Terry Eagleton in Commonweal:

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of Zoroastrianism? Why is it that my local bookshop has suddenly sprouted a section labeled “Atheism,” hosting anti-God manifestos by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others, and might even now be contemplating another marked “Congenital Skeptic with Mild Baptist Leanings”? Why, just as we were confidently moving into a posttheological, postmetaphysical, even posthistorical era, has the God question broken out anew?

Can one simply put it down to falling towers and fanatical Islamists? I don’t really think we can. Certainly the New Atheists’ disdain for religion did not sprout from the ruins of the World Trade Center. While some of the debate took its cue from there, 9/11 was not really about religion, any more than the thirty-year-long conflict in Northern Ireland was over papal infallibility. In fact, radical Islam generally understands exceedingly little about its own religious faith, and there is good evidence to suggest that its actions are, for the most part, politically driven.

That does not mean these actions have no religious impact or significance. Islamic fundamentalism confronts Western civilization with the contradiction between the West’s own need to believe and its chronic incapacity to do so.

“Sex is a political condition.” —Kate Millet

Toward a Better Love
Roque Dalton

No one disputes that sex
is a condition in the world of the couple:
from there, tenderness and its wild branches.

No one disputes that sex
is a domestic condition:
from there, kids,
nights in common
and days divided
(he, looking for bread in the street,
in offices or factories;
she, in the rear guard of domestic functions,
in the strategy and tactic of the kitchen
that allows survival in a common struggle
at least to the end of the month).

No one disputes that sex
in an economic condition:
it’s enough to mention prostitution,
fashion,
the sections in the dailies that are only for her
or only for him.

Where the hassles begin
is when a woman says
sex is a political condition.

Because when a woman says
sex is a political condition
she can begin to stop being just a woman in herself
in order to become a woman for herself,
establishing the woman in woman
from the basis of her humanity
on not of her sex,
knowing that the magic deodorant with a hint of lemon
and soap that voluptuously caresses her skin
are made by the same manufacturer that makes napalm
knowing the labors of the homes themselves
are labors of a social class to which that home belongs,
that the difference between the sexes
burns much better in the loving depth of night
when all those secrets that kept us
masked and alien are revealed.

Translation, Jack Hirschman
—from the collection Poetry Like Bread; Curbstone Press, 1994

One night after Christmas last year, in a dark, well-upholstered restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the American poet Frederick Seidel, an elegant man of 73 with an uncommonly courtly manner, told me a story about poetry’s power to disturb. “It was years ago,” Seidel explained in his measured voice, “in the days when I had an answering machine. I’d left my apartment, briefly, to go outside to get something, and when I came back there was a message. When I played it, there was a woman’s voice, a young woman’s voice sounding deeply aroused, saying: ‘Frederick Seidel . . . Frederick Seidel . . . you think you’re going to live. You think you’re going to live. But you’re not. You’re not going to live. You’re not going to live. . . .’ All this extraordinary, suggestive heavy breathing, getting, in the tone of it, more and more intensely sexual, more gruesome, and then this sort of explosion of sound from this woman, and: ‘You’re . . . not . . . going . . . to . . . live.’ ” Seidel paused. The bright cries of a group of young women giving a baby shower in the adjoining booth rose and fell behind the bare crown of Seidel’s gray head. “So,” he continued, “the first thing I did was call a girlfriend. And the woman said, ‘I’m coming over.’ And did. And listened to this thing. And burst into tears. Because it really was horrific.” Another friend, a federal judge, also listened, insisting that Seidel call the police immediately and tell them he’d received a death threat. “They came by and they said: ‘It’s real. Have you published a book recently?’ I had. And that was it, really. Meaning nothing happened. But,” Seidel said, his large blue eyes brightening, “it was the most severe review I’ve ever received.”

more from the NY Times here.

This book has divided the world. The French love it, and gave it not only the Prix Goncourt but the Académie Française’s Prix de la Littérature as well. The British are split – Antony Beevor loved it, Peter Kemp hated it. The survivor-writer Jorge Semprún admired it; Claude Lanzmann, the maker of Shoah, first hated it, then changed his mind. Most Americans and Canadians loathe it. Why? And who is right and wrong? That should be a naïve question, since wildly differing responses to the same book are perfectly normal. But here there is, I think, a right and a wrong answer, though not simple ones. Those who admire The Kindly Ones are right, but those who loathe it are not completely wrong. It is half a work of genius and half a work of gratuitous perversion.

more from Literary Review here.

Every once in a while some woman gets fed up with the constant news of war, poverty, greed, environmental degradation, and corruption, and publicly growls, “You know, if women ran the world, it would be a better place.” Detractors immediately howl back, reminding us of the plague that was Thatcherism, but it turns out that we don’t need a matriarchy to improve the world. Just improving the lives of women, guaranteeing their rights, and allowing them to decide their own fates independent of religious or societal control would help piece our world back together. Muhammad Yunus started the Grameen Bank to offer microloans to the rural poor, allowing them to start small businesses and work their way out of poverty. He quickly noticed that women allowed to earn their own incomes “show remarkable determination to have fewer children, educate the ones they have, and participate actively in our democracy.” By 2007, 97 percent of his borrowers were women, and he had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

more from The Smart Set here.

From The Telegraph:

With his horn-rimmed glasses, dark suits and generally lugubrious demeanour, it is plain to see how Dr Kissinger, the Presidential National Security Advisor, was the chief inspiration for Peter Sellers’ Dr Strangelove – who, as the world is about to end, gleefully informs the bigwigs in the bunker that nuclear annihilation won’t be too bad: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. I am saying only 10 to 20 million people killed, tops, depending upon the breaks.”

Despite spending his adult life in America, Kissinger hasn’t lost or modified his sonorous Teutonic accent, “perhaps because he never wanted to,” according to Evi Kurz, in this fascinating and suggestive biography. Though he has ascended to great heights in the US – having been Nixon’s Secretary of State and the chairman, advisor or director of everything from the Chase Manhattan Bank to NBC and American Express – Kissinger remains the immigrant German: courtly, enigmatic, theatrical and somewhat furtive. There is nothing open or benign about his personality – his cunning commands respect, but not affection.

More here.

From Salon:

Goodall has remained a fascinating figure partly because she's kept one foot outside of mainstream science. She's an outspoken advocate of animal rights and also the rare scientist who talks openly about mystical experiences — from her transformative encounters in the wild to a ghostly vision she once had of her dead husband. Now 75, Goodall is a larger-than-life figure who looms over the field of primatology. Today she spends less time with her beloved Gombe chimps than traveling the world as a U.N. messenger of peace, campaigning for environmental causes and promoting her Roots and Shoots program for young nature lovers.

I caught up with Goodall after she received the Leakey Prize, awarded to “scientists who transcend the boundaries of their disciplines.” The prize was fitting since it was famed paleontologist Louis Leakey who first asked Goodall to conduct a field study of chimpanzees. Leakey's choice was remarkable, as Goodall had not been to college and had no scientific training. As she explains, Leakey picked her “because he wanted to send somebody into the field with an unbiased mind.”

As I've read the accounts of your early field work at Gombe, I'm struck by how much time you were out in the field, alone with the chimpanzees.

It was absolutely amazing. It wasn't only a beautiful place, surrounded by this timeless world, but also, everything I saw with the chimpanzees was new. I mean, how lucky can you get?

More here.

If you haven't seen these already, over at the ACLU, memos from the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department (sounds Orwellian in this context) authorizing and blessing torture. “[F]earsome word-and-thought-defying,” as someone once said of another bureaucrat's complicity in crimes.

Johann Hari in The Indpendent:

The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live.” In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Read more »

This piece seems to come from the crankier, nuttier side of conservatism, in the Washington Post:

On any American street, or in any airport or mall, you see the same sad tableau: A 10-year-old boy is walking with his father, whose development was evidently arrested when he was that age, judging by his clothes. Father and son are dressed identically — running shoes, T-shirts. And jeans, always jeans. If mother is there, she, too, is draped in denim.

Writer Daniel Akst has noticed and has had a constructive conniption. He should be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has earned it by identifying an obnoxious misuse of freedom. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he has denounced denim, summoning Americans to soul-searching and repentance about the plague of that ubiquitous fabric, which is symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche.

It is, he says, a manifestation of “the modern trend toward undifferentiated dressing, in which we all strive to look equally shabby.” Denim reflects “our most nostalgic and destructive agrarian longings — the ones that prompted all those exurban McMansions now sliding off their manicured lawns and into foreclosure.” Jeans come prewashed and acid-treated to make them look like what they are not — authentic work clothes for horny-handed sons of toil and the soil. Denim on the bourgeoisie is, Akst says, the wardrobe equivalent of driving a Hummer to a Whole Foods store — discordant.

Long ago, when James Dean and Marlon Brando wore it, denim was, Akst says, “a symbol of youthful defiance.” Today, Silicon Valley billionaires are rebels without causes beyond poses, wearing jeans when introducing new products. Akst's summa contra denim is grand as far as it goes, but it only scratches the surface of this blight on Americans' surfaces. Denim is the infantile uniform of a nation in which entertainment frequently features childlike adults (“Seinfeld,” “Two and a Half Men”) and cartoons for adults (“King of the Hill”). Seventy-five percent of American “gamers” — people who play video games — are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote. In their undifferentiated dress, children and their childish parents become undifferentiated audiences for juvenilized movies (the six — so far — “Batman” adventures and “Indiana Jones and the Credit-Default Swaps,” coming soon to a cineplex near you). Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy's catechism of leveling — thou shalt not dress better than society's most slovenly.

more from The Walrus here.

Here Bullet
Brian Turner

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

And yet, despite this, when I recently listened to the band’s biggest-selling albums, 1999’s Significant Other and 2000’s Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, I experienced an unexpected sensation: pleasure. Ten years after the band’s disastrous Woodstock ’99 performance—the one that made them synonymous in the popular imagination with the brutes in the audience who brawled, torched, and (according to a chilling eyewitness report) gang-raped while the band played—it’s harder to hear in Limp Bizkit’s churning bars either the vital threat or the cause for despair they once seemed to contain. What’s revealed is a band at once more stupid, more fun, and more interesting than history has given it credit for. Heard today, Fred Durst is best appreciated as a complex comedic creation: An oblivious, incompetent, impotent, sad, tantrum-throwing, ultimately hilarious man-child, a guy who wears a backward cap to hide his bald spot and—get this—raps! Eternally aggrieved and eternally spiteful, Durst threatens to punch someone in the face, it seems, every other song—the knuckle sandwich is his emotional lingua franca. Sometimes his antagonists’ transgressions are left vague: “Hot Dog” is a 360-degree bile spray (“Fucked-up moms and fucked-up dads,/ a fucked-up cop with a fucked-up badge …”). Other times, Durst details his grievances in all their laughable banality: “I’m Broke” is an agonized, virulent screed … about cheapskates who borrow money and don’t repay it. “Don’t make me have to call a sniper,” Durst threatens one debtor. It’s an absurd, adolescent taunt that makes me chuckle every time I hear it—and I can’t imagine Durst doesn’t chuckle a bit at it, too.

more from Slate here.

On November 6, 1868, Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud, a day boy at the Collège de Charleville in north-eastern France, sat down at his desk, read the few lines of Horace that were printed on the examination paper, and, recognizing the ode, began to develop the theme in a neat hand: “Ver erat, et morbo Romae languebat inerti / Orbilius . . . ”. He had just turned fourteen and already had an enviable ability to banish distractions from his mind. He wrote in the first person, but as though he were writing about somebody else: a schoolboy, wearied by his master’s “assiduous ferule”, allows his mind and senses to be seduced by the burgeoning spring; he lies down on a grassy riverbank and is flown off by a flock of doves to be crowned with laurel and to have his brow inscribed by Apollo with words of flame, “Tu vates eris!” (“You shall be a poet!”). After three-and-a-half hours, Rimbaud handed in fifty-nine almost perfect Latin hexameters, which were deemed worthy of publication in the official Bulletin of the Académie de Douai.

more from the TLS here.

From Edge:

A Talk With AC Grayling

Because, apart from anything else, science is the greatest achievement of human history so far. I say that as a huge admirer of the Renaissance and Renaissance art, music and literature, but the world-transforming power of science and the tremendous insights that we've gained show that this is an enterprise, a wonderful collective enterprise, that is a great achievement of humanity. How are we going to make more people party to that? That's a pressing question for our century. Starting right from the very beginning of grade school, finding ways of making science more accessible, not frightening people away from mathematics and physics, not making them think that it's all too difficult, finding ways of drawing them in and getting them engaged — that's one.

Another big question for me, and I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about it, is the question of human rights and civil liberties in our world. We think of the Western liberal democracies as representing and embodying an achievement, which took off in the Enlightenment but by a process that began even before then of respecting individual autonomy, creating institutions which embody due process of law and respect individual rights, including rights to privacy, and which lead to a big margin of individual decision over important matters in life, like our relationships and where we live and the kinds of things that we do, protecting us from the power of the state, protecting us from the power of majorities who disagree with our own choices.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Agriculture has fueled the eruption of human civilization. Efficiently raised, affordable crops and livestock feed our growing population, and hunger has largely been banished from the developed world as a result. Yet there are reasons to believe that we are beginning to lose control of our great agricultural machine. The security of our food supply is at risk in ways more noxious than anyone had feared.

The trouble starts with crops. Orange groves in Florida and California are falling to fast-moving blights with no known cure. Cavendish-variety bananas the global standard, each genetically identical to the next will almost certainly be wiped out by emerging infectious disease, just as the Cavendish's predecessor was six decades ago. And as entomologists Diana Cox-Foster and Dennis vanEngelsdorp describe in “Saving the Honey bee,” on page 40, a mysterious affliction has ravaged honeybee colonies around the U.S., jeopardizing an agricultural system that is utterly dependent on farmed, traveling hives to pollinate vast swaths of monoculture. The ailment may be in part the result of the stresses imposed on hives by this uniquely modern system.

Plants and animals are not the only ones getting sick, however. New evidence indicates that our agricultural practices are leading directly to the spread of human disease.

More here.

Brad DeLong in The Week:

If you’re not satisfied with Paul Krugman or Nouriel Roubini as your guide to the current turmoil, you can always rely on E.M. Forster. It was Forster who grasped the essential drawback of the Internet long before anyone else, depicting, in his 1909 story “The Machine Stops” a world in which individuals communicate in isolation via machine. It turns out he’s pretty good on 21st-century financial crises, too, mostly because the underlying processes remain so similar to those of a financial crisis he studied. Only the scale has changed.

Forster’s great-aunt Marianne Thornton helped raise him after his father's death, leaving him 8,000 pounds upon her death, when Forster was 8. That legacy gave him the financial cushion to become a writer. So he wrote Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography 1797-1887, stringing her voluminous letters together with scene-setting prose. As it happens, the fortunes of the Thornton family turn on history’s first episode of successful central banking: the Bank of England's intervention in the 1825 financial crisis.

In the last years of the boom, numerous artists came to the fore who have their aesthetic heads up the aesthetic asses of Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Cady Noland, and Christopher Wool. They make punkish black-and-white art and ad hoc arrangements of disheveled stuff, architectural fragments, and Xeroxed photos. This art deals in received ideas about appropriation, conceptualism, and institutional critique. It’s a cool school, admired by jargon-wielding academics who write barely readable rhetoric explaining why looking at next to nothing is good for you. Many of these artists have sold a lot of work, and most will be part of a lost generation. They thought they were playing the system; it turned out that they were themselves being played. The New Museum’s flawed but tantalizing new triennial, “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” puts this kind of art behind us and points to what might lie beyond that recycling machine.

more from New York Magazine here.

Walter Benjamin once said that every great work dissolves a genre or founds a new one. But is it only masterpieces that have a monopoly on novelty? What if a writer had written several works that rose to Benjamin’s high definition, not all great, perhaps, but so different from one another, so peculiar to their author, and so inimitable that each founded its own, immediately self-dissolving genre? The English writer Geoff Dyer delights in producing books that are unique, like keys. There is nothing anywhere like Dyer’s semi-fictional rhapsody about jazz, “But Beautiful,” or his book about the First World War, “The Missing of the Somme,” or his autobiographical essay about D. H. Lawrence, “Out of Sheer Rage,” or his essayistic travelogue “Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.” You can spot Dyer’s antecedents and influences—Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, Thomas Bernhard, Milan Kundera, John Berger, Martin Amis—but not his literary children, because his work is so restlessly various that it moves somewhere else before it can gather a family. He combines fiction, autobiography, travel writing, cultural criticism, literary theory, and a kind of comic English whining. The result ought to be a mutant mulch but is almost always a louche and canny delight.

more from The New Yorker here.

In 1923 Samuel Barclay Beckett, aged seventeen, was admitted to Trinity College, Dublin, to study Romance languages. He proved an exceptional student, and was taken under the wing of Thomas Rudmose-Brown, professor of French, who did all he could to advance the young man’s career, securing for him on graduation first a visiting lectureship at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, then a position back at Trinity College. After a year and a half at Trinity, performing what he called the “grotesque comedy of lecturing,” Beckett resigned and fled back to Paris. Yet even after this letdown, Rudmose-Brown did not give up on his protégé. As late as 1937 he was still trying to nudge Beckett back into the academy, persuading him to apply for a lectureship in Italian at the University of Cape Town. “I may say without exaggeration,” he wrote in a supporting letter, “that as well as possessing a sound academic knowledge of the Italian, French and German languages, [Mr Beckett] has remarkable creative faculty.” In a postscript he added: “Mr Beckett has an adequate knowledge of Provençal, ancient and modern.”

more from the NYRB here.