John Scalzi in Whatever:

1. No.

2. Seriously, are you fucking kidding me?

3. Did you wake up this morning and say to yourself “You know what? A New York Timesbestselling author who has been working full-time as a writer for two decades, who frequently rails at writers for undervaluing their own work in the market and who is also the president of a writers organization that regularly goes after publishers for not paying writers adequately is exactly the person who will be receptive, through lack of other work or personal inclination, to my offer”? And if you did, what other dumb things did you do with your morning?

4. If you didn’t know that I was that guy in point three, and just asked me to write for free for you because, I don’t know, you heard I was a writer of some sort, although you couldn’t say what kind or what I had done, then what you’re saying to me is “Hey, you’re a warm body with an allegedly working brain stem and no idea of the value of your work — let me exploit you!” I want you to ask yourself what in that estimation of me would entice me to provide you with work, starting with the fact that you didn’t do even the most basic research into who I was. Rumor is, it’s not hard to find information about me on the Internet! Just type “John Scalzi” into Google and see!

5. If you try to mumble something at me about “exposure,” I’m going to laugh my ass off at you. Explain to me, slowly, what exposure you possibly think you could give me with your Web site or publication. Please factor in that this Web site gets up to 50,000 visitors on a normal day — with spikes into the hundreds of thousands when I write something particularly clicky — and that it’s regularly ranked one of the top ten book sites and top 100 entertainment sites on the entire Web by Technorati (at this moment, number five and sixty four, respectively).

More here.

For the writer, the emphasis on the inner life of characters is itself an implicitly moral act, a least when the writer is able to fully and successfully exploit the inherent capacity of fiction to reveal the inner life. It is moral because, as Wood says of Jane Austen’s fiction, such an act allows characters and their behavior to be “gradually comprehended and finally forgiven” (“Comedy and the Irresponsible Self”). It is the writer’s success in exploiting this capacity that constitutes the “art” of the work, but the art is in the service of the moral goal. (Perhaps Wood might retort that the two cannot be so easily separated.) For the reader, the novelist’s skill in achieving this sort of compelling psychological realism allows us to inhabit a perspective other than our own, to become aware of “the thoughts of other people.” If Wood doesn’t exactly attribute a didactic moral purpose to fiction, he certainly does suggest throughout his reviews and critical essays, as well as in How Fiction Works, that the moral effects of our encounter with other “minds” are what make fiction valuable to us a form or genre of writing. And if Wood doesn’t much dwell on the “cultural” issues or implications of the fiction he considers, his selection of works or writers to assess and the consistent return to his core concerns related to narrative strategy and the portrayal of character signal a clear desire to “instruct” readers how to read fiction for what it most importantly has to offer.

more from Daniel Green at The Quarterly Conversation here.

Lewis Lapham in The Nation:

The question that tempts mankind to the use of substances controlled and uncontrolled is next of kin to Hamlet’s: to be, or not to be, someone or somewhere else. Escape from a grievous circumstance or the shambles of an unwanted self, the hope of finding at a higher altitude a new beginning or a better deal. Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars; give me leave to drown my sorrow in a quart of gin; wine, dear boy, and truth.

That the consummations of the wish to shuffle off the mortal coil are as old as the world itself was the message brought by Abraham Lincoln to an Illinois temperance society in 1842. “I have not inquired at what period of time the use of intoxicating liquors commenced,” he said, “nor is it important to know.” It is sufficient to know that on first opening our eyes “upon the stage of existence,” we found “intoxicating liquor recognized by everybody, used by everybody, repudiated by nobody.”

The state of intoxication is a house with many mansions. Fourteen centuries before the birth of Christ, the Rigveda finds Hindu priests chanting hymns to a “drop of soma,” the wise and wisdom-loving plant from which was drawn juices distilled in sheep’s wool that “make us see far; make us richer, better.” Philosophers in ancient Greece rejoiced in the literal meaning of the word symposium, a “drinking together.” The Roman Stoic Seneca recommends the judicious embrace of Bacchus as a liberation of the mind “from its slavery to cares, emancipates it, invigorates it, and emboldens it for all its undertakings.”

More here.

More than three-quarters of the food consumed in the United States today is processed, packaged, shipped, stored, and sold under artificial refrigeration. The shiny, humming stainless steel box in your kitchen is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak—a tiny fragment of the vast global network of temperature-controlled storage and distribution warehouses cumulatively capable of hosting uncounted billions of cubic feet of chilled flesh, fish, or fruit. Add to that an equally vast and immeasurable volume of thermally controlled space in the form of shipping containers, wine cellars, floating fish factories, international seed banks, meat-aging lockers, and livestock semen storage, and it becomes clear that the evolving architecture of coldspace is as ubiquitous as it is varied, as essential as it is overlooked.

more from Nicola Twilley at Cabinet here.

Around the time of Noma’s opening, Redzepi and Meyer, along with other young chefs, drafted a New Nordic cuisine manifesto (because you simply can’t have a movement without a manifesto). They called for, among other things, “purity, freshness, simplicity, and ethics,” much like an earlier influential Danish artistic movement with a manifesto, the Dogme 95 film movement led by Lars von Trier. The New Nordic chefs promoted the sole use of seasonal, Scandinavian ingredients—which meant, for instance, no olive oil, no lemons and no pasta—and a return to traditional Scandinavian techniques such as pickling, smoking, curing and fermenting. The idea was to force creativity by setting limitations. Here’s how New Nordic cuisine came to be identified: Ingredients such as sea-buckthorn or Douglas fir or gooseberries or deep-fried moss; cellared or slow-cooked vegetables and under-ripe fruit; dishes served on pieces of wood, rocks, seashells and tree branches; a focus on fish and veggies, rather than meat.

more from Jason Wilson at Table Matters here.

Carlo Strenger in Haaretz:

Judith Butler has rightly been described as an academic superstar. She is one of the most quoted scholars in the humanities, and has also acquired fame − or notoriety, depending on one’s viewpoint − as a political activist. She has been highly critical of Israel’s occupation policy, describes herself as an anti-Zionist, and endorses the BDS movement, which advocates boycotting and divesting from Israel and imposing sanctions against it.

“Parting Ways” is Butler’s latest book, and she states its goal right at the outset: She wants to make a case for a specifically Jewish critique of Israeli state violence. Furthermore, she wants to make a case for “Jewish values of cohabitation with the non-Jew that are part of the very ethical substance of diasporic Jewishness.”

More here.

Reading is without question an extreme city, a trait seemingly encouraged by plan rather than circumstance. Concurrent with the slow death of passenger rail, the West Shore Bypass roadway was built to allow traffic to avoid the downtown area entirely. This ensured not only the starvation of many small businesses, but an urban version of the isolation that you might find in a remote rural village. In elementary school I experienced the city as a place one drives over on the way to the mall or a restaurant. Only occasionally would my parents take me downtown, a trip which involved traveling over or under a bridge no matter the approach (Reading is bound by river or mountain on all sides). At Christmas we would go to the Reading Symphony Orchestra to watch their rendition of The Nutcracker. Mid-year my mother might drag me to a specialty vendor that the suburbs couldn’t or wouldn’t host. I remember annual visits to a vacuum cleaner repair shop and a ceiling fan store. And then there were bureaucratic issues that could only be resolved in the Reading City courthouse, probably dropping off taxes or some kind of professional licensing. But I remember thinking the building was big and old and beautifully out of place.

more from Chris Reitz at n+1 here.

From The Washington Post:

I write by stealing time. The hours in the day have never felt as if they belonged to me. The greatest number has belonged to my day job as a physician and professor of medicine — eight to 12 hours, and even more in the early days. Lest it sound as if I resent my day job, I have to say that my day job is the reason I write, and it has been the best thing for me as a writer. Indeed, when I am asked for writing advice, which is rare, I offer this: Get a good day job, one that you love, preferably one that consumes you and that puts your boat out in the river of life. Then be passionate about it, give it your all, get good at what you do. All that gives you plenty to write about, and it also takes the pressure off the writing. Counting on writing to pay the mortgage or your kid’s college tuition is decidedly risky.

The next lien on time is held by family. I know, if I were being PC, I’d list family before work. But I’m being truthful. The current obsession for parents to be everything to their children, from purveyor of Mozart in utero to muse, coach, camp counselor and chauffeur to as many enriching activities as one can afford ultimately produces parents who accomplish too little at work. I wonder if it produces children who are more accomplished than the parents who had none of these things. (There, I said it. Someone must.)

More here.

John Horgan in Scientific American:

I’m pondering complexity again. The proximate cause is the December 11 launch at my school, Stevens Institute of Technology, of a Center for Complex Systems & Enterprises. The center’s goal is “to enable deep understanding of complexity and create innovative approaches to managing complexity.” This rhetoric reminds me of the Santa Fe Institute, a hotbed of research on complex systems, which I criticized in Scientific American in June 1995 in “From Complexity to Perplexity.” Speakers at the Stevens event include a mathematician I interviewed for that article, John Casti, who has long been associated with the Santa Fe Institute. The event’s organizers asked a few professors in the College of Arts & Letters, my department, to offer some concluding comments on complexity. I jumped at the chance, because I’m fascinated by the premise of complexity studies, which is this: Common principles underpin diverse complex systems, from immune systems and brains to climates and stock markets. By discovering these principles, we can learn how to build much more potent, predictive models of complex systems. Here are some points I hope to make on December 11:

*Researchers have never been able to agree on what complexity is. The physicist Seth Lloyd has compiled a “non-exhaustive” list of more than 40 definitions of complexity, based on thermodynamics, information theory, linguistics, computer science and other fields. Can you study something if you’re not sure exactly what it is?

More here.

They Are Coming
.

Gogo watches timorous
through a rent in her curtain
as the kids boil down the street.

Minutes ago
a terrified woman ran past
bleeding, dress torn,
yelling
THEY ARE COMING!

In an instant the streets were empty
of even the wind
only the yelling
cadres of national sovereignty
wielding dread in upraised little fists
like that man they admire
on the front
of their T-shirts

Gogo fears for her only son
she told him not to go –
but leaving
he told her “the country will never be a colony again”

He is leading the toyi toyi towards her home
sweating faces set
feet pumping
stones and sticks raised
teeth bared
with intention.

by Chris Mlalazi
publisher PIW, 2008

Martin Klimas. Smash 1.2011.

“For his project titled “Porcelain Figurines”, (german) photographer Martin Klimas dropped various porcelain figurines onto the ground from a height of 3 meters and set up a camera to capture photos triggered by the sound of the crash. The result are razor-sharp images of exploding figurines frozen in time — “temporary sculptures made visible to the human eye by high-speed photography”.”

More here (do check out the flower vase series too … stunning!) and here.

Olivia Harrison in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Israel's recent military assault on Gaza serves as a reminder of the continuing urgency of the Palestinian question, which has been a topic of worldwide debate since the June 1967 war and returns to the center stage of global politics whenever Palestinian or Israeli blood is spilt. Something has changed in recent years, however, particularly after conflicts so disproportionate (the 2006 Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon, the 2008-2009 Gaza war) that it becomes difficult to speak of two “sides” in a conflict involving a military force, on the one hand, and a majority of unarmed civilians on the other.

But the increasingly uneven balance of forces is not the only thing that has tipped the scales in favor of the Palestinian people (if not their leadership) at dinner tables across the world. Palestinian civil society has also made itself heard more forcefully, particularly through non-violent protest actions (represented in films such Bil’in My Love and 5 Broken Cameras) and the 2005 West Bank-based call for an international campaign ofBoycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Modeled after the South African boycott campaigns, the BDS movement has received wide support from luminaries including Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, and Alice Walker. It has also garnered the support (sometimes partial or qualified) of an increasing number of Jewish activists against Israeli state violence, including groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace or intellectuals such as Judith Butler and Naomi Klein. The growing legitimacy of the BDS movement is a symptom of the changing fortunes of the Palestinian question. It also reveals the extent to which it has become a Jewish question.

More than 60 years ago, a similar evolution in public opinion occurred at another historical juncture.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

I should begin by confessing a history of prejudice, which reaches back more than two decades, to a different historical era. Some readers will have heard this story by now, and will likely be bored by it; but it is my story, and each time I tell it I see something new about myself. I became interested in Russia during the Cold War, and was disappointed by the onset of perestroika because, from a certain suburban American perspective, that made the place less bad-ass. I stole Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism from my California high school's library in 1988, shortly before dropping out.

Two years later, I surfaced in Leningrad –and here's the prejudice part– and found myself haughtily, condescendingly, imperialistically judgmental of what Russia at that time was able to put forth as a youth counterculture. Everything seemed imitative, derivative, shabby. Kids with long hair tied actual shoelaces around their heads, like some cartoon version of hippies they must have seen somewhere. I saw 'Sex Pistals', misspelled (and, I see now, beautifully botanicized), written in ballpoint pen on fake leather jackets.

I was disappointed. I was a youth –if not wholly exceptional in this regard– intent on revaluing all values, etc., and yet I was far more influenced by the standards of MTV glossiness than I myself could see. I was, I think now, part of a sort of advance reconnoitering mission for what in a few more years would be official IMF policy towards Russia: the demand that they move 'up', to our level, on our terms, the refusal to accept that a part of the world could decline to strive toward glossiness, and the belief that this gloss could only be attained through the ordeal of 'shock therapy'. That there was anything there to build on, indigenous, pre-Soviet and running like an underground stream from 1917 to 1989, never occurred to me or to Jeffrey Sachs.

More here.

Ramachandra Guha in Caravan:

Thompson may have been reading the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), the Bombay journal where these thoughts and influences converge and meet. Rich in information and glowing with polemic, its pages are an index to the life of India. On subjects as varied (and important) as the economy, caste politics, religious violence, and human rights, the EPW has consistently provided the most authoritative, insightful, and widely cited reports and analyses. Among the journal’s contributors are scholars and journalists, but also activists and civil servants—and even some politicians.

Like other such journals around the world, the EPW commands an influence far out of proportion to its circulation. It has shaped intellectual discussion in India, and had a profound impact on policy debates. Can one see it, then, as an Indian version of the esteemed New York weekly The Nation? There are some telling similarities. For one thing, both are appallingly bad looking. The well-loved columnist Calvin Trillin said of the Nation that it was “probably the only magazine in the country [that] if you make a Xerox of it, the Xerox looks a lot better than the original”.

David Blackburn pushes back a little on Zoe Heller's review of Rushdie's Joseph Anton, in the Spectator:

The literary world anticipates Salman Rushdie’s response to Zoe Heller’s cauterisation of his memoir, Joseph Anton, in the New York Review of Books. Heller’s pointed review is deeply considered. It is a delight to read, even though some of its arguments are uneven and some of its conclusions are trivial next to the themes of Rushdie’s unlovely yet important book.

Heller is, in my view, right to slam the grandiloquence of Rushdie’s ‘de Gaulle-like third person’ narration. The technique succeeds in alienating Joseph Anton (Rushdie’s secret service nom-de-guerre) from normality; but its relentless oddness irritates to the point where the reader might lose sight of the fact that Joseph Anton is actually Salman Rushdie living in a grim part of the real world. It also leaves Rushdie open to mockery, perhaps deserved. The accounts of precious Joseph carousing with babes at Moomba and other flesh pots ‘to reduce the climate of fear around him’ are laughable.

Yet this particular criticism rather misses the point because Rushdie’s strange mix of heroism and preening is central to the book.

Ahmad Shokr in MERIP (image from Wikimedia commons):

The draft constitution does not reflect a democratic consensus, as many in the opposition have argued that it should. It reflects an emerging relationship between the Muslim Brothers and existing state institutions, like the army, along with a great deal of appeasement of the salafis, whom the Brothers have embraced as junior partners. The rush to a referendum suggests a deep anxiety among the state elites about continuing instability and a desire to seize the opportunity to cement a new political framework as quickly as possible. More worrisome than the text itself is the vision these leaders have for which voices count and which alliances matter in the new Egypt. Should this vision go unchallenged, the losers would be all those who have been calling for more pluralistic and inclusive system.

In his December 6 post, Jason Brownlee writes, “It is important that the ideological debate between liberalism and Islamism not be seen as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism.” Perhaps recent events in Egypt call for a rethinking of these terms. True, liberalism and democracy are not automatic counterparts, no more than Islamism and authoritarianism are. But the battle in Egypt is indeed one between a democracy that reflects the country’s political diversity and a remodeled authoritarianism, led by the Muslim Brothers and their allies, that seeks to circumscribe it.