Wednesday, August 25, 2010
By SADIE STEIN [Jezebel] – There’s nothing worse than telling people you have bedbugs, because inevitably, they make you feel worse. If they haven’t been through the wars themselves, they know people who have. They’ll talk gleefully about the thousands of dollars you have to spend, the furniture you’ll need to throw away, the inevitable return. and your disgust will be supplanted by despair. Continue reading “Noted: Snug as a bug in a rug under your bed in Manhattan.” »
By GEORDIE GREIG [Evening Standard] – “I am hoping it is not going to cause a firestorm. It is so not my intention,” says VS Naipaul, Nobel Laureate, English knight of the shires and consumate provocateur, about his latest travel book, The Masque of Africa
. “I just wanted to see what made the people tick,” he says.
Too late: a firebomb exploded this weekend as his book was called racist and “repulsive” by the novelist Robert Harris, who compared passages in the book about Africa to the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley’s depiction of blacks in London in the Fifties.
Continue reading “Noted: Witchcraft and Winnie in the heart of Naipaul's Africa.” »
The Godin head.
By SETH GODIN – [Seth Godin’s Blog] – Traditional book publishers use techniques perfected a hundred years ago to help authors reach unknown readers, using a stable technology (books) and an antique and expensive distribution system.
The thing is–now I know who my readers are. Adding layers or faux scarcity doesn’t help me or you. As the medium changes, publishers are on the defensive…. I honestly can’t think of a single traditional book publisher who has led the development of a successful marketplace/marketing innovation in the last decade. The question asked by the corporate suits always seems to be, “how is this change in the marketplace going to hurt our core business?” To be succinct: I’m not sure that I serve my audience (you) by worrying about how a new approach is going to help or hurt Barnes & Noble.
Continue reading “Noted: Mr Godin says adieu to all those free lunches.” »
By SARDA SAHNEY, MICHAEL J. BENTON, and PAUL A. FERRY [Science Letters] – Tetrapod biodiversity today is great; over the past 400 Myr since vertebrates moved onto land, global tetrapod diversity has risen exponentially, punctuated by losses during major extinctions. There are links between the total global diversity of tetrapods and the diversity of their ecological roles, yet no one fully understands the interplay of these two aspects of biodiversity and a numerical analysis of this relationship has not so far been undertaken.
Continue reading “Noted: Ecospace: Man's final frontier.” »
By ROBERT B. LAUGHLIN [The American Scholar] – The way forward is fogged by misunderstandings about the earth. Experts are little help in the constant struggle in this conversation to separate myth from reality, because they have the same difficulty, and routinely demonstrate it by talking past each other. Continue reading “Noted: The weather: Fog, followed by gloom, then raining dogs, without cats.” »
By ALAIN de BOTTON [Apollo] – At the Council of Trent in 1563, Rome issued a decree insisting that, contrary to the impious suggestions of the Protestants, churches, sculptures and paintings should be thought of as integral to the task of ensuring that ‘the people be instructed and confirmed in the habit of remembering, and continually revolving in mind the articles of faith.’ Far from being a distraction, sacred architecture could function as a devotional poem written in stone, timber, and fragments of coloured glass. The Catholic church therefore unleashed a programme of construction and decoration. Alongside the pale, featureless halls of the Reformation, there now arose a new generation of ecclesiastical buildings designed to breathe passionate emotion back into an endangered faith. Ceilings were overlaid with plump cherubs, niches were crowded with saints and heavy stucco mouldings were affixed to ceilings depicting miraculous incidents in Jesus’s ministry.
Continue reading “Noted: The beauty of buildings and the blindness of Protestants.” »
By CHARLES MOORE [The Spectator] – The world finally took notice of Ceausescu’s horrors when he began a policy of systematically destroying all villages, housing peasants in concrete blocks of flats. The Prince of Wales eloquently pleaded for a unique rural culture. Ceausescu was overthrown at Christmas 1989. He had not yet managed to complete his work of destruction. Most of the villages were still standing.
Continue reading “Noted: How to rebuild Saxon Romania.” »
Thursday, August 19, 2010
By RICHARD DEMING [Boston Review] – The poems of Ann Lauterbach’s Or to Begin Again
probe the difficult questions—ethical, emotional, political, and even spiritual—of accounting for despair while allowing for it to become something more than a mechanism pressing the death drive forward. How do any of us, Lauterbach’s poems ask, begin again without turning our backs on catastrophic events, events that, like a bad dream, seem to continue to shape and define the present and our sense of a possible—or impossible—future? How does one respond to the world, then, in the aftermath of the aftermath?
Continue reading “Noted: Poetry as a cure for a hangover.” »
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
By ELISA GABBERT [Open Letters Monthly] – In 2007, in a rather obvious attempt to keep up with the Joneses, Chanel launched the “Les Exclusifs” collection: “a virtuoso collection of 12 rare fragrances created by CHANEL Master Perfumers,” available in select stores only and sold in large (200 ml) bottles for a premium of $200. (On a per-ounce basis this is not exorbitant, but since this is the smallest size available, it prices many people out.) This meant Chanel could continue to bank off aspirational teens with mall stuff like Coco Mademoiselle and Chance Eau Fraiche while still appealing to a moneyed elite.
Continue reading “Noted: How cheap to smell expensive.” »
By GREG J. SMITH [3:AM Magazine] – Over the last two decades, representations of urban space have become a prominent subject within gaming. Franchises such as SimCity and Grand Theft Auto have taken the ebb and flow of the city and created simulations that synthesize the economic, sociopolitical, experiential and aesthetic qualities of urban life into reflexive environments. The eye of the contemporary gamer is trained to decode the isometric projection and urban informatics associated with the “god game” genre and switch over to the point of view of a digital citizen in a sandbox style open-city game without skipping a beat. Continue reading “Noted: You have often gamed down these streets before.” »
By REBECCA GOULD [Guernica] – At the top of the stairwell, I knock; the woman who opens the door has a question in her eyes. Who am I? Has she forgotten she lives in a museum? It turns out they have not had a visitor for years. As museums go, Titsian Tabidze Museum is unconventional in that it is the private residence of Titsian’s descendants, home of his daughter Nitka, now eighty-four, and his granddaughter, Nina (named after his late wife). The Titsian Tabidze Museum is more shrine to this legacy than institution.
Continue reading “Noted: A chat at the museum of Georgian poetry.” »
By STEVEN B. SMITH [The Claremont Review of Books] – Perhaps most revealing is Heidegger’s response to a letter written to him by his former student, Herbert Marcuse, shortly after the war. “A philosopher can be mistaken in politics,” wrote the future author of One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization, “but he cannot make a mistake about a regime that killed millions of Jews simply because they were Jews.” Not only does Heidegger refuse to apologize for his “mistake,” he takes the occasion to reaffirm the correctness of his decisions. Encouraging Marcuse to read the “entirety” of his Rectoral Address, Heidegger repeats Marcuse’s statement about the murder of millions of Jews and suggests that Marcuse should have said “East Germans.”
Continue reading “Noted: Heidegger's bad turn for metaphysics.” »
By DANIEL RASMUS [The Future of Information Work] – I was watching the Kennedy assassination recently through the eyes of AMC’s Mad Men. Although I was very young, I recall through years of personal testimony by friends and relatives, that loosing Kennedy was a shock to a set of predictions that people made about their future, and the future of the world. No one foresaw the random act of violence that cut short a Presidency. I can safely say that in this event, only the outliers were right. Scenarios are about embracing the outliers as a part of the analysis, not exclusively, but also not disregarding them because they are outliers.
Continue reading “Noted: Twelve events that embrace the outliers.” »
By SANDRO MAGISTER [Chiesa] – For August 15, which for the Orthodox is the feast of the Dormition of the Holy Mother of God, the Turkish government has authorized the celebration of a liturgy in a place that is a symbol of the Christian faith of the East, as much of its flourishing as of its violent uprooting: the monastery of Sumela or (its Greek name) of the Mother of God of the Black Mountain.
Continue reading “Noted: Why they're chanting on the Black Mountain.” »
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Physicist Stephen Hawking has recently begun advocating we abandon Earth if we want to survive as a species. “It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million,” he says. “Our only chance of long term survival, is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.”
If spreading out into space is our “only chance of long term survival,” shouldn’t we do as he advises and just go? It is a simple question and astonishingly there is an equally simple answer “No!”
Continue reading “A brief dose of reality.” »
