… Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

… Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I have a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

… Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

… Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here in my heart.
.

by Antonio Machado
from Times Alone, Selected Poems of Antonio Machado
Wesleyan University Press, 1983

M.J.Moore in The Paris Reviw:

Back in 1985, on the morning of November 23 (a cold, wet, gray autumn Saturday), I woke up happy. At that time in my life, nothing could have been more unusual. But I knew that before that day’s sun had set, I was going to meet James Baldwin, whose body of work (the novels and short stories, his plays and all those exquisite essays) had inspired my own burning desire to write.

…For three years Baldwin’s books had meant the world to me. Back in the summer of ’82, when I transferred from a small college in Chicago to the flagship University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I brought my interest in the 1960s downstate. And shortly before leaving to enroll in two summertime classes, a PBS documentary called I Heard It Through the Grapevine was aired; James Baldwin was all over it. Throughout the program, Mr. B. pored over photographs of America and varied Americans in the late 1950s and early 1960s—from the mayhem at Little Rock in 1957 to the burning buses that carried Freedom Riders in 1961 and myriad other images; as one iconic photo after another was re-examined, Baldwin commented on camera, or quotations from his past essays were articulated in voice-overs. The sound of James Baldwin’s voice captured me with its splendid variety of tonal colors, its musically percussive rhetorical rhythms, and its soaring narrative power. His voice was the instrument that created what I’d later learn to see on the page as his unique brand of “spoken prose.” And at length, Baldwin reflected on the bloodshed, the torment, and the suffering that characterized the 1960s for him; I tried to do him justice now.

More here.

Leon Wieseltier in The New York Times:

Too much of the discourse on Israel is a doubting discourse. I do not mean that it is too critical: Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. I mean that the state is too often judged for its viability or its validity, as if some fundamental acceptance of its reality is pending upon the resolution of its many problems with itself and with others. About the severity of those problems there is no question, and some of them broach primary issues of politics and morality; but Israel’s problems are too often combined and promoted into a Problem, which has the effect of emptying the Jewish state of its actuality and consigning it to a historical provisionality, a permanent condition of controversy, from which it can be released only by furnishing various justifications and explanations.

In its early years Israel liked to think of itself as an experiment in the realization of various ideals and hopes, but really all societies, including Arab ones, are, in the matter of justice, experiments; and existence itself must never be regarded as an experiment, as if anybody has the authority to declare that the experiment has failed, and to try and do something about it. Israel is not a proposition, it is a country. Its facticity is one of the great accomplishments of the Jews’ history and one of the great accomplishments of liberalism’s and socialism’s and nationalism’s histories, and it is not complacent or apologetic to say so. The problems are not going away. I cannot say the same about the sense of greatness.

More here.

From The Economist:

Until now, experiments to try to determine the biological basis of beauty have been of the please-look-at-these-photographs-and-answer-some-questions variety. Some useful and not necessarily obvious results have emerged, such as that one determinant of beauty is facial symmetry.

But what would really help is a breeding experiment which allowed the shapes of faces to be followed across the generations to see how those shapes relate to variations in things that might be desirable in a mate. These might include fertility, fecundity, social status, present health, and likely resistance to future infection and infestation. Correlations between many of these phenomena and attributes of the body-beautiful have, indeed, been established. But in a pair-forming, highly social species such as Homo sapiens, you also have to live with your co-child-raiser or, at least, collaborate with him or her. So other things may be important in a mate, too, such as an even temper and a friendly outlook.

It would be impossible to do such a breeding experiment on people, of course. But as Irene Elia, a biological anthropologist at Cambridge, realised, it has in fact been done, for the past five decades, on a different species of animal. Dr Elia has published her analysis of this experiment in the Quarterly Review of Biology. The animals in question are foxes.

More here.

Chris Maisano in Jacobin:

While it may be premature to sound the death knell for social democracy, it is clear that the current crisis has accelerated the long-term decline of social-democratic politics in Europe. Social-democratic parties may still be able to win elections and form governments, but they’ve shown little inclination to break decisively from neoliberal policy prescriptions when in power. From Greece to Spain to Ireland to France to Germany, the principles of solidarity and social welfare that have underpinned the kinder, gentler form of capitalism embodied in the phrase “social Europe” are under attack. They may not hold up under the combined pressures of the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and European Central Bank as they pursue neoliberal structural adjustment. Citizens across the continent have protested against the dismantling of their social protections, sometimes ferociously, but to date they have not been able to turn the tide. At the moment, at least, an “asocial Europe” appears to be the continent’s future.

In the recently published book What’s Left of the Left, a group of prominent political scientists, sociologists, and policy experts attempt to make sense of social democracy’s long transition from left to center-left, from opposition to capitalism to its humane and rational administration. This is not a neutral or objective piece of scholarship. All of the volume’s contributors can be counted among the partisans of social democracy and accept the putative wisdom of the center-left’s rejection of socialist visions in favor of capitalism with a human face. Edited by James Cronin, George Ross, and James Schoch, and including contributions from such luminaries of the academic center-left as Sheri Berman, Gerassimos Moschonas, and Jonas Pontusson, it attempts to provide an intellectual framework to advance the project of “progressive politics in tough times.” The book is far too long and detailed to permit comprehensive treatment here, so I will focus primarily on those contributions that are most relevant to our purposes. While valuable for anyone seeking to attain an introduction to the contemporary European center-left, it reflects the profound limitations of the political tradition it seeks to defend.

More here.

An old piece by John Berger on Eqbal Ahmad, over at The Transnational Institute:

He has fought alongside guerrillas in the mountains many times in at least two continents. He's also an excellent cook. He will happily spend an entire day preparing an evening meal for friends. His name is Eqbal Ahmad. Once when he and I were cutting up vegetables for a curry, he told me a story.

It began in 1947. Eqbal was thirteen years old. His voice had begun to break. Sometimes he spoke as gruffly as a man, at other times he spoke in a boy's falsetto. He couldn't control it. But he already had a man's decisiveness, he was already at risk like a man. I imagine the knowledge of that risk was in his eyes but I didn't know him then.

With independence, India was being partitioned. Twelve million people were on the roads, going in both directions, seeking safety. Eqbal's family had lived as Muslims for generations in India but now his elder brother decided to take the family to the newly created Pakistan.

The boy's mother refused to leave. Only mothers who are widows can become as immovable as she did. The rest of the family took the train for Lahore. In Delhi they learnt that the train would go no further: the fighting of the civil war was too dangerous. Everybody was lodged in a refugee camp. Eqbal's brother, who was a senior civil servant, telegraphed for a plane to come and rescue them. A whining man, begging for opium in the camp, caught Eqbal's attention. Misery importuning misery, he thought. Some youngsters pushed the man aside. Ay! Charsi! they mocked. Ay! Charsi! Opium-eater who lives in a cloud of smoke!

Finally the plane from Pakistan arrived. It was an ex-RAF Fokker. At the airport the two brothers were the last to embark. Every place was already taken.

You can fly in the cockpit with me, sir, the pilot shouted to his brother.

No, we're two, there's also Eqbal.

Then would you like me to tell somebody to get down, sir?

No, take Eqbal.

It was then that the thirteen year old revolted. He ran across the tarmac away from the plane.

Go, he shouted, go! I'm going to walk.

His brother, perhaps because he wanted to accompany his wife and small children, perhaps because he knew how obstinate and bone-headed Eqbal could be, climbed up into the plane and, standing by the still open door, said: All right, but take these! Whereupon he handed down a .22 single-barrel hunting gun, an ammunition belt and a 100-rupee note. Stay here and wait for the next plane, he added. Finally the Fokker took off.

More here.

Matthew Davis in Guernica:

The Qasabji bar in Damascus, on an unremarkable road just outside the Old City, was where Khaled Khalifa and I had our best conversations. Khaled always entered first and greeted the customers sitting at tables near the door. He bent down, kissed the men, flirted with the women, and strutted to where Nabil, Qasabji’s owner, had cleaned a spot for us. He ordered either a glass of arak or the local Damascene beer, Barada, pulled a cigarette from his pack, lit it, and added to the purplish haze of smoke. Qasabji was a singular room shaped like a boxcar, crowded with wood tables, benches and chairs that pushed against one another and three walls. I only saw it at night, crowded and smoke-filled, loud, dim. Khaled always faced out, better to see the men and women, but mostly the women, and when an attractive one entered he banged the table with his fist and hooted like a wolf.

I met Khaled Khalifa in 2007. He was a fellow at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where I was working. His third novel, In Praise of Hatred had come out in Arabic the year before, and within the year would be short-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, commonly known as the Arab Booker, and Khaled would be profiled by the New York Times.

Qasabji was one of two Damascene locales where Khaled had often written In Praise of Hatred. He had worked until the early hours of the morning, Nabil serving him cup after cup of coffee. It was a romantic image, the focused writer, the devoted bartender, but everything about Khaled was romantic—his outsized personality (he once orchestrated an entire club to dance while standing atop a bar), his love of women (his womanizing is notorious), his capacity to drink (he buys Smirnoff vodka in two gallon jugs, places them around his apartment, and fills them with olive oil when they’re empty). And when he talked about writing, he spoke with a refreshing earnestness…

More here.

Michael Fried at nonsite:

Several years ago Anthony Caro was invited to propose a large-scale work for one of the central malls on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan. This was in connection with Park Avenue Malls, on ongoing program begun more than ten years ago under the auspices of the Park Avenue Authority and in which a number of sculptors had already taken part. Typically, Caro had his own approach to the project: it mattered to him that in addition to passersby there were countless cars moving in both directions, and he began to think in terms of making a work long enough to lend itself to being viewed meaningfully from passing cars as well as by pedestrians. This involved building maquettes of the street, trying out various possible designs for the construction itself, visiting New York more than once to study the site in detail and pursue various questions on the ground, returning to London and modifying the models in accordance with his new findings, and so on.

Before long, Caro’s proposal envisioned a construction fully three city blocks long, represented in his Camden Town, London, studio by a model built to 1:4 scale and erected at waist height with trees and bushes made of wire and plastic.

more here.

David Rieff at The Nation:

If films were horses, almost no one would have placed even a $2 bet on Hannah Arendt, the recent biopic by the independent German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta. How did a film that reprises the fifty-year-old controversy about what the German-Jewish refugee and political philosopher thought and wrote in 1963 about the kidnapping and trial of Adolf Eichmann become the most talked-about art-house movie of this past summer, and one of the most improbable independent-film successes in recent memory? There have been any number of movies about writers and artists, from Michelangelo to Truman Capote, made by directors of varying intellectual abilities in both Hollywood and Europe, but very few biopics made about intellectuals or philosophers. And with good reason: however wrongly, the lives of writers are thought to be sexy and exciting—think Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dinesen, Lillian Hellman. In contrast, the lives of intellectuals are thought to be deadly dull. It was said of Kant that one would be hard-pressed to infer the existence of the two sexes from his work. So imagine a biopic in which the philosopher is portrayed tramping around eighteenth-century Königsberg, giving his tutorials, writing The Critique of Pure Reason and, perhaps in order to spice up the plot, dashing off a stern letter to his erstwhile disciple Johann Gottlieb Fichte, warning him of the dangers of radical idealism. Its appeal would be, shall we say, somewhat circumscribed, no matter how buttery the popcorn.

But having made biographical films about the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen and Rosa Luxemburg—both of which starred Barbara Sukowa, who also plays the title role in Hannah Arendt—von Trotta is the only living director with a major body of work who could conceivably have mastered so austere and complicated a figure as Arendt.

more here.

Siddhartha Mahanta at Bookforum:

Vichy France was a disgusting place. Harper's readers were reminded of that in the October issue of the magazine, which included an excerpt from a 1945 handbook for American soldiers in occupied France. It featured useful tips on navigating filthy streets (where “the acute shortage of gasoline prevents refuse trucks from making daily rounds”), making do with corroded plumbing systems, and coping with villagers' “malodorous custom of piling manure in front of houses.” These descriptions set the stage for Ian Buruma's Year Zero: A History of 1945, which illustrates in harrowing detail how forging a new world order out of the remains of war can be nasty business. One might have expected that the end of World War II would have immediately ushered in a period of international peace. Buruma demonstrates that before it did, the world descended into a brutal free-for-all, full of reprisal killings against religious and ethnic minorities, political disarray, and carnal excess.

What Buruma delivers in Year Zero is a counter-narrative to the widely accepted idea of 1945 as a year of global reconciliation. At the close of the war, the victors were faced not only with the problems of widespread starvation and ruined cities, but also with the task of creating a new political and economic order, and of resolving (or at least learning to manage) old rivalries.

more here.

David Weigel in Slate:

One can, as most Republicans prefer to do, remember what happened in 2005, when Republicans wanted to end filibusters on judicial nominees and every Democrat—including our current president—predicted nuclear fallout, brimstone, and exploding skulls.

We do know how the Senate came to change its rules today, a vote that represented the biggest victory for the left since the election of President Barack Obama. That process started in the first weeks of 2009, after a Democratic landslide mighty enough to sweep even Al Franken into the upper house. The Republicans, who’d held 55 seats during the 2005 “nuclear option” fight, were down to 41. A new class of Democrats, including Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall, buckled in for action.

They got a slog. An economic stimulus package, once expected to get up to 80 votes, got over the 60-vote cloture line only with huge concessions to three Republicans. A simple omnibus parks funding bill took weeks to pass. Then, in May, just enough Republicans held together to filibuster the president’s nominee for deputy secretary of the Interior. To Majority Leader Harry Reid’s surprise, the Democratic left honed in quickly on the filibuster, demanding that he change it.

More here.

From More Intelligent Life:

Every year, 1.17m people die in road accidents around the world. As of January 2011, 7,066 soldiers from coalition forces had been killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with an estimated 110,000 civilians; in 2007, the last year for which there are full figures, 521,303 people died of cancer in western Europe. Behind all these statistics are families who need to be informed and someone whose job it is to inform them. There is now a widespread belief that the way the news is delivered has a profound effect on the way the dead person is remembered and the way the survivors heal.

There are some textbook examples of what not to do. Putting a note through the letterbox; getting the victim’s name wrong; using euphemisms such as “lost” or “passed on” (confusing at a time when someone is trying hard not to believe it); and turning up in shorts and flip-flops, like the British diplomats who greeted one woman as she arrived in Bahrain in 2006 after her husband’s death in a boat disaster. A vision that has stuck in her mind, rather than anything that was said.
And what of the bearers of bad news? What is it like to knock on a door knowing you are about to instigate the worst moment in someone’s life, and then have to confront the ways in which they do or do not deal with the fact that a life has ended?

More here.

Bradford Harris in American Scientist:

When it comes to the story of evolutionary science, people know the name Charles Darwin, but most do not know the names Ivan Wallin or Lynn Margulis—two more recent, groundbreaking evolutionary theorists. Over the past several decades, these and other researchers have revealed that organisms’ cooperation and interdependence contribute more to evolution than competition. Symbiogenesis—the emergence of a new species through the evolutionary interdependence of two or more species—is at least as important in the history of life as survival of the fittest. Such insight has failed to gain traction in American minds—including those of American scientists—because of cultural history traceable back through the popularization of Adam Smith’s individualist philosophy.

By the time Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, the Western European and American mind had long been intellectually primed to interpret complexity by reducing perspective to the individual. Adam Smith’s publication of The Wealth of Nations 83 years earlier had set the tone of philosophical and scientific approaches to understanding complex systems. Fundamental to Smith’s philosophy, as economic historian Warren Samuel reminds us, was the notion that large organizations like the economy were to be “comprehended in terms of self-interest or maximization of personal well being.” Smith’s influence on Darwin was as strong as it was on the rest of the reading public.

Picture: Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis, a painting by Shoshanah Dubineer, occupies a hallway in the Morrill Science Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where Margulis was a professor until her death in 2011. Margulis maintained that genetic variation emerges primarily through symbiosis, not through competition, a once-controversial view that is gaining increasing acceptance

More here.

Lindsey Gilbert in the Boston Review:

Lindsey Gilbert: I’ve heard it said that there aren’t a whole lot of independent scholars and thinkers left—either they’ve been swallowed by the academy or given up and started blogging about their cats. Except you, you’ve been called an independent scholar, haven’t you? What does that mean?

George Scialabba: I have been miscalled, I think. I certainly don’t consider myself a scholar. In fact, I mostly read magazines. But an independent thinker—well, if it’s true, it’s because I have a day job [at Harvard]. The day job is a mixed blessing, of course. It’s dull, but it’s undemanding. It swallows half my time, but it doesn’t swallow my imagination, my reserves. I do feel lucky that I fell into a job like that; just as I owe some of my independence to rent control in Cambridge, I owe some of it to the fact that Harvard has a good union, at least for my kind of employees, clerical and technical workers. But I really worry about whether my good fortune is replicable for someone starting out with the same aspirations.

LG: Why is that?

GS: It’s all laid out very well and presciently by Russell Jacoby in The Last Intellectuals. It’s about why the kind of intellectual that flourished in the thirties, forties, and fifties is a dying breed. That sounds a little bit nostalgic, but it’s just that the situation is less and less tenable. There’s no cheap urban real estate, it’s hard to survive without a regular salary, and academia has become professionalized in a way that it wasn’t in the thirties and forties.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

There it is! I can definitely make out the Moon.

Bit of old news here — well, the existence of the Moon is extremely old news, but even this new result is slightly non-new. But it was new to me.

Ice Cube is a wondrously inventive way of looking at the universe. Sitting at the South Pole, the facility itself consists of strings of basketball-sized detectors reaching over two kilometers deep into the Antarctic ice. Its purpose is to detect neutrinos, which it does when a neutrino interacts with the ice to create a charged lepton (electron, muon, or tau), which in turn splashes Cherenkov radiation into the detectors. The eventual hope is to pinpoint very high-energy neutrinos coming from specific astrophysical sources.

For this purpose, it’s the muon-creating neutrinos that are your best bet; electrons scatter multiple times in the ice, while taus decay too quickly, while muons give you a nice straight line. Sadly there is a heavy background of muons that have nothing to do with neutrinos, just from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere. Happily most of these can be dealt with by using the Earth as a shield — the best candidate neutrino events are those that hit Ice Cube by coming up through the Earth, not down from the sky.

More here.

William Dalrymple in the New York Times Magazine:

The Karzai family graveyard lies a few miles outside Kandahar, on the edge of the village of Karz. On the day I drove there, burned-out cars stood rusting by the sides of the road, children splashed through open drains and bullet holes riddled the mud walls opposite checkpoints. Amid all this, the graveyard stood out — gleaming, immaculate. Straggling bougainvillea and mulberry trees blossomed over the calligraphic tiles topping the cream-colored walls. Through the double gates were lines of cypresses. In the middle stood a domed enclosure containing the graves of the clan elders.

Hamid Karzai was entering the final lap of his presidency, and I had traveled to Karz with Mahmood, one of the president’s elder brothers, accompanied by a phalanx of his bodyguards. Afghanistan’s presidential election is set for April, and as the deadline for registering candidates approached, the country’s future seemed to hang in part on the fraught internal family politics of the Karzais. Hamid is ineligible to run for a third term, and it had been long rumored in Kabul that he would anoint his brother Qayum as his successor. Mahmood had made it clear that he wanted the presidency to stay in the family; he had even begun to raise campaign funds for Qayum, just as he once had for Hamid.

More here.

Carmine Di Biase at the Times Literary Supplement:

The interviews and letters, however, along with the essays in Collection of Sand, shed light on this final image and reveal a continuity of imagery that binds much of Calvino’s work together. The “shells washed clean by the waves” speak of the serenity, momentary though it may be, that comes when a bit of the world’s chaos is contained in a fixed form, like the dead ants in a sack, like the sand transformed, through the slow work of a mollusc, into a shell. Two years before this story was published, Calvino had written to Natalia Ginzburg from San Remo, where he had grown up. It was “overflowing with people on holiday”, so he stayed “locked up at home” or went “out on walks in the country”. A better refuge, however, lay in “an old collection of shells” he had found in the house. He had begun to draw them “in order not to lose contact with things”. He found the nautilus shells particularly difficult to draw. “I’m not good at it”, he said. He was also struggling to translate his “favorite four lines” from Baudelaire’s “Le mort joyeux”. McLaughlin renders them thus: “In fertile earth full of snails / I want to dig myself a deep grave, / Where I can stretch out my old bones in peace / And sleep in oblivion like a shark in the waves”. Here, perhaps, in this early letter to Ginzburg, is the origin of an image that would follow Calvino and inform his work for the rest of his life.

more here.

Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon at The American Reader:

No contemporary writer has tarried in literary Hell more faithfully—or more convincingly—than the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai. In the almost thirty years since his first novel, the infernally-titled Satantango, Mr. Krasznahorkai’s vision of society as an inescapable Hell of its own design has never lapsed. It is an ever-expanding world of deceit and human folly, one spun by interminable sentences that spread quaquaversally, like wild flames, scorching hope wherever it writhes.

True to Beckett and Sartre before him, Mr. Krasznahorkai’s Hell always manifests itself as a scene or closed circle. Though these closed circles are of human design, they are populated by demons who are paradoxically all too human. These demons, themselves deeply acquainted with Hell—the closed circle that never opens—choreograph set pieces of swindle and deceit that lead innocents and the willfully gullible to inexorable doom. In this respect, Mr. Krasznahorkai’s work sharply recalls Pushkin’s “Demons,” a poem later used as an epigraph by Dostoevsky in his novel of the same name:

Strike me dead, the track has vanished,
Well, what now? We’ve lost the way,
Demons have bewitched our horses,
Led us in the wilds astray.

more here.