This Bread I Break

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wine at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.

Once in this time wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

.
by Dylan Thomas

Greene, for sure, is a writer who goes on inspiring other writers, haunting them, even, as evidenced by Pico Iyer’s lovely new book “The Man Within My Head,” which chronicles an obsession to which in many ways he’d rather not be subjected. Greene, after all, was nothing if not an Englishman, whereas Iyer, educated in England and California, born to dazzling Indian parents, springs from several cultures and has created a career moving among many more. Iyer is a very modern kind of guy; Greene, while prescient in many ways, stalks us from another era. “But there he is, in spite of everything,” Iyer writes. “Not a hero or a counselor or the kind of person I would otherwise want to claim as kin. I see the gangly, long-legged figure graciously receiving a visitor in his room and keeping the intruder at bay with an offer of a drink, folding his awkward limbs around himself on the sofa; I see the high color in his cheeks, and the pale, unearthly blue eyes that speak to everyone of the troubled depths he’s both concealing and perceiving in the world. He speaks in a slightly strangled English voice … and, when amused, he breaks into an unhardened, high-pitched giggle, suddenly, that equally abruptly stops, as if he’s been caught out, the mischievous boy escaping, for a moment, from the sharp-eyed keeper of his own counsel.”

more from Richard Rayner at the LA Times here.

“When reviewers take the trouble to compliment a writer on her style,” William H. Gass writes in “Life Sentences,” his new collection of essays, “it is usually because she has made it easy for them to slide from one sentence to another like an otter down a slope.” Gass’s sentence enacts its own dissent from this critical preference for clear and simple prose: as soon as the otter barges in, the reader’s attention is forcibly drawn away from Gass’s meaning and toward his style. An ostentatious style is often considered a token of difficulty, and Gass certainly has a reputation as a difficult writer in the high-modernist mode. In his long career — he is now 87 years old — he has published only two novels, the most recent of which, “The Tunnel,” was a 650-page exploration of the psychology of fascism. (The other is “Omensetter’s Luck,” an avant-garde historical novel about the nature of good and evil.) Yet that otter is a cheerful kind of disruption, and the style of prose Gass practices and celebrates in “Life Sentences” tends to be not knotted and elliptical, but exuberantly baroque. Early on, he announces that “the three greatest masters of English prose” are the 17th-century writers Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Browne; other touchstones are Emerson’s essays and the rococo style of Henry James.

more from Adam Kirsch at the NY Times here.

There was an implicit understanding in these books that most of us live, as Ford puts it in his 1986 novel The Sportswriter, “applauseless” lives, none more so than Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the everyman “hero” of Updike’s great tetralogy, written between 1960 and 1990, that comprises Rabbit Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; and Rabbit At Rest. Rabbit is a sportsman of sorts – he was once a “first-rate” basketball player. But as a mature adult, he is restlessly second-rate. We first encounter him as a young man on the basketball court, where he is nimble and commanding. Then, at the end of Rabbit at Rest, we look on as he dies in bloated and complacent late middle-age – on a basketball court, completing the circle of his life. Rabbit’s is an emblematically American death. He has joined in with a group of kids who are playing in a park, and he collapses, “bursts from within”, as he rises to shoot a basket, the ball hitting the ground just after he does. “Harry,” wrote Updike in an introduction to the collected Rabbit novels in 1995, “was for me a way in – a ticket to the America all around me.” The narrator of Ford’s The Sportswriter is, like Rabbit, a would-be man of action and sportsman who has lost his way in life but who never stops believing in the redemptive capacity of sport.

more from Jason Cowley at the FT here.

The peaceful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have broken with the past and opened the door to change in neighbouring countries. They do not owe their existence to an ideology or political manipulation. This fact alone constitutes an unprecedented chapter not just in Arab history but in history full stop. No one is currently in a position to foresee what the future will bring. A number of issues are on hold: social and economic challenges yet to make themselves felt (in Egypt in particular); the danger of a return to corruption and old police practices; the weakness of the replacement political structures; but also opportunism in future foreign policy, from all countries involved worldwide, in respect of these newly liberated peoples. Westerners fear Islamists will hijack the revolutions or seize power. Many of the people who rose up fear this too, proving that such a seizure can be avoided. This is not a guarantee; it is a hope. After all, what should be feared most is the eroding of democracy by the powers it establishes. Is it not high time for the western powers to change their policy in the Arab countries and give up creating divisions?

more from Gérard D. Khoury at Eurozine here.

Forty-two years ago, I was mysteriously invited to visit North Korea. Pakistan’s military dictatorship had been toppled after a three-month struggle and in March 1970 the country was in the throes of its first ever general election campaign. I was travelling to every major town and many smaller ones, interviewing opposition politicians and those who’d taken part in the uprising for a book. I was still there in May, my work unfinished, when the invitation arrived. North Korea was even then a country set apart. The letter came via a local Communist known as Rahim ‘Koreawallah’, secretary of the Pak-Korea Friendship Society. Short, paunchy, loquacious and full of beer, he was out of breath as he handed me the letter from Pyongyang. I had to leave straightaway, he said. Why? Because the North Koreans were convinced that the US was preparing to invade and needed global solidarity. In January 1968 the Koreans had captured the USS Pueblo, a naval intelligence vessel, and arrested its crew. Relations between the two countries remained poor. Could I leave next week, Koreawallah asked? I laughed and said no. I was on my way to what was then East Pakistan. North Korea was a distraction. Koreawallah was both angry and insistent, but his argument was weak. There was no evidence that Washington was preparing for war. I had experience to back me up. A few years earlier I had spent six weeks in North Vietnam and, as well as crouching in air-raid shelters during US bombing raids on Hanoi, I sat through several military briefings by senior Vietnamese officers who made it clear that they would eventually win the war. For the Americans, already overstretched in Indochina, a new war in Korea would be suicidal.

more from Tariq Ali at the LRB here.

The Nobleness of Life is to do Thus

A tribute to Omar Azfar by Azra Raza, M.D. being re-posted on his third death anniversary

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’t is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

Shakespeare, HAMLET, Act v. Sc. 2.

At the end, the readiness to face whatever providence had in store was there, both in the case of Omar as well as his mother Naheed. I only saw him two or three times without Naheed in the roughly 16 months of our acquaintance in New York, therefore it is hard for me to think of them separately. She brought her two sons to meet me in September of 2007 shortly after I had moved to New York. Omar, the 38 year old elder son, a graduate of Oxford and Columbia, had been diagnosed with a highly malignant osteogenic sarcoma of the left shoulder. He had received a round of aggressive chemotherapy a few days before and his mouth was a battlefield of raw ulcers, abraded mucosa, bleeding gums. As we sat down to an elaborate meal with family and a few close friends, Omar calmly produced a bottle containing some sort of a bland, soothing drink and sipped away as if it were an equally exclusively prepared gourmet meal, all the while entertaining us with his signature brilliant quips and observations. Such was his class, such his chic. My childhood friend and the current Consul General of Pakistan, Mohsin Razi and his lovely wife Sarwat were present at dinner that evening. Earlier this year, when Mohsin and Sarwat heard about Omar’s death, they rushed to offer their condolences to Kamal and Naheed, both tearing up in the car at the memory of this dinner when Omar had shown such an astonishing and calm acceptance of his condition.

Starting with the first note I received from Omar via cyberspace in the summer of 2007 which was copied to Ama, and ending with my last glimpse of him as he lay dying with his mother curled up next to him in bed, straightening his blanket, holding his hand, I was exquisitely aware of what a unique privilege it was to be witnessing this sublime relationship. Of course love is never quantifiable. In Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, Act 1 Scene 1, Cleopatra demands to know how much Anthony loves her.

Cleo.If it be love indeed, tell me how much.

Ant.There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d.

Cleo.I’ll set a bourn how far to be belov’d.

Ant.Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.

The friendship alone that existed between Omar and Naheed would require new heavens and new earths to accommodate it.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Minuscule amounts of ethanol, the type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages, can more than double the life span of a tiny worm known as Caenorhabditis elegans, which is used frequently as a model in aging studies, UCLA biochemists report. The scientists said they find their discovery difficult to explain. “This finding floored us — it's shocking,” said Steven Clarke, a UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry and the senior author of the study, published Jan. 18 in the online journal PLoS ONE, a publication of the Public Library of Science. In humans, alcohol consumption is generally harmful, Clarke said, and if the worms are given much higher concentrations of ethanol, they experience harmful neurological effects and die, other research has shown. “We used far lower levels, where it may be beneficial,” said Clarke, who studies the biochemistry of aging. The worms, which grow from an egg to an adult in just a few days, are found throughout the world in soil, where they eat bacteria. Clarke's research team — Paola Castro, Shilpi Khare and Brian Young — studied thousands of these worms during the first hours of their lives, while they were still in a larval stage. The worms normally live for about 15 days and can survive with nothing to eat for roughly 10 to 12 days.

“Our finding is that tiny amounts of ethanol can make them survive 20 to 40 days,” Clarke said. Initially, Clarke's laboratory intended to test the effect of cholesterol on the worms. “Cholesterol is crucial for humans,” Clarke said. “We need it in our membranes, but it can be dangerous in our bloodstream.” The scientists fed the worms cholesterol, and the worms lived longer, apparently due to the cholesterol. They had dissolved the cholesterol in ethanol, often used as a solvent, which they diluted 1,000-fold. “It's just a solvent, but it turns out the solvent was having the longevity effect,” Clarke said. “The cholesterol did nothing. We found that not only does ethanol work at a 1-to-1,000 dilution, it works at a 1-to-20,000 dilution. That tiny bit shouldn't have made any difference, but it turns out it can be so beneficial.”

How little ethanol is that?

More here.

Roya Hakakian at NPR:

My encounter with America, from the moment we drove away from the airport and I saw layer after layer of bridge and road piled vast and high, had dwarfed me through and though. The currency of everything I knew or had was of no value in the American bazaar. Everything here was bigger, better or, as displayed on every shampoo bottle, at least 20 percent more.

Except, and this was my sole consolation, for the treasury of poetry I carried in my head. Persian literature with its ancient tradition of verse was how I cured homesickness and soothed the melancholic byproducts of displacement.

When feelings of insecurity or inadequacy arose, I fought them, knowing that America, however great, could not match my country's peerless poetry.

Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Hafez were no longer simply writers but the pillars of my reconfigured identity. And when has identity ever been reconfigured without a note of superiority? No verse in this towering new land could outdo the love, passion, devotion and yearning, the beauty in the ones I knew.

I'd rested in that certainty when a poem by Theodore Roethke unsettled me. It was called “My Papa's Waltz.”

More here.

Max Rivlin-Nadler in The Awl:

Walking into McCormick Place, Chicago’s half-hangar, half-labyrinth convention center, I looked at the schedule to find that I had just missed “Canadians Do Cremation Right.” The 130th National Funeral Directors Conference, was underway; held each year in a different city, the conference brings together funeral directors from across the country for three days of presentations, trade talk, awards and camaraderie. After shaking off my initial disappointment at having missed the Canadian talk, I scanned the remaining workshops. After passing on “Marketing Your Cemetery: Connecting With Your Community” and “Managing Mass Fatality Situations,” I circled “The Difference Is In The Details,” an embalming workshop.

The small film company I sometimes work for was planning a feature on new trends in funerals, and I had flown out for the weekend to try to meet some of the younger, hipper funeral directors at the conference. One of these was Ryan, a round man with a wide smile and an impeccable hair-part, whose car, he told me, has a bumper sticker that says “Let's Put The 'Fun' Back In Funeral.” He started his career as a funeral director, but had since moved into the lucrative field of “death care industry” consultation, where he works with funeral directors on ways to expand their businesses. In one of our conversations he tells me, “The worst thing I’ve heard a funeral director say is ‘we’ve always done it this way.’” Later, I tell him my plan to attend that evening's “Funeral Directors Under 40: A Night on the Town” event. Without missing a beat, he lowered his voice and said, “Funeral directors are notoriously heavy drinkers. There will definitely be some hook-ups.”

The funeral industry is in the midst of a transition of titanic proportions. America is secularizing at a rapid pace, with almost 25% of the country describing itself as un-church. Americans, embracing a less religious view of the afterlife, are now asking for a “spiritual” funeral instead of a religious one. And cremation numbers are up. Way up.

More here.

Before a democratic government can stabilise, the middle classes, schooled in the Pakistan Military Academy narrative, start aching for another saviour on horseback, but none exists.

Omar Ali in The Hindu:

In the current crisis in Pakistan, there has been some comment over what might work better for the country's development — a “democratic” model or an “authoritarian” one. These categories may be misleading. Generalised arguments about “authoritarian regimes” and “democracies” hide far too many details under the hijab. There is vigorous debate about the shortcomings (real and imagined) of modern capitalist democracy and there is no reason to think that it is the final system under which mankind will live forever. But in the last 100 years, most absolute or dictatorial regimes have all either broken down, or seen capitalist development and evolved into some sort of democracy. The question then is not about democracy versus authoritarianism. It is about whether an “under-developed” state, such as Pakistan, can “develop” as a capitalist democracy without going through a fascist phase.

At least in Pakistan, the answer is clear. It either stabilises as a democracy, or it violently fails. There is no third choice.

More here.

Manu Joseph in Open the Magazine (photo from Getty):

William Dalrymple, the Scotland-born writer and a director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, who is sometimes in medieval robes, has for long insisted that he is Indian at heart. But when he announces that the probability of an event occurring is one hundred per cent, it is not clear if he is being fatalistic the Indian way or if it is the swagger of the White man’s confidence in cause-and-effect, or if it is just that he knows something that others don’t. Last Friday, when I asked him if Salman Rushdie would be visiting the Jaipur festival, Dalrymple said, “Even if there is the threat of a nuclear explosion, Salman will come to Jaipur.”

The events of the past few days, which have cast a shadow over Rushdie’s visit, suggest that in this great republic the threat of a nuclear explosion is not as serious as the imagination of wounded religious sentiments, especially in the time of crucial elections. After an Islamic cleric objected to the visit of Rushdie because the writer has not apologised for Satanic Verses, and several Muslim groups joined the noise, with one of them even offering a prize of Rs 1 lakh to the lucky person who would fling a shoe at the writer, the Indian government has not told the nation what its position is. At least some Muslim organisations have had the will to strongly condemn those who have threatened violence against Rushdie, a grace the government is yet to show. Instead, the home ministry has conveyed, “law and order is a state subject”. And the Congress Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Ashok Gehlot, in turn, has very clearly said that he cannot promise safe passage for Rushdie because “a section of people” is offended.

Alasdair Wilkins in io9 (image by Tonis Pan):

There's an idea that suggests all the universe's electrons are actually one particle forever traveling backwards and forwards in time. It's a simple, elegant idea that solves some of physics's biggest mysteries. There's only one tiny problem. It's complete nonsense.

This is the story of that bizarre thought experiment and John Archibald Wheeler, the brilliant, largely unsung physicist who came up with it.

Like so much of the quantum world, electrons are strange. What's worse, they're all strange in exactly the same way. Every electron is identical to every other electron. They all have the same mass, the same electric charge, and the same spin. (For more on what these terms mean, check out our field guides here and here.) Electrons are just one of the indistinguishable particles – other examples include photons, neutrinos, protons, neutrons, and indeed most of the subatomic particles.

This isn't a trivial point, either. Not only is it impossible to tell electrons apart based on their physical properties, it's essentially impossible to tell them apart at all. This is because determining specific electrons by their position would require measuring their trajectories with exact precision, and the laws of quantum mechanics forbid this. Between measurements, electrons in the quantum world are probabilistic, defined by wave functions that give the odds of finding that particle in any given position. When the wave functions of multiple electrons overlap, it becomes officially impossible to determine which of the electrons was the one that was originally measured.

An interview with Tim Maudlin in The Atlantic (photo by Ross Anderson):

Your group has identified the central goal of the philosophy of cosmology to be the pursuit of outstanding conceptual problems at the foundations of cosmology. As you see it, what are the most striking of those problems?

Maudlin: So, I guess I would divide that into two classes. There are foundational problems and interpretational problems in physics, generally –say, in quantum theory, or in space-time theory, or in trying to come up with a quantum theory of gravity– that people will worry about even if they're not doing what you would call the philosophy of cosmology. But sometimes those problems manifest themselves in striking ways when you look at them on a cosmological scale. So some of this is just a different window on what we would think of as foundational problems in physics, generally.

Then there are problems that are fairly specific to cosmology. Standard cosmology, or what was considered standard cosmology twenty years ago, led people to the conclude that the universe that we see around us began in a big bang, or put another way, in some very hot, very dense state. And if you think about the characteristics of that state, in order to explain the evolution of the universe, that state had to be a very low entropy state, and there's a line of thought that says that anything that is very low entropy is in some sense very improbable or unlikely. And if you carry that line of thought forward, you then say “Well gee, you're telling me the universe began in some extremely unlikely or improbable state” and you wonder is there any explanation for that. Is there any principle that you can use to account for the big bang state?

Amartya Sen in the FT:

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Like many board games that were developed in India, of which chess is perhaps the most important and famous, the game of “snakes and ladders” too emerged in this country a long time ago. With its balancing of snakes that pull you down and ladders that take you up, this game has been used again and again as a metaphor for life, telling us about our fortunes and misfortunes, and going further, about the consequences of good deeds and bad actions. Good decisions yield handsome rewards – taking us rapidly up a ladder – and bad moves yield severe penalties – making us suffer a precipitate decline through the mouth of a long snake, all the way down to its distant tail.

Britain too found in this board game from their colony a good way of expressing their traditional ethical tales, illustrating, for example, the simple moralistic world of what was called “Virtue Rewarded and Vice Punished” – a game that became very popular in early 19th century. The English version used the graphic illustrations of the snakes and ladders to depict traditional English moral tales that made this old Indian game popular first in England and then in the British-dominated global world of the nineteenth century. The Indian names – from Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu and other subcontinental languages – for the qualities that respectively yielded rewards and punishment were replaced in the English version into the names of classical English virtues such as penitence, pity, obedience and self-denial yielding ascent up the ladders, while time-honoured vices of depravity, cruelty, dandyness made one slip rapidly down through the body of a snake.

The diagnosis of virtues and vices is, of course, adaptable, and the richness of the analogy of snakes and ladders can be put to use today in discussing modern problems as well – even the contemporary challenges of economic and social policies. We can well ask: what are the nasty snakes we face today in thinking about economic policies in our troubled world, and what helpful ladders we should try to climb up in moving an economy and society forward – in a world full of opportunities as well as serious dangers. The distinctions are quite important for the emerging economies which are trying to decide where to emerge. We do not want to emanate from the bottom end of snakes, and would rather emerge at the top of elevating ladders. How can we do this?

Christa Wolf belonged to the generation in which I also count myself. We were stamped by National Socialism and the late—too late—realization of all the crimes committed by Germans in the span of just twelve years. Ever since, the act of writing has demanded interpreting the traces that remain. One of Christa Wolf’s books, Patterns of Childhood, responds to that imperative, exposing her successive immersions in brown-shirted dictatorship and the doctrines of Stalinism. False paths credulously followed, stirrings of doubt and resistance to authoritarian constraints and beyond that, the recognition of one’s own participation in a system that was crushing the utopian ideals of Socialism—those are hallmarks of the five-decades of writing that established Wolf’s reputation, a journey that leads book by book from The Divided Sky (1963) to her final work, Stadt der Engel (“City of Angels,” 2010); and the books remain. To pick one out: “What Remains” is the title of a story published in June 1990 by Aufbau Verlag in the East and Luchterhand Verlag in the West. Even before it was available to East and West German readers, some West German journalists—the sort who assumed they were history’s victors and the hour of reckoning was at hand—ignored the embargo and struck. Christa Wolf, the celebrated author who had been much-praised for her resistance, the 1980 recipient of the Büchner Prize, Germany’s most prestigeous literary award, who was mobbed by enthusiastic students two years later as she delivered her Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics, Christa Wolf, whose voice had been heard in both Germanies, was now—the Wall hardly having fallen—subjected to an unending barrage of words.

more from Günter Grass at the NYRB here.

Among the 457 letters in Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, there is not one love letter. This may not surprise fans of the writer — author of The Radetzky March, The Emperor’s Tomb, and Job, among others — who may know Joseph Roth as a vagabond and misanthrope whose occupation as a journalist had him traveling from one European country to the next, living in rented rooms, wearing threadbare clothes, without a bank account, mostly alone, too miserable for romance, the consummate Wandering Jew. But even Roth the World War I soldier left no love letters, no tender requests to, perhaps, a girl he left behind in the crumbling Hapsburg Empire, asking for solace or maybe a photo. Nor did he write any romantic epistles to the lovers with whom he found companionship and comfort in his final years. There are a handful letters from Roth’s pre-war younger days, but they are all written to his cousins in Lemberg. They are letters of encouragement, advice, pontifications, the kind of letters one writes in youth that are more an affirmation of one’s self-understanding: “I am a sworn enemy to etiquette,” he wrote to his cousin Resia (which, in any case, was not true) and “…just like in Goethe’s Faust, which, alas and alack, you haven’t read.” “Who ever would have guessed it: all of nineteen!” he wrote to his younger cousin Paula when he was 22. “But then nineteen years are like a piece of fluff on the scales of eternity. And it’s in eternity that we live. From eternity, in eternity, for eternity. Yes, for eternity as well.”

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

A new species of book has emerged to tell us about the financial panic and subsequent economic calamity that have befallen the United States (and much of the rest of the world). Some books zero in on a particularly dramatic episode like the spine-tingling final hours leading up to the decision to let Lehman Brothers go under. Others recount the rise or fall of some venerable banking house such as Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch and treat these commercial ups and downs as if they were the sagas of grand empires come and gone. Biographical variants gives us the inside dope on titans of finance, invariably men of obsidian hearts and egomaniacal will, undone by their global ambition. Yet another sub-species of this genre, of which Jeff Madrick’s Age of Greed is an example, tries to combine story-telling and profiles of the rich and infamous with a survey and analysis of the whole sorry landscape of financial wilding and how its debaucheries came to be. Melodrama and moral drama supply the oxygen for this new literature. So we have books called Age of Greed, The Greed Merchants, The Big Con, Zombie Capitalism, The Great American Stick-Up, Bad Money, The End of Wall Street, The Banksters, Griftopia. Most of these books share a story line about what happened. An excess of greed nurtured in the highest precincts of the country’s financial establishment and ignored, deliberately or negligently, by those public authorities charged with monitoring and reining in these out-sized appetites, led inexorably to the near terminal breakdown, whose after-shocks reverberate to this day.

more from Steve Fraser at Dissent here.