by David Lewis

I share Alex's concerns about the increasingly widespread vision of ‘political stability' : it leads to dangerous complacency about authoritarian states and their often violent legacies. The crisis in Syria reminds us again that almost every US foreign policy crisis of the past two decades has come through misreading the politics of authoritarian states. Central Asia is yet another region where the lure of short-term, authoritarian stability disguises the real political, social and economic challenges these countries face.

But I want to add a couple of caveats to his argument in relation to Central Asia, because I think that some of the old liberal tropes about the region need to be revisited and rescripted.

Firstly, the alternatives to the mantra of stability are not simple: rapid regime change in the Middle East has produced a real possibility of political renewal, but also mass violence, renewed authoritarianism and social and economic collapse. In the post-Soviet world, processes of regime change have also provoked civil conflict and ethnic violence. Russia and China may appear obsessed with regime stability, but both experienced 20^th century revolutions that led directly to the deaths of tens of millions of people. Not surprising that they have less romantic ideas about revolution than most Americans.

And it is not only elites in Central Asia who support these discourses of stability: many ordinary people are wary of the allure of radical political change, when the outcomes are so uncertain, and alternatives not easy to identify. The choices are often between religious radicals, corrupt oligarchs in exile or marginalised secular liberals. A majority of the population certainly want more freedom, prosperity and justice, but finding viable channels to articulate and institutionalise these concerns is not easy.

None of this excuses the repression that blights so many people's lives in countries such as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Managed reform is clearly the best option, but the international community has been weak in maintaining pressure for change and too willing to go along with the short-term stability that such regimes represent. As Alex argues, these authoritarian states are building up tensions that will surely make any future political development incredibly difficult and prone to conflict. But a recognition that stability is important to people who actually live in the region does highlight the need for advocates of reform to have responsible ideas on how to manage political change.

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by Alexander Cooley

I am pleased to respond to the important points raised by Pavel Baev and David Lewis, both long-time and insightful observers of Eurasia and its rapidly changing politics.

Pavel's point about the “stability paradox” (a term he might consider patenting), or how great powers such as the United States, Russia and China actively pursue policies that ultimately undermine even their own visions of the concept, is right on target, so I will confine myself to discussing the implications of my argument for the post-Spring and current developments in Syria.

Rather than provide any one set of clear lessons, the Arab Spring and subsequent developments appear to have reinforced these varying external assumptions about the determinants of “stability.” In hindsight, Western policymakers and commentators now view the 2011 upheavals as a long-term consequence of decades of political stagnation and kleptocracy, with the Tunisian spark quickly generating regional demonstration in other countries with these same characteristics.

But in practice, translating such hindsight into new Western policies has remained difficult. Indeed, the US pursued dramatically different policies towards Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Jordan, in great part because of enduring concerns over “access stability.” In Egypt, for instance, following the Egyptian military's overthrow of President Morsi and post-coup the Obama Administration has struggled mightily to reconcile its enduring need for security cooperation and access to Suez with its own legal guidelines, such as the Leahy Law, mandating aid termination.

As with US policy towards Uzbekistan, the parsing of various categories of US military assistance and activities and calls for “political engagement” in the service of encouraging incremental political reform might facilitate internal bureaucratic policy compromises, but abroad it mostly signals confusion, inconsistency and hypocrisy. Moreover, in Egypt, like in Central Asia, the political conditions accompanying assistance have become weaker still given the availability of other external patrons in the event of US aid cut-offs. As Stephen Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations has observed regarding US military assistance to Cairo, “We allegedly have influence but we never used the lever of the influence; so as a result we don't have any.”

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Dear Reader,

It is with great excitement and pleasure that I present to you the new version of 3 Quarks Daily. You will have already noticed our bold new look, I am sure. Here is a summary of some of the new features:

1. Site width has been explanded to 1024 pixels and a column added on the left side to make the look more symmetrical and reduce clutter in the right-hand column.
2. A randomly chosen main banner is displayed from a list of interesting images contributed by various artist and photographer friends of 3QD. If you don't like the banner image, just refresh the page by clicking the main banner and you'll get a different one. Try it now, it's kind of addictive!
3. There is a new menu bar and new pages which are under construction at the moment. We are in the process of organizing the information for the prizes and symposia in a better way. We will also be updating the Monday Magazine page with a better design a little bit later.
4. The “Search” function in the menu bar finally works properly!
5. At the bottom of each post are new social media buttons to allow you to share that post on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and other sites, or just to email it to a friend.
6. The biggest change of all is that we have switched to a very powerful comments platform called Disqus and have imported all existing 75,000+ comments into this new system. This will allow you to do many useful things, such as:
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   • And much more.
7. The HTML code for the entire site has been cleaned up and updated and we hope you'll notice that the site loads significantly more quickly than before.

We had to overcome a number of hurdles and so it has taken us a while to roll out this new version but I hope you'll agree that it has been worth the wait. We have tried to maintain a degree of continuity with our old design while adding new features and giving the site a more contemporary look.

The overall layout and banner logo have been designed by me, and I have tried to keep it as simple and clean as possible. Banner images have been contributed by Terri Amig, Carla Goller, Tom Hilde, Georg Hofer, Sheherbano Husain, Margit Oberrauch, Sughra Raza, Hartwig Thaler, and me. I would especially like to thank Henry Molofsky who worked energetically with me on various aspects of the design. And last, but not by any means least, the new features have been expertly coded by Dumky de Wilde, to whom goes much credit and many thanks.

Goodbye, old 3QD!

As you can imagine, there will inevitably be some bugs and it will take a little time before everything starts humming along smoothly, so please be patient as we try to fix any problems and do bring anything wrong that you notice to our attention. Please keep in mind that it always takes a few days to get used to a new look!

I really, really, hope you like the changes but even if you don't we would love to know what you think. Please do give us some feedback in the comments section of this post, including on the new comments system itself.

Yours,

Abbas

P.S. This post will stay on top for a few days as explanation of the new stuff for returning readers. New posts are just below this one.

From the New York Times:

You were born in Kenya and spent your early childhood there. What kinds of books did you read while growing up in Africa?

The greatest novel to come out of Kenya is, in my admittedly limited opinion, one of the great novels of the English language, and it is lamentably neglected by literary connoisseurs: Elspeth Huxley’s “Red Strangers,” a saga sweeping through four generations of a Kikuyu family, based on the author’s sympathetic and lifelong familiarity with that tribe. Beginning before the coming of the white men, she takes us readers into the Kikuyu world and mind so successfully that when the British finally arrive, we find their ways as quaint and alien as if they were invading Martians. We feel at home in an economy pegged to the goat standard (as I put it in my introduction to the Penguin reprint of the book), and we share the tribal indignation that rupees cannot, as promised, be “changed into goats.” Huxley’s descriptive powers rival Steinbeck’s, with the added subtlety that her metaphors and imagery are drawn from the Kikuyu mind. The pasture “gleamed like a parrot’s wing.” A felled tree “tottered like a drunken elder.”

More here.

Salman Hameed in The Express Tribune:

Here is the recipe: You take two stars that are orbiting each other. This is not as hard as it seems. Nearly half of all stars in our own Galaxy have at least one other star in its system. But make sure that both of these stars are at least 10 times bigger than our Sun. Then wait about 10 million years. This is the average lifetime of big stars. They will eventually exhaust all their fuel and explode in their individual supernovae. All that will be left of them will be their cores, called neutron stars. These are some of the strangest objects in the universe. Each of the neutron star contains mass equal to that of our Sun, but all packed in a size no greater than a city like Karachi. This means that they have very high density. A teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh as much as a mountain. Now you have two of these neutron stars orbiting each other. But orbits for such exotic objects are unstable. The two stars will eventually collide with each other — and this collision will result in the creation of gold and other rare elements.

However, in an act of ultimate charity, these elements are spread into the surrounding space.

By the time our Solar system was born, many such collisions had enriched our Galaxy with gold (and other elements). The gas cloud that formed the Sun and the Earth already contained these elements. Some of this gold became part of the Earth. Four-and-a-half billion years later, this rare element caught the attention of bipedal species and it became an object of desire and envy.

More here.

Ian Lustick in the NYT:

The Palestinian Authority needs its people to believe that progress is being made toward a two-state solution so it can continue to get the economic aid and diplomatic support that subsidize the lifestyles of its leaders, the jobs of tens of thousands of soldiers, spies, police officers and civil servants, and the authority’s prominence in a Palestinian society that views it as corrupt and incompetent.

Israeli governments cling to the two-state notion because it seems to reflect the sentiments of the Jewish Israeli majority and it shields the country from international opprobrium, even as it camouflages relentless efforts to expand Israel’s territory into the West Bank.

American politicians need the two-state slogan to show they are working toward a diplomatic solution, to keep the pro-Israel lobby from turning against them and to disguise their humiliating inability to allow any daylight between Washington and the Israeli government.

Finally, the “peace process” industry — with its legions of consultants, pundits, academics and journalists — needs a steady supply of readers, listeners and funders who are either desperately worried that this latest round of talks will lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state, or that it will not.

Conceived as early as the 1930s, the idea of two states between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea all but disappeared from public consciousness between 1948 and 1967. Between 1967 and 1973 it re-emerged, advanced by a minority of “moderates” in each community. By the 1990s it was embraced by majorities on both sides as not only possible but, during the height of the Oslo peace process, probable. But failures of leadership in the face of tremendous pressures brought Oslo crashing down. These days no one suggests that a negotiated two-state “solution” is probable. The most optimistic insist that, for some brief period, it may still be conceivable.

Richard Marshall interviews Timothy Williamson in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: Alex Rosenberg thinks that understanding the nature of maths will rest on the success that science has had so far in making sense of everything else. He bets that an epistemology explaining how we know a priori synthetic truths will come from science not analytic philosophy. And he also points out that even if you’re right that naturalists have no handle on mathematical truths, neither do non-naturalists. How do you respond?

TW: Alex bravely defends what I think of as the worst beliefs associated with the word ‘naturalism’, the scientism and the reductionism. He claims that only the methodology of natural science produces genuine knowledge. I pointed to mathematics as a glaring counterexample. He admits that it’s a problem for his view, but has faith that somehow or other, he has no idea how, the methodology of natural science will solve the problem and show that mathematics isn’t really a counterexample after all. There is no symmetry between his view and mine with respect to mathematics. On the face of it, mathematics is a massive counterexample to his view. On the face of it, mathematics is perfectly consistent with my view. His view requires mathematics to be either reduced to natural science or ditched. He can’t ditch it, because natural science itself uses mathematics all the time, and he has no idea how to reduce it to natural science. My view involves no such dilemma. Mathematics is fine as it is, without being reduced to anything else. He can’t find the sort of handle on mathematics his view says he needs. My view says no such handle is needed.

Furthermore, it’s not even approximately true that natural science has had success in making sense of everything but mathematics, if that involves showing that other forms of genuine human knowledge resulted from the methodology of the natural sciences. We have massive knowledge of history that doesn’t come from that methodology. Of course, some naturalists in a watered-down sense would stretch their understanding of the methodology to cover past and present historical scholarship. But Alex Rosenberg doesn’t do that, he just dismisses history as a source of genuine knowledge. If he wants to enact a reductio ad absurdum of his own extremist brand of naturalism, that’s fine by me.

From NPR:

There are a lot of fascinating details hiding below the surface in the world of color. For instance, scientists once thought the average color of the entire universe was turquoise — until they recalculated and realized it was beige. In Japan, you wait at a stoplight until it turns from red to blue, even though it's the same green color as American stoplights. And in World War II, the British painted a whole flotilla of warships pinkish-purple so they'd blend in with the sky at dusk and confuse the Germans. That's right — pink warships. Design writer Jude Stewart's new book, Roy G. Biv, is full of facts like these. She tells NPR's Rachel Martin about the relationship between language and color, and what it's like to live with synesthesia.

…”Roy g biv” is a mnemonic that helps you remember the order of the colors of the rainbow. So it's red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

On the surprisingly universal relationship between language and color

In 1969 these two linguists, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, did a survey of 20 different languages that were completely unrelated to each other. And they found that as languages develop differing names for colors, those names always enter the language in the same order. So that order is black, white, red, green and yellow, blue, and then brown. So, if they're going to have only three words for colors, those words will almost always be black, white and red.

More here.

Dennis Drabelle in The Washington Post:

At her peak, Swanson wangled a movie contract that brought her $1 million a year. But she felt constrained by studio bosses and sought a measure of artistic control by joining United Artists, the distributing company founded by Pickford, Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith. It wasn’t long, though, before her finances were a mess, and she was delighted to run into a charmer who promised to straighten them out: the financier Joseph P. Kennedy, father of a future U.S. president. Kennedy fancied himself a movie tycoon in the making. (Too late, Swanson realized that he lacked a prerequisite for that role: an aesthetic sense.) Their affair was fulfilling enough, but Kennedy hired — and then failed to supervise — the profligate Erich von Stroheim to direct Swanson in “Queen Kelly,” a melodrama about a convent girl who marries a king, although not before being sent to live with her aunt, a brothel keeper in the African jungle. Not only was the story preposterous, but Stroheim insisted on adding lascivious touches that never would have made it past the censors. Finally, an exasperated Swanson got Kennedy to fire him. The picture had to be scrapped, at an estimated loss of $800,000. In the meantime, the advent of sound had transformed the movie industry. A few silent stars managed to cross over, but Swanson was not one of them.

Welsch is good at showing how Swanson kept busy during the 20 ensuing years in the wilderness. Despite having no more than an eighth-grade education, she was a smart and worldly woman who succeeded in business, founding and running a firm that sold inventions made by refugees from Nazi Germany, and then starting a line of cosmetics. (Toward the end of her life, she also wrote a best-selling autobiography.) Swanson became famous again in 1950, thanks to “Sunset Boulevard,” which, as Welsch points out, changed markedly after she joined the cast. Director and co-writer Billy Wilder had set out to tell the story of a gigolo (played by William Holden), but Swanson made so much of her role as an aging, half-mad silent-movie queen that the kept boy became secondary. “The resonance with the leading lady’s real life got deeper and stranger,” Welsch writes, as Desmond’s mansion filled up with memorabilia from Swanson’s career, as footage from Swanson’s movies served to illustrate Desmond’s filmography, and as her former nemesis Stroheim took the juicy part of her depraved butler.

The result was Swanson’s finest performance and a revived career on stage and television.

More here.

Slow Dance

More than putting another man on the moon,
More than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
between the couch and dining room table, at the end
of the party, while the person we love has gone
to bring the car around
because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
to bring the evening home. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey.
It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about
how all the stars in the sky are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-chord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes. Small
and cruel. I made my plans.
I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine.
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like children
before they turn three. Like being held in the arms
of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
and when he turns to dip me
or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.
The slow dance of what’s to come
and the slow dance of insomnia
pouring across the floor like bath water.
When the woman I’m sleeping with
stands naked in the bathroom,
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
into the sink. There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dress
covered in a million beads
slinks toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life,
I take her hand in mine. I spin her out
and bring her in. This is the almond grove
in the dark slow dance.
It is what we should be doing right now. Scraping
for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutan slow dance.

by Matthew Dickman
from American Poetry Review

Lee Konstantinou in the LA Review of Books:

IN 2004, The New York Times reported on the effort of the borough of Queens to find a replacement for Hal Sirowitz, its departing poet laureate, “one of those rare New York writers who is willing — eager, in fact — to identify himself with the borough.” The qualifications for the position were simple: “The winner must be someone who has lived in Queens for at least five years and has written, in English, ‘poetry inspired by the borough.’” But finding someone who met both criteria proved more difficult than expected. Compared to other boroughs — especially Manhattan and Brooklyn — theTimes concluded that “[t]he muse has been less kind to Queens.” Submissions ranged from poems celebrating the fact that the city’s two airports were housed in the borough to odes to those felled on Queens Boulevard, America’s premiere Boulevard of Death.

With Dissident Gardens, Jonathan Lethem — now, inconveniently for official purposes, a resident of California — makes a belated bid for the job of the borough’s poet laureate. Lethem’s longstanding willingness to traverse borders, whether of culture, race, or genre, carries him away from his beloved Brooklyn into what his narrator calls “that impossible homeland of steaming stacks and tombstones.” Dissident Gardens suggests that if you can overcome what Lethem calls “Boroughphobia,” you might find in Queens the makings of something like Utopia, a word often hard for American tongues to pronounce without irony.

An assured, expert literary performance by one of our most important writers, Dissident Gardens is a largely plotless, multigenerational novel about the network of characters surrounding Rose Zimmer, a member of the American Communist Party whose husband leaves her, and who must raise their daughter Miriam alone. After being expelled from the Party in 1955 for having an affair with a married black policeman, Douglas Lookins, Rose becomes the “Red Queen” of Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, a community of garden homes built around a common courtyard. Rose is at the center ofDissident Gardens; around her, in the thrall of her tremendous gravity, orbit a variety of other characters.

Philip Kitcher in The NYT's The Stone:

Thomas Nagel, one of the world’s most eminent philosophers, is especially noted for his ability to write about the most difficult questions with subtlety and clarity. His recent book, “Mind and Cosmos,” has sparked lively discussion, as he observed recently in his précis of the book’s main argument in The Stone. He has found new – not always welcome – allies (“Nagel has paved the way for a religious world-view!”), and some long-time admirers have denounced his claims and arguments (“Nagel has paved the way for religious mumbo-jumbo!”). But the link with religion is a sideshow. Nagel’s main concern lies with the requirements of a complete metaphysical view.

J. L. Austin is reputed to have remarked that, when philosophy is done well, all the action is over by the bottom of the first page. Nagel does philosophy very well. Once he has set up the framework within which the possible positions will be placed, his arguments are not easy to resist. In my view, though, the framework itself is faulty.

In his Queries to the “Opticks,” Newton looked forward to a vision of the cosmos in which everything would be explained on the basis of a small number of physical principles. That Newtonian vision remains highly popular with many scientists who turn philosophical in their later years and announce their dreams of a final theory. Yet, since the 19^th century — since Darwin, in fact — that has not been a convincing picture of how the sciences make their advances. Darwin did not supply a major set of new principles that could be used to derive general conclusions about life and its history: he crafted a framework within which his successors construct models of quite specific evolutionary phenomena. Model-building lies at the heart of large parts of the sciences, including parts of physics. There are no grand theories, but lots of bits and pieces, generating local insights about phenomena of special interest. In the revealing terms that Nancy Cartwright has borrowed from Gerard Manley Hopkins, we live in a “dappled world.”

Melanie Tannenbaum in the Scientific American blog in PsySociety:

Although it is often called the “holiest day of the Jewish year,” what is notable about Yom Kippur is not the fact that it is particularly holy, nor is it the fact that many Jews you know might be particularlyhungry today. Yom Kippur is notable because it is really all about the unequivocal importance of one thing — atonement. We sit in our religious services all day, reflecting on the need to atone for our sins. However, it is stressed that we cannot just do this by showing up to services and praying. We must also directly ask for forgiveness from those that we have wronged in the past year; and, in turn, we must be willing to grant forgiveness to those whom we believe have wronged us.

This past week has been a particularly challenging one for me, a fact that is only made more salient by my recent reflection on Yom Kippur. This was a week filled with a lot of stress – a major disagreement with friends (an unpleasantry that doesn’t happen all too often, thankfully, though this relative infrequency makes it especially painful when it does occur), dissertation work, transitioning back into a new semester of teaching, losing a flash drive for a period of about 24 hours (always enough to give me a few panic attacks). I had to face the unavoidable fact that I’ve once again found myself over-scheduled and under-rested this semester, and brace myself for the uncomfortable reality of having to let go of a few commitments and inevitably let people down. And of course there were more things — smaller stresses here and there that are not worth mentioning, and larger ones that are less appropriate for a public blog. But in a way, it’s almost perfect that Yom Kippur has arrived for me after such a truly stressful, overwhelming week. If nothing else, this week has served as a critical reminder to me of one of the most consistent and foundational facts in all of social psychology. The environment that surrounds us — those stressors, obligations, demands, fights, and other situational pushes that we constantly experience — have a strong, disconcerting influence on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. If we’re going to reflect on atonement, it must serve us well to acknowledge just how important our surrounding environments can be when it comes to events that require repentance — and just how often we might fail to acknowledge the situation’s strong role in our lives. If someone were to judge me for anything that I said or did this week, I know that I would hope they would have accounted for the numerous stressors and other dramatic ongoings that could be influencing my words and actions. Unfortunately, given what I know of social psychology, I’m also well aware that they probably would not have done so — and to be fair, I likely wouldn’t be immediately prone to doing so either, if the tables were turned.

Anjum Hasan in Caravan:

This is to be expected, given that American and British publishers are the source of virtually all the international fiction we read in English. We’ve grown used to discovering first the Russian writers, then the Latin American, and lately the African via Western selections and translations. This traffic is so old and so commonplace it doesn’t surprise us. Yet it’s worth wondering why two countries that share such a long border and seemingly many a cultural trait, not to speak of being gripped today by similar economic and social upheavals, can only access each other’s novels based on the tastes, fashions and economics of Western publishing.

It could be argued that the nationality of a book’s publisher has no effect on the reader’s experience of the text. This may be true: that Western publishers are the gatekeepers of what we read from China doesn’t change our way of reading, but it does exert a considerable influence on what Chinese fiction gets widely circulated in the English-speaking world. Pankaj Mishra wrote in these pages three years ago, in his essay ‘National Identities and Literature’, of his hope that “one day soon a Chinese novelist aspiring for an international reputation will be able to steer clear of the misery of the Cultural Revolution or the massacre in Tiananmen Square (perennial publishing favourites in the West).”

This tendency (to write what the West expects and recognises) as well as its constant accompaniment (the anxiety that writers are pandering to Western expectations of a country’s literature) are all too familiar to us in India. Both are blind allies, the tendency as limiting as the anxiety is counter-productive. Yet they both also open up interesting questions. How, for instance, has the English-speaking West come to have such a large stake in the translation and transmission of Chinese literature, or in giving Indian literature in English global currency?

Samira Shackle in Aeon:

We are sitting in a room the size of a football pitch in an upmarket area of Karachi: men and women in our mid-20s, most smoking cigarettes. On a coffee table in front of us sits a two-litre bottle of imported Famous Grouse whisky and an equally outsize bottle of Absolut vodka. Occasionally, a servant — a young man the same age as us — enters to remove dirty glasses or refill the ice bucket. Outside is a fleet of cars, and three armed guards; two working at the gate of the house, and one who accompanied a guest. The group is debating the merits of the iPad mini. Sadia bought hers on a recent trip to New York. Faroukh interjects: ‘You’re so lucky you have a US passport. I’m dying to go. I’ve been waiting for my visa for eight weeks now.’ Talk turns to the torturous process of travelling with a Pakistani passport. One young woman says with outrage that her parents recently had a visa application rejected by the US embassy: ‘I mean, what the hell are they going to do? Blow up the White House?’

In the eyes of the world, Pakistan equals terrorism. For young, privileged Pakistanis wishing to travel to the UK, the US or France, that means submitting to a visa application process that can take months to allow for extra security checks. ‘I feel self-conscious, even apologetic when I’m travelling internationally,’ said Komail Aijazuddin, a 28-year-old artist from Lahore. ‘I’m not always made to, but myself I feel it.’ Ghazal Raza, a 26-year-old NGO worker from Peshawar, in north-western Pakistan, describes being pulled out of a queue in Bangkok airport. ‘They said: “You’re a Pakistani passport-holder. We have to do a full security check.” When you travel, you know what people think of you and your country.’

Like many others, Ghazal blames overly negative media portrayals of Pakistan. But the hindrance of the Pakistani passport also underscores deeper questions about national identity. When I first met Komail, at his house in Lahore, he showed me the clause printed on every page of his passport: ‘Valid for every country of the world except Israel.’ ‘In order to get my passport to leave the country, I have to say that Israelis don’t exist, and that Ahmadis [a persecuted Muslim sect] don’t exist, and that I believe in the Prophet and the last word of God,’ he told me. ‘Fine. But what do the Israelis have to do with it?’

Are you ready for Thomas (Screaming Comes Across the Sky) Pynchon on the subject of Sept. 11, 2001? On the one hand, his poetry of paranoia and his grasp of history’s surrealist passages make a perfect fit. Yet his slippery insouciance, his relentless japery, risk being tonally at odds with the subject. Either way, and despite his sensibility’s entrenchment in ’60s Californian hippiedom, Pynchon is a New Yorker, with an intimate license to depict the sulfurous gray plumes and tragic tableaus of that irreconcilable moment: “On the way home she passes the neighborhood firehouse. They’re in working on one of the trucks. . . . She threads among the daily bunches of flowers on the sidewalk, which will be cleared in a while. The list of firefighters here who were lost on 11 September is kept back someplace more intimate, out of the public face, anybody wants to see it they can ask, but sometimes it shows more respect not to put such things out on a billboard. . . . What makes these guys choose to go in, work 24-hour shifts and then keep working, keep throwing themselves into those shaky ruins, torching through steel, bringing people to safety, recovering parts of others, ending up sick, beat up by nightmares, disrespected, dead?”

more from Jonathan Lethem at the NY Times here.

Nicholson Baker never meant to write a sequel to “The Anthologist.” And yet, he explains by phone from his home in Maine, the narrator of that 2010 novel, a poet named Paul Chowder, kept demanding to be heard. “It was more a refusal,” Baker notes, voice dry as a whisper on the wire. “A refusal on Paul’s part to be overlooked. I was writing a different book, in my own voice, and I kept slipping into his voice. At a certain point, I just gave in.” What Baker’s getting at is the tendency of characters — or certain characters — to assert themselves, to emerge in a piece of writing whether we want them there or not. Paul is such a figure: idiosyncratic, unashamed of his quirks and ticks and odd obsessions, not unlike the author who created him.

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.