After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard
Charkes Wright

East of me, west of me, full summer.
How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.

Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this mockingbird,
I flit from one thing to the next.
What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?
Tomorrow is dark.
Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.
The sky dogs are whimpering.
Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
up from the damp grass.
Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.

From The Telegraph:

When, in 1984, The Times asked Samuel Beckett for his New Year’s resolutions and hopes, he responded with a brief telegram: “resolutions colon zero stop period hopes colon zero stop beckett”. The best joke is kept till last: “stop beckett”. Much of Beckett’s career now looks like a set of painful and playful variations on the idea “stop beckett”, as he tried to come to terms with the sprawling mess of the world, while recognising that he would clutter it up even further with his descriptions of it.

His response to this paradox? To do more with less. To write works that shrink on the page but expand in the mind. To put words in their place. Beckett’s style took time to develop – a lifetime, in fact – but his early letters offer fascinating glimpses of its first stirrings, and this monumental edition gives Beckett’s own perspective on the years when he found his feet in the world and his voice as a writer.

Waiting for Godot opens with Estragon trying to take his boot off before giving up with a muttered “Nothing to be done”, and as a young man Beckett certainly seems to have got plenty of practice in getting nothing done. Like a weirdly inverted diary, his letters are a litany of what he has failed to do: “Nothing anyhow is so attractive as abstention”, “Nothing seems to come off”, “I can’t write anything at all”. Even his occasional dreams of escape – his more speculative career plans included working in Moscow under the film director Sergei Eisenstein and training as a pilot – end up with him rooted in the same place, writing sentences that snarl him up like a web.

More here.

Michael Shermer in The Scientific American:

On a Los Angeles street corner in 2000, I was the “inside man” in a classic con game called the pigeon drop. A magician named Dan Harlan orchestrated it for a television series I co-hosted called Exploring the Unknown (type “Shermer, con games” into Google). Our pigeon was a man from whom I asked directions to the local hospital while Dan (the “outside man”) moved in and appeared to find a wallet full of cash on the ground. After it was established that the wallet belonged to neither of us and appeared to have about $3,000 in it, Dan announced that we should split the money three ways.

I objected on moral grounds, insisting that we ask around first, which Dan agreed to do only after I put the cash in an envelope and secretly switched it for an envelope with magazine pages stuffed in it. Before he left on his moral crusade, however, Dan insisted that we each give him some collateral (“How do I know you two won't just take off with the money while I'm gone?”). I enthusiastically offered $50 and suggested that the pigeon do the same. He hesitated, so I handed him the sealed envelope full of what he believed was the cash (but was actually magazine pages), which he then tucked safely into his pocket as he willingly handed over to Dan his entire wallet, credit cards and ID. A few minutes after Dan left, I acted agitated and took off in search of him, leaving the pigeon standing on the street corner with a phony envelope and no wallet!

More here.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso in openDemocracy:

Sergio's entire life was dedicated to the ideals of human rights and humanitarian work. For him freedom and human dignity were the foundation of peace and justice. Sergio was courageous and compassionate. Bold but also pragmatic. Often at the frontlines but always taking the side of the weak, the vulnerable, the powerless. Uncompromising in his principles but with a gift for listening to and learning from those he worked with. He had the capacity to combine a maximum flexibility in dealing with the complexities of real life situations with a strong commitment to basic values. This allowed him to stand unequivocally on the side of the victims while talking to all the parties involved. Perhaps this is as close as one can get to being a practitioner of what I would call the art of politics: this combination of vision and pragmatism, flexibility in the means and consistency on the goals.

From Cambodia to Bosnia, Rwanda to Kosovo, East Timor to Iraq, Sergio came to grips with some of the most dreadful conflicts of the last decades. Time and again he was confronted with life and death questions for which there were no easy answers. How to balance the obligation to protect the victims with the denunciation of human rights violations? What kinds of compromise are or are not acceptable to minimize human suffering? At what point pragmatism becomes complacency in the face of the unacceptable? When is dialogue no longer an option and the aggressor has to be engaged despite the risk that, in the short term, the level of violence may increase? How to define this moment in which, faced with massive human rights abuses and crimes against humanity, it is legitimate to use force in the pursuit of peace?

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn't faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I'd go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don't write I'm not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

In Arab Comment:

They are dying by the day. First, there was Edward Said, then Mahmoud Darwish, and now Tayeb Salih.

If Said sang about the pleasures of the “placeless place,” Darwish wrote like a jealous child unwilling to share the page with any one, a ruthless occupier in particular. Salih, on the other hand, spent most of his life on borderline between East, West, and the Rest. As a thinker, citizen, and writer, he towered quietly over our time with extraordinary luminosity. He also had a prodigious capacity for understanding people no matter where they came from.

A sign well defined in his chef-d’oeuvre, Season of Migration to the North, where the narrator intones: “The [the Sudanese people] were amazed to learn that Europeans with some differences were much like us, marrying and raising children in accordance with tradition and that generally they were a moral and honest people.” A humanist voice at its best! This is not the nonsense one finds in shabby screeds likes the “clash of cultures” or “what went wrong?”

Suffice it to add that Salih had an unbounded energy for waging struggles on behalf of the truth—the truth not only of usually unrecorded social suffering, but also the truth about the institutional obduracy that lurks beneath the surface of things, and a persistent endeavor of his last years the callous posturing of so-called realistic, or pragmatic writers.

Power never phased or impressed Si Tayeb, as he was often called: he took on its many contemporary forms with undaunted courage. When the 2005-Cairo Third Arab Novel Conference sought to salvage something of the reputation of its much coveted prize by awarding it to Salih, the decision raised eyebrows. The recipients of the same prize had been Saudi novelist Abdul-Rahman Munif, Sonallah Ibrahim who turned it down, and Gamal El-Ghitani, who belongs to Ibrahim’s defiant generation, declined to be named for the award. “With all due respect Tayeb Salih is an outstanding novelist,” he chimed in, “his winning of the prize does not whitewash the event.”

The Economist revisits Barrington Moore:

In 1966 Barrington Moore, an American historian, pithily summarised decades of scholarly opinion in his formula, “no bourgeoisie, no democracy”.

But that view has been changing. Moore’s academic successors increasingly see the middle class as marginal to establishing a democracy. Some of them think that the poor are more influential, others that the main actors are particular individuals, not social groups. In much of the post-communist and developing worlds, the giddy hopes for liberal democracy that grew up after the Berlin Wall came down have given way to a period of disappointment and democratic stagnation. Despite the huge growth in the middle class, the number of elected democracies worldwide, as tracked by Freedom House, an American advocacy group, has been flat since the mid-1990s.

China’s 800m-strong new middle class has conspicuously failed to rise up against its rulers.

Russia’s smaller, weaker middle class seems to have colluded in the reversal of hard-won but fragile freedoms: hence the popularity (across all classes) of Mr Putin. In both countries, middle-class fear of instability seems to have trumped democratic impulses. Their middle classes have also provided some particularly ugly manifestations of aggressive nationalism: for example, during the controversy over the Olympic torch for last year’s Beijing Games, and in Russia’s war on Georgia.

For a particular type of cinephile from my generation—those of us born in the early ’60s and raised on a strict diet of left-leaning, somewhat Eurocentric art and culture—the physical act of seeking out and consuming great or hallowed or mythical films was as obsessive as our need to experience these films, when and if we found them. When I say physical, I’m talking about the rumors traded among cinephiles, the stories and the clues. We wrote letters to long-forgotten crew members of neglected masterpieces and arranged meetings in difficult-to-pronounce European cities still shrouded behind the Iron Curtain. We sent money orders or contraband to shady PO boxes in hopes of hitting the mother lode. (That’s how I got my hands on Bergman’s Merry Widow script, crafted as a showcase for Barbra Streisand and set aside when it could not be financed.) Did Jacques Rivette’s twelve-hour-and-forty-minute version of Out 1, noli me tangere, supposedly screened at Le Havre in 1971, really exist? Could sequences from the abandoned version of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, the one starring Jason Robards and Mick Jagger (before Robards had a massive heart attack and Klaus Kinski replaced him), be bought on black-market videotape?

more from The Believer here.

The Turkish model of laïcité is unique in that the state continues to direct religious affairs: the thousands of Muslim clerics who serve in mosques are educated in state-sponsored institutions of higher learning. In the last three decades, however, this peculiar Turkish model has become destabilized, and the sociological firewalls that the Turkish republic tried to erect between state and religion have turned out not to be as thick as the Kemalist revolutionaries imagined. The ensuing difficulties are nicely suggested by a question recently posed by Jürgen Habermas: “How should we see ourselves as members of a post-secular society and what must we reciprocally expect from one another in order to ensure that in firmly entrenched nation states, social relations remain civil despite the growth of a plurality of cultures and religious world views?” Habermas asks this question with an eye to the conflict between European societies and their Muslim residents and citizens. In Turkey, where the majority of the population is Muslim but where a modern constitutional understanding of citizenship and civil rights is institutionalized, the question requires a nuanced response. I will try to respond by reexamining the “headscarf ban” and the legislative struggles surrounding it.

more from Dissent here.

ON HIS DEATHBED in 1851, at the home of his mistress, the great English painter J. M. W. Turner is said to have offered an enviably neat summary of his life’s work and beliefs. Having produced hundreds of oil paintings and watercolors over the previous six decades – a corpus of landscapes that would redefine European art – Turner simply declared: “The sun is God.” In the century after Turner’s death, landscape painting became the great engine of modern artistic creativity. Artists did in fact live by chasing the sun, capturing the way it felt in the world in ever more pioneering ways. Turner’s pale and radiant scenes changed the way artists painted light; his main rival, John Constable, was similarly influential with his moody evocations of shifting weather. The French painters who followed – Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Degas – successively pushed the boundaries of artistic innovation, and created landscapes that still count today among the great works of art, bridging both serious and popular tastes. In our own time, landscape painting retains an unquestionable popular appeal. As civilization pulls us further and further from nature, it’s no surprise that we cherish glimpses of arcadia. Landscapes have become nearly ubiquitous: in living rooms and waiting rooms; on fine china and restaurant walls; at adult ed and on PBS; in regular blockbuster exhibitions and on the resulting sweatshirts, mugs, and even refrigerator magnets. There is one place, however, where landscapes have almost disappeared: serious contemporary painting.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Crutches
Nikki Giovanni

it's not the crutches we decry
it's the need to move forward
though we haven't the strength

women aren't allowed to need
so they develop rituals
since we all know working hands idle
the devil
women aren't supposed to be strong
so they develop social smiles
and secret drinking problems
and female lovers whom they never touch
except in dreams

men are supposed to be strong
so they have heart attacks
and develop other women
who don't know their weaknesses
and hide their fears
behind male lovers
whom they religiously touch
each saturday morning on the basketball court
it's considered a sign of health doncha know
that they take such good care
of their bodies

i'm trying to say something about the human condition
maybe i should try again

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

In seeking bipartisan support for his economic policies, President Obama has tried every tip on the standard hospitality crib sheet: beer and football, milk and cookies, Earth, Wind and Fire. Maybe the president needs to borrow a new crib sheet — the kind with a genuine baby wrapped inside. A baby may look helpless. It can’t walk, talk, think symbolically or overhaul the nation’s banking system. Yet as social emulsifiers go, nothing can beat a happily babbling baby. A baby is born knowing how to work the crowd. A toothless smile here, a musical squeal there, and even hard-nosed cynics grow soft in the head and weak in the knees.

In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine. As Dr. Hrdy argues in her latest book, “Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding,” which will be published by Harvard University Press in April, human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.

More here.

Adeela Suleman. Assembled Bondage. 2008

Metal sculpture.

More here, here and here.

Owen Edwards in Smithsonian Magazine:

At the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum (NASM), a display of six unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) demonstrates what happens when the little airplanes of my childhood get serious. Take the five-pound, 45-inch wingspan AeroVironment RQ-14A “Dragon Eye.” Launched by hand, or with a bungee cord, the tiny scout plane is controlled by GPS coordinates entered into its guidance system with a standard laptop computer. Once aloft on its mission—to transmit video images of territory lying ahead of a marine infantry or transport unit—the little scout is completely autonomous.

“The video is received in special eyeglasses worn by one of the two marines who operate the plane,” says NASM curator Dik Daso. “Taking the pilot out of the plane [in reconnaissance missions] has been a concern for a long time,” says Daso, a former Air Force reconnaissance pilot. “All sorts of cosmic stuff can be done when the person is out of the vehicle. You can design things that are really stealthy.”

The pilotless Dragon Eye keeps marines from having to move into what may be hostile territory without knowing what's ahead. Two tiny video cameras in the nose cone—one positioned to look down, the other to look to the side—give an accurate view of what's on the ground, precise enough for mortar fire to be directed at perceived threats.

More here.

Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?

From a 1959 BBC interview (Russell is 87 here):

It can happen anywhere: a dinner table, a pub, a bus queue, a classroom, a bookshop. You strike up a conversation with someone you don’t know, and you’re getting on OK, and then suddenly, without warning, you hear the five words that mean the relationship has no future beyond the time it takes to say them: “I think you’ll like it.” This phrase is presumptuous enough when used to refer to, say, a crisp flavour; if, however, you happen to be talking about books or films or music, then it is completely unforgivable, a social solecism on a par with bottom-pinching. You think I’ll like it, do you? Well, it has taken me more than 50 years to get anywhere near an understanding of what I think I might like, and even then I get it wrong half the time, so what chance have you got? Every now and again I meet someone who is able to make shrewd and thoughtful recommendations within the first five years of our acquaintance but for the most part the people that I listen to I’ve known for a couple of decades, a good chunk of which has been spent talking about the things we love and hate.

more from The Times Online here.

Up a steep, strange, snake of a street and sheer, straight steps is a set of concrete buildings clinging onto the side of the Hollywood Hills. In an attempt to penetrate the bunker (I have an appointment, after all) I mistakenly walk into an empty recording studio, where a state-of-the-art mixing table spans several metres and a blank cinema screen covers a wall in front of it. Beyond this, the place is all skylights and high slit windows – a bright but viewless series of rooms with severe angles and unpredictable shifts, blind corners around which are an empty kitchen or an empty meeting room with a single lightbulb drawn in chalk on a blackboard. Once inside, its geography is impossible to decipher. I have come to meet David Lynch, who lives, works and meditates here – the bunker includes offices, an outdoor painting studio and a home.

more from The Guardian here.

Ilene R. Prusher in the Christian Science Monitor:

Israel plans to demolish 88 homes in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, to make way for a new archaeological park, adding new fuel the slow-burning dispute over Jerusalem.

A variety of neighborhood activists, Muslim leaders in Jerusalem, and even figures from the Palestinian Authority (PA) held a press conference Wednesday, saying that Israel was trying to minimize the Arab presence in this city claimed by both Palestinians and Jews as their capital. They say such a move amounts to ethnic cleansing.

“They have made a decision to clear out 88 houses, and with about three families living in each of these houses, we're looking at the eviction of about 1,500 people. But people in Silwan are clinging to their land and will not leave, despite the eviction orders,” says Adnan Husseini, who is PA President Mahmoud Abbas's adviser on Jerusalem Affairs.

More here.

Some Final Words
Billy Collins

I cannot leave you without saying this:
the past is nothing.,
a nonmemory, a phantom,
a soundproof closet in which Johann Strauss
is composing another waltz no one can hear.

It is a fabrication, best forgotten,
a wellspring of sorrow
that waters a field of bitter vegetation.

Leave it behind.
Take your head out of your hands
and arise from the couch of melancholy
where the window-light falls against your face
and the sun rides across the autumn sky,
steely behind the bare trees,
glorious as the high stains of violins.

But forget Strauss.
And forget his younger brother,
the poor bastard who was killed in a fall
from a podium while conducting a symphony.

Forget the past,
forget the stunned audience on its feet,
the absurdity of their formal clothes
in the face of sudden death,
forget their collective gasp,
the murmur and huddle over the body,
the creaking of the lowered curtain.

Forget Strauss
with that encore look in his eye
and his tiresome industry:
more than five hundred finished compositions!
He even wrote a polka for his mother.
That alone is enough to make me flee the past,
evacuate its temples,
and walk alone under the stars
down these dark paths strewn with acorns,
feeling nothing but the crisp October air,
the swing of my arms
and the rhythm of my stepping—
a man of the present who has forgotten
every composer, every great battle,
just me,
a thin reed blowing in the night.