The reasoning about Uncertainty

Seventy-six years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the inaugural dais and reminded a nation that its recent troubles “concern, thank God, only material things.” In the midst of the Depression, he urged Americans to remember that “happiness lies not in the mere possession of money” and to recognize “the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success.”
“The only thing we have to fear,” he claimed, “is fear itself.”
As it turned out, Americans had a great deal more to fear than that, and their innocent belief that money buys happiness was entirely correct. Psychologists and economists now know that although the very rich are no happier than the merely rich, for the other 99 percent of us, happiness is greatly enhanced by a few quaint assets, like shelter, sustenance and security. Those who think the material is immaterial have probably never stood in a breadline.
[...] But light wallets are not the cause of our heavy hearts. [...]

Consider an experiment by researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who gave subjects a series of 20 electric shocks. Some subjects knew they would receive an intense shock on every trial. Others knew they would receive 17 mild shocks and 3 intense shocks, but they didn’t know on which of the 20 trials the intense shocks would come. The results showed that subjects who thought there was a small chance of receiving an intense shock were more afraid — they sweated more profusely, their hearts beat faster — than subjects who knew for sure that they’d receive an intense shock.
That’s because people feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur. Most of us aren’t losing sleep and sucking down Marlboros because the Dow is going to fall another thousand points, but because we don’t know whether it will fall or not — and human beings find uncertainty more painful than the things they’re uncertain about. [...]

- more of the above in The New York Times.

NM & OP: 4 common features and many more differences

As said, I am getting back to talking of Orhan Pamuk [OP], yet this is now in conjuction with talking of Naguib Mahfouz [NM]: the two most recent writers that have enchanted me with their crafts; as I wrote of their 4 common features, here's what I was referring to:

• the fact that both of them wrote stories from and about times and places which are very different from our daily lives,
• their crafts having won each of them the Nobel Prize for literature,
• that they both belong to the very large family of Islam-touched patterns of thought,
• and that they've both written stories of stories, of transformation.

Orhan Pamuk's novel is a philosophical thriller constructed around the clash between [two] views of artistic meaning, which is also a chasm between two world civilisations. Great fiction speaks to its time; in the week of the American suicide bombings, this outstanding novel clamours to be heard.
Frankish novelty is represented by the brilliance of Venetian painting, which sweeps all before it with its portraits of faces set on achieving death-defying immortality through the palette. On the other hand is a tradition which seeks to record the objective truth as it might appear to Allah's dispassionate gaze (and may therefore be a subtle form of blasphemy). We all know that appearance deceives. A fool, thought Blake, sees not the same truth as the wise. But even the wise see differently. Islamic art took - and takes - its iconoclastic cue from that fact.
What followed was the rejection of the image in the name of a higher realism. Horses saunter in unison with forelegs simultaneously, "unnaturally", extended. What matters is the perfection of the single unvarying red, compounded from the dried beetle found in the hottest part of Hindustan - not the Frankish delicacy of graded shades. Pamuk's miniaturists grow blind in the obsessive service of art.

This fragment, think I, probably does a much better job appreciating My Name is Red than I could at the time, and you can keep reading Hywel Williams's review in The Guardian.

Arabian Nights and Days is [yet] a[nother] novel written in the episodic form that Mahfouz came to favour. In it he chooses tales from the classic Thousand and One Nights and reforges them into narratives dealing with those themes he was always occupied with: good and evil, man's social responsibility, and, increasingly with time, death. The novel is set in an Arabian Nights atmosphere, but many of the issues relate to Egypt's present problems: the corruption of those in power, social justice and the rise of the fundamentalist movement. [...] Mahfouz also rendered Arabic literature a great service by developing, over the years, a form of language in which many of the archaisms and cliches that had become fashionable were discarded, a language that could serve as an adequate instrument for the writing of fiction in these times.

- as summarised here.

From bringing the stories to their natural political connotations to reversing that same process, these two controversial story-tellers tend to help one remember not only that there's always more than meets the eye, but that visions and worlds [of thought, and not only] had been built on such concepts; and, of course, there are always the juicy historical bits to add to the picture.
My fondness of controversial Islam writings has been raised to a new level!

Listing: the Manners

Belknap's take on The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing is a 5 chapter essay which refers to - as the 1st chapter reassures, rather than simply informing - Literary Lists. In this endeavour, 4 American authors are dealt with thoroughly, each of them for unique qualities of their manner of listing.
First is Emerson, the written collections of whom are said to abide by an ideal of 'intrinsic vitalizing capacity' [p. 51]; the method appears to be that of a 'seemingly random structuring': 'His lists seem to have less crisp distinction than those of other writers, unless they egregiously violate our expectations.' [p. 47]
Whitman is second, and here we learn that

A collection of items can be read sequentially, where there is a movement from one member to the next, or substitutionally, where there is an equivalence among members. Frequently in Whitman's verse the relation between list constituents is oblique, and the narrative of development through a series of terms is left to the reader. [pp. 86-87]

and also that:

One major application of the literary list is as a tool to suggest order, by either reflecting a perceived order or enforcing a desired one. [...] In The World Below the Brine and Germs, Whitman uses the list format to delineate the cosmos. Each poem is composed primarily of a list, and the intention of each is to map out a cosmography. [pp. 98-99]
Striking out for a new world of poetic form, Whitman likewise sang his characteristic songs, using variations of listing that seem to have all added grace of unpremeditated improvisation, poured spontaneously like the unrehearsed songs of the thrush. Leaves of Grass [is] a volume of such songs... [p. 118]

Penultimate is Melville, who is said 'to consume his predecessors in his leviathanic work' [p. 132]. This is mostly an analysis of the meanings in Moby-Dick, a novel 'so full of life and character and motion and humour and the grand compass of things, [which also] reveals itself as a profoundly disturbing expression of nihilism. [p. 158]:

For the White Whale, paradoxically, represents the absence of meaning, symbolises the meaninglessness of the universe.. The blankness of white is unreadable not because it is too complicated to be deciphered [...] but because the white field bears the imprint of Nothing. The attempt to interpret the unmarked is a confrontation with nothingness.

Final is the entry on Thoreau, who is described as 'preternatural [...] in that its connotations of "extraordinariness" and existence literally "beyond nature" reinforce the indefinable separation that forever kept Thoreau on the outside of nature, as it were. [...] Not only was Thoreau's work solitary and labour intensive, but its worth was misunderstood by his contemporaries..' [pp. 175-176]. Over the passage of time this seems to have changed, since

Many readers have noted that Thoreau seems to write on two levels at once. Thoreau encoded his writing to reach a select audience within his general reading public in a way that required embedding one level of discourse within another. [...] Just as it takes a careful reader to catch all Thoreau's punning wordplay, so too must one read mindfully to fully appreciate his distinctive definitions and the frisson these definitions generate when considered alongside their popular significations. [...e.g.] For Thoreau, is the expenditure of living, a trade-off of time that would otherwise be spent in different pursuits.

All of the above are therefore seen as settings and modes of list usage in literary pursuits. Lists serve a variety of functions in Emerson's essays, Whitman's poems, Melville's novels, and Thoreau memoirs, and Belknap discusses their surprising variety of pattern, intention, scope, art, and even philosophy.
This exercise in literary analysis provides with an interesting selection, sampling the writers' overall styles; on my part, it elicited curiosity about a careful and, why not, creatively interpretative reading of the 4 authors' productions: lists may be surprisingly crafted.

Burn after Reading

The Coens spend the bulk of the film putting the players into place; it’s a complex, multi-character set-up kept going by a martial tick-tock score, which instills Burn After Reading with a gravitas to which it never quite lives up. Set in and around the corridors of power, Burn is a comedy of errors, full of sex-obsessed jokers, in which two gym employees (Pitt & Frances MacDormand) stumble upon a CD-R with the working memoirs (mem-wahz) of a recently fired CIA agent-slash-alcoholic (John Malkovich, wandering hilariously from scene to scene, repeatedly moaning, in a muttering whine, “what the fuck?”). The personal trainers mistake the files for important when they’re merely self-stroking, and the duo’s consequent shenanigans set off a chain reaction that ends in violence and murder.

On a basic level, Burn After Reading is a spoof of the paranoid conspiracy thriller, the type popularized in the post-Watergate ‘70s; here, the Washington backrooms are full of clowns and Princeton alum garbling old college singalongs in black-tie drunkenness. These nitwits would be incapable of concocting and carrying out a conspiracy even if they wanted to. It’s a portrait of the American government as wholly dysfunctional, paralleling the characters’ sexual dysfunctions (see: the wild dildo-equipped rocking chair that George Clooney builds in his basement.)

[above equally written here]
It was the trailer that dragged me to the Cinema and the film that determined me to post this up..

Wall-E

You’ve already heard—Wall-E is a part of Hollywood’s go-green conspiracy to brainwash our children into obeying Overlord Gore. It’s certainly environmentally conscious, including a scolding speech near the end about a planet in trouble and a do-nothing populace, but such a reading of Pixar’s latest is too easy. Set well into the millennium, the film opens in the majesty of outer space (“there’s a world outside of Yonkers,” croons the soundtrack) before switching to an aerial survey of Planet Earth in ruin—rusted-over and littered, with a skyline of trash-cube skyscrapers. So, Wall-E is anti-waste, sure, but it has an odd and tender affection for artifact, as well—the titular robot, a Sisyphean garbage compactor with only a cockroach for a friend, collects Zippos, bubble wrap, Rubik’s cubes and other assorted tchotchkes from among humanity’s detritus with the same reverence with which we hoard pre-historic earthenware. (This might help to explain the apparent contradiction many commentators have noted between the film’s politics and its marketing, which includes more than its fair share of landfill-bound merchandising.) Above all, Wall-E is not a critique of the state of things but a condemnation of a mindset. It is not so much anti-waste as it is anti-wastefulness.

Keep reading this really nice review for a film I definitely enjoyed on Cinepinion, or watch the trailer:

what am I talking about?

this is my twitter 'Wordle'

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

According to TweetStats, these are the 5 words that I refer to most: work, today, time, day, good
... Should this make me think? :)

Politikverdrossenheit?

p. 180:

[The] electoral volatility [...] led to much talk of German disillusionment with politics as such - Politikverdrossenheit. Indeed the Society for the German Language proclaimed Politikverdrossenheit to be the word of the year for 1993.

Yet the word to characterise this book it is not. And as the writing at hand has aimed 'to introduce the reader to the legacy that present-day Germany has inherited from both East and West and from the period before 1945', so it has kept up to its promise.
For the student of Germany in an European and international context that I once was, this was a tale full of reminders, but also (new) insights. Some samples, p. 126:

The attempt to defend democracy through the curtailment of civil liberties was the most acute of the moral dilemmas the Brandt government faced.

- [concept sounding familiar?];
p. 145:

Buffeted by the oil shock, challenged by the New Left's rejection of the post-war consensus, undermined by terrorism, and divided by the measures to combat it, the FRG of the Schmidt period might well have seemed on the verge of destabilization. It certainly became more difficult to govern, though the talk then current of 'governmental overload' and 'ungovernability' seems in retrospect greatly exaggerated. What is true is that from the early 1970s onwards West German governments not only faced more complex policy challenges, but met greater institutional obstacles. [...] The increasing weight of the checks and balances has become a familiar feature of German politics and the Kohl government has been subject to them particularly since unification. But at the time they were a new factor and appeared to add to the burdens of maintaining the FRG's stability.
None of these difficulties seems to have diminished the legitimacy of democracy West German style. [...]

All in all, this is a collection of crisp analyses over half a century of German history - and not its mildest half, one should note - done in less pages than one would expect, but with more attention for detail than what appearances would have suggested.
It's also an abounding fountain of history's lessons considering not only explanations for solutions to crises (domestic and otherwise), but also the general context, and putting things into perspective.
Here's the book's OUP page and details: German Politics 1945-1995, by Peter Pulzer.