Rachel Cusk in New Statesman:

Sylvia Plath said that writers are “the most narcissistic people”: whatever the truth of that statement, one can assume at least that her use of the term was correct. Freud bequeathed the modern era a tangled concept in narcissism, and literary culture has shown itself as apt as any other to misappropriate it. Yet it is the fashion to see people increasingly as one of two types – a narcissist, or the victim of one – so perhaps it is worth asking precisely what is meant by the word, which has come to encapsulate a cultural malaise.

Snow

i was new
and so was
the snow
befuddled
i went out
and caught a flake
took it in
then began
the examination

not wanting
to give up
its secrets
to a stranger
it melted
in my hand.
.

by Rudyard Fearon
from SPIN, 2004

Nicholas Lemann in the Times Literary Supplement:

People tend to have little sympathy with accounts of crisis in a trade or profession. It comes across as evidence of excessive self-preoccupation, or as a prelude to special pleading before government. Journalism’s difficulties seem to be drawing this kind of reaction from many people who aren’t journalists. Isn’t the press still a swaggering, even power-abusing actor in politics and society? Doesn’t it command vast attention and resources? Isn’t more news being read by more people than ever before?

Out of Print: Newspapers, journalism and the business of news in the digital age shows that something really has changed quite suddenly and dramatically in the press industry. George Brock is a veteran newspaperman, and his main concern in this clear-headed, synoptic and never whiny book is with the institutions where he has spent most of his career. In the United States, newspaper advertising revenue – the main source of economic support by far – was $63.5 billion in 2000. By 2012 it had fallen to $19 billion. (During the same period, advertising revenue at Google went from zero to $46.5 billion.) Employment in the American newspaper industry fell by 44 per cent between 2001 and 2011. In the European Union, newspaper revenue is falling by more than 10 per cent a year. In the UK, newspaper circulation has dropped by more than 25 per cent during the twenty-first century. It would be hard to think of another industry that is going through such a sudden collapse.

More here.

Melinda Taub in McSweeney's:

Dear friends, family, and Austrian nobility,

Captain Von Trapp and I are very sorry to inform you that we no longer plan to wed. We offer our deepest apologies to those of you who have already made plans to travel to Salzburg this summer.

Those of you on the Captain’s side of the guest list are probably aware of the reason for the change of plans. I’m sure by now you have received that charming “Save the date!” card in the shape of a mountain goat from the Captain and his new fiancée, Maria.

I must confess to being rather blindsided by the end of our relationship. It seems Captain Von Trapp and I misunderstood each other. I assumed he was looking for a wife of taste and sophistication, who was a dead ringer for Tippi Hedren; instead he wanted to marry a curtain-wearing religious fanatic who shouts every word she says.

More here. [Thanks to Feisal Naqvi.]

Monica Corcoran in National Geographic:

During the month of November, National Geographic magazine invited photographers from around the world to submit photos in three categories: People, Places and Nature. We received more than 7,000 entries from over 150 countries, with amateur and professional photographers across the globe participating. You can view all of the winning images here.

We asked Senior Photo Editor Susan Welchman, and National Geographiccontributing photographers Stephanie Sinclair and Ed Kashi to judge this year’s photo contest at the Society’s headquarters in Washington, DC, on December 9th.

Imagine a darkened room with images projected on a huge screen, and almost total silence except for the ‘yeas’ and ‘nays’ of the judges and the occasional discussion over specific photos. Several hours later, after multiple rounds of editing, the finalists became clear and the real debate began.

Ultimately, the judges unanimously agreed the Grand Prize should be awarded to Paul Souders for his image of a polar bear lurking beneath melting sea ice in Hudson Bay, Canada. After realizing the photographer had won an award in another contest for a very similar photo, we thought it would be interesting to hear from Paul directly.

More here.

Virginia Morrell at Lapham's Quarterly:

It is often said that our understanding and knowledge of death separates the human animal from all other animals. We alone know that we will die—that one day, suddenly or slowly, our life, our loves, our dreams will end. Surely this awareness sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, we say, pointing to some of our greatest art, music, and literature—all inspired by what we know: that death awaits every living being. And yet, how very odd it is that we should be the only animal to know what life ultimately has in store for us. We share biological histories and physiologies DNA, eyes, muscles, nerves, neurons, hormones—with other animals, and these may lead to similar behaviors, thought processes, and emotions—even about death.

Take the case of Thomas, a nine-year-old chimpanzee who died in 2010 at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust in Zambia, home to more than one hundred chimps. Research scientists filmed the reactions of one community of forty-three chimpanzees to Thomas’ corpse; thirty-eight of them gathered around and stayed by his side for almost twenty minutes. During that time, some of the chimps gently touched his body, smelled and studied him closely.

more here.

By chance, I was having a late dinner in Brooklyn with a Sri Lankan friend at the moment the tsunami struck Sri Lanka nine years ago today but we remained blissfully unaware of what had happened until the next morning. We also did not know at the time what had just happened to our mutual friend Sonali Deraniyagala and her family who were vacationing on a beach in Sri Lanka.

This is from NPR:

Economist Sonali Deraniyagala lost her husband, parents and two young sons in the terrifying Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. They had been vacationing on the southern coast of her home country Sri Lanka when the wave struck. Wave is her brutal but lyrically written account of the awful moment and the grief-crazed months after, as she learned to live with her almost unbearable losses — and allow herself to remember details of her previous life. In this scene, Deraniyagala revists both the house of her parents in Colombo, which has been emptied and closed up since the tsunami, and Yala National Park, where she was when the wave struck.

[Excerpt from 'Wave' By Sonali Deraniyagala:]

Someone had removed the brass plate with my father's name on it from the gray front wall. It had his name etched in black italics. I sat in the passenger seat of my friend Mary-Anne's car, my eyes clinging to the holes in the wall where that brass plate was once nailed.

This had been my parents' home in Colombo for some thirty-five years, and my childhood home. For my sons it was their home in Sri Lanka. They were giddy with excitement when we visited every summer and Christmas. Vik took his first steps here, and Malli, when younger, called the house “Sri Lanka.” And in our last year, 2004, when Steve and I had sabbaticals from our jobs and the four of us spent nine months in Colombo until September, this house was the hub of our children's lives.

This was where we were to return to on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth of December. My mother had already given Saroja, our cook, the menu for dinner. This was where they didn't come back to. Now, six months after the wave, I dared to set eyes on this house.

I was wary as I sat in Mary-Anne's car, which was parked by our front wall. I didn't want to look around. I was afraid of seeing too much. But I couldn't help myself, I peeked.

More here. Also see this. Wave is also on the New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2013 list.

Christopher Hart at Literary Review:

Erik Satie may have worn chestnut-coloured velvet suits, eaten thirty-egg omelettes and founded the Church of Jesus Christ the Conductor, but this was just bohemian decoration. He also walked 12 miles into and out of Paris every day, composing all the way. In his introduction to this wonderfully entertaining little book, Mason Currey quotes V S Pritchett: 'Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.'

It should come as no surprise, perhaps, that most high-achieving creative people who have given something permanent to the world are not really in the slightest bit bohemian. They discover for themselves Flaubert's famous advice that one should live like a bourgeois and put one's bohemianism into one's work.

Food is often of little importance, mere brain fuel. Patricia Highsmith lived on vodka, cereal and bacon and eggs. For lunch Ingmar Bergman ate a revolting sort of baby food made up of yoghurt and strawberry jam which he mixed in with cornflakes. In the evening he enjoyed watching Dallas.

more here.

Massimo Pigliucci in Rationally Speaking:

I am not particularly friendly to the so-called New Atheism. While I respect (and often respectfully disagree with) Dan Dennett, I have been a fairly strong critic of Dawkins, Harris, and the late Hitchens(not to mention other NA’s, such as Jerry Coyne). I have even written a technical paper analyzing the NA movement from a philosophical perspective.

So it was with some interest that I recently read a piece by David V. Johnson at 3QuarksDaily, entitled “A refutation of the undergraduate atheists,” which promised to deliver some guilty pleasure for my weekend readings. It did deliver, but only in part. In the following I will outline Johnson’s arguments and where, I think, he goes astray. I have also invited him to respond here at Rationally Speaking, and he has graciously agreed, so stay tuned for a follow up.

Johnson adopts the (obviously derisive) language of philosopher Mark Johnston, referring to the NA as “undergraduate atheists” (notice that while Johnson seems to be some kind of deist, Johnson is an atheist). Since the NA’s themselves are notorious for their, shall we say, aggressive sarcasm, I think that’s a fair enough shot.

More here.

From More Intelligent Life:

Our Top 10 of 2013. No. 7: Can we change the world, one click at a time? Ricken Patel, a young Canadian, thinks so, and he has 20m followers to show for it. Profile by Robert Butler.

Avaaz is an online campaigning organisation that’s halfway between an NGO and a megaphone. After only six years, it has 20m followers—more than the population of the Netherlands. Avaaz, which means “voice” or “song” in Persian, was set up with the overarching goal of closing the gap between “the world we have and the world most people everywhere want”. From the outset it has been unashamedly idealistic and aspirational. Its executive director is Ricken Patel, and his ambition goes back half a lifetime.

…IF YOU HAD to pinpoint the moment when Ricken Patel first sensed this gap in the world that needed closing, it might be the day he went to primary school. His family had moved to Canada from Kenya in the 1970s, an anxious time for Indians in east Africa after Idi Amin expelled 60,000 Asians from Uganda and seized their assets. Patel grew up in Alberta, 35 minutes by bus from the nearest school. It was a First Nations school on a reservation; he was the only child at the time who wasn’t white and wasn’t First Nation. He was witnessing the end of the Cree culture. “It was a deep annihilation of a people’s culture and it was conscious,” he tells me over lunch. “They took a nomadic people and confined them to a reserve.” He had a friend, Michael, whose front door was broken (“the cold wind blew in”); the family slept in a tent inside the house and ate flour, having nothing else. “History was a very live thing.” On his first day at school, he went to the playground, a large field, and came across a two-year-old boy sitting on his own in the middle of an old tyre. There was no one else around. Patel, aged five, went up and said hello. The two-year-old said, “Go fuck yourself.”

More here.

Keith Richards in delanceyplace:

“One hit requires another, very quickly, or you fast start to lose alti­tude. At that time you were expected to churn them out. 'Satisfac­tion' is suddenly number one all over the world, and Mick and I are looking at each other, saying, 'This is nice.' Then bang bang bang at the door, 'Where's the follow-up? We need it in four weeks.' And we were on the road doing two shows a day. You needed a new single every two months; you had to have another one all ready to shoot. And you needed a new sound. If we'd come along with another fuzz riff after 'Satisfaction,' we'd have been dead in the water, repeating with the law of diminishing returns. Many a band has faltered and foundered on that rock. 'Get Off of My Cloud' was a reaction to the record companies' demands for more — leave me alone — and it was an attack from another direction. And it flew as well.

“And because you've been playing every day, sometimes two or three shows a day, ideas are flowing. One thing feeds the other. You might be having a swim or screwing the old lady, but somewhere in the back of the mind, you're thinking about this chord sequence or something related to a song. No matter what the hell's going on. You might be getting shot at, and you'll still be 'Oh! That's the bridge!' And there's nothing you can do; you don't realize it's happening. It's totally subconscious, unconscious or whatever. The radar is on whether you know it or not. You cannot switch it off. You hear this piece of conversation from across the room, 'I just can't stand you anymore'… That's a song. It just flows in. And also the other thing about being a songwriter, when you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an observer, you start to distance yourself. You're constantly on the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years, observing people, how they react to one another. Which, in a way, makes you weirdly distant. You shouldn't really be doing it. It's a little of Peeping Tom to be a songwriter. You start looking round, and everything's a subject for a song. The banal phrase, which is the one that makes it. And you say, I can't believe nobody hooked up on that one before! Luckily there are more phrases than songwriters, just about.”

More here.

Similes

You give of yourself only partially
refusing to give me your body
yet my body doesn’t give up, it persists

Am I not like Ahab
chasing across the vast ocean
after a white whale
a primordial creature of the depths
whose formidable motion
may yet break my boat
sink it under the breakers

Still, I’d rather stick to the eastern mentality
to depict my state of utter sentimentality
I’ve become addicted to chasing after deer
I’m the hunter with an arrow in his heart
I’m the hunted hunter
hunted by the deer
.

by Mordechai Geldman
from Halachti Shanim Le-Tzidcha
publisher: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Mossad Bialik, 2011
translation: 2013, Tsipi Keller

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in The Guardian:

On the day our new neighbours came to our house, my brother Ofodile bit my mother on the arm. She was feeding him, pushing soft mashed yam into his mouth. She did it quickly, she always did, spoonful chasing another spoonful, then a plastic cup of water forced into his mouth to make him swallow. She did it silently, without really looking at him, her movements thick with duty, in his bedroom with the foam-carpeted floor that caught his falls. The door was always shut. Never ajar. When guests visited, the door was not just shut but locked, Ofodile sleeping inside. Sometimes she asked me to lock his door and I did it as she did, key turned swiftly, not looking in to see him first.

His piercing cries scared me. Sounds that ached and keened. High drawn-out screams filled with loneliness. They shattered the silence of every room in the house, and I would press my hands against my ears. My mother said that since he was fed and dry, he was merely expressing himself, and his crying would exhaust him and bring sleep. She would shut the door and let him cry, in that bedroom that was his life, where he ate and cried and slept. He slept more now that my mother was taking care of him. He always slept. He slept for hours and he woke up red-eyed and screaming, and my mother pushed food into his mouth between his cries. She had been taking care of him for almost a year, since she lost her job. When the new state was created, she became, overnight, a native of Anambra, a non-indigene who could no longer work in Enugu. She found another job in Anambra, and was preparing to start – she would go on Mondays and come back on Thursdays – when, one evening, a lump began to swell on Ofodile's forehead. The nanny, Ukalechi, said Ofodile had not fallen down. Then she said Ofodile could not have fallen down, then she said she did not know if he had fallen down, because most of the time when she was taking care of him, he was alone in his room while she stayed in the parlour and watched TV.

More here.

Henry Alford in The New York Times:

Public speaking can give you the willies. Even the most seasoned speakers worry that they will be exposed as frauds, or purvey all the narrative excitement of televised fishing. They worry that they will have to refer by name to Turkmenistan’s president, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow. So when an acquaintance asked me recently why I had joined Toastmasters, the 292,000-member international organization that lets people practice giving speeches to one another, I told him I was hoping to reduce terror by putting myself in terror’s path as often as possible. He applauded this idea and asked how it was going. “Pretty well,” I said. “My heart has hammered a lot, but I haven’t passed out yet or tasted my own bile.”

“So: Looking good!”

Now that we can watch TED talks on Netflix and on airplanes, it seems a lot more of us are looking to enthrall the masses via the deadly cocktail of homily and headset. Before she gave a February 2012 TED talk about introverts that would generate more than five million views online, Susan Cain, the author of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,” joined Toastmasters; on her website, Ms. Cain encourages all aspiring public speakers to follow suit. The 89-year-old Toastmasters is the granddaddy of beard-tugging and business-card-swapping, long predating stalwarts of the seminars industry like the World Economic Forum and Renaissance Weekends.

More here.

Divine Image

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is man, his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face;
And Love, the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine:
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew.
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.

William Blake

Michael Greenberg in the NYRB:

Throughout his life, Jorge Luis Borges was engaged in a dialogue with violence. Speaking to an interviewer about his childhood in what was then the outlying barrio of Palermo, in Buenos Aires, he said, “To call a man, or to think of him, as a coward—that was the last thing…the kind of thing he couldn’t stand.” According to his biographer, Edwin Williamson,1 Borges’s father handed him a dagger when he was a boy, with instructions to overcome his poor eyesight and “generally defeated” demeanor and let the boys who were bullying him know that he was a man.

Swords, daggers—weapons with a blade—retained a mysterious, talismanic significance for Borges, imbued with predetermined codes of conduct and honor. The short dagger had particular power, because it required the fighters to draw death close, in a final embrace. As a young man, in the 1920s, Borges prowled the obscure barrios of Buenos Aires, seeking the company ofcuchilleros, knife fighters, who represented to him a form of authentic criollonativism that he wished to know and absorb.

The criollos were the early Spanish settlers of the pampa, and their gaucho descendants. For at least a century now, the word has signified an ideal cultural purity that, according to its champions, was corrupted by the privatization of the pampa and, later, by the flood of immigrants from Italy and elsewhere in Europe that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

More here.

Marek Kohn in More Intelligent Life:

Five times in the history of life on Earth, mass extinctions have eliminated at least three-quarters of the species that were present before each episode began. The likely exterminators were volcanoes, noxious gases, climatic upheavals and the asteroid that did for the dinosaurs. Now a single species threatens to wipe out most of the others that surround it. We are faced with the realisation, as the ecologist Robert May puts it, that we “can now do things which are on the scale of being hit by an asteroid”.

THE LYNX BECAME top predator in Doñana after the last wolf was shot in 1951. That is how it goes with predators and large animals. The bigger they are, the sooner they tend to vanish. Among mammals, the risk of extinction rises sharply for species that weigh more than three kilograms—about as much as a small pet cat. Big creatures need more food and more space to find it in than small ones; they are slower to reproduce, and are apt to get on the wrong side of humans. “The species that tend to go extinct first tend to be the big-bodied things, and the tasty things,” says Rob Ewers of Imperial College London. He is talking about the Amazon forests, but it’s a general truth.

Big animals, particularly those at the top of food chains, “are really fundamentally important to holding ecosystems together,” says Jim Estes, a biologist based at the University of California, Santa Cruz. When they go, ecosystems unravel and reorganise, removing more species in the process. “Apex consumers” can take whole habitats with them. Wolves may protect forests by preying on the deer that browse saplings. If the wolves are wiped out, the deer multiply at the expense of the trees, preventing the forest from renewing itself: the end-point, as on the once-forested Scottish island of Rùm, is a treeless landscape. Globally, the result is the “downgrading of Planet Earth”, as Estes put it in an article for the journal Science in 2011.

The exits began long before roads or rifles were devised. Nearly three-quarters of North American and a third of Eurasian megafauna disappeared between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. Woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, giant sloths and sabre-toothed cats were among the species that vanished from the face of the Earth. While climate change was one part of the story, human expansion was another. The selective disappearance of large animals marks this period out from other extinction episodes, and was the start of what Estes and his fellow authors suggested “is arguably humankind’s most pervasive influence on the natural world”. For Estes, it was the beginning of the sixth mass extinction.

More here.