Joy Williams at The New York Times:

Denis Johnson is closest in sensibility to the great Robert Stone, though he lacks that writer’s command of plot and structure. Yet we don’t read Johnson for methodology but for troubled effect and bright astonishments. A writer should write in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and that nobody may say that he is innocent of what it is all about. Sartre says this, more or less, in “What Is Literature?” Johnson writes in just such a way. Life is ludicrous and full of cruel and selfish distractions. Honor is elusive and many find the copious ingestion of drugs necessary. Our ignorance is infinite and our sorrows fearful. We have made an unutterable waste of this world, and our passage through it is bitter and unheroic. Still, the horror can at times be illuminating, and it is necessary that the impossible be addressed. Here is the hapless murderer Bill Houston at the end of Johnson’s first novel, “Angels,” strapped down in the gas chamber, listening to the sound of his heart:

“Boom. . . . Boom! Was there ever anything as pretty as that one? Another coming . . . boom! Beautiful! They just don’t come any better than that. He was in the middle of taking the last breath of his life before he realized he was taking it. But it was all right. Boom! Unbelievable! And anothercoming? How many of these things do you mean to give away? He got right in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn’t going to come.”

Writing, like old age and Wyoming, is not for sissies.

more here.

Jacob Siefring at The Quarterly Conversation:

However much the Formalists and New Critics insisted on maintaining an analytic gap between the work of literary interpretation and the life circumstances of authors, readers and reviewers generally expect a modicum of information about the author to come along with a book. Where such information is counterfactual, as in the case of pseudonymity or heteronymity, the situation is a little different, but fundamentally the same. The impulse toward biographical candor is not wholly dodged, as one might first think, but rather reinforced through a teasing gesture that only appears to oppose it. Pseudonymity calls attention to authorship and identity in ways that more conventional forms of attribution do not, and it generally has the effect of intensifying the curiosity and mystique which sometimes surrounds literary authorship.

In other words, textual signification is never only intrinsic to the text, but on the contrary always also framed by what information is known about its composition and provenance. A famous Borges story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” pivots on this interplay between authorship/attribution and signification. The central character, a writer called Pierre Menard, develops an ambition to “produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.” When the narrator of the story compares Menard’s fragments with the corresponding passages from Cervantes, he is awestruck by the differences of style that arise from attributing the text to either Cervantes or Menard.

more here.

Philippe Sands at The Financial Times:

In August 1947 a young Jewish man named David Rosenberg descended alone from a train at the small town of Södertälje, a few kilometres to the west of Stockholm. A “pitiful remnant of his almost extinguished family”, David was in his twenties, on a journey that began in the Polish city of Lodz, took him to the selection ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau – the point of separation from his beloved Halinka – and thence on to numerous labour and death camps in Germany. Somehow he ended up in Sweden, on a train. “My dearest Halinka,” he writes hopefully to the woman who eventually became his wife, “I got to Södertälje at seven in the evening.” Has he chosen the right place to disembark?

That question threads its way through A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz. David and Halinka are soon reunited; it is a time for “bright dreams and big projects” in a new country. They produce a son who is given a local name, Göran. He will become one of Sweden’s most distinguished journalists, a success story for a child of immigrants, and years later will write this fine, captivating account of his father’s journey, his own journey of discovery, and the nature of Sweden in the years after the war.

more here.

Keith Gessen in Vanity Fair:

This past year has seen hostilities between Amazon and the publishers, which had been simmering for years, come out into the open, filling many column inches in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, not to mention numerous online forums. The focal point of the dispute has been a tough negotiation between Amazon and the publisher Hachette, with some public sniping between the companies’ executives (who have otherwise kept out of view). Hachette, it should be said, is no slouch: it is owned by the large French media conglomerate Lagardère. The other big publishers are similarly well backed. HarperCollins is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Simon & Schuster is a part of CBS. Macmillan and Penguin Random House are owned, or co-owned, by hefty German corporations. Nonetheless, all the publishers feel bullied by Amazon, and Amazon, in turn, feels misunderstood.

It wasn’t always this way. When Amazon first appeared, in the mid-90s, mailing books out of the Seattle garage of its founder, Jeff Bezos, it was greeted with enthusiasm. The company seemed like a useful counterweight to the big bookstore chains that had come to dominate the book-retailing landscape. In the late 1990s, the large chains, led by Borders and Barnes & Noble, controlled about a quarter of the adult-book market. Their stores were good. They may have lacked individuality, but they made up for it in inventory—a typical Barnes & Noble superstore carried 150,000 titles, making it as alluring, in its way, as the biggest and most famous independent bookstores in America, like Tattered Cover, in Denver, or City Lights, in San Francisco. Now a person on a desolate highway in upstate New York could access all those books, too.

The big chains were good for publishers because they sold so many books, but they were bad for publishers because they used their market power to dictate tough terms and also because they sometimes returned a lot of stock. People also worried about the power of the chains to determine whether a book did well or badly. Barnes & Noble’s lone literary-fiction buyer, Sessalee Hensley, could make (or break) a book with a large order (or a disappointingly small one). If you talked to a publisher in the early 2000s, chances are they would complain to you about the tyranny of Sessalee. No one used her last name; the most influential woman in the book trade did not need one.

More here.

Daniel Menaker in The New York Times:

In his previous book, “The Shallows” — essential reading about our Internet Age — Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review and author of several books about technology, discussed the detrimental effects the Web has on our reading, thinking and capacity for reflection. In this new book, “The Glass Cage: Automation and Us,” similarly essential if slightly repetitive, Carr explains how certain aspects of automative technology can separate us from, well, Reality. How, for all its ­miraculous-seeming benefits, automation also can and often does impair our mental and physical skills, cause dreadful mistakes and accidents, particularly in medicine and aviation, and threaten to turn the algorithms we create as servants into our mindless masters — what sci-fi movies have been warning us about for at least two or three decades now. (As Carr puts it near the end of “The Glass Cage,” when “we become dependent on our technological slaves . . . we turn into slaves ourselves.”)

Exhibit A: Electronic medical records. In 2005, the RAND Corporation predicted that electronic medical records “could save more than $81 billion annually and improve the quality of care.” But as it turns out, Carr shows us, along with the usefulness of these records has arrived a plague of problems — above all, the interposition of the computer screen between doctors and their patients. Studies have proved that checking records, possible diagnoses and drug interactions on a computer during a medical examination can interfere with what should be not only a fact-based investigation but a deeply human, partly intuitive and empathetic process. One tiny but telling detail: Handwritten records allow physicians to pick out and attend to the comments of individual colleagues. How? Penmanship. In computerized rec­ords, one font fits all.

More here.

Is it Time to Go to Sleep Yet?
.

I just want
to go to sleep

and wake up
not to a brighter day

but to one less
until I see you again.
.

by Sassan Tabatabai
from Uzunburun
Pen and Anvil Press, 2011

Lindsay Abrams in AlterNet:

Hey, creationists, wrap your minds around this: Not only is evolution definitely a thing, it’s happening all around us — and at an incredibly rapid pace. The growing threat of antibiotic resistance, the need for new genetically modified crops after our old herbicides stopped being so effective, the resurgence of bedbugs: these are all examples of what biochemical toxicologist Emily Monosson calls “evolution in the fast lane.”

And despite the opinions of those who don’t like to think that human activity can have a significant, detrimental effect on our planet, they’re proof of just the opposite. We may temporarily gain the upper hand over pests and diseases through our use of chemicals, but eventually they’re all but guaranteed to bounce back, stronger than before. Less intentional still, says Monosson, are the impacts we’re having on larger species: where industrial pollution meets wildlife, frogs, fish and salamanders evolve to survive in their newly toxic environments.

In “ Unnatural Selection,” Monosson discusses the myriad ways in which the chemical age is changing life, and, most importantly, what we can do to slow things down. Part of the challenge, she told Salon, is just understanding that this is evolution we’re seeing — something that not everyone seems to grasp. ”Maybe if we did,” she mused, “we’d realize how important it is to reduce our chemical influence on life.”

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in The Guardian:

Fourteen years ago, around the time young Rimsha Masih, now in jail under Pakistan's blasphemy law, was born, a Roman Catholic bishop walked into a courthouse in Sahiwal, quite close to my hometown in Central Punjab. The Right Rev John Joseph was no ordinary clergyman; he was the first native bishop in Pakistan and the first ever Punjabi bishop anywhere in the world. He was also a brilliant and celebrated community organiser, the kind of man oppressed communities look up to as a role model. Joseph walked in alone, asking a junior priest to wait outside the courthouse. Inside the court, he took out a handgun and shot himself in the head. The bullet in his head was his protest against the court's decision to sentence a fellow Christian, Ayub Masih, to death for committing blasphemy. Masih had been charged with arguing with a Muslim co-worker over religious matters. The exact content of the conversation cannot be repeated here because that would be blasphemous. The bishop had campaigned long and hard to get the blasphemy law repealed without any luck. He wrote prior to his death: “I shall count myself extremely fortunate if in this mission of breaking the barriers, our Lord accepts the sacrifice of my blood for the benefit of his people.”

More here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

From the moment Eben first sees Jennie, time begins to slip. Each time they meet, Jennie is a little older; Eben starts to wonder, then, just who Jennie Appleton is. He embarks on a journey of the city’s past, visits the old places and starts asking questions. Eben meets the doorman at the Rialto who played Hammerstein’s back in the day, and a nun at the convent where Jennie was sent after her parents died. These people remember Jennie. They tell Eben that Jennie is dead. The old New Yorkers are alive but speak like ghosts. They live in 1934 New York, and also a New York that is no more. The old New Yorkers pull Eben deeper into the labyrinth of slippage.

The portrait of Jennie progresses but slowly — weeks, sometimes months pass between the moments when Jennie appears. When she does, it’s never for long. And there is always the premonition of death. Eben’s artistic depression turns into obsession. Finishing the portrait of Jennie is all that matters. He’s not fully alive whenever Jennie is gone. Winter turns to summer which turns back eventually to winter. Time doesn’t progress but curves around him. Love and art orient Eben toward the future. And yet Eben knows that Jennie is a ghost, and that their future has already passed. The portrait of Jennie brings Eben to life — but love seems to lead him toward death. Who knoweth if to die be but to live … and that called life by mortals be but death?

more here.

Ezra Palmer in Far From Brooklyn:

There are a thousand and one reasons the Democrats lost control of the Senate, but the main one is this: They didn’t stand for a goddam thing.

The GOP ran on a single talking point — “We’ll stop Obama” — whereas the Dems couldn’t even work up the guts to admit they voted for the man.

What a bunch of empty suits, lacking vision, courage, values, goals — indeed, lacking any sort of apparent dream other than that of being elected to public office.

It’s become a commonplace to criticize President Obama for failing to lead. I call bullshit on that. What happened is that his party has failed to follow.

How hard is it to campaign alongside a man who ended two wars and staved off a second Great Depression? How hard is it to remind the electorate of what life was like in 2008, when there was a very real possibility of mass failure of our bank system, the collapse of much of our mutual fund infrastructure, and erasure of wealth on a scale never before seen in history?

But the 2014 Democratic candidates, this cluster of zymotic panderers, no, they didn’t even dare to share a podium with the man, let alone attempt to argue for anything that’s happened in the past six years.

So they deserved to lose. They deserved to have the Senate wrested from them. They deserved the shame of listening to the victorious GOP talk magnanimously about the need for bipartisanship.

More here.

Atul Gawande at TED:

I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in my first term — but that was solely a way to learn about human anatomy. Our textbooks had almost nothing on aging or frailty or dying. How the process unfolds, how people experience the end of their lives and how it affects those around them? That all seemed beside the point. The way we saw it — and the way our professors saw it — the purpose of medical schooling was to teach us how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise.

The one time I remember discussing mortality was during an hour we spent on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy’s classic novella. It was in a weekly seminar called Patient-Doctor — part of the school’s effort to make us more rounded and humane physicians. Some weeks we would practice our physical examination etiquette; other weeks we’d learn about the effects of socioeconomics and race on health. And one afternoon we contemplated the suffering of Ivan Ilyich as he lay ill and worsening from some unnamed, untreatable disease.

More here.

Ron Taffel in Alternet:

Over the past decade or two, seasoned therapists who treat young people have been seeing some increasingly worrisome trends. Although solid statistics are hard to come by, one indication of a surge in troubled young adults comes from the reports of college mental health services. A 2010 survey by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California, Los Angeles of almost 202,000 incoming college freshmen at 279 colleges and universities showed a shocking decline in self-reported mental and emotional well-being—at its lowest level since 1985, when HERI began conducting the surveys. In this recent survey, the percentage of students who rated their emotional health “above average” fell from 64 percent in 1985 to 52 percent. According to the June 2013 APA Monitor, 95 percent of surveyed college counseling-center directors said that the number of students with “significant psychological problems is a growing concern,” citing anxiety, depression, and relationship issues as the main problems. Another 2013 survey, the American College Health Association–National College Health Assessment, reported that 51 percent of 123,078 responders in 153 US colleges had experienced “overwhelming anxiety” during the previous year, 31.3 percent had experienced depression so severe it was difficult to function, and 7.4 percent had seriously considered suicide.

I regularly speak with tens of thousands of child professionals, parents, educators, and kids across the country, and as chair of a large nonprofit psychotherapy training and treatment agency, I compare notes with the directors of other centers as well. These extensive dialogues, though not as formal a means of data collection as the surveys above, allow me to see trends emerging just under the radar—the current one being a wave of intense anxiety and affective disorders sweeping through agencies and schools across the country, reaching deep down into elementary and even preschool. Of course, teens and young adults have always been vulnerable to the onset of serious mental illness, but these days they seem to suffer from a new kind of emotional fragility. It’s as if at a core level, their fundamental security, the very ground of their psychic being, is increasingly shaky and unreliable.

More here.

Robert Minto at Open Letters Monthly:

In addition to being dead, Irving Howe might seem irrelevant to 21st century culture because he was dedicated to causes few take seriously anymore – at least in Howe’s country, the United States – causes such as socialism and aesthetic modernism. Consequently the title of the new collection of his shorter works – A Voice Still Heard – has polemical overtones: it stakes a claim for what it contains that is not immediately obviously true. Howe’s daughter, Nina Howe, has chosen for the volume a representative selection of her father’s shorter work, organized by decade, spanning the full course of his career from the 1950s to the 1990s. Why should we listen to a voice that seemingly wasted itself in the fight for lost causes through the medium of essays about books and politics? Foremost, perhaps, because Howe belonged to a group of thinkers and writers who perfected a certain kind of essay.

For the New York intellectuals, among whom Howe belonged by a bare margin, the purpose of the essay was aesthetic and political at the same time. The New York intellectuals published in the mid-20th century journals Commentary and Partisan Review. Dickstein notes of Howe that, “more than a decade younger than Trilling, Rahv, and their generation, he always felt like a latecomer.” Summing up the movement in retrospect, Howe said they combined “anti-Stalinist leftism and the defense of cultural and literary modernism. Two avant-gardes.”

more here.

Ben Lynfield in The Christian Science Monitor:

Projecting the Palestinian-Israeli conflict's intensity and seeming intractability today onto the past, many people assume that enmity has been at the fore of relations for centuries. But in Lives in Common, the dovish Israeli politicial scientist Menachem Klein reclaims a time – only about a century ago – when the interaction was characterized by a good deal of civility, respect, and a shared identity between Arab and Jew in Palestine. The book, published last month by Oxford University Press, analyses the history of the conflict from bottom up, focusing on the daily interactions of Arab and Jew in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and extending to the present day. Taking a new and original approach, Klein draws heavily on the diaries and memoirs of ordinary people, elevating his book beyond the usual leader-based perspectives or histories emanating from official documents.

His touching-off point is that before nationalism – both Jewish and Arab – made the words Arab and Jew mutually exclusive, there were people who thought of themselves as ''Arab Jews,'' just as today there are American Jews. Lifestyle, language, culture, and shared attachment to place created a common identity with Muslims that was expressed in every day life, Klein posits. In other words, there were lives in common.The author shows how Jews and Arabs lived in the same courtyards, participated in each other's religious festivals, watched over each other's children, and worked together in charitable and public welfare organizations.

More here.

Agri Ismail at Eurozine:

At an Irish pub managed by an international hotel chain, German beer is being served by Filipino waitresses. An Eritrean bartender is mixing a cocktail, his theatrical performance indicative of extensive industry training, a training that he has received somewhere other than here. Speakers relay Rihanna concluding her ecstatic confession of having found love in a hopeless place, which gives way to a western-inspired whistle soaring above a beat that is almost militaristic.

An alien's love-thirst / A wonder who betrayed who first. “Oh, I love this!” someone shouts in Swedish from the other side of the pub, as the hoarse voice of singer Jocke Berg makes itself heard through the ambient noise. At another table sit a handful of young women, one of whom is explaining to the others that “this is a Swedish rock band called Kent”. Like so many of us Kurds who have moved here after growing up somewhere else she speaks English with her friends, supposedly the most obvious indicator that we are the pioneers of global gentrification, whereas it is in fact merely the language that we are most comfortable speaking. Iraq, whose population the extreme Right's rhetoric likens to swarming pests, was among the ten countries from where most people emigrated to Sweden in 2013. Meanwhile, Swedish emigration in general is at a level that hasn't been seen “since the peak of the major emigrations to the USA in the 1880s”.

more here.

The One

The enormous head and huge
bulbed knees, elongated
hands and feet, don't fit
with the filed down chest, limbs
of kindling, yet this is one
whole boy, suspended
in a cloth harness hooked
to what looks like a clock
stuck at three fifteen.
Closer, you can see it is
not a clock but a scale,
the kind you find in any North
American grocery,
but of course this is not
North America, this is
the Sahel famine, this
is Mali in 1985, where a boy
waiting for his rations
to be adjusted
must be weighed. At once
his face relays one and many
things: he could be crying out,
he could be grinning,
he could be frightened
or tired, he could believe
he is suspended in unending
dream. What starvation started
gravity refines as the boy
reclines, the hunger having
crumpled his neck, his face
staring up at the ceiling
of sticks which like most ceilings
anywhere in this world is blank.
.

by Shane Book
from New American Poets

.

Over at Rationally Speaking:

Are you a nihilist? Forget about wearing all black and being indifferent to the rest of the world — nihilism is a lot more complicated than most people think. In this episode of Rationally Speaking, Massimo and Julia explain the different types of philosophical nihilism, reveal their own personal views on the subject, and explore why nihilism has such different emotional effects on different people.

Steve Snyder in Scientia Salon:

I am going to connect issues of free will and determinism … to Buddhism! (But only as a psychology, folks.) I’m going to explain why I reject free will in the sense of being associated with a unitary self, and also why I say “mu” to the whole dualistic issue of “free will versus determinism.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it comes from Zen Buddhism. There’s no precise translation in English, but a good approximation to the meaning is to “unask” a question or idea. In other words, saying “mu” to “free will vs. determinism” rejects the dualism, that these are the only two ways of looking at decision-making in human consciousness. Related to that, to the degree that these are ever useful terms, it rejects the polarity behind them, that is the idea that a particular action is either one hundred percent determined or one hundred percent of free will.

And that gets us into the meat of the piece.

The reason I say “mu” relates to the idea of subselves, multiple drafts of consciousness, and even Hume’s “fleeting impressions.”

To use Daniel Dennett’s language, if there is no “Cartesian meaner” in a “Cartesian theater,” there’s no “Cartesian free willer” there either. There is no unitary conscious self with a free will at the center of the controls. And, depending on how one understands the idea of “volition” — how much daylight one puts between it and “free will,” and spells this out — there’s arguably no “Cartesian volitioner” there either.

Now, whether our subselves, or whatever of the “multiple drafts” is in the driver’s seat at any particular moment, might be engaged in something that might be called quasi-free will, is another question. I think something like that does happen.

More here.