September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Read more »

From The Telegraph:

From Nature:

Common nesting birds may provide a convenient way to track environmental clean-up efforts. Nesting birds that feed on insects that hatch in lake or stream-bed sediments may make good biomonitors for pollution, says Thomas Custer of the US Geological Survey's Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin. That's because any contamination in the sediment will make its way into the birds and into their eggs and young. An example, says Custer, is the tree swallow (Tachycineta bicolor), which still showed “significant quantities” of toxic chemicals called polychlorinated biphenols in its eggs and chicks seven years after remediation efforts started at a former capacitor-manufacturing plant in Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge in southern Illinois¹. The findings “prompted further sediment removal”, he says.

…Homing pigeons — once used to carry messages over long distances — are still bred by hobbyists around the world, who use them for competitions. Many birds are kept in lofts, and often in cities, so breathe ambient air. Even better, their life histories are well known, which is not possible for wild birds. Pigeon hobbyists “keep pretty elaborate records”, Halbrook says. In a pilot study involving birds purchased from hobbyists in China, the Philippines and the United States, Halbrook found stunning health-related differences that were apparently related to air quality. In Beijing and Manilla, for example, he found black lungs and enlarged testes. In one case, a testicle was so huge it was one-fifth the weight of the entire bird. But in less polluted cities elsewhere in China and in the United States, the birds' organs were much healthier. Plus, the lungs and livers from the birds from Beijing contained three or four times more polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, common by-products of fossil-fuel burning, than did those from areas with better air quality. “This suggests that other species, including humans, may also have adverse effects” from these environmental contaminants, he says.

Chris McCaw. Sunburned GSP #389 (Puget Sound, WA/Full day), 2009.

Unique gelatin silver paper negative.

More here and here.

More here.

Charles McGrath in the NYT:

To his friends the notion of Mr. Roth not writing is like Mr. Roth not breathing. It sometimes seemed as if writing were all he did. He worked alone for weeks at a time at his house in Connecticut, reporting every morning to a nearby studio where he wrote standing up, and often going back there in the evening. At an age when most novelists slow down, he got a second wind and wrote some of his best books: “Sabbath’s Theater,” “American Pastoral,” “The Human Stain” and “The Plot Against America.” Well into his 70s, the books, though shorter, came uninterruptedly, practically one a year.

But over the course of a three-hour interview — his last, he said — Mr. Roth seemed cheerful, relaxed and at peace with himself and his decision, which was first announced last month in the French magazine Les InRocks. He joked and reminisced, talked about writers and writing, and looked back at his career with apparent satisfaction and few regrets. Last spring he appointed Blake Bailey as his biographer and has been working closely with him ever since.

Mr. Roth said he actually made the decision to stop writing in 2010, a few months after finishing his novel “Nemesis,”about a 1944 polio epidemic in his hometown, Newark.

“I didn’t say anything about it because I wanted to be sure it was true,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wait a minute, don’t announce your retirement and then come out of it.’ I’m not Frank Sinatra. So I didn’t say anything to anyone, just to see if it was so.”

Sanyasi over at Chapati Mystery:

The Indian media prides itself on its independence, its critical eye, its ability to speak truth to power. Indian celebrities fancy themselves socially responsible intellectuals. Indian politicians routinely remind the world of the glorious vibrancy and dynamism of the “world’s largest democracy.” But neither the conventions of in-house obituary boilerplate nor the pithy wisdom of the tweets emanating from the finest minds in Indian media, celebrityhood, and politics have spoken today in any honest way about Thackeray’s role in one of most disgraceful episodes in the history of independent India–the pogrom against Bombay’s Muslim communities in 1992 and 1993. When they have pointed to Thackeray’s involvement, they have refused to ask the difficult but obvious questions that follow; questions about justice, rights, accountability, and rule of law, but also about tolerance, coexistence, and our responsibility to our fellow citizens.

The list of those participating in what can only be called a soft-pedaling of Bal Thackeray’s legacy, through this Fox News style “Fair and Balanced” approach, is a veritable who’s who of contemporary Indian political, social, and cultural life. The President and Prime Minister of India; politicians across parties; Sachin Tendulkar, Harbhajan Singh and other cricketers; any number of Bollywood actors, directors, and producers who queued up to meet him as he lay on his deathbed; and reputed journalists like Rajdeep Sardesai, Barkha Dutt, and Vir Sanghvi.

This is the real legacy of Bal Thackeray. To make political violence so routine that it ceases to outrage. To make the strategy of scapegoating and targeting particular ethnic, religious, or political groups part of the calculus of everyday politics. To make fear and intimidation a legitimate, accepted part of political leadership. And to constantly remind any potential critic, in media or otherwise, of the threat of violent reprisal for saying something that Thackeray and his thugs might not appreciate.

Subways in Europe

I ride out into nowhere on the Paris blue line
because it is Paris after all, and riding is being
anywhere else but home on a bus out West.
There are people who think riding the subways
of Europe is only a way to get around, to work
or the theater, to a bookstore, or some place
like a destination, with a purpose, a goal. But
I ride for the pleasure of the displacement,
distance grows in me like a nervous worm.
No one rides the subways here just for the ride.
They believe in destiny. I ride through factory towns
on the outskirts of cities, through neighborhoods
where the incomprehensible graffiti screams, words
whipped up out of a maelstrom of urban languages,
ride through subsistence gardens planted along tracks
that feed those who cannot ride the subways
for pleasure. It is a time machine, this subway,
journeying back into the world’s fine, forgotten
ancestry. It’s a spider that feeds on my desire
for the oldest forms of communion.
.

by George Moore
from Drafthorse, Winter 2012

Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian:

A central premise of US media coverage of the Israeli attack on Gaza – beyond the claim that Israel is justifiably “defending itself” – is that this is some endless conflict between two foreign entitles, and Americans can simply sit by helplessly and lament the tragedy of it all. The reality is precisely the opposite: Israeli aggression is possible only because of direct, affirmative, unstinting US diplomatic, financial and military support for Israel and everything it does. This self-flattering depiction of the US as uninvolved, neutral party is the worst media fiction since TV news personalities covered the Arab Spring by pretending that the US is and long has been on the side of the heroic democratic protesters, rather than the key force that spent decades propping up the tyrannies they were fighting.

Literally each day since the latest attacks began, the Obama administration has expressed its unqualified support for Israel's behavior. Just two days before the latest Israeli air attacks began, Obama toldPalestinian Prime Minister Mahmud Abbas “that his administration opposes a Palestinian bid for non-state membership of the UN”. Both the US Senate and House have already passed resolutions unequivocally supporting Israel, thus earning the ultimate DC reward: the head-pat from Aipac, which “praised the extraordinary show of support by the Senate for Israel's struggle against terrorist attacks on its citizens”. More bipartisan Congressional cheerleading is certain to come as the attacks continue, no matter how much more brutal they become.

More here.

Lars Haberg in lensculture:

I have spent more than 10 months in the West Bank, Palestine, over the last few years. These photos are part of a project about stories that fall in the shadows of violence and politics. The occupation of Palestine has a psychology, and it stirs up the emotions of everyone involved: It creates a sense of hopelessness and it brings out the best and the worst in people. Every attempt to oppose it only seems to make it worse. It’s there every day. It creates agony and a life-lasting panic seizure. Despite the occupation, and the stories that actually reach the news, daily life goes on in a fascinating and unpredictable way.

Eventually this project is not only about Palestine. Making stories about the occupation is impossible without portraying Israel from a West Bank Palestinian perspective. I want to communicate the occupation’s impact on daily life. To understand this is crucial to be able to understand Palestine. And I think it is impossible to make any sense out of this conflict without understanding the people and the communities that are mentally and physically affected. Palestine is one of those two communities.

Picture: Since 2001, Israel through its military and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, has uprooted, burnt and destroyed more than 548,000 olive trees that belong to Palestinians. The uprooting of the ancient olive trees, as a byproduct of war, has had tremendous effects on the Palestinian agriculture, economy, and identity.

More here.

From The New Yorker:

Ray Kurzweil is, by all accounts, a genius. He holds nineteen honorary doctorates, has founded a half-dozen successful companies, and was a major contributor to the field of artificial intelligence. He built some of the first practical systems for recognizing speech and scanning text. Time magazine recently featured Kurzweil on its cover, and Fortune described him as “a legendary inventor with a history of mind-blowing ideas.” And now he has a new book, with a subtitle that suggests he has found another such idea: “How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.” In the preface to the book Kurzweil argues, with good reason, that “reverse-engineering the human brain may be regarded as the most important project in the universe.” He then presents a theory he calls “the pattern recognition theory of mind (PRTM)” which he claims “describes the basic algorithm of the neocortex (the region of the brain responsible for perception, memory, and critical thinking).” Kurzweil suggests that his conclusions are “inescapable” and that the principles he espouses can be used “to vastly extend the power of our own intelligence.” That would be big news. But does the book deliver? Kurzweil’s critics have not always been kind; the biologist PZ Myers once wrote, “Ray Kurzweil is a genius. One of the greatest hucksters of the age.” Doug Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of “Gödel, Escher, Bach” has been even harsher, saying once in an interview that “if you read Ray Kurzweil’s books … what I find is that it’s a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad.”

Which Kurzweil shows up to explain the mind? The brilliant inventor and autodidact or the man who has written one book on diets and another on immortality?

More here.

Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist and “father of the atomic bomb”, continues to be hailed as one of the towering figures in 20th-century science. Friend and colleague of the great names in theoretical physics, and charismatic leader of outstanding teams of researchers at Caltech, Berkeley and finally Princeton, he was a man whose huge intellectual curiosity and energy also embraced literature, poetry and philosophy. Thousands of pages of biography have been devoted to this complicated and controversial figure since his early death from throat cancer in 1967. Yet Oppenheimer remains an enigma, “an endlessly, maddeningly and intriguingly baffling man”, as Ray Monk wrote in 2004, reviewing Jeremy Bernstein’s perceptive memoir Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma. Now, in Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the much-lauded biographer Monk has himself taken on the task of trying to make sense of him.

more from Lisa Jardine at the FT here.

“Modernity: a word that emerges and rebounds between Gautier and Baudelaire in the space of a little more than 10 years . . . between 1852 and 1863. And this was always done with caution, with the awareness of introducing an alien notion into the language. Gautier, 1855: ‘Modernity. Does this noun exist? The sentiment it expresses is so recent that the word may very well not be in the dictionaries.’ Baudelaire, 1863: ‘He is looking for that something we shall be allowed to call modernity; since there isn’t a better word to express the idea in question.’ But what was this idea . . . so recent and feeble . . . made of? The malicious Jean Rousseau immediately declared it was made up of bibelots and female bodies. Arthur Stevens responded to him in defense of Baudelaire, defined on the occasion for the first time as ‘he who is the inventor, I believe, of this word modernity.’ Through painting and frivolity, modernity burst into the dictionary. But it was destined to remain and spread, following progressive campaigns of conquest, accompanied by devastation. Soon no one would remember these frivolous and modest beginnings. In Baudelaire, however, the word remained enfolded as in a mist of perfume and face powder.”

more from John Simon at the NY Times here.

Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers won the National Book Award on Wednesday. Here's a review by Anis Shivani in the Huffington Post:

Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House, 2012), a gripping work of reportage based on the three years she spent in Bombay's Annawadi slum, is a truly deserving National Book Award finalist.

Earlier in the year when I read the book, I hoped it would be in line for the major awards. I was impressed with the way Boo keeps herself out of the narrative, giving us a no-holds-barred dramatization of life in the slums, without any element of romanticization or exoticization. Boo is a staff writer for the New Yorker, married to the Indian academic Sunil Khilnani, and has previously written about poor communities in the U.S. There isn't a single jarring note as she transitions to reporting about Annawadi.

Boo's is not the only recent book in this genre. While the dominant impression from neoliberal propagandists like Thomas Friedman is that of an aspiring hegemon with a thriving middle class of more than 300 million people, and growing more powerful by the day, more honest writers have been presenting a mixed picture of the winners and losers resulting from India's high-stakes economic liberalization, a regime the country has been doggedly pursuing since the early 1990s.

More here.

Christopher M. Davidson in Foreign Policy:

At first glance the Gulf monarchies look stable, at least compared to the broader region. In reality, however, the political and economic structures that underpin these highly autocratic states are coming under increasing pressure, and broad swathes of citizens are making hitherto unimaginable challenges to the ruling elites.

These six monarchies — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman — have faced down a number of different opposition movements over the years. However, for the most part, these movements have not been broad-based and have tended to represent only narrow sections of the indigenous populations. Moreover, given their various internal and external survival strategies — including distributive economic systems and overseas soft power accumulation — the incumbent regimes have generally been in strong, confident positions, and have usually been able to placate or sideline any opposition before it could gain too much traction. In most cases the Gulf monarchies have also been very effective at demonizing opponents, either branding them as foreign-backed fifth columns, as religious fundamentalists, or even as terrorists. In turn this has allowed rulers and their governments to portray themselves to the majority of citizens and most international observers as safe, reliable upholders of the status quo, and thus far preferable to any dangerous and unpredictable alternatives. Significantly, when modernizing forces have begun to impact their populations — often improving communications between citizens or their access to education — the Gulf monarchies have been effective at co-option, often bringing such forces under the umbrella of the state or members of ruling families, and thus managing to apply a mosaic model of traditional loyalties alongside modernization even in the first few years of the 21st century.

More recently, however, powerful opposition movements have emerged that have proved less easy to contain.

More here.