Month: November 2012

Science is hard at work:

As any beer drinker can tell you, a tall glass of lager without a white, foamy head on top just doesn't look right. And even if you start out with one, it can dissipate fast. And that's just sad. Now, microbiologists have identified the specific gene in yeast responsible for a beer's head and they say this discovery can lead to stronger, longer lasting, more aesthetically pleasing foam on your favorite brews.

It's called the Carlsbergensis foaming gene, or CFG1:

As [Tom] Villa and his colleagues write in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the gene resides in the yeasts used to ferment beer and it produces a protein that binds to the drink's CO2 bubbles, preventing them from escaping from the glass too quickly. … Now that we know exactly which gene is responsible for beer foam, Villa says it's possible to manipulate that gene to create beer with foam that lasts longer — potentially for hours and hours…

A movie cliché greater than the sum of its parts:

(Hat tip: Vulture)

Chloe Schama reviews Alice Munro's new collection of short stories, Dear Life, the last three of which she describes "closer to my own life than the other stories I had written." After a lifetime of making things up, the forays into near-autobiography presented their own challenges:

When truth is stranger than fiction, how should the writer preserve her subtlety? "If I was writing fiction instead of remembering something that happened," Munro writes, in her description of the prostitute from "Voices," "I would never have given her that dress. A kind of advertisement she didn’t need." The prostitute wore "golden-orange taffeta"; Munro the fiction-writer would have had her in olive silk. In another story, the collective failings and misfortunes of her hapless father seem too woeful to be credible: "You would think that this was just too much. The business gone, my mother’s health going. It wouldn’t do in fiction." Even when she is hewing close to personal history, she is conscious of the particular kind of truth required by fiction—perfect pitch and proportion, and perhaps less verisimilitude.

According to Anne Enright, "a kind of absence is essential to Munro's work," the keeping of a distance between writer and reader, so she finds herself grateful for these more personal stories' "insight into Munro's formation as a writer":

It would be wrong to say there is an absence at the heart of it – that would sound aggrieved – but there is nothing wrong with holding yourself a little in reserve. A slight sense of withholding gives Munro's prose its gracefulness, and allows intimacy without danger. After many years, many collections and many wonderful stories, readers may feel they know everything about Alice Munro, especially as so many of her characters lead lives similar to her own. In fact, we know very little about her. This is one of the reasons readers become dizzy with love for Munro. This other reason is that she is so damn good.

Read one of Munro's short stories from the collection here.

Mike Deri Smith contrasts himself to the giants of the journalistic past:

As idealistic young journalists, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and William T. Vollmann each wanted to fix something: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and the Soviet war in Afghanistan, respectively. As an idealistic young person, at a similarly nascent stage in my journalism career, I’d like to think I understand their drive. But I can’t say I’m idealistic enough to fight or die for the freedom of North Korea, if that option were available to me. The old idealists fought in the mountains; I scroll over North Korean mountains on Google Maps. They suffered on the front line; I read a little of the news from North Korea before going to a restaurant and gorging myself on beef ribs to the point of severe stomach pain.

But he nevertheless makes the case for his own cause of ending North Korea's gulag camps:

Concentration camps are a reality in the 21st century. Their existence in North Korea is an incontestable fact proven by hundreds of satellite images and the testimony of thousands who have escaped. A former camp guard and a defector who once worked within North Korea’s National Security Agency have suggested that approximately 200,000 people are currently in the camps. That's a number equal to the population of Tallahassee, Fla.

In North Korea’s concentration camps, there is no judicial system or right to appeal. Starvation-level rations kill thousands. Prisoners work 12-hour days, seven days a week, with time off only for national holidays. Forced abortions are carried out on pregnant women repatriated from China. Their young infants are often killed. Guards torture, murder, and rape. Almost every act classified as a crime against humanity is being carried out by the North Korean regime. This method of punishment has remained unchanged for more than 40 years. North Korea will eventually collapse. The horrors of the North Korean gulag will continue until that day.

(Image: From a series of Google Earth shots chronicling the death camps of North Korea)

Sam Kashner recounts the sad tale of Truman Capote's last attempted novel, a thinly-veiled expose of fixtures in New York's high society, revealing "their gossip, the secrets, the betrayals—even a murder":

[Capote] had boasted to his friend Marella Agnelli, wife of Gianni Agnelli, chairman of the board at Fiat, that Answered Prayers was “going to do to America what Proust did to France.” He couldn’t stop talking about his planned roman à clef. He told People magazine that he was constructing his book like a gun: “There’s the handle, the trigger, the barrel, and, finally, the bullet. And when that bullet is fired from the gun, it’s going to come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen—wham!” But he had unwittingly turned the gun on himself: exposing the secrets of Manhattan’s rich and powerful was nothing short of social suicide.

Why did he do it?

"I wonder whether he wasn’t testing the love of his friends, to see what he could get away with. We had Truman around because he paid for his supper," [John] Richardson says, "by being the great storyteller in the marketplace of Marrakech. Truman was a brilliant raconteur. We’d say, ‘Oh, do tell us what Mae West was really like,’ or what did he know about Doris Duke? And he’d go on in that inimitable voice for 20 minutes, and it was absolutely marvelous, one story after another. And he loved doing it—he was a show-off."

Truman bristled at the idea that he was some sort of mascot or lapdog. "I was never that," he insisted. "I had a lot of rich friends. I don’t particularly like rich people. In fact, I have a kind of contempt for most of them. . . . Rich people I know would be totally lost … if they didn’t have their money. That’s why … they hang together so closely like a bunch of bees in a beehive, because all they really have is their money." In what would become a mantra of Truman’s, he often asked, "What did they expect? I’m a writer, and I use everything. Did all those people think I was there just to entertain them?"

In researching the piece, Vanity Fair stumbled upon a six-page manuscript of a chapter called "Yachts and Things," also unfinished. You can read it here.

(Truman, in 1959, by Roger Higgins, via Wikimedia Commons)

E.J. Schultz takes stock of Americans' on-the-go eating habits:

"New Convenience Items Balloon Food Sales," stated an Ad Age headline in 1960. What was all the excitement about? Frozen meals, cake mixes and instant potatoes — foods that by today's standards would be considered a bit of a hassle. We are now living in a yogurt-and-snack-bar world, where the fastest-growing foods are those that often require little or no preparation. …

Indeed, of the 10 fastest-growing in-home foods and beverage categories over the past decade, only two are routinely heated (pizza and pasta), while the rest are pretty much open-and-eat, such as nuts and chips, according to NPD. Even staples such as soup and cereal — once considered easy — have lost momentum to items that can be scarfed down on the go.

In a review of Alastair Fowler's Literary Names, Colin Burrow dissects the best and worst of character nomenclature:

Some fictional names are filled with semantic clues about the nature of their owners: you know that someone called Gradgrind will not be an advocate of child-centred learning, and that Luke Skywalker will not stay long on Tatooine. A character called Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt is likely to be able to offer a girl a big house, though ‘Mallinger’ suggests it will come at a price. But there are still mysteries. Even ‘invisible’ non-significative fictional names can ‘seem right’. Quite how they do so is as mysterious as the reason why in any given year several thousand parents will simultaneously become convinced that their daughter ‘looks like’ a Joanna or a Niamh.

P.G. Wodehouse apparently took the name Jeeves from a Warwickshire cricketer. Did the name sound right for a valet simply because it rhymes with ‘sleeves’? Wodehouse became rich by sounding ultra-British to an American readership. Perhaps ‘Jeeves’ so well suits the ultimate English gentleman’s gentleman because his name coolly eschews early 20th-century US slang: ‘Jeeves’ is definitely not ‘Jeeze’ or ‘Gee’, but contains hints of both. Or is this just fantasy?

Yesterday, Ugandan Speaker of the Parliament Rebecca Kadaga renewed the push to pass the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, urging a vote by next Tuesday:

Jim Burroway summarizes the most appalling parts of the bill:

There has been considerable confusion over what would happen if the bill were to become law…. [I]t’s important to address the persistent false reports in the media that the death penalty has been removed from the bill. Those false reports have been reported as though they were fact since December, 2009.

He continues:

Most of the attention has focused on the bill’s death penalty provision, but even if it were removed, the bill’s other seventeen clauses would still represent a barbaric regression for Uganda’s human rights record. … There are a ton of "related offenses" in the proposed bill, including renting a room to a gay person, refusing to report a gay person to police, using the internet to advocate for the rights of gay people, donating to a pro-gay cause — and all of these offenses may be committed by straight people. A prior conviction on one of those clauses and then "touching" someone “with a part of a body” and "through anything" without anything even close to sex taking place … and you’re headed to the gallows under this bill.

Meanwhile, Melanie Nathan emphasizes that gay rights advocates in Uganda are "urging caution" from sympathizers abroad. Recent Dish coverage here and here.