by Liz Mermin

When I was asked two summers ago if I’d like to make a documentary on “Bollywood,” I thought: melodramatic love stories, endless musical numbers, glittery kitsch… not my thing.  Six months later I was at a trendy café in Mumbai listening to a vigilante cop once known as “Bombay’s Dirty Harry” extol the virtues of P. G. Wodehouse and Jodie Foster. ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’ is a cliché documentary filmmakers take seriously, but when the fiction in question is Bollywood, it’s quite a challenge.  Except in Bombay.

That documentary has just been broadcast and is about to come out on DVD, so it seems as good a time as any to reflect on the madness of it all.   If you aren’t familiar with this story, please pay attention, because it’s complicated.  The Bollywood film we chose to focus on for the documentary was called “Shootout at Lokhandwala”: a star-studded, highly-dramatized retelling of an incident that took place in 1991 in a middle-class housing complex in the Bombay suburbs, in which seven alleged gangsters and over 400 cops spent four and a half hours in the middle of the afternoon shooting at each other.  At the end of the day the seven gangsters (or in some versions, six gangsters and one hostage) were dead.  There were some at the time who suggested that the police reaction might have been a bit heavy-handed, but for the most part the media treated the incident as a victory for law and order, and the lead officer, A. A. Khan, as a hero.  (Khan later wrote a book about the incident, sprinkled with quotes about justice from, among others, Tennyson, Emerson, and Martin Luther King.)

The film had a lot going for it, by Bollywood standards: a dramatic story, a huge star cast, a hot young director, and a production house famous for edgy fare (as well as, if one believed the rumours, more than a passing acquaintance with the underworld).  But there was a problem.  The actor playing the lead role of A. A. Khan, superstar Sanjay Dutt, was on trial for weapons possession, in connection with the largest terrorist attack in India’s history, and could at any point be sent to jail.

It started in 1993, when Dutt allegedly received some weapons (three AK-56 rifles, a few dozen hand grenades, and a pistol) from a notorious gangster with close ties to the film industry.  He said at the time that he needed the weapons for self-defense, because his father – a beloved film-star turned MP – had been helping Muslim riot victims, and as a result Hindu nationalists were threatening the family.  Shortly after Dutt received the weapons, a series of bomb-blasts ripped through Bombay, killing over 250 people and injuring 700 more.  Dutt’s weapons suppliers were alleged to be behind the blasts, and the film star became one of the 125 accused in what would become the longest trial in India’s history.

Over the next fourteen years, although (or because) Dutt was in and out of jail, his career took off.  He made over 50 films – the most successful being one in which he plays a gold-hearted gangster who receives ethics lessons from Mahatma Gandhi’s ghost.  The fact that the star might be sent to jail at any moment didn’t stop the industry’s top producers from signing him, possibly because his predicament seemed to deepen the devotion of his fans, who were convinced that he was the victim of political machinations.  But just as “Shootout” was going into production, verdicts came down: Dutt was acquitted of terror charges, but convicted of weapons possession.  The judge granted him provisional bail in dribs and drabs while he awaited sentence, requiring him to report to court almost every week; and the filmmakers had to get “Shootout” in the can before their star was put away.

It turns out that nothing is easy in Bollywood, and what should have been a cake-walk to fame and fortune for the unproven young director and his team became a test of patience and strategic ingenuity.  Shots and reverse shots were filmed weeks, even months apart, with ample use of body doubles.  Scenes that should have been shot in three days were completed in three hours.  Sets went up and down so quickly you couldn’t be sure they’d ever been there.  And while hundreds of technicians frantically embedded thousands of tiny explosives in the walls of the fake housing complex, the vigilante cop and the convicted film star palled around. “I suppose he got carried away,” Khan said, when I asked how he felt about Dutt’s troubles with the law.  Dutt himself looked surprisingly vulnerable, with sad matinee eyes that could melt any heart – though not, it would turn out, that of the judge.

If this is your reality, why would you turn to fiction?

The scary thing about documentaries is you never know how your story will end: would they finish the film? Would it be a hit or a flop? Would Dutt go to jail? If you’re interested in finding out, the documentary – called “Shot in Bombay” – is playing at the MIAAC film festival in New York on Nov 8 and is coming out on DVD in Europe.  And if you’d like to see how Bollywood turns a four hour shootout into twenty minutes of hand-to hand combat, ending with a gooey impalement, you might check out “Shootout at Lokhandawala” – also playing at MIAAC.

Liz Mermin is a documentary filmmaker.

Wolf Boewig.

Bangladesh; stone-quarry near the indian border. More than 2000 men, women and children work here. Next to the shore of the Meghna-River they dig for stones which will be used for construction-work in the south.

More on this superbly sensitive German photographer here, here and here.

Thanks to Abbas and through him to Wolf.

Robert Crease in Physics World:

Its name is Quantum Cloud. Visitors to London cannot miss it when visiting the park next to the Millennium Dome or taking a cruise along the Thames. It rises 30 m above a platform on the banks of the river, and from a distance looks like a huge pile of steel wool. As you draw closer, you can make out the hazy, ghost-like shape of a human being in its centre. It is a sculpture, by the British artist Antony Gormley, made from steel rods about a metre and a half long that are attached to each other in seemingly haphazard ways. Framed by the habitually grey London sky, it does indeed look cloud-like. But “quantum”?

The word quantum has a familiar and well-documented scientific history. Max Planck introduced it into modern discourse in 1900 to describe how light is absorbed and emitted by black bodies. Such bodies seemed to do so only at specific energies equal to multiples of the product of a particular frequency and a number called h, which he called a quantum, the Latin for “how much”. Planck and others assumed that this odd, non-Newtonian idea would soon be replaced by a better explanation of the behaviour of light.

No such luck. Instead, quantum’s presence in science grew. Einstein showed that light acted as if it were “grainy”, while Bohr incorporated the quantum into his account of how atomic electrons made unpredictable leaps from one state to another. The quantum began cropping up in different areas of physics, then in chemistry and other sciences. A fully fleshed out theory, called quantum mechanics, was developed by 1927.

Less familiar and well documented, though, is quantum’s cultural history. Soon after 1927 the word, and affiliated terms such as “complementarity” and “uncertainty principle”, began appearing in academic disciplines outside the sciences. Even the founders of quantum mechanics, including Bohr and Heisenberg, applied such terms to justice, free will and love. Quantum has made unpredictable leaps to unexpected places ever since. The next James Bond film, for example, is to be called Quantum of Solace.

Rob Mifsud talks to Hervé This, in The Globe and Mail:

Trained as a physical chemist, Dr. This is the godfather of molecular gastronomy, the emerging discipline of understanding the physical and chemical structure of food and the scientific processes of cooking.

Naysayers accuse him of tarnishing culinary traditions, but to Michelin three-star chefs such as Spain’s Ferran Adria and Paris’s Pierre Gagnaire, he’s a guru. Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor and Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking, the first of his books to be released in English, set out to make kitchen science accessible to the lay cook. We talked to him about distilling countless napkins’ worth of experimental results into practical advice on how to prepare meltingly tender meat and why all you need is a good oven.

The term “molecular gastronomy” is now associated with chefs like Ferran Adria, but you disagree with that usage. Why?

They are doing molecular cooking. The truth is that molecular gastronomy is science, molecular cooking is cooking, and chefs are not scientists.

What equipment do you consider essential for home cooks?

A good oven, certainly. Induction is fine, because induction is more efficient than a gas stove. That’s all.

Adam Kirsch reviews Raymond Geuss’s Philosophy and Real Politics, in City Journal:

Raymond Geuss, a political philosopher who teaches at the University of Cambridge, does not seem like the kind of man who would try to devour his opponents. But his intention in Philosophy and Real Politics, his short, sharp new book, is the same as Thrasymachus’s: to introduce a note of realism into contemporary philosophical debates about justice, by force if necessary. “I object to the claim that politics is applied ethics,” he writes in his introduction. Rather than starting out, like Socrates, with questions about the good or the just, we should ask the question famously posed by Lenin: “Who whom?” That is, in any actual society, who has power, what do they use it for, and who suffers as a result? “To think politically,” writes Geuss, “is to think about agency, power, and interests, and the relations among these.”

Of course, this is hardly an unprecedented approach to political philosophy. In addition to Lenin, Geuss invokes Hobbes, Nietzsche, and Max Weber as teachers in his hard-headed analysis of power. But Geuss’s perspective is especially needed today, he believes, because American political thought is dominated by what he sees as the uselessly abstract neo-Kantian theories of Robert Nozick and especially John Rawls. These thinkers commit what Geuss views as the cardinal sin of political thought: they begin not by addressing the concrete power relations of their societies, but by speculating at will about imaginary concepts like rights and fairness.

Andrew Billen in The Times:

If, a couple of Mondays ago, on your way to pay your council tax at Woolwich town hall you happened to get lost and found yourself in its basement, you would have chanced upon not one but two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Seamus Heaney, the English language’s most-read living poet, should surely, I thought, be digging a sod somewhere or debating poetry over a Guinness. And, even at 78, his fellow grand old man of letters, the Caribbean author Derek Walcott, would have looked more himself striding from the waves on to one of the St Lucian beaches evoked in his great poem, Osmeros.

But here the two friends were in southeast London, scruffy jackets, crumpled brief-cases at their feet, up to their ears in a project that in itself sounds like a game of Consequences: an opera adapted from Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes, a version of Sophocles’ Antigone, to be directed by Walcott and staged at Shakespeare’s Globe. It is the Globe’s first opera, the first opera Walcott has directed and about the seventh Heaney will have ever been to.

The poets were having fun, or at least the thrice-married Walcott was, flinging his arms round his Antigone, the German singer Idit Arad, who remarked, in praise of Heaney, how unusual it was to sing arias containing thoughts more complex than “I love you, I love you. Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.” Heaney confined himself to reminding Brian Green, singing the part of the tyrant Creon, not to rely on the Faber edition of The Burial at Thebes, as he had changed some lines for the libretto.

The conductor, Peter Manning, whose company is producing the piece, eventually called lunch, and the laureates and I retired to a room where a dancer was rehearsing. As he flew around the space, we sat on plastic chairs, a pile of M&S sandwiches behind us.

Heaney seemed to regard this operafication of The Burial at Thebes as a fait accompli. Eighteen months ago, he had received a letter from the composer Dominique Le Gendre saying that she and Manning intended making an opera of his 2004 reworking of Sophocles’ tragedy of personal versus civic duty. He did not like to object, especially since Walcott was committed and he had long wanted Heaney to write a play he could direct.

Over at fora.tv”

Author Michael Ruhlman and Chef Dan Barber talk about modern industrial farming and agriculture in the United States as part of Chautauqua Institutions week long program called “What’s for Dinner: Food and Politics in the 21st Century.”

Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation:

The Post today reports that Al Qaeda has endorsed John McCain for president. With seemingly impeccable logic, the cave dwellers — actually, more likely, Quetta-squatters — say that by electing McCain, the United States will commit itself to an extension of President Bush’s blunders and thus exhaust itself militarily and financially.

Of course, Al Qaeda says that the way it can assist McCain is through a terrorist act that will rally Americans to his side.

Saying that McCain will continue the “failing march of his predecessor,” Al Qaeda added:

“Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election. … [We] will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so that he takes revenge for them against al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda then will succeed in exhausting America.”

The quotes came from an AQ-linked website called al-Hesbah and were written by Muhammad Haafid, a longtime contributor to the site.

Conspiracy theorists, along with pessimists and Cassandras on the left, will no doubt see in those words an imminent fatal blow to the Obama campaign in the form of a looming attack that would shift the electoral dynamic. I wouldn’t worry. If the cave-dwellers and Quetta-squatters could attack the United States, they would have done it by now. I suppose its remotely possible that Al Qaeda types might blow something up, but there isn’t a chance in the world that in the next two weeks they can do anything that could shift the election. In fact, by stepping up attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda does indeed have some actual ability to kill people, the organization will only add to Obama’s arguments that the Bush-McCain policies have failed.

From The Guardian:

A Mercy by Toni Morrison reviewed by Tim Adams

Since winning the Nobel Prize in 1993, Morrison has, not altogether reluctantly, taken on the voice of America’s conscience. After the marvels of empathy that were Beloved and, to a lesser extent, Jazz, that public voice has grown – she has sometimes seemed a spokeswoman rather than a writer – and the voice of her novels has become sparer. In this book, a good deal of Morrison’s stark, almost biblical imaginative power is on display, without all of her former detailing energy. Nathaniel Hawthorne has become her model in some ways; like him, she is capable of creating fictional environments in which everything can come to seem symbolic. Portentous is not always a comfortable tone, but in the coming American weeks it may well be the appropriate one. The first line of A Mercy? ‘Don’t be afraid.’

More here.

Amanda Vaill in The Washington Post:

EMILY POST: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners By Laura Claridge

It was in part to make that world more hospitable to others that Post embarked on her magnum opus, Etiquette: In Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, in which she declared that “charm of manner . . . and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members.” Despite the book’s “glacial prose” and a morality-play dramatis personae that included such characters as the Toploftys, the Kindharts, Mrs. Bobo Gilding and the Richan Vulgars, Claridge argues that Etiquette’s emphasis on manners over money places it in a “triumvirate of the modern moment,” with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt and Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence. By the 1930s it had sold over a million copies, and its author had become a brand name, with a syndicated newspaper column and radio show, all of which she had engineered on her own initiative (and often without the help of an agent). The book remained on bestseller lists through World War II and the social changes that followed; and although attempts to extend her reach to television were (in the words of her grandson and manager) “a disaster,” Post’s influence and activity continued well into the 1950s: The last edition of Etiquette overseen by its author was published in 1955, and the book has never gone out of print.

Much of Claridge’s narrative is devoted to an examination of Post’s career, and accounts of contractual negotiations — not to mention tallies of sales and circulation figures, exegeses of revisions and lengthy quotes from reviews — don’t always make for compelling reading. Such details do, however, provide a measure of the ways in which a girl who just wanted to be a worthy heir to her father turned herself into one of the most powerful women in America, second only to Eleanor Roosevelt, according to a 1950 poll of women journalists. They also show how (as Claridge puts it) Post’s Etiquette was “a cultural history of her nation.”

In 1960 — having lived through the introduction of the telephone, automobile, airplane, radio and television — Emily Post died politely in her bed. “Just over two weeks later,” Claridge tells us, “during a General Assembly meeting at the United Nations, Comrade Nikita Khruschchev removed his shoe and banged it on the table.” As Life magazine asked, “What Would Emily Post Have Said?” ·

More here.

///
The Physiology of Kisses
Tony Hoagland

The kiss begins……………in the center of the belly
and travels upwards……  through the diaphragm and
throatalong fine filaments…………which no forensic scientist
has ever been able to find.

From the hard flower………of the kisser’s mouth,
the kisses leave the body……   in single file,
into the reciprocal mouth…  of the kiss-recipient,
which for me is Kath.

What can I say? My kisses make her happy and I need that.
And sometimes, bending over her,
I have the unmistakable impression
………………   .that I am watering a plant.

gripping myself softly………by the handle,
tilting my spout……………… forward
pouring what I need to give
………………into the changing shape of her thirst.

I keep leaning forward………   to pour out
what continues to rise up
from the fountain……………of the kisses
which I, also, …………… am drinking from.

//

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll has a couple of interesting posts on the seeming collapse of the wave function and Saturn’s moon Hyperion:

One of the annoying/fascinating things about quantum mechanics is the fact the world doesn’t seem to be quantum-mechanical. When you look at something, it seems to have a location, not a superposition of all possible locations; when it travels from one place to another, it seems to take a path, not a sum over all paths. This frustration was expressed by no lesser a person than Albert Einstein, quoted by Abraham Pais, quoted in turn by David Mermin in a lovely article entitled “Is the Moon There when Nobody Looks?“:

I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I looked at it.

The conventional quantum-mechanical answer would be “Sure, the moon exists when you’re not looking at it. But there is no such thing as `the position of the moon’ when you are not looking at it.”

Nevertheless, astronomers over the centuries have done a pretty good job predicting eclipses as if there really was something called `the position of the moon,’ even when nobody (as far as we know) was looking at it. There is a conventional quantum-mechanical explanation for this, as well: the correspondence principle, which states that the predictions of quantum mechanics in the limit of a very large number of particles (a macroscopic body) approach those of classical Newtonian mechanics. This is one of those vague but invaluable rules of thumb that was formulated by Niels Bohr back in the salad days of quantum mechanics. If it sounds a little hand-wavy, that’s because it is.

The vagueness of the correspondence principle prods a careful physicist into formulating a more precise version, or perhaps coming up with counterexamples. And indeed, counterexamples exist: namely, when the classical predictions for the system in question are chaotic. In chaotic systems, tiny differences in initial conditions grow into substantial differences in the ultimate evolution. It shouldn’t come as any surprise, then, that it is hard to map the predictions for classically chaotic systems onto average values of predictions for quantum observables. Essentially, tiny quantum uncertainties in the state of a chaotic system grow into large quantum uncertainties before too long, and the system is no longer accurately described by a classical limit, even if there are large numbers of particles.

Some years ago, Wojciech Zurek and Juan Pablo Paz described a particularly interesting real-world example of such a system:  Hyperion, a moon of Saturn that features an irregular shape and a spongy surface texture.

In the New Yorker, Alex Ross reviews this production of John Adams’ opera:

I first heard John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic”—an opera set in the days and hours leading up to the first nuclear test, on July 16, 1945—while driving toward the patch of New Mexico desert where the detonation took place. In the course of chronicling the first production of “Atomic,” at the San Francisco Opera in 2005, I had arranged to visit the Trinity site, and brought with me the composer’s computer realization of his score. An eerie trip ensued. Even as the hot gleam of the highway gave way to desolate roads and fenced-off military zones, Adams’s characteristic musical gestures—the rich-hued harmonies and bopping rhythms that have made repertory items of “Harmonielehre,” “Nixon in China,” and “Short Ride in a Fast Machine”—disintegrated into broken clockwork rhythms, acid harmonies, and electronic noise.

Rehearsals for the première revealed “Atomic” to be not only an ominous score but also an uncommonly beautiful one. Scene after scene glows with strange energy. There is an inexplicably lovely choral ode to the bomb’s thirty-two-pointed explosive shell, with unison female voices floating above lush string-and-wind chords and glitterings of chimes and celesta. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the atomic project, and Kitty, his brilliant, alcoholic wife, sing sumptuous duets over an orchestra steeped in the decadent glamour of Wagner and Debussy. Oppenheimer’s central aria, a setting of the John Donne sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” has a stark Renaissance eloquence, its melody a single taut wire. The night of the countdown is taken up with a hallucinatory sequence of convulsive choruses, lurching dances, and truncated lyric flights. After the first run-through with singers and orchestra, it seemed clear that “Doctor Atomic” was Adams’s most formidable achievement to date.

Over at NYPL Live, an audio conversation with Ferran Adrià, Corby Kummer and Harold McGee:

No one can get into elBulli, Ferran Adrià’s restaurant on the northeast coast of Spain. But plenty of people certainly try: every year, the restaurant receives over two million requests for only 8,000 seats during the six months it is open. For the other six months, Adrià, who is proud to be called the “Salvador Dali of the Kitchen,” travels, dreams, and creates at his “food laboratory” in Barcelona, called elBulli Taller, where his team includes a chemist and an industrial designer who also design plates and serving utensils to go with the food. No wonder, as Corby Kummer wrote in The Atlantic, “making the twisty two-hour drive from Barcelona for a dinner that ends well into the wee hours has become a notch on every foodie’s belt—perhaps the notch, given the international derby to get reservations.”

For mortals who won’t be making the trip soon—or who didn’t hit the lottery last year in the German contemporary-art exhibition Documenta, which flew two people at random per day to el Bulli to experience “the exhibition” that is dinner at elBulli—Adrià has given the world A Day at elBulli: An Insight into the Ideas, Methods and Creativity of Ferran Adria. This is the first book to take a behind-the-scenes look at the restaurant whose sources and methods every ambitious chef wants to know. It shows a full working day from dawn until the last late-night guests leave, using photographs, menus, recipes and diagrams that reveal the restaurant’s preparations, food philosophy, and surroundings.

What have the rest of us been missing?

Meera Nanda in Economic and Political Weekly:

“New cars smell the same in India as they do in the US”, was the first thought that came to my mind as I took my seat in my nephew’s new Hyundai sedan in which he had come to pick me up from the Chandigarh airport. It was the first of August and I had just arrived in India for a short visit. My home- town was my first stop.  New cars in India may have the same leathery-plasticky smell as new cars every-where, but they look like nothing else in the world. The car that I was riding in, like the tens of thousands that roll out of auto-showrooms everyday all over India, was bedecked in red ribbons and had a garland of fresh marigolds strung around the number plates. The top of the front window had two swastikas and an “Om” painted on it in red colour. The drivi ng-wheel had the “auspicious” red string tied to it. The Ganesh idol on the dashboard had the residue of burnt incense in front of it.

My nephew told me that he was coming straight from the temple where he had taken his car for a vahan puja, a brand new Hindu ritual invented to bless the new vehicles that are clogging the Indian roads these days.  This being his first car – and the object of his loving devotion, at least for now – my nephew told me that he wanted to do something really, really, special for it. That is why, he told me, he took it to the temple where he had to shell out some serious cash for the ceremony, instead of getting a free puja which his dealership had offered as a part of the incentive package.  “What”? My ears pricked up. I must have sounded incredulous: “Car dealers offer free pujas? Do they have pundits on their staff now? Car dealerships have become new temples or what?” 

My nephew looked at me as if to ask where I had been all these years! This is nothing new, he said. Knowing how popular vahan pujas are, more innovative car-dealers throw in free pujas for their customers.

///
…From an epigram by Plato

A Way to Make a Living
James Wright

When I was a boy, a relative
Asked for me a job
At the Weeks Cemetary.
Think of all I could
have raised that summer,
That money, and me
Living at home,
Fattening and getting
Ready to live my life
Out on my knees, humming,
Kneading up docks
And sumac from
Those flawless clerks-at-court, those beautiful
Grocers and judges, the polished
Dead of whom we make
So much.

I could have stayed there with them.
Cheap, too.
Imagine, never
To have turned
Wholly away from the classic
Cold, the hill, so laid
Out, measure by seemly measure clipped
And mown by old man Albright
The Sexton.  That would have been a hell of
A way to make a living.

Thank you, no.
I am going to take my last nourishment
Of measure from a dark blue
Ripple on swell on ripple that makes
its own garlands.
My dead are secret wine jars
Of Tyrian commercial travelers.
Their happiness is a lost beginning, their graves
Drift in and out of the Mediterranean.

One of these days
The immortals, clinging to a beam of sunlight
Under water, delighted by delicate crustaceans,
Will dance up thirty-foot walls of radiance,
And waken,
The sea shining on their shoulders, the fresh
Wine in their arms.  Their ships have drifted away.
They are stars and snowflakes floating down
Into your hands, love.

From: Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose (1990).

///

  From Scientific American:

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

So annealed into pop culture are the five stages of grief—introduced in the 1960s by Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross based on her studies of the emotional state of dying patients—that they are regularly referenced without explication. There appears to be no evidence, however, that most people most of the time go through most of the stages in this or any other order. According to Russell P. Friedman, executive director of the Grief Recovery Institute in Sherman Oaks, Calif., and co-author, with John W. James, of The Grief Recovery Handbook (HarperCollins, 1998), “no study has ever established that stages of grief actually exist, and what are defined as such can’t be called stages. Grief is the normal and natural emotional response to loss…. No matter how much people want to create simple, bullet-point guidelines for the human emotions of grief, there are no stages of grief that fit any two people or relationships.”

Friedman’s assessment comes from daily encounters with people experiencing grief in his practice. University of Memphis psychologist Robert A. Neimeyer confirms this analysis. He concluded in his scholarly book Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss (American Psychological Association, 2001): “At the most obvious level, scientific studies have failed to support any discernible sequence of emotional phases of adaptation to loss or to identify any clear end point to grieving that would designate a state of ‘recovery.’”

Nevertheless, the urge to compress the complexities of life into neat and tidy stages is irresistible. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud insisted that we moved through five stages of psychosexual development: oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital. Developmental psychologist Erik H. Erikson countered with eight stages: trust vs. mistrust (infant); autonomy vs. doubt (toddler); initiative vs. guilt (preschooler); industry vs. inferiority (school-age period); identity vs. role confusion (adolescent); intimacy vs. isolation (young adult); generativity vs. stagnation (middle age); and integrity vs. despair (older adult). Harvard University psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg postulated that our moral development progresses through six stages: parental punishment, selfish hedonism, peer pressure, law and order, social contract and principled conscience.

More here.

From The New York Times:

John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters. His output alone (60 books, almost 40 of them novels or story collections) has been supernatural. More wizardly still is the ingenuity of his prose. He has now written tens of thousands of sentences, many of them tiny miracles of transubstantiation whereby some hitherto overlooked datum of the human or natural world — from the anatomical to the zoological, the socio-economic to the spiritual — emerges, as if for the first time, in the complete­ness of its actual being.

This isn’t writing. It is magic. And it’s not surprising that the author who practices it should be drawn repeatedly to the other, darker kind, though it is often masked in droll comedy. In the 1960s, surveying the field in the literary rat race, Updike put a hex, collectively, on the Jewish novelists (Bellow, Mailer, Malamud, Roth) then looming as his chief competition. He invented a wickedly funny composite parody, Henry Bech, whom he entraps in a web of debilitating spells, from hydrophobia to sleep-anxiety. At one point Bech squanders the best part of a work morning on the toilet, “leafing sadly through Commentary and Encounter,” journals not often hospitable to Updike’s own fiction. Lest we, or his rivals, miss the drift, Updike afflicts Bech with the cruelest curse of all, writer’s block, which leaves him unable to begin, much less finish, his next novel. “Am I blocked? I’d just thought of myself as a slow typist,” Bech weakly jokes to Bea, his current emasculating Gentile mistress, who has supplanted her even more emasculating sister in Bech’s bed. “What do you do,” Bea sneers in reply, “hit the space bar once a day?”

More here.

Hal Neidzviecki in the New York Times:

I used Facebook to create an “event” and invite my digital chums. Some of them, of course, didn’t live in Toronto, but I figured, it’s summer and people travel. You never know who might be in town. If they lived in Buffalo or Vancouver, they could just click “not attending,” and that would be that. Facebook gives people the option of R.S.V.P.’ing in three categories — “attending,” “maybe attending” and “not attending.”

After a week the responses stopped coming in and were ready to be tabulated. Fifteen people said they were attending, and 60 said maybe. A few hundred said not, and the rest just ignored the invitation altogether. I figured that about 20 people would show up. That sounded pretty good to me. Twenty potential new friends.

On the evening in question I took a shower. I shaved. I splashed on my tingly man perfume. I put on new pants and a favorite shirt. Brimming with optimism, I headed over to the neighborhood watering hole and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Eventually, one person showed up.

More here.  [Thanks to Husain Naqvi.]

Sandra Tsing Loh in The Atlantic Monthly:

I have accorded former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers the apparently unusual honor of actually reading her book, Why Women Should Rule the World, and I will now discuss it, whether you want me to or not.

By “you,” I mean the surly female ur-reader who long ago elected to ignore the encroaching continent of women’s- studies tomes. Forget the male ur-reader. At this point, I doubt a man exists who would dive eagerly into a book about women’s superior leadership qualities. As to which men should, well, if there remains even one male executive in Canton, Ohio, unaware that hiring a qualified, well-liked, profit-driven female is a good thing, I say let him slump gloomily in business class with his Chivas and Clive Cussler, because his skyrocketing cholesterol (“Cholesterol? What’s cholesterol?”) will soon fell him anyway.

To be gender-neutral where one can, it is fair to note that the genre of Important Unread Books — by authors with weighty resumes who seem to be on every TV talk show, and in every Barnes & Noble window display, gazing boldly, hands on hips — is apparently not limited to women. In response to my puzzled query as to why I’d seen Myers’s book mentioned everywhere but read almost nowhere, a (male) friend of mine in publishing wrote:

I’d say the Myers book sounds like the female equivalent of what we in the bookstore business (my former occupation) used to call Father’s Day Books, e.g. anything by David Halberstam and/or about a Founding Father. Do people buy these books? Sure — they make great, heavy Father’s Day gifts. Do people read them? Er — I don’t have any exact figures, but I imagine more than a few of them are holding up wobbly Black & Decker work benches right now.

More here.