People,

I want to state publically that this is one of the happiest days of my life.

Yes, I know all the reasons not to be too happy, thank you.

I am happy.

It is something to have one’s faith restored, to feel connected to something bigger than oneself, to feel inspired, to feel ready to give rather than take.

As a non-white person who grew up in Pakistan, I took it for granted that white men ran the world. My father served in the British Government of India. Now, there is a person even darker than me who will be the leader of the free world. It is a wonderful and remarkable thing, and a testament to the true beauty of America. I am finally undeniably proud to be a citizen of this crazy melting pot, this so pleasing instantiation of brotherhood and tolerance, this America!

Last year, I became a US citizen at a time when I almost felt ashamed pulling out my blue passport when traveling; henceforth, I shall display it with pride.

I have not slept all night and must get some rest. To my fellow Americans, and also to everyone else, my heartfelt congratulations. Believe it or not, the world has changed today. For the better.

Yours,

Abbas

Over at the Bruno Schulz’s Stories website:

IN JULY, my father went to take the waters, and he left me with my mother and older brother, prey to the glowing white and stunning days of summer. We browsed — stupefied by the light — through that great book of the holiday, in which every page was ablaze with splendour, and had, deep inside, a sweetly dripping pulp of golden pears.
    Adela returned on luminous mornings, like Pomona^* out of the fire of the enkindled day, tipping the sun’s colourful beauty from her basket — glistening wild cherries, full of water under their transparent skin, mysterious black cherries whose aroma surpassed what would be realised in their taste, and apricots in whose golden pulp lay the core of the long afternoons. And alongside that pure poetry of fruits she unloaded slices of meat and a keyboard of calf ribs, swollen with energy and goodness, and algae of vegetables calling to mind slaughtered octopus and jellyfish — the raw material of dinner, its flavour still unformed and sterile — dinner’s vegetative and telluric ingredients with their wild and field aroma.

For the month of November, the current and 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal is free.  Michelle  Sieff on Africa, its diversity and its prospects:

Africa in 2033 will look somewhat like Africa in 2008: it will still face challenges, but different challenges than today. Internal wars, such as in Sudan, will no longer be the primary threats to the security of Africa’s populations. Instead, transnational organized crime syndicates and radical Islamist groups will become the greatest threats to civilian life in Africa. But there are positives too: economic growth will continue, democracy will spread, though its progress may be halting and unpredictable.

Today, some 50 years after the beginning of the independence era, Africa is far more complicated than the image of Africa in the popular imagination. All too often, Africa is still seen as the basket-case continent of Darfur and Zimbabwe, of “blood diamonds,” “resource curses,” and “poverty traps.” In reality, however, Africa is a humdrum continent, and is part of the general trend towards economic and political progress shared by other parts of the world.

Timothy Fitzgerald over at The Immanent Frame:

The invention of “religions” in the modern discursive form is also the invention of the secular state and the modern idea of “science” as essentially different from “religion.” In any given context of modernity we are always dealing with “religion” in various binary oppositions, which are all dependent on the bottom-line distinction between religion and whatever is assumed to be non-religion, now referred to rhetorically as the secular. In discussions about religion, its separation from, and thus relation to, other discursive non-religious domains such as science, politics or economics is usually only acknowledged tacitly and in passing, if at all, conveying (say) an untroubled and unquestioned sense that religion and politics or religion and science or religion and economics are essentially distinct, and thus in danger of getting confused.

Max Blumenthal over at pollster.com:

Following the 2004 election, when partial and misleading results leaked out at mid day, the network consortium that conducts the exit polls decided to restrict access to a small number of analysts in a “quarantine room” for most of the day. During the primaries this year, and presumably tonight as well, they release their results and vote estimates to producers and reporters at the television networks and other subscriber organizations about about 5:00 p.m. eastern time. While some of that information will no doubt leak after 5:00 p.m, anything you see before that time claiming to be an “exit poll” is probably bogus and certainly not part of the official network exit poll apparatus (Tom Webster, an employee of Edison Research, blogged some details about life inside the quarantine room just before the Super Tuesday primaries).

And while I have your attention, let me offer some advice: Ignore leaked exit polls tonight. I know, I know. How can you ignore them? Everyone wants to know as much as possible about the outcome of this election as soon as possible. But you will do youself a favor if you ignore what leaks out before the polls close, or at least try not to jump to any conclusions about the likely outcome based on what you see. Why? First, the McCain campaign is right: Historically, the leaked exit poll results have “tended to overstate the Democratic vote,” and as I reported in March, and the early leaked results during the primaries tended to overstate the Obama vote as well.

Does that information help? Can we apply our own informal adjustment (Obama minus some percentage) and get an precise result? Maybe, but I would not advise it.

From The New York Times:

While Americans choose their next president, let us consider a question more amenable to science: Which candidate’s supporters have a better sense of humor? In strict accordance with experimental protocol, we begin by asking you to rate, on a scale of 1 (not funny at all) to 9 (hilarious) the following three attempts at humor:

A) Jake is about to chip onto the green at his local golf course when a long funeral procession passes by. He stops in midswing, doffs his cap, closes his eyes and bows in prayer. His playing companion is deeply impressed. “That’s the most thoughtful and touching thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. Jake replies, “Yeah, well, we were married 35 years.”

B) I think there should be something in science called the “reindeer effect.” I don’t know what it would be, but I think it’d be good to hear someone say, “Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.”

C) If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I’d say Flippy, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong, though. It’s Hambone.

Those were some of the jokes rated by nearly 300 people in Boston in a recent study.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Feverishly streaming clips of Obama over the past weeks, I’ve been struck by the freshness of his conversational style. In one interview on The Daily Show he explained how the electorate wanted to “look under the hood and kick the tyres” before they voted for him, implying solid construction while also invoking the American automotive tradition. If we unpack it a little further, there are other metaphors nestled within: he’s “roadworthy” and already has “a few miles on the clock”. In short, he has the necessary experience.

When faced with the thorny issue of whether Hillary’s experience as first lady had any bearing on her potential as a presidential candidate, Obama conceded that she had done “some heavy lifting on issues” during Bill Clinton’s time in office. The metaphor was damning and decisive, casting Hillary as a little oafish and clumsy, fit only for drudge work.

Kennedy knew the importance of words when he chose Robert Frost to speak at his inauguration. As he said in a speech in 1963 after the poet’s death: “When power corrupts, poetry cleanses … When power leads man towards his arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.” But as Michael Donaghy pointed out, Kennedy wasn’t beyond co-opting a little of this for himself: the rhetorical techniques deployed in his inauguration speech mirrored those of the Robert Frost’s poem The Gift Outright.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Democracy, as we all know, is a Greek word. Literally, it means “rule of the people.” To a proponent of democracy, then, it is not unfair to ask, “How have the people been ruling themselves?” In these days of election fever (or exhaustion), it is amusing, if not illustrative to remember that one prominent American openly proclaimed that the people stink and that democracy is a joke. I’m thinking, of course, of H.L. Mencken. Surveying the teeming hordes of American citizens, Mencken called them the “booboisie.” The booboisie is composed of idiots and mental children. “Ideas,” Mencken noted, “leave them unscathed; they are responsive only to emotions, and their emotions are all elemental — the emotions, indeed, of tabby-cats rather than of men.”

Mencken wrote these thoughts down in 1926’s Notes on Democracy (recently published in a new edition through Dissident Books with an introduction by Mencken biographer Marion Elizabeth Rodgers). Fear, Mencken thought, is the essential force driving human beings. The vast majority of us look simply to quell the terror in our hearts with basic comforts. Give us sweet things to eat and some light pornography and we crawl back to our domiciles awaiting further instruction. Rarely, a human being will be able to conquer that basic fear and take a stab at truth or beauty. Rarely.

More here.

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

My father, Max Fish, was a plumber. His Uncle Frank, to whom he apprenticed, was a plumber. My brother Ron was a plumber until he retired at an early age to build villas in St. Kitts. And, as the oldest son, I was supposed to have been a plumber; my father never did quite understand what I chose to do instead.

Given these pieces of autobiography, you can understand why I have been more than slightly bemused to find that another plumber – Joe by name (although his name isn’t Joe and he’s not a licensed plumber) – has become a storied figure in a national election.

Max’s was a better story…

More here.

Gregory Crewdson. Untitled from the series “Beneath the Roses”. 2004.

Digital chromogenic print.

More here and here.

Steven Poole at Unspeak:

George Packer at the New Yorker, whose writing I admire greatly, has had it up to here with the vocabulary of the current US election campaign:

When this is all over, certain half-dead words will need to be put out of their misery with a quick bullet to the back of the head. My candidates for a mercy verbicide: pivot, tank, cave, pushback, gravitas, message, game-changer, challenges, the entire litany of Palinesque nouns, attack dog, battleground, pork-barrel, earmark, impacting, and impactful. Other words that are too important to be executed will need to undergo a long and painful rehabilitation before they can be safely used again: change, experience, straight, truth, lie, victory, character, judgment, populist, and elite.

So far, so potentially interesting. But one’s heart sinks at what follows:

It was Orwell, of course, who first explained the relation between decadent language and corrupt politics.

Of course, it wasn’t. The relation had been explained previously by John Arbuthnot, Confucius, and Cicero, among many others, as I pointed out in the Introduction to Unspeak. Packer goes on:

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” [Orwell] wrote in “Politics and the English Language.” “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.” In our time, the corruption takes a different form. Instead of defending the Soviet purges with Latinate words like “liquidate,” politicians and journalists use clichés mainly borrowed from sports, war, and rural life in order to seem to be saying something tough-minded when in fact they’re saying nothing.

Saying nothing? I beg to differ: when George W. Bush assures the American public that prisoners are being “questioned by experts”, or when Condoleezza Rice refuses calls for a ceasefire on the grounds of seeking a “sustainable ceasefire”, or when Martin Amis complains that his society is unable to “pass judgment on any ethnicity”, they are definitely saying something. The task (heroically shouldered by this blog, among others) is to figure out what exactly that something is. Packer claims to be offering a different diagnosis than Orwell’s, but really they are making the same claim: that politicians are not worth listening to.

Such nihilism is, in my view, Orwell’s most malign influence.

Nouriel Roubini in Forbes:

Aggregate demand is now collapsing in the U.S. and advanced economies, and sharply decelerating in emerging markets. There is a huge excess capacity for the production of manufactured goods in the global economy, as the massive, and excessive, capital expenditure in China and Asia (Chinese real investment is now close to 50% of gross domestic product) has created an excess supply of goods that will remain unsold as global aggregate demand falls.

Commodity prices are in free fall, with oil prices alone down over 50% from their July peak (and the Baltic Freight Index–the best measure of international shipping costs–is 90% down from its peak in May). Finally, labor market slack is sharply rising in the U.S., and rising, as well, in Europe and other advanced economies.

Next question: What are financial markets telling us about the risks of stag-deflation?

First, yields on 10-year Treasury bonds have fallen by about 50 basis points since Oct. 14, getting close to their previous 2008 lows. Also, the two-year Treasury yield has fallen by about 150 basis points in the last month.

Second, gold prices–a typical hedge against rising global inflation–are now sharply falling.

Finally, and more important, yields on Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) due in five years or less have now become higher than yields on conventional Treasuries of similar maturity.

///
Election Day
Willaim Carlos Williams

Warm sun, quiet air
an old man sits

in the doorway of
a broken house—

boards for windows
plaster falling

from between the stones
and strokes the head

of a spotted dog

////

This is an honest and reasonable piece by Khalidi, it also has the virtue of being right. To refer to this man as anti-semitic is simply absurd. Notice, btw, the degree to which he discusses failures in Palestinian leadership and tactics across the board while simultaneously condemning the root problem, the Israeli military occupation.

The “Palestine Question” has been with us for sixty years. During this time it has become a running sore, its solution appearing ever more distant. Whether the events sixty years ago that created this question solved the previously perennial “Jewish Question” is once again open to debate. This is the case after many years when the apparent triumph of Zionism stilled doubts and drowned out the protests of those who argued that what purported to be the solution to one problem had created an entirely different one.

It is considered by some to be a slur on Israel and Zionism, and indeed even tantamount to anti-Semitism, to suggest that these events sixty years ago should be the subject of anything but unmitigated joy. Commemoration, or even analysis, of what Palestinians call their national catastrophe, al-Nakba–the expulsion, flight and loss of their homes by a majority of their people sixty years ago–is thus considered not in terms of this seminal event’s meaning to at least 8 million Palestinians today (some estimates are over 10 million) but only because it is directly related to the founding of Israel. Palestinians presumably do not have the right to recall, much less mourn, their national disaster if this would rain on the parade of celebrating Zionists everywhere. The fact that the 1948 war that created Israel also created the largest refugee problem in the Middle East (until the US occupation of Iraq turned 4 million people into refugees) must therefore be swept under the rug. Also disregarded is the obvious fact that it would have been impossible to create a Jewish state in a land nearly two-thirds of whose population was Arab without some form of ethnic cleansing.

more from The Nation here.

Studs Terkel, who made his name listening to ordinary folks talk about their ordinary lives — and who turned that knack for conversation into a much-honored literary career — died Friday. He was 96. Terkel died of old age at his home in Chicago, his son Dan said.

“He lived a long, eventful, satisfying, though sometimes tempestuous life,” Dan Terkell said. “I think that pretty well sums it up.”

The author of blockbuster oral histories on World War II, the Great Depression and contemporary attitudes toward work, Terkel roamed the country engaging an astounding cross-section of Americans in tape-recorded chats — about their dreams, their fears, their chewing gum, about racism, courage, dirty floors and the Beatles.

more from the LA Times here.

A poet should never fall in love with another poet — love is already too much like gambling on oil futures. Two poets in love must succumb to the same folie à deux as the actor and the actress, the magician and the fellow magician, because each knows already the flaws beneath the greasepaint, the pigeons hidden in top hats, all the pockmarked truth beneath illusion. Real lovers, Shakespeare long ago reminded us, have reeking breath and hair like a scouring pad.

Lovers may be permitted an exception to this ironclad rule, if they never achieve the bliss of consummation — and therefore never have to wake to the beloved’s morning breath the morning after. Many would-be lovers have been divided by family, law or plain bad luck; before the days of long-distance phone calls or e-mail, the sublimated affair was conducted by postage stamp. The letters of Nietzsche and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Pirandello and Marta Abba, Gautier and Carlotta Grisi show that, though literature has always been good for love (think how many seductions may be chalked up to Shakespeare’s sonnets), love was even better for literature if there was a mailbox nearby.

more from the NY Times here.

From lensculture.com:

Photographs and text by Katarina Radovic

The series of images A Husband in Paris was set out as a playful comment on the idea of marrying abroad for papers, due to political isolation in economically underdeveloped countries. This was a starting point in my work, which, during the course of its progress, acquired a number of other meanings related to the choice of place and the characters photographed.

The scenario is the following: I myself took up the role of a young woman from Eastern Europe in the search of a husband in Paris, the model of a Western “city of dreams“. Walking across the city districts within the period of several weeks, I approached candidates asking them whether they would be willing to “marry me” and what it would look like. After a short introductory “sniffing“, they happily agreed to pose together with me for a snapshot, in which we played the role of a potential couples.

The aesthetic complexity of these staged images surpasses the strictly political aspects and stretches to romantic relationships between possible marriage partners as well as the seduction of the young woman who, in her appointed role, does not hide that she is “in the hurry”.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

The literature about Abraham Lincoln is so vast as to defy comprehension, yet historians and other scholars — not to mention novelists, poets, artists, sculptors, even composers — continue to find new and revealing things to say about this greatest of all Americans. Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, is the latest case in point, a book that is certain to become essential to our understanding of the 16th president. To be sure, many others before Kaplan have dealt in various ways with Lincoln’s love of literature and writing, but no one has explored the subject so deeply or found so much meaning in it. Kaplan’s central subjects are Lincoln’s “compelling interest in language as the instrumental vehicle for civilization and culture” and his specific interest in written language, about which he once said:

” Writing— the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye — is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination which necessarily underlies the most crude and general conception of it — great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space; and great, not only in its direct benefits, but greatest help, to all other inventions. . . . Its utility may be conceived, by the reflection, that to it we owe everything which distinguishes us from savages. Take it from us, and the Bible, all history, all science, all government, all commerce, and nearly all social intercourse go with it.”

More here.