe today.”

Apparently it's not only Islamist revolutionaries, but also rapidly breeding Muslims who are transforming Europe into “Eurabia”. The birthrates of Europe's Muslim immigrants are actually falling and converging with national averages, according to a recent survey in the Financial Times; but “advanced” cultures, Caldwell claims in his book, “have a long track record of underestimating their vulnerability to 'primitive' ones”.

More here. [Thanks to Namit Arora.]

Via All Things Pakistan:

Gordon Brown in The Telegraph:

This has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude that characterise the British experience. Earlier this year, I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against fascism and declared the outbreak of the Second World War.

So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain's fight against the darkness of dictatorship: that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely.

More here.

Three years ago today, on the fifth anniversary of the attacks on NYC and Washington D.C., 3 Quarks Daily published 16 pieces of remembrance of 9/11/01 by various authors. You can see those here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, plus we have added three “wildcard” entries which we thought were deserving nominees that didn't make it past the voting round. Thanks again to all the participants. There was a lot of interesting stuff, and we discovered many interesting and great blogs through this contest. I hope our readers did too.

Once again, South Tyrolean graphic artist Carla Goller has provided a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs. And if you like our site, please do add us to your blogroll!

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Professor Dan Dennett, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name)

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Penne For Your Thought
2. Der Wille Zur Macht und Sprachspiele: Nietzsche's Causal Essentialism
3. Grundlegung: Philosophy as Bildung
4. Justin Erik Halldór Smith: The Fundamentals of Gelastics
5. PEA Soup: Scanlon on Moral Responsibility and Blame
6. The Immanent Frame: Immanent Spirituality
7. Tomkow: Blackburn, Truth and other Hot Topics
8. Underverse: Refuting “It,” Thus
9. Wide Scope: Emotions and Moral Skepticism

We'll announce the three winners on September 22, 2009.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best philosophy posts out of the semifinalists, and added three others that we liked.

In Forbes:

[W]hile the rate of economic contraction is now lower than the free-fall and near-depression experienced by many economies in the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first of 2009, the recent optimism that “green shoots” of recovery will lead to the recession to bottom out by the middle of this year–and that recovery to potential growth will rapidly occur in 2010–appears grossly misplaced, for three noteworthy reasons.

First, the current deep and protracted U-shaped recession in the U.S. and other advanced economies will continue through all of 2009, rather than reach a trough in the middle of this year as expected by the optimists.

Second, rather than a rapid V-shaped recovery, growth will remain sluggish and sub-par for at least two years into all of 2010 and 2011. A couple of quarters of more rapid growth cannot be ruled out as we get out of this recession toward the end of the year or early next year as firms rebuild inventories and the effects of the monetary and fiscal stimulus reach a delayed peak. But structural weaknesses of the U.S. and the global economy will cause both a below-trend growth and even the risk of a reduction of potential growth itself.

Third, we cannot rule out a double-dip W-shaped recession, with the wings of a tentative recovery of growth in 2010 at risk of being clipped toward the end of that year or in 2011. This will result from a perfect storm of rising oil prices, rising taxes and rising nominal and real interest rates on the public debt of many advanced economies, as concerns rise about medium-term fiscal sustainability and the risk that monetization of fiscal deficits will lead to inflationary pressures after two years of deflationary pressures.

In June, 1955, Robert Frank bought a car. It was a Ford Business Coupe, five years old, sold by Ben Schultz, of New York. From there, Frank drove by himself to Detroit, where he visited the Ford River Rouge plant, in Dearborn, as if taking the coupe home to see its family. Later that summer, he headed south to Savannah, and, with the coming of fall, set off from Miami Beach to St. Petersburg, and then struck out on a long, diversionary loop to New Orleans, and thence to Houston, for a rendezvous with his wife, Mary, and their two children, Pablo and Andrea. Together, they went west, arriving in Los Angeles in the nick of Christmastime. They stayed on the Pacific Coast until May of the following year, when Mary and the children returned to New York. Frank, however, still wasn’t done. Alone again, he made the trip back, going via Reno and Salt Lake City, then pushing north on U.S. 91 to Butte, Montana. From there, it was a deep curve, though a swift one, through Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa to Chicago, where he turned south; at last, by early June, Frank and his Ford Business, his partner for ten thousand miles, were back in New York. It had been a year, more or less, since he embarked, and there was much to reflect upon. Luckily, he’d taken a few photographs along the way.

more from Anthony Lane at The New Yorker here.

Sometime around 1537, Petrus Gonzales was born on Tenerife with a rare genetic disorder that made hair grow all over his face and across his body. He was recognized as one of the “wild” or “dog-faced” men believed to exist at the outer reaches of the world, and was sent as a curiosity to the French court of Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici. There, he was raised as a courtier, married a smooth-faced woman and had at least seven children with her. Most of them shared his furriness and also became minor court celebrities, but eventually settled together in an Italian village and fell from historical record. Merry Wiesner-Hanks in The Marvelous Hairy Girls has now carefully reconstructed the story of the Gonzales family, and especially of the three hairy daughters, Maddalena, Francesca and Antonietta. Although the sources are sparse, they include evocative paintings and medical records; and Wiesner-Hanks makes the most of them by sensitively drawing out the attitudes behind the artistic, religious and scientific interest in the hairy family.

more from Bettina Bildhauer at the TLS here.

It is not a new thought that the Belgian painter James Ensor—who was born in 1860 and died in 1949—was bewitched by the shimmering, iridescent light of his native Ostend, the resort on the North Sea. The artist himself rhapsodically described his hometown’s pearly and rarely directly sunny light and marine air. At the Museum of Modern Art’s current Ensor retrospective, though, the significance of an atmosphere where light is always indirect, skies seem invariably cloudy and possibly rain-filled, and shadows therefore are rarely densely dark came through with a new force. It was Ensor’s affinity for this whitened, moist, and fleeting atmosphere, one could believe, that lies behind what is most appealing and distinctive about his paintings, drawings, and prints as objects: their often powdery, shifting surfaces and the way his forms—whether he is showing a group of carnival revelers in masks, the roofs of Ostend under a huge sky, or crowds pouring forth on a street—look as if they have only this moment come together (and will in another second move apart).

more from Sanford Schwartz at the NYRB here (my own take on Ensor here).

Omens

Cows always take the easiest path
Dead level to suit their ambling shuffle
Which was why the builders of the first
American roads took the ancient buffalo routes.
Foxes are different though, they blaze
A vertical trail over ditches,
Scatter decoys in your wake to spoil the chase.

Badgers are erratic, will disperse wodges of earth
Any old how and leave no directive
To chart the route to their winter burrow.
Above though, the November flocks impress
Carve a V and tell you exactly where they are headed.

So why should I still look out for omens
When I can track to a T the path my brother
Took across these fields before he left us,
And worry about what signposts I can turn to
To chart my progress when I’ve exhausted
All the pathways of earth and sky.

by Eugene O’Connell

from One Clear Call; Bradshaw Books, Cork, 2003

From The Washington Post:

Anita Diamant's new novel offers all the satisfactions found in her previous works “The Red Tent” and “The Last Days of Dogtown”: rich portraits of female friendship, unflinching acknowledgment of life's cruelty and resolute assertion of hope, enfolded in a strong story line developed in lucid prose. She ups the ante here, chronicling three months in the lives of Jewish refugees interned in Atlit, a British detention center for illegal immigrants to the Palestinian Mandate. Based on an actual event — the rescue of more than 200 detainees from Atlit in October 1945 — “Day After Night” demonstrates the power of fiction to illuminate the souls of people battered by the forces of history.

“Not one of the women in Barrack C is twenty-one, but all of them are orphans,” the author tells us on the first page. “There are only 170 prisoners in Atlit tonight, and fewer than seventy women in all. It is the same lopsided ratio on the chaotic roads of Poland and Germany, France and Italy; the same in the train stations and the Displaced Persons camps.” Tedi, Zorah, Shayndel and Leonie have lost their parents in the Holocaust and are the random survivors of Nazi genocide that killed women faster than men because they had less short-term value as slave labor. Only Zorah was in a concentration camp; Tedi was hidden in the Dutch countryside; Shayndel, a Polish Zionist, fought with the partisans; Leonie was forced into prostitution in Paris. But each of these women wonders why she was spared when so many others died.

More here.

From The New Yorker:

Before President Obama’s speech on health care, I wrote out a list of what I thought we needed him to do.

1. Make clear the stakes.
2. Make clear what we get under his reform.
3. Understand our fears.
4. Convey strength in the face of them.
5. Speak to our core beliefs as a nation.

I thought he did this and did it amply. He made clear that our present system is damaging our people and damaging our economy. He made clear that if we accepted the challenge and the struggle, we could have better insurance coverage without preëxisting condition exclusions or sudden disappearance of benefits. Those of us who are self-employed or unable to get coverage through work could have the kinds of insurance choices and discounts that big companies and congressmen can get. Those who don’t have the money for this coverage could get tax credits to offset the costs. The elderly would get a better drug-benefit package.

There was nothing here that was watered down or unfamiliar, either. He did not skirt the realities that this would have to be paid for—that government would be requiring many businesses to cover their employees and most individuals to carry insurance coverage, and that he would be using money from ending subsidies to Medicare HMOs to help finance the bill. And he spoke with podium-pounding conviction in response to the absurd charges that this would involve government takeover of our doctor’s offices and to the deeper fears that those charges fed into.

After far too many weeks, he again became the Barack Obama one could rally behind—the cool-headed president willing to face long odds and enemy fire, rather than the coolly calculating professor with the academic’s annoying certitude.

As I said, he checked all the boxes on my list. And yet I remain concerned that he may not have done enough.

More here.

From The New York Times:

For Khulsoom and Salman, hard-working immigrant Muslims from Pakistan, life in the American suburbs in the post- 9/11 era is not working out the way they had planned. Their oldest son is an unmarried playboy, and their daughter has become a student activist who wears a head scarf as a sign of her newfound religious fervor and is dating a devoted Muslim who happens to be an African-American. And now their younger son, the good, obedient son, comes home on a college break and announces that he is abandoning premed courses to become a history teacher so that he can help correct the misinformation being spread about Islam.

“You will get the blessings of my work,” the younger son tells his parents.

“We have enough blessings,” his mother says. “You can bless us by becoming a surgeon. You like kids? Become a pediatrician. Teach them Islam as you give them their lollipops.”

This family is at the center of “The Domestic Crusaders,” an envelope-pushing play that opens on 9/11 at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and runs for the next five weekends. When the family reunites for the younger son’s birthday, conflicts erupt over everything from biryani to sex roles to Middle Eastern politics to airport security checks to racism. The play was written by Wajahat Ali, a young Pakistani-American who grew up in Fremont, Calif. He started writing it in the weeks after the terrorist attacks as a paper for a college class taught by the poet and playwright Ishmael Reed. The actors, all South Asians, are playing roles that echo their own lives. Some will be performing while they are fasting for Ramadan.

More here.