Anthony Sattin in The Guardian:

Justin Marozzi's new book is the first English-language history of Baghdad for nearly 80 years. The previous history was subtitled “City of Peace”, a tag without a hint of irony, taking the name by which the city by the Tigris was known to its first inhabitants. Marozzi's additional subtitle – city of blood – is there to keep you from yawning and also to present a more rounded image of what is to come. Because what emerges from this impressive book is that whatever else it has been, Baghdad has always been a city of peace and love, and blood and spilled guts.

The city of peace was born out of blood, created following one of the perennial bloodlettings between Sunni and Shia Muslims that have occurred with depressing regularity since the untimely death in 632AD of the prophet Muhammad. The previous rulers of the Arab world, the Sunni Umayyad caliphs, had been based in Damascus. But with the ascendancy of the Abbasids in the 8th century, their Shia leader, al-Mansur – the Victorious – decided to create a new capital on the Tigris. The site was an inspired choice as it has good access via the Mesopotamia river system and along the Persian Royal Road to the markets of the Silk Road, the Arab Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. The cliche that history repeats itself may well have been coined in this city for few places on earth have enjoyed such relentlessly inevitable cycles of prosperity, cultural outpouring and descent into bloodletting. Perhaps no one has expressed this duality better than al-Mansur's grandson, Harun al-Rashid. Harun is famous for being the caliph of The Arabian Nights, and is celebrated for having overseen one of the most glorious of all the city's booms. While the empire was run by the grand vizier, Harun filled his magnificent palace with scholars and poets, his gold goblet with Shirazi wine and his bed with some of 40 or so gorgeous courtesans from his harem. Marozzi weighs this image against another side of the pleasure-loving aesthete, for Harun, who made the pilgrimage to Mecca eight times, was also capable of leaving his friends briefly at a banquet to go and behead two girls caught in bed together. When he returned with their jewel-bedecked heads on a platter, one of his courtiers recorded that he “found this a horrific sight”.

More here.

Nicholas Slayton in The Atlantic:

When Sunni militants seized the Iraqi city of Mosul at the start of the week, instantaneously creating half a million refugees and an existential crisis for the country, it came as a surprise. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has been terrorizing Iraq for months now, but when it along with other jihadi forces and Baathists still loyal to Saddam Hussein’s regime took the nation’s second-largest city, the threat became more serious. As ISIS pledges to advance south toward Baghdad, Iraqi soldiers are in many cases abandoning their posts and stripping off their uniforms to escape. It’s a terrifying development, but it shouldn’t come as a complete shock. Iraq is disintegrating, and ISIS’s success is just a distillation of the problems the country has been struggling with for some time now.

The roots of the current violence go at least as far back as Iraq’s 2006-2007 civil war, which didn’t so much end as get put on hiatus. The spate of sectarian violence pitted the Shiite-majority government against Sunni militias and al-Qaeda in Iraq (a group from which ISIS emerged). The U.S. troop “surge” halted the bloodshed and got Sunni groups to side with the government against foreign jihadists. But it failed to produce a greater political resolution. With the departure of American forces from the country in 2011, these grave tensions reemerged.

More here.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
.

by Dylan Thomas
from The Poems of Dylan Thomas
published by New Directions, 1952

A. O. Scott at The New York Times:

Zweig, who wrote biographical studies of Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, Sigmund Freud and Erasmus (among many others), was as interested in the meanings as in the facts of his subjects’ lives. Prochnik, a protean writer of fiction, criticism and intellectual history, to some extent shares this bias. Not that Zweig’s character is easily gleaned from his writings, even the intimate letters and journals that make up a substantial portion of Prochnik’s material.

A fervent admirer of Walt Whitman, he is introduced to Prochnik’s readers as a bouquet of self-contradictions, containing multitudes. Between em-dashes, Prochnik describes him as an “affluent Austrian citizen, restless wandering Jew, stupendously prolific author, tireless advocate for Pan-European humanism, relentless networker, impeccable host, domestic hysteric, noble pacifist, cheap populist, squeamish sensualist, dog lover, cat hater, book collector, alligator shoe wearer, dandy, depressive, cafe enthusiast, sympathizer with lonely hearts, casual womanizer, man ogler, suspected flasher, convicted fabulist, fawner over the powerful, champion of the powerless, abject coward before the ravages of old age, unblinking stoic before the mysteries of the grave.” And this is only a partial catalog.

more here.

David L. Ulin at the LA Times:

Stuart Dybek's stories occupy a territory somewhere between Vladimir Nabokov and Nelson Algren — beguiled by the play of language but also gritty and specific, fundamentally urban at their core. This makes sense, I suppose: Born in 1942, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a native of Chicago, Dybek is a product of the classroom and the streets. Although he's received a Guggenheim and a MacArthur “genius” grant, he doesn't publish often; his last book of fiction, “I Sailed With Magellan,” came out in 2003.

And yet, to read him is to be reminded of the resonance of small moments, the connections that arise and dissipate with the passing power of a thought. “[T]he story might at first be no more than a scent,” Dybek observes in “Fiction”: “a measure of the time spent folded in a cedar drawer that's detectable on a silk camisole.” What he's getting at is the power of inference, the longing implied, and inspired, by a gesture or a phrase.

“Fiction” comes late in “Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories.” The book takes its title from a line in “The Great Gatsby”: “First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we'd been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time.”

more here.

Nathaniel Popkin at Fanzine:

Here in these letters Agee is skinned, here he is bruised, here he is fresh, romantic, frustrated, idealistic, thoughtful, perceptive, fatalistic, honest, loyal, shameful, rational, destructive, skeptical, and honest. He’s wanting, grasping, rationalizing, grieving, pitying, singing, in love with the nature of things, and always, it seems, spent for time and focus and money. The letters begin in 1925, when Agee is 16, rejecting insincerity, and attending Exeter and continue rather steadily as he moves on to Harvard and then to New York to become a writer. Of this possibility, he writes to Father Flye from Cambridge in 1930, “I’d do anything on earth to become a really great writer…devise a poetic diction that will cover the whole range of events as perfectly and evenly as skin covers every organ…”

Despair comes naturally next, as night follows day, and just as relentlessly, to every writer of such erupting ambition. In Agee’s first letter from New York he mentions suicide; his own mortality patters the pages of the next 23 years’ of letters, stippling ink that grows, by the mid-1940s into a puddle: Agee is killing himself with alcohol and cigarettes.

more here.

Jesus Diaz in Sploid:

Every four years there is a new World Cup ball and players have to adapt to its new behavior due to changes on its aerodynamic properties. Players hated the 2010 ball—Jabulani—for its unpredictable moves. Has the new 2014 ball—Brazuca—solved these problems? NASA has the answer.

In South Africa, players said that Jabulani sucked. I remember watching the interviews with the Spanish team—the cup winners—and they all bitched about it. “It behaves like a f*cking beach ball” was the most common complain. The problem was the knuckling.

The previous World Cup ball, the Jabulani, was described as sometimes demonstrating “supernatural” movements […] when kicked with little or no spin, the ball “knuckled,” […] Knuckling occurs when, at zero or near-zero spin, the seams of the ball channel airflow in an unusual and erratic manner making its trajectory unpredictable.

The lack of precision affected the entire game, so most players hated it. According to NASA, Adidas “worked with hundreds of players to develop the Brazuca football” to solve this “supernatural” behavior.

They introduced some changes: While a traditional football has 32 panels and Jabulani has eight, the Brazuca has only six. The Brazuca's panels also have a rougher surface.

More here.

Stephen Greenblatt in The Telegraph:

When, near the end of his career, Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, the tragicomic romance that seems at least in retrospect to signal his impending retirement to Stratford, he had in his mind and quite possibly on his desk a book of Montaigne’s Essays. One of those essays, “Of the Cannibals,” has long been recognized as a source upon which Shakespeare was clearly drawing. The playwright had some degree of acquaintance with French culture and language. Yet close attention to the allusions in The Tempest and elsewhere makes clear that Shakespeare read Montaigne not in French but in an English translation. That translation, published in a handsome folio edition in London in 1603, was by John Florio. For Shakespeare — and not for Shakespeare alone but for virtually all of his English contemporaries – Montaigne was Florio’s Montaigne. His essays, in their rich Elizabethan idiom and wildly inventive turns of phrase, constitute the way Montaigne spoke to Renaissance England.

Shakespeare quite possibly knew Florio, who was 12 years his senior, personally. English-born, the son of Italian Protestant refugees, Florio was on friendly terms with such writers as Ben Jonson and Samuel Daniel. In the early 1590s, he was a tutor to the Earl of Southampton, the wealthy nobleman to whom Shakespeare dedicated two poems in 1593 and 1594. But it is not simply a likely personal connection that accounts for the fact that Shakespeare read Montaigne in Florio’s translation. The translation seemed to address English readers of Shakespeare’s time with unusual directness and intensity.

More here.

Patricia T. O'Conner in The New Yourk Times:

Is there room in American fiction for another brilliant young émigré writer? There had better be, because here he is. Boris Fishman’s first novel, “A Replacement Life,” is bold, ambitious and wickedly smart.

The story, which unfolds during the summer and fall of 2006, begins as a jangling predawn phone call wakes 25-year-old Slava Gelman in his tiny Manhattan apartment. His adored grandmother, Sofia, who raised him, has just died in Brooklyn. Slava, a frustrated writer, has lost more than his grandmother. He’s lost what he can never know, the Holocaust memories that died with her, memories he had hoped to write about one day. The Gelmans, who emigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1980s, know that as a teenager in Belarus Sofia lost her parents when the Nazis annihilated the Jewish ghetto in Minsk. But that’s all they know. For 60 years, she kept silent about her escape from the ghetto and the horrors that followed. Even the man she married after the war, Yevgeny Gelman, now 80, knows only a few small details: “a factory, a raid, bodies in a basement, a dead child.”

More here.

Daffodils

I hunker down, and see the daffodils
At eye-level, with the light coming through them.

It has happened once before.
I am being born. There is yellow light,

Indefinable, but absolutely pure,
Irradiating everything – maybe a vein or two,

My mother’s or my own, the yolk of an egg
Or a streak of red in a bloodshot eyeball –

Either way, the world in its primary state
Being given. Ever afterwards

Yellow is my colour. And it multiplies
Endlessly. But nothing is the same.

The Spring comes in. Again it is making windows
Of itself, to be seen but not seen through.
.

by Harry Clifton
from The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass
publisher Bloodaxe, Newastle, 2012

Neha Sharma on the Indian General elections, Arundhati Roy, and the secular ideal, in the LA Review of Books:

Roy’s nonfiction abandons the careful cadence of her Man Booker–winning novel, The God of Small Things (1997), and employs a combative approach. Roy’s critique of Indian democracy — which underscores most of her nonfiction, from Listening to Grasshoppers to Broken Republic — makes me feel like a reluctant trainee in a guerrilla camp. Critics have derided Roy as a polemicist, an agitator, and a hypocrite, but I believe her greatest failings in her nonfiction are her inability to appreciate complexity and her tendency to dehumanize her opponent.

Her lack of insight is best exemplified by Walking with the Comrades and “TheTrickledown Revolution,” her sympathetic essays about the Naxal movement, which is currently India’s biggest internal security threat. The Naxal movement — inspired by the tenets of Mao — is an armed struggle by adivasis(tribals) to reclaim their mineral-rich land, which the government-owned National Mineral Development Corporation is mining for bauxite. It seemed like a worthy cause, and Roy became a voice for the oppressed, but not a reasonable one. Over the past decade the “cause” inspired disenchantment among many of its own members because of the escalating violence — killing civilians and scapegoating bottom-rung public employees, like teachers and constables. But Roy stood strong in her support for the Naxals, with complete disregard for the brutality and destruction the movement spawned. The main characters of Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest novel, The Lowland (September 2013), are both immediate and collateral victims of the Naxal conflict, and, unlike Roy, the author allows for the inhumanity and disillusionment that an extremist revolution might engender, its noble motivations enmeshed in undesirable consequences.

Now Roy’s recalcitrance is given new relevance by the verdict of the 2014 prime ministerial elections in the world’s largest democracy: on May 16, the majority chose Narendra Modi — a Hindu nationalist who was once accused of abetting a pogrom against Muslims while he was the chief minister of Gujarat — as the 15th prime minister of India.

“The Doctor and the Saint”and its reaffirmation of Ambedkar’s views on Hinduism, caste, and social reform come at a time when the new regime might herald a resurgence of Hindu nationalism, in a country that has struggled and failed time and again to uphold the secular ideal.

More here.

Russell Bennetts and Daniel Tutt interview Simon Critchley in Berfois (image by Tommaso Galli):

You present Carl Schmitt’s reading of Hamlet and discuss the politics of Hamlet, what you call “Hamletization”. It’s probably the most important reading of the political implications ofHamlet. Based on his reading of Hamlet, Schmitt argues that all politics happens in a radical decision to establish sovereignty. This strikes a similar chord to Badiou’s theory of the truth event, and even Žižek’s idea of the act – a sort of radical, earth-shattering moment to break us out of what’s rotten in Denmark. To what extent is that a plague of modernity, this “Hamletization”? One could also apply Foucault’s biopolitics as a kind of impossibility of real politics, where we lack the capacity for real change to take place. Countless political theorists since Schmitt present a theory of an act or an event to break out of this deadlock of the political. Are we doomed to a Schmittian politics? How is this connected to what Hamlet tells us about the modern condition, politically speaking?

Critchley

The first thing is that it’s not clear what the ‘modern condition’ is. One of the axes that we’re grinding in this book and in my own current work on ancient tragedy is to try and destabilise the distinction between ancient and modern tragedy and, by implication, antiquity and modernity. I don’t believe in modernity. I don’t believe there is such a thing as modernity. And you get a kind of modernity fundamentalism in all kinds of areas of inquiry.

If you look at a play like Hamlet, it’s more like there’s some relationship between a world that is passing away and a world that is coming into existence. The play seems to be taking place at a kind of end between those two moments – the old and the new. The old is still there, though it’s in crisis – the king has been murdered – so the order of sovereignty based on kings has been destabilised with the murder of Hamlet’s father. And the new world is coming into being, which looks like a world of crime and opportunism, and that’s what’s wrong. The play is kind of juxtaposed between the two domains. It’s as if what most philosophers want to say of Shakespeare is that he’s the philosopher of modernity – that’s what you get with Hegel, Schelling, everyone. And we’re not so sure about that. And if you look at antiquity, it’s not clear what’s ancient about antiquity.

Ancient drama is as modern as modern drama. In exactly the same way, if you look at ancient tragedies, you find a world that has passed away – a world of myth – and the world that’s coming into existence – the world of law. And there’s a crisis.

More here.

Russell Arben Fox at Front Porch Republic:

So I come back, once again, to Norman Mailer’s “left conservative” formulation: to “think in the style of Karl Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke.” Porcherism can’t be friendly to the present global liberal regime, as much as we may pragmatically work with it, because we see it premised upon the valuation of states and corporations and individuals who build their webs of connection in anything but Burkean, organic ways. The state, the corporation, even the sovereign individual all have their intellectual place in our accounting of the present world, and may be defended in better or worse ways. But absent a real communitarian context–a liveable, sustainable, historical one–they will follow paths that can never truly privilege place, and all too often will instead undermine it. That’s a fairly grand conclusion to come to about an online, ideological debate, I know. But for those few of us who have found an intellectual home in the combination of traditionalism with radicalism, it’s an important one to never forget either.

more here.

Christopher Ketcham in The New Republic:

In early 2010, the editors at Harper’s Magazine began reviewing a lengthy manuscript submitted by Chris Hedges, a former New York Times reporter. In the piece, Hedges had turned his eye to Camden, New Jersey, one of the most downtrodden cities in the nation. Hedges’s editor at Harper’s, Theodore Ross, who left the magazine in 2011 and is now a freelance writer, was excited when he saw the draft. “I thought it was a great story about a topic—poverty—that nobody covers enough,” Ross said.

The trouble began when Ross passed the piece along to the fact-checker assigned to the story. As Ross and the fact-checker began working through the material, they discovered that sections of Hedges’s draft appeared to have been lifted directly from the work of a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter named Matt Katz, who in 2009 had published a four-part series on social and political dysfunction in Camden.

Given Hedges’s institutional pedigree, this discovery shocked the editors atHarper’s. Hedges had been a star foreign correspondent at the Times,where he reported from war zones and was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for covering global terrorism.

More here.

Jacob Mikanowski in The Point:

This is how you cook potatoes the Noma way: Find an organic farm in the Danish countryside. Persuade the farmer to leave a field fallow for a full year and then have him dry out the hundreds of kinds of grasses, plant tops and weeds that have grown in it in the absence of crops. Unearth a few new potatoes fresh from a neighboring field. Pack each one individually in the dried weeds. Then wrap them in salt dough. Roast. When they’re done, mash them lightly with a little bit of butter. Pack the mash in skins made of dehydrated milk, creating “ravioli.” Sprinkle with wild herbs, chickweed, yarrow and glazed snails. Add a sauce of buttermilk blended with newly cut grass. Prepared this way, the dish should allow the green flavors from one field to merge with those of the potatoes from below. According to René Redzepi, the chef who created it, the completed ensemble should taste “exactly like the wonderful, heartwarming scent of a freshly mowed lawn on a summer’s day.”

When Redzepi described this recipe in front of a packed audience at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre this past November, I found myself strangely moved. It sounds like a lot of work, but it contains a beautiful thought, of hay, herbs, sun, grass, earth, a particular season in a particular place. It’s like something out of a poem by Wordsworth or John Clare. It’s the kind of recipe that has lifted Redzepi to culinary fame. In the nine years since he opened his restaurant in a Copenhagen warehouse, Noma (the name is a combination of the Danish words for Nordic and food) has become one of the most sought-after tables in the world. Starting in 2010, it was named the best restaurant in the world three years in a row, a position it only lost this year, to El Celler de Can Roca in Spain.

More here.

Robert Fisk in The Independent:

So after the grotesquerie of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 suicide killers of 9/11, meet Saudi Arabia’s latest monstrous contribution to world history: the Islamist Sunni caliphate of Iraq and the Levant, conquerors of Mosul and Tikrit – and Raqqa in Syria – and possibly Baghdad, and the ultimate humiliators of Bush and Obama.

From Aleppo in northern Syria almost to the Iraqi-Iranian border, the jihadists of Isis and sundry other groupuscules paid by the Saudi Wahhabis – and by Kuwaiti oligarchs – now rule thousands of square miles.

Apart from Saudi Arabia’s role in this catastrophe, what other stories are to be hidden from us in the coming days and weeks?

The story of Iraq and the story of Syria are the same – politically, militarily and journalistically: two leaders, one Shia, the other Alawite, fighting for the existence of their regimes against the power of a growing Sunni Muslim international army.

While the Americans support the wretched Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his elected Shia government in Iraq, the same Americans still demand the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad of Syria and his regime, even though both leaders are now brothers-in-arms against the victors of Mosul and Tikrit.

More here.

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

A reservoir of water three times the volume of all the oceans has been discovered deep beneath the Earth's surface. The finding could help explain where Earth's seas came from.

The water is hidden inside a blue rock called ringwoodite that lies 700 kilometres underground in the mantle, the layer of hot rock between Earth's surface and its core.

The huge size of the reservoir throws new light on the origin of Earth's water. Some geologists think water arrived in comets as they struck the planet, but the new discovery supports an alternative idea that the oceans gradually oozed out of the interior of the early Earth.

“It's good evidence the Earth's water came from within,” says Steven Jacobsen of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The hidden water could also act as a buffer for the oceans on the surface, explaining why they have stayed the same size for millions of years.

Jacobsen's team used 2000 seismometers to study the seismic waves generated by more than 500 earthquakes. These waves move throughout Earth's interior, including the core, and can be detected at the surface. “They make the Earth ring like a bell for days afterwards,” says Jacobsen.

By measuring the speed of the waves at different depths, the team could figure out which types of rocks the waves were passing through. The water layer revealed itself because the waves slowed down, as it takes them longer to get through soggy rock than dry rock.

More here.

Mike Melia at PBS Newshour:

Charles Wright, a master of capturing landscape and meditation in verse, has been named the next Poet Laureate of the United States by the Library of Congress. It is the latest in a long list of honors and awards for Wright, who is considered one of the greatest American poets of his generation.

At times self-effacing, Wright shies away from the public eye and was reluctant to take the post. “My wife kept nudging me to do it and also others have said, ‘You know, you should do it.’ And I hadn’t done it before when it was offered to me and I always felt sort of bad about that — that I snuck into the shadows where I am more comfortable,” Wright said to Jeffrey Brown in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “I’m going to try to pull up my socks here and see what happens.”

Wright will succeed Natasha Trethewey as the Library’s 20th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. “For almost 50 years, his poems have reckoned with ‘language, landscape, and the idea of God,’” said Librarian of Congress, James Billington. “Wright’s body of work combines a Southern sensibility with an allusive expansiveness, for moments of singular musicality.”

Born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, in 1935, Wright came to poetry at the age of 23 while serving in the Army in Verona, Italy. He had “an epiphanic moment” while reading Ezra Pound and began writing his own verse.

More here.