From The New York Times:

Nadeem Aslam, a Pakistani novelist who lives in England and has visited Afghanistan extensively, has now made his own bid for the fictional peaks. In “The Wasted Vigil,” he ranges across the country’s ancient and modern history, punctuating his narrative with cross-cultural allusions. Unafraid of political complexity, he is also unflinching in his examination of depravity — of torture, rape and gore. Yet his writing also encompasses tenderness. Aslam’s characters are intricately wounded and geographically diverse. Lara is a Russian who has been attacked with a tire iron for letting her feet point toward Mecca while sleeping amid a crowd of travelers. She has come to Afghanistan to find her long-lost brother, a soldier who is, she discovers, also a rapist. Casa, wounded in a trip-wired field of flintlock guns on tripods, is an Afghan orphan raised by Taliban jihadists in sadistic training camps. Marcus, a Briton who is missing a hand, lost his Afghan wife to the Taliban, and their daughter to the Soviet invasion. David, an American, is a former spy whose brother disappeared during the fighting in Vietnam.

They all come together in Marcus’s house in the countryside near Jalalabad. It is a noisy house, and for a particularly bizarre reason. Marcus’s now deceased wife, forced by the Taliban to cut off her husband’s hand in front of a crowd at a local stadium, went mad in the aftermath and nailed their extensive book collection to the ceiling. The books often fall down with thuds and thwacks. It is also a dirty house because Marcus was forced to put mud on the walls to hide painted images of lovers that had been banned by the Taliban. And it is a suggestive house, filled with strange scents, because Marcus’s defunct perfume factory lies under the ground nearby. As if this weren’t unsettling enough, a giant relic, an ancient stone Buddha’s head, was uncovered during the excavation and left in place on the factory floor.

More here.

Paul de Grauwe in the FT:

The essence of what banks do in normal times is to borrow short and lend long. In doing so, they transform short-term assets into long ones, thereby creating credit and liquidity. Put differently, by borrowing short and lending long, banks become less liquid, thereby making it possible for the non-banking sector to become more liquid; that is, have assets that are shorter than their liabilities. This is essential for the non-banking sector to run smoothly.

This credit transformation model performed by banks only works if there is confidence in the banks and, more importantly, if banks trust each other. This confidence has now evaporated and, as a result, the model fails. The generalised distrust within the banking system has led to a situation where banks do not want to lend any more. That means that they continue to borrow short but lend equally short; that is, acquire the most liquid assets.

The result is a massive destruction of credit and liquidity in the economy. The non-banking sector cannot borrow long so as to acquire liquid assets that they need to run their business, because banks do not lend long anymore. This risks bringing the economy to a standstill. A depression is looming.

It is important to realise that this liquidity crisis is the result of a co-ordination failure: bank A does not want to lend to bank B, not necessarily because it fears insolvency of bank B but because it fears other banks will not lend to bank B, thereby creating insolvency of bank B out of the blue. Thus bank lending comes to a standstill because banks expect bank lending to come to a standstill.

Congratulations also to Eeva and Marko!!!

Martti had been the frontrunner in the bookmakers’ odds for the Peace Nobel for several years. Finally, he’s got it! And no one has deserved it more.

Among other things, it would not be an exaggeration to say that without Martti Ahtisaari, there would be no 3 Quarks Daily, as it is his son, and my friend, Marko Ahtisaari who first got me blogging on a Finnish blog and then encouraged me to start 3QD (I didn’t even know what blogs were at the time, and nor, I think, did anyone else). In addition to all his professional achievements, I can attest that Martti is one of the warmest, smartest, nicest, and most cultured persons I have met.

I am so excited that I cannot help showing off by posting this picture of my wife Margit and me with the Ahtisaaris at breakfast in their home in Helsinki earlier this summer (he already seems to have a halo around him!).

More here, here, and here.  And, of course, some dissenting opinion.

Finally, an optimistic note. I was reminded yesterday that the vast bulk of “wealth” created during the Greenspan/Bernanke bubble years accrued to the very top percentiles of population – with many in the OECD middle class and lower class either stagnating or getting poorer as they mired themselves in unsustainable debt. While opportunity and employment grew strongly in emerging countries, there too the elites gained disproportionately as income inequalities surged. The crash of global financial markets therefore will have disproportionate effect on the elites, impoverishing them to a far greater extent, although it will be felt throughout society as employment, pensions, investments and public services contract.

Once we hit bottom of this downturn, some years hence in all probability, we may experience a democratisation of wealth and opportunity like none seen since the end of World War II when education reforms and unionisation laid the groundwork for the rise of the American and OECD middle classes. Those who have lost economic and political power during the boom years, are likely to organise and retake authority within economic and political systems during the bust years. This could provide reorientation of economic progress toward more equitable, sustainable and democratic outcomes in coming generations. I hope so, it’s the only bright spot of the week.

more from RGE Monitor here.

One of the most striking things about the reaction to the current financial meltdown is that, as one of the participants put it: ‘No one really knows what to do.’ The reason is that expectations are part of the game: how the market reacts to a particular intervention depends not only on how much bankers and traders trust the interventions, but even more on how much they think others will trust them. Keynes compared the stock market to a competition in which the participants have to pick several pretty girls from a hundred photographs: ‘It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.‘ We are forced to make choices without having the knowledge that would enable us to make them; or, as John Gray has put it: ‘We are forced to live as if we were free.’

more from the LRB here.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s views on religion are notoriously hard to pin down with confidence. If you collected up the criticism devoted to Tolstoy, there could be no doubt about what he believed at any stage of his journey. Yet in the history of Dostoevsky criticism we find, for example, Henry Miller reading Dostoevsky as a great social revolutionary, whereas others have seen him as a diehard conservative. Rowan Williams, in his latest book, quotes (and rebuts) William Hamilton, who sought to enlist Dostoevsky as a forerunner of “Death of God” theology; Georges Florovsky, who saw Dostoevsky as an exemplar of Russian Orthodoxy; Malcolm Jones, who has linked him to “post-atheism” in contemporary Russia, and judged him to exemplify the workings of “minimal religion”. Clearly, all these contradictory readings cannot be right. Or can they? Is that precisely the nature of the difficulty?

We need a guide who combines the gifts of a literary critic and a trained theologian to work out how far the novels of Dostoevsky can be used as vehicles for such explorations. We also need a guide who is deeply versed in the ethos and spiritual traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church to place Dostoevsky, and the tormented exchanges of his characters, within some intelligible historical framework. Luckily, the Archbishop of Canterbury combines all these qualities, and more.

more from the TLS here.

We here at 3QD have been fans and friends and, some of us, colleagues of Martti Ahtisaari for years. For years, we have been rooting for him in the Peace Prize runnings.  And so we congratulate him today.  In the NYT:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its 2008 peace prize on Friday to Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish president who has been associated over decades with peace efforts and quiet, cautious diplomacy from Asia to Africa and Europe.

Out of 197 people nominated for the annual prize, the committee said, Mr. Ahtisaari had been chosen “for his important efforts in several continents and over three decades to resolve international conflicts.”

To outsiders, Mr. Ahtisaari, 71, has often seemed an undemonstrative and aloof figure. But some people who worked with him praised what Gareth Evans, the head of the nongovernmental International Crisis Group in Brussels called “charm and humor” in dealing with his various negotiating partners.

He has played a central role in ending conflicts that took root in the late 20th century and threatened the early 21st century with conflagrations in many places, some of them remote and all of them complex, presenting mediators with tangles of ethnic, religious or racial passions.

Specifically, the committee mentioned his work in ending South African domination of Namibia, the former South-West Africa, from the 1970s to the late 1990s , and peace efforts in the Indonesian province of Aceh, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Central Asia, the Horn of Africa and, most recently, in Iraq.

Mr. Ahtisaari has frequently been seen as a contender for the peace prize, whose recipients last year included former American Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body. By choosing Mr. Ahtisaari, the committee seemed to have opted for a more traditional, peacemaking candidate whose selections was relatively free of political sensitivities.

In a television interview after the award was announced, Mr. Ahtisaari indicated that he might slow the pace of his travels, which, he said, had kept him away from Finland for 200 days a year. “I want to spend more time with my wife,” he said.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Remember that couple you knew, the ones who went out on a date and instantly fell in love, who had been together for years and seemed as happy together as the day they met, the ones who gave you hope that you might find your own true love, the ones who made you feel that there was joy to be found in the world? And remember how one day they suddenly called the whole thing off and pretty soon were seeing other people, leaving you confused and reeling?

I’ve been having the same experience with blood flukes.

I first encountered blood flukes while doing research for my book Parasite Rex. They are extraordinary flatworms that get their start in life in ponds and streams. Once they’ve hatched, they seek out a snail and plunge into its guts to feed. They develop and produce a new generation of flukes that look like little missiles. A single fluke can produce thousands of these missiles, which emerge from the snail and flick around in the water in search of human skin. When they find their target, they drill into their host like diving through butter. They reach a blood vessel and then ride through the circulatory system until they find their ultimate destination–depending on the species, that’s the blood vessels behind the intestines, or behind the bladder.

More here.

///
Hosea
Alvaro Marín

The prophet Hosea
predecessor of Friedrich Nietzche
did not preach hope to the poor
A whore bore him a daughter and he called her
No more mercy;
then she bore him a son, whom he called
You are not my people;
and his unfaithful wife he called
People.

Hosea believed that the bond
between men was not the law
but love.
To disown him they called him
a minor prophet, but
Hosea was, before Christ,
the prophet of love
and of the mystic fight
against the degradation of the spirit,
the incompetence of the lords
and the degeneration of the privileged prophets.

He was quoted by Christ
when he said “love, not sacrifices”
Maybe Christ was only a preacher of Hosea’s
doctrine
and was turned by time into the son of God, while Hosea
was turned into a prophet forgotten by men.

Translation: Nicolás Suescún
Click link for poem in Spanish

Read more »

From Powell.com:

During the fourth season of The Simpsons, there was an episode where the residents of Springfield gathered in a contest to see who could kill the largest number of snakes on what is called Whacking Day. After Bart and Lisa (with the help of Barry White) show the townspeople the error of state-sanctioned snake slaughter, Springfield’s Kennedy-esque mayor arrives with an armload of pre-killed snakes, inciting boos and hisses from the now-enlightened crowd. Mayor Quimby hollers back, “You’re all a bunch of fickle mush heads,” to which the crowd responds, “He’s right. Give us hell, Quimby.”

The animated incident is a wonderfully realized crystallization of the problems discussed in Rick Shenkman’s book Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth about the American Voter. As everyone is rushing to assign blame for the current financial crisis in Washington and on Wall Street, there has been little mention of the role voters played. President George W. Bush’s approval ratings have sunk to subterranean lows, and, for all the hand wringing going on, no one has addressed the obvious question: why did a smidge over 50% of the voting public re-elect a president whose clearly-stated policies created such turmoil?

Shenkman’s answer is that we aren’t as smart as we like to think we are, and the evidence he presents is fairly damning. For example, in recent surveys, only 21 percent of Americans polled could name the current secretary of defense, only 35 percent knew that Congress can override a presidential veto, and, appallingly, 49 percent believe that the president can suspend the Constitution. “Why are we so deluded?” Shenkman asks.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The cult French writer JMG Le Clézio yesterday won the Nobel prize for literature, lifting Paris out of its depression over the nation’s cultural decline. Le Clézio, known as France’s “nomad novelist”, lives mainly in New Mexico in the US, in near seclusion, and is the opposite of Paris’s current trend for writers’ navel-gazing accounts of their sex lives.

The Swedish jury hailed his scathing critiques of urban western civilisation and the “poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy” of his stories of native populations in Africa and Latin America. His novels, whose settings range from the Sahara to Mauritius, are expected to see a massive sales boost in Britain, where he is currently out of print and barely known. Le Clézio, 68, last year signed an open letter with other writers appealing for French literature to be more open to the wider world. Last night he batted off talk of French cultural stagnation. “I deny it,” he said. “It’s a very rich, very diversified culture. There’s no risk of decline.”

In Paris Le Clézio is seen as one of France’s greatest living writers. He says his work is defined by his mixed roots. He was born in Nice but most identifies with the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, where his Breton ancestors fled in the 18th century and lived for generations before returning to France. He has joint Mauritian citizenship and calls the island his “little fatherland”, describing himself an “exile” who grew up steeped in its mixed culture and traditions. His father, a Mauritian doctor with British citizenship, moved the family to Nigeria when Le Clézio was a child, before returning to Nice. Le Clézio studied in Britain, taught at universities in the US, Mexico and Thailand and travelled extensively with his Moroccan wife, writing about mixed relationships, and postcolonial and indigenous cultures.

Le Clézio, who publishes books at a rate of around one a year, shot to fame in France as a 23-year-old with his first novel, Le Proces-Verbal (The Interrogation), a portrait of a young man’s mental illness. It won critical acclaim and a major literary prize, and his looks saw him dubbed French literature’s Steve McQueen. Yesterday French media still referred to him as a blue-eyed “elegant cowboy”.

More here.

Peter W. Galbraith in the New York Review of Books:

We hear again and again from Washington that we have turned a corner in Iraq and are on the path to victory. If so, it is a strange victory. Shiite religious parties that are Iran’s closest allies in the Middle East control Iraq’s central government and the country’s oil-rich south. A Sunni militia, known as the Awakening, dominates Iraq’s Sunni center. It is led by Baathists, the very people we invaded Iraq in 2003 to remove from power. While the US sees the Awakening as key to defeating al-Qaeda in Iraq, Iraq’s Shiite government views it as a mortal enemy and has issued arrest warrants for many of its members. Meanwhile the Shiite-Kurdish alliance that brought stability to parts of Iraq is crumbling. The two sides confronted each other militarily after the Iraqi army entered the Kurdish-administered town of Khanaqin in early September.

More here.

Sarah Lyall in The Times of London:

In a nation of the chronically ill-at-ease, alcohol is the lubricant that eases the pain of frightening social encounters, an essential prelude to relaxation, to joie de vivre and even, at times, to rudimentary conversation. But because Britain has what is known as an “ambivalent alcohol culture” – which means the British haven’t worked it out completely – they can take their drinking too far, too fast, with corrosive consequences to health, happiness and productivity.

I have many British friends who in America would be considered functioning alcoholics – the equivalent of 1950s Cheeveresque businessmen from suburban Connecticut who greeted the end of the workday with a couple of predinner martinis before moving on to wine and whisky. Heavy drinking is part of the fabric of their lives and it would be considered rude to comment on it.

I had come from New York, a city where this kind of drinking is reserved for the weekend and drinking to the point of insensibility is an activity only for the very young or the very likely to be headed for AA. By contrast, Britons seemed to drink all the time. It was a shock to see how enthusiastically they knocked back the booze at Sunday lunches in the country and how high their tolerance was. It was a shock to see, after we’d had our first weekday dinner party (everyone stayed until 1am, never mind their jobs), that the table was covered in twice as many empty wine bottles as there had been guests.

More here.

Excerpts from Rose George’s new book, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, in Slate:

It drips on her head most days, says Champaben, but in the monsoon season it’s worse. In rain, worms multiply. Every day, nonetheless, she gets up and walks to her owners’ house, and there she picks up their excrement with her bare hands or a piece of tin, scrapes it into a basket, puts the basket on her head or shoulders and carries it to the nearest waste dump. She has no mask, no gloves, and no protection. She is paid a pittance, if she is paid at all. She regularly gets dysentery, giardiasis, brain fever. She does this because a 3,000-year-old social hierarchy says she has to.

They used to be known as bhangi, a word formed from the Sanskrit for “broken,” and the Hindi for “trash.” Today, official India calls them the “scheduled castes,” but activists prefer Dalits, a word that means “broken” or “oppressed” but with none of the negativity of bhangi. Most modern Indians don’t stick to their caste jobs any more. There is more inter-caste marriage, more fluidity, more freedom than ever before. But the outcastes are usually still outcastes, because they are still the ones who tan India’s animals, burn its dead, and remove its excrement. Champaben is considered untouchable by other untouchables—even the tanners of animals and the burners of corpses—because she is a safai karamchari.

More here.

Roland Pease at BBC News:

Perfect secrecy has come a step closer with the launch of the world’s first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption at a scientific conference in Vienna.

The network connects six locations across Vienna and in the nearby town of St Poelten, using 200 km of standard commercial fibre optic cables.

Quantum cryptography is completely different from the kinds of security schemes used on computer networks today.

These are typically based on complex mathematical procedures which are extremely hard for outsiders to crack but not impossible given sufficient computing resources or time.

But quantum systems use the laws of quantum theory, which have been shown to be inherently unbreakable.

The basic idea of quantum cryptography was worked out 25 years ago by Charles Bennett of IBM and Gilles Brassard of Montreal University, who was in Vienna to see the network in action.

More here.

Alan Cowell in the New York Times:

The Swedish Academy on Thursday awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a cosmopolitan and prolific French novelist, children’s author and essayist regarded by many French readers and critics as one of the country’s greatest living writers.

Mr. Le Clézio has written more than 40 books, 12 of which have been translated into English, an exotic canon of novels, essays and children’s books depicted by the academy as distilled from experience in Mexico, Central America and North Africa and suffused with a quest for lost culture and new spiritual realities.

In its citation, the prize committee in Stockholm called him an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.” The prize, won last year by the British author Doris Lessing, was worth $1.43 million.

More here.

///
Nine Little Goats
Nuala Ni Dhomnail

It’s a cock’s foot of a night:
If I go on hanging my lightheartedness
Like a lavender coat on a sunbeam’s nail,
It will curdle into frogspawn.
The clock itself has it in for me,
Forever brandishing the splinters of its hands,
Choking on its middle-aged fixations.

Since the pooka fertilized the blackberries,
The year pivots on its hinges, breathing
Wintry gusts into our warmth.
Our bones grate like an unoiled
Rusty stable door,
Our teeth get pins and needles
As Autumn’s looming tide drowns
The endless shores of Spring.

Darkness will be dropping in
In the afternoons without an appointment,
A wolf’s bite at the windowpane,
And wolves too the clouds
In the sheepish sky.
You needn’t expect the wind
To put in her white, white paws
Before you open the door,
For she hasn’t the slightest interest
In you or your sore throat:
The solar system is all hers
To scrub like a floor if she pleases,
She’s hardly likely to spare her brush
On any of us, as the poison comes to a head
In the brow of a year
That will never come back.

So we might as well put in a match
To the peat briquettes
That the summer gave the grate,
And draw the sullen curtains tight
On the Family’s bad luck,
And sit with a library book,
Half-dozed by the television news,
Or roused by a game of chess,
Or a story, until
We are our own spuds,
Roasting in the embers.

Translated from the Irish by Medbh McGuckian From
Pharoaoh’s Daughter (Wake Forest University Press, 1998)
///

From The Telegraph:

Evolution could already be at an end, leaving the human race more uniform than ever, argues Steve Jones:

Things ain’t what they used to be – but when were they? Not in 18th-century Japan, when the poet Ejima Kiseki wrote: “The shrewd observer of the modern scene will note that sons are altogether inferior to their fathers, and that the grandson rarely offers hope for improvement.” Plato felt much the same and Simon Heffer, the Plato de nos jours, agrees. Markets, crime, education; every day, in every way, things seem to get worse and worse. If the philosophers have it right, the human race is in decline – social, moral and, in the end, biological. Now science can test at least the last of those claims.

Because we understand how evolution happens, we can also guess where it will go next. It is, in Darwin’s words, “descent with modification” – genetics plus time. The process turns on differences: in genes themselve, and on natural selection – on inherited variation in the ability to copy them. Isolation helps changes to build up and, in time bears, Bushmen and Britons evolve from a common ancestor. Human diversity is so great that every sperm and egg ever made is unique.

More here.