In April, 1951, Richard Yates sailed from New York to Paris. He had been there twice before, as a child and, later, as a soldier, but for him, as for so many American writers, it was less a place than a laurelled idea—the silvery and careless city of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Careless, but a literary workshop, too: Yates said that he was determined to produce short stories there “at the rate of about one a month.” Then twenty-five years old, he was beginning an indenture that would last until his death, in 1992. Around the compulsion of writing he shaped everything else. There were two other compulsions, smoking and drinking, but they only killed him, while writing plainly kept him alive. (He was an alcoholic, but he rarely wrote while drunk.) He lived in New York, in Iowa, in Los Angeles, in Boston, and, finally, in Alabama, yet his homes were identical in their shabby discipline of neglect. In each there was a table for writing, a circle of crushed cockroaches around the desk chair, curtains made colorless by cigarette smoke, a few books, and nothing much in the kitchen but coffee, bourbon, and beer. Friends and colleagues found these accommodations appallingly bleak; for Yates they were accommodations for writing.

more from The New Yorker here.

LORRAINE ADAMS reviews The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones in The New York Times:

Sherry Jones, a Montana and Idaho correspondent for the Bureau of National Affairs, a specialty news service covering legislative and regulatory issues, has written a novel from the point of view of Muhammad’s third and youngest wife, A’isha. Most accounts agree that she was 6 at their engagement, 9 at their wedding and 14 when publicly accused of adultery. The novel’s story line coincides with a pivotal time in Islamic history — the 10 years beginning with Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina in A.D. 622 and ending with his death at age 62. His actions during that period have also been seized upon by Western commentators and poets as proof of Muhammad’s unmanageable sexual appetite and self-serving declaration of divine revelation. Among the most contested criticisms of Muhammad are his taking of many more than the four wives he decreed as the limit for other men and his edict, supposedly inspired by Allah, requiring his wives to be placed behind a curtain, the basis for the veiling of Muslim women. Both matters are fictionalized in Jones’s novel, which was scheduled to be published by the Random House imprint Ballantine until controversy intervened.

The most authoritative contemporary English-language account of A’isha — “Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of A’isha Bint Abi Bakr” — is not listed as one of Jones’s sources. But its author, Denise Spellberg, played a role in Random House’s decision to abandon the book.

More here.

Arundhati Roy in The Guardian:

We've forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching “India's 9/11”. Like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we're expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it's all been said and done before. As tension in the region builds, US Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that if it didn't act fast to arrest the “Bad Guys” he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on “terrorist camps” in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India's 9/11. But November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

It's odd how in the last week of November thousands of people in Kashmir supervised by thousands of Indian troops lined up to cast their vote, while the richest quarters of India's richest city ended up looking like war-torn Kupwara – one of Kashmir's most ravaged districts. The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian towns and cities this year. Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur and Malegaon have all seen serial bomb blasts in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded. If the police are right about the people they have arrested as suspects, both Hindu and Muslim, all Indian nationals, it obviously indicates that something's going very badly wrong in this country.

More here.

Merit Award: Majed Sultan Ali, Kuwait City, Kuwait
Nikon Coolpix Digital Camera and a Bogen National Geographic Prize Package

Majed Sultan Ali, a computer engineer, photographed a wild cat in Kuwait's Subah reserve. Noticing flying ants in the area, he waited for one to enter the frame before shooting. (Nikon D300 camera, Nikkor 200-400 mm Vr lens at 400 mm, exposure at 1/640 second, f/5.6, ISO 320)

Again this year, Traveler partnered with Photo District News on the ultimate travel-photo contest. More than 4,000 amateur shutterbugs entered 14,647 images in our World in Focus competition.

More here. [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

Martti Ahtisaari's Nobel Peace Prize Lecture:

Peace is a question of will. All conflicts can be settled, and there are no excuses for allowing them to become eternal. It is simply intolerable that violent conflicts defy resolution for decades causing immeasurable human suffering, and preventing economic and social development. The passivity and impotence of the international community make it more difficult for us to place our faith in jointly built security structures. Despite the many challenges, even the most intractable conflicts can be resolved if the parties involved and the international community join forces and work together for a common aim. The United Nations provides the right framework for international peace efforts and solutions to global problems. However, we are all aware of the constraints of the United Nations and of the tendency of the member states to give it demanding assignments without providing adequate resources and political support. It is important that the UN member states work resolutely to strengthen the world organization. We cannot afford to lose the UN.

In a conflict, one party can always claim victory, but building peace must involve everybody: the weak and the powerful, the victors and the vanquished, men and women, young and old. However, peace negotiations are often conducted by a small elite. In the future we must be better able to achieve a broader participation in peace processes. Particularly, there is a need to ensure the engagement of women in all stages of a peace process.

Peace processes and the agreements resulting from them end the violence. But the real work only starts after a peace agreement has been concluded. The agreements reached have to be implemented. Social and political change does not happen overnight, and the reconstruction and establishment of democracy demand patience. That requires a comprehensive approach to peacebuilding, and support for civil society.

More here.

James Ryerson in the New York Times Magazine:

With the death of David Foster Wallace, the author of “Infinite Jest,” who took his own life on Sept. 12, the world of contemporary American fiction lost its most intellectually ambitious writer. Like his peers Richard Powers and William T. Vollmann, Wallace wrote big, brainy novels that were encyclopedically packed with information and animated by arcane ideas. In nonfiction essays, he tackled a daunting range of highbrow topics, including lexicography, poststructuralist literary theory and the science, ethics and epistemology of lobster pain. He wrote a book on the history and philosophy of the mathematics of infinity. Even his signature stylistic device — the extensive use of footnotes and endnotes — was a kind of scholarly homage.

But Wallace was also wary of ideas. He was perpetually on guard against the ways in which abstract thinking (especially thinking about your own thinking) can draw you away from something more genuine and real. To read his acutely self-conscious, dialectically fevered writing was often to witness the agony of cognition: how the twists and turns of thought can both hold out the promise of true understanding and become a danger to it. Wallace was especially concerned that certain theoretical paradigms — the cerebral aestheticism of modernism, the clever trickery of postmodernism — too casually dispense with what he once called “the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community.” He called for a more forthright, engaged treatment of these basic truths. Yet he himself attended to them with his own fractured, often-esoteric methods. It was a defining tension: the very conceptual tools with which he pursued life’s most desperate questions threatened to keep him forever at a distance from the connections he struggled to make.

More here. [Thanks to Alex Star.]

An interview with Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy conducted by Cristina Otten and originally published in German in Focus Magazin:

Tensions between Pakistan and India have been growing after the Mumbai attacks. Are we close to a military escalation?

In spite of vociferous demands by the Indian public, Manmohan Singh’s government has withstood the pressure to conduct crossborder strikes into Pakistan. Correspondingly, in spite of the bitter criticism by Islamic parties, Pakistan’s government has taken some action against the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT), the jihadist organization that is quite probably behind the attacks. For now, the tension has eased somewhat but another attack could push India over the fence.

What makes the LeT so different from other militant groups? Is Pakistan really moving against it?

LeT, one of the largest militant groups in Pakistan, was established over 15 years ago. It had the full support of the Pakistani military and Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) for over a decade because it focussed upon fighting Indian rule in Muslim Kashmir. Today it is one of the very few extremist groups left that does not attack the Pakistani army and state; in contrast almost all others have turned into mortal enemies. We now hear that a few members of LeT, who were named by India, have been arrested. Time will tell whether this was a serious move, or if this was a ruse to ease the enormous pressure against Pakistan. If serious, then the Army and ISI will have earned the bitter enmity of yet another former ally. They are afraid of a repeat of their experience with Jaish-e-Muhammad, a formerly supported Islamic militant group that now is responsible for extreme brutalities, including torture and decapitations, of Pakistani soldiers captured in FATA. It’s a nightmarish situation for the Pakistan Army.

Read more »

So, you might reasonably ask, what is it about Bettie Page? Why does her image still capture the imagination, while legions of her cohorts in the nudie modeling trade could barely sell a publicity still to save their pasties? Bettie’s fans tend to answer that question with the naughty-but-nice paradox. For Karen Essex and James L. Swanson, Bettie Page “embodied the stereotypical wholesomeness of the Fifties and the hidden sexuality straining beneath the surface…. Her fresh-faced beauty was the perfect camouflage for what lurked beneath her veneer–the exotic, whip-snapping dark angel. In Bettie Page, forbidden longings were made safe by an ideal American girl.” For Steve Sullivan, the author of a methodically researched history of the pin-up called Va Va Voom!, there’s a “fascinating duality” in Bettie’s photographs, “which run the gamut from sunny innocence to sinister darkness.” Truth is, though, that’s a gamut run rather often in pornography. The appeal of the sweet-faced girl with the bod for sin is as old as the oldest dirty postcard, and as common as guilt…Still, it can’t entirely explain her popularity, particularly today. To account for it, we have to go further afield–into the realm of nostalgia and the yearning for a vanished sense of the illicit, a sense of the illicit that was the other side of a sense of the innocent. We could do worse, though, than to start with her smile.

more from a 1997 TNR piece here. youtube bettie page here.

Although Venetian is routinely referred to as a “dialetto” in Italy, this has become misleading in that it is now widely and unthinkingly interpreted as implying that Venetian is a dialect of Italian. In fact Venetian predates Italian by hundreds of years. It grew naturally and autonomously out of the late Latin spoken in the north-east of the peninsula. Italian, on the other hand, was an artifically created language, based primarily on vernacular Tuscan and the works of Tuscan writers, notably Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio, and forged by scholars and humanists of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in an attempt to found a national language, written and spoken, for the entire population of the yet to be unified country. More or less universal knowledge of Italian was only achieved in the second half of the twentieth century. The robustness of Venetian in the face of the exclusive use of Italian in the media, education system, bureaucracy and the Church, and in a country where other “dialects” are in more rapid decline, is remarkable.

more from the TLS here.

Behind the debate over remaking U.S. financial policy will be a debate over who’s to blame. It’s crucial to get the history right, writes a Nobel-laureate economist, identifying five key mistakes—under Reagan, Clinton, and Bush II—and one national delusion.

Joseph E. Stiglitz in Vanity Fair:

There will come a moment when the most urgent threats posed by the credit crisis have eased and the larger task before us will be to chart a direction for the economic steps ahead. This will be a dangerous moment. Behind the debates over future policy is a debate over history—a debate over the causes of our current situation. The battle for the past will determine the battle for the present. So it’s crucial to get the history straight.

What were the critical decisions that led to the crisis? Mistakes were made at every fork in the road—we had what engineers call a “system failure,” when not a single decision but a cascade of decisions produce a tragic result. Let’s look at five key moments.

No. 1: Firing the Chairman

In 1987 the Reagan administration decided to remove Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and appoint Alan Greenspan in his place. Volcker had done what central bankers are supposed to do. On his watch, inflation had been brought down from more than 11 percent to under 4 percent. In the world of central banking, that should have earned him a grade of A+++ and assured his re-appointment. But Volcker also understood that financial markets need to be regulated. Reagan wanted someone who did not believe any such thing, and he found him in a devotee of the objectivist philosopher and free-market zealot Ayn Rand.

Greenspan played a double role. The Fed controls the money spigot, and in the early years of this decade, he turned it on full force. But the Fed is also a regulator. If you appoint an anti-regulator as your enforcer, you know what kind of enforcement you’ll get. A flood of liquidity combined with the failed levees of regulation proved disastrous.

More here.

///
To Tanya on my Sixtieth Birthday
Wendell Berry

What wonder have you done to me?
In binding love you set me free.
These sixty years the wonder prove:
I bring you aged a young man's love.
.

Finally. Why doesn't Obama just drop this sleazy woman and move on? She claims that at the time she was the National Coordinator of the VHP America, the Gujrat massacres had not yet occured, and she was only raising funds for earthquake victims for them (as if she couldn't have worked for a less heinous organization, like the Red Cross). Well, did she bother to say a word condemning them and the VHP's undisputed role in them after the Gujrat killings, or distance herself from her association with the VHP? Never. What she did is continue to address youth conferences associated with the VHP (which Martha Nussbaum has described as, “possibly the most successful fascist movement in any contemporary democracy”) and the RSS. Imagine the uproar if someone said, “Oh, I was just helping with humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza as National Coordinator of Hamas's US wing. I am so against violence!” She keeps whining that questioning her ties to fascist parties is just “guilt by association” just the way Obama was smeared by allegations of ties to Bill Ayers. This is ludicrous. Barack Obama was not the National Coordinator of a fascist hate group implicated in large scale massacres (of thousands of people). The analogy could not be more false. It will be a terrible mistake if Obama appoints her to his administration. Her judgment as well as her character are extremely suspect.

This is Gautham Nagesh in the National Journal:

The controversy has been gathering steam in the Indian press and South Asian blogosphere for weeks now, but it went mainstream on Thursday when former GOP Senator Rick Santorum published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer questioning the appointment of Shah to the transition team — prompting a Lost In Transition post Friday.

Shah, a Google executive who previously worked for Goldman Sachs and served as a Treasury official in the Clinton years, was appointed to the Obama transition team in November and has since been tapped to be part of the three-person team to develop technology policy. She is also reportedly being considered for Secretary of Energy.

However, her appointment to the administration has drawn strong reactions from the South Asian community. While many prominent Indian-Americans have stood behind Shah, others have raised doubts about her past. Dr. Shaikh Ubaid is part of a group including several Muslim and Sikh associations and dozens of college professors that sent letters to both Shah and President-elect Obama, requesting further information on Shah's past associations.

“When she was appointed, it was initially a proud moment for us, her being an Indian-American,” said Ubaid in an interview given before Shah's latest statement. However, the reports regarding Shah's past ties to the VHP gave Ubaid and others a cause for concern.

More here. [Thanks to Manas Shaikh.]

From The Guardian:

Milton was brought up by his father “while yet a little child for the study of humane letters”. Not for him the rough and tumble of Shakespeare's Stratford or the London stage. A fun-averse bookworm at Cambridge, at 23 he was already telling the world that his writing was the will of heaven: “All is, if I have grace to use it so/ As ever in my great Task-Master's eye.”

We prefer to like our poets, and Milton was a bore and a prig. Even the youthfulness of the two early poems, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, has a ponderous religiosity. The play, Comus, is a pastoral-mythical tract about a son of Bacchus and Circe that is near unplayable today. Lycidas, supposedly an “honest shepherd”, is an elegy on a dead friend, a mix of pagan myths and Puritan Christianity. The least we owe it is, “Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new”, even if most people say fields for woods. Milton was instantly famous. He was lionised in Italy, where he wrote verses in Latin and Italian and was eulogised in return. He met Grotius and Galileo, scholars and philosophers, and returned with an even more exalted sense of his destiny. He wrote a tract on education that would have blown the curriculum authority's collective mind.

More here.

From Science:

Elephants are one of the top draws for zoos, which are the only places most of us get a chance to see the behemoths. But a new and controversial study in tomorrow's issue of Science suggests that captivity is so bad for female elephants' health and overall well-being that their life spans are less than half of those of protected populations in Africa and Asia. The data also indicate that captive-born Asian elephant calves are particularly likely to die young. The team has called for an end to zoos' acquisition of wild elephants and for limits on transfers of animals among zoos.

Already concerned about their elephants, many zoos in the United States and Europe are expanding or building new enclosures, or even deciding against exhibiting the great beasts altogether. Studies in the wild have documented the importance of roaming and family ties for these animals, which zoos with limited space often cannot provide. A sign that the animals aren't thriving is that “zoos are not able to maintain their elephant populations without importing new, wild-caught animals,” says Ros Clubb, a wildlife biologist at England's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in London. Clubb and co-author, Georgia Mason, a behavioral biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, published a pilot, non-peer-reviewed study on this issue 6 years ago. It was fiercely and “rightly” criticized, they say, for its small data set and poor statistics–problems they say they have corrected with the new report.

More here.

My purpose here is to consider the place of John Locke in American political life. I will follow the wisdom of George Carey in explaining why Locke forms the foundation of part of us, but not all of us. Our founders had a complex view of human nature, in which Locke played his part. But we—especially our intellectuals—have become more Lockean over time, coming to believe in effect that our founders lacked our theoretical greatness because their view of liberty was not as expansive or individualistic as ours. We have come to accept too uncritically the view that our nation has progressed historically by embracing principled individualism more consistently over time. Carey writes as a conservative American, and he distinguishes his conservatism from the progressivism he finds in neoconservatism. This does not mean that he is simply a traditionalist. He is one of the most astute and meticulous defenders of The Federalist Papers, a set of essays that, among other things, defends the innovation that was the American Constitution. He sees that the American solution is strong on institutional remedies for destructive factional strife and is in some ways, in the interest of success, a bit weak on virtue. But that weakness is mitigated by our federalism; the cultivation of virtue, according to our founding thought, was to be left to our states and churches, and the scope—including the moral reach—of our national government was originally quite limited.

more from First Principles here.

Four new works by Negri appeared in English in 2008—the year we all found ourselves well downstream from that era when debate over globalization and its discontents took the form of extrapolating long-term trends. The problem now is to find a way through the ruins. I have been studying the books in a state of heightened (indeed, strained) attention—with powers of concentration periodically stimulated and shattered by arteriosclerotic convulsions in the world’s financial markets—but also through tears in my eyes. They are tears of perplexity and frustration. It is not that Negri’s most recent books pose difficulties, both conceptual and programmatic, that his earlier ones did not. The ambiguities have been there all along, as have the opacities. Still, they seemed poetic—not just in that terms like Empire and Multitude possessed a certain evocative, science-fictional luminosity, but also in something like the root sense of poesis. They did not simply name possibilities; they seemed to create a new thing in the world, if only by inciting the political imagination to new efforts. But the latest books do not have that quality. Negri’s analysis of the emerging system is itself a system—if not a world unto itself—and the movement of his thought is now largely centripetal.

more from Bookforum here.

From The Wall Street Journal:

In October 1947, a bare six weeks after India and Pakistan achieved their independence from British rule, the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote a remarkable letter to the Chief Ministers of the different provinces. Here Nehru pointed out that despite the creation of Pakistan as a Muslim homeland, there remained, within India, “a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if they want, go anywhere else. That is a basic fact about which there can be no argument. Whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a civilized manner. We must give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic State.”

In the wake of the recent incidents in Mumbai, these words make salutary reading. It seems quite certain that the terrorists who attacked the financial capital were trained in Pakistan. The outrages have sparked a wave of indignation among the middle class. Demonstrations have been held in the major cities, calling for revenge, in particular for strikes against training camps in Pakistan. The models held up here are Israel and the United States; if they can “take out” individual terrorists and invade whole countries, ask some Indians, why not we?

More here. (Thanks to my dear friend Giri).

From CNN:

A week of events to mark the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize to former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari continues Thursday with a stellar concert in Oslo to be shown live on CNN International.

Actors Michael Caine and Scarlett Johansson are due to host the gala event which features performances from Diana Ross, operatic quartet Il Divo and Swedish singer-songwriter Robyn.

In an interview Wednesday, Ahtisaari called for a fresh Middle East peace initiative and warned that western powers risked losing credibility unless they acted to solve the conflict.

Ahtisaari told CNN's Jonathan Mann that peace was a “question of will.”

“All conflicts can be settled and there are no excuses for letting them become eternal,” said Ahtisaari, who was cited for his work promoting Namibian independence in southern Africa and for his “central role” promoting peace in the conflict-stricken Indonesian province of Aceh.

“It is simply intolerable that violent conflicts defy resolution for decades, causing immeasurably human suffering and preventing economic and social development.”

Ahtisaari said that finding a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians was crucial to the future development of the entire Middle East and Muslim world.

“As Western nations we are losing our credibility… because we can't keep on talking, year after year, that we are doing something. And no one sees any results,” he said.

More here.

///
Scars
William Stafford

They tell how it was, how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.

Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek, and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can't reach when they sing.

Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.
.