Christopher Buckley in The New Yorker:

We were friends for more than thirty years, which is a long time but, now that he is gone, seems not nearly long enough. I was rather nervous when I first met him, one night in London in 1977, along with his great friend Martin Amis. I had read his journalism and was already in awe of his brilliance and wit and couldn’t think what on earth I could bring to his table. I don’t know if he sensed the diffidence on my part—no, of course he did; he never missed anything—but he set me instantly at ease, and so began one of the great friendships and benisons of my life. It occurs to me that “benison” is a word I first learned from Christopher, along with so much else.

A few years later, we found ourselves living in the same city, Washington. I had come to work in an Administration; he had come to undo that Administration. Thirty years later, I was voting for Obama and Christopher had become one of the most forceful, and persuasive, advocates for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. How did that happen?

In those days, Christopher was a roaring, if not raving, Balliol Bolshevik. Oh dear, the things he said about Reagan! The things—come to think of it—he said about my father. How did we become such friends? I only once stopped speaking to him, because of a throwaway half-sentence about my father-in-law in one of his Harper’s essays. I missed his company during that six-month froideur (another Christopher mot). It was about this time that he discovered that he was in fact Jewish, which somewhat complicated his fierce anti-Israel stance.

More here.

Robin sent me an email from India to tell me the news, and I must admit it hit me much harder than I would have imagined. I never met Hitch, but we knew people in common and I have been a devoted fan of his since the 80s when I discovered him through one of his articles in Harper's magazine and I have been following him closely ever since. It has become normal in some circles to always preface any profession of admiration for Hitchens (and anyone who doesn't admire him in some way or other is a rotten Philistine in my not-very-humble opinion) with something like, “I don't agree with some of his political views, but…”, as if it is normal to agree with public intellectuals of prodigious output 100% of the time. This just irritates me.

The world of letters has lost a giant, atheists have lost their most articulate spokesman, all of us have lost one of the most provocative and courageous voices of our time. And what a voice! If you have not read his autobiography, Hitch-22, do yourself a favor and get a hold of a copy right away. I cannot think of any recent prose which could match the felicity, clarity, honesty, wit, masterful and effortless erudition, and sheer muscle of Christopher Hitchens's lapidary writing there.

The bravery and spunky defiance with which Hitchens faced his painful illness should teach all of us something about how to live. He remained productive and alert to the bitter end. In his last article for Vanity Fair, published just last week, he wrote:

I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.

I know I shall be thinking of him and our own profound loss all day today, and very frequently in the future, and I will be reading and rereading him for a long time. One time Robin's sister found herself standing next to Hitch at a party in Manhattan and turned to him and asked, “Hey, you're Christopher Hitchens, aren't you?” to which he replied, “The sexually magnetic Christopher Hitchens!” Indeed, he was a beautiful man.

William Grimes in the NYT:

Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died Thursday at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was 62.

The cause was pneumonia, a complication of esophageal cancer, said the magazine Vanity Fair, which announced the death. In recent days Mr. Hitchens had stopped treatment and entered hospice care at the Houston hospital. He learned he had cancer while on a publicity tour in 2010 for his memoir, “Hitch-22,” and began writing and, on television, speaking about his illness frequently.

“In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist,” Mr. Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair, for which he was a contributing editor.

He took pains to emphasize that he had not revised his position on atheism, articulated in his best-selling 2007 book, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” although he did express amused appreciation at the hope, among some concerned Christians, that he might undergo a late-life conversion.

He also professed to have no regrets for a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. “Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was “impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.”

Armed with a quick wit and a keen appetite for combat, Mr. Hitchens was in constant demand as a speaker on television, radio and the debating platform, where he held forth in a sonorous, plummily accented voice that seemed at odds with his disheveled appearance. He was a master of the extended peroration, peppered with literary allusions, and of the bright, off-the-cuff remark.

In 2007, when the interviewer Sean Hannity tried to make the case for an all-seeing God, Mr. Hitchens dismissed the idea with contempt. “It would be like living in North Korea,” he said.

Justin E. H. Smith in Bookforum:

David Graeber has been much praised of late as a prophet of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and even if one doesn't want to go that far, his book is remarkably timely. I received my review copy the day of the October 5th NYPD pepper-spray incident in Zuccotti Park. By the time I finished reading it, copycat occupations had sprung up in my adoptive home city (Montreal), my native city (Sacramento), and spots around the world. Graeber's book shows that mass movements that result in debt cancellation—whether through revolution or amnesty—are inevitable, and suggests that we may be entering such a period now. We may also be entering a moment in which the philosophical and cosmic nature of debt finally becomes apparent.

Debt's striking synchronicity with OWS should not overshadow the fact that it's also a formidable piece of anthropological scholarship. The book spans the concept's evolution from the great Axial Age civilizations—adapting Karl Jaspers's label to describe the period between 800 BCE and 600 CE in Greece, India, and China—into the age of global conquest, and finally though its bizarre mutations over the past forty years. As Graeber shows, debt could not have taken the form that it did during the Axial Age without the appearance of currency, but it was also far from being only, or even principally, an economic matter. Debt was originally a moral and cosmological notion, about our debt to the gods (in India), to our parents (in China), or to the cosmos (in Greece, and sometimes in India).

More here.

Brian Greene in the New York Times:

When rumors started crisscrossing the Internet last week that the elusive Higgs particle had been detected by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, I experienced my first physics-generated chill in a decade. It happened again Tuesday morning with the official announcement suggesting that the more than 40-year search for the Higgs may finally be nearing its end.

The researchers have cautioned that the data have not yet reached the threshold for claiming a definitive discovery. But the stakes are so high that even the tentative announcement has rightly fueled much excitement. Finding the Higgs particle would complete an essential chapter in our quest to understand the basic constituents of the universe.

The story began in the 1960s as physicists developed what would soon be called “the standard model of particle physics” — a mathematical framework that would prove capable of predicting the results of every experiment at every atom smasher around the world. The equations locked quarks and electrons, muons and neutrinos and a host of other fundamental particles into a mathematical matrix whose intrinsic patterns, like the form of a perfect snowflake, exhibited an exacting symmetry.

But even as the theory’s predictions were repeatedly borne out by nearly half a century of experimental data, one vital part remained beyond reach.

More here.

Manan Ahmed in The National:

“I am sitting you next to Secretary Clinton at dinner. Say exactly what you think. If you don't, I never – ever – want to hear you criticise the policy again.” So said Richard Holbrooke, the US Special Representative to the Af-Pak region, barely a week after assuming his new position under the Obama administration. He was talking to Rory Stewart, and Stewart told the anecdote on the Huffington Post after Holbrooke's sudden death in 2010.

Holbrooke, Stewart remembered, praised his acumen regarding Afghanistan, and listened to him, even though Stewart disapproved of the emerging policy of General Petraeus. To Holbrooke, Stewart was the expert who dared disagree, but whose disagreement still needed to be heard in the halls of power.

Stewart is widely considered an expert on Afghanistan. Currently a Member of Parliament in Britain, he sits on the influential Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Previously, he was the Ryan Family Professor of the Practice of Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School. Before that, in 2003-04, he worked in southern Iraq with the American administration. And prior to that, in 2002, he walked 6,000 miles – partly across Afghanistan. This last bit, his walk in Afghanistan, became the fulcrum of his 2004 book, The Places in Between, which was a bestseller in the UK and the USA. The website for his book declared that he survived his walk because of “his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs” and a grounded knowledge of the entire region.

More here.

Arne de Boever on Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s polytheistic philosophy over at The LA Review of Books:

Last August, I traveled to France to participate in a reenactment of Plato’s banquet at the house of Bernard Stiegler, the French philosopher of technology. The reenactment was part of a school of philosophy that Stiegler started in the fall of 2010 and that is continuing this academic year. The school involves not just doctoral students but also high school students and people living in Stiegler’s hometown: the mayor and his wife, a photographer, an art dealer, a philosopher-turned-architect, and so on. For the banquet, they were joined by local and international visitors (academics, a community activist, a high-school physics teacher, a video artist, a software engineer).

Although there was no general theme for the banquet, many of the presentations and discussions revolved around the notion of pharmacology. Taking our cue from Jacques Derrida’s brilliant text “Plato’s Pharmacy,” which lays bare the ambiguities of the word “pharmakon” in Plato’s dialogues — it means, among other things, both “cure” and “poison” — the group reflected for four days on the “pharmacological” conditions of modern existence: the ways in which technology, for example, has both remedial and empoisoning effects (it enables you to read this article online, but it might also distract you to go update your status on Facebook, and miss out on the good stuff that is to come). Hence, the pharmakon requires a therapeutics, that is, some practice of care. Philosophy, those at the banquet believed, can participate in defining such a therapeutics, can actually be therapeutic; it can help one live a meaningful life in a time of disorientation.

I thought of that banquet as I read All Things Shining, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s new book on how to “find meaning in a secular age.” For Dreyfus and Kelly, professors of philosophy at UC Berkeley and at Harvard, respectively, philosophy provides orientation in a time characterized by all manner of crises, emergencies, and exceptions. All Things Shining echoes both authors’ work in existentialism and phenomenology. Following the position that Dreyfus takes up in his work on artificial intelligence (for example, in Dreyfus’s What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence), Dreyfus and Kelly argue that technology is an important contributor to the contemporary state of disorientation, because it has attacked and replaced the craftsmanlike skills that allow things to shine (more on this enigmatic formulation in a moment). Although it “improves our lives by making hard things easier,” the authors note that “the improvements of technology are impoverishments as well,” and thus enter into the logic of the pharmakon. In such a condition, only philosophy can help one navigate the treacherous, shifting border between poison and cure.

Over at The Millions, several writers comment on their year in reading. Here's Siddhartha Deb's:

It was perhaps not the best book I read this year, but it came with the kind of extraneous charge few other works could match. The book was The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima, the final novel in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, completed just before Mishima launched a coup against the Japanese government.

I read the opening novel in the tetralogy, Spring Snow, four years ago, on a flight out from Japan. Since then, I’ve finished one book in the series each summer. Even as I’ve found myself in very different places, and sometimes in extremely different states of mind, I’ve followed Mishima’s brilliant and demented account of how modern Japan fell apart and was never quite put together again.

The story is told through the relationship between two characters, one of whom gets older in each novel while the other dies and is reincarnated, serving as an exemplar of the particular kind of transformation Japan is going through at the moment. Mishima was a right-wing nationalist, so I read him from a rather oppositional political stance. Yet he moves me with his obsessions: modernity, the west, materialism, sexuality, martial traditions, spirituality, love, the body, and the east, and I can’t help being touched when one of his principal characters travels to Calcutta and Benares in India.

This summer, as I read The Decay of the Angel, I became ever more conscious of the compositional history of the novel.

Jesus of Nazareth remains a disturbing presence, a question mark hanging over uneasy Western world-views. Some invoke him unquestioningly as the divine, redeeming Son of God. Others dismiss him as a minor figure whose followers invented stories about him and a religion around him. No serious historian doubts his existence, though some (noted and refuted by Maurice Casey in his trenchant introductory survey) still try. What we have, rather, in general and in the writings surveyed here, is a bewildering range of viewpoints, which with only a slight stretch could be described as pre-modern, modern and postmodern: in this case, a German, an Englishman and a North American. As Barack Obama said of a different trio (recent guest speakers in Westminster Hall), this is either a very high bar or the beginning of a very funny joke. Curiously, the Pope features in both trios. As his visit to Britain last year confirmed, Benedict XVI is by no means the hard-nosed dogmatic disciplinarian many had assumed. Deeply orthodox, of course. But he makes it clear in the preface to the first volume of Jesus of Nazareth (reviewed in the TLS, January 25, 2008) that he is not writing ex cathedra but contributing to discussion and devotion. Everyone is free to disagree with him. His project also reflects unflagging energy. For a man in his eighties to write a serious multi-volume work on Jesus (he promises a third instalment, on the infancy narratives) is remarkable enough. When the author happens to be the chief pastor of over a billion Catholics, it is truly extraordinary.

more from Tom Wright at the TLS here.

Tully Lake

The cry of the grey heron on the wind
the scream of the wild goose
over the crannog in the lake

the summer rain falling slowly
on Taoiseach Mc Kenna
mourning his brídeach sí and children
gone forever beneath the foam
into the lake of broken promises

All he has left now
is the whistle of the moor plover
the bleat of the jacksnipe
the scream of the wild goose
and the blubbing of the moorhen
a cormorant wheeling above him
as he empties his head of tears
in his lonely castle on the edge of the lake

by Caitríona Ní Chléirchín
translation by author

Poet's Note: crannog = an ancient Scottish or Irish fortified dwelling constructed in a lake or marsh; brídeach sí = fairy bride

This poem is based on the folklore story about the fairy bride in my native area Emyvale in County Monaghan. The Mc Kenna and Mac Mahon taoiseachs (chieftans) were in power in the local area under the leadership of the O’Neills in Tyrone, but they lost their lands and were slaughtered at the end of the sixteenth century.

The Mc Kenna Taoiseach met his fairy bride at the edge of Tully Lake according to the legend but when he broke his promises to her (never to make love to another woman, not to come home without firewood, and not to call the children out of their names), she went back into the lake with his children and was never seen again. After this he lost all his lands and eventually his life.

George Whitman, the owner of Shakespeare and Company, a bookshop that became the center of English-language literary life in Paris and might be the most famous and beloved bookstore in the world, died Dec. 14 in his apartment above the store. He died two days after his 98th birthday. According to the store’s Web site, he had had a stroke two months ago. Mr. Whitman was an American expatriate who found his way to Paris after World War II and never left. He opened the bookstore, directly opposite Notre Dame cathedral, in 1951. In time, Mr. Whitman’s jumbled shop, with its sloping shelves and teetering stacks of books, became something of a cathedral in its own right and a required stop for Americans in Paris. For decades, Mr. Whitman presided over the store with a benign if somewhat mercurial presence, holding poetry readings and providing free room and board to thousands of would-be Hemingways. It has been featured in books, documentaries and the recent Woody Allen film “Midnight in Paris.”

more from Matt Schudel at the Washington Post here.

From The New Yorker:

Dearborn, Michigan, is the city in America with the highest proportion of Muslims. That is not a new development. Immigrants from the Middle East began arriving in the area generations ago, when jobs building cars were still a lure—which should give a sense of the community’s vintage. Some still work in the auto industry, including Angela Jaafar, who is a marketer, and is married to Mike, a deputy chief in the sheriff’s office. The Jaafars and their children form one of five Dearborn families featured on “All-American Muslim,” a reality show, on TLC, created by some of the same team behind “Real Housewives of New York.” The show has become the target of an ugly campaign by a group called the Florida Family Association, which calls it “propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda’s clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values.” That someone, somewhere, would yell at the television when presented with images of Arab-Americans getting married or ready for school or running a football practice is sad, but might not be surprising. What is more remarkable, and even alarming, is that the group’s campaign persuaded Lowe’s, the home-improvement chain, to pull its advertising from “All-American Muslim.”

More here.

“IF YOU want to understand Russia, you must listen to Vladimir Visotsky,” my Moscow friends told me. That was in 1980 as I began a Russian course at university. Visotsky, a poet and songwriter with a deep, hoarse voice, has often been called the “Bob Dylan of the Soviet Union”. As an East Berliner I soon began to see that the idealised image of “our great and glorious communist brothers” did not quite match real life in Moscow. Just as at home brave people such as artists, who dared to criticise the society around them, were monitored and often arrested by the Stasi, so they were here by the KGB. Whenever I visited my Moscow friends Eleg and Elita they played Visotzky songs and explained his lyrics to me. Of course they had the few records released by the state label “Melodia”. But most of the songs they played were secret recordings from live concerts which came on bootleg cassettes. I remember relatively opulent dinners at their flat, with lots of vodka, sovietskoje shampanskoje and endless discussions about bureaucracy, corruption, anti-Semitism, alcoholism, crime and the daily tribulations of Soviet life—subjects that Visotzky addressed in his songs. As Red Army veterans who had fought for a better world, Eleg and his brother-in-law Viktor (who shared the modest flat along with his wife) were clearly embarrassed by the status quo. I never saw Visotzky in the flesh. A month before I came to Moscow the man who was loved and worshipped as a voice of the people—and hated by the authorities for the same reason—died of a heart attack, aged 42.

more from Prospero at The Economist here.

From Smithsonian:

Colonial Boston’s secret patriot network crackled with the news. Regiments of British troops were on the move, bound for points north to secure military supplies from the rebels. Paul Revere mounted his horse and began a feverish gallop to warn the colonists that the British were coming. Except this ride preceded Revere’s famous “midnight ride” by more than four months. On December 13, 1774, the Boston silversmith made a midday gallop north to Portsmouth in the province of New Hampshire, and some people—especially Granite Staters—consider that, and not his trip west to Lexington on April 18, 1775, as the true starting point of the war for independence.

With talk of revolution swirling around Boston in the final days of 1774, Revere’s patriot underground learned that King George III had issued a proclamation that prohibited the export of arms or ammunition to America and ordered colonial authorities to secure the Crown’s weaponry. One particularly vulnerable location was Fort William and Mary, a derelict garrison at the mouth of Portsmouth Harbor with a large supply of munitions guarded by a mere six soldiers. When Boston’s Committee of Correspondence, a local group of citizens opposed to British rule, received intelligence that British General Thomas Gage had secretly dispatched two regiments by sea to secure the New Hampshire fort—a report that was actually erroneous—they sent Revere to alert their counterparts in New Hampshire’s provincial capital. Just six days after the birth of his son Joshua, Revere embarked on a treacherous wintry journey over 55 miles of frozen, rutted roads. A frigid west wind stung his cheeks, and both rider and steed endured a constant pounding on the unforgiving roadway.

More here.

Some years ago, while I was interviewing a cordial octogenarian for my biography of André Breton—often called, to his disgust, the “Pope of Surrealism”—my interviewee suddenly leaned across the table and threatened to give me “a sound thrashing” if I used the abhorred word pope in my book. I did include the term, of course, but not without trepidation—a fear that had little to do with the outrage of vengeful codgers and everything to do with disappointing those whose trust I’d spent years courting. It’s a quandary for any biographer, particularly when writing about a figure who still inflames the passions of a fervent cult: Does one respect the insider’s code and eschew those aspects of the subject deemed vulgar, indiscreet, or commonplace? Or does one acknowledge that, for the general reader, such inconvenient or well-rehearsed truths are an integral part of the story? In some ways, Alfred Jarry is the poster boy for literary cult figures. Like fellow turn-of-the-century French eccentrics Arthur Cravan, Raymond Roussel, and Jacques Vaché—though more famous than any of them—Jarry has left a legacy based partly on an enigmatic, often hermetic body of writing, and partly on an equally enigmatic, and more flamboyant, garland of anecdotes. Figures as diverse as Apollinaire, Picasso (with whom Jarry might have had a dalliance), the Surrealists, Italo Calvino, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, and even Sir Paul of Liverpool have acknowledged his influence—one that owed as much to Jarry’s nonconformist attitude as it did to his writing.

more from Mark Polizzotti at Bookforum here.