Issac Chotiner in The New York Times:

In the spring of 1997, the literary quarterly Granta published an issue devoted to India’s Golden Jubilee. The tone was cautious but celebratory: on the cover, the country’s name was printed in bright red letters, followed by an exclamation point. Fifty years after partition, an independent India was rapidly establishing itself as an international power. The issue, which consisted largely of contributions from native Indians writing in English, was a testament both to the country’s extraordinary intellectual and artistic richness, and to one of the few legacies of British colonialism that could be unequivocally celebrated by readers in South Asia and the West: a common language. Seventeen years after Salman Rushdie’s shot across the bow with “Midnight’s Children,” a new generation of Indian writers was, in Granta’s words, “matching India’s new vibrancy with their own.”

…

Now, Granta has assembled another well-timed issue devoted to the subcontinent, but this time the subject is Pakistan, partition’s other child.

More here.

The Laws of Probability in Levittown

I've been smoking so much pot lately,
I figure out what my poems are going to do
before I write them, which means when I finally
sit down in front of the typewriter . . . well . . . you know . . .

I moved back in with my parents,
and I'm getting really good at watching TV.
Soon as I saw the housewife last night on Inevitable Justice,
I knew her husband was the killer and I told her so and I was right.

Remember whenever Jamie Lee Curtis would come on
TV and we'd yell, Hermaphrodite! all happy? I maintain
her father, Tony, is an American treasure, and have prepared a mental
list of examples why, so should we happen to meet again, my shit's backed up.

There were too many
therapists in the city—97% of all therapists
are certifiable ding-dongs by nature, which is fine
if you live in Platteville, Nebraska, where there's only

like three therapists in the whole town
(the odds are in your favor), but if ten thousand
therapists are lurching around the streets, chances are
one thousand will be 100% batshit nuts.

I had a choice between watching
Robert Frost talking about his back yard
on Large American Voices and Farrah Fawcett on True Hollywierd.
I chose Farrah, because I knew what was going to happen, and I was right.

Here's something I've been trying
to work in: 10 rations = 1 decoration.
What do you think? 10 monologues = 5 dialogues,
10 millipedes = 1 centipede, .000001 fish = 1 microfiche . . .

I've got a million of those.
I wrote them down, back when I was
writing things down. But I've been thinking I should
tip the Domino's kid more than a buck on 14. Should I?

by Jennifer L. Knox
from the Best American Poetry – 2006

For all the ground and pound, for all the down-in-the-trenches dirtiness of the New York Jets, they are essentially a northern team. They like to swarm in the clear, crisp air of an autumn night, like bats feasting on the insects at twilight. Rex Ryan loves nothing more than the quick brutality of a single blitzer, unimpeded on the way to the quarterback, ending a play before it ever started. In short, the New York Jets are not a swamp team. The difficulty in going to Miami is thus a difficulty of geologic eras. It is a Cenozoic Era team (The Jets) traveling back in space and time in order to do battle with a Mesozoic Era team (The Dolphins). Or it is air (Jets) versus water (Dolphins)? Or it is man versus dinosaur? Sometimes, when the Miami Dolphins go in to their wildcat offense and all hell breaks loose as a pocket of running-backs-cum-quarterbacks dash madly into the scrum I am sure that I’m watching the dinosaurs play. Somehow, the New York Jets rose above the ferns and the algae-clogged water and the reptilian scales. Perhaps it was because they had one of the dinosaurs on their own team, Jason Taylor, a man who, after twelve long seasons in Miami’s Mesozoic lost world, had become a Jet in the off-season. Who knows what kind of strange physiological changes had to occur for this transformation to become reality? Probably, he went through a summer’s agony, writhing and squirming in a football-shaped egg with all the other new Jets while the necessary changes were wrought upon them.

more from me at The Owls here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

I find Berlin overwhelming. I experience the city as one giant gaping wound, a trauma. You are walking down the street and there, at your feet, are two cobblestones that have been replaced with tiny memorials to people once living there, who were shipped off to Auschwitz and killed. Here's a memorial to Peter Fechter, the East German kid who tried to get over the Wall and was shot dead by border guards. Here are bullet holes in the side of a building from street-to-street fighting that doesn't seem all that long ago. Here's the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church far in the former West of the city, bombed to smithereens by an Allied air raid and left that way as a memorial. See the empty hole where the rose window once stood? Is there an emptier hole, a more desolate monument to destruction, in any city on the planet?

Every street in Berlin is ghosted. Every memorial is plastered in 20 layers of tragedy, heroism, and shame. To spend time in Berlin right now, to live here, takes a skill for living in the moment, for bracketing the past, that I do not sufficiently possess. I walk around the city in a daze, waiting for the next historical shock, cringing at the prospect of what memorial might be waiting for me around the next corner. I admit, of course, that it is possible to experience the city of Berlin in a less traumatized way. People do it all the time. Good people. Just not me.

Walking around Berlin, I simply did not feel a great need for art. When I poked my head from the FischGrätenMelkStand installation and gazed out at the sights of Berlin, the installation couldn't measure up to the meaning and impact that was being achieved on every street and in every square. Reality was a better and more meaningful work, here in Berlin, than anything contrived by the cleverest of artists.

More here.

Jake Whitney interviews Andrew Bacevich in Guernica:

Sacrifice. It’s a word Andrew Bacevich uses when discussing U.S. national security policy. While he pays respect to the tiny percentage of Americans who currently fight our wars, he also laments that more Americans don’t help shoulder those wars, and decries our politicians for having stopped asking anything of the American people. Bacevich, though, knows what it means to sacrifice. A retired U.S. Army colonel, Bacevich served in post-war Germany, fought in Vietnam, and taught at West Point. In 2007, he lost his twenty-seven-year-old son, Andrew, Jr., in Iraq. While Bacevich refuses to speak about this in interviews (“what is private ought to remain private”), one can surmise that the tragedy was compounded by Bacevich’s profound opposition to the war. Indeed, Bacevich fundamentally disagrees not only with current U.S. militarism in the Middle East but with the unwieldy behemoth that the American national security state has become.

Bacevich’s opposition, however, was not born of a father’s anger over a lost son. It is the opposition of a scholar, teacher, and author who has spent nearly half his life studying American foreign policy and seeing, sometimes from the inside, its uneven, often terrible results. It is an opposition that gathered particular urgency after 9/11, and since then Bacevich has proved an unrelenting and increasingly influential critic of U.S. national security policy. As Bacevich views it, that policy continues to follow a playbook that was penned sixty years ago and no longer makes sense, if it ever did. Blind adherence to this playbook has resulted in our current predicament: 370,000 troops stationed in more than thirty-five countries, a Middle Eastern war that looks increasingly like a quagmire, a defense budget that is bankrupting the country, and, worst of all, a political system that has become little more than theater.

More here.

Moon Poem

How did I lose track of the moon?
Living as I do in a place with no streetlights,
a place dark as the inside of my eyelids,
black as the bottom of a burnt pot.

You used to call me, and I'd run out to see the full
moon, a silver hubcap hovering at the top of the hill,
or waning, a wedge of melon ripe as any in the field.

Some nights I'd wake on my own, my bed lit white
and wonder what it was my Swedish ancestors feared
when they said, “Don't let the moon shine on you
while you're sleeping.”

If I rise then, go into the kitchen for a glass of water,
the moon follows and I realize the danger –
I might wander off looking for something I lost,
something I loved, something that won't
come around again.

Call me melancholy.
I've been called worse.
The moon knows life leans
and fattens, one part joy
two parts loss, and our job
is to make it come out even.

Maybe it was just a long month of cloud cover.
Maybe it was because your house burned down
and you moved. Or maybe I just forgot
how much I needed to see it –
pizza pan, squashed balloon,
thin edge of a dime,
spinning.

by Trish Crapo
from 5-Minute Pieces;
Arms Library Reading Series, 1998

From MSNBC:

British physicist Stephen Hawking may claim that extra dimensions provide the key to understanding the “grand design” of the universe, but it's Chinese-American mathematician Shing-Tung Yau who actually figured out how those extra dimensions work.

In his new book, “The Shape of Inner Space,” Yau and his co-author, Steve Nadis, touch upon the work that led to the discovery of theoretical “Calabi-Yau spaces” — and the cosmic implications of multidimensional geometry. The typical representation of a Calabi-Yau space looks like twisted web of a crumpled-up piece of paper. There's something elegant about its look — in fact, Calabi-Yau paperweights were voted the most popular gewgaw for holiday giving in last year's Cosmic Log Geek Gift Guide contest. But these shapes aren't just abstract art: String theorists believe that every single point in our universe is actually a compactified Calabi-Yau space in six dimensions.

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in Salon:

Last week, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights released a comprehensive report detailing its findings regarding the May, 2010, Israeli attack on the six-ship flotilla attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Israel-blockaded Gaza. The report has been largely ignored in the American media despite the fact (or, more accurately: because) it found that much of the Israeli force used “was unnecessary, disproportionate, excessive and inappropriate and resulted in the wholly avoidable killing and maiming of a large number of civilian passengers”; that “at least six of the killings can be characterized as extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions“; and that Israel violated numerous international human rights conventions, including the Fourth Geneva Conventions (see p. 38, para. 172).

Even more striking in terms of U.S. media and government silence on this report is the fact that one of the victims of the worst Israeli violations was a 19-year-old American citizen.

More here. And see also “What You Get for Not Rocketing Israel” by Sam Sedaei in The Huffington Post:

Throughout its short life, Israel has engaged in many actions that the world democracies have deemed dubious and inconsistent with Israel's claim to be “the only democracy in the Middle East.” One can mention the Israeli wall in the West Bank, Wars on Lebanon and Gaza, a choking and indiscriminate blockade on the citizens of Gaza, ethnic discrimination against Arabs and attack on and killing of a number of individuals on board a Turkish flotilla in international waters just over the past few years alone. Israel has consistently countered condemnations and repeated U.N. Security Council resolutions denouncing its actions with one argument: those actions are necessary because of the actions of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza has refused to accept the existence of Israel and repeatedly fired rockets into Israel.

So is that Israeli claim true? Are Israel's actions truly a reaction to hostilities against its existence and security? Let's look at this claim in the context of the ongoing negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis.

More here. [Thanks to Nikolai Nikola for both items.]

James Davidson in the London Review of Books:

In the early 1800s, nearly 25 per cent of all females in the United Kingdom were called Mary. If you add to these many Marys the crushing numbers of Elizabeths, Sarahs, Janes and variform Anns (Nancys, Nans and Hannahs), you would have the Christian names of something close to 80 per cent of the female population. There was a similar pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William.

Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and Dorothy, soon to be supplemented by endless Geoffreys. This remarkable efflorescence has been described as a ‘personalisation’ of names, although since in this period the ‘proper’ name one gave to registrars and census enumerators might very well be supplemented by a highly personalised nickname – Old Tom, Long Tom, Short Tom, or even, according to Rev. Alfred Easther, a 19th-century Yorkshire dialectologist, Wantem, Blackcop and Muddlinpin – it might better be described as an outbreak of name-consumerism, as parents increasingly invested their energies in baptismal choice.

Children were no longer necessarily named after parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Indeed, parents began to choose names and forms of names simply because they liked them or because they reminded them of someone they liked, in life, in fiction or in a Shakespeare comedy: Olivia, for example.

More here.

Nadeem F. Paracha in Dawn:

Islamic Fundamentalism:

Though usually attributed to the beliefs of modern-day extremist movements in Islam, Islamic Fundamentalism (in the political context), is basically a firm belief in the theological musings of ancient Islamic jurists and scholars.

Islamic Fundamentalists all agree with Imam Ghazali’s dictum (in the twelfth century), that the ‘gates of ijtihad (rational debate) in Islam are now closed.’

After about three hundred years of open debate in the Islamic world between conservatives and the rationalists (Mu’tazilites), Ghazali insisted that a perfect synthesis (between the two) had been reached and that Islam’s social and spiritual philosophy had achieved completion.

The Mu’tazilites’ influence began declining during the rule of the ninth Abbasid caliph, Al-Muttawakkil, and the conservatives, who had ferociously debated with the rationalists, began their ascendance.

Modern-day Islamic Fundamentalism is rooted in this bygone intellectual triumph of the conservatives. Nevertheless, Islamic Fundamentalism never did attempt to form a so-called ‘Islamic state.’ Islamic Fundamentalists in the shape of scholars (ulema) and clergymen (maulvis and imams), mostly worked as advisers to caliphs and kings, or in the mosques. They were only interested in advocating Islamic laws, but never articulated a political plan that would carry these laws.

More here.

On July 18 1610, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, feverish, bedraggled, frightful to behold with knife wounds to his face, died alone in Porto Ercole. He was 38 years old and was buried in an unmarked grave. Wanted for murder, he had been trying to reach Rome from exile in Naples, but was thrown into jail en route and had lost track of the paintings which he hoped might secure a papal pardon. The most notable of these was his gory “David with the Head of Goliath”, full of dread, in which he depicted himself as the decapitated Philistine. The paintings survived and their intense naturalism and dynamic effects of light and shade influenced generations, but Caravaggio as a personality dropped from historical view. No letter, drawing, or document penned by him remains; the sole records in which he appears are those kept by police, along with scant references by contemporaries confirming him as a brilliant troublemaker. “There is also a Michelangelo da Caravaggio who is doing extraordinary things in Rome,” the Dutch painter-poet Karel van Mander noted in 1603. “He does not devote himself continually to study, but after a fortnight’s work will swagger about a month or two with a sword at his side and a servant following him … ever ready to engage in a fight or an argument, so that it is most awkward to get along with him. Despite this, his painting is beyond dispute.” This fourth centenary of Caravaggio’s death is the first to be celebrated.

more from Jackie Wullschlager at the FT here. My own little reflection on Caravaggio here.

It’s Wednesday morning, oops, afternoon, and the deadline for this month’s column is sort of breathing down my neck, but I’m actually not that worried about writing this review of Charles Yu’s time-travel novel, “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” (Pantheon: 240 pp., $24), because reading the book has made me understand that my review already exists in the future. It’s really not a problem! I just need to get the future Ed Park (the impossibly relaxed one, the one who’s completed the punishing labor of writing this column and is enjoying his traditional celebratory beverage) to step out of one of Yu’s weirdly convincing time machines and hand the piece to me. Or maybe he can just e-mail it. Because one thing I have to be careful not to do is panic at the sight of my future self and shoot him in the stomach, which is what Yu’s narrator does to his future self.

more from Ed Park at the LAT here.

George Washington’s corpse was scarcely a month in its grave when an enterprising minister from Maryland named Mason Locke Weems made a pitch to a Philadelphia publisher. “I’ve got something to whisper in your lug,” Weems wrote in January 1800. “Washington, you know is gone! Millions are gaping to read something about him. . . . My plan! I give his history, sufficiently minute” and “go on to show that his unparalleled rise & elevation were due to his Great Virtues.” Weems was on to something. His sentimental and often fictional biography became a best seller, the first in a seemingly endless stream of studies of the man who led the Continental Army to victory in the American War for Independence and who as the first president of the United States did more than anyone else to establish the legitimacy of a national government merely outlined in the Constitution of 1787. Today, books about Washington continue to appear at such an astonishing rate that the publication of Ron Chernow’s prompts the inevitable question: Why another one?

more from Andrew Cayton at the NYT here.

Daniel Barenboim interviewed by Clemency Burton-Hill, over at Eurozine:

Clemency Burton-Hill: One of my strongest memories of rehearsing with you and the West-Eastern Divan is a moment when you reminded the members of the orchestra that every single one of their governments would stop them from being there if they could, and that what they were doing was therefore very brave. For all the adulation and acclaim that the Divan garners around the world, it strikes me that it is, essentially, a censored orchestra.

Daniel Barenboim: Yes, you're probably right. The Divan is not acceptable to any of the countries represented by its members. We can't play in any Arab countries except the Emirates, nor in Israel. The Israelis don't understand why it is even necessary to make the gesture. And the Arab world mostly sees the Divan as a way of normalisation, in the sense of accepting Israel, and all the problems that involves.

C. B.-H.: So the fact that those kids come together to make music with each other every year, in the face of governments who would silence them and despite recriminations from their friends and family at home, feels like something of a defiant act.

D. B.: It is. And you know, I believe more and more that it is up to individuals – or minorities – to express things which are not acceptable to the majority. Because there is always a special angle that an individual or a minority can have. And maybe the majority will eventually follow, but you cannot start a new idea that is going to change things with the blessing of the majority.

C. B.-H.: How important is it that the orchestra be allowed to make music freely in the Middle East?

D. B.: I think the full dimensions of the Divan will only be achieved when we are able to play in Tel Aviv, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, because that is really what it is all about. On the other hand, if the conflict was resolved there would hardly be a need for the Divan. And so it is a bit of a contradiction in terms. The Divan came into existence and continues to develop because of the conflict, and it has not yet been fully able to push through its idea of accepting the narrative of the other, the point of view of the other. For that you need a yearning voice for justice and for compassion, from both sides. And the Israelis as a majority I don't think have a compassion for the rights of the Palestinians, otherwise they wouldn't be occupying the territories for so many years and they wouldn't blockade Gaza.

Eric Michael Johnson in Psychology Today:

Primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (author of The Woman That Never Evolved, Mother Nature, as well as her latest book Mothers and Others) is one of the leading experts on polygynous mating systems in primates. As she explained to me in our recent correspondence there are several important considerations that have been left out of this story. The most important is the kind of sample bias I referred to earlier if we were to make conclusions about Agatha Christie's work based only on her final novel. The DNA evidence may be a record of the human past, but how far into the past does it actually go? As Hrdy explained:

Keep in mind that in terms of interpreting such genetic evidence we are of necessity confined to a fairly recent time depth (and remember, by “recent” someone like me means the last 10,000 years or so). For this time period multiple lines of evidence do indeed suggest that humans were moderately to extremely polygynous and that women were moving between groups more than men were.

However, humans have been around for far longer than 10,000 years, with conservative estimates placing the emergence of modern Homo sapiens at about 200,000 years ago. A genetic record extending back 10,000 years is remarkable, but it's essentially adding only three more novels to our existing timeline. There is also something very important to consider that dramatically influenced human behavior within the last 10,000 years: the invention of agriculture. Prior to about 12,000 years ago all humans were hunter-gatherers and lived a migratory existence. With the advent of farming some human societies began to remain sedentary for the first time in our history. This change had serious impacts on human life and behavior. Just as Alzheimer's dramatically altered the content of Agatha Christie's work, so agriculture radically transformed human society and, by consequence, sexual behavior.

Hrdy argues that there was a major disruption in human residence patterns as a result of this “agricultural revolution.” In small bands of modern day hunter-gatherers there is a mixture of what anthropologists call matrilocal and patrilocal residence, the practice of women or men to stay within the community they're born into while the other migrates between communities. However, recent research has shown that hunter-gatherer societies today emphasize matrilocal (or bilocal) residence while fewer than 25% are considered patrilocal. This is in stark contrast to the larger scale agricultural societies where an estimated 70% are patrilocal

Via Razib Khan, who has some interesting comments on the issue.

From The Guardian:

For those who don't know the story, Dostoevsky's first novel Poor Folk was passed before publication to a legendary critic/blowhard called Vissarion Belinsky who promptly declared that Dostoevsky was the heir to Gogol. This was nonsense: Poor Folk is a mawkish tale that would have been forgotten had the same author not also written Crime and Punishment et al. Still, the 24-year-old Fedya D was suddenly feted everywhere as the new literary genius of St Petersburg. It went to his head and he soon became insufferable, alienating all his new literary “friends”, who revenged themselves when he published his second novel, The Double. Not merely trashed, the book was denounced. Dostoevsky became a bad joke.

What I didn't know until now was the length of time between his moment of glory and terrible downfall. Authors then wrote much more quickly than they do today, and some of those impossibly fat 19th-century mega-books were composed in a quarter of the time it takes Milan Kundera to crank out a boring late novella. Bearing that in mind, take a guess: how long did Fedya D last as a cause celebre? A year? Nine months? Six? Three? The correct answer is: 15 days. That's right. Poor Folk was published on 15 January 1846; The Double followed on 30 January. Cue the reputation apocalypse. Now that has to be some kind of record. Thirteen years later he did emerge from exile to score a comeback with his novel-memoir House of the Dead, but according to Mochulsky, Dostoevsky never recovered his confidence. Even as he was writing some of the greatest books in world literature he remained consumed with anxiety that he had not yet “established his reputation”.

More here.