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First, some axioms. Points. Nodes. Notes. (After which, a few fragments.)
From Alfred Nobel's will: "The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: ...one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction..."
Even if every winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature were universally acclaimed as worthy, there would still be more worthy people who had not won the Prize than who had. Thus, the Nobel Prize in Literature will always be disappointing. The history of the Nobel Prize in Literature is a history of constant, repeated disappointment.
The Nobel Prize in Literature's purpose is not to recognize the unrecognized, nor to provide wealth to the unwealthy, nor to celebrate literary translation, nor to bring attention to small publishers. Occasionally, it does one or more of these things, and doing so is good. It would be nice if any or all of those were its purpose. I'm not sure what purpose it does serve except as a sort of Hall of Fame thing, which reminds me of what Tom Waits said at his induction to the Rocknroll Hall of Fame: "Thank you very much. This has been very encouraging."
As with many things, Coetzee probably got it most right: "Why must our mothers be 99 and long in the grave before we can come running home with a prize that will make up for all the trouble we have been to them?"
My personal pick for a Nobel Literature laureate among the writers who seem like plausible candidates — that is, among the small group of writers whose names continue to be mentioned, year after year — is Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Among such American writers, I guess I'd pick Pynchon (not just for the early work — Mason & Dixon is a wonder, and Against the Daycontinues to seem to me to be the best science fiction novel of the 21st century), though I doubt they'd give it to him because he's pretty much guaranteed not to show up for the ceremonies. Among writers never/seldom spoken of for the Prize, I can hardly come up with a list without narrowing it somehow; for instance, U.S. writers I would like to see in contention include Ursula Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany, as well as countless poets, various nonfiction writers, a playwright or two (Wallace Shawn! Suzan-Lori Parks!), and maybe some unclassifiable weirdos. (I certainly feel no excitement for the idea of Philip Roth or Joyce Carol Oates winning, the two Americans typically mentioned.) We live in a very rich time for literature of all sorts, whether popular or elite.
But — brace yourself — hard as it is to believe, my personal desires are irrelevant to the Nobel Prize in Literature. I'm not even Swedish!
Anyway, I'm quite happy with Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature because I like Bob Dylan's songs. Thus, the Prize as such seems to reflect well on my taste, and I want to defend it because my taste is mine and therefore I like it. If the Prize went, as it sometimes has, to a writer I don't especially care about, or whose work I don't especially like, I would feel annoyed, because isn't the job of prizes to flatter my taste?
I suppose this is how people who have passions for corporate sports teams feel when their favorite corporate sports team wins the corporate sports team tournament.
I adore Dylan and thus I agree with the Nobel Prize Committee. Their referees this year have made good calls, generally, though of course if I were one of the referees this year, the calls would have been even better.
No, I don't think Dylan is a poet in a strict, contemporary sense. He doesn't have to be. It's not the Nobel Prize in Poetry. ("Literature" is always in the making.) Dylan is a songwriter and a performer. Separating his lyrics from performances of those lyrics can be clarifying, but it does violence to the work, leaves out an entire realm of communication. Nonetheless, his lyrics have proved portable, his music malleable, as he himself has often shown in performance (listen to "The Times They Are A-Changin'" on MTV Unpluggedor "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" from Live 1975 for just a couple of the many examples) and countless musicians of various styles have proved (one of my favorites is Chris Smithers' version of "Visions of Johanna"; also, Antony & the Johnsons' "Knockin' on Heaven's Door").
The living U.S. Nobel Laureates in Literature are Toni Morrison and Bob Dylan. Obviously, American literature (what means "American"? what means "literature"?) is far more capacious than any two people, no matter how talented or accomplished, can represent, but nonetheless, look at the idea of American literature embodied in those two figures together: there's a perspective there on history, myth, and experience, on culture and creation. Both are popular artists, despite their obscurities and weirdnesses and highbrow allusions. They draw on and contribute to what can be called, for all such a term's inadequacies, an American vernacular. They are both obsessed, in their own unique ways, with the old, weird America, its slave songs, murder ballads, hymns, blues, and jazz. There is something that feels very right to me about the pairing of their oeuvres, the way their poetries sing stories together.
I don't really care about the Nobel Prize, though. All prizes are awful. I won't defend the Nobel as a prize. Say what you want about it; I don't care. (Unless they give it to me. Then I'd care and I would accept the prize and I would do whatever they wanted me to do, because hey, why not? And the money would be nice.)
I care a lot about Bob Dylan, though — not the man, who I doubt I'd get along with very well, but his work, which awes me. The song "Blind Willie McTell" alone would be enough to assure its writer of a place in the pantheon, and he's written dozens more of equal wonder.
To draw a bit of attention away from the ultimately useless questions of "Is it poetry?" or "Did he deserve to win?", here are some random, fragmentary thoughts on just a few corners of Dylan's body of work:
Everyone who has any liking for Dylan at all likes some Dylans more than others. I don't at all care for the current torchsong-singing Dylan. The last album I really adored was 2003's "Love and Theft", though there are individual songs on the later albums, particularly Tempest, that I enjoy. But there's a looseness to his later work, a tendency to let songs go on and on with the same rhythm, that doesn't do much for me. My favorite period is the 1970s, the period from roughly Self-Portrait through At Budokan, a period I often prefer in bootlegs and alternate versions of individual songs rather than the album versions, but which also includes my single favorite album, Blood on the Tracks. Maybe it's because I was born the same year as Blood on the Tracks, and maybe it's because I grew up listening to Dylan — but I didn't grow up listening to the '70s Dylan, since my father, the Dylan fan in the house, seemed to have given up on Dylan after he went electric. By the time I entered high school, I knew all the words to the first five albums, but had no idea there were later albums. Those later albums would be a revelation, first with Highway 61 Revisited, then Blood on the Tracks. A friend in college had the first official Bootlegs album, and we listened to it like a secret hymnal. (I feel a bit sad that I heard "official bootlegs" before I ever heard the real boots, but the official ones are pretty great, and now that the Basement Tapes have been released, there are only a handful of unofficial tracks I really love.)
Two somewhat unheralded albums are among my favorites: Hard Rain and World Gone Wrong. Hard Rain is punk Dylan — live recordings in bad weather, with all the instruments going out of tune and the musicians furiously trying to get through their set. That album's versions of "Maggie's Farm" and "Stuck Inside of Mobile..." are especially fierce, but it's all great, wild, angry, dissonant. World Gone Wrong is one of a pair of albums (with Good as I Been to You) that brought Dylan back from the brink and rejuvenated him for some of his later masterpieces. Good as I Been to You is good, but World Gone Wrong somehow goes beyond it, and sometimes vies for position as my favorite Dylan album: it's just Dylan and his guitar, singing old songs. Each track is wondrous, a reinvention that is also a summoning.
I love how much of a magpie Dylan is, a thief and a scoundrel, a channeler of all he's ever heard. I said a year ago, and still say: "Dylan's references, allusions, echoes, riffs, cut-ups, and copies expand his work and connect it to networks of meaning." Also: "Dylan is all poses, all artifice, and he always was. He's not, though, a postmodern ironizer; his earnestness is in the earnestness of his artifice. (His art is real for as long as he performs it.)"
Ahh well, enough of this. Go listen to some songs.
This is hard country to stay alive in Blades are everywhere and they're breaking my skin I'm armed to the hilt and I'm struggling hard You won't get out of here unscarred It's a long road, it's a long and narrow way If I can't work up to you, you'll surely have to work down to me someday... —"Narrow Way"
0 Comments on A Long and Narrow Way as of 10/13/2016 4:53:00 PM
I first met Elie Wiesel in the summer of 1965. Wiesel’s book Night had been translated into English five years earlier. Night was just beginning to be recognized in English-speaking countries. Wiesel was not yet then the impressive speaker he was soon to become. As he addressed the audience that summer about the horrors of the Holocaust, Wiesel was diffident to the point of shyness.
Milton Friedman is regarded as one of the most prominent economists of the twentieth century, contributing to both economic theory and policy. 31st July is his birthday, and this year marks 10 years since his death, and 40 years since he won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his contributions to consumption analysis and to monetary theory and history.
The serendipitous discovery of Penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1929 positively transformed modern medicine. Fleming’s decision to spend his summer holiday in East Anglia and his casual approach to laboratory housekeeping was an auspicious combination. After his return to the laboratory he observed that an uncovered culture plate of Staphyloccocus bacteria had been contaminated.
The history of modern Crystallography is intertwined with the great discoveries’ of William Lawrence Bragg (WLB), still renowned to be the youngest Nobel Prize in Physics. Bragg received news of his Nobel Prize on the 14th November 1915 in the midst of the carnage of the Great War. This was to be shared with his father William Henry Bragg (WHB), and WHB and WLB are to date the only father and son team to be jointly awarded the Nobel Prize.
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (October 8, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0316322407
ISBN-13: 978-0316322409
A MEMOIR BY THE YOUNGEST RECIPIENT OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
“I come from a country that was created at midnight. When I almost died it was just after midday.”
When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.
On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive.
Instead, Malala’s miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she became a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize.
I AM MALALA is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls’ education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.
I AM MALALA will make you believe in the power of one person’s voice to inspire change in the world.
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Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate. She is known mainly for human rights advocacy for education and for women in her native Swat Valley in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of northwest Pakistan, where the local Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. Yousafzai’s advocacy has since grown into an international movement.
Her family runs a chain of schools in the region. In early 2009, when she was 11–12, Yousafzai wrote a pseudonymous blog for the BBC detailing her life under Taliban occupation, their attempts to take control of the valley, and her views on promoting education for girls in the Swat Valley. The following summer, journalist Adam B. Ellick made a New York Times documentary about her life as the Pakistani military intervened in the region. Yousafzai rose in prominence, giving interviews in print and on television, and she was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize by South African activist Desmond Tutu.
On the afternoon of 9 October 2012, Yousafzai boarded her school bus in the northwest Pakistani district of Swat. A gunman asked for her by name, then pointed a pistol at her and fired three shots. One bullet hit the left side of Yousafzai’s forehead, travelled under her skin through the length of her face, and then went into her shoulder. In the days immediately following the attack, she remained unconscious and in critical condition, but later her condition improved enough for her to be sent to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England, for intensive rehabilitation. On 12 October, a group of 50 Islamic clerics in Pakistan issued a fatwa against those who tried to kill her, but the Taliban reiterated their intent to kill Yousafzai and her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai.
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111 writers have won the Nobel Prize in Literature; only a few of them are female. The team at freshessays.com has created the “13 Female Nobel Laureates in Literature” infographic to celebrate these women.
According to visual.ly, the piece showcases the “names of their best novels and poems and words of wisdom.” We’ve embedded the full infographic below for you to explore further—what do you think?
Tomorrow, 8 November, will mark the third anniversary of the now established International Day of Radiology, an event organised by the European Society of Radiology and Radiological Society of North America: a day in which health care workers worldwide mark their debt of gratitude to Wilhelm Roentgen’s great discovery of x- rays, and its subsequent applications in the field of medical practice, today known as radiology or medical imaging. On 8 November 1895, Roentgen conducted his seminal experiment, which was to change the world forever and earn Roentgen the first Nobel Prize for Physics. This day now is celebrated by over one hundred learned radiology societies worldwide to promote the importance of this discipline in current medical practice, a discipline which has changed beyond wildest recognition from the early days of the pioneers and radiation martyrs. The day is a celebration of all radiology team members’ contribution to patient care. In the early days of this new discipline practitioners were not confined to members of the medical profession but included any lay interested member of the public. Only with the passage of time did the discipline of radiology become the sole preserve of medical practitioners, with appropriate training and regulation introduced to raise standards.
It is interesting to note that the first multidisciplinary society devoted to the new subject ‘The Roentgen society’ was founded in 1897 in London by David Walsh, F.E. Fenton, and F. Harrison Low. In the summer of that year, Professor Silvanus Thompson, the physicist, Fellow of the Royal Society of London, brilliant lecturer, populiser of science, prolific author, and true Victorian polymath became its inaugural President. It has since metamorphosed into the current British Institute of Radiology.
One of the celebratory themes of this year’s International Day of Radiology is brain imaging. The immediate early application of x-rays was to look for fractures and localise foreign bodies, leading to their application in the military setting. In the early days, x-rays did not allow doctors to directly visualise the brain. Arthur Schueller, the Viennese radiologist who worked closely with G. Holzknecht, became an early pioneer in using x-rays to make neuroradiological diagnosis and help neurosurgeons deal with brain tumours.
Doctor review brain images by Rhoda Baer. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Although the brain itself could not be seen by x-rays, secondary signs from tumours often showed, such as erosion of the skull bones. Localisation of tumours was not an exact science and early detection was difficult. The American Walter Dandy, who worked at Johns Hopkins Hospital, pioneered the imaging of the ventricles by introducing air and contrast, this assisted surgeons in localising tumours of the brain by looking for ventricular displacement. It is claimed that the great Pulitzer Prize-winning neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing thought that this technique would take the skill out of making a diagnosis by clinically examining the patient, though by today’s standards, a clinical examination would not be considered a pleasant investigation to have.
In Portugal in the late 1920s the polymath Egaz Moniz pioneered cerebral angiography, enabling doctors to visualise the blood supply to the brain, including tumours; this was a great step forward. Moniz was an author, researcher, was at one time Portuguese Foreign Secretary, and was also awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949 for his medical advances. However, a really great leap in brain imaging occurred in the early 1970s, when CT scanning (invented by the British genius Hounsfield) came of age, enabling doctors to visualise the brain itself, along with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in the 1980s, further clarifying the workings of the normal and abnormal brain.
Today diagnostic imaging, including the more sophisticated CT scanners, are available even in less affluent countries, and their applications and uses in patient care continues to multiply. They have replaced some of the earlier, more dangerous and uncomfortable investigations endured by the preceding generations of patients. More affluent nations continue to see an exponential growth in modern radiological investigations; such is our fascination for high technology.
Today we salute the pioneers in radiology whose efforts have left us with safer, more accurate and more patient friendly tests than ever before. To find our more about International Day of Radiology and its activities, visit the website.
When I wrote Materials: A Very Short Introduction (published later this month) I made a list of all the Nobel Prizes that had been awarded for work on materials. There are lots. The first was the 1905 Chemistry prize to Alfred von Baeyer for dyestuffs (think indigo and denim). Now we can add another, as the 2014 Physics prize has been awarded to the three Japanese scientists who discovered how to make blue light-emitting diodes. Blue LEDs are important because they make possible white LEDs. This is the big winner. White LED lighting is sweeping the world, and that’s something whose value we can all easily understand. (Well done to the Nobel Foundation, by the way: this year the Physics and Medicine prizes are both about things we can all get the hang of.)
Red and green LEDs have been around for a long time, but making a blue one was a nightmare, or at least a very long journey. It was the sustained target of industrial and academic research for more than twenty years. (Baeyer’s indigo by the way was a similar case. In the late nineteenth century, making an industrial indigo dye was everyone’s top priority, but the synthesis proved elusive.) What Akasaki, Amano, and Nakamura did was to work with a new semiconductor material, gallium nitride GaN, and find ways to build it into a tiny club sandwich. Layered heterostructures like this are at the heart of many semiconductor devices — there was a Nobel Prize for them in 2000. So it is not so much the concept of the blue LED that the new Nobel Prize recognizes as inventing methods to make efficient, reliable devices from GaN materials. In this Akasaki, Amano, and Nakamura succeeded where many others had failed.
The commercial blue LED is formed by two crystalline layers of GaN between which is sandwiched a layer of GaN mixed with closely related semiconductor indium nitride InN. The InGaN layer is only a few atoms thick: in the business it is called a quantum well. Finding how to grow these exquisitely precise layers (generally depositing atoms from a vapor on a smooth sapphire surface) took many years.
The quantum well is where the action occurs. When a current flows through the device, negative electrons and positive holes are briefly trapped in the quantum well. When they combine, there is a little pop of energy, which appears as a photon of blue light. The efficiency of the device depends on getting as many of the electron-hole pairs as possible to produce photons, and to prevent the electrical energy from leaking off into other processes and ending up as heat. The blue LED achieves conversion efficiencies of more than 50%, an extraordinary improvement on traditional lighting technology.
An LED Solar Lamp, Rizal Park, Philippines “Solar Lamp Luneta” by SeamanWell. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
How does this help us to get white light? Well, one route is to combine the light from blue, red, and green LEDs, and with a nod to Isaac Newton the result is white light. But most commercial white LEDs don’t work that way. They contain only a blue LED, and are constructed so that the blue light shines through a thin coating of a material called a phosphor. The phosphor (commonly a yttrium garnet doped with cerium) converts some of the blue light to longer wavelength yellow light. The combination of yellow and blue light appears white.
Perhaps we should pay more attention to how amazing little devices such as these are made. And how they are packaged, and sold for next to nothing as components for everyday consumer products. Low cost and availability are important. It is easy to see that making a white-light LED which can produce say 200 lumens of light for every watt of electrical energy it uses is a big step in reducing energy consumption in lighting homes, offices, industries, in street lighting, in vehicles, and so on. They replace the old incandescent lamp which produced perhaps 15 lumens per watt. Since 20% of our electricity is used for lighting, a practical white LED lamp is transformative.
But the white LED has another benefit, in bringing useful light to communities all over the world that do not have a public electricity supply. One day, I took to pieces a little solar lamp, which sells for a few dollars. I wanted to see exactly what was in it, and in particular how many chemical elements I could find. When I totted them up I had found more than twenty, about a quarter of all the elements in the Periodic Table. This little lamp has a small solar panel, a lithium battery and at its heart a white LED. It brings white light to people who previously had only dangerous kerosene lamps, or perhaps nothing at all. And it provides a solar-powered charger for a phone too. Four of the more exotic elements in this lamp are in the LED light, indium and gallium in the LED heterostructure, and yttrium and cerium in the phosphor. Is this solar lamp really the simple product that it seems? Or is it, like thousands of other everyday articles, a miracle of material ingenuity?
Featured image: Blue light emitting diodes over a proto-board by Gussisaurio. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Here’s more about the lecture: “The Nobel Lecture in Literature will be held on Friday 7 December 2012, at 5:30 p.m. (CET), at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm (tickets required). The lecture will be webcast live at Nobelprize.org, and the text will be published here at the same time. The Nobel Lecture will be published in six different languages: English, Swedish, French, German, Spanish and Chinese. A video of the lecture will be available here a few days later.”
He's my favorite author and he's had Nobel hype for years. It's so exciting that he finally won!
The first book of his that I read was Red Sorghum. It was assigned for a Chinese Literature in Translation course. I was only auditing the class and could only read part of it before I had to turn my attention elsewhere. But, I liked it so much that I went back and finished it after the semester was over.
I prefer is earlier stuff to his later stuff. The shorter works are tighter and more accessible. His later works seem like a Nobel bid, but are still very good. Overall his writing is marked by a visceral lushness that I'm not used to seeing from Chinese prose, which is usually sparse in its descriptions. Many of his works are touched by a magic realism that brings to mind Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
AND! When writing up this blog post I see that many of his works are available for FREE for Amazon Prime members through the lending library and many are priced at bargain prices to own the Kindle version. Take advantage while you can, especially of the three titles I mentioned in this post.
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Stricken by a cerebral hemorrhage, wealthy industrialist Alfred Nobel died on December 10, 1896. That date is still commemorated as the day on which the famous prizes issued in his name—perhaps the most prestigious prizes in the world—are officially awarded each year.
In his thirties, Swedish chemist and engineer Alfred Nobel became interested in explosives and experimented with a chemical named nitroglycerin, but it was very volatile, and accidental explosions frequently occurred. When he accidentally discovered that the liquid was more stable if dried, he had a new invention, which he called dynamite, from which he built a huge fortune. Nobel lived a solitary life: he never married and had little social life, though he was intellectually active and committed to philanthropic causes. In 1895, at sixty-two, he began to develop chest pains. Late in that year, he wrote a will. When he died the following year, his family was shocked to learn that in this will he had left the bulk of his fortune to fund prizes to be given each year to individuals who had made the greatest achievements in chemistry, literature, physiology or medicine, physics, and who had made significant contributions to world peace.
Because his surviving family contested the will, the first Nobel Prizes were not issued until 1901. In 1968, the Bank of Sweden created a sixth award, in economics, named in Alfred Nobel’s honor. The winners of the six awards—called laureates—receive medals and a citation at an awards ceremony each December 10; they also receive a sum of money. All prizes but the peace prize are awarded in Stockholm; that ceremony occurs in Oslo, as a Norwegian committee confers that award. Each laureate gives a lecture in the days preceding the awards ceremony. Some years, more than one person receives a given award. In some years, a prize in a particular field may not be granted.
“This Day in World History” is brought to you by USA Higher Education.
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I'm a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards this year, so perhaps I'm more sensitive than normal to pundits carping about award results, but something about awards brings out people's desire to complain, and they don't usually come out looking very good by doing so.
The Parks piece isn't terrible, but I'd agree with M.A. Orthofer at The Literary Saloon that it's "somewhat careless". (Parks has written a bit more thoughtfully about the Nobel in his essay "The Nobel Individual".) I certainly agree that the Nobel is inevitably in a tough position because it's supposed to be so international and definitive, and people give it almost mystical reverence, but its track list really isn't that bad. Sure, I wish they'd give it to Chinua Achebe already, and then Ngugi wa Thiong'o (so I could say I once interviewed a Nobel winner), and not be so generally Eurocentric, but it's an award based in Europe, so, you know, whatever. And I've got no problem with it being anti-American. Michael Bourne can whine all he wants about Philip Roth not getting it, and maybe Roth will get it one of these days, but I hope not. When Bourne writes, "If Philip Roth doesn’t deserve the Nobel Prize, no one does," he just flaunts his ignorance of world literature. There are plenty of other writers out there who would benefit from it more and who are equally interesting and even influential artists.
Tomas Transtörmer, this year's winner, is a safe and relatively obvious choice. Some people have complained that he's an "obscure poet", but anybody who refers to him as such doesn't know what they're talking about. He's been translated into somewhere around 50 languages, has multiple translators in English, has books in print in the U.S. For a poet, that's rockstar status. Just because you haven't heard of somebody doesn't mean they're obscure.
Laura Miller's slam of the NBA is some of the worst writing I've ever seen from her. People have a habit of complaining about the obscurity of NBA finalists, and it always makes them sound stupid. Laura Miller accuses the NBA judges in the fiction category of deliberately seeking out books that are no fun to read and are published by small presses. She accuses them of seeking out books that deserve more attention and ignoring books that are popular. "If you categorically rule out books that a lot of people like," she says, "you shouldn’t be surprised when a lot of people don’t like the books you end up with."
That's not really an argument, though. It's more like a non sequitur. At the very least, it's irrelevant.
The judges for the fiction award this year are Deirdre McNamer (Panel Chair), Jerome Charyn, John Crowley, Victor LaValle, Yiyun Li. That's an interesting panel. My interest in a book would rise if I knew those folks had thought the book was worthwhile and even impressive.
Laura Miller, though, thinks they seem like out-of-touch snobs who want to boost the sales of books that aren't entertaining. The NBA for fiction, she says,
more than any other American l
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It’s 144 days until the release of The Only Ones. For those without an abacus on hand, that places the launch date at September 13, 2011 (aka Peter Cetera’s 67th birthday). Movie studios like to whet audiences appetites months in advance of their release date, so I’m thinking I’ll do the same thing. At the end of this post you’ll find a humble, but hopefully enticing, teaser book trailer for The Only Ones.
Those outside of the book business might not run across book trailers during their internet adventures. With honey badger videos to watch and alt.magick bulletin boards to monitor, the average surfer doesn’t have time to dabble in such things. Well, book trailers are thick out there. Some great. Some…different. There’s debate as to whether these things boost book sales or whether they cheapen the esteemed art of the novelist. My take is that as long as you’re not sinking big bucks into the forgettable or misleading, then a book trailer can’t hurt. At worst, no one will watch it and forward it on to their pals. At best, you’ll win a Nobel Prize (let the boy dream big!).
So, without further ado, here’s the teaser trailer for The Only Ones. Keep in mind this is just a preview, a tiny taste. Like when you go to see the new Michael Bay flick and Warner Brothers hooks you with short clip of Rick Moranis, shirtless and sweaty, running through a supermarket with a cocked crossbow and flowing Confederate flag as a cape, a soundtrack of the Georgia Satellites in the background and a booming voiceover proclaiming, “This Christmas, Moranis will rise again. Live and Die in Dixie”
Like that, but better.
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Ray Davis was the first person to look into the heart of a star. He did so by capturing neutrinos, ghostly particles that are produced in the centre of the Sun and stream out across space. As you read this, billions of them are hurtling through your eyeballs at almost the speed of light, unseen.
Neutrinos are as near to nothing as anything we know, and so elusive that they are almost invisible. When Davis began looking for solar neutrinos in 1960, many thought that he was attempting the impossible. It nearly turned out to be: 40 years would pass before he was proved right, leading to his Nobel Prize for physics in 2002, aged 87.
In June 2006, I was invited by The Guardian newspaper to write his obituary. An obituary necessarily focuses on the one person, but the saga of the solar neutrinos touched the lives of several others, scientists who devoted their entire careers chasing the elusive quarry, only to miss out on the Nobel Prize by virtue of irony, chance, or, tragically, by having already died.
Of them all, the most tragic perhaps is the genius Bruno Pontecorvo.
Pontecorvo was a remarkable scientist and a communist, working at Harwell after the war. When his Harwell colleague Klaus Fuchs was exposed as an atom spy in 1950, Pontecorvo immediately fled to the USSR. This single act probably killed his chances of Nobel Prizes.
In the following years, Pontecorvo developed a number of ideas that could have won him one or more Nobels. But his papers were published in Russian, and were unknown in the West until their English translations appeared up to two years later. By this time others in the USA had come up with the same ideas, later winning the Nobel Prize themselves.
Amongst his ideas, one involved an experiment which Soviet facilities could not perform. But most ironic were Pontecorvo’s insights about neutrinos.
Ray Davis had detected solar neutrinos – but not enough of them. For years, many of us involved in this area of research thought Davis’ experiment must have been at fault. But Pontecorvo had another theory which indicated that like chameleons, neutrinos changed their form en route across space from the Sun to Earth. And he was right. It took many years to prove it, but by 2000 the whole saga was completed. Davis duly won his Nobel Prize, but so many years had elapsed that Pontecorvo by then was dead.
So although my piece for The Guardian began as the life story of Ray Davis, Pontecorvo was there behind the scenes to such an extent that it became his story also. It is also the story of John Bahcall, Davis’ lifelong collaborator, who, to the surprise of many, was not included in the Nobel award.
The lives of these three great scientists were testimony to what science is all about: as Edison put it, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
A final sobering thought to put our human endeavors in context: those neutrinos that passed through you when you started reading this article are by now well on their way to Mars.
My newest obsession is Terriers, an FX show created by Ted Griffin (who wrote Ocean’s Eleven) and Shawn Ryan (creator of The Shield, the best TV show ever). This show has deliciously Seinfeldian dialogue, effortless and charming acting, plus plots that are unpredictable and fresh. It’s even heart-wrenching at times, and I didn’t know I had a heart to wrench. This show is wonderful. Of course, no one is watching it.
One reason for the low ratings—suggested by everyone and their schnauzer—is that the title Terriers reveals nothing of what the show is actually about: a former cop and former criminal who have split the difference to become private investigators. That’s true. You won’t find any Wheaton terriers, Jack Russell terriers, or Yorkshire terriers—though a bulldog named Winston is a regular character. But terrier has been describing people as well as pooches for a long time, just like Doberman, pit bull, hound, and especially poodle. As quick as people are to anthropomorphize their dogs, we’re just as fond of poochopomorphizing ourselves. In honor of Terriers, here’s a look at words that have been transmitted from pooches to people.
As for terrier itself, it’s been used literally since the 1400’s and figuratively since the 1500’s. As the owner of a rat terrier, I can vouch for the OED’s definition: “A small, active, intelligent variety of dog, which pursues its quarry (the fox, badger, etc.) into its burrow or earth.” Believe me, if my dog were on the case, I would not want to be a rat, mouse, bunny, Smurf, or mole man. Metaphorical uses from 1622 (“Bonds and bills are but tarriers to catch fools.”) and 1779 (“Hunted…by the terriers of the law.”) show that the title of my new favorite show isn’t breaking any new ground. Terrier-osity, whether found in a dude or dog, is characterized by relentless determination that’s almost creepy: think of a Jack Russell who doesn’t seem aware there’s a world beyond his tennis ball.
As for a dog that is as well-established in language as it is horrible-reputation’d in general, you can’t beat the pit bull. Sarah Palin is synonymous with this breed, but she sure didn’t invent the comparison. A 1987 OED example involved a political hero of Palin’s: “President Reagan accused his Democratic critics in Congress Monday of practicing [sic] ‘pit bull economics’ that would ‘tear America’s future apart’ with reckless fiscal and trade policies.” Later citations mention “pit bull management” and “pit-bull intensity.” FYI, since I am a dog-lover, I have to share this article from Malcolm Gladwell on why pit bulls aren’t as deserving as demonization as you think. As with most dog problems, an idiotic owner is the key ingredient.
The word poodle has been prolific as poodles themselves, who seem to breed with anything that chases a squirrel, and maybe even squirrels themselves. There’s poodle-faker (an old term for a dandy, which feels like an old term itself), poodle parlor (a dog grooming business), and poodle skirt (an unfortunate fad in the fifties). Tony Blair was often described as George W. Bush’s poodle—that meaning of “poodle” is about a hundred years old, and it’s first found here in 1907: “The House of Lords consented… It is the right hon. Gentleman’s poodle. It fetches and carries for him. It barks for him. It bites anybody that he sets it on to.” A similar shade of meaning is used in th
0 Comments on Terriers are People Too: Dog Breeds as Metaphors as of 10/21/2010 6:21:00 AM
She had no children, but for those of us who are social workers, she was the mother of us all. The social action focus, empathy with people in poverty, campaigning for human rights—these priorities of social work had their origins in the work and teachings of Jane Addams. Unlike the “friendly visitors” before her, Addams came to realize, in her work with immigrants and the poor, that poverty stems not from character defects but from social conditions that need to be changed. From the vantage point of the Chicago Hull House, the most famous settlement house of her day, Addams addressed such issues as political corruption, child labor, urban sanitation, women’s suffrage, and race relations. “We don’t expect to change human nature,” she said, “we people of peace, but we do expect to change human behavior.”
By the turn of the last century Jane Addams was the most famous woman in America. By the culmination of her career in 1931, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for her efforts for her international work following the destruction of World War I. But during a major part of her life, she was neither honored nor beloved.
Because of her staunch pacifism during World War I—a position which branded her a subversive and radical for the rest of her life—Addams rapidly fell out of favor. Just as she had been universally acclaimed prior to the war, Addams experienced a fall from grace unparalleled among public figures in U.S. history. She was hounded by the FBI. She was even given the dubious honor of having been given a life membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution and then subsequently to be expelled.
“If you are different from others, you need to act on that difference, if society is to advance.” This statement by Jane Addams succinctly sums up her life. Her award of the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 71 was a proud moment for social workers, Quakers, and women the world over. The story of Jane Addams is one that can inspire us all.
I had just finished reading this note about the New Yorker's 20 Under 40 List with its prejudice toward youthful fictioneers when I headed to the NY Times website to read the day's headlines and discovered Jose Saramago has died at age 87. I nearly screamed out, "Too young! Too young!"
It's been a few years since I last read Saramago, simply because other things kept grabbing my reading time, but I will forever be grateful to the Nobel Prize committee for bringing him to the world's attention, because I doubt I would have encountered his work otherwise. I read Blindness soon after it was released in the U.S. to see if the latest Nobel Prize winner was my sort of writer, and it was a shattering experience. Because I came to it with only basic expectations and knew little about it, I was in just the right frame of mind to be shocked and awakened by its visceral power. No other book had ever so powerfully made the fragility of human civilization so clear.
I went back and found everything else I could get my hands on by him. (My copy of Baltasar and Blimunda was discarded by the New Hampshire State Prison, and I almost brought it back to the prison and said, "No, you need this. Keep it.") The History of the Siege of Lisbon, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The Stone Raft, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, All the Names, The Cave -- I devoured these books, one after another, their voices melding in my head over the course of a year or two of hungry reading. I have few memories of the books individually, but ghostly memories of their voices and characters, and that seems appropriate to them, so filled with what is otherworldly, so beautiful in their terrors and aching in their loves.
And so I imagine Faulkner and Kafka sitting together at a wobbly table in a café in an unnamed city built with thousand-year-old stones, drinking something locally distilled, a little tipsy and loquacious, twilight setting in, and so they help each other stand up and discover themselves skipping down the street and humming a tune and giggling until they get to an alley and they realize it's dark and time to go home, and melancholy sets in, and they stare up at the sky in silence for a moment and they see the stars through industrial haze, and there's a new one up there, shimmering, and at the same time, without even realizing it, without knowing why, the two men whisper a word whose meaning they don't understand, Saramago, and then walk home, slowly, in opposite directions through the endless darkness of night.
Another octogenarian master gone. Saramago's death isn't as personally upsetting as Markson's, but it leaves more of a sense of lost work. I don't know if he was still producing at the height of his powers, as the cliche goes, but his recent books didn't seem diminished, particularly, and his public pronouncements were mostly as feisty as ever. I thought I'd still get to read at least a few more new books from his pen.
I've wanted for some time to read his Manual of Painting and Calligraphy but it's been virtually unobtainable. Anyone have an opinion about that one?
While I have not had the great good pleasure to work with Ostrum and Williamson, there is still a sense of pride in working for the publisher that recognized their genius and contributions to Economics long ago. We might not see too many celebrity authors (thankfully), or New York Times bestsellers (unfortunately) here at OUP, but we do have a long list of authors who are Nobel laureates, Pulitzer recipients, and National Book Award winners (fortunately). And to the sage Nobel Economics committee in Oslo I say, “Thanks for making my Monday a little sweeter. Keep up the good work. I look forward to next year’s recipients.”
0 Comments on Congratulations to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson as of 1/1/1900
This morning, or evening if you happen to be in Europe,Herta Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Müller originally published in Romanian and German however her works have been translated into several languages, including English. Most of these translations have been though small presses and now an increase in demand for her work is causing some temporary shortages in supply.
I just checked Amazon, and they appeared to be out of stock with many of her English translations but you can still find used copies from various booksellers. So I thought I would post some links for people looking for Herta Müller translations.
*edit* - I also just checked on AbeBooks.com and it seems that copies are flying off the virtual shelves there as well. If you don't want to wait for the reprints I would pick one up sooner than later.
I n a statement signed by Raymond B. Cattell, Hans Eysenck, Arthur R. Jensen and Richard Lynn, all eminent professors and experts in the field of intelligence and IQ testing, they concur that the definition of intelligence is “general mental capacity that involves the ability to reason, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience.” These gentlemen agree that intelligence is not merely book learning or test-taking smarts; rather it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending one’s surroundings. It is important to realize that “catching on,” “making sense” and “figuring out” are the key factors in “intelligence.” The professors also agree that IQ tests measure this general ability, and that most standardized IQ tests measure more or less the same traits - so far so good! However, they overemphasize the role genetic factors play in the measurement and understanding of human intelligence. According to these men and 48 other signees of the approval of the conclusions of the book The Bell Curve, Blacks are doomed to be less intelligent than Whites and Asians. The group further declares that there is no convincing evidence that the IQ bell curves for different racial groups are converging. In unison they affirm that there is no definite answer as to why IQ bell curves differ across racialethnic groups. Could it be that IQ tests themselves hold the key to this problem…? Is it really “genetics” that explains why a hungry child in Ethiopia or young student in some war-torn area of the globe does not learn math and language as well or score as high on an IQ test as his counterpart who lives in a good neighborhood in the socalled First World, is at peace with himself and his environment, has the benefit of a decent education and parents who can care for and tutor him? The signees believe that research on matters of intelligence relate to some unclear social and primarily biological distinctions. A phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect may reduce or eliminate differences in IQ between races and cultures in the future. With IQ scores in affluent Holland and Spain up by 6–8 points, respectively, in just one decade and an astonishing 26- point increase in the past 14 years in developing Kenya, it is evident that the Flynn Effect is a reality and that genetic bias against Blacks does not carry any weight. There is, in addition, an argument that the average IQ of the United States was 75 before improved nutrition increased the scores of the general population. (The IQ for the average American is currently 98.) It is almost universally agreed upon that a person’s IQ can predict academic success, but not how to function successfully in one’s environment. Furthermore, there is considerable evidence from re-testing and the application of different tests that a person’s IQ does not remain fixed over his lifetime.
Emotional and motivational factors play a key role on how one scores on any given test and may vary from one test to another. It is a believed that as many as 60% of IQ test scores change significantly over time. With this in mind, can we assume that a test score accessed at a particular point in an individual’s life is a valid indicator of his “native” intelligence? “G” or “general intelligence” is as cultural as it is controversial. The core element in measuring a person’s intelligence is vocabulary. Vocabulary reflects one’s cognitive skills but exposure to words is not genetic, it is learned (read environmental). A child or an adult who has never seen an octagon or the male icon or symbol (B&) or the symbol for female (@&) would most certainly not recognize them if they were presented to him in an intelligence test. The genetic component in IQ is the reciprocal of the environmental component: the larger the difference in environments, the less thecomponent determined by genes will appear. Today it is acceptable and realistic to embrace the view that racial and gender differences are not genetic but reflect environmental challenges. But consider Harvard University’s President in 2005, Lawrence Summers. Summers suggested that gender differences in intrinsic ability were a cause of the dearth of top echelon female scientists. He cavalierly disregarded the realities of bias in hiring, discriminatory tenure practices and negative stereotypes. Stating that sex differences in cognitive ability were the “real” reason there were less women scientists than men; he and his supporters felt that research on the matter clearly pointed in that direction. Summers must have completely forgotten about Marie Curie, the only person to win two Nobel Prizes: one in chemistry and the other in physics! Summers later apologized for his “reckless” language and shortly thereafter resigned. Phillip Emeagwali, who helped give a boost to the supercomputer, is a Nigerian-born scientist who stunned the world of high tech and HIQ when he won the Gordon Bell Prize in 1989. The fact that a Black African would have an IQ of 190 and be married to a Black American microbiologist/biochemist may have caused racist Nobel Prize winner, Dr. William Shockley, to roll over in his grave. Ironically, Shockley died the same year that Emeagwali won the Gordon Bell Prize for The Connection Machine. Andy Warhol was one of the most important representatives of pop art and best remembered for his representations of Campbell’s Soup cans. Warhol created hundreds of other works during his allotted 58 years, including commercial advertisements, films, the blotted-line technique and the process of silk screening in painting. His IQ was allegedly 86. Yet many would call both Emeagwali and Warhol geniuses despite the 104 point difference in IQ scores. The idea that one group of people is, in comparison to another, smarter or dumber than another should be discarded. Clearly there will always be individual differences, but it should be emphasized that the individual who is well adjusted has the capability; life experience and motivation will be a success in his elected vocation.
I n a statement signed by Raymond B. Cattell, Hans Eysenck, Arthur R. Jensen and Richard Lynn, all eminent professors and experts in the field of intelligence and IQ testing, they concur that the definition of intelligence is “general mental capacity that involves the ability to reason, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience.” These gentlemen agree that intelligence is not merely book learning or test-taking smarts; rather it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending one’s surroundings. It is important to realize that “catching on,” “making sense” and “figuring out” are the key factors in “intelligence.” The professors also agree that IQ tests measure this general ability, and that most standardized IQ tests measure more or less the same traits - so far so good! However, they overemphasize the role genetic factors play in the measurement and understanding of human intelligence. According to these men and 48 other signees of the approval of the conclusions of the book The Bell Curve, Blacks are doomed to be less intelligent than Whites and Asians. The group further declares that there is no convincing evidence that the IQ bell curves for different racial groups are converging. In unison they affirm that there is no definite answer as to why IQ bell curves differ across racialethnic groups. Could it be that IQ tests themselves hold the key to this problem…? Is it really “genetics” that explains why a hungry child in Ethiopia or young student in some war-torn area of the globe does not learn math and language as well or score as high on an IQ test as his counterpart who lives in a good neighborhood in the socalled First World, is at peace with himself and his environment, has the benefit of a decent education and parents who can care for and tutor him? The signees believe that research on matters of intelligence relate to some unclear social and primarily biological distinctions. A phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect may reduce or eliminate differences in IQ between races and cultures in the future. With IQ scores in affluent Holland and Spain up by 6–8 points, respectively, in just one decade and an astonishing 26- point increase in the past 14 years in developing Kenya, it is evident that the Flynn Effect is a reality and that genetic bias against Blacks does not carry any weight. There is, in addition, an argument that the average IQ of the United States was 75 before improved nutrition increased the scores of the general population. (The IQ for the average American is currently 98.) It is almost universally agreed upon that a person’s IQ can predict academic success, but not how to function successfully in one’s environment. Furthermore, there is considerable evidence from re-testing and the application of different tests that a person’s IQ does not remain fixed over his lifetime.
Emotional and motivational factors play a key role on how one scores on any given test and may vary from one test to another. It is a believed that as many as 60% of IQ test scores change significantly over time. With this in mind, can we assume that a test score accessed at a particular point in an individual’s life is a valid indicator of his “native” intelligence? “G” or “general intelligence” is as cultural as it is controversial. The core element in measuring a person’s intelligence is vocabulary. Vocabulary reflects one’s cognitive skills but exposure to words is not genetic, it is learned (read environmental). A child or an adult who has never seen an octagon or the male icon or symbol (B&) or the symbol for female (@&) would most certainly not recognize them if they were presented to him in an intelligence test. The genetic component in IQ is the reciprocal of the environmental component: the larger the difference in environments, the less thecomponent determined by genes will appear. Today it is acceptable and realistic to embrace the view that racial and gender differences are not genetic but reflect environmental challenges. But consider Harvard University’s President in 2005, Lawrence Summers. Summers suggested that gender differences in intrinsic ability were a cause of the dearth of top echelon female scientists. He cavalierly disregarded the realities of bias in hiring, discriminatory tenure practices and negative stereotypes. Stating that sex differences in cognitive ability were the “real” reason there were less women scientists than men; he and his supporters felt that research on the matter clearly pointed in that direction. Summers must have completely forgotten about Marie Curie, the only person to win two Nobel Prizes: one in chemistry and the other in physics! Summers later apologized for his “reckless” language and shortly thereafter resigned. Phillip Emeagwali, who helped give a boost to the supercomputer, is a Nigerian-born scientist who stunned the world of high tech and HIQ when he won the Gordon Bell Prize in 1989. The fact that a Black African would have an IQ of 190 and be married to a Black American microbiologist/biochemist may have caused racist Nobel Prize winner, Dr. William Shockley, to roll over in his grave. Ironically, Shockley died the same year that Emeagwali won the Gordon Bell Prize for The Connection Machine. Andy Warhol was one of the most important representatives of pop art and best remembered for his representations of Campbell’s Soup cans. Warhol created hundreds of other works during his allotted 58 years, including commercial advertisements, films, the blotted-line technique and the process of silk screening in painting. His IQ was allegedly 86. Yet many would call both Emeagwali and Warhol geniuses despite the 104 point difference in IQ scores. The idea that one group of people is, in comparison to another, smarter or dumber than another should be discarded. Clearly there will always be individual differences, but it should be emphasized that the individual who is well adjusted has the capability; life experience and motivation will be a success in his elected vocation.
Physicist turned science writer, Gordon Fraser, most recent book Cosmic Anger: Abdus Salam - The First Muslim Nobel Scientist, is a biography of Salam who despite wining the Nobel Prize was excommunicated and branded as a heretic in his own country. A staunch Muslim, he was ashamed of the decline of science in the heritage of Islam, and struggled doggedly to restore it to its former glory. Undermined by his excommunication, these valiant efforts were doomed. In the article below Fraser looks at the history of Muslim winners of the Nobel Prize.
Amid all the international reaction to Israel’s offensive in Gaza, 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi has stirred up more controversy in Iran. In December the Iranian authorities closed the Tehran office of Ms Ebadi’s Human Rights Defenders Centre, saying it had operated for eight years without permission. Whatever the context, the perception of a Nobel Prize in Islamic countries often appears to clash with the traditional veneration in which it is held elsewhere.
The Iranian lawyer’s Nobel acknowledged ‘her efforts for democracy and human rights. She has focused especially on the struggle for the rights of women and children.’ While people around the world applauded this recognition, others maintained that it was an insult to and part of a continuing conspiracy against Islam. In a statement carried by the Iranian Jomhuri Eslami newspaper, a group from a major seminary said ‘The decision by the Western oppressive societies to award the prize to Ebadi was done in order to ridicule Islam.’ How can what is supposed to be one of the world’s highest honours also be perceived as insult and ridicule?
Shirin Ebadi is one of the few Muslims to have been honoured by the Nobel authorities. The first was Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who shared the Peace Prize with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978 for their unexpected Middle East peace overture. In 1981 Sadat was assassinated by Egyptian hard-liners who condemned his rapprochement with Israel. So much for Nobel honor.
One year after Sadat’s award, in 1979 the Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam (1926-1996) became the first Muslim to win a Nobel Science Prize, and the first Pakistani to win any Nobel. The achievement was greeted in the West with the customary apotheosis. But the accolade in Salam’s home country was very different. Salam belonged to the fringe Ahmadi sect of Islam, which was formally excommunicated in 1977 for its belief in a 19th-century promised messiah. Salam, once the Pakistan President’s chief scientific adviser, was ostracized. Revivalist Muslim voices criticized his Nobel award as a desperate attempt to restore Ahmadi credibility. In a grotesque eructation of prejudice and hate, the award was scorned as a deliberate insult to Islam.
After his funeral in 1996, Salam’s tombstone in Rabwah, Pakistan was inscribed ‘Abdus Salam, the First Muslim Nobel Laureate’ (innocently ignoring Sadat’s 1978 award). Soon the grave was visited by contemptuous outsiders and the inscription edited - and the error magnified - by an imperious hammer and chisel to read ‘Abdus Salam, the First … Nobel Laureate’. The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, and the now absurd epitaph was daubed with black paint.
After Salam’s award, the 1988 Nobel Literature Prize went to the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), whose initial literary success in the 1960s and 70s created a new hub of Arabic culture. This became overshadowed by his controversial Awlad Haratina (Children of the Alley) which was banned in much of the Arab world after reactionary Islamic scholars declared its portrayal of religious figures to be blasphemous. In the darkness of such bigotry, writers who can still write are deemed more dangerous than what they actually publish. In 1994 Mahfouz almost died after being knifed in the neck, and was left unable to work.
In 1994 Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat shared the Peace Prize with Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres for their resolute but eventually futile efforts towards resolving the perennial Israel-Palestine conflict. Such a pairing of names which not that long before had been sworn enemies soon created a new conflict of its own, and in 1995 Rabin was assassinated in his own country, a macabre reflection of the Sadat episode.
(On a less controversial note, in 1999, the Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewail was awarded the Nobel Chemistry Prize for his work in using laser beams to track chemical reactions, ‘freeze-framing’ their evolution. 2005, Mohamad ElBaradei, the Egyptian Director General of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA), and the IAEA itself received the Peace Prize for their efforts in preventing nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and for promoting its safe use for peaceful aims. In 2006, Muhammad Yunus from Bangladesh received the Peace Prize for his idea of ‘micro-credits’ – mini-loans to help disadvantaged people haul themselves out of poverty.)
The world’s 800 million Muslims make up about ten per cent of the world’s population, but have garnered just a handful of Nobel awards, many of them generating more controversy than honour. Jews make up a small fraction of one per cent of the world’s population, but have won hundreds of Nobel prizes. This track record alone is enough to convince ultraconservative Muslims that the Nobel dice are loaded. But why such disparity and dissent?
The West has grown to view the Orient from afar through a thick prism which distorts the transmitted image. For more than a thousand years, the membrane between Islam and the West, inflamed by lack of understanding, has been rubbed raw by mutual hypersensitivity, and the ulcerated wound periodically erupts. It appears to be especially sensitive to Nobel Prizes.
10 Comments on Islam and the Nobel Prize, last added: 2/12/2009
It is unfair to judge the contribution of Islam and Muslims to humanity by considering only 110 years of the history of mankind. During this period, the majority of the Muslim nations were first under occupation by the Western countries, and only became independent starting the 1940s. It is only later when the Muslims scientists started to travel to the West to live and work, where they proved themselves among other non-Muslim scientists. I suppose you have not watched the documentary that was on the BBC a week ago on Science in Islam, which showed that many of the great scientific discoveries were actually made by Muslim scientists.
In all cases, Nobel prize is not an excellent criterion to judge the contribution of a certain race/religion/nationality to mankind. Otherwise, you could erroneously deny almost any contribution for China or India, based on the number of Nobel prizes they received to their population.
Sara said, on 1/23/2009 3:36:00 PM
May one be so crass as to ask for author Fraser’s cultural/religious background? His article smacks of bias and of an attempt to belittle Muslims as a people. As a previous comment noted, it is unfair to judge Muslims’ contributions to mankind on the basis of only 110 years of history and on criteria established by the West. And one is compelled to ask: What is Mr. Fraser’s point? I think I know what it is, but I’d rather hear it from him.
Sara said, on 1/23/2009 3:38:00 PM
I’d also like to note that only one Israeli has won the Nobel Prize, and that was for work he was able to do in the United States!
Rebecca said, on 1/23/2009 3:57:00 PM
I don’t think Fraser is trying to belittle anyone but rather to look at the reaction and reception of someone who does win the Nobel Prize.
Nadeem said, on 1/29/2009 12:06:00 AM
I can understand how Dr. Salam felt when he was refused to open an institute in Pakistan. I’m glad he didn’t open that institute in any Islamic country….you could imagine what these fundamentalists have done to that.
PMHowell said, on 2/4/2009 7:39:00 AM
It would appear that the writers Sara and Attallah have misapprehended the editorial, and or the book by Gordon Fraser, taking a defensive aggressive view of any part of the commentary that touches upon Islam in other than a favourable way.
The author Fraser does not denigrate the contributions ascribed to Muslim/Arabic culture, nor does he seek to demean Islam by the current paucity of Nobel prizes for Muslim ’scientists’. Similarly, he does not glorify the overwhelming preponderance Judeo/Christian Nobel prize-winning scientists because that has no bearing on ethic of the awards.
He tells the story of Adbul Salam, a scientist and a Muslim , who sought to promote scientific endeavour in the Islamic world and was ostracized by his countrymen for his troubles . Shame on the clerics.
And, shame on the writers for being so narrow minded and parochial, a reflection of the mind set that reached out and desecrated Salam’s tombstone and grave.
Perhaps Greece would like to complain as it is officially listed with only two Nobel prizes, though one suspects there are others in their Diaspora.
Hungary too should seek reparations for being inadequately represented in the ‘national league tables’…
The English barely ever complain about being second; just the weather, and in any event they seem to be disproportionately represented, obviously a secret pact with the Swiss.
Perhaps the attribution of Nobel prizes to ethnicity, religion and or cultural backgrounds is a useful indicator, just because it does not favour your viewpoint does not make it an invalid statement.
If the writers feel so strongly about their perceived bias or the irrelevance of the Nobel Prizes, why not write a reasoned, logical and provocative counterpoint. By all means describe the historic contribution of Islamic scholars since the seventh century AD, having regard for all that went before them and has since paralleled their achievements. Perhaps there is already such a book or two on the subject and a good read might calm them down.
And, if you want to nitpick over ‘Israeli’ Nobel Prizes [actually there are 8 officially ascribed to Israel] then consider that Yasser Arafat’s half ’prize’ for Peace [sic] was based on ‘work’ he did exclusively outside Palestine, and Iran has one, of two prizes, attributed by Doris Lessing in deference to who knows what - not likely Sufism - and she is still British, I think.
Sara said, on 2/6/2009 12:03:00 PM
I’m afraid Mr. Howell is the one who “misapprehended” the editorial. Mr. Fraser did not refer to “Judeo/Christian” Nobel Prize winners, whatever or whomever that may be. He in fact compared the number of Muslim winners to the number of Jewish winners. What is Mr. Fraser’s point in comparing the number of Nobel prizes won by Muslims to the number of prizes won by Jews??? One might more reasonably compare the number won by individuals from various countries, I would think. Would Mr. Fraser compare the number won by Christians versus Muslims? Or the number won by Christians versus Jews? No, of course not. His comments are racist at the core and are meant to demean Muslims. (By the way, I am a Western Christian, but I have seen this information put forth many times by Zionists who expect one to draw the conclusion that Jews are more worthy than Muslims, and ergo, are more entitled to the land of Palestine. Mr. Fraser is just one of many propagandists.) Perhaps Mr. Fraser, or Mr. Howell, would like to comment on the fact that individuals working in Germany have won over 100 Nobel Prizes compared to Israel’s “8″.
David said, on 2/8/2009 3:36:00 PM
So we should keep our mouths shut about the achievements of one group compared to another just because the Muslims have an inferiority complex?
JP said, on 2/10/2009 11:21:00 AM
Sara’s comment that the author’s “comments are racist at the core” does not really make sense. Islam is not a race, it’s a religion. And that religion happens to promote a culture that is apparently opposed to many of the values and accomplishments that the rest of the world acknowledges to be worthwhile and laudable. Some ideologies ARE inherently better than others, based on both their impact on the welfare of humankind and what they proclaim to be right and wrong. A quick internet search revealed that 163 Jews (not necessarily Israelis) have won a Nobel Prize. Therefore I also find Moataz Attallah’s comment irrelevant. He makes the excuse that the Muslim nations “only became independent starting in the 1940’s.” The Jews didn’t even have a nation until the late 1940’s, and yet they have won 163 Nobel Prizes, even though they currently make up less than 1% of the world’s population. This seems to indicate to me that one culture fosters more concern for human welfare than the other. And Sara, if you are a Christian, you should be able to appreciate Genesis 18:18 - …”Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him…” One ethnicity is not inherently better than another, but the ideologies they embrace profoundly impact their contributions to humankind.
Moataz Attallah said, on 2/11/2009 6:14:00 PM
To David, the Muslims have inferiority complex? I think it’s really shameful and racist (even though Islam is not a race) to say that comment.
To JP, the Jews did not have a state until 1947. So the Jews who earned the prize were actually citizens of the Western imperialistic countries which occupied the Muslim countries and consumed their resources, and they had every reason to excel in all fields of human knowledge, in the absence of occupation. I think if the Muslim world had had 1% of the support that the Western countries gave to Israel (e.g. building them a nuclear reactor, like what the French did by building the Israeli’s reactor, or giving an access to the latest military technologies as the Americans did), the Muslim world would have achieved a good number of Nobel prizes by now. Unfortunately, all what the Muslim world received from the West was destruction (Iraq), terror and oppression (by the French in Algeria and the Italians in Lybia), land mines (Egypt), sectarian tensions (India and Pakistan), and sometimes dictators.
I still think that assessing the contributions of Islam to mankind by Nobel prize is not scientific. If the last 110 years of the contributions of certain races, religions, or nationalities are assessed this way, we might equally come up with many fallacies on the contribution of the Hindus, atheists, Africans, Chinese, or Indian to mankind. This article reminds me of the racist studies used to be performed during the previous century, which claimed that the white people had IQs higher than the black people. I expect that the author of this article shares a similar opinion regarding the IQs of the Muslims.
I love it when the Nobel Prize for Literature goes, as this year, to a writer whose name is unfamiliar to me. I'm woefully ignorant of French literature in general, and contemporary French literature in particular, and so Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio is not a byline I'd noticed before. Given how few of his books are currently available in English translation, though, I expect I'm not alone in my ignorance.
This is one of the great values of the Nobel for American readers, and perhaps one of the only things that makes it, unlike most other awards, culturally valuable. Its profile is high enough that, in the right circumstances, it can propel writers into view who would otherwise remain at best only barely visible.
Of course, this is not mainly what it does. As often as not, the Nobel goes to writers who are already prominent. This is much less interesting, although I will admit to celebrating when it goes to writers who are or have been particularly meaningful in my reading life, which has been true of some of the recent awards (Lessing, Pinter, Coetzee). I, too, could make a list, though, of recipients whose work does not interest me or, beyond that, seems undeserving of such accolades (Toni Morrison, William Golding, John Steinbeck, Winston Churchill, Pearl Buck, Sinclair Lewis -- interestingly, all writers writing in English, perhaps because I am most confident of my judgment there).
But then there are writers such as Gao Xingjian and Jose Saramago whose work I discovered because of the new prominence the Nobel gave them, and those are discoveries I treasure. (Someone like Elfriede Jelinek is a more problematic case, someone whose work I sampled and found interesting, but I'm wary of the difficulties and inadequacies of the translation of her work into English.)
Before the announcement of the award, all the news in the lit'ry world was about the chair of the prize committee's comments that "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining." He also made some comments about Europe being the center of all literature or somesuch, and that seems to me to be too much of an us-versus-the-world mentality, but I don't know why there were so many knee-jerk negative reactions from U.S. critics (well responded to by The Literary Saloon) to the comment about insularity and isolation. Do we really need to further promote the insidious idea of American exceptionalism? "We're not isolated and insular, we're the best!" Come on. We don't translate nearly enough, and there are many conversations about literature going on in the world that we are utterly oblivious to. Horace Engdahl may have painted with too broad a brush, but we shouldn't deny the fact that it takes an awful lot of work and luck to get American readers interested in writers from outside our borders.
The Nobel is sometimes a good force against that insularity and isolation, because it plays well with our celebrity culture. It can cause American companies to translate and publish previously unavailable work, and cause American readers to buy the work in enough quantity to keep such efforts going. I wish the Nobel had the power to do that for dozens of writers each year, not just one.
2 Comments on Nobel Thoughts, last added: 10/13/2008
I guess my issue with what he said is the implication that Europe somehow does not possess those qualities. As if this is not a European award that is not by and large given to Europeans or non-Europeans who "take part" in the European conversation about literature. I find it offensive on that level, the assumption that any regional award--and the Nobel certainly is one, albeit a large region--is not by its nature insular and isolated.
Not to mention, the most revolutionary literature is the one that starts a new conversation--but the Nobel is not about revolution. It's about performing the status quo with excellence, which is beautifully illustrated, I think, by those comments.
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Nice. That last paragraph does a good job mimicking Saramago's style.
Well said, Mr. Cheney.
Another octogenarian master gone. Saramago's death isn't as personally upsetting as Markson's, but it leaves more of a sense of lost work. I don't know if he was still producing at the height of his powers, as the cliche goes, but his recent books didn't seem diminished, particularly, and his public pronouncements were mostly as feisty as ever. I thought I'd still get to read at least a few more new books from his pen.
I've wanted for some time to read his Manual of Painting and Calligraphy but it's been virtually unobtainable. Anyone have an opinion about that one?