Ellis Weiner in The New Yorker:

Hi, Ellis—

Let me introduce myself. My name is Gineen Klein, and I’ve been brought on as an intern to replace the promotion department here at Propensity Books. First, let me say that I absolutely love “Clancy the Doofus Beagle: A Love Story” and have some excellent ideas for promotion.

To start: Do you blog? If not, get in touch with Kris and Christopher from our online department, although at this point I think only Christopher is left. I’ll be out of the office from tomorrow until Monday, but when I get back I’ll ask him if he spoke to you. We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click “Endless,” and under “Contacts” just list everyone you’ve ever met. It would be great if you could post at least six hundred words every day until further notice.

If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent. You may have gotten the blast e-mail from Jason Zepp, your acquiring editor, saying that people who do this sort of thing will go to Hell, but just ignore it.

More here.

Tony Karon in The National:

Mr Obama has certainly not been deterred by failure thus far. His envoy, George Mitchell, is in the region pressing the two sides to begin final-status negotiations, but there is little belief on either side that a peace agreement is possible. Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, declared that any attempt to reach a final settlement for years to come is misguided and doomed to fail, and the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s senior aide, Uzi Arad, has said much the same.

On the Palestinian side, the president, Mahmoud Abbas, grows ever weaker. His political demise was accelerated last week by Palestinian fury over his decision to sideline the Goldstone report into alleged war crimes during Israel’s invasion of Gaza in January. Fatah has instructed Mr Abbas to stay out of any talks with Mr Netanyahu until the Israelis commit to the settlement freeze demanded by the Obama administration. And his likely successor as the head of Fatah, the imprisoned Marwan Barghouti, says anyone who believes it possible to negotiate peace with the current Israeli government is “delusional”.

Moreover, Mr Obama could soon have more to worry about than the absence of progress. Ominous echoes are everywhere of the conditions that brought about the second Palestinian intifada in 2000, which left thousands dead and destroyed the Oslo peace process.

More here.

Mitch Epstein. Trans-Alaska Pipeline. 2007.

Photograph 70″ x 92″. American Power series.

More here and here.

Thanks to Anjuli Kolb for the tip.

Willis G. Regier in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Vegetius, a Roman writer of the fourth century AD, said, “Let him who desires peace prepare for war.” Carl von Clausewitz sharpened the point: “The fact that slaughter is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity. Sooner or later someone will come along with a sharp sword and hack off our arms.” Darfur has made clear that that is not just a metaphor.

Clausewitz (1780-1831) studied total war. Although he knew nothing of tanks, air forces, or satellite communications, he knew from combat how wars kill, confuse, and terrify. In war studies, expertise matters enormously; he had plenty.

At the age of 12, Clausewitz joined two brothers as cadets in the Prussian army. (Eventually all three became generals.) He fought for Prussia against Napoleon at Jena, was captured, taken to Paris, exchanged, and returned to duty. When Prussia was intimidated into joining Napoleon for his disastrous 1812 campaign, Clausewitz resigned his commission and fought for the czar. In 1815, again with the Prussian army, he fought at Ligny. In 1818 he became director of the Military Academy in Berlin, where he devoted the last 15 years of his life to scholarship. His major work, On War (three volumes of Vom Kriege were published, from 1832 to 1843), was left unfinished at his death.

On War has become something of a classic, often cited, discussed in numerous recent books, seen in the company of Sun Tzu’s Art of War (thought to be circa fourth century BC), and studied in military academies. On War appeals to anyone who wants to see how a general thinks, and to all who suppose that warcraft applies to an office, company, college, or team. Clausewitz himself compared war with commerce and alliances with “a business deal.”

Nurse.........................
 Veronica’s face is not like the face on the veil.
It has seen much suffering but it does not wear

last judgment or a crown of thorns. I have seen blood

on her uniform (which happens to be violet today
……………………..

but is often white), sometimes fresh splashes of it

leaked from an IV or, barely visible, dry specks.
…………………….

I have observed firsthand her unflinching kindness,

and I have thanked any and all the gods for her,
…………………….

and I have wondered at her ability to bear

so many crucifixions all at once.

Susan Kelly-DeWitt

From Lensculture.com:

Photoquai, the biennial festival of photography based in Paris, was founded in 2007. Dedicated to non-western photography, the festival aims to to raise the international profile of artists previously unexhibited or little-known in Europe. It also aims to foster cultural exchange — and the vibrant interchange of different world views.

This year, the Guest of Honor at Photoquai is Iran. The festival has been directed by Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh, an Iranian gallerist and founder of the Silk Road Gallery in Tehran, a space specifically dedicated to photography.

Etehadieh has organised an intriguing exhibition, focusing on the themes of politics, society and poetry, and featuring the work of 50 contemporary photographers from around the world.

More here.

Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH The Evidence for Evolution

By Richard Dawkins

Dawkins invites the reader to share the frustration of an imaginary history teacher, some of whose students refuse to accept that the Roman Empire ever existed, or that Latin is the mother tongue from which the Romance languages evolved. Instead of concentrating on how Western culture emerged from the institutions of the Roman state, the teacher must spend time combating a school board that insists he give equal time to their alternative view that French has been spoken from time immemorial and that Caesar never came or saw or conquered. This is exactly analogous to the plight of the biology teacher trying to acquaint students with the richness of modern biology in states where fundamentalist opponents of evolution hold sway.

Dawkins has a nice sense of irony, deployed without mercy on the opponents of evolution. If the creationists think the earth is less than 10,000 years old, rather than 4.6 billion, he asks, shouldn’t they assume, by the same measure, that North America is less than 10 yards wide? The book is even more enjoyable when Dawkins forgets the creationists and launches into evolutionary explanations, whether of the hippopotamus’s long-lost cousin the whale, or of the long-tongued moth that Darwin predicted must exist to pollinate a Madagascan orchid with a nectary 11 inches in length. He gives striking examples of “unintelligent design,” forced on evolution because it cannot ever start from scratch but must develop new structures from older ones.

Picture: The dancing sifaka lemur of Madagascar, which Richard Dawkins calls “possibly my favorite species in all the world.”

More here.

Roald Hoffmann in American Scientist:

Although abstract art has been with us for only about 100 years, sometimes it seems that there are more abstract-art movements than there are scientific “-ologies.” The list begins with cubism, and will not end with postmodern painting. Recognizing that there are degrees of the abstract, my perception of the essence of this artistic direction involves several factors.

First of all, abstraction is oppositional, wanting to be seen as alternative to such ideals as naturalistic representation and the figurative. I will not say “alternative to reality,” for (to paraphrase Magritte) the two-dimensional surface of the most photorealist painting still is not its subject. Not unexpectedly, much theory of the abstract disclaims a definition by opposition. Art desires a broader conception of what stirs the imagination…

To be abstract, chemistry might thus have to be oppositional. But opposed to what?

More here.

John Cook at Gawker:

It's been getting kind of confusing keeping track of what's truly American anymore, so we came up with a handy list of things that are socialist and foreign because Barack Obama has soiled them, by doing them.

Winning the Nobel Peace Prize
Used to be a win for America back when Henry Kissinger won it. Now it's a sign of a “weakened, neutered U.S.,” unless John McCain had won it, which he should have, in which case it would have been awesome.

Puppies
Bo is a ringer, a fake rescue dog who was personally raised by Ted Kennedy for the Obamas and the press won't look into it because they're too busy writing about how cute he is. And he's Portuguese!

Classrooms
That's where kids get indoctrinated. Keep them away.

Community Organizing
What sort of person helps other people?

More here.

Craig Calhoun in Transformations of the Public Sphere:

Public engagement was a strong feature of the social sciences from their birth. Could one imagine Hobbes, Locke or the Scottish moralists as mere academics? Weber, Durkheim, and the great Chicago School sociologists had university jobs but both public concerns and public audiences. Social scientists today contribute to public understanding of issues from social inequality to transformations of the family. They also inform public policy on problems from educational reform to economic productivity. But since World War II, dramatic growth in universities and research institutions not only created opportunities for social scientists, it contained much of their communication inside the academy. An ideology that opposed academic professionalism to public engagement and a prestige hierarchy that favored allegedly pure science over applied added to the tendency.[1]

Today there are widespread calls for more public social science. Academics have recognized the problems that come from being too much cut off from public discussion. But two questions arise. First, what is the relationship between effective participation in public discourse and the maintenance of more or less autonomous academic fields with their own standards of judgment and intellectual agendas? Second, what is the relationship between “public intellectual” work, informing broad discussions among citizens, and “policy intellectual” work informing business or government decision makers?

More here.

Alexander Cockburn in Counterpunch:

I suppose we should not begrudge Barack Obama his Nobel Peace Prize, though it represents a radical break in tradition, since he’s only had slightly less than nine months to discharge his imperial duties, most concretely through the agency of high explosives in the Hindu Kush whereas laureates like Henry Kissinger had been diligently slaughtering people across the world for years.

Woodrow Wilson, the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked affinities, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, having brought America into the carnage of the First World War. The peace laureate president who preceded him was Teddy Roosevelt, who got the prize in 1906 as reward for sponsorship of the Spanish-American war and ardent bloodletting in the Philippines. Senator George Hoar’s famous denunciation of Roosevelt on the floor of the US Senate in May of 1902 was probably what alerted the Nobel Committee to Roosevelt’s eligibility for the Peace Prize:

“You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture.”

TR was given the peace prize not long after he’d displayed his boundless compassion for humanity by sponsoring an exhibition of Filipino “monkey men” in the 1904 St Louis World Fair as “the missing link” in the evolution of Man from ape to Aryan, and thus in sore need of assimilation, forcible if necessary, to the American way. On receipt of the prize, Roosevelt promptly dispatched the Great White Fleet (sixteen U.S. Navy ships of the Atlantic Fleet including four battleships) on a worldwide tour to display Uncle Sam’s imperial credentials, anticipating by scarce more than a century, Obama’s award, as he prepares to impose Pax Americana on the Hindukush and portions of Pakistan.

Unnurtured elsewhere, the New Aestheticist writer must perforce be a great and wide reader, taking heart from, for instance, classical Chinese poetry, Willa Cather, and van Gogh’s letters, such as the one where he complains of his contemporaries that “they do not admire enough.” Fortunately, the New Aestheticist cares little for self-expression, for his or her own special individual specialness. They are just as happy to see beauty in another’s work as to make it themselves. They tend to be translators. They do not fear accusations of plagiarism. They look backward, and outward. Some names to conjure with: Peter Handke. Alvaro Mutis. Anne Carson. Their books tend to be short, their long books in sections. In the movies: Kusturica’s Underground, Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I and Cleo from 5 to 7, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Only rarely does New Aestheticist art take on political topics, and even more rarely does it have a discernible message. For all its implicit timelessness, New Aestheticism will no doubt one day be seen as a reaction to its age and therefore part of it, like the Chinese literati in dark times who turned away from a corrupt court to tend to their gardens. Whom has all our genocide testimony helped? Has deconstructing the bourgeois subject of linear narrative served any purpose but to construct an escapist ghetto for intellectuals who might otherwise have been among the best minds of their generation? And then of course there’s the Bush years. But hear how shrill this all sounds. The New Aesthete would rather be beautiful than shrill. “I don’t know why literary people spend so much time apologizing for their perfectly harmless little books that no one will ever read. You don’t hear generals apologizing for killing people” (Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet). If you write interesting sentences then people will want to read them if not then not, that is the truth.

more from Damion Searls at the Quarterly Conversation here.

William Butler Yeats has been called the twentieth century’s greatest poet. He may even deserve the title. As Richard Ellmann wrote in his classic study Yeats: The Man and the Masks, “it is not easy to assign him a lower place.” Others may have attempted more; none achieved it. Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and all the other contenders of Yeats’s illustrious generation—none stakes quite the same claim on the imagination, or on the idiom, of our time. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”; “A terrible beauty is born”; “Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare / Rides upon sleep.” Even Joyce has his protagonist Stephen Dedalus murmuring lines from Yeats’s early poem “Who Goes with Fergus?” on Sandymount strand: “And no more turn aside and brood / Upon love’s bitter mystery.” Like Shakespeare, Yeats is inescapable. Yet few critics, including Ellmann, have seemed entirely comfortable with this fact. As a man, Yeats could be personally unappealing, even arrogant and intolerant, although not more so than Eliot and less so than Pound. The problem with casting Yeats as the ne plus ultra of twentieth-century poets stems from the fact that his work defies preconceptions about what a sufficiently modern—and specifically Modernist—poetry should be. Yeats’s ties to the nineteenth century and the legacy of Romanticism were vital and strong. Most importantly, Yeats forsook radical formal innovation and was instead a lifelong advocate of traditional poetic meter and form.

more from Robert Huddleston at The Boston Review here.

Ramparts stands with a handful of 20th-century American magazines — Playboy, the Harold Hayes-era Esquire, Rolling Stone, Spy and Wired — whose glory days continue to influence editors. Each of these magazines not only grabbed the zeitgeist but shaped it. If you’ve never heard of Ramparts or have only vague awareness of its significance, Peter Richardson’s compact history, “A Bomb in Every Issue,” will assure you of its place in the magazine pantheon. This San Francisco Bay Area magazine didn’t live long, starting in 1962 as a quarterly and expiring in 1975. Its very best pages appeared between 1966 and 1968: in that short span, it restored the lapsed institution of muckraking, put showmanship back into journalism, exposed Central Intelligence Agency excesses, helped turn Martin Luther King Jr. against the Vietnam War, gave radicalism a commercial megaphone and boosted the careers of such notable journalists as Warren ­Hinckle (who gave the magazine its heart), Robert Scheer (who gave it its brain), Adam Hochschild, David Horo­witz, Peter Collier and Jann Wenner.

more from Jack Shafer at the NYT here.

Clay Risen in The National:

Atop a forested hill a few kilometres outside the sleepy west German town of Detmold stands a 19-metre high statue of Hermann, the Germanic chief whose forces annihilated nearly 20,000 Roman legionnaires at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9AD. Gazing toward the French border, the copper statue, wearing a jaunty winged helmet, holds an upraised sword, whose blade bears the inscription “German Unity is my strength, and my strength is Germany’s power”.

The Hermannsdenkmal, or “Hermann Monument”, was unveiled in 1875, in the aftermath of Germany’s crushing defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent unification of the disparate German states into the Second Reich. At the time it was the world’s largest statue; standing on an 18-metre pedestal, it is visible for nearly 50 kilometres. The monument became a symbol for German militant nationalism and a pilgrimage site for the growing cult that celebrated Hermann as a kind of Ur-German, a movement that reached its fever pitch under the Nazis.

After the Second World War the Germans purged their culture of anything remotely tainted by Nazism, and the monument – and Hermann – fell into anonymity. The battle, once known as the Hermannschlacht, or Hermann Battle, was rechristened the Varusschlacht, after the Roman general Publius Quinctilius Varus: it is surely one of the only battles in history named after its loser. German schoolchildren, who once read from the countless Romantic Age poems celebrating Hermann, now learnt what a shame it was that the erstwhile hero had prevented Latin culture from reaching northern Germany.

More here.