An Entertaining Anectode

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A poignant, though entertaining anecdote in Frans de Waal's review of "The Price of Altruism- George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness" by Oren Harman-

"Extremely well researched and written with great love of the subject, “The Price of Altruism” reveals all sorts of personal details of momentous events in the history of science. There is, for example, the delicious fact that John Maynard Smith, the famous British evolutionary biologist, brought to the deathbed of the even more famous J. B. S. Haldane a book arguing that flocks of birds prevent overpopulation by curtailing their own reproduction, in an attempt to give themselves an advantage over other flocks. This idea, known as group selection, was to become the focus of much passionate debate and ridicule over the years. Despite his grave condition, Haldane immediately saw the problem, which he summarized to visitors with a mis­chievous smile:

“Well, there are these blackcock, you see, and the males are all strutting around, and every so often a female comes along, and one of them mates with her. And they’ve got this stick, and every time they mate with a female, they cut a little notch in it. And when they’ve cut 12 notches, if another female comes along, they say ‘Now, ladies, enough is enough!’ ”

- Book Review - The Price of Altruism - By Oren Harman - NYTimes.com:

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An Intensely Concentrated Look

What is so great about this picture?

“This is so sexy, precisely because it’s Marilyn reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. She doesn’t have to pose, we don’t even need to see her face, what comes off the photo is absolute concentration, and nothing is sexier than absolute concentration..."-Jeanette Winterson

via Ordinary Finds via Solitary Pleasures

Does the knowledge that she is reading Ulysses make any difference to you?

But about the attractiveness of a concentrated look, I know it. It has something to do with the fact that the person who is concentrating has her whole being in one place, and you are shut out of it, and you would like her to have you with the same kind of intent absorption.

A question by -O-uknow:

Does a concentrated look in the eyes, focused but distant and a slight upward curvature of the mouth almost always signals arousal?

Phillis - Zacks little sister answers:

Sure, it could be arousal, but it may not be sexual arousal. A baseball fanatic could be thinking about last year's stats of his favorite player. No kidding - that happened to me once! 4 years later, I had my first child with the man.

Read more: Answerbag

The Colour Blue

Image by Disha Gadhiya via Flickr

Alex Bellos in the review of "Through the Language Glass: How Words Colour Your World" by Guy Deutscher at the Guardian writes,

"Deutscher has a lot of fun relating the discovery that colour words emerge in all languages in a predictable order. Black and white come first, then red, then yellow, then green and finally blue. (Although sometimes green is before yellow.) Red is probably first because it is the colour of blood and of the easiest dyes to make in the wild. Green and yellow are the colours of vegetation. And blue is last because – with the exception of the sky – few naturally occurring things are blue and blue dyes are very difficult to make."

 The relationship between language and coginition is a fascinating one- I remember an article at the Edge by Lera Boroditsky - it defined the influence of language on coginition in my mind. There were several articles at the New York Times too, regarding how the words and images we use to describe the world impinge upon our consciousness, manipulating the way we feel objects outside us and the environment around us.

The interesting part of this article is the claim that we found the word for blue only recently, after we had named all other colours- Homer never described the sky as blue, writes Bellos, and I remember that in our Myths too, Lord Krishna is described not as black, but blue: could it be that he was originally described as black, and later in a strange reversal, his colour was changed to blue- or could it be that blue is black, and the two were coterminous words that meant the same thing in Sanskrit?

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A Surplus Easy to Squander- Jonah Lehrer on Cognitive Surplus

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Jonah Lehrer review of Clay Shirky's book, "Cognitive Surplus- Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age". Shriky seems to develop the theme that passive watching of television has come to end, and we are poised to enter more deeply the interconnected world of web-based colloboration-

". "The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something, and someone making lolcats has bridged that gap."

Whether reading a poem, or passively watching a classic movie is an inferior act to making a lolcat, or as in my case, making a blogpost is the question Lehrer poses.

"We have arranged our modern lives to maximize free time. Now, thanks to the virtual infrastructure of the internet, we are able to collaborate and interact as never before. The question is what these collaborations will create. A surplus, after all, is easy to squander."

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• Access vs Contemplation (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• Recommended read: Clay Shirky's Does the Internet Make You Smarter? - WSJ.com (fredzimny.wordpress.com)
• Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution (wired.com)

On Slavery

George Orwell wrote a withering passage about money, adapting I Corinthians xiii in Keep the Aspidistra Flying:

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. . . . And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money. "

I am reminded of this when I read this article by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the NYT, where he discusses the role of African kings in the commercial activity of slavery: they sold Africans to European merchants- and when the issue of giving them freedom and sending them back home came up, Frederick Douglass wrote,

“The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia. We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”

 It is a sorry story, with no winners in terms of race and colour.

Openly Gay- Archie Comic Shifts Gears

Except for Jughead, I never liked anyone or anything about Archie- too elitist for me. But then, when something as ground breaking as this happens, you have to mention it: Kevin Keller is acomin'.

CBC News - Books - Archie comic to introduce gay character:

 "'Archie's hometown of Riverdale has always been a safe world for everyone. It just makes sense to have an openly gay character in Archie comic books.'

All Dressed Up...

Liked this nice little peace by Robert Herrick:

928. CLOTHES ARE CONSPIRATORS.

Though from without no foes at all we fear,

We shall be wounded by the clothes we wear.

I am not too particular about my dress, but still, I can understand the sentiment: we are betrayed by the clothes we wear.

"Dear Mr. Thourlby,

Thank you for your wonderful no-nonsense guide, You Are What You Wear. I bought a copy of it in a used book store and it has paid off immensely in increased self-esteem, increased respect, and increased income."

-Vladimir and Mary Hykel review You Are What You Wear at Amazon.com

Taking it on the chin...

Amazing response to criticism:

"The only unhelpful reaction is the non-reaction, the shrug," he says. "You either want something to be positive or negative. You don't want indifference, because that means you haven't stirred them in any way."

(Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/story.html?id=2936399#ixzz0lq6vB6Gw)

Yann Martel, the author of Life of Pi has received negative criticism from many of the acclaimed critics for his new novel, Beatrice and Virgil ("So dull, so misguided, so pretentious that only the prospect of those millions of Pi fans could secure the interest of major publishers and a multimillion-dollar advance."- Michiko Kakutani) . Yann Martel  has also responded,

""You have to listen. I don't read every single review carefully -- good or bad -- but generally the way a work of art is received is part of the dialogue of art, so that's important. I don't live or die by it."

Nothing can equal Pi

And Twain Shall Meet

Sorry.

Kipling meets Mark Twain. PDF.

Story of the Week: An Interview with Mark Twain

"You are a contemptible lot, over yonder. Some of you are Commissioners, and some Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the V. C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand, and smoked a cigar—no, two cigars—with him, and talked with him for more than two hours! Understand clearly that I do not despise you; indeed, I don’t. I am only very sorry for you, from the Viceroy downward. To soothe your envy and to prove that I still regard you as my equals, I will tell you all about it."

More on Mark Twain, who apparently had the habit of making voluminous marginalia- he fiercely annotated as read on, and some of these books are now in a collection.

New York Times: 

"“Twain could just lacerate a book,” said Kevin Mac Donnell, a collector of rare books in Austin, Tex. who owns more than 150 books once owned by Twain. Badly written books bore the brunt of his annotations, Mr. Mac Donnell said, but the author “would also correct a book if he thought it was a gem.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he corrected the Bible and Shakespeare,” he added. "

The Murty Classical Library of India

Here's some good news:

Murty family donates $5.2 million to establish library of Indian classical literature

"Harvard University and Harvard University Press (HUP) announced today that the Murty family of Bangalore, India, has established a new publication series, the Murty Classical Library of India, with a generous gift of $5.2 million. The dual-language series aims both to serve the needs of the general reading public and to enhance scholarship in the field. ...

"Under the direction of General Editor Sheldon Pollock, William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Columbia University, and aided by an international editorial board composed of distinguished scholars, translators will provide contemporary English versions of works originally composed in Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, and other Indian languages. ..."

We need this.

Animal Farm

Animal Farm is one of those books the reading of which can mark you for life: I was eighteen when I first read it, and it created in me an aversion to all totalitarian regimes, whatever their ideology. It is entertaining, and well-written, and in reading it, children and adults, whatever their situation, can by a stretch of imaginative outreach, can find their own dictator portrayed there.

Superb book, and there is a superp appreciation of it at The Guardian: Christopher Hitchens re-reads Animal Farm:

"There is a timeless, even transcendent, quality to this little story. It is caught when Old Major tells his quiet, sad audience of overworked beasts about a time long ago, when creatures knew of the possibility of a world without masters, and when he recalls in a dream the words and the tune of a half-forgotten freedom song. Orwell had a liking for the tradition of the English Protestant revolution, and his favourite line of justification was taken from John Milton, who made his stand 'By the known rules of ancient liberty'. In all minds – perhaps especially in those of children – there is a feeling that life need not always be this way, and those malnourished Ukrainian survivors, responding to the authenticity of the verses and to something 'absolute' in the integrity of the book, were hearing the mighty line of Milton whether they fully understood it or not."

Erotica for the Blind

For those who cannot see, erotica in 3-D - thestar.com

"Lisa J. Murphy doesn't make ordinary books. Most books are meant to be looked at, read only with your eyes. Hers are meant to be touched.

Her book Tactile Mind, which she hand-crafted herself, is meant to be felt up, to be precise. It is an erotic book for the blind and visually impaired, though it can be enjoyed by the sighted as well."-  thestar.com

I wonder why no one came up with this idea earlier. We might argue that this is so unnecessary, given the kind of porn that is freely available- just a push away with our Bluetooth phones. But then, the blind need their erotica, don't they?

And then again, when it comes to sex, even the expert of us with all our functioning senses, we are all blind: who is to say we won't enjoy erotica in 3-D?

As John Donne so beautifully put it (I could never get it out of my head)-

"...Licence my roving hands, and let them go

Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland, ...

- Elegy XX

We need this.

Digested Classics

Digested classic: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy | Books | guardian.co.uk

Some of us here hate Arundhati Roy with almost pathologic passion, and don't know why: as for me, I hate her for the incessant verbal diarrhoea that would brook at no opposition: unintimidated, she drones on and on: that is neither here nor there.

But I found this delightful Digest (via Blog of a Bookslut) of her "God of Small Things," by John Crace: brilliant-

"It was a skyblue day in 1969 when Rahel found herself in a fictive time-slip. She gasped in amazement as the skyblue Plymouth pulled up and her uncle Chacko got out and talked about how Pappachi started drinking after a moth wasn't named after him and used to beat up Mammachi until he warned him off, how he had been a Rhodes scholar, had married Margaret and had a child, Sophie Mol, how she had left him, how he had returned to Kerala to run Mammachi's Paradise Pickles and Preserves factories, how he was a supporter of the Keralan Communist Party run by Comrade Pilla, how ...

"Stop, Uncle," Rahel said. "There are too many names, too many things going on. I can't keep up."

"That's the whole point," Chacko replied. "This is India, a land of sensory and poetic overload, a land where small boats bob in rippling water of green silk, a land teeming with literary prizes for those who can find the right imagery to win them. But these are small things."

"Is there a God of Small Things?"

"There must be if I won the Booker,""...

Nine Year Old Entrepreneur Sells Short Story To... | Gather

Nine Year Old Entrepreneur Sells Short Story To Pay For Own Heart Surgery
Gather:

"I keep on striding down the road, and a nice little house steps into my view. There is a closed window, and a small candle glows inside. I hear a voice: “Goodnight, Katie.” A small voice replies: “Goodnight, mommy.”

I think to myself, “I think I’ll take a peek.” I jump toward the window, trying to get their attention. As soon as I smack against the window, I black out."

Nine year old Malkolm Poyer, who needed money for his heart surgery, wrote a short story, "Luna" and put it on Ebay. He has sold 550 copies of the short story $10 each.

The money is not much, but the idea is- and the headline.

Granta Cover

The cover of Granta 110: Pretty Imaginative-