From The Two Cultures to no culture

From Spiked:

It is one of the great ironies of modern times, observed the New York Times last year, that CP Snow’s The Two Cultures remains one of the most frequently cited, yet least read, books of the past 50 years.

Black-hole-cat After all, Snow’s thesis was that the pool of human knowledge was at risk of being drained by a potentially insurmountable gulf between scientists and literary intellectuals, who were at that time regarded as the guardians of culture. As an example, he recounted going to a cocktail party where fellow scientists admitted to knowing no Dickens and the literati revelled in their ignorance of basic scientific terminology. So he started one of the great spats of post-war intellectual life, provoking literary critic FR Leavis into a fantastically bad-tempered attack on Snow, stating that the scientist-turned-novelist had perhaps overestimated his own understanding of intellectual greatness. The first canapé in the cocktail war – sorry, culture war – had been thrown. Anyone who read Ian McEwan’s novel Solar – featuring a Nobel Prize-winning physicist taken aback by non-scientists’ claims to know anything at all – will recognise that Snow’s warning still lingers in the literary imagination. It has clearly stirred the minds of the culturati on the BBC’s niche arts channel, BBC4, who have opened their doors for a whole season of programmes on The Tools of Science.

More here.

The Patriarch

From The New York Times:

Jeff Thomas Jefferson’s mother, who came from a rich and influential Virginia family, was in the first generation of colonial women brought up to run a plantation. But although her husband died when Jefferson was only 14, she allowed his executors to manage her son’s inheritance. And when Jefferson married a wealthy widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, he added to that estate. Martha was not only rich, she was also beautiful, and she shared Jefferson’s love of music. With her he pursued his dream of domestic tranquility — one in which he ran the plantation and she organized the household. Women, Jefferson believed, should not “wrinkle their foreheads with politics” but instead “soothe and calm the minds of their husbands.” There are no surviving letters between Jefferson and his wife, or between Jefferson and his mother, and too often Scharff must resort to phrases like “We have no way of knowing” and “She may have disagreed.” Sometimes, though, an entry in an account book succeeds in bringing Martha alive — when, say, a little sketch of two birds summons up the image of her doodling and dreaming over her housekeeping. It’s only Jefferson’s grief after her death, in 1782, that opens a window onto their relationship. For weeks he shut himself in his room or feverishly roamed the forests and mountains.

Two years later, Jefferson traveled to Paris with his oldest daughter, Patsy, to join Benjamin Franklin and John Adams as an American diplomat in Europe, leaving his two younger daughters, Polly and Lucy, behind. When he received news that Lucy had died of the whooping cough, he once again fell into a deep depression. In the aftermath, he sent for Polly, who crossed the Atlantic at the age of 9, accompanied by 14-year-old Sally Hemings, a slave who was also Martha Jefferson’s half-sister. (She was the daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, and his slave Elizabeth Hemings.) As Annette Gordon-Reed has convincingly argued in “The Hemingses of Monticello,” it was in Paris that Sally probably began her lifelong job as Jefferson’s chambermaid — and also became his mistress. Like his father-in-law, Jefferson would have a shadow family: Sally and their children. His was a world of complicated relationships hidden behind a veil of silence.

More here.

A Bayesian Take on Julian Assange

230px-Julian_Assange_(Norway,_March_2010) Nate Silver in 538 (h/t: mr goodbar):

Psychologists and behavioral economists have conducted a lot of experiments along these lines, testing our ability to think through problems that involve what statisticians call Bayesian inference: those that require to us to infer the likelihood of various possibilities based on a combination of prior, underlying conditions (we are in Japan: most people we encounter here will be of Japanese ancestry) and new information (but based on this woman’s appearance, it is hard to tell whether she is Caucasian or Japanese!) They’ve found that, in general, we do pretty badly with them: we tend to get lost in the most immediate details and we forget the underlying context.

I was reminded about this recently when reading WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is wanted for questioning by Swedish authorities on charges that that he has committed sexual assault. People have spent a lot of time debating the details of the charges, which invoke a number of difficult questions about what constitutes consent during a sexual encounter. Commenters differ in their interpretations both about the facts intrinsic to the case and in their readings of Swedish law.

I certainly do not intend to resolve those debates, although they are by no means uninteresting or unimportant. What I would suggest, however, is that it would be a mistake, from the standpoint of Bayesian reasoning, to think we can separate out the merits of the charges from their political motivations.

There is virtually no chance that the case against Mr. Assange would have proceeded in quite the same manner if he were instead an itinerant painter named Jens Andersen, or a traveling salesman named John Andrews — instead of an internationally renowned provocateur. Indeed, the charges might not have been brought against Mr. Assange in the first place. Sweden has among the highest rates of reported rape cases in the European Union. But unfortunately, few cases are brought to trial (only between 10 and 20 percent, according to various reports), and fewer still result in convictions.

That alone might not tell us much. There are other ways, however, in which the behavior of the authorities has been quite unusual.

The initial warrant in the case against Mr. Assange had been issued in August. But it was revoked the next day, due to what the lead prosecutor cited as a lack of evidence. It was only last month – just as WikiLeaks was preparing to release a set of confidential diplomatic cables – that Sweden again issued a warrant to detain him.

Photo from wikipedia.

Mark Twain’s Riverboat Ramblings

Keillor-popupGarrison Keillor in the NYT:

Samuel L. Clemens was a cheerful promoter of himself, and even after he’d retired from the lecture circuit, the old man liked to dress up as Mark Twain in a fresh white suit and take a Sunday morning stroll up Fifth Avenue just as churches were letting out and see the heads turn and hear his name murmured, the crowds of Presbyterians and Episcopalians standing awe-struck as the most beloved mustache in America passed by, tipping his silk hat to the ladies. Mr. Twain’s autobiography was meant to be a last stroll around the block, and to build up suspense and improve sales, Sam told everybody that he was writing one and that it contained material so explosive it would need to be embargoed for a hundred years. That century has passed now and here it is, Volume 1 of “The Complete Authentic Unexpurgated Edition, Nothing Has Been Omitted, Not Even Scandalous Passages Likely to Cause Grown Men to Gasp and Women to Collapse in Tears — No Children Under 7 Allowed to Read This Book Under Any Circumstance,” which made Sam front-page news when all three volumes of the “Autobiography of Mark Twain” were announced last spring. The book turns out to be a wonderful fraud on the order of the Duke and the Dauphin in their Shakespearean romp, and bravo to Samuel Clemens, still able to catch the public’s attention a century after he expired.

He speaks from the grave, he writes, so that he can speak freely — “as frank and free and unembarrassed as a love letter” — but there’s precious little frankness and freedom here and plenty of proof that Mark Twain, in the hands of academics, can be just as tedious as anybody else when he is under the burden of his own reputation. Here, sandwiched between a 58-page barrage of an introduction and 180 pages of footnotes, is a ragbag of scraps, some of interest, most of them not: travel notes, the dictated reminiscences of an old man in a dithery voice (“Shortly after my marriage, in 1870, I received a letter from a young man in St. Louis who was possibly a distant relative of mine — I don’t remember now about that” begins one story that goes nowhere), various false starts, anecdotes that must have been amusing at one time, a rough essay (with the author’s revisions carefully delineated) on Joan of Arc, a critique of the lecture performance of Petroleum V. Nasby, a recap of the clipper ship Hornet’s ill-fated voyage that ended in Hawaii in 1866, a piece about German compound words, an account of medicine on the frontier, well-worn passages from lectures, a fair amount of self-congratulation (“I expected the speech to go off well — and it did”), a detailed report on the testimony of Henry H. Rogers in a lawsuit in Boston, newspaper clippings, generous quotations from his daughter Susy’s writing about her father (“He always walks up and down the room while thinking and between each course at meals”), ruminations on his methodology of autobiographicizing (“I shall talk about the matter which for the moment interests me, and cast it aside and talk about something else the moment its interest for me is exhausted; . . . a complete and purposed jumble”), recollections of Reuel Gridley and other Hannibal classmates, and there is precious little that could be considered scandalous — maybe a rant against James W. Paige, the inventor of a typesetting machine that Sam lost $170,000 on: “If I had his nuts in a steel trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died” — but you have to wade through 18 pages of mind-numbing inventory of the Countess Massiglia’s Villa di Quarto, which he leased in Florence (“I shall go into the details of this house, not because I imagine it differs much from any other old-time palace or new-time palace on the continent of Europe, but because ­every one of its crazy details interests me, and therefore may be expected to interest others of the human race, particularly women”), the only point of which is that the man can afford to rent a palace that is fancier than anything you’d find in Missouri.

Some Shit I’m Sick of Hearing Regarding Rape and Assange

Kate Harding over at her blog (via Sullivan):

Claim: Because nobody cares about prosecuting rape under normal circumstances, it is somehow an insult to rape survivors to prosecute Assange for it now.

Someone really fucking said that? Yeah, Naomi Wolf in the Huffington Post, for instance. Money quote:

Of course ‘No means No’, even after consent has been given, whether you are male or female; and of course condoms should always be used if agreed upon. As my fifteen-year-old would say: Duh.

But for all the tens of thousands of women who have been kidnapped and raped, raped at gunpoint, gang-raped, raped with sharp objects, beaten and raped, raped as children, raped by acquaintances — who are still awaiting the least whisper of justice — the highly unusual reaction of Sweden and Britain to this situation is a slap in the face.

Wait, what? Yeah, she actually seems to be arguing that out of respect for rape survivors who never saw justice, Britain and Sweden should not prosecute an accused rapist. It’s all of them or none of them. Or something.

Doesn’t she have a good point somewhere in there, though? Sure. To wit, “Here is what I mean: men are pretty much never treated the way Assange is being treated in the face of sex crime charges.” Usually, rapists go free.

BUT: That doesn’t mean these charges shouldn’t be taken seriously. See above. And as someone who’s worked extensively with rape survivors, Naomi Wolf should damn well know better than to smear alleged victims long before all the facts are in, perpetuate a flat-out lie about the seriousness of the charges, and generally act like a cheerleader for rape culture, under the guise of someone concerned about “real” victims. Which we all know these women are not, duh, because Assange has already been tried and found not OH WAIT.

Better idea: Decry the routine dismissal of rape allegations and shameful treatment of victims all over the damned world, but maybe skip the part about how prosecuting an accused rapist somehow makes it worse.

Herzen in London

Alexander-Herzen-by-Nikolai-Ge-1867-233x300 Sarah Young over at her website:

When researching the history of Russians in London, Alexander Herzen presents a considerable problem. He is without doubt the most significant of all the writers and activists who visited London in the nineteenth century, not only because he settled in the capital for some years (1852-64), but also because many of his compatriots — Turgenev, Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nekrasov, Pavel Annenkov, Vasily Botkin, Vasily Sleptsov — came specifically to see him. It’s certainly true to say that neither his closest friend Nikolai Ogarev nor Bakunin would have ended up in London if Herzen hadn’t been here. He is also the author of one of the greatest memoirs ever written, My Past and Thoughts, which is a massively important source on the Russian intelligentsia as well as being a very entertaining read. So he would seem like the ideal subject.

But for all the wealth of detail he presents, relatively little of My Past and Thoughts is devoted to his London life, and in general Herzen does not provide us with much commentary in other sources either. This may have been because he did not feel any rapport with the English, so failed to establish any real friendships, as Isaiah Berlin suggests. Perhaps, as London was the first long-term home he established after the disillusionment and failure of the revolutions of 1848, he was in no mood to seek out new acquaintances. Certainly, his description of his first days in London speak to preference for isolation: ‘I grew unaccustomed to others’; ‘Nowhere could I have the same hermit-like seclusion as in London’; ‘There is no town in the world which is more adapted for training one away from people and training one into solitude than London’ (My Past and Thoughts, pp. 445-7). According to Bernard Porter (Exiles, p. 43), such negative feelings about Britain were common among the political refugees who arrives after 1848 – most of them had no desire to be here.

Schwitters and Blinky

Schwabskyhiresblue_img

In 1984, while preparing for the great Kurt Schwitters retrospective that MoMA was to mount the next year, a member of the museum’s curatorial staff noticed a discrepancy between one of its Schwitters assemblages, The Cherry Picture (Merzbild 32A. Das Kirschbild), from 1921, and a photograph taken of the structure in 1954, when it entered the collection: a cork attached to the surface of the piece had somehow migrated to a different spot altogether. Worse still, a photograph of The Cherry Picture published in 1924 shows no cork at all. Was the wayward bottle stop a belated addition by Schwitters, an artist known to have kept fiddling with his works when he could? And if so, where does it really belong? Or did someone else add the cork and yet another person unknown move it? After reviewing the evidence, MoMA conservator Antoinette King (in an essay published in 1992) found it to be inconclusive. The prominence of the cork “creates a particular formal unity in the assemblage elements,” she noted, “entirely changing Schwitters’s original work, if it is indeed not his own addition”—going on to cite the artist’s conviction that “all that matters in a work of art is that all parts should be interrelated and evaluated against each other.” But what if the parts tend to drift? I was sorry not to find The Cherry Picture in “Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage,” the first American museum show devoted to the artist since the one at MoMA twenty-five years ago, now on view at the Menil Collection in Houston through January 30. (The show also tours the Princeton University Art Museum, March 26–June 26, and the Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California, August 3–November 27.) It would have been nice to see whether that little cork has continued to bob around as a reminder that even now there is something very difficult to pin down in Schwitters’s art—which, it’s been said, “was never about the object itself, but the dynamic of relations that appeared in the course of its making.” If so, that’s a problem for museums: all we have left are the objects.

more from Barry Schwabsky at The Nation here.

weeds

TLS_Cooper_732533a

In his biography of Gilbert White (1986), Richard Mabey suggested that the “greatest legacy” of The Natural History of Selborne was a “blending” of scientific responses to nature with emotional ones, including “respect” for living things and a sense of “kindredness” with them. The Natural History, Mabey added, also “helped pioneer that affectionate writing about place” and natural life which has become “part of the mainstream of English literature”. His dozen or more books – which include Flora Britannica (1996) and Nature Cure (2005) – have established Mabey himself as the most distinguished exponent of this “affectionate writing” and, alongside his late friend, Roger Deakin, the main inspiration for such younger writers as Mark Cocker and Robert Macfarlane. He has done more than anyone, perhaps, to ensure that “modern British nature writing”, as anthologies and publishers like to call it, remains in the mainstream of English literature. The word “blending” in Mabey’s tribute to White’s legacy needs stressing. For what characterizes the best nature writing is not an oscillation between two quite separate ways of responding to nature – scientific and emotional, drily objective and merely subjective. Mabey’s books are, instead, ways of presenting or rendering nature in which understanding, insight, mood, sensibility and appreciation are inseparably combined. The presentation, an artful blending of these ingredients, is doubtless a personal one, but not therefore idiosyncratic – no more than the depictions of nature found in, say, the landscapes of Turner. Or, more relevantly, in Albrecht Dürer’s “Large Piece of Turf”, a picture of “a clump of weeds” which Mabey, in his new book, Weeds, admires not least for its fusion of ecological insight and scientific accuracy with “reverence” and “a new humanistic attitude towards nature”.

more from David E. Cooper at the TLS here.

an escape artist of the imagination

Ghoststill

As ahead of her time as she was in some ways, she was very much a Victorian in others—Craddock regarded homosexuality as a perversion and deplored masturbation of any kind, which by her definition included manual and/or lingual stimulation of the genitals. “There is but one lawful finger of love,” she wrote, “the erectile organ of the male.” She discouraged clitoral contact as well, instructing couples that that organ should be “saluted, at most, in passing, and afterwards ignored as far as possible.” Not surprisingly, many of her male clients hit on her. “There are times,” she wearily confided in her case notes, “when I think maleness in men is something diabolical and loathsome.” In other ways, she sounded altogether modern:

Just as long as wives remain, by reason of their wifehood, economically dependent upon their husbands, just as long as they are willing to fill, at one and the same time, the various positions of cook, chambermaid, seamstress, laundress, housekeeper, child’s nurse, governess and concubine, with no salary for their exhausting labors and remuneration beyond their board and clothing—and often not that: Just so long will marriage mean for the average wife sexual slavery and thankless household drudgery.

Craddock’s mother attempted to have her forcibly committed to an asylum on several occasions; worse still, her lecture on the benefits of belly dancing, which had been introduced to America at the Chicago World’s Fair, brought her to the attention of Anthony Comstock of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Constantly harassed by the authorities, Craddock moved frequently, making a precarious living as a secretary while pursuing her research and counseling on the side. She lived in San Francisco, Denver, and Chicago (where she started her Church of Yoga—and where her books were seized and burned after Clarence Darrow negotiated a plea bargain that kept her out of jail). She moved to Washington, DC, where she was arrested and expelled from the city.

more from Arthur Goldwag at Killing The Buddha here.

In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture

Patricia Cohen in the New York Times:

ScreenHunter_01 Dec. 17 15.47 With little fanfare, Google has made a mammoth database culled from nearly 5.2 million digitized books available to the public for free downloads and online searches, opening a new landscape of possibilities for research and education in the humanities.

The digital storehouse, which comprises words and short phrases as well as a year-by-year count of how often they appear, represents the first time a data set of this magnitude and searching tools are at the disposal of Ph.D.’s, middle school students and anyone else who likes to spend time in front of a small screen. It consists of the 500 billion words contained in books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian.

The intended audience is scholarly, but a simple online tool allows anyone with a computer to plug in a string of up to five words and see a graph that charts the phrase’s use over time — a diversion that can quickly become as addictive as the habit-forming game Angry Birds.

With a click you can see that “women,” in comparison with “men,” is rarely mentioned until the early 1970s, when feminism gained a foothold. The lines eventually cross paths about 1986.

More here.

Tea and Antipathy

From The New Yorker:

Pix What did the American Revolution look like? Nathaniel Hawthorne imagined it as an angry face, painted so as to appear divided in two. “One side of the face blazed of an intense red, while the other was black as midnight,” he wrote. This uncanny visage appears in Hawthorne’s tale “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” of 1831; its owner rides on horseback through moonlit Boston streets, carrying a drawn sword and leading a mob of people who laugh and shout as they wheel along a rich elderly man whom they have tarred and feathered.

Hawthorne’s “double-faced fellow” was modelled on a historical figure who went by the pseudonym Joyce Jr. and, in the seventeen-seventies, claimed to lead Boston’s Committee for Tarring and Feathering. In 1777, Abigail Adams recorded the charges against five merchants who were his victims: “It seems they have refused to take paper money, and offered their goods lower for silver than for paper.” During wartime, anxieties about hoarding and profiteering no doubt shortened tempers, and, in the Boston Gazette, Joyce Jr. threatened “Judgment without Mercy” to anyone else guilty of “such nefarious Practices.” Joyce Jr. had little of the dignity that we associate with the Founding Fathers; his tone was bitter, and, more important, his grievance was mercenary rather than ideological.

More here.

Murder Music

From Guernica:

Ebony_500 “Homophobia is the wrong term for what’s going on in Jamaica because there’s no fear of gays here. The fear is all the other way,” N told me inside an HIV prevention center, one of the few places in Kingston where we could talk without fear of retribution from someone overhearing our conversation. Leaving an upscale Kingston restaurant a few months before, fourteen men had ambushed N and a male colleague in the restaurant’s parking lot. Shouting anti-gay epithets and in clear view of witnesses, the assailants ripped a hole in N’s eye, punched and body-slammed both men, and left them to bleed out on the pavement. “I’m afraid to drive in my own vehicle with another man in the front seat,” said N. “I can pull up to a red light and something can happen. I’m afraid to have any man in my apartment. I’m afraid someone will call me out as gay for using too many hand gestures. Yes, that happens here. Anything can be used to call a man gay, on the street or in the neighborhood.”

This fear of being identified as gay may have even contributed to Jamaica’s rising incidence of colon cancer. Jamaican men often refuse digital rectal examinations out of fear the procedure will result in an allegation of homosexuality, health officials have complained to local media. Until a few years ago, private apartment parties in Kingston were common places for gay Jamaicans to meet, but after mobs attacked several gay parties they are now considered too dangerous. Today, occasional street dance parties with a high security presence and, for those who can afford to travel, chance encounters at gay events abroad comprise the few venues where gay Jamaicans can openly socialize.

More here.

Lifetime Medical Costs of Obesity: Prevention No Cure for Increasing Health Expenditure

Pieter H. M. van Baal, Johan J. Polder, G. Ardine de Wit, Rudolf T. Hoogenveen, Talitha L. Feenstra, Hendriek C. Boshuizen, Peter M. Engelfriet, and Werner B. F. Brouwer in PLoS Medicine:

Background

Obesity is a major cause of morbidity and mortality and is associated with high medical expenditures. It has been suggested that obesity prevention could result in cost savings. The objective of this study was to estimate the annual and lifetime medical costs attributable to obesity, to compare those to similar costs attributable to smoking, and to discuss the implications for prevention.

Methods and Findings

Cigarette-Smoking With a simulation model, lifetime health-care costs were estimated for a cohort of obese people aged 20 y at baseline. To assess the impact of obesity, comparisons were made with similar cohorts of smokers and “healthy-living” persons (defined as nonsmokers with a body mass index between 18.5 and 25). Except for relative risk values, all input parameters of the simulation model were based on data from The Netherlands. In sensitivity analyses the effects of epidemiologic parameters and cost definitions were assessed. Until age 56 y, annual health expenditure was highest for obese people. At older ages, smokers incurred higher costs. Because of differences in life expectancy, however, lifetime health expenditure was highest among healthy-living people and lowest for smokers. Obese individuals held an intermediate position. Alternative values of epidemiologic parameters and cost definitions did not alter these conclusions.

Conclusions

Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures.

More here.

Supermax Torture in America

Lance Tapley in the Boston Review:

Tapley_35_6_james James, who is in his twenties, has been beaten all his life, first by family members: “I was punched, kicked, slapped, bitten, thrown against the wall.” He began seeing mental-health workers at four and taking psychiatric medication at seven. He said he was bipolar and had many other disorders. When a doctor took him off his meds at age eighteen, he got into “selling drugs, robbing people, fighting, burglaries.” He received a twelve-year sentence for robbery. Of the four years James had been in prison when I met him, he had spent all but five months in solitary confinement. The isolation is “mental torture, even for people who are able to control themselves,” he said. It included periods alone in a cell “with no blankets, no clothes, butt-naked, mace covering me.” Everything James told me was confirmed by other inmates and prison employees.

James’s story illustrates an irony in the negative reaction of many Americans to the mistreatment of “war on terrorism” prisoners at Guantánamo. To little public outcry, tens of thousands of American citizens are being held in equivalent or worse conditions in this country’s super-harsh, super-maximum security, solitary-confinement prisons, or in comparable units of traditional prisons. The Obama administration— somewhat unsteadily—plans to shut down the Guantánamo detention center and ship its inmates to one or more supermaxes in the United States, as though this would mark a substantive change. In the supermaxes inmates suffer weeks, months, years, or even decades of mind-destroying isolation, usually without meaningful recourse to challenge the conditions of their captivity. Prisoners may be regularly beaten in cell extractions, and they receive meager health services. The isolation frequently leads to insane behavior including self-injury and suicide attempts.

More here.

Poems of the Night by Jorge Luis Borges

Patrick Kurp in The Quarterly Conversation:

Jorge-luis-borges Borges—as with Aristotle, one name will do—migrated to North American shores early in the 1960s and was identified by critics as a doubly exotic species—a “Latin American” and a spinner of such metaphysical tales as “Funes the Memorious,” “The Library of Babel” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” The field-guide classification has largely stuck. With Beckett and Nabokov, he has been taxonomized as a senior precursor to the trendy “meta-fiction” practiced half a century ago by such juniors as John Barth and Donald Barthelme. Without benefit of his Argentine context, critics have misunderstood this deeply tradition-minded and allusive writer, and failed to notice we had a major poet on our hands, an elegant Spanish-language alternative to the odious Pablo Neruda.

Born in 1899, Borges began writing poems as a boy and published his first volume of verse, Fervor de Buenos Aires, in 1923, a decade before he started writing his best-known ficciones. Throughout his life (he died in 1986) Borges deemed himself principally a poet, secondarily a writer of fiction. In his prologue to a revised edition of Fervor (1969), Borges said he had “moderated its baroque excesses” and “eliminated sentimentality and haziness.” He declined to renounce his younger self, however, and said: “At the time, I was seeking out late afternoons, drab outskirts, and unhappiness; now I seek mornings, the center of town, peace.”

More here.

WikiLeaks: Where’s the Oil?

Charlotte Dennett in the Huffington Post:

Charlottedennett My father, the late Daniel C. Dennett, worked under diplomatic cover as U.S. cultural attaché in Lebanon for the Office of Strategic Services and later the Central Intelligence Group. He had been recruited because of his Harvard education in European History and Islam and his invaluable post-graduate education during the 1930s teaching English to Arabs at the American University of Beirut. In 1943, just prior to his departure for Beirut, he issued a warning to an audience of academics: “God help us if we ever send troops to the Middle East.” And yet, once immersed in his espionage work, he found himself having to play the Great Game for Oil. That same year, 1943, he wrote an “Analysis of Work” (which I later released to The Village Voice) where he wrote — thanks to the inattention of some CIA-redactor who missed this line — that the oil of Saudi Arabia was so important that it “must be controlled at all costs.” And when he said “all costs” he wasn't kidding. He had been trained to anticipate a post-war “free for all” among America's former WW II allies in their quest for Arab oil. His involvement in trying to secure the greatest oil reserves in the Middle East for the U.S. — the oil of Saudi Arabia — would cost him his life, as well as the lives of tens of millions of Arabs and Jews. But that is another story.

I never knew my father. He died under mysterious circumstances following a top secret mission to Saudi Arabia in 1947, when I was six weeks old. But I've done a lot of digging, and I invite you to go to the Voice article where you will find a World War II era government map that I obtained from the national archives in Maryland that says this: “World War II is largely a war by and for oil.”

More here.

Thursday Poem

The Dream

The tortoise had been, back then, the emblem of what
we’d always been told: Take your home with you,

she said, wherever you go. And that’s what we did—
what we had to do—back then when everything

disassembled, our belongings scattered in the yard.
We gathered, you remember. But that was elsewhere

and long ago. Now you’re packing and moving on
to the Midwest, a thousand miles from the ocean

and these days I walk into the New York morning
and carry a past I know by heart exactly but cannot find

the words to tell. In the dream, I walk the sands
of San Francisco and little Alcatrazes, slow-clawed

and cracked-shelled, wash onto the shoreline at night.

by Sarah V. Schweig
from The Boston Review
September/October 2010

The King’s Speech

From The Telegraph:

King-after-broadca_1785869c Albert Frederick Arthur George, King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and the last Emperor of India, woke suddenly. It was just after 3am. His bedroom in Buckingham Palace was normally a haven of piece and quiet, but this morning his slumbers had been interrupted by the crackle of loudspeakers being tested on Constitution Hill. “It was so loud one of them might have been in our room,” he wrote in his diary. And then, just when he was finally dropping back off to sleep, the marching bands started.

It was May 12, 1937, and the 41-year-old King George VI, father of the present Queen, was preparing for one of the most nerve-racking days of his life. He had acceded to the throne five months earlier after his elder brother, King Edward VIII, abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American, plunging the monarchy into one of the worst crises in its history. Today, the reluctant monarch was to be crowned in Westminster Abbey. The coronation, a piece of national pageantry unmatched anywhere in the world, would have been daunting enough for anyone, but King George – known to the royal family as Bertie – had good reason to be anxious: he suffered from a chronic stammer that turned the simplest of conversations into a challenge and a public speech into a terrifying ordeal. Words beginning with the letter 'k' – as in king – proved a particular problem: confronted with one, he would struggle to make any sound at all, leaving an awkward silence.

More here.