Why the Young Men Are So Ugly

They have little tractors in their blood
and all day the tractors climb up and down
inside their arms and legs, their
collarbones and heads.

That is why they yell and scream and slam the barbells
down into their clanking slots,
making the metal ring like sledgehammers on iron,
like dungeon prisoners rattling their chains.

That is why they shriek their tires at the stopsign,
why they turn the base up on the stereo
until it shakes the traffic light, until it
dryhumps the eardrum of the crossing guard.

Testosterone is a drug,
and they say No, No, No until
they are overwhelmed and punch
their buddy in the face for joy,

or make a joke about gravy and bottomless holes
to a middle-aged waitress who is gently
setting down the plate in front of them.

If they are grotesque, if
what they say and do is often nothing more
than a kind of psychopathic fart,

it is only because of the tractors,
the tractors in their blood,
revving their engines, chewing up the turf
inside their arteries and veins
It is the testosterone tractor

constantly climbing the mudhill of the world
and dragging the young man behind it
by a chain around his leg.
In the stink and the noise, in the clouds
of filthy exhaust

is where they live. It is the tractors
that make them
what they are. While they make being a man
look like a disease.

by Tony Hoagland

Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian in MERIP:

Pakistan’s generals are besieged on all sides. Like never before, they are at odds with their own rank and file. According to the New York Times, the discontent with the top brass is so great as to evoke concerns of a colonels’ coup. The army also is losing support from its domestic political allies and subject to the increasing hostility of the Pakistani public. The generals are even at risk of being dumped by their oldest and most generous supporter, the United States.

Pakistani army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani and other military leaders know it is wise to stop digging when in a hole. But it is not clear if the generals can stop. On July 5, the New York Times reported that US officials hold senior officers of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the military intelligence agency, responsible for the kidnapping, torture and murder of Pakistani journalist Saleem Shahzhad. Shahzhad was well known for his reporting on the military’s ties with militant Islamist groups.

The immediate cause of this crisis was the successful US operation to discover Osama bin Laden’s hiding place in Pakistan, stealthily enter the country and kill him. But, in reality, the generals have been brought to these dire straits by army policies, particularly those enacted over the past three decades, which have left the army, and Pakistan, deeply divided. Keeping the army and the country together is part of the same challenge.

Jimmy Chen in HTML Giant:

More here.

Alexander Cooley and Lincoln Mitchell in the New York Times:

Last Friday, voters in the Georgian breakaway territory of Abkhazia went to the polls in a presidential election that was broadly ignored by the United States and its European allies.

There were no international observers, no stern warnings to Abkhaz leaders about the rule of law, no Western congratulations to the winner — Alexander Ankvab, who had been acting president since Sergei Bagapsh, the twice-elected Abkhaz president, died suddenly in May.

In fact, many Western organizations, urged by Tbilisi, condemned the polling. Catherine Ashton, the European Union foreign policy chief, said the E.U. “does not recognize the constitutional and legal framework within which these elections have taken place,” while NATO declared that the alliance “does not recognize the elections.”

The main reason for these reactions is that while the people of Abkhazia view themselves as an independent state, the world’s governments, with only a very few exceptions, consider the territory as an integral part of Georgia. Only a few weeks ago the U.S. Senate passed a resolution describing Abkhazia as “occupied” by Russia.

Still, condemning political processes in the breakaway territory damages Western credibility and influence in the South Caucasus in a number of ways.

More here.

BUT WAIT. The anniversary of September 11 reminds me that, before I come up with a gloomy word to conclude my sentence, it might be useful to recall the Middle Eastern landscape of ten years ago. It was not a spectacle of hope. The whole region seemed to be veering in terrorist directions, with battles almost everywhere going on between Islamists of different stripes and mukhabarat regimes, likewise of different stripes, ranging from the bad to the ghastly. And ten years later? Dismal still, in a kaleidoscopically different pattern. Anyone can think of doomsday possibilities—an Iranian order to Hamas and Hezbollah to launch a regional war, and so on. Still, two new elements, which you could not have found ten years ago, figure nowadays on the landscape. Here and there around the region you can see democratic institutions, shaky as a leaf—threatened by terrorists and Islamist militias in Iraq, trampled underfoot by an Islamist militia in Lebanon, still merely a project for the future in Tunisia, and feebler yet in Egypt, given that, if the Egyptian elections go ahead, they will probably bring the wrong people to power. Democratic institutions nonetheless amount to a new element. And something else: the ineradicable fact that liberals, relatively isolated and weak as they are, have made a mass appearance on the public stage, and the liberals left a good impression on the rest of society, and they even demonstrated the ability, for a moment, to shape events, and their day may not be over yet. Do these new elements add up to nothing? If you are philosophically a hard-core materialist and you tally up the measurable facts of power and wealth, they add up to nothing. But if you consider that ideas sometimes have an autonomous force of their own, and that liberal ideas are more likely to flourish in an atmosphere of freedom, these two new and feeble elements look like—well, a beginning.

more from Paul Berman at TNR here.

As a child, Elias Canetti treasured Robinson Crusoe. The author of Auto da Fé (1935), the nightmarish story of a self-absorbed sinologist who is tricked into marriage by his illiterate housekeeper and who sinks first into the lower depths of society and then into madness, seems to have had the lifelong feeling of being solitary, separate from the rest of humankind. According to his later study in mass psychology Crowds and Power, crowds form in an effort to shake off the burden of individuality. Perhaps surprisingly – as he always claimed to value the individual human being above all else – the impression the reader takes from the book is that, for Canetti, this process of self-obliteration held a powerful attraction. Born into a Sephardic Jewish family in a small port city on the Ottoman Danube and growing up amid the festering anti-Semitism of interwar Europe, Canetti had no illusions about the wisdom of crowds. Yet he seems to have been drawn by suddenly formed masses of humanity, finding a sense of elation in being swept up as a student by a flood of people marching on the Palace of Justice in Vienna in 1927. The crowd was a threat, but also a way out from painful self-consciousness. Crowds fascinated Canetti, so much so that he was inclined to explain the whole of history through them.

more from John Gray at the New Statesman here.

Michel Houellebecq is best known as a novelist, especially since he was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 2010 for La Carte et le territoire, but the current enfant terrible of French literature actually began his career as a poet. His manifesto, Rester vivant (Staying Alive), appeared as long ago as 1991, the same year as his study of H. P. Lovecraft, whose sombre vision has influenced him. A year later came La Poursuite du bonheur (The Pursuit of Happiness), followed by Le Sens du combat, translated here as The Art of Struggle, the first book of his poetry to appear in English. Already an ambiguity arises, as his translators acknowledge: “In French, ‘sens’ can mean either ‘way’ or ‘sense’, and ‘combat’ can mean ‘struggle’ or ‘fight’”. But Combat was the newspaper for which Albert Camus, whom Houellebecq seems to admire, worked during the Second World War, and there is a hand-to-hand sense about it. So why not “The Way of Combat”, especially since the translators do not even raise the possibility of “art” for “sens” in their foreword? Furthermore, this collection had a companion volume in fiction, with an equally combative title, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994). Perhaps this should have been called something like “Widening the Battlefield” in English, but instead was given the puzzling title Whatever. This ignores Houellebecq’s theme, the destructive quality of economic coupled with sexual liberalism, which, he maintains, combine to extend our contemporary battleground.

more from John Montague at the TLS here.

From The Boston Globe:

LIKE CORRUPTION, crime, and asbestos, “inflation” is a word that many Americans imagine in all-red capital letters, flashing across TV screens amid warnings of crisis. For anyone who remembers the gloomy, scary 1970s, when the inflation rate in the United States reached double digits, the word is shorthand for an economy that has spiraled out of control, the dollar losing value and prices climbing feverishly. “Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man,” said Ronald Reagan in 1978, as nervous citizens imagined the day when they’d have to push a wheelbarrow full of cash to the grocery store in order to buy a loaf of bread.

That particular nightmare never came to pass, thanks to drastic measures taken by the Federal Reserve. For the better part of the past 30 years, the dollar has stayed stable, reassuring American families and the nation’s trading partners, with the central bank standing guard over the economy and doing everything necessary to keep inflation low. You might say that Kenneth Rogoff has been one of the guards. As a research economist at the Federal Reserve during the first half of the 1980s, he helped ensure that the word “inflation” would never again flash across American TV screens. His reputation as a conservative-minded inflation hawk followed him from the Fed to the International Monetary Fund to his current position in the economics department at Harvard.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

Part of the Taj Mahal’s beauty derives from the story the stones embody. Though a tomb for the dead, it is also a monument to love, built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, fifth in a line of rulers who had originally come as conquerors from the Central Asian steppes. The Mughals were the dominant power on the Indian subcontinent for much of the 16th to 18th centuries, and the empire reached its cultural zenith under Shah Jahan. He constructed the Taj (which means “crown,” and is also a form of the Persian word “chosen”) as a final resting place for his favorite wife, Arjumand Banu, better known as Mumtaz Mahal (Chosen One of the Palace). A court poet recorded the emperor’s despair at her death in 1631, at the age of 38, after giving birth to the couple’s 14th child: “The color of youth flew away from his cheeks; The flower of his countenance ceased blooming.” He wept so often “his tearful eyes sought help from spectacles.” To honor his wife, Shah Jahan decided to build a tomb so magnificent that it would be remembered throughout the ages. For more than 15 years, he directed the construction of a complex of buildings and gardens that was meant to mirror the Islamic vision of Paradise.

More here.

Butter

A Welshman has taken
his nervous bank with him to the beaches
of Spain, from a glass-louvered bottom
of a small yacht he watches the vaulting ribs
of a sunken ship emptied
of the marigolds of salad
and dominion. His girlfriend’s
breasts are copper; he will
sell, he thinks, his dead father’s
dairy farm in late September.
Septembre. Septembre.
He is honestly reading a short story
by Poe. Thunderheads
moving over the lighter casino clouds
of mid-morning. He wonders
about Samuel Beckett
at late night rehearsals.
Spear points and bullwhips
up in the darkening sky. Who wants to die
in Springtime with a collapsed market
and in Paris. He laughs
having just bought back the farm. The slang
of the Americans gaining on him.

by Norman Dubie
from Blackbird
Spring 2011, Val. 10

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Frans Hals is often described as a “loose” painter. You can see what that means in one of Hals' great paintings currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting is called “The Smoker,” from 1625. You wouldn't be surprised, though, if someone told you it was painted 250 years later than that. The face of the young man smoking a pipe at the center of the painting is rendered in almost impressionistic strokes. A dab of red here, a curve of yellow there. The collar of the man's shirt is created with a rough stab of white down the middle of the canvas. The painstaking brushwork of other Dutch masters from the Golden Age is notably absent. That is not to say Hals was sloppy, a crime for which he has sometimes been accused. Hals labored at his chosen craft all life long. It is just that he worked very hard to achieve a looser style. You can see it even in his formal portraits, in works such as “Portrait of a Man” from 1636-8. The face of the man in that painting is rendered with all the precision you might find in a Rubens of roughly the same era. And the expressiveness of the man's face is reminiscent of Rembrandt. But if you look at the man's left arm, the one cocked at his hip, you notice that the style devolves (or evolves?) into that of the loose Hals again. The elbow — and the folds of garment around the elbow — are painted with the same rough gestures and impressionistic swaths of color that are so startling in “The Smoker.”

More here.

Maria J. Stephan in Waging Nonviolence:

Recent analyses of the Arab Spring have questioned the efficacy of nonviolent resistance compared to armed struggle in ousting authoritarian regimes. The relatively expeditious victories of the nonviolent uprisings (not “revolutions,” as some suggest) in Tunisia and Egypt stand in stark contrast to Libya, where a disparate amalgam of armed groups, guided politically by the Libyan Transitional National Council (TNC) and backed militarily by NATO, are on the verge of removing Moammar Qadhafi from power. As someone who has written extensively about civil resistance, notably in the Middle East, while at the same time working on the Libya portfolio within the State Department, I’ve been grappling with the meaning and significance of the Libyan revolution and its possible impact on the region.

More here.

Gary Wexler in Forward:

Even with all the efforts of Camera, the Israel Project, the Jewish Federations and all the other organizations that blast my email inbox daily with defensive statements, Israel is increasingly emerging as the world’s pariah nation.

Yet, as strange as it may sound coming from a marketer with an advertising background, who has represented hundreds of Jewish organizations worldwide, I have arrived at the conclusion that the solution will not be found in branding, marketing, public relations or the writings of political pundits. The problem is that all their concepts, strategies, words and legitimate defenses – no matter how powerful and clever – are not going to elevate Israel’s plummeting image. Hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors and the Israeli government have been poured into this effort, yet the situation only worsens every month. I am as much to blame as anyone for being a supporter of these actions.

It has become clear that the world doesn’t care about Israel’s wines, its Bauhaus architecture, its fashion, its alluring women, its sexy gay men, its beaches, its ballet or its hummus. The world, its media and its university campuses are riveted upon Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians as well as the state of its democracy.

No, the answer to Israel’s image problems does not depend upon the marketing. It depends first upon the policies.

More here.

A t whose expense comes the mild irony when, this fall, the cheaply produced scandal sheet Private Eye will have an exhibition of its cartoons and pictorial covers at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a building consecrated to taste and restraint? Perhaps the show’s modest title furnishes a clue: “ Private Eye: The First 50 Years.” Keep in mind that, a half-century ago, the British establishment was almost as near in time to its Victorian forebears as we are to the half-forgotten names—like Harold Macmillan (who even in his own day was described as an Edwardian)—who were so pitilessly lampooned in Private Eye’ s first issues. I was a mere sheltered schoolboy at the time, but couldn’t fail to notice the exciting fact that the authorities were getting nervous. In spite of a BBC monopoly on the airwaves, the semi-official censorship of cinema and the theater, and the titanic, still-enduring prestige of Winston Churchill and the royal family, you could hear the noise of collapsing scenery as a whole parcel of scandals—sexual ones, property ones, espionage ones—started to unwrap at the same time. Private Eye, which could be bought inexpensively and smuggled under the jacket, was the ideal samizdat bulletin, where you could very often read next week’s real news. They so nearly called it Bladder, which would have gone well with the bathroom humor, the word bubbles, the dirty paper, and the graffiti-like cartoons. But that image would also have evoked the squeaky rubber balls of the old court jesters, meant to rebound in the end from the armor of authority.

more from Hitch at Vanity Fair here.

In that regard, the past two years have been good to me. Forty-four states¾most recently Hawaii (Aloha) and Indiana (Go Hoosiers!)—have tacitly affirmed what I insisted all those years ago, with their adoption of an education platform called the Common Core State Standards, which replaces decades-old handwriting requirements with a “keyboarding” mandate. “The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers,” reads the program’s website. “With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.” Of course, competing in the global economy isn’t everybody’s sole concern. “How do they expect these children to sign all their papers when their kids are students?” asks Pamela on one online forum. “Sign their checks, mortgage papers, marriage licenses, personal correspondence?” she continues. “Can you imagine what it would be like to find the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence illegible?” wonders Dwain. “What if the computer goes down or the power goes off?” writes Deeply Shaded. Those are the sorts of questions asked by legions of hand-wringers in thousands of comments on hundreds of websites that have reported on cursive’s demise. A recent CNN story tellingly titled “Nation of adults who will write like children?” opens with some unkind words about the penmanship of Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber and ends with the strange warning: “If you write slowly, your hand may not be able to keep up with your mind’s attempt to have a thought, form it into a sentence, and remember it long enough to write it down.”

more from Graham T. Beck at The Morning News here.

From The Paris Review:

From the end of the forties to 1961, the beautiful, talented, temperamental, generous American expatriate dancer and writer Theodora Roosevelt Keogh (1919–2008) wrote nine vivid novels as sensational, in their way, as anything you’ll ever read. She wrote her novels the way people used to write them: on rackety typewriters in walk-up apartments and hotel rooms in Saint-Germain-des-Prés on Paris’s Left Bank, where she’d moved in the late forties with her new husband, the designer and illustrator Tom Keogh. This was after she graduated from Miss Chapin’s School, made a formal debut in New York Society, dipped into Radcliffe, and ran away in wartime to dance in a ballet company in Rio de Janeiro (and high-kick at the Copacabana) with Alexander Iolas, the future New York gallerist. Fifty years later, gossamer webs of gossip still cling to Theodora Keogh’s life. No, her pet margay did not bite off her ear in the Chelsea Hotel. Stimulated by the atmosphere of that once-lively refuge, the margay took a few irritated nips off an earlobe, after which Theodora styled her hair a little differently. And, no, her second husband, Tommy O’Toole, wasn’t a tugboat captain. More like a steward on the Circle Line when Theodora met him, although he and Theodora did live on a tugboat in New York harbor while she was writing a novel in a neighborhood bar.

For a woman who grew up without the money her social advantages implied—she was the namesake of her grandfather, President Theodore Roosevelt, and the favorite niece of his witty daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth—Theodora always took care to select her own society. But she never had to choose between living it up or writing it down. She did both—and at the same time, too. Keogh’s novels are mostly set in places she’d lived in intensely and knew by heart: the Upper East Side of New York, the Left Bank of Paris, the North Shore of Long Island.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

It was just last year that a certain company selling a special probiotic enhanced yogurt was ordered by a U.S. court to stop suggesting in its advertisements that it's product had health benefits that went beyond the norm. Now, new evidence by Javier Bravo and colleagues at University College Cork, suggests the company may have been on to something. In their paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the team describes how mice given the prbiotic Lactobacillus rhamnosus, showed signs of being less anxious and depressed and even had lowered levels of stress hormones. Building on recent research that suggests there may be more of a gut-mind link than scientists have realized (such as depression and anxiety linked to bowel problems) Bravo and his team decided to look into probiotics and their possible impact on mood. In their research, they focused on Lactobacillus rhamnosus, a probiotic bacterium normally found in the gut, and which is also commonly found in various kinds of yogurt and other types of dairy products.

To find out if ingesting L. rhamnosus did indeed have any impact beyond normal nutritional value, the team fed half of a group of mice a broth heavily laden with the bacterium for a period of time; the other half were given the same broth without the probiotic. Afterwards, the mice were tested to see if any discernible behavioral changes resulted. Bravo et al found that the mice that had been given the probiotic demonstrated less anxious type behaviors, such as more of a willingness to traverse narrow walkways or to venture out into wide open spaces, activities that are known to cause stress in mice. They also found that the mice that had eaten the probiotic were less likely give in to the sensation of drowning when put in water, a sign that normally indicates depressive behavior. And finally, they found that the treated mice also had lower levels of stress hormones in their blood.

More here.