Brad Fox interviews Aleksandar Hemon in Guernica:

Aleksandar Hemon—Sasha, as he likes to be called—left his native Sarajevo for Chicago on a cultural exchange program in 1992, just as the siege began. He resolved to settle, mastering English while he canvassed for Greenpeace and watched his hometown burn on the news. Once a journalist in Bosnia, Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995 and within a decade received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur “genius grant” for works penned in his new language.

His 2008 novel, The Lazarus Project, began as an investigation into the true story of an escapee from the pogroms of Eastern Europe, who was shot by Chicago’s police chief in 1908. Photos of a police captain posing with the corpse are included in the book, which Hemon calls “an Abu Ghraib novel.” It is narrated by Brik, a columnist and Bosnian immigrant to Chicago, who wins a grant to travel to Moldova and finally to Sarajevo to research the worlds that both he and Lazarus left behind.

Unconcerned with the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction—“There’s no such difference in Bosnia,” he says—Hemon’s work investigates the many uses of narrative, from jokes and gossip to the way states create national identities and individuals struggle to maintain coherence. “In some way there is no real life,” he says. “It’s always the story of your life that you’re living.” Among the most deeply felt of these explorations, the essay “The Aquarium,” from his forthcoming nonfiction debut, The Book of My Lives, describes experiencing the death of his one-year-old daughter as his three-year-old acquires language and invents an imaginary brother. The book’s dedication reads, “For Isabel, forever breathing on my chest.”

I met Hemon at his agent Nicole Aragi’s apartment in Chelsea. When I arrived, I found him in front of a large TV discussing soccer coaching strategies with the Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah. Hemon led me to a long, heavy wood table and we sat directly across from each other. He nervously fingered a plastic bottle cap, bouncing it off the tabletop over and over again as we talked. His presence was large and looming, and there was a controlled aggression in his posture. He was serious but laughed easily, adamant but occasionally self-mocking. “There’s a very simple rule of writing,” he told me. “It’s all shit, until it isn’t.”

—Brad Fox for Guernica

Guernica: What do you make of the story that Sasha Hemon came to America, couldn’t speak English, and then two years later sat down to write The Question of Bruno: Stories?

Aleksandar Hemon: That’s the great American story [laughs]. It complies with the story of immigrants who came through Ellis Island: they were nobodies—half-human somehow. They had potential, but of course they couldn’t do anything with it over there, because it wasn’t America, so they came here, and suddenly they bloomed.

I don’t know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.

Guernica: But you didn’t return home?

Aleksandar Hemon: I could have at a certain point, but I didn’t. Life had started here. Chicago is not a bad place to live. But the usual story of immigration is the happy fulfillment of human potential in America that is not available anywhere else—it’s propaganda, really. It’s more complicated than that.

Tomorrow marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. David Swanson in Counterpunch:

At 10 years since the launch of Operation Iraqi Liberation (to use the original name with the appropriate acronym, OIL) and over 22 years since Operation Desert Storm, there is little evidence that any significant number of people in the United States have a realistic idea of what our government has done to the people of Iraq, or of how these actions compare to other horrors of world history. A majority of Americans believe the war since 2003 has hurt the United States but benefitted Iraq. A plurality of Americans believe, not only that Iraqis should be grateful, but that Iraqis are in fact grateful.

A number of U.S. academics have advanced the dubious claim that war making is declining around the world. Misinterpreting what has happened in Iraq is central to their argument. As documented in thefull report, by the most scientifically respected measures available, Iraq lost 1.4 million lives as a result of OIL, saw 4.2 million additional people injured, and 4.5 million people become refugees. The 1.4 million dead was 5% of the population. That compares to 2.5% lost in the U.S. Civil War, or 3 to 4% in Japan in World War II, 1% in France and Italy in World War II, less than 1% in the U.K. and 0.3% in the United States in World War II. The 1.4 million dead is higher as an absolute number as well as a percentage of population than these other horrific losses. U.S. deaths in Iraq since 2003 have been 0.3% of the dead, even if they’ve taken up the vast majority of the news coverage, preventing U.S. news consumers from understanding the extent of Iraqi suffering.

In a very American parallel, the U.S. government has only been willing to value the life of an Iraqi at that same 0.3% of the financial value it assigns to the life of a U.S. citizen.

The 2003 invasion included 29,200 air strikes, followed by another 3,900 over the next eight years. The U.S. military targeted civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances It also made use of what some might call “weapons of mass destruction,” using cluster bombs, white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and a new kind of napalm in densely settled urban areas.

Birth defects, cancer rates, and infant mortality are through the roof. Water supplies, sewage treatment plants, hospitals, bridges, and electricity supplies have been devastated, and not repaired. Healthcare and nutrition and education are nothing like they were before the war. And we should remember that healthcare and nutrition had already deteriorated during years of economic warfare waged through the most comprehensive economic sanctions ever imposed in modern history.

Sughra Raza. Untitled. 2010.

Digital photograph.

In honor of Pakistan Day on March 23rd.

Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson in Prospect:

Within the world of academic philosophy, Putnam is famous (perhaps notorious is the word) for his habit of changing his mind. His entry in the joke Philosophical Lexicon runs:

“Hilary: A very brief but significant period in the intellectual career of a distinguished philosopher. “Oh, that’s what I thought three or four hilaries ago.”

His longtime admirer Sidney Morgenbesser once quipped of Putman: “He’s a quantum philosopher. I can’t understand him and his position at the same time.”

This intellectual mutability extends to his politics and personal life. Born in 1926 to an intellectually gifted, middle-class Jewish family in Chicago, Putnam was raised an atheist and progressive. In the 1960s Putman was a vocal defender of the Civil Rights Movement, a critic of the American involvement in Vietnam, and a member of the communist Progressive Labor Party. By 1976 Putnam, after grappling with the human rights abuses by communists, left the PLP and gave up his support for Maoism. Both Putnam and his wife, the philosopher Ruth-Anna Putnam, returned to Judaism after decades of atheism. Putnam was 68 when he had his Bar Mitzvah.

Changing your mind in any situation, much less academic philosophy, is seen as a sort of weakness. It takes a very secure ego to end a debate with “well I think I may have been wrong.” Putnam’s shifts in position demonstrate not just his intellectual confidence, but also the virtue of seeing the bigger picture. Putnam is able to step back for a moment and see a particular position, say functionalism in philosophy of mind, and notice that it doesn’t quite fit in with a greater commitment in metaphysics and philosophy of language.

In Philosophy in an Age of Science Putnam wants us to take a step back and consider the relationship between two deeply entrenched ways of understanding the world. One, the scientific position, attempts to explain things in mind-independent and law-like terms. This is often called the descriptive or “is” position. The other, the moral position, attempts to explain things in mind-dependent and value-laced terms. This is often called the normative or “ought” position.

More here.

Letter from Henry Miller to Anaïs Nin after a visit to Nin's home. From Letters of Note:

August 14, 1932

Anais:

Don't expect me to be sane anymore. Don't let's be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes—you can't dispute it. I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. Everything I do and say and think relates back to the marriage. I saw you as the mistress of your home, a Moor with a heavy face, a negress with a white body, eyes all over your skin, woman, woman, woman. I can't see how I can go on living away from you—these intermissions are death. How did it seem to you when Hugo came back? Was I still there? I can't picture you moving about with him as you did with me. Legs closed. Frailty. Sweet, treacherous acquiescence. Bird docility. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old.

Here I am back and still smouldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger. I read the paper about suicides and murders and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal. I feel somehow that it is a disgrace to do nothing, to just bide one's time, to take it philosophically, to be sensible. Where has gone the time when men fought, killed, died for a glove, a glance, etc? (A victrola is playing that terrible aria from Madama Butterfly—”Some day he'll come!”)

More here.

Max Ross in The New Yorker:

In the late fall of 2004, Nathan Zuckerman, the American-Jewish novelist whose fictions aggressively scrutinized Jewish values (and subsequently caused him to be ostracized from the Jewish community), was found dead in his country estate—evidently the result of complications following a neurosurgical procedure. He was eighty-one years old. At the time, a number of mysteries remained concerning Zuckerman’s life. Why had he fled Manhattan for rural Massachusetts? How, after a series of marriages, had he come to live alone? After his novel “Carnovsky” made him rich and famous, had he merely quit publishing his work, or had he stopped writing altogether? While it was assumed these questions would never be answered, the recent discovery of hundreds of notebooks and journals hidden throughout Zuckerman’s home in the Berkshires explains, at least in part, the seclusion and silence that marked his final thirty-five years. Consumed by depression after his father’s death, in 1969, the author was, for a time, unable to produce anything he considered of value; and by the nineteen-nineties, when he began writing again, a neurodegenerative disorder was unravelling his mind. As a quartet of unearthed novels demonstrates, much of his prose was incoherent. Nevertheless, the notebooks and manuscripts provide an intimate glimpse of the author’s heretofore undocumented life—a life marked by ongoing filial resentment, self-deception, and tendencies toward seclusion buoyed by periods of intense sexual compulsion.

Nathan Zuckerman was born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Victor, an overbearingly permissive chiropodist, and Selma, a lover of gardening and mahjongg. He was followed four years later by Henry, who adored Nathan, although they became estranged later in life. The Zuckermans’ was a typical American Jewish household of the era. They believed that happiness could be attained only through academic achievement; that anti-Semitism was more muted than before, but still ubiquitous. Around the dinner table, Nathan’s parents discussed the perils of intermarriage, the problem of Santa Claus, and the injustice of medical-school quotas. From an early age Nathan collected donations door-to-door for the Jewish National Fund, and learned Hebrew at the Talmud Torah on Schley Street. All his friends were Jewish, all his schoolteachers were Jewish, and, to a boy who seldom left his neighborhood, the entire world seemed Jewish—suffocatingly so.

More here.

From APS:

We say that time flies, it marches on, it flows like a river — our descriptions of time are closely linked to our experiences of moving through space. Now, new research suggests that the illusions that influence how we perceive movement through space also influence our perception of time. The findings provide evidence that our experiences of space and time have even more in common than previously thought. The research, conducted by psychological scientist Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and colleagues, is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “It seemed to us that psychological scientists have neglected the important fact that, in everyday experience, people don’t evaluate the past and the future in exactly the same way,” says Caruso. From research on spatial perception, we know that people feel closer to objects they are moving toward than those they are moving away from, even if the objects are exactly the same distance away. Because our perceptions of time are grounded in our experiences of space, Caruso and his colleagues hypothesized that the same illusion should influence how we experience time, resulting in what they call a temporal Doppler effect.

Surveying college students and commuters at a train station, the researchers found that people perceived times in the future (i.e., one month and one year from now) as closer to the present than equidistant times in the past (i.e., one month and one year ago). Similarly, participants who completed an online survey one week before Valentine’s Day felt that the holiday was closer to the present than those who were surveyed a week after Valentine’s Day. These findings hint at the relationship between movement in space and perceptions of time; to establish a direct link between the two, the researchers conducted a fourth study using a virtual reality environment.

More here.

History as a Crescent Moon

The horns
of a bull
who was placed
before a mirror at the beginning
.. of human time;
. .. in his fury
at the challenge of his double,
.. he has, from
.. that time to this,
been throwing himself against
…………………………..the mirror, until..
. . by now it is
shivered into millions of pieces—
………………………….here an eye, there
a hoof or a tuft
of hair; here a small wet shard made
entirely of tears.
And up there, below the spilt milk of
.. the stars, one
. silver splinter—
parenthesis at the close of a long sentence,
new crescent,
beside it, red
asterisk of
Mars

Saroop Ijaz in the Express Tribune:

How would it feel to lose everything and then hear that the real tragedy is that the image of this country has been tarnished? Your suffering and loss do not matter; you are just a marketing prop. You should, perhaps, be ashamed for having your houses burnt and bringing embarrassment to the Fatherland. Pakistan does not have an “image” problem. The gap in the conveyed image and reality is there, but it is the other way around. Pakistan should be thankful that most of the world does not read or hear the Urdu press, the local Friday Khutba [sermon in a mosque], banners on Hall Road, Lahore, or pamphlets in the Civil Courts. Pakistan has an image that is softer than it deserves.

More here.

John McDermott talks to Noam Chomsky in the FT:

I am about to ask the professor about Hugo Chávez, who died the night before our lunch, but a waitress arrives and asks for our order. Chomsky chooses the clam chowder, and a salad with pecans, blue cheese, apples and a lot of adjectives. I go for tomato soup and a salmon salad. The professor asks for a cup of coffee and since we are about to discuss the late Venezuelan leader, I ask for a cup, too.

In 2006, Chávez recommended Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance to the UN General Assembly. “It’s a mixed story,” Chomsky says of Chávez’s legacy. He points to reduced poverty and increased literacy. “On the other hand there are plenty of problems,” such as violence and police corruption; he also mentions western hostility – in particular an attempted coup in 2002 supported by the US. America’s behaviour towards Caracas is obviously important in any assessment of Chávez but its appearance is an early signifier of a pattern in a Chomsky conversation: talk for long enough about politics with the professor and the probability of US foreign policy or National Socialism being mentioned approaches one.

I say that he hasn’t referred to Chávez’s human rights record. Some of Chomsky’s critics have accused him of going easy on the faults of autocrats so long as they are enemies of the US. Chomsky denies this vehemently: he spoke out against the consolidation of power by the state broadcaster; he protested the case of María Lourdes Afiuni, a judge who spent more than a year in prison awaiting trial for releasing a government critic. “And I do a million cases like that one.”

Still, Chomsky thinks about how hard to hit his targets. He admits as much as our soups arrive. “Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.” He argues that any criticisms about, say, Chávez, will invariably get into the mainstream media, whereas those he makes about the US will go unreported. This unfair treatment is the dissident’s lot, according to Chomsky. Intellectuals like to think of themselves as iconoclasts, he says. “But you take a look through history and it’s the exact opposite. The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.”

Amer Zahr in The Civil Arab:

Mr. President, I hear you are traveling to Israel next week. As a concerned patriotic American citizen of Palestinian descent, I have some pointers for you.

Now, I assume you’ll be flying into Tel Aviv. Usually, when non-Jews arrive there, especially if they are a little darker-skinned, they are asked to wait in a… let’s call it a “VIP Room.” Incidentally, the room is quite nice. There’s a water cooler, comfortable chairs, and a soda machine. It’s probably the only place in the world where you can be racially profiled and get an ice-cold Coca-Cola all at once.

To avoid the room, I would mention that you are the President of the United States. It might help.

You may get strip-searched. Saying you are an American doesn’t help much here. I’ve tried. I even sang the national anthem last time an Israeli soldier was looking down my pants. Right after I said, “Oh say can you see,” he said, “Not much.”

To escape this embarrassment, I would mention that you are the President of the United States. It might help.

In case they don’t already know, you might not want to tell Israeli security you are half-Muslim. As a fellow half-Muslim, I can tell you they don’t really care about the percentage. Any bit of Muslim freaks them out. And I’m not sure if you heard, but the fans of one of Israel’s soccer teams, Beitar Jerusalem, actually protested when the club signed two Muslim players. When one of them scored in a game last week, hundreds of fans actually walked out of the stadium. One of the fans later stated about the Muslim players, “It’s not racism. They just shouldn’t be here.” Hopefully, they don’t know your middle name is “Hussein.” Maybe they didn’t watch the inauguration.

In any case, I would mention that you are the President of the United States. It might help.

More here. [Thanks to John Ballard.]

Ten years ago today Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer. It is still worth having a look at Edward Said's article on the subject, which is also almost ten years old. From CounterPunch:

In early May, I was in Seattle lecturing for a few days. While there, I had dinner one night with Rachel Corrie’s parents and sister, who were still reeling from the shock of their daughter’s murder on March 16 in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer. Mr. Corrie told me that he had himself driven bulldozers, although the one that killed his daughter deliberately because she was trying valiantly to protect a Palestinian home in Rafah from demolition was a 60 ton behemoth especially designed by Caterpillar for house demolitions, a far bigger machine than anything he had ever seen or driven. Two things struck me about my brief visit with the Corries. One was the story they told about their return to the US with their daughter’s body. They had immediately sought out their US Senators, Patty Murray and Mary Cantwell, both Democrats, told them their story and received the expected expressions of shock, outrage, anger and promises of investigations. After both women returned to Washington, the Corries never heard from them again, and the promised investigation simply didn’t materialize. As expected, the Israeli lobby had explained the realities to them, and both women simply begged off. An American citizen willfully murdered by the soldiers of a client state of the US without so much as an official peep or even the de rigeur investigation that had been promised her family.

But the second and far more important aspect of the Rachel Corrie story for me was the young woman’s action itself, heroic and dignified at the same time. Born and brought up in Olympia, a small city 60 miles south of Seattle, she had joined the International Solidarity Movement and gone to Gaza to stand with suffering human beings with whom she had never had any contact before.

More here. [Thanks to Najla Said.]

Philip Roth knows he is running out of time. He speaks now of the end – certainly of the end of his writing life. He ought to have won the Nobel Prize long ago, but perhaps his work is simply too American for the august Swedes of the Nobel committee, who have grumbled about the parochialism of the American novel, of how it looks inward rather than out to the rest of the world. That is nonsense, of course. The greatest living American writers – Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo and, preeminently, Roth – are universalists who in radiant prose ask, again and again: what does it mean to be human and how should we act in a world that is as mysterious as it is indifferent to our fate? At the end of The Tempest, as he prepares to take his leave, Prospero, a magician of words, hints that “the story of my life” is ending, and now “Every third thought shall be my grave”. Roth has told the story of his life many times and in many different ways, and now he is done.

more from Jason Cowley at the FT here.

For potential pen pals, these two famous writers might seem at first an unlikely pairing. Auster, the younger by seven years, is an enthusiast, or certainly I’ve always thought of him that way: his fascination with coincidences and odd circumstances; his bottomless bag of anecdotes; his championing of out-of-the-way books and films that always end up being very good. Meanwhile Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning South African, seems more of a skeptic, a fastidious thinker and uncompromising moralist, who strips away social and political conventions in search of an ethics of essential experience. Yet whatever their differences, real or perceived, what quickly becomes clear in the pages of “Here and Now” is that they have far more in common than not. They both love sports, for example, and the fact that they don’t love precisely the same sports, or love them for precisely the same reasons, is largely why they have so much to say to each other about them. Discussing the nature of sports’ appeal, Auster proposes they are “a kind of performance art.” Coetzee responds that his interest in sports is “ethical rather than aesthetic,” having to do with “the need for heroes that sports satisfy.”

more from Martin Riker at the NY Times here.

Can it be coincidence that shoemakers like Maurizio Gucci of Florence and Salvatore Ferragamo of Campania and Florence came from places with strong Etruscan connections? A tomb painting from the Etruscan city of Tarquinia, executed perhaps around 530-520 BC, shows several mourners in elegant pointed boots. The people portrayed in this “Tomb of the Augurs” may well have had close connections with Rome, where the ruling dynasts were named Tarquinius, and the tyrant-slayer Brutus, credited with founding the Roman Republic a few years after this tomb was decorated (509 BC), was actually a Tarquinius on his mother’s side. When Roman patricians sported red shoes in subsequent centuries, they were simply carrying on ancestral tradition. With the red shoes went a red-striped robe, again in Phoenician purple—a wide stripe for members of the Senate, a narrower stripe for the second-rank aristocrats known as horsemen, equites. After the coming of Christianity, the tradition of wearing red passed from the Roman Senate to the “Sacred Senate,” the College of Cardinals. Cardinal red, in fact, is Roman senatorial red, derived from Phoenician purple (or a cheaper—but not cheap—substitute called cochineal, made by grinding the shells of beetles).

more from Massimo Gatto at the NYRB here.

From The Independent:

Domestic and demure. Neat and sweet. Sugar and spice and all things nice… but what happens when girls go bad? It's a subject that has long fascinated, and titillated, the press, public, and politicians, from whispers over 'fallen women' in the past to drunken 'sluts' slumped in the gutter in 2013. Now a new book, Girl Trouble, by the cultural historian Carol Dyhouse, explores the history of our moral panics over rebel girls, from the late-19th century onwards. Dyhouse found herself “more and more interested in rebel girls, bad girls, the ones who went off the rails. They're not exactly feminist, but they're representing a discontent with what's in front of them. It allows you an insight into the constraints young women have operated under.” And what constraints… from an inability to vote, own property, prevent pregnancy, get a degree, an abortion, or a job, to more ephemeral, societal expectations of decorous behaviour, obedience to men, feminine beauty, and sexual restraint. No wonder nearly every generation had its own modern lasses who stuck their fingers up at societal norms and got stuck into enjoying themselves instead.