Robert McCrum in The Guardian:

The first time I met Hanif Kureishi it was the mid-80s, and we talked about writing fiction for Faber and Faber whose list I was directing. Kureishi came into my office like a rock star and I remember thinking that he did not seem in need of a career move. He was already riding high on the international success of his screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette.

…His new novel, however, The Last Word, returns him to his personal hinterland. Mamoon Azam is an eminent novelist who has authorised an ambitious younger writer, Harry Johnson, to undertake his biography, in the hope that it will rescue his career and reputation. The idea that the end of a life is as interesting as its beginning is a fruitful one, with echoes of the relationship between VS Naipaul and his biographer Patrick French. But, at heart, it's really a commentary on the complicated inner turmoil of Kureishi's own career. As usual, the epigrammatic Kureishi has a good line in good lines. There are sharp asides about England, (a “wilderness of monkeys”), and art (“anything good has to be a little pornographic”), with references to Orwell, Johnny Rotten and Wodehouse. Mamoon is an engaging monster, drawn from Kureishi's grandfather, but also an idealisation of Kureishi's alter ego, an internationally respected literary man. The closing lines of the novel tell us all we need to know about Kureishi's current self-image: “He'd been a writer, a maker of worlds, a teller of important truths. This was a way of changing things, of living well, and creating freedom.”

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Heather MacDonald in City Journal:

It is no wonder, then, that we have been hearing of late that the humanities are in crisis. A recent Harvard report, cochaired by the school’s premier postcolonial studies theorist, Homi Bhabha, lamented that 57 percent of incoming Harvard students who initially declare interest in a humanities major eventually change concentrations. Why may that be? Imagine an intending lit major who is assigned something by Professor Bhabha: “If the problematic Ωclosure≈ of textuality questions the totalization of national culture. . . .” How soon before that student concludes that a psychology major is more up his alley? No, the only true justification for the humanities is that they provide the thing that Faust sold his soul for: knowledge. It is knowledge of a particular kind, concerning what men have done and created over the ages. The American Founders drew on an astonishingly wide range of historical sources and an appropriately jaundiced view of human nature to craft the world’s most stable and free republic. They invoked lessons learned from the Greek city-states, the Carolingian Dynasty, and the Ottoman Empire in the Constitution’s defense. And they assumed that the new nation’s citizens would themselves be versed in history and political philosophy. Indeed, a closer knowledge among the electorate of Hobbes and the fragility of social order might have prevented the more brazen social experiments that we’ve undergone in recent years. Ignorance of the intellectual trajectory that led to the rule of law and the West’s astounding prosperity puts those achievements at risk.

But humanistic learning is also an end in itself. It is simply better to have escaped one’s narrow, petty self and entered minds far more subtle and vast than one’s own than never to have done so. The Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino said that a man lives as many millennia as are embraced by his knowledge of history. One could add: a man lives as many different lives as are embraced by his encounters with literature, music, and all the humanities and arts. These forms of expression allow us to see and feel things that we would otherwise never experience—society on a nineteenth-century Russian feudal estate, for example, or the perfect crystalline brooks and mossy shades of pastoral poetry, or the exquisite languor of a Chopin nocturne. Ultimately, humanistic study is the loving duty we owe those artists and thinkers whose works so transform us. It keeps them alive, as well as us, as Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini understood. The academic narcissist, insensate to beauty and nobility, knows none of this.

More here.

Three Cold Mountain Poems

1.

Don’t you know the poems of Han-shan?
They’re better for you than scripture-reading.
Cut them out and paste them on a screen,
Then you can gaze at them from time to time

2.

A thousand clouds, ten thousand streams,
Here I live, an idle man,
Roaming green peaks by day,
Back to sleep by cliffs at night.
One by one, springs and autumns go,
Free of heat and dust, my mind.
Sweet to know there’s nothing I need,
Silent as the autumn river’s flood.
.
3.

Thirty years in this world
I wandered ten thousand miles,
By rivers, buried deep in grass,
In borderlands, where red dust flies.
Tasted drugs, still not Immortal,
Read books, wrote histories.
Now I’m back at Cold Mountain,
Head in the stream, cleanse my ears.

.
by Han-Shan
translation, A.S. Kline 2006

Pepe Escobar in Asia Times:

In the early morning of November 2, 1975, in Idroscalo, a terminally dreadful shanty town in Ostia, outside Rome, the body of Pier Paolo Pasolini, then 53, an intellectual powerhouse and one of the greatest filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, was found badly beaten and run over by his own Alfa Romeo.

It was hard to conceive a more stunning, heartbreaking, modern mix of Greek tragedy with Renaissance iconography; in a bleak setting straight out of a Pasolini film, the author himself was immolated just like his main character in Mamma Roma (1962) lying in prison in the manner of the Dead Christ, aka theLamentation of Christ, by Andrea Mantegna.

This might have been a gay tryst gone terribly wrong; a 17-year-old low life was charged with murder, but the young man was also linked with the Italian neo-fascists. The true story has never emerged. What did emerge is that “the new Italy” – or the aftereffects of a new capitalist revolution – killed Pasolini.

Pasolini could only reach for the stars after graduating in literature from Bologna University – the oldest in the world – in 1943. Today, a Pasolini is utterly unthinkable. He would be something like an UFIO (unidentified flying intellectual object); the total intellectual – poet, dramatist, painter, musician, fiction writer, literary theorist, filmmaker and political analyst.

For educated Italians, he was essentially a poet (what a huge compliment that meant, decades ago …) In his masterpiece The Ashes of Gramsci (1952), Pasolini draws a striking parallel, in terms of striving for a heroic ideal, between Gramsci and Shelley – who happen to be buried in the same cemetery in Rome. Talk about poetic justice.

More here.

Mohsin Hamid and Anna Holmes in the New York Times:

The advantages of e-books are clear. E-books are immediate. Sitting at home in Pakistan, I can read an intriguing review of a book, one not yet in stores here, and with the click of a button be reading that book in an instant. E-books are also incorporeal. While traveling, which I do frequently, I can bring along several volumes, weightless and indeed without volume, thereby enabling me to pack only a carry-on bag.

And yet the experience of reading e-books is not always satisfactory. Yes, it is possible to vary the size of the font, newly important to me at age 42, as I begin to perceive my eye muscles weakening. Yes, e-books can be read in the dark, self-illuminated, a reassuring feature when my wife is asleep and I am too lazy to leave our bed, or when electricity outages in Lahore have persisted for so long that our backup batteries are depleted. And yes, they offer more frequent indicators of progress, their click-forwards arriving at a rapidity that far exceeds that of paper-flipping, because pixelated screens tend to hold less data than printed pages and furthermore advance singly, not in two-sided pairs.

Nonetheless, often I prefer reading to e-reading. Or rather, given that the dominance of paper can no longer be assumed, p-reading to e-.

More here.

From Newswise:

A new study on the human skeletal remains from the ancient Indus city of Harappa provides evidence that inter-personal violence and infectious diseases played a role in the demise of the Indus, or Harappan Civilization around 4,000 years ago.

The Indus Civilization stretched over a million square kilometers of what is now Pakistan and India in the Third Millennium B.C. While contemporaneous civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotomia, are well-known, their Indus trading partners have remained more of a mystery.

Archaeological research has demonstrated that Indus cities grew rapidly from 2200-1900 B.C., when they were largely abandoned. “The collapse of the Indus Civilization and the reorganization of its human population has been controversial for a long time,” lead author of the paper published last month in the journal PLOS ONE, Gwen Robbins Schug, explained. Robbins Schug is an associate professor of anthropology at Appalachian State University.

Climate, economic, and social changes all played a role in the process of urbanization and collapse, but little was known about how these changes affected the human population.

Robbins Schug and an international team of researchers examined evidence for trauma and infectious disease in the human skeletal remains from three burial areas at Harappa, one of the largest cities in the Indus Civilization. The results of their analysis counter longstanding claims that the Indus civilization developed as a peaceful, cooperative, and egalitarian state-level society, without social differentiation, hierarchy, or differences in access to basic resources.

More here.

Andrew Eagle in The Daily Star:

Confident concrete pillar, gleaming glass, reflection, angle and contemplative curve: seemingly simple, skyscrapers are, at their best, towers of thought. Modern design conceals little, so it seems –neither shy to be straightforward nor backward in coming forward.

How the light will play, the engineering dimensions and even the impact of shadow through the day will have been considered. Simplicity is not simplicity in the end.

Poet Ahsan Akbar in his first collection, “The Devil's Thumbprint” published by Bengal Lights Books in 2013 has likewise pursued architecture of the modern kind. The collection was criticised on first submission, with one potential Bangladeshi publisher claiming Akbar's work was “too permissive and explicit.” It's true that some of the poems concerning the themes of attraction are not for the prudish.

But Akbar took the criticism as encouragement. He refused to consider the suggested edits and withdrew the manuscript. True to what he wanted – honesty and candour – his manuscript found its way…

It's not surprising it wasn't readily recognised. The deltaic tradition is substantially different. Whether it is the intricate beauty of Tagore, the labyrinth layers of Das or the zeal of the rebel poet – Akbar's work does not seem to draw from the same well. But the expectation of decorative adornment familiar to the renaissance building is unlikely to be fulfilled by a modern high rise. There's a need to look for something else.

More here.

Andrew Wheatcroft at The New York Times:

The River Danube, like a siren, has seduced at least three authors over the centuries. The first was Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli from Bologna, in the 17th century. His work grew into six wonderfully illustrated volumes, published in ­Latin in 1726. The second was Claudio Magris, from Trieste, in the 20th century. A professor, scholar and novelist, he completed a journey to the Black Sea in 1986, just before the fall of the old Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Like Marsigli, he had no very clear idea of what kind of book he wanted to write, yet in the end, Magris produced “Danube,” a masterpiece.

In his hands, the river is not just a majestic force of nature but becomes the silent hero of the book. Like Laurence Sterne with Tristram Shandy, Magris discovered the unlikely circumstances of the Danube’s origins, at least in folklore. It was a stream of water gushing from a tap, which no one had managed to turn off. For a moment he mused on what might happen if someone did manage to turn the great river off at its source, and Bratislava, Belgrade and Budapest were left “completely waterless.”

more here.

Joshua Cohen at The Guardian:

Now that Roth's retirement has given him the opportunity to pursue his legacy full-time, it is telling that he hasn't proceeded in the manner ofHenry James, who dedicated his final stretch to assembling his corpus into the New York Edition, rephrasing whole sentences, if not just rearranging the commas he had strewn them with half a century previously. It is as if Roth doesn't think it makes much difference thatOur Gang, his humourless Nixon pastiche, and The Great American Novel, his fussy and precious baseball picaresque, are still available as they were written. Or maybe, after more than four decades in analysis, he has resigned himself to their flaws, or even thinks they are perfect and deserve to be shelved alongside his best: The Counterlife,Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral.

But then Roth's tendency has never been to withhold, rather to explain, or revise by explanation, and it is ironic that the same technique that unifies his oeuvre has the opposite effect on its criticism: to Pierpont,Letting Go is about the influence of James, Thomas Wolfe, the stultifying 50s, and “not letting go”; When She Was Good is about the influence of Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser, the stultifying 50s, and Roth's first wife Margaret Martinson, who faked a pregnancy, faked an abortion, took Roth's money in a divorce and promptly killed herself (though Pierpont insists that her fullest character portrayal is as Maureen Tarnopol in My Life as a Man).

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James Lovegrove at The Financial Times:

In autumn 1945, as an exhausted Europe emerged from almost six years of war, young Finns and Swedes were introduced to a family they would come to know very well. Tove Jansson’s first book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, follows Moominmamma and her son Moomintroll in their search for Moominpappa, who is lost, feared dead. They travel through a dark forest, drawn beautifully by Jansson in pen and tinted wash, using a primitivist style reminiscent of Henri Rousseau. Near the end of their quest, the weather turns strange: “It had become very hot late in the afternoon. Everywhere the plants drooped, and the sun shone down with a creepy red light.” This presages a rainstorm so powerful that the land is submerged. Moominpappa is eventually discovered alive and well, perched high above the waters in the branches of a tree.

The Great Flood was not a commercial success and attracted little attention – which perhaps explains why it was the last of the Moomin books to be translated into English, in 2005. It was only when the third volume in the series, Finn Family Moomintroll, came out three years later in 1948 that the Moomins begin their ascent to international fame.

more here.

Elegy for Bud

Bud be sixty on the
sixth, and it was beyond me
how he fell but now with
his blue boat shoes on,
only then would he tell
that man cannot translate
trauma.

Tall and stiff like Marlboros
and sharp like corner store vodka,
Bud be catching character
in the Sunday crosswords.
He’d bum a bogey with Boo and
talk late into the night on what is
and ain’t right.

Had Bud been here,
Bud be sixty.
He’d make sense of the overcast sky
on the day he died,
and the plum color of his
boiling cheeks.

by Max Eyes
from The Sandy River Review, Spring 2013

.

Thomas E. Ricks in The New York Times:

As I was reading “Duty,” probably one of the best Washington memoirs ever, I kept thinking that Robert M. Gates clearly has no desire to work in the federal government again in his life. That evidently is a fertile frame of mind in which to write a book like this one. The former defense secretary is naming names. Vice President Joe Biden? A comical “motormouth” who, though he is “simply impossible not to like,” presumes to know more about counterterrorism than an experienced Special Operations general. He is “relentless . . . in attacking the integrity of the senior military leadership” and, for good measure, “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” The former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is “hell on wheels, . . . a whirling dervish with ­attention-deficit disorder.” Tom Donilon, President Obama’s second national security adviser, is suspicious and distrustful of the uniformed military leadership to the point of stating in a meeting that it was “insubordinate” and “in revolt” against the White House. At one point in an Oval Office meeting, Donilon was so querulous about military operations that Gates contemplated walking out in anger. “It took every bit of my self-discipline to stay seated on the sofa.”

One of the few members of the Obama administration who comes off well is Hillary Clinton, who, in her time as secretary of state, is portrayed by Gates as consistently mature and cooperative.

More here.

Seth Colter Walls at The Baffler:

Jean-Paul Sartre’s chief political fidelity was not pledged to Communism, or Marxism, or even the amorphous spirit of May ’68 (with which he was sometimes associated)—but rather to a program of constant self-revision. In a 1969 interview, Sartre provided a cheerful example of his propensity for containing disputatious multitudes. Taking stock of some of his earlier outbursts on behalf of revolutionary purism, the philosopher-novelist-playwright exclaimed: “When I read this, I said to myself: ‘It’s incredible, I actually believed that!’” In other words, Sartre demanded the freedom to be crazily wrong, and then to notice this reality according to his own timetable. Ronald Aronson, the coeditor of We Have Only This Life to Live, a new collection of Sartre’s nonfiction, writes in his introduction that Sartre was fond of “over-the-top analyses” and was continually at pains to remind the world that “situations and people can change.” They do, and one can, of course—but even fans of Sartre must grapple with the obvious flights from accuracy that crop up in his writing.

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Dana Goodyear at The New Yorker:

In 1977, the San Joaquin Valley—the swath of agricultural land that runs through central California—was designated a disaster area. Record-low runoff and scant rainfall had created drought conditions. At the beginning of Christmas week, the weather was normal in Bakersfield, the city at the Valley’s southern end, but in the early hours of December 20th a strong wind began to blow from the Great Basin through the Tehachapi Mountains. Hitting the ground on the downslope, it lofted a cloud of loose topsoil and mustard-colored dust into the sky.

The plume rose to five thousand feet; dust blotted out the sun four counties away. Traffic on Highway 5, the state’s main artery, stopped. At a certain point, the anemometers failed; the U.S. Geological Survey estimated wind speeds as high as a hundred and ninety-two miles an hour. Windows on houses were sandblasted to paper thinness.

The Tempest from Tehachapi, as one researcher called it, spread dirt over an area the size of Maine. Twenty hours afterward, the dust reached Sacramento, four hundred miles north of Bakersfield, in the form of a murky haze that hung in the air for another day, stinging the eyes and noses of the residents. On the twenty-first, it started raining in Sacramento, which turned the dust to mud, coating the cars and sidewalks, and marked the end of the drought.

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George Scialabba at Bookforum:

I always used to feel sorry for myself, having suffered four debilitating episodes of clinical depression and many years of moderate-to-severe dysthymia. No longer. In fact, I feel rather fortunate not to be Scott Stossel, editor of The Atlantic, whose lifetime of psychic agony—suffering is too weak a word—is chronicled in excruciating, enthralling detail in My Age of Anxiety.

The torments of Job were nothing compared with Stossel’s. Two-year-old Scott would throw “epic tantrums” in which he “lay on the floor, screaming and writhing and smashing my head on the ground, sometimes for hours at a time.” A few anguished years later, his afflictions began assuming their permanent shape. Constant emetophobia (fear of vomiting) set in, along with an almost equally frequent and tormenting fear of losing control of his bowels. Neither of these terrors has ever left him in peace, except briefly.

Nor has acute separation anxiety. In first grade, when his mother started taking night classes, he fled all babysitters. For several years after that, he paced his bedroom agitatedly every night, convinced that his parents had abandoned him, until his father came home from work around six thirty.

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Jake Johnston in the Boston Review:

The earthquake decimated Haiti’s housing stock: 100,000 were destroyed and more were damaged. There were $2.3 billion in damages in the housing sector alone, and 1.5 million people left living in makeshift tent camps. Unplanned and unregulated housing construction made Port-au-Prince, with population at least 3 million, extremely vulnerable to natural disasters. In less than a minute, entire shantytown neighborhoods came crashing down.

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission was created by the international community to coordinate post-quake aid and align it with Haitian government priorities. Bill Clinton, as the U.N. special envoy and the head of the Commission, was optimistic. “If we do this housing properly,” he affirmed, “it will lead to whole new industries being started in Haiti, creating thousands and thousands of new jobs and permanent housing.”

Like the Caracol Industrial park, the Commission was presented as a response to the devastation of the earthquake. But its basic tenets—and its slogan, “Build Back Better”—were actually agreed upon by the U.S. and U.N. in the year prior. The commission’s formation was handled not by the Haitian government, but by the staff of the Clintons, mainly Cheryl Mills and Laura Graham, as well as a team of U.S.-based private consultants. The commission’s bylaws were drafted by a team from Hogan Lovells, a global law firm headquartered in Washington, D.C. A team from McKinsey and Company, a New York based consultancy firm, handled the “mission, mandate, structure and operations” of the commission. Eric Braverman, part of the McKinsey team, later went on to become the CEO of the Clinton Foundation.

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Jason Stanley and Vesla Weaver in the New York Times:

Given the centrality of liberty to democracy, one way to assess the democratic health of a state is by the fairness of the laws governing its removal. The fairness of a system of justice is measured by the degree to which its laws are fairly and consistently applied across all citizens. In a fair system, a group is singled out for punishment only insofar as its propensity for unjustified violations of the laws demands. What we call a racial democracy is one that unfairly applies the laws governing the removal of liberty primarily to citizens of one race, thereby singling out its members as especially unworthy of liberty, the coin of human dignity.

There is a vast chasm between democratic political ideals and a state that is a racial democracy. The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues that when political ideals diverge so widely from reality, the ideals themselves may prevent us from seeing the gap. Officially, the laws in the United States that govern when citizens can be sent to prison or questioned by the police are colorblind. But when the official story differs greatly from the reality of practice, the official story becomes a kind of mask that prevents us from perceiving it. And it seems clear that the practical reality of the criminal justice system in the United States is far from colorblind. The evidence suggests that the criminal justice system applies in a radically unbalanced way, placing disproportionate attention on our fellow black citizens. The United States has a legacy of enslavement followed by forced servitude of its black population. The threat that the political ideals of our country veil an underlying reality of racial democracy is therefore particularly disturbing.

More here.