From The LA Review of Books:

MARTIN AMIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN a casualty of his own biography. Every new book comes swathed in literary gossip or literary scandal to do with his father, his teeth, his divorce, his politics, his agent or his friends. The recent publication in England of Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford (a jangling heap of bad writing and factual inaccuracy) doesn't actually tell us anything new: we know it all already. Born in 1949, the son of novelist Kingsley Amis, handsome Martin with his furrowed brow and energized prose seized on the wheezing literary world of 1970s England and shocked it back to life. While writing some of the most entertaining literary criticism you'll ever come across for publications like the Times Literary Supplement and The New Statesman, young Amis penned in quick succession a handful of early novels that heralded the arrival of a bright, brash new voice in English letters — a voice perfectly suited to mingle with the yobs and snobs alike, scathing in its hyperbolic charge, addicted to the dregs of British society. In one of those early novels — Success, published in 1978 — one of the characters pleadingly tells the reader, “Take me to America,” and that's exactly what Martin Amis did. His sprawling, early-to-mid-career comedies — Money, London Fields, The Information — all pitched their voices “somewhere in the mid-Atlantic,” as another character has it, revitalizing English prose with the freewheeling energies of its American cousin.

The ensuing four decades of novels, essays, stories and journalism make up one of the most electric and original bodies of work in modern literature. Whatever one says of Amis, however one feels about what Kingsley complained of as a “terrible compulsive vividness in his style,” it takes serious effort to deny the overwhelming originality of Amis's voice, and seems to me quite a bit harder to resist the temptation to imitate it. Alas, Amis says somewhere that the great stylists are the ones you shouldn't be influenced by (easier said than done, mate); like Proust, he believes that style is a quality of vision, the revelation of an author's private universe. In his memoir Experience he claims that “style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified.” Reading Amis, we learn to inhabit his voice, his vision, and the morality that is his private universe. We learn to see the world the way Amis sees it: the way, in the novel Money, an overheated tunnel's “throat swelled like emphysema with fags and fumes and foul mouths”; or the distant airplanes in Yellow Dog that “were like incandescent spermatozoa, sent out to fertilize the universe.” We see, in The Rachel Papers, the narrator's mother's skin that “had shrunken over her skull, to accentuate her jaw and to provide commodious cellarage for the gloomy pools that were her eyes; her breasts had long forsaken their native home and now flanked her navel; and her buttocks, when she wore stretch-slacks, would dance behind her knees like punch-balls.”

More here.

Emily Grosholz reviews two books of poetry in American Scientist:

If you are a scientifically trained poetry lover who has always wanted to travel to the polar regions or the tropics, or a lover of poetry who would like to venture into the history of science, you can fly away to those distant reaches on the pages of these two books. Elizabeth Bradfield, author of the poetry collection Approaching Ice, has worked as a naturalist in Alaska and the Eastern Canadian Arctic. Ruth Padel, author of Darwin: A Life in Poems, has visited tiger forests in China and Russia, as well as tropical and subtropical forests in Brazil, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Laos and Sumatra. She is, moreover, the granddaughter of Darwin’s granddaughter Nora Barlow, from whom she first heard about the complexities of the marriage of Charles and Emma Darwin.

Bradfield’s Approaching Ice is a miscellany of poems and annotated texts that makes use of the writings of two dozen Arctic and Antarctic explorers. The book unfolds in roughly chronological order, from John Cleves Symmes and James Weddell, who went north around 1820, through Roald Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton and Richard E. Byrd in the early 20th century, to Lynne Cox, who, in the late 20th century, swam the Strait of Magellan and the Cape of Good Hope.

Scattered throughout are definitions of ice formations from Nathaniel Bowditch’s The American Practical Navigator, poetically elaborated with the subtext of what seems like a love story.

More here.

Parag Khanna in The National Interest:

The Old Order no longer qualifies as an order. The term “world order” denotes a stable distribution of power across the world. But power concentration today is in a state of tremendous flux, characterized by rapid diffusion and entropy toward a broad set of emerging powers that now share the regional and global stage. Western-centered multilateralism represents at best a partial component of a world system that is increasingly fragmented.

Nostalgia for the post–World War II or post–Cold War periods will not affect this picture. At those junctures, America had an opportunity to fashion a new world order. After World War II, America capitalized on this moment; after the Cold War, it squandered it. The world has moved beyond even the assumptions embedded in President George H. W. Bush’s famous “new world order” speech to a joint session of Congress two decades ago in which he envisioned a unipolar order managed through a multilateral system. Instead, the world has quickly become multipolar, institutionally polycentric and even “multiactor,” meaning nonstate groups such as corporations and NGOs are commanding more and more influence on key issues. This trend seems irreversible, and it needs to be digested before any kind of new global-governance mechanism can be formulated, with or without American leadership.

More here.

From a conference over at Brown's Watson Center on the future of the euro:

More videos from this conference:

Mohsin Hamid in The New York Times:

At the end of Nell Freudenberger’s second novel, “The Newlyweds,” we encounter the following sentence: “I believe that it is only by sharing our stories that we truly become one community.” A worthy objective, surely. Nonetheless we’re on tricky ground here, and a little probing on our part is called for. The sentence quoted above is in fact part of a Starbucks “Reach for the Stars” writing competition entry attributed to the novel’s protagonist, Amina, a Bangladeshi woman who has immigrated to America. But Amina’s entry, it turns out, was not actually written by Amina. It was written, and submitted, by Kim, an American cousin of Amina’s American husband, George. Kim is a yoga instructor. She is a storyteller, a bit of a liar. Like Freudenberger herself, she has spent time in South Asia. And Kim is held up, at least partly, as a stand-in for the author: “ ‘But you always wear Indian clothes,’ Amina said. “Kim laughed. ‘I wear my own version. This kind of thing.’ She indicated the bulky sweater she was wearing over an unseasonable cotton dress and a pair of black tights. ‘But trust me — I look stupid in a sari.’ ”

Freudenberger is aware of the pitfalls she faces in telling us Amina’s tale, and she wants us to be aware of them too. If Kim has invented a competition-­winning story as Amina, about Amina, without Amina’s permission, and with various inaccuracies, what, Freudenberger invites us to ask, has Freudenberger done? At stake here isn’t — or shouldn’t be — the question of authenticity, which is a red herring: nationalities, ethnicities, genders and even species do not “own” the right to fictional narratives spoken in what purport to be their voices. Such a proposition, taken to its logical extreme, would reduce fiction to autobiography, and while fiction may well be alive and kicking in the belly of many an auto­biography, to confine fiction solely to that domain would be madness. No, the more pressing issue is that of verisimilitude, truthlikeness, the illusion of being real, a quality without which fiction that adheres to the conventions of what is commonly called realism (a problematic term, but useful shorthand for the more cumbersome “let’s try not to draw attention to the fact that this is all made up”-ism) starts to feel to its audience like an ill-fitting and spasmodic sock puppet.

More here.

About Mohsin Hamid:

Up Front

By THE EDITORS

This week, Mohsin Hamid reviews Nell Freudenberger’s novel “The Newlyweds,” about an American man and a Bang­ladeshi woman who meet over the Internet and, despite the geographic and cultural gulfs between them, decide to marry. Hamid, the author of two novels, is himself a traverser of borders, having grown up mostly in Lahore, Pakistan, where he now lives, with stints in London and the United States. In addition to writing fiction, he is a prolific essayist on culture and politics for publications including The Guardian of London, Time magazine and The New York Review of Books. “I’m a political animal,” he told us via e-mail. “How the pack hunts, shares its food, tends its wounded — these things matter to me. So I write about them. Fiction and nonfiction are just two different ways of lying to try to get at truths. Fiction lies by fabricating what isn’t there. Non­fiction lies by omitting what is. Doing both is useful: it keeps me aware of sentences, a novelist’s obsession, and the power of the void that surrounds them, a preoccupation of journalists.” Hamid’s third novel, which he described as “a love story and a meditation on the nature of fiction” that “pretends to be a self-help book about how to get rich in 21st-century Asia,” is scheduled to be published next spring. At press time he was also preparing for the birth of his second child. How has fatherhood affected his writing life? “It’s been fantastic,” he said. “My 2-year-old daughter has started knocking on my door every day, coming in and sitting down in silence until I finally say, ‘What are you doing?’ And she answers, ‘I’m working, Baba. Working.’ She makes me laugh every time. To write, you have to deal with solitude. And to become a father, at least for me, is to have a powerful enchantment enter your solitude, a new smile you get to smile when you’re alone.”

James Gustave Speth in Orion Magazine:

Part one of this article.

WE NEED A COMPELLING VISION for a new future, a vision of a better country—America the Possible—that is still within our power to reach. The deep, transformative changes sketched in the first half of this manifesto provide a path to America the Possible. But that path is only brought to life when we can combine this vision with the conviction that we will pull together to build the necessary political muscle for real change. This article addresses both the envisioning of an attractive future for America and the politics needed to realize it. A future worth having awaits us, if we are willing to struggle and sacrifice for it. It won’t come easy, but little that is worth having ever does.

By 2050, America the Possible will have marshaled the economic and political resources to successfully address the long list of challenges, including basic social justice, real global security, environmental sustainability, true popular sovereignty, and economic democracy. As a result, family incomes in America will be far more equal, similar to the situation in the Nordic countries and Japan today. Large-scale poverty and income insecurity will be things of the past. Good jobs will be guaranteed to all those who want to work. Our health-care and educational systems will be among the best in the world, as will our standing in child welfare and equality of women. Racial and ethnic disparities will be largely eliminated. Social bonds will be strong. The overlapping webs of encounter and participation that were once hallmarks of America, “a nation of joiners,” will have been rebuilt, community life will be vibrant, and community development efforts plentiful. Trust in each other, and even in government, will be high.

More here.

Susan Cain in The New York Times:

I awoke one January morning from uneasy dreams to find myself transformed. For seven blissful years I had spent my time reading, writing and researching a book about introversion. But the publication date had arrived, the idyll was over and my metamorphosis was complete. I was now that impossibly oxymoronic creature: the Public Introvert. Having never given a single media interview in the first 43 years of my life, I appeared that day on “CBS This Morning” to promote my book, a critique of our overly loquacious culture. Then I shuttled uptown to my publisher’s office to continue talking — for 21 radio interviews. My book is about the power of being quiet. About the perils of a society that appreciates good talkers over good ideas. And about the terrible pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves and never to be visibly anxious. I believe all this passionately — which puts me in an interesting pickle. Promoting my work requires doing the very thing my book questions: putting down my pen and picking up a microphone. Now, in what I’ve come to think of as my Year of Speaking Dangerously, I’ve gone on national TV to talk about being the kind of person who dislikes going on national TV. I let my friends talk me into having a big book party, even though my book advises introverts to stay home on New Year’s Eve if they feel like it (I usually feel like it). And in February I took the stage at the 2012 TED conference before an audience of 1,500 people to critique a society that favors the kind of person who craves an audience.

For me, TED embodied the paradox that lay at the heart of my book tour. On the one hand, TED stands for everything I love. Its mission is to promote “Ideas Worth Spreading,” and how many tranquil evenings have I spent at my kitchen table, listening as thinkers of various stripes delivered eloquent soliloquies from deep inside my laptop? TED takes scholars and turns them into rock stars. On the other hand, this approach emphasizes the need to be a rock star in the first place. TED presenters share their brain waves from a backlighted, red-carpeted dais while giant cameras glide overhead, capturing their every gesture from multiple angles and projecting them onto Jumbotron megascreens. Implicit in the stellar production values is the notion that people might pay less attention without them.

More here.

After Work

The shack and a few trees float in the blowing fog  I pull out your blouse, warm my cold hands on your breasts. you laugh and shudder peeling garlic by the hot iron stove. bring in the axe, the rake, the wood  we'll lean on the wall against each other stew simmering on the fire as it grows dark drinking wine.  
by Gary Snyder

How odd it is that, long before she died of cancer in 2004, Susan Sontag should have become the intellectual icon of postwar America. Her saturnine looks were of course photographed more keenly and frequently than those of her peers – right up to her last moments. There was also something stentorian about her many public pronouncements: the impatient 1960s cultural radical who called for a new “erotics of art” and denounced the white race, after a visit to the war in Vietnam, as a “cancer”; who described communism in 1982 as “fascism with a human face”, staged Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo in 1993 and then responded to 9/11 with a broadside against US politicians and opinion-makers and their apparently joint “campaign to infantilise the public”. Her reputation may still seem unearned. Alfred Kazin, whose recently published journals are a remarkable document of American intellectual life, was a much finer reader of individual texts. William F Buckley, Christopher Lasch and C Wright Mills had more influence on their contemporaries. Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, James Baldwin and Norman Mailer sold more books.

more from Pankaj Mishra at the FT here.

In February 1863, Thomas Faulkner, a Detroit saloon owner of mixed-race background, was arrested on the charge of raping a 9-year-old white girl. Despite his protestations of innocence, Faulkner was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The Civil War-era incident incited a white mob to burn 35 homes, kill at least two black people and injure numerous others. It’s a chilling story — all the more so because there was no rape. The witnesses recanted, and Faulkner was pardoned “after serving seven years in prison for a crime that never happened,” Scott Martelle writes in “Detroit: A Biography.” Martelle, a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and the Detroit News, caps this account by quoting a disturbing letter from a woman on a farm outside Detroit to her lawyer-husband in the city: “Abstractly considered, the burning of those houses was something to be thankful for.” This, Martelle notes dryly, “was a timeless indicator of the relations between Detroit’s future suburbs and the core of the city.”

more from Julia M. Klein at the LA Times here.

To the long catalog of odd hybrids that inhabit Greek myth — the half-human, half-equine centaurs, the birdlike Harpies with their human faces, the man-eating Scylla with her doglike nether parts — we may now add Madeline Miller’s first novel, “The Song of Achilles.” In it, Miller has taken on an (appropriately) heroic task: to fashion a modern work of literature out of very ancient stories — specifically, the tale of the Greeks at Troy, one of the oldest and most seminal of all legends in the Western tradition. The idea of recasting the Greek classics began with the ancients themselves; Virgil’s “Aeneid” is, in many ways, both a rewriting of and a commentary on the Homeric epics. More recently, it has challenged ambitious writers like Mary Renault, whose 1958 novel “The King Must Die” brilliantly reimagined the Theseus legend as narrated by the hero himself, and David Malouf, whose terrific 2009 novel “Ransom” invents a moving episode toward the end of the “Iliad.” But in the case of Miller, who earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in classics at Brown, the epic reach exceeds her technical grasp. The result is a book that has the head of a young adult novel, the body of the “Iliad” and the hindquarters of Barbara Cartland.

more from Daniel Mendelsohn at the NY Times here.

Charli Carpenter in Duck of Minerva:

Let's start with the DON'TS, shall we? 1) Don't Use Women's Naked Bodies To Sell Articles About How Godawful It Is To Use Women's Naked Bodies. Seriously, guys? No wonder tweets reacting to the issue included the following:

To be fair, there was lots of praise for the issue as well, and to their credit, FP responded to the outrage by posting a round-table 24 hours later as a forum for critique, featuring female Muslim voices from around the world. I am with those who thought the article was important yet the picture was a mistake, among them Naheed Mustafa:

“The image works against [Mona Eltawahy's] essay. It belies the nuance and breadth of the writing by reducing a subject to one easily consumable image… an image that doesn't even speak to the kind of women Eltahawy is writing about. If anything, the imagine does exactly what Eltahawy accuses Islamists of doing: reducing women to one-dimesnional caricatures with little or no autonomy… and it's not just about Muslim women. The illustration is insulting to women in general. It takes the profoudn probelm of gender-based violence and reduces it to sexual imagery: 'Hey, we might be talking about the endemic hatred of one gender for another, but here's a naked painted lady to keep you company!'”

Yep, that about says it.

2) Don't Pit Women Against One Other. I don't know what Mona El-Tahawny originally titled her piece, but the subtitle Foreign Policy's editors chose (“the real war on women is in the Middle East“) was a needless slap in the face to women fighting in the US for pay equity, reproductive health and to safety in our homes, streets and workplaces. The “real” war on women – and other gender minorities – is everywhere. It just takes different forms. What is a constant in world affairs is the use of finger-pointing about “other cultures' women” to create a sense of our own cultural superiority.

Also Sherene Seikaly and Maya Mikdashi in Jadaliyya:

[T]there is the visual. A naked and beautiful woman’s flawless body unfolds a niqab of black paint. She stares at us afraid and alluring. We are invited to sexualize and rescue her at once. The images reproduce what Gayatri Spivak critiqued as the masculine and imperial urge to save sexualized (and racialized) others. The photo spread is reminiscent of Theo van Gogh's film Submission, based on Ayyan Hirsli Ali’s writings, in which a woman with verses of the Quran painted on her naked body and wearing a transparent chador writhes around a dimly lit room. Foreign Policy’s “Sex Issue” montage is inspired by the same logic that fuels Submission: we selectively highlight the plight of women in Islam using the naked female body as currency. The female body is to be consumed, not covered!

For those of us now long familiar with the depictions of the Arab/Muslim woman as repressed but uncontrollable sex object, these images only reify the fascination with the hidden underside of that liberated, secularized self.

Richard Marshall interviews Katerina Deligiorgi in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You argue that the Enlightenment is still a live issue. You cite Foucault who claimed, rather like yourself, that the ‘event that is called Aufklarung… has determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and what we do today?’ You call the Enlightenment ‘Janus faced.’ And you want to engage with the Enlightenment without being in historical bad faith. So can you tell us about these issues and how you approach them?

KD: This question is about the Enlightenment, as opposed to enlightenment, that is, about a period in European history in which the concept of enlightenment became current and its meaning intensely debated, at least in the German intellectual scene. Out of this debate emerges the concept I set out briefly in the previous answer. As I try to show in the book this does not boil down to have a critical attitude, which is what I think Foucault advises in his own writings. In fact, my take on enlightenment goes against this subjectivisation or perhaps better, privatisation of enlightenment.

The Janus face metaphor is intended to convey that the concept is forward looking since it describes a project and a goal, but it also has a past, a history of debate, of right and wrong turns, that must inform our current views of it.

3:AM: So according to your approach, Kant sets up a tribunal of enlightenment to put enlightenment on trial? Can you say what you mean by this?

KD: In the German debate about the meaning of the enlightenment, there was a lot of what I called earlier sloganising, including unsupported claims about the good things that would come out of this project, movement, cast of mind (it was different things to different people). There was also a lot of anxiety about its corrosive aspects. Often Kant comes to debates that are polarised and changes them by altering the way in which the problem is set. In this case, there is a ‘rationalist’ sense in which enlightenment means reason’s shining forth to illuminate all our practices and to guarantee progress; conservative critics pointed out that this shining forth is an intellectualist fantasy that has nothing to do with the condition in which most people find themselves and is likely to destroy values embedded in traditions. There is also an ‘empiricist’ sense that sees open discussion as best means for advancing our affairs, to which the counter-argument is that the cost benefit analysis here is rigged.

So enlightenment appears on the tribunal in pretty bad shape, accused of both dogmatism and scepticism. Kant rescues it by identifying its legitimacy as residing in the critical employment of our reason and this last as expressing a value of autonomy.

William Wootten in the TLS:

Contemporary poetry began in 1962 – in April to be precise – with the publication of A. Alvarez’s Penguin anthology The New Poetry, the first two volumes of the Penguin Modern Poets series, and the first number of Ian Hamilton’s little magazine, the Review. As with the beginning of sexual intercourse, dated by Philip Larkin’s “Annus Mirabilis” to the following year, the fact that April 1962 fell between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP was significant. On the one hand, sales of D. H. Lawrence’s book had greatly enriched Penguin Books, which allowed the recently appointed chief editor, Tony Godwin, to pursue ambitious new projects; on the other, the Fab Four had yet to ensure that the new and relevant would be more culturally synonymous with Pop than with Lawrentian intensities and critical seriousness.

In “Beyond the Gentility Principle”, his introductory essay to The New Poetry, A. Alvarez was not short of either: Lawrence stands as the “only English writer . . . able to face the most uncompromising forces at work in our time”, a writer who had “almost nothing to do with middle-class gentility” and whose example validates the verse of the young Ted Hughes. Lawrence also means F. R. Leavis, invoked at the opening and close of “Beyond the Gentility Principle”, whose criticism helped shape The New Poetry’s contributors, editor and readership alike. Which is not to say that Alvarez’s ideas had not moved on a good way from those of the Leavisites pur sang.

The significance of Alvarez’s essay tends to be portrayed in terms of its reactions: to the stuffiness and repression of post-war Britain, to the poetic attitudes of the Movement, to the anti-modernism and insularity of English literature. However, its advocacy of a path forward is quite as notable, if less likely to meet with agreement.

Diana Raffman on Ruth Barcan Marcus in the NYT's The Stone:

I first met the renowned Yale professor Ruth Barcan Marcus in the ladies’ room at the Marlboro Music Festival during the summer of 1977. As a music major in Yale College I had taken only a few philosophy courses, and none with Marcus. But word of the arrival in 1973 of the formidable philosopher had reached even the musty practice rooms in the bowels of Harkness Hall; and I had seen her several times, from a safe distance, on campus. Perhaps because this initial encounter occurred on musical rather than philosophical terrain, I managed to ask the woman adjusting her collar in the mirror next to me whether she was Ruth Marcus, “the famous logician.” She laughed and said yes, and then asked what I planned to do with my Yale degree. I told her I wanted to go to graduate school in philosophy, but feared that a major in music, rather than philosophy, would be an obstacle. She replied, “I don’t see why that should stop you.”

Those words were to be my first lesson from Professor Marcus, who died in February at the age of 90. They were emblematic of the whole of her intellectual and professional life. Yes she was brilliant, and famous, and powerful; yes her writings changed the course of philosophical history; and yes she demolished her philosophical opponents when she thought they deserved it. But what made Marcus more than a great philosopher were her unflinching honesty, her unfailing integrity and a will of steel. I first thought to describe her as the most courageous person I’ve ever known; but really she wasn’t courageous. Courage requires fear, and Marcus was fearless. She said what she thought and did what she thought was right, no matter the consequences.

Srivas Prasad in Accidental Blogger:

Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist best known for his work on the moral foundations, identifying the dimensions along which peoples' moral responses vary. The most fundamental moral concerns of human beings include, he says, care or harm, fairness or cheating, liberty or oppression, loyalty or betrayal, authority or subversion, and sanctity or degradation. The neat fact uncovered by his research is that not all people weigh these dimensions of morality seriously, that whilst conservatives bring all these dimensions to bear upon moral deliberation, liberals and libertarians use only the first three. The ''money'' plot is here, showing how much people of different political orientations care about a given moral concern. A significant portion of Haidt's new book, ''The Righteous Mind'' is devoted to explaining these dimensions and findings.

An important concern for Haidt is that liberals and conservatives in contemporary America are increasingly divided (his book is subtitled ''Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion''), and he thinks his moral dimensions help explain why. We simply respond to different moral criteria. We have different ''moral taste-buds'', he says, in an image used repeatedly in the book. It is not just moral disagreement he is interested in however, but moral incomprehension, the fact that we can literally fail to understand what someone on the opposite side might be thinking, or why he isn't a moral monster just because we disagree with him. Here he thinks a significant portion of the blame rests with the liberal side of the divide.

More here.