On Friday, France celebrated the famed anthropologist and author Claude Lévi-Strauss’s centenary with films, lectures and free admission to the museum he inspired.
100th-Birthday Tributes Pour in for LĂ©vi-Strauss
By Ian Buruma
Kirchner and the Berlin Street
an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, August 3–November 10, 2008.
When Ernst Ludwig Kirchner put a pistol to his head in Davos, Switzerland, on June 15, 1938, he left more than a thousand oil paintings, several thousand pastels, drawings, and prints, as well as many wood carvings and textiles. Only a fraction of his work was shown at an extraordinary exhibition held recently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But this fraction probably comprises the very best of his oeuvre. A handful of paintings, executed just before and during World War I, of Berlin streets filled with elegant whores, some in black war-widow garb, are accompanied by a number of exquisite drawings and woodcuts, some on the same subject matter, some of nudes, and some of a variety of urban scenes. Those who missed the show can see them beautifully reproduced in the MoMA catalog.
By Sarah Kerr
2666
by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
The Romantic Dogs
by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Laura Healy
Well beyond his sometimes nomadic life, Roberto Bolaño was an exemplary literary rebel. To drag fiction toward the unknown he had to go there himself, and then invent a method with which to represent it. Since the unknown place was reality, the results of his work are multi-dimensional, in a way that runs ahead of a critic’s one-at-a-time powers of description. Highlight Bolaño’s conceptual play and you risk missing the sex and viscera in his work. Stress his ambition and his many references and you conjure up threats of exclusive high-modernist obscurity, or literature as a sterile game, when the truth is it’s hard to think of a writer who is less of a snob, or–in the double sense of exposing us to unsavory things and carrying seeds for the future–less sterile.
The Triumph of Roberto Bolaño
Gabriel GarcĂa Márquez: a Life
Gerald Martin
Bloomsbury, 688pp, ÂŁ25
Gabriel GarcĂa Márquez’s life story is just as magical as anything in his fiction. He was raised in a tiny, largely illiterate town in an isolated region of a developing country, and his origins could hardly have been more obscure. His father was a philandering telegraphist, his mother bore 11 children, and he was left in the care of his eccentric grandparents. Though always prodigiously talented, he was so poor [...]
After the Movies · Michael Wood on Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinĂ©ma
World stability hangs by a thread as economies continue to unravel - Telegraph
Going, gone: Mr. Go throws in the towel - INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos
The poet, philosopher, translator and scholar Lewis Hyde has spent his life trying to figure that out — and became a literary cult figure in the process.
This year the world has seen the power of money to socialize the costs of capitalist crisis, but are prices going to go on rising to Weimar-like levels? Jon Amsden explores the origins of the crisis and discerns something worse than inflation on the horizon.
Jason Rohrer’s solitary and stubborn quest for a future in which pixels and code and computers will make you cry and feel and love
The Video-Game Programmer Saving Our 21st-Century Souls
OVER THE PAST few months, Americans have been hearing the word “depression” with unfamiliar and alarming regularity. The financial crisis tearing through Wall Street is routinely described as the worst since the Great Depression, and the recession into which we are sinking looks deep enough, financial commentators warn, that a few poor policy decisions could put us in a depression …
Among the models laid out by H. Richard Niebuhr in his book Christ and Culture is the “Christ without culture”—meaning Christianity indifferent to culture. That would seem to produce a circumstance in which religion is impervious to culture and culture impervious to religion. But, in fact, it results in religion’s acquiescing to the culture’s demand [...]
Beekeepers have been struck two such terrible blows over the past 18 months that there may not be any home-produced honey in Britain’s shops by Christmas
Some of the most plaintive, and most distinctively English, lines to be written by any of the Great War poets were those of Rupert Brooke in “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”: “Stands the Church clock at ten to three?/And is there honey still for tea?”
Nearly a century after Brooke, homesick in Berlin, pined for his old Cambridgeshire residence (now occupied by Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare), chances are, though, that any [...]
In myth, Babylon is a place of romance and wonder, but years of dictatorship and war have taken their toll. Hisham Matar on his attempt to visit the ancient metropolis
Once upon a time, some 600 years before Christ, a king fell completely in love with his Persian concubine. He spent nights listening to her reminisce about the mountain meadows of her distant homeland. Fearing her restlessness, he vowed to replicate the verdant landscapes of Persia in his desert kingdom, and embarked on a building project that was to become one of the Wonders of the World. Yet the Hanging [...]
Report
Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World - The National Intelligence Council’s 2025 Project
Recent literary debates in Sweden have dwelled, among things, on authors’ love lives and penchant for designer handbags. Yet there is more out there if one looks: Hans Koppel’s hatchet job on suburban manners, for example, or Magnus Hedlund’s explorations of human perception. [German version added]
If Hollywood makes a movie about the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, a basement room in a government building in Washington will serve as the setting for a key scene. There investment bankers from the largest institutions pleaded successfully with Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) officials during a short meeting in 2004 to lift a rule specifying debt limits and capital reserves needed for a rainy day. This decision, a real event described in the New York Times, freed billions to invest in complex mortgage-backed securities and derivatives that helped to bring about the financial meltdown in September.
In the script, the next scene will be the one in which number-savvy specialists that Wall Street has come to know as quants consult with their superiors about implementing the regulatory change. These lapsed physicists and mathematical virtuosos were the ones who both invented these oblique securities and created software models that supposedly measured the risk a firm would incur by holding them in its portfolio. Without the formal requirement to maintain debt ceilings and capital reserves, the commission had freed these firms to police themselves using risk tools crafted by cadres of quants.
After the Crash: How Software Models Doomed the Markets
Most entangled states are not useful, say physicists
Hunting for a planet that can support life? There’s more to it than looking for Earth’s distant twin, says
 |
 |
Changes in bone shape left by a life of overhand throwing hint that Stone Age humans regularly threw heavy objects, while Neanderthals did not
|
|
The virus resembles no other previously discovered strains – a feature that might complicate ongoing efforts to develop a universal vaccine
|
|
New excerpts from Darwin’s letters and diaries, along with contemporary cartoons and photographs, show how his revolutionary On the Origin of Species was received
India terror begins with corpses on train platform - Yahoo! News
DNA tests on hair and a tooth have ended a centuries old hunt for the tomb Nicolas Copernicus, the 16th century astronomer who shocked the world by declaring the Earth was not the centre of the universe.
Einstein’s celebrated formula e=mc2 has been corroborated (again), thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.
I am an American worker, and you are damn right I want the wealth to be shared and spread. I am talking about the wealth my hard work helped to create, but was taken from me by George Bush’s base, the very rich, or as I know them, my corporate bosses. For the past eight years I have watched W.’s and McCain’s (Country Club First) base grab the largest share of our country’s wealth. Where did they take it from? They took it from my family’s pocketbook, and my co-workers’ families’ pocketbooks.
Green activists are seeing the global economic crisis as an opportunity, but the truth remains: high economic growth cannot be reconciled with limited resources
You could call it the see-saw effect: it has long been an article of political faith that as worries about the economy go up, interest in the environment must go down. It stands to reason: people who are concerned today about their jobs have more immediate matters of alarm than whether or not there may be more storms in 2055. Environmental concerns are a luxury of the rich, something we [...]
World saved . . . planet doomed
American missile-defence plans falter in eastern Europe
IRAN’S new medium-range missile, the Sajil, which was test-fired on November 12th, marks something of a technological breakthrough. It is fast and has a claimed range of 2,000km (1,250 miles). It might reach Moscow or southern Italy, say. Yet both Russia and Italy are opposed to American plans to place ten interceptor rockets in Poland and an anti-missile radar in the Czech Republic. The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has criticised the plan because it “provoked” Russia. The Kremlin has threatened to put short-range Iskander missiles in its Kaliningrad exclave (or possibly in Belarus, a close ally) if the missile-defence deployment goes ahead.
Raising the temperature even higher, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president who (until the end of December) also presides over the European Union, said on November 14th that the American plan “does nothing to bring security and complicates things”. That infuriated his Polish and Czech counterparts, who noted that France signed up to a decision at the NATO summit in April in support of missile defence. They also questioned what business a French president had pronouncing on other countries’ security ties with America. Mr Sarkozy issued a partial retraction, saying merely that nobody should put new missiles in Europe pending talks with Russia about new security arrangements for the entire continent. …
A surge in the run-up to the election
MANY sorts of Americans are happy that Barack Obama has been elected to be their 44th president: blacks, rich whites, Hispanics, women, the young. But no one seems happier, at the moment, than the owners of gun shops.
According to the National Instant Criminal Background Checks System (the FBI body that oversees applications for people who want to buy guns), the number of checks run between January and October this year rose by 9%, compared with the same period in 2007. Even more dramatically, the body reports that 15.4% more checks took place in October 2008 than in October 2007. …
The next president has been told that, for security reasons, he will have to give up his beloved mobile device. We’ve intercepted his last e-mails: here’s the first
“YOUR promise to close Guantanamo is popular. Including a clear announcement on this in your inaugural will make for great headlines. But if you have to give a firm date for closure, kick the can at least a year down the road. Remember: W. wanted to close the place too, but disposing of the 260-odd (in every sense) inmates still incarcerated there won’t be easy.
A few dozen are small fish—not to mention innocents—who we could easily send home. But there are some whose governments don’t want them, and others (eg, those Chinese Uighurs) whom their governments might torture or execute. International law says you can’t repatriate them. We’ll ask friendly countries to take a few, but you will end up having to let most go free in the United States. Some might well return to the battlefield after all we’ve done to them. But as General Barry McCaffrey has said (we’ll keep the quote handy), it’s going to be cheaper and cleaner to kill them in combat than sit on them for 15 years. …
One week before Buy Nothing Day focuses the attention of activists around the world on the perils of overconsumption, groundbreaking economist, Herman Daly, zeroes in on the root cause of our financial meltdown.
From Adbusters #81
Michael Crichton aspired to be more than a mere entertainer. He was fundamentally a novelist of ideas.
Stuart Evers: They’re hateful, yes, but they also provide very useful lessons in how not to write
Brace yourself for the literary event of 2009: the posthumous publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s last novel.
Nabokov’s last book comes to light
Did you read “Treatise on Conic Sections” by Apollonius of Perga in college? What about works of Epictetus? Plato, at least? If you didn’t, and you’re feeling pangs of intellectual inferiority, don’t despair. You can still buy the “Great Books of the Western World.”
The global financial crisis threatens to hamper poverty alleviation efforts in India and China, responsible for lifting the largest numbers of the world’s poor out of extreme poverty. Political or social instability are concerns.
On the 500th anniversary of the artist’s first climb up the ladder in 1508 to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, a new book claims he embedded subversive messages in his spectacular frescoes.
It is fortunate for literary historians that Thornton Wilder and Edmund Wilson did not meet at the Princeton-Yale football game or, heaven forbid, in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s bedroom. They were brought together instead at one of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s weekend debauches at their rented estate of Ellerslie, outside Wilmington, Delaware, in the winter of 1928. Wilson had heard that the Fitzgeralds’ latest parties were “on a more elaborate scale than their old weekends at Westport or Great Neck,” an impression confirmed by the invitation. “All is prepared for February 25th,” Fitzgerald wrote Wilson. “The stomach pumps are polished and set out in rows, stale old enthusiasms are being burnished…. Pray gravity to move your bowels. It’s little we get done for us in this world. Answer. Scott.”
The Restless Life Of Thornton Wilder
IN 1990, a lost painting by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was discovered by a curator from the National Gallery of Ireland. The Taking of Christ, which was spotted hangi
Mr. Finkel was a noted American poet whose work teemed with curious juxtapositions, which in their unorthodoxy helped illuminate the function of poetry itself.
Donald Finkel, 79, Poet of Free-Ranging Styles, Is Dead
Exhibition of 19th-century visions of the ‘exotic’ Orient recalls the heavy history of colonialism.
Old art form is flourishing in US as new opera companies open and works are premiered.
Web-only feature film made by fans and several Star Trek actors honors the TV series’ enduring appeal.
Sci-fi fans go into warp drive over an independent Star Trek film
When he was a 10-year-old in Springfield, Tommy Tallarico spent his Saturdays wandering video arcades with a portable cassette deck, recording sounds from his favorite games. Then he’d run home, splice his favorite parts together, and pretend to play along with the crude remix on a broomstick.
LOVE as a subject for serious literature has always had its critics.
The greatest conspiracy theories in history - Telegraph
People are still amazed he won. In a country where more than a few white folks would still say outright that one of “them” shouldn’t be in charge, here was a politician who didn’t downplay his ethnicity, his foreign-sounding name, or his father who wasn’t even a Christian. And he wasn’t just ethnically atypical. He’d made himself a member of the country’s meritocratic elite. He wrote real books that really sold. That blend of outsider detachment and obvious ambition drove his earnest enemies crazy.
[more ...]
The wrongheaded American belief that Barack Obama could only happen here.
The New Atlantis » Green Bridge to Nowhere
The New Atlantis » People of the Screen
The rapid ice melt and temperature rise in the Arctic region has been widely reported, with a record summer ice melt occurring last year in the Arctic ocean, and a near-record this year (the volume of sea ice, if not the extent, did reach a record low this year, with autumn temperatures in the Arctic 9 degrees Fahrenheit above normal).
Antarctic Warming Shows “Human Fingerprints”.
VQR » No Memory for Pain: John Cheever Begins
Congress might adjourn without acting on the deepening economic crisis, leaving Obama to inherit the catastrophe.
Victims of Philippines dirty war - Australasia, World - The Independent
Financial Crisis Tab Already In The Trillions - Financials * US * News * Story - CNBC.com
Scientists now suspect that the earth’s greatest mass extinction wasn’t caused by an asteroid strike or any other single cataclysmic event.
Did Greenhouse Gases Cause the Earth’s Greatest Mass Extinction?
If the West wants Arabs to bail it out of its financial crisis, it must put an end to historic injustices and exploitation in the Middle East, Aijaz Zaka Syed writes
World War I wasn’t so gray after all. A full 90 years after the end of the catastrophic conflict, a new set of spectactular color photographs are being published for the first time.
The Night of the Hunter is a fairy tale gone terribly wrong. By Morgan Meis
Your earnest, self-important prattle has gotten on Gen X nerves for decades. But now we finally get it.
An open apology to boomers everywhere
Milton expert Stanley Fish refuses to demonise the administrator and warns against influencing the moral character of students, he tells Matthew Reisz
V.S. Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2001, sometimes seems like a mandarin literary figure from another age — the Tolstoy of his time.
A new collection of Vera Brittain’s writing is being published to mark the 90th anniversary of the Armistice. Here, the bestselling chronicler of the Great War tells of its impact on women
Because You Died: Poetry and Prose of the First World War and After, by Vera Brittain
Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 may be the Great American Novel
Jorge Luis Borges wrote of the desert as a labyrinth without walls or center, unending and inescapable. That’s a fair description of Roberto Bolaño’s last work, the 912-page opus 2666 .
-Mathieu-Bourgois.jpg "081114_bolano_main") DIABOLICAL: Bolaño’s tantalizing, often unfinished digressions are part of his genius. |
| 2666 | By Roberto Bolaño | Translated by Natasha Wimmer | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 912 pages | $30 |
Jorge Luis Borges wrote of the desert as a labyrinth without walls or center, unending and inescapable. That’s a fair description of Roberto Bolaño’s last work (he died in 2003, age 50), the 912-page opus 2666. His book, however, does have a circumference of sorts, a circular narrative that begins, like his previous novel, The Savage Detectives, with academics (in Detectives they were poets) searching the wastelands of the Sonora province of Mexico for a legendary writer and ending . . . well, it’s hard to say, somewhere in that general vicinity. It offers innumerable passages that cohere into a sense of immanent revelation, some of them contained in single multi-page run-on sentences, before dissolving like blowing sand. Like Moby Dick, it confronts the nature, the ubiquity, and the elusiveness of evil. And as such it can also make a claim for being the Great American Novel, both North and South.
The academics’ story is told in the first of five sections, "The Part About the Critics." They include four literature professors from different European countries, three men and a woman, who share an obsession with Benno von Archimboldi, a mystery author who over the decades has turned out novels with titles like TheLeather Mask and Bifurcaria Bifurcata. Little is known about him except that he is Prussian and very tall and that he served on the Eastern Front in World War II. The quartet attend conferences on Archimboldi and engage in passionate discussion, and their bonds heat up into something more than Platonic. At last, following up a lead, they head to Mexico where a sighting of the octogenarian legend has been reported.
Sounds deadly? Not when every page veers off on a tantalizing, often unfinished digression — like the one about the painter whose masterpiece is a canvas adorned with his own severed hand — or includes tossed-off descriptions of the everyday like "It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like the grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness." [9] Or when the quartet arrive at their destination, Santa Teresa, a fictional city where — as in the real city of Ciudad Juárez, on which it is based — hundreds of women, mostly workers in local factories, have turned up raped and brutally murdered, a serial-killing spree that’s been going on since 1993.
The British intelligence officer turned newspaper man turned spy novelist, born 100 years ago this year, spent winters on his Caribbean getaway for almost two decades.
Winter in the Sun: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica
Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novel is not only a capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what’s possible for the form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world.
From a childhood reading Keats to a career of triumphs (and failures), Donald Hall recounts cultivating the poet’s life.
Would democracy control the corporations, Adolf Augustus Berle asked in 1932, or would the corporations control democracy?
Seventy years after the terror and cruelty of Kristallnacht, the event should not be simply consigned to our history books writes Karen Pollock of the Holocaust Educational Trust
Can you imagine your neighbours being attacked and dragged away – and you doing nothing? Seeing their houses looted and torched – and you saying nothing?
Seventy years ago on Sunday 9th November the Nazi government sanctioned widespread destruction of property and wanton terror and violence against the Jewish communities of Germany and Austria. In the space of a few hours more than 1000 synagogues were torched, tens and thousands [...]
Now that we know how far we are past the carbon tipping point, it’s time to freak out—and get to work.
The Most Important Number on Earth
In the wake of the global credit crunch, stock exchanges throughout the world collapsed in tandem. Why?
In football circles, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys are often referred to as “America’s Team.” This isn’t really an accurate term though. A more accurate description of the team would be “The Ass of the NFL.” What in the Sam Hill could this possibly have to do with left-wing politics?
The epic 1975 boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Smokin’ Joe Frazier - the Thriller in Manila - was famously brutal both inside and outside the ring, as a new documentary shows. Neither man truly recovered, and nor did their friendship. At 64, Frazier shows no signs of forgetting - but can he ever forgive? By Adam Higginbotham.