“Humboldt’s Gift,” first published in 1975 and just re-issued (Penguin: 512 pp., $16), is both a crazy mess of a novel and an abiding testament to the vital exuberance of Saul Bellow’s genius. “The book of ballads published by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the Thirties was an immediate hit. Humboldt was just what everyone had been waiting for. Out in the Midwest I had certainly been waiting eagerly, I can tell you that,” the book begins. The narrator is Charlie Citrine, and his friend Humboldt has just died in a fleabag New York hotel. Citrine uses his relationship with the doomed poet as a springboard for meditations on the relationship between the artist and society in America, on women, on marriage, on contemporary life, on pretty much anything, in effect, that interests or obsesses his creator, Saul Bellow.

more from the LA Times here.

Soon after completing “The Quiet American,” Graham Greene confessed to Evelyn Waugh, his fellow Roman Catholic novelist,that “it’ll be a relief not to write about God for a change.” “Oh, I wouldn’t drop God if I were you,” Waugh retorted. “Not at this stage anyway. It would be like P. G. Wodehouse dropping Jeeves halfway through the Wooster series.” Waugh had a point. Born in 1904, Greene belonged to a lost British generation that had been too young either to fight in World War I or to reflect soberly on its calamitous effects. Until his conversion to Catholicism in 1926 (in order to marry a believer), Greene had known only the private neurosis of a privileged English youth. As a preternaturally bored schoolboy, he is said to have played Russian roulette; it could be argued that he never recovered from the ennui of the 1920s and the following even lower (and more dishonest) decade.

more from the NY Times here.

From The New York Times:

When Azar Nafisi was a professor of Western literature in Tehran in the 1980s and ’90s, she told her best stories anonymously, sometimes to visiting foreign journalists seeking guidance about Iran’s Islamic Republic. In 1997 she settled for good in the United States and discovered her public voice, turning the volume up high in her 2003 memoir, “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” That memoir wove her personal stories with those of her former students, using as a touchstone their two years of shared experiences in a reading group at her home focused on banned authors like Nabokov and Fitzgerald. “Reading Lolita” became an international best seller; Nafisi, who is a visiting fellow and lecturer at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, became famous.

Now she has written a second memoir, much more intimate than the first, a dissection of her often difficult family life, recounted against the dramatic sweep and turbulence of recent Iranian history. The idea for the book sprang from a list that she began compiling in her diary sometime after the 1979 Islamic revolution, entitled “Things I Have Been Silent About.” It draws on other sources as well, including diaries her father, a former mayor of Tehran, started when she was 4, and addressed to her; his sanitized published memoirs and his unvarnished unpublished version; and family photographs, some of which she said she tookfrom her mother and which appear in the book. Much of the time she relies on memory, a powerful tool that can distort as well as enlighten.

(Picture shows Azar Nafisi’s mother, Nezhat.)

More here.

///
What the Doctor Said
Raymond Carver

He said it doesn't look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I'm real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong
/

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

Thirty years ago the literary critic and editor Malcolm Cowley brought out a memoir called The View from 80. It was, as you might guess, a slender volume about old age, much of it emphasizing the “grow old along with me!/The best is yet to be” approach to the advancing years. I had to assign the book for review and, after some thought, called up the distinguished and elderly scholar Douglas Bush, long a fixture of the English department at Harvard. I had every reason to expect Professor Bush to confirm an image of old age as a time of retirement and happy retrospection, of favorite volumes reread before the fireplace, of glasses of brandy shared with friends while reminiscing over the good times, a period, in other words, of serene pleasures and quiet satisfactions.

Wrong.

Bush's piece was an angry cry of rage at these familiar clichés. Old age was cruel and bitter, a time of ashes, not warming fires. He wrote that he could hardly read anymore, and when he could, even favorite books seemed stale and unprofitable. His doctors had cut out drink; his diet was restricted; his body gave him nothing but trouble and misery. A once formidable memory was going, and with it the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of a lifetime of scholarship. Those rosy images of a cultivated and leisurely Otium were all mirages. The so-called sunset years were at best tedious and at worst an ordeal.

Somewhere Towards the End, Diana Athill's account of growing old, lacks Bush's passion but does underscore that, on the whole, the later years are a time of making do with less of everything except aches and pain. Only writing — a talent that the now 91-year-old Athill discovered relatively late in life — affords some modest pleasure to this former editor for the English publisher André Deutsch. To readers Athill delivers far more than modest pleasure: Her easy-going prose and startling honesty are riveting, for whither she has gone many of us will go as well.

More here.

John C. Butcher reviews Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life by Robin Wilson, in American Scientist:

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote under the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an Oxford don, a talented mathematician, a deacon in the Church of England and a pioneer in portrait and studio photography. He is best known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which are, on one level, books for children. Within them, however, are philosophical discussions, sophisticated word plays, parodies, satirical comment and mathematical allusions. In Lewis Carroll in Numberland , Robin Wilson focuses on Dodgson’s personal life and particularly on his mathematical life, asking, “What mathematics did he do? How good a mathematician was he, and how influential was his work?”

In a nod to the playful nature of Dodgson’s writing style, Wilson divides his own text not into chapters but into eight “fits,” after Dodgson’s extended poem The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits . Wilson’s fits follow the chronology of Dodgson’s life as they delve into his mathematical pursuits and other activities. The final two deal with puzzles, problems, paradoxes and logic.

Wilson is insightful, and his approach to his subject is scholarly and serious. The portrait of Dodgson that emerges is intriguing. The book shows him to have been an earnest and pious churchman, a dedicated teacher and popularizer of mathematics, an artistic and creative pioneer in photography, and a diffident and stammer-prone adult. Dodgson took his vows of celibacy very seriously, Wilson emphasizes; his opinion is that Dodgson would never have engaged in inappropriate behavior or done anything “untoward” in his friendships with children, whom he regarded as “the embodiment of purity.”

More here.

Jacob Heilbrunn in the New York Times Book Review:

In November 1915 a German corporal in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment left his billet in a two-story farmhouse near Fournes, two miles behind the front lines in northern France, and walked into town. Instead of enjoying the traditional soldiers’ comforts of visiting a brothel or purchasing cigarettes and schnapps, he spent four marks to buy a slender book about Berlin’s cultural treasures. Referred to as “the artist” by his fellow message runners, he was something of a figure of amusement to them, partly because it was easy to get a rise out of him by declaring that the war was lost, and partly because he spent hours in the trenches hunched over news­papers and books during lulls in his duties. This withdrawn infantryman had denounced the Christmas Truce of December 1914, when British and German soldiers fraternized for a day. The only living being he reserved his affection for was a white terrier that strayed across enemy lines and obeyed him unconditionally.

Nor did his habits ever really change. Decades later he would abandon his companions late in the evening to retire to the solitude of his study, where reading glasses, a book and a steaming pot of tea awaited him. When his girlfriend was once so indelicate as to intrude upon his reveries, she met with a tirade that sent her running red-faced down the hallway. A sign hanging outside, after all, adjured “Absolute Silence!” By the end of his life, when he had been abandoned by most of his retinue and staged his own Götterdämmerung, the only personal effects the invading Soviet soldiers found in his Berlin bunker were several dozen books.

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in Salon:

Is there any other significant issue in American political life, besides Israel, where (a) citizens split almost evenly in their views, yet (b) the leaders of both parties adopt identical lockstep positions which leave half of the citizenry with no real voice? More notably still, is there any other position, besides Israel, where (a) a party's voters overwhelmingly embrace one position (Israel should not have attacked Gaza) but (b) that party's leadership unanimously embraces the exact opposite position (Israel was absolutely right to attack Gaza and the U.S. must support Israel unequivocally)? Does that happen with any other issue?

Equally noteworthy is that the factional breakdown regarding Israel-Gaza mirrors quite closely the factional alliances that arose with regard to the Iraq War. Just as was true with Iraq, one finds vigorous pro-war sentiment among the Dick Cheney/National Review/neoconservative/hard-core-GOP crowd, joined (as was true for Iraq) by some American liberals who typically oppose that faction yet eagerly join with them when it comes to Israel. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the world — Europe, South America, Asia, the Middle East, the U.N. leadership — opposes and condemns the attack, all to no avail. The parties with the superior military might (the U.S. and Israel) dismiss world opinion as essentially irrelevant. Even the pro-war rhetorical tactics are the same (just as those who opposed the Iraq War were demonized as being “pro-Saddam,” those who oppose the Israeli attack on Gaza are now “pro-Hamas”).

More here.

A H Nayyar & Zia Mian in Himal South Asia:

The murderous assault on Bombay by Islamist militants, at least some of whom were from Pakistan, has exposed once again the grave danger that radical Islamist movements pose to Pakistan, its neighbours and the world. The urgent challenge now is for Pakistan and its neighbours, together with the international community, to work together to confront the risk of Pakistan spiralling into chaos and collapse.

Ten years ago, the political thinker and activist Eqbal Ahmad wrote that “conditions for revolutionary violence have been gathering in Pakistan since the start in 1980 of the internationally sponsored Jihad in Afghanistan.” He argued that “revolutionary violence in Pakistan is likely to be employed by religious and right‑wing organizations which have not set theoretical or practical limits on their use of violence.” He then warned that Pakistan “is moving perilously toward a critical zone from where it will take the state and society generations to return to a semblance of normal existence. When such a critical point of hard-return is reached, the viability of statehood depends more on external than internal factors.”

Pakistan’s leaders have failed for a decade to heed this warning. Sadly, the recognition of the need to act against the Islamist violence that now imperils Pakistan has come not from the terrible war that jihadi groups have unleashed on state and society, wreaking havoc from remote border areas to the heart of the capital city, targeting both the powerful and the powerless. It has come due to external pressure.

More here.

///
The Story of Keys
Richard Garcia

If you would give me
the key to your house
I would think of it
as a one-dimensional
mountain range.
I would hold it up
to the sky
and study how clouds
drink in its valleys.
Think of it
as a tiny file
that cuts through
vertical shadows.
The door to your house
would be a rectangle of light

that shuts behind me
trapping the moon
by the coattails.
I would no longer need
the twisted path
that brought me to you.
It would disappear
along with the forest
that popped up
on springs and hinges.
And the stagehands
and roadies of my dreams
could put away their props—
cups, pools, musical perfumes
darker than your hair.

Entering for the first time
would be as if I never left.
And I would tell you
the story of keys.
They were made long before
the invention of doors.
Although no one knew their function,
wise men suspected their importance.
carefully, they would place them
into the cracks of tree bark and twist.

Anything can be a key: a piece of wire,
a safety pin, laughter.
/

Steven Rose examines the latest theories about the human brain in The Guardian:

Half a century ago, passionate to study the brain, I began my graduate research in a gloomy, red-brick building in south-east London – the Maudsley Institute of Psychiatry. In the biochemistry department I was rapidly disabused of any idea that my research might lead to a greater understanding of how the brain could be “the organ of mind” – and still less that it might provide any help for the hospital's patients, whom I could dimly see through my laboratory windows. Neurochemistry meant grinding rats' brains up and extracting their enzymes; neuroanatomy was about cutting thin slices and staining them to be viewed under the microscope; neurophysiology was sticking minute electrodes into nerve cells and checking their electrical responses. To articulate the thought that this might tell one anything about “higher nervous functions” was strictly out of bounds. A dozen years ago, I heard a young American physiologist describe the study of consciousness as a “CLM” – a career limiting move. No topic for a young and ambitious neuroscientist, best left for those old enough to be experiencing the “philosopause” – said to affect scientists who had run out of research steam.

How times have changed! What was once dangerous territory is now the hottest theme in brain research. The subtitle of Semir Zeki's excellent new book is Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness. David Linden's is brasher: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God. Richard Joyce goes even further in claiming that our very morality is an evolved property of the brain. The rupture with the past is striking. From the ancients to the 20th century, it was philosophers who speculated about how the mind and brain might work. Now it is neuroscientists who are displacing the philosophers and theologians and telling us how we must behave. Three hundred years ago, David Hume argued that one could not derive an ought from an is, but now we are being told that our “oughts” – our moral feelings – are indeed “ises”, genetically and developmentally incarnated in our brains. Whole new scientific disciplines – neuroeconomics, neuroethics, neuroaesthetics – are emerging. No wonder that an issue of Science, timed for November's US election, claimed that brain imaging could identify voting intentions.

More here.

Richard Falk:

The Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip represent severe and massive violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions, both in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the requirements of the laws of war.

Those violations include:

Collective punishment – the entire 1.5 million people who live in the crowded Gaza Strip are being punished for the actions of a few militants.

Targeting civilians – the airstrikes were aimed at civilian areas in one of the most crowded stretches of land in the world, certainly the most densely populated area of the Middle East.

Disproportionate military response – the airstrikes have not only destroyed every police and security office of Gaza’s elected government, but have killed and injured hundreds of civilians; at least one strike reportedly hit groups of students attempting to find transportation home from the university.

More here.

This is the full, uncut interview with Professor Michael Baum which was filmed for Channel 4's “The Enemies of Reason.” Michael Baum is Professor Emeritus of Surgery at University College London. The discussion covers alternative and complimentary [sic] medicines, and how they interact with scientific medicine. This video is provided free online by The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and http://richarddawkins.net

Brandon Keim in Wired:

In preparation for Charles Darwin's upcoming 200th birthday, the editors of Nature compiled a selection of especially elegant and enlightening examples of evolution.

They describe it as a resource “for those wishing to spread awareness of evidence for evolution by natural selection.” Given the continuing battles over evolution in America's public schools — and, for that matter, the Islamic world — such a resource is most welcome.

However, I'd like to suggest another way of looking at the findings below, which range from the moray eel's remarkable second jaw to the unexpected plumage of dinosaurs. They are, quite simply, wondrous — glimpses through an evolutionary frame of life's incredible narrative, expanding to fill every possible nook and cranny of Earth's biosphere.

After all, it's hard to stir passion about the scientific validity of evolution without first captivating minds and imaginations. And this is a fine place to start.

More here.

It seems to have been agreed by every single media outlet that only one group has the right to challenge Obama’s promotion of “Pastor” Rick Warren, and that group is the constituency of politically organized homosexuals. But why should that be? Last week, I pointed out that Warren maintains that heaven is closed to Jews and that his main theological mentor was a crackpot “end-of-days” ranter. Why is this not to count against him as well? Do we need our presidential invocation to be given by a bigmouth clerical businessman who is, furthermore, a religious sectarian? Let me add a little more to the mix. In November 2006, Warren made a trip to Syria and was granted an audience with the human toothbrush who has inherited control of that country and all its citizens. Bashar Assad, the dictator of Syria, is also a religious sectarian—his power base is confined to the Alawite sect—and in the intervals of murdering his critics in Lebanon, he does not expect to receive very many distinguished American or European guests. Of late, the most eminent I can think of have been David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and George Galloway of Britain’s so-called Respect Party, and I believe only Galloway—an old fan of Baathism in all its forms—got an audience with the Grand Toothbrush himself.

more from Slate here.

The presidential campaign of 2008 will be recalled for many firsts: the first African-American presidential nominee, the near-miss campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, the record spending and record turnout. But what was not new was its reliance on a very old standard of American political culture, the frontier myth. Perhaps no other set of ideas about America is more powerful politically, and the two autumn campaigns were reverential in their implicit bow to, or explicit exploitation of, the dense complex of frontier images and values attached to the American experience. The limitless possibilities of the American dream, the expansion of American values, the national effort to tame faraway places, the promise of a bounty just over the horizon, and the essential virtue of the American people who explore and settle these frontiers—all of these tropes fortified the hopes of the campaigns to situate their candidate in the company of legendary pioneers. It is a testament to the power of this myth that it grips us still—its self-gratifying qualities having ensured its long lineage—even as the actual frontier of American action is swiftly closing. A century ago, the closure of the continental frontier obsessed politicians and intellectuals alike. Today, when the global frontier is closing, our political leaders have little sense of its significance.

more from The American Scholar here.

An epic battle between environmentalists and loggers left much of the spotted owl's habitat protected. Now the celebrity species faces a new threat—a tougher owl.

Craig Welch in Smithsonian Magazine:

Every chick counts, because spotted owls are vanishing faster than ever. Nearly 20 years after Forsman's research helped the federal government boot loggers off millions of acres to save the threatened owls, nature has thrown the birds a curveball. A bigger, meaner bird—the barred owl—now drives spotted owls from their turf. Some scientists and wildlife managers have called for arming crews with decoys, shotguns and recorded bird songs in an experimental effort to lure barred owls from the trees and kill them.

To Forsman and other biologists, the bizarre turn is not a refutation of past decisions but a sign of the volatility to come for endangered species in an increasingly erratic world. As climate chaos disrupts migration patterns, wind, weather, vegetation and river flows, unexpected conflicts will arise between species, confounding efforts to halt or slow extinctions. If the spotted owl is any guide, such conflicts could come on quickly, upend the way we save rare plants and animals, and create pressure to act before the science is clear.

More here.