Tony Barber at the Financial Times:

From its construction in 1961 to its destruction in 1989, the Berlin Wall was the world’s most compelling symbol of the moral and material bankruptcy of communism. Other dictatorships, from Albania to North Korea, laid mines and put up barbed wire to stop their oppressed peoples from fleeing to freedom. But no monument to incarceration was more visible and damning of its creators than the Wall, a hideous 156km-long complex of watchtowers, searchlights, anti-tank obstacles, dog patrols and ditches that cut through the once bustling centre of the historic German capital.

East German border guards, with the support of their Soviet-backed masters, fired upon scores of people who tried to escape over the Wall. They were responsible, during its 28-year life, for 136 Wall-related shootings and other deaths. Hundreds more were killed on the inner German border that divided West Germany from East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR). Right to the end, the East German communist party stuck to the brazen lies that there was no official policy of shooting would-be escapees, and that the Wall’s sole purpose was to repulse an attack from the “imperialist” west.

more here.

David L. Ulin at the LA Times:

This territory of anarchy and madness — let's call it derangement — is one to which Johnson has returned throughout his career. His 1992 collection “Jesus' Son,” which sits on a short shelf of the finest American fiction of the last quarter-century, traces in 11 spare, linked stories the experiences of a recovering drug addict trying to find a place in an incomprehensible world.

“Tree of Smoke,” which won a 2007 National Book Award, uses Vietnam as setting and metaphor, portraying derangement on a national scale.

“I follow world events,” Johnson explains, “but I'm not obsessed with politics, and that's probably because — it's occurred to me more than once — as a white North American I find things on this planet ordered pretty much in my favor. But as a storyteller I'm drawn to realistic, contemporary situations and to figures caught up in danger and chaos.”

more here.

Matt Jakubowski in his blog, Truce:

David Winters is a literary critic living in Cambridge, England. His reviews, essays and interviews have appeared in a wide variety of print and online publications, including the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Literary Review, The White Review, The Quarterly Conversation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. A collection of his literary criticism, titled Infinite Fictions, is forthcoming from Zero Books in January 2015; it can be pre-ordered here. He is currently co-editor in chief of 3:AM Magazine, where he commissions criticism and nonfiction. He can be found online at davidwinters.uk.

I’d like to hear a little bit about your beginnings as a critic. Was there a particular experience that triggered your interest in writing criticism?

Not a particular experience, so much as my general experience of reading—a basic love of reading being why anyone ends up a critic! For me, writing about books presented an opportunity—or perhaps just an excuse—to extend my engagement with the reading experience. What interests me most about that experience is its mystery—its opacity; its apparent distance from everyday reality. And really, thinking about my “beginnings” as a critic means thinking back to my earliest, murkiest memories of reading. Among those is an image of my father, sat on a bench in the garden of the house where I grew up, reading a paperback book. I must have been four or five. I’m not sure of the author—maybe Aldiss or Asimov; it doesn’t matter. What matters is my memory of his mood: sunlit, immersed in his book, he seemed serenely removed from the world. Maybe that’s what I’ve always sought in my reading: a kind of miraculous disappearance. Another memory: I’m sixteen, sitting in the same spot—my father is already four years dead—and I’m reading Kafka for the first time. Another: nineteen, same bench, different book—Roland Barthes. In both cases, I feel the same thing I think I saw on my father’s face, as a child. I can’t put a name to that feeling, but it’s the real reason I read, and the reason I write about what I read.

More here.

Uri Bram in Cafe:

It's traditional to begin a profile of a Cambridge academic with a description of quads and spires and other quaint English-sounding things. But I meet Will MacAskill not at his college but in the nearby branch of Wetherspoons, a UK pub chain legendary for its improbable willingness to sell craft beer for one pound (one pound!) as an add-on to a burger meal. Everything about MacAskill is similarly unpretentious and amiable, in a highly Wetherspoons-esque way. He has a fondness for mild ales, a rollicking laugh, a warm Scottish accent and a manner that reminds you of the kid everyone likes in senior year of high school—not thepopular kid, mind, but the kid everyone actually likes. Oh: and, at 27 years old, he's already a superstar among his generation of philosophers. And he wants to revolutionize the way you think about doing good.

MacAskill started off thinking about altruism the same way most of us do: trying to balance his own ideas of the good life with a desire to give back to the world. His day-to-day life as an undergraduate in philosophy was happily consumed by obscure questions about language and logic, but when looking for summer work he sought out options with a social impact. He worked at a care home (once, among the hazards of the job, he was punched in the face by an old lady on steroids), volunteered as an English teacher at a school in Ethiopia, and worked for a major international development charity as a street fundraiser—what people in the U.K. call a chugger, a charity mugger. When MacAskill talks about his younger self, I can't help feeling a twinge of recognition of my own self now. “It was more a feeling of guilt that I wasn't really doing things,” says MacAskill. “I had this real ambivalence between normal pressures, but at the same time feeling that I ought to be doing more to make a difference.” He pauses, and frowns. “But then not really acting on that.”

More here.

Granizo

To have been gone so long
But to have forgotten hail,
its name in Spanish, granizo,
until a storm, as I drove
toward a place named Golondrinas,
eight miles from the main highway
because I was enchanted by the name
I was home again,
if only for a while, after eighteen years
I remembered my grandfather, his cornfield
Somehow granizo belongs to him
He named it each summer
as he sat and watched, defined its terror
An old enemy, the way only water,
if it isn't gentle rain, can be

by Leroy Quintana
from After Atzlan, Latino Poets of the Nineties
Godine Publishing, 1992

Shannon Palus in The Atlantic:

When Phil Olson was 20, he earned money in the family business by draining the blood from corpses. Using a long metal instrument, he sucked the fluid out of the organs, and pumped the empty space and the arteries full of three gallons of toxic embalming fluid. This process drains the corpse of nutrients and prevents it from being eaten by bacteria, at least until it’s put into the ground. Feebly encased in a few pounds of metal and wood, it wasn’t long until all the fluid and guts just leak back out.

Most of the bodies Olson prepared in his family's funeral home would then be buried in traditional cemeteries, below a lawn of grass that must be mowed, watered, sprayed with pesticides, and used for nothing else, theoretically until the end of time.

Cemeteries “are kind of like landfills for dead bodies,” says Olson. Today, as a philosopher at Virginia Tech, his work looks at the alternatives to traditional funeral practices. He has a lot to think about: The environmentally friendly funeral industry is booming, as people begin to consider the impacts their bodies might have once they’re dead. Each year, a million pounds of metal, wood, and concrete are put in the ground to shield dead bodies from the dirt that surrounds them. A single cremation requires about two SUV tanks worth of fuel. As people become increasingly concerned with the environment, many of them are starting to seek out ways to minimize the impact their body has once they’re done using it.

More here.

Chris Power in The Guardian:

The villain in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick isn’t the monstrous White Whale, but the man that wants to kill him: Captain Ahab. Melville withholds Ahab’s appearance for well over 100 pages of his novel. At first he is only a name, then a sailor’s story, then a brooding but unseen presence, shut up in his cabin, as the Pequod sets sail from Nantucket on Christmas Day and strikes south for the whaling grounds of the Pacific. The Pequod’s shareholders are hoping for a great profit, but Ahab is only interested in a single whale among the multitudes: Moby Dick.

Ahab is an enigma whose “larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted”. What can we say we know about him? That he is a “grey-headed, ungodly old man”. He has eyes “like powder pans”. His crew say he never sleeps, only tosses in bed. Dough-Boy the steward tells Ishmael that every morning: “He always finds the old man’s hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied in knots”, and Ahab’s pillow hot to the touch, “as though a baked brick had been on it”. He has a scar, too, a “slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish”, running from head to toe. None of the crew knows where he got it, but they all know how he lost his leg. In the Pacific, a year before the events Ishmael describes in the novel, Ahab found himself surrounded by “the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades”, all churning in the “white curds of the whale’s direful wrath”. Moby Dick took Ahab’s leg, “as a mower a blade of grass in the field”, and now the captain uses a peg leg carved from whalebone.

More here.

Deborah E. Lipstadt in The New York Times:

In the wake of World War II, America recruited a few leading German scientists in order to advance our space and military programs and to keep these valuable assets from falling into Soviet hands. This is the broadly accepted script about Nazis in America. In fact, as Eric Lichtblau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times, relates in “The Nazis Next Door,” we welcomed approximately 10,000 Nazis, some of whom had played pivotal roles in the genocide. While portions of this story are not new — see Annie Jacobsen’s book “Operation Paperclip,” for example — Licht­blau offers additional archival information in all its infuriating detail. (He conducted some of his research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, on whose supervisory committee I serve. I had no role in his selection as a fellow at the center.)

America began reaching out to leading Nazis months before the Germans surrendered. In March 1945, while the war still raged, the American spy chief Allen Dulles conducted a friendly fireside chat in the library of a Zurich apartment with the Nazi general Karl Wolff, the closest associate of the SS leader Heinrich Himm­ler for much of the war. The Scotch-­lubricated conversation convinced Dulles that Wolff, despite his ties to Himmler and his role as a leader of the Waffen SS, was a moderate who deserved protection. When prosecutors sought to try Wolff, one of the highest-ranking SS leaders to survive, at Nuremberg, Dulles worked to have his name removed from the list of defendants. While Wolff was in Allied custody, he was permitted to take a yacht trip, spend time with his family and carry a gun. Nonetheless, he complained that what he endured was “much more inhumane than the extermination of the Jews.” He said the Jews had been gassed in a few seconds, while he did not know how long he would be held. (His imprisonment lasted four years.) While Jews languished in the camps after Germany’s defeat (“We felt like so much surplus junk,” one survivor said), the United States gathered up Nazi scientists. Had only leading scientists been enlisted, it would have been distasteful if understandable. But of the more than 1,600 scientists brought over, some had pedestrian skills. Others had developed the chemicals for the gas chambers, or conducted experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Even the State Department protested. But we did not stop with scientists. The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. sought out spies and informants who had participated in genocide.

More here.

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig in Boston Review:

It is a strange season when culture warriors and women’s studies departments find common cause, though not unheard of—think pornography. But while Gail Dines’ Pornlandwon acclaim from The Christian Post, conservative Christian sex ethics and feminist sex ethics maintain disparate opinions of sex itself. For the conservative Christian, sex has always been a matter of the most sincere gravitas, the ultimate (and sometimes sacramental) union; feminist sex ethicists have a more liberal view of the matter, favoring personal experience over some sublime essence. In other words, the two don’t seem to share a conception of the kind of thing sex is.

This gap appears to be closing.

In late August, the California legislature passed bill SB 967, a bundle of regulations pertaining to educational institutions receiving public funding. Most notably, it enforces a standard of ‘affirmative consent’ in sexual assault proceedings. Roughly a month later, Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill into law. According to the text of the law, a standard of affirmative consent

means affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity. It is the responsibility of each person involved in the sexual activity to ensure that he or she has the affirmative consent of the other or others to engage in the sexual activity. Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent. Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time. The existence of a dating relationship between the persons involved, or the fact of past sexual relations between them, should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent.

No, in other words, means no. But nothing also means no, and a variety of intermediate expressions between perhaps and absolutely now must also be presumed to mean no, and body language is also no longer sufficient to communicate consent.

More here.

Dylan Scott in TPM:

More here.

David Graeber in The Guardian:

The autonomous region of Rojava, as it exists today, is one of few bright spots – albeit a very bright one – to emerge from the tragedy of the Syrian revolution. Having driven out agents of the Assad regime in 2011, and despite the hostility of almost all of its neighbours, Rojava has not only maintained its independence, but is a remarkable democratic experiment. Popular assemblies have been created as the ultimate decision-making bodies, councils selected with careful ethnic balance (in each municipality, for instance, the top three officers have to include one Kurd, one Arab and one Assyrian or Armenian Christian, and at least one of the three has to be a woman), there are women’s and youth councils, and, in a remarkable echo of the armed Mujeres Libres (Free Women) of Spain, a feminist army, the “YJA Star” militia (the “Union of Free Women”, the star here referring to the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar), that has carried out a large proportion of the combat operations against the forces of Islamic State.

How can something like this happen and still be almost entirely ignored by the international community, even, largely, by the International left? Mainly, it seems, because the Rojavan revolutionary party, the PYD, works in alliance with Turkey’s Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK), a Marxist guerilla movement that has since the 1970s been engaged in a long war against the Turkish state. Nato, the US and EU officially classify them as a “terrorist” organisation. Meanwhile, leftists largely write them off as Stalinists.

But, in fact, the PKK itself is no longer anything remotely like the old, top-down Leninist party it once was. Its own internal evolution, and the intellectual conversion of its own founder, Abdullah Ocalan, held in a Turkish island prison since 1999, have led it to entirely change its aims and tactics.

The PKK has declared that it no longer even seeks to create a Kurdish state. Instead, inspired in part by the vision of social ecologist and anarchist Murray Bookchin, it has adopted the vision of “libertarian municipalism”, calling forKurds to create free, self-governing communities, based on principles of direct democracy, that would then come together across national borders – that it is hoped would over time become increasingly meaningless.

More here.

Francisco Goldman in The New Yorker (photo by Macro Ugarte/AP):

On Sunday morning, a heartbreaking headline appeared on the news Web site SinEmbargo, which is based here in Mexico City: “I Know My Son Is Alive and That He Will Be a Teacher.” The speaker was Manuel Martínez, the thirty-five-year-old father of a seventeen-year-old boy named Mario, who has been missing since September 26th, along with many of his classmates at the Ayotzinapa Normal teacher-training school. That night, according to witness testimonies and the confessions of those arrested in the case, six students from the school were murdered by municipal police and other gunmen, and forty-three others were “disappeared” in the small city of Iguala, in the Pacific-coast state of Guerrero.

The Martínezes are indigenous Huave from the impoverished seaside village of San Mateo del Mar, in Oaxaca. Martínez told SinEmbargo’s Humberto Padgett that he’d also studied at Ayotzinapa, twenty years before, and that his son had long dreamed of following in his footsteps. Like many other rural schoolteachers, Martínez built his little school with his own hands, out of planks and zinc sheeting. “All the rural schools are bad,” he said. “Here and in the country, education is in terrible shape. … In my school, we don’t even have electricity. The students live in the same conditions we do, or a little worse, because they live on just corn and beans, and from their tomato and chile harvests. … None of them owns a pair of shoes; they use huaraches or sandals.”

Martínez went on, “The authorities should pay for what they’ve done because they’ve done the very worse that you can do, to the most humble of people.”

The country has been seized by the story of the missing forty-three, though many refuse to believe the worst until it can no longer be denied—my dentist, for example, says that this is all just a student prank that went too far, and that the students will turn up any day now, sheepish and contrite.

More here. Also see Esteban Illades's piece in The New Inquiry.

In a Neighborhood in Los Angeles

I learned
Spanish
from my grandma

mijito
don't cry
she'd tell me

on the mornings
my parents
would leave

to work
at the fish
canneries

my grandma
would chat
with chairs

sing them
old
songs

dance
waltzes with them
in the kitchen

when she'd say
niño barrigón
she'd laugh

with my grandma
I learned
to count clouds

to point out
in flowerpots
mint leaves

my grandma
wore moons
on her dress

Mexico's mountains
deserts
ocean

in her eyes
I'd see them
in her braids

I'd touch them
in her voice
smell them

one day
I was told:
she went far away

but still
I feel her
with me

whispering
in my ear
mijito

by Fancisco Alarcón
from After Atzlan
Godine Publishing, 1992

Wilcox and Lerman in National Review:

The standard portrayals of economic life for ordinary Americans and their families paint a bleak picture of stagnancy, rising economic inequality, joblessness, and low levels of economic mobility. From President Barack Obama’s speech last year at the Center for American Progress to Fed chairman Janet Yellen’s address this month in Boston, we’re getting the picture that the American Dream looks to be in bad shape. These portrayals contain an important germ of truth — today’s economy isn’t doing ordinary Americans many favors — but what is largely missing from the public conversation about economics in America is an honest discussion of the family factor in all of this.That’s unfortunate, because one reason — though, to be sure, not the only reason — that the American economic landscape looks bleaker today is that American families are not as strong and stable as they could be. Indeed, in a new report released this week from the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, we find that about one-third of recent increases in family-income inequality and male joblessness, and a significant share of median family-income stagnation, can be linked to the declining share of Americans who are getting and staying married.

More here.

Larry Greenemeier in Scientific American:

For the past four decades the Nikon Small World competition has placed photography under the microscope, with eye-catching results. This year’s 20 finalists, announced Thursday, are no exception, zooming in on microorganisms, minerals and even electronic circuitry to find beauty hidden from the naked eye. Judges evaluated more than 1,200 photos sent from dozens of countries based on scientific relevance, composition, quality and technique, along with technical and artistic merit. The competition’s subject matter is unrestricted as long as some type of light microscopy technique is used, including phase contrast, polarized light, interference contrast, dark field or some combination thereof.

PICTURE: Anagallis arvensis (scarlet pimpernel)

More here.

Eric Naiman at The Times Literary Supplement:

We are used to the Nabokov who wrote for a robust, “panting and happy” reader, for the climber of “trackless slopes”. This is the playful Nabokov who loves to fold his magic carpet so that some readers might trip, the scourge of lazy, system-bound critics, the “perfect dictator” who so savagely heaps scorn on idols of the West: Dostoevsky, Freud, Sartre, Mann. The Nabokov on display in this beautifully produced volume of letters, only a few of which have been published in the original Russian, is quite different: not an inveterate competitor besting his characters and critics, but an author who sees his task as talking his fragile reader down from an upper-storey ledge by showing her the luminosity of a world that has somehow ceased to be a source of delight.

Some of the letters contain poems, some are about writing poetry, others are essentially poems in prose. Nearly all the letters from the summer of 1926 are about the importance of noticing things, and, as in The Gift, are informed by a gratitude for the omnipresence of beauty, even in images that might otherwise chill or disgust. Nabokov is delighted by animals: “a charming borzoi” with “ash-blue specks on her forehead (like yesterday’s evening sky)” plays with “a russet dachshund”, their “two long tender snouts prodding each other”.

more here.

Elizabeth Pritchard at Immanent Frame:

Let me start with a confession. I am not particularly keen on stories of modernity in which “modernity” figures as a character and in which the plot—surprise—entails a “fall” or “break.” Thomas Pfau’s Minding the Modern is a long telling of this tale, containing some wonderfully astute scenes and bringing on stage two of my favorite thinkers, John Locke and Theodor Adorno (the first appearing as a culprit and the second as an ally). I am not unmoved by Pfau’s convictions and arguments that what appears to be human advancement is actually decline (325). Nonetheless, I find myself appreciating the worldliness and ostentatiousness of Adorno’s miniaturized version of this story: “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.” Pfau frames his argument as an exploration of and possible solution to the crisis in the humanities. For him, that crisis is not the devaluation of humanistic study in a context of the corporatization of higher education and intense competition for scarce and unstable employment. Rather, it is his sense that we are suffering through a case of amnesia. (I am putting aside, for the moment, who it is that constitutes this “we.”) According to Pfau, we have forgotten the conceptual framework of human personhood and thus have a “stunted conception of the will” or, more ominously, “[have atrophied] our capacity for articulate reasoning about ends” (10, 398, 325). Pfau’s equivocation as to whether the problem is a conception or an actual impairment of the will or agency is telling. Pfau is convinced that our conceptual portfolio shapes and reflects our capacity for reasoning, judging, and willing. Yet this is a different, and far less contentious, point than the one that insists that a particular vocabulary or argument is either in accord with or detrimental to moral judgment and moral behavior. For instance, does Thomas Hobbes’s denial of a qualitative divide between humans and other animals really “cause us to stray into very dangerous moral territory” (203)?

more here.

Kelsey Osgood at Harper's Magazine:

From 1967 until their disbanding in 1971, the group wrote and performed. They played at a fundraiser for Eugene McCarthy, at bars where the air was thick with marijuana smoke, in college quads, on radio shows, and at the New England Conservatory of Music’s Jordan Hall, in front of a thousand rapt listeners. The men wore turtlenecks and jackets. (“We weren’t Kiss,” Clawson says.) Anne wore long dresses: she had two favorites, a red one and a black-and-white one. “She moved discreetly,” Clawson says. “She had those long arms and long fingers. Her movement was lovely . . . it wasn’t frenzied . . . she might wink at the audience. She was really engaging.”

Anne Sexton the performer stands in some contrast to Anne Sexton the poet. Though both Linda Sexton and Bob Clawson claim she had no sense of rhythm and often fell into a kind predetermined modulation better suited for readings than musical performances, her voice on the recordings is lilting and measured, rising and softening in accordance with the band. Listening to a performance of “Protestant Easter,” a hilarious poem that digs at New England Calvinism from the point of view of a child (“After that they pounded nails into his hands / After that, well, after that / everyone wore hats”), I begin to envision her covered in sweat, down on her knees in front of a congregation, shouting “Praise Jesus!” as the organ trills away behind her.

more here.

Sam Anderson in the NYT Magazine (photo Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times):

For more than 100 years, Punta Gorda has claimed to have the Fountain of Youth: an artesian well that once drew such long lines of tourists that, according to National Geographic, the fountain’s handle had to be replaced every six months. I walked there as soon as I woke up. I knew I was getting close when I started to see kitschy images of Ponce de León everywhere: murals on the sides of restaurants, fake motorized galleons parked at an Oktoberfest carnival. Ponce: his bulging armor, his pointy beard, the cockatoo crest of his helmet plume. He always seemed to be gesturing at something. “Go over there,” he seemed to be saying. “The important things are just out of the frame.” It was hot; after only a few minutes of walking, my face was pouring sweat. My plan, while I was in Florida, was to drink exclusively out of self-described Fountains of Youth, which meant I was already very thirsty. When I reached the spot where the fountain was supposed to be, it was nowhere. There was just an empty small-town intersection — restaurant, bank, chiropractor, stop sign. No special plaque, no burbling fountain, no crowds of elderly people leaping out of wheelchairs and dancing with joy. I worried, for a minute, that the trip had been a waste.

Then I saw it, and I laughed out loud. The Fountain of Youth was tiny, shabby and neglected: a blocky little drinking fountain, not much bigger than the garbage can it stood next to, covered in green tile that must have been decorative 90 years ago but was now cracked and stained. Today nothing identified it as the Fountain of Youth. In fact, the only sign on it was a warning from the Florida Department of Health: “Use Water at Your Own Risk: The water from this well exceeds the maximum contaminate levels for radioactivity as determined by the United States Environmental Protection Agency under the Safe Drinking Water Act.”

I turned the little spigot, and sure enough, water sputtered out. It smelled sulfurous. I bent down and drank. It was not refreshing, not at all. It tasted exactly like hard-boiled eggs. But I was thirsty, so I kept drinking. It seemed to have a little more body than regular water — maybe the high mineral content thickened it, I thought, or the radiation was already warping the nerves on the inside of my cheeks. Every mouthful felt like swallowing a single, liquid hard-boiled egg. I started to feel ill. But I had come all this way, and it was hot, and there was a long day of driving ahead of me, so I kept gulping it down. I filled a few plastic bottles to get me to the next fountain.

More here.