Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Review of Books:

The conception of the Mediterranean as the meeting of three continents goes back to classical Greece. But it took a further intellectual leap to conceive of their inhabitants as a collectivity. You can have Europe, Africa, and Asia without thinking of Europeans, Africans, and Asians as particular kinds of people.

David Levering Lewis’s rich and engaging God’s Crucible shows that it took two things to make Europeans think of themselves as a people. One was the creation of a vast Holy Roman Empire by the six-foot-four, thick-necked, fair-haired Frankish warrior king we know as Charlemagne. The other was the development, in the Iberian peninsula on the southwestern borders of his dominion, of the Muslim culture of Spain, which the Arabs called al-Andalus. In the process that made the various tribes of Europe into a single people, what those tribes had in common and what distinguished them from their Muslim neighbors were both important. This is, by now, a familiar idea. But God’s Crucible offers a more startling proposal: in making the civilization that modern Europeans inherit, the cultural legacy of al-Andalus is at least as important as the legacy of the Catholic Franks. In borrowing from their great Other, they filled out the European Self.

More here.

My family here is fairly mixed in terms of the religions.  I have noticed the hardening of confessional identities among many family members, alongside the growing secularism and syncreticism and atheism among others.  I’d meant to post this story earlier, which I just find so sad. It has echoes of Gogol’s Dead Souls, except not funny at all and with religious fanaticism replacing Chichikov’s opportunistic moderation and conformity, all against the backdrop of the giant cultural-sectarian war that characterizes our era. In the NYT:

Friends and family remember Shafayet Reja as an affectionate young man who stayed up late to write poetry, danced exuberantly at weddings and explored the faiths of his father and mother with an openheartedness that led him to declare on his Facebook page, “I never get tired of learning the new things that life has to offer.”

But within hours of his death on Sept. 10 after a car accident, his memory — in fact, his very body — had become the object of a tug-of-war over religious freedom and obligation. It began when his mother, who was raised Hindu, and his father, who is Muslim, decided to have his body cremated in the Hindu tradition, rather than burying him in a shroud, as Islam prescribes.

His parents, Mina and Farhad Reja, say a small group of Muslims who do not understand their approach to religion are trying to intimidate them over the most private of family choices. “This is America,” Mrs. Reja said. “This is a family decision.”

The couple say that people accosted them at their son’s funeral, that an angry crowd threatened to boycott a shopping center they own in Jackson Heights, Queens, and that on Sept. 13, two men they know threatened to bomb and burn down the building.

The men they accused in a complaint filed with the police — one is a doctor and the father of a close friend of Shafayet Reja, the other a Bangladeshi business leader — say that they made no threats and deny that they have called for a boycott. They say they and others simply expressed their concern about what they see as a deep violation of their religion and of the wishes of the son, who, according to some of his college friends, had recently chosen Islam as his sole religion.

In the 1970s, when the Czech filmmaker Vojtěch Jasný was struggling in exile from his Communist-run homeland, he came to the German writer Heinrich Böll for guidance. Böll offered a simple reminder:

“He said three words: ‘Patience, Vojtěch, patience,'” Mr. Jasný, 79, recalled recently.

Patience was a necessity for the director, who lived through World War II, Communist rule, exile, and all the accompanying turmoil before alighting in America in 1984. Beginning Friday, Anthology Film Archives will celebrate Mr. Jasný, whom compatriot Milos Forman dubbed “the spiritual father of the Czech New Wave,” with a weeklong, seven-film series. Bookended by his 1958 debut, “Desire,” and a 1999 documentary shot in Washington Heights, the heartening program also offers the opportunity to see Mr. Jasný’s best-known feature on the big screen: the gorgeously shot chronicle of a village sighing under collectivization, “All My Good Countrymen,” which was banned the moment Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968.

more from the NY Sun here.

When I was young, and new to L.A., and hanging around dissolute poets, I read a lot of Bukowski, and it seemed to me, even then, that there was a lot of dreck to page through before something struck and resonated. So when I picked up “Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook,” it was with those hard questions in mind: doesn’t this guy need an editor? And a garbage can? But these essays have that sometimes-absent discipline (or help from editors) so that even when they consist of disconnected paragraphs, they have a kind of form. And, I think, a preciseness of language that’s missing in his lesser work. I was charmed. From the title essay:

drunk again in a crackerbox room, dreaming of Shelley and youth, bearded, jobless bastard with a walletful of win tickes un-cashable as Shakespeare’s bones. we all hate poems of pity or cries of the wailing poor — a good man can climb any flag and salute prosperity (we’re told) but how many good poets can you find at IBM or snoring under the sheets of a fifty-dollar whore? more good men have died for poetry than all your crooked battle-fields were worth; so if I fall drunk in a four-dollar room: you messed up your history — let me dawdle in mine.

more from the LA Times here.

James M. McPherson’s “Tried by War” is a perfect primer, not just for Civil War buffs or fans of Abraham Lincoln, but for anyone who wishes to under­stand the evolution of the president’s role as commander in chief. Few histo­rians write as well as McPherson, and none evoke the sound of battle with greater clarity. There is scarcely anyone writing today who mines original ­sources more diligently. In “Tried by War,” McPherson draws on almost 50 years of research to present a cogent and concise narrative of how Lincoln, working against enormous odds, saved the United States of America.

This is not a book about White House table talk, the president’s spiritual values, his relations with Mary Todd or even his deep-seated opposition to slavery. It is about how Lincoln led the nation to victory: his formulation of the country’s war aims; his mobilization of public opinion; his diplomatic and economic leadership. Above all it is about his oversight of military strategy, in short, his duties as wartime commander in chief — duties that Lincoln defined and executed for the first time in the nation’s history. A peacetime president is circumscribed by elaborate checks and balances. In the full flush of war, Lincoln learned to act unilaterally.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

///
Postscript
Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among the stones
The surface of the slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lighting of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Unless you think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly.  You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

From The Spirit Level; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996
///

From The Guardian:

When Orhan Pamuk was young, Turkey lacked a great library, so he started to build his own. As the Frankfurt book fair focuses on Turkish culture, he looks back on his days with the booksellers of Beyazit market.

I regret that I have not been able to shake off the enlightenment idea that books exist to prepare us for life. Perhaps this is because a writer’s life in Turkey is proof that they are. But it also has something to do with the fact that in those days Turkey lacked the sort of large library where you could easily locate any book you wanted. As for books in foreign languages, not a single library had them. If I wanted to learn everything that there was to be learned, and become a wise person and so escape the constraints of the national literature – imposed by the literary cliques and literary diplomacy, and enforced by stifling prohibitions – I was going to have to build my own great library.

Between 1970 and 1990, my main preoccupation after writing was buying books; I wanted my library to include all the books that I viewed as important or useful. My father gave me a substantial allowance and from the age of 18 I was in the habit of going once a week to Sahaflar, the old booksellers’ market in Beyazit. I spent many days in its little shops, which were heated by ineffective electric heaters and crowded with towers of unclassified books; everyone from the shop assistant to the owner, the casual visitor to the bona fide customer, looked poor. I would go into a shop that sold second-hand books, comb all the shelves, leafing through the books, and I would pick up a history of the relations between Sweden and the Ottoman empire in the 18th century, or the memoir of the head physician of the Bakirköy Hospital for the Insane, or a journalist’s eyewitness account of a failed coup, or a monograph on the Ottoman monuments of Macedonia, or a Turkish précis of the writings of a German traveller who came to Istanbul in the 17th century, or the reflections of a professor from the Çapa Medical Faculty on manic depressive disorder; and, after bargaining with the shop assistant, I would cart them all away.

I wasn’t buying as a book collector would, but as a frantic person who was desperate to understand why Turkey was so poor and so troubled.

More here.

Shashi Tharoor reviews The Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh in The Washington Post:

The year is 1838, and the setting British India, a country immiserated by colonial rule, as fertile agricultural lands are swamped by the flower of the novel’s title, grown to produce opium that the British are exporting to addicts in an increasingly resistant China. Hungry Indian peasants, meanwhile, are being driven off their land, and many are recruited to serve as plantation laborers in far-off British colonies like Mauritius. Meanwhile, the clouds of war are looming, as British opium interests in India press for the use of force to compel the Chinese mandarins to keep open their ports, in the name of free trade. Against this background, Sea of Poppies brings together a colorful array of individuals on a triple-masted schooner named the Ibis. There is the widow of an opium addict, saved from a drugged self-immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre by an outcaste who signs up for a new life as a worker in Mauritius; a free-spirited French orphan and the Muslim boatman with whom she has grown up; the Ibis’s second mate, an American octoroon sailor passing for white; a clerk and mystic possessed by the soul of his female spiritual mentor; a lascar seaman with a piratical past; and a dispossessed Raja who has been stripped of his lands and honor and sentenced to transportation for an innocent act of forgery.

The novel unfolds with the stories of the events that bring these “ship-siblings — jaházbhais and jaházbahens” on board and traces the beginning of their voyage from Calcutta to their unknown destinies across the Black Water. The principal characters’ fates are left unresolved — this is a book that is clearly “to be continued” — but their stories are compelling. Even though the Ibis’s journey is incomplete, it provides enough dramatic tension to keep the reader turning the pages.

More here.

And who are we to argue? 🙂 Mark Moford in the San Francisco Chronicle:

1) Make new travel plans. Yes, the dollar has been gutted. Yes, a small espresso and a day-old sourdough baguette on the rue du Cherche-Midi will cost you 97 dollars. But if you can afford it, now is the time to plan a new European jaunt.

Why? Easy: No more foreigners scowling at you. No more shameful hiding of your nationality. No more telling that hot barista you’re from Canada and instead confessing, with even a tiny hint of Obama-infused national pride, “I’m American,” and then not apologizing and feeling that sickly sense of mortification. Incredible.

2) Whip out your 2009 Precious Moments wall calendar, start blocking out weekends for all the spring weddings now being planned by your most lovestruck gay friends. Pitiable evangelical panic aside, Proposition 8 shows hopeful signs of being slammed to the ground like the hateful piece of homophobic intolerance it so very much is (then again, as of this writing, this one’s still too close to call). At least Connecticut just joined the gay marriage party. What will you wear? Who tosses the bouquet?

3) Remember books? Actual literature? Stock up. Read more 3 Quarks Daily and N+1 and Arts & Letters Daily, subscribe to the New York Review of Books, TLS, The Atlantic, The Sun. Prepare, in other words, for a new climate of intellectual stimulation and curiosity. Prime your mind. It’s been a while since someone in the White House had an IQ higher than a pickup’s tailpipe. The quality of the national dialogue is about to improve tremendously.

More here.

From The New York Times:

EMILY POST: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners

By Laura Claridge

“She must not swing her arms as though they were dangling ropes,” Emily Post wrote about a young bride in one of the ubiquitous editions of her etiquette books. “She must not shout; and she must not, while wearing her bridal veil, smoke a cigarette.”

It is something of a surprise nearly 50 years after Emily Post’s death to be reminded that there was a real person behind the name that has become synonymous with good manners. And it is to Laura Claridge’s credit that she has written the first full biography of Post. An exhaustive researcher, Ms. Claridge, the author of biographies of Norman Rockwell and the painter Tamara de Lempicka, has in this book provided beguiling new details about the taxonomies that governed Post’s life. And Ms. Claridge has situated her within the context of the fast-changing customs at the beginning of the 20th century when she exerted her greatest power.

Emily Post’s first etiquette book, published in 1922, went through 10 editions and was in its 89th printing when she died in 1960. Her syndicated columns appeared in 160 newspapers, she received 3,000 letters a week seeking advice and had a thrice-weekly radio program. In 1950 Pageant magazine named her the second most powerful woman in America, after Eleanor Roosevelt. “Emily Post’s Etiquette” is still in print, updated by Peggy Post, her great-granddaughter-in-law.

More here. (Bravo Laura! What a great accomplishment!)

Like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, Márquez’s Macondo, and Hardy’s Wessex, Škvorecký’s Kostelec is a grand recreation of his own town, a decidedly minor place to outward appearances, yet rich enough to its creator. I asked Škvorecky why he has returned to the past in Kostelec across the decades of his writing. “Because when you are a teenager, everything appears as new,” he said. “Your impressions are much stronger. Falling in love, for instance. I fell in love with my first girl when I was in prima, the first grade in an eight-grade gymnasium. A new girl came to our town, whom I later called Irene [in my fiction]. It was as if God had switched on a brilliant lamp in the skies above our drab wartime world.”

That the past remains as vivid and locally contained as it does for Škvorecký suggests the author’s strongest, most evident literary influence. As a reader, translator, and novelist, he explained, he “fell under the spell of what I used to call Faulkner’s white magic. I realized that what he wrote about was the content of the mind, the inner life of folks who might appear as very simple but, in fact, inside were as complex as people of high education.” He also admired Faulkner’s “stylistic fireworks,” and “the admixture of pop literature” — like detective and pulp fiction — one finds in his otherwise densely modernist work. Škvorecký has himself written or co-written (with Salivarová) a series of detective novels, and he explained the odd circumstances of his first reading the genre.

more from The Walrus here.

I have left Dubai’s spiralling towers, man-made islands and mega-malls behind and driven through the desert to the outskirts of the neighbouring city of Abu Dhabi. Turn right before the Zaha Hadid bridge, and a few hundred metres takes you to the heart of Mousafah, a ghetto-like neighbourhood of camps hidden away from the eyes of tourists. It is just one of many areas around the Gulf set aside for an army of labourers building the icons of architecture that are mushrooming all over the region.

Behind the showers, in a yard paved with metal sheets, a line of men stands silently in front of grease-blackened pans, preparing their dinner. Sweat rolls down their heads and necks, their soaked shirts stuck to their backs. A heavy smell of spices and body odour fills the air.

Next to a heap of rubbish, a man holds a plate containing his meal: a few chillies, an onion and three tomatoes, to be fried with spices and eaten with a piece of bread.

more from The Guardian here.

Slide show here.

“You can define steampunk as visions of the future that never was, as seen through the technology of the Victorian era, when things were made of pistons and steam rather than silicon and transistors,” says Slater, who is dressed in a ruffled white shirt, pegged trousers and spats. “It’s an aesthetic, a geek culture, a craft culture.” It’s certainly all those things; steampunks take pride in their ability to make 19th-century-style clothes and gadgets from found objects, creating intricate gizmos from brass, leather and rivets. A London-based American musician called Thomas Truax even makes his own instruments: there’s one called the Hornicator, made from a gramophone horn; another, known as Mother Superior, emits steam when played.

The emphasis on gadgetry explains why so many steampeople are male. So does the movement’s basis in late 20th-century science fiction. “Steampunk” was initially a literary genre dreamed up in the 1980s by authors such as KW Jeter, who set stories in steam-powered Victorian London as a riposte to then-fashionable cyberpunk books and films. It was quickly adopted by goths as well as sci-fi buffs and grew into a culture that, in America, is big enough to support a three-day Steam Powered convention, which will be held this month near San Francisco.

more from The Guardian here.

Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker:

During this election cycle, the Times reported today, ACORN has deployed thirteen thousand mostly paid workers, who have registered 1.3 million new voters. One or two per cent of these workers turned in sheaves of forms that they filled out themselves with fake names and bogus addresses, and, even though at least a hundred of these workers have already been fired, the forged forms have been submitted to election boards.

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that groups like ACORN are required by law to submit them, even if they’re obvious fakes. This is to prevent funny business, such as trashing forms that look like they might be Republican (or Democratic, as the case may be).

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that ACORN normally sorts through forms, flags those that look fishy, and submits the fishy ones in a separate pile for the convenience of election officials.

Sounds suspicious—until you reflect that the motivation of the misbehaving registration workers is almost always to look like they’ve been doing more work than they really have, and that the victim of the “fraud” is actually the organization they’re working for.

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that even if one of these fake forms results in a nonexistent person actually being registered, now under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, “any voter who has not previously voted in a federal election” must provide identification in order to actually cast a ballot.

///
…..Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation
…..Stanley Kunitz

Since that first morning when I crawled
into the world, a naked grubby thing,
and found the world unkind,
my dearest faith has been that this
is but a trial: I shall be changed.
In my imaginings I have already spent
my brooding winter underground,
unfolded silky powdered wings, and climbed
into the air, free as a puff of cloud
to sail over the steaming fields,
alighting anywhere I pleased,
thrusting into deep tubular flowers.

It is not so: there may be nectar
in those cups, but not for me.
All day, all night, I carry on my back
embedded in my flesh, two rows
of little white cocoons,
so neatly stacked
they look like eggs in a crate.
And I am eaten half away.

If I can gather strength enough
I’ll try to burrow under a stone
and spin myself a purse
in which to sleep away the cold;
though when the sun kisses the earth
again, I know I won’t be there.
Instead, out of my chrysalis
will break, like robbers from a tomb,
a swarm of parasitic flies,
leaving my wasted husk behind.

Sir, you with the red snippers
in your hand, hovering over me,
casting your shadow, I greet you,
whether you come as an angel of death
or of mercy. But tell me,
before you choose to slice me in two:
Who can understand the ways
of the Great Worm in the Sky?
/////

And here’s Obama:

Catherine Clabby in American Scientist:

By examining death rates county-by-county, public health researchers found that life spans, especially among women, fell in some United States counties. The numbers were small but such a reversal of fortune was, well, shocking.

“We started looking at disparity questions. This became arguably a bigger finding and a more depressing finding,” said Majid Ezzati, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Ezzati, whose research results appeared in PLoS Medicine, is among scholars dicing and splicing mortality data to create more precise pictures of lifespan trends in the United States. The nation is not known as the life-expectancy leader in the developed world. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranks the life expectancy of women in the U.S. 27th globally.

More here.

David Crossland in Der Spiegel:

In the whole of Germany, more than 2,000 tons of American and British aerial bombs and all sorts of munitions ranging from German hand grenades and tank mines to Russian artillery shells are recovered each year. Barely a week goes by without a city street or motorway being cordoned off or even evacuated in Germany due to an unexploded bomb being discovered.

Nazi Germany was first to launch massive air raids on civilian targets in World War II with devastating attacks on Warsaw and London. But, it reaped what it sowed as the Allies waged a five-year campaign of aerial bombardment during which they dropped 1.9 million tons of bombs to destroy Germany’s industry and crush public morale. The raids killed an estimated 500,000 people.

Most estimates for the percentage of unexploded bombs range from 5 to 15 percent — or between 95,000 and 285,000 tons. As Germany hastily rebuilt its cities after the war, authorities didn’t have the time or the means to locate and dispose of a large part of that tonnage.

As a result, a deadly legacy has lain dormant beneath Germany’s streets ever since.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Aravind Adiga’s debut novel, The White Tiger, won the Booker prize this week. But its unflattering portrait of India as a society racked by corruption and servitude has caused a storm in his homeland. He tells Stuart Jeffries why he wants to expose the country’s dark side.

How do you get the nerve, I ask Aravind Adiga, to write a novel about the experiences of the Indian poor? After all, you’re an enviably bright young thing, a middle-class, Madras-born, Oxford-educated ex-Time magazine correspondent? How would you understand what your central character, the downtrodden, uneducated son of a rickshaw puller turned amoral entrepreneur and killer, is going through?

It’s the morning after Adiga, 33, won the £50,000 Man Booker award with his debut novel The White Tiger, which reportedly blew the socks off Michael Portillo, the chair of judges, and, more importantly, is already causing offence in Adiga’s homeland for its defiantly unglamorous portrait of India’s economic miracle. For a western reader, too, Adiga’s novel is bracing: there is an unremitting realism usually airbrushed from Indian films and novels. It makes Salman Rushdie’s Booker-winning chronicle of post-Raj India, Midnight’s Children (a book that Adiga recognises as a powerful influence on his work), seem positively twee. The Indian tourist board must be livid.

Adiga, sipping tea in a central London boardroom, is upset by my question. Or as affronted as a man who has been exhausted by the demands of the unexpected win and the subsequent media hoopla can be. Guarded about his private life, he looks at me with tired eyes and says: “I don’t think a novelist should just write about his own experiences. Yes, I am the son of a doctor, yes, I had a rigorous formal education, but for me the challenge of a novelist is to write about people who aren’t anything like me.” On a shortlist that included several books written by people very much like their central characters (Sheffield-born Philip Hensher, for example, writing about South Yorkshire suburbanites during the miners’ strike, or Linda Grant writing about a London writer exploring her Jewish heritage), the desire not to navel-gaze is surprising, even refreshing.

But isn’t there a problem: Adiga might come across as a literary tourist ventriloquising others’ suffering and stealing their miserable stories to fulfil his literary ambitions?

More here.