///
Mirador
Randolyn Zinn

Your eyes were brown like my grandmother's wherein
I watched the faces of my entire family shuffle past
………..
like a deck of cards or video transmission from space,
choppy and with time delays. Relatives I'd only seen
………..
in photos pasted in old albums showed up as you
batted your lashes, then others, born before the camera
………..
yet clearly bearing the family resemblance: an El Greco
duke in doublet, a young Vandal girl crossing the Strait
………..
of Gibraltar, a Visigoth shepherd in rough furs, even
a dark-haired Roman with wide smile carrying wheat
………..
sheaves bound for his Emperor. I kissed your two fringed
almond lids and danced like a bayadére on Persian carpet,
………..
arms lifted, in time with your oud, before settling back
on your wide-striped couch when I heard the generations whisper
………..
that we are all related.
//

Christopher Hitchens in The Slate:

Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy “experience”—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim “worked” well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton's memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.

Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: “It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.”

Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy. Yet isn't it all—all of it, every single episode and detail of the Clinton saga—exactly like that? And isn't some of it a little bit more serious? For Sen. Clinton, something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her “greatness” (her overweening ambition in other words) and only ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose. And we are all supposed to applaud the skill and the bare-faced bravado with which this is done. In the New Hampshire primary in 1992, she knowingly lied about her husband's uncontainable sex life and put him eternally in her debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. In the Iowa caucuses of 2008, he returns the favor by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally mendacious account of what they thought about Iraq and when they thought it. What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama—yet again—a central part of our own politics?

More here.

Philip Slater in The Huffington Post:

I can understand that after centuries of persecution it's satisfying for a Jewish state to be the aggressor for a change, but there's a codicil that goes with that role. You don't get to act like a victim any more. “Poor little Israel” just sounds silly when you're the dominant power in the Middle East. When you've invaded several of your neighbors, bombed and defeated them in combat, occupied their land, and taken their homes away from them, it's time to stop acting oppressed. Yes, Arab states deny your right to exist, threaten to drive you into the sea, and all the rest of their futile, helpless rhetoric. The fact is, you have the upper hand and they don't. You have sophisticated arms and they don't. You have nuclear weapons and they don't. So stop pretending to be pathetic. It doesn't play well in Peoria.

(Yes, I know, we Americans should talk–always trembling in our boots about terrorists and 'rogue states' and 'evil empires' when we have enough nukes to blow up entire continents, and spend more on arms in an hour than most of the world's nations spend in a year. But just because we're hypocrites and Nervous Nellies doesn't mean you have to be).

Calling Hamas the 'aggressor' is undignified. The Gaza strip is little more than a large Israeli concentration camp, in which Palestinians are attacked at will, starved of food, fuel, energy–even deprived of hospital supplies. They cannot come and go freely, and have to build tunnels to smuggle in the necessities of life. It would be difficult to have any respect for them if they didn't fire a few rockets back.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Zeba Hyder)

Scott Indrisek in Asylum:

Most struggling novelists are penniless, pathetic, poorly dressed wretches who piss and moan about how no one appreciates their “Art.” Thankfully, “Absurdistan” author Gary Shteyngart isn't most novelists. The Russian-born scribe makes a handsome living off bestsellers that satirize ethnicity, love, Jewish identity, Iraq war contractors and everything in between. “I don't know what explains it,” the novelist told us, “but [my books] do sell in the hundreds of thousands, and that enables me to really keep my caviar ratio up.”

We asked Shytengart to share some secrets of the writing trade, from appropriate booze choices to matters of dress — and let's not forget the importance of a little depression and tragedy. “If you're happy, things are not going well,” he advises. “Stop being so goddamn happy! Unless you want to join the Obama transition team, this is not the field for you. It's all about despair.”

Have a Daily Writing Schedule
“Take a lot of Xanax in the morning to really calm the hell down. Try to wake up no later than 11. Work from 11:30 to 4:30, then go see the shrink, then meet some friends for drinks. Find a good bar where everyone knows your name and you can get a nice buyback. Try to relax. This is the major problem. Writing is both boring and stressful, it's the worst combination. Sometimes I go to the gym, but it's very hard to lift things there, because they're so heavy.”

Finding Inspiration
“I think all good books come from heartbreak. Focus on the worst thing that's happened to you — usually it's interpersonal. Could be your parents drank themselves to death; an ostrich killed your baby brother. Or focus on the worst, horrible break-up. Go off from that. Feel something. It's very hard to feel something these days because we're living such electronic lives; everything's just some weird electronic echo. Try to access what human beings used to have — emotions. Go from there.”

Coping with Writer's Block
“I don't have it. Often what I write is crap, so that's not writer's block, that's writer's crap. You know what I do? I take long showers, sometimes three hours long. It's really helpful.”

More here.

Letter to The Guardian:

We the undersigned are all of Jewish origin. When we see the dead and bloodied bodies of young children, the cutting off of water, electricity and food, we are reminded of the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto. When Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, talked of putting Gazans “on a diet” and the deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, talked about the Palestinians experiencing “a bigger shoah” (holocaust), this reminds us of Governor General Hans Frank in Nazi-occupied Poland, who spoke of “death by hunger”.

The real reason for the attack on Gaza is that Israel is only willing to deal with Palestinian quislings. The main crime of Hamas is not terrorism but its refusal to accept becoming a pawn in the hands of the Israeli occupation regime in Palestine.

The decision last month by the EU council to upgrade relations with Israel, without any specific conditions on human rights, has encouraged further Israeli aggression. The time for appeasing Israel is long past. As a first step, Britain must withdraw the British ambassador to Israel and, as with apartheid South Africa, embark on a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Ben Birnberg, Prof Haim Bresheeth, Deborah Fink, Bella Freud, Tony Greenstein, Abe Hayeem, Prof Adah Kay, Yehudit Keshet, Dr Les Levidow, Prof Yosefa Loshitzky, Prof Moshe Machover, Miriam Margolyes, Prof Jonathan Rosenhead, Seymour Alexander, Ben Birnberg, Martin Birnstingl, Prof. Haim Bresheeth, Ruth Clark, Judith Cravitz, Mike Cushman, Angela Dale, Merav Devere, Greg Dropkin, Angela Eden, Sarah Ferner, Alf Filer, Mark Findlay, Sylvia Finzi, Bella Freud, Tessa van Gelderen, Claire Glasman, Ruth Hall, Adrian Hart, Alain Hertzmann, Abe Hayeem, Rosamene Hayeem, Anna Hellmann, Selma James, Riva Joffe, Yael Kahn, Michael Kalmanovitz, Ros Kane, Prof. Adah Kay, Yehudit Keshet, Mark Krantz, Bernice Laschinger, Pam Laurance, Dr Les Levidow, Prof. Yosefa Loshitzky, Prof. Moshe Machover, Beryl Maizels, Miriam Margolyes, Helen Marks, Martine Miel, Diana Neslen, O Neumann, Susan Pashkoff, Hon. Juliet Peston, Renate Prince, Roland Rance, Sheila Robin, Ossi Ron, Manfred Ropschitz, John Rose, Prof. Jonathan Rosenhead, Leon Rosselson, Michael Sackin, Ian Saville, Amanda Sebestyen, Sam Semoff, Prof. Ludi Simpson, Viv Stein, Inbar Tamari, Ruth Tenne, Norman Traub, Eve Turner, Tirza Waisel, Karl Walinets, Renee Walinets, Stanley Walinets, Philip Ward, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Ruth Williams, Jay Woolrich, Ben Young, Myk Zeitlin, Androulla Zucker, John Zucker

Ian Sample in The Guardian (for Morgan Meis):

The despicable acts of Count Dracula, the unending selflessness of Dorothea in Middlemarch and Mr Darcy's personal transformation in Pride and Prejudice helped to uphold social order and encouraged altruistic genes to spread through Victorian society, according to an analysis by evolutionary psychologists.

Their research suggests that classic British novels from the 19th century not only reflect the values of Victorian society, they also shaped them. Archetypal novels from the period extolled the virtues of an egalitarian society and pitted cooperation and affability against individuals' hunger for power and dominance. For example in George Eliot's Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke turns her back on wealth to help the poor, while Bram Stoker's nocturnal menace, Count Dracula, comes to represent the worst excesses of aristocratic dominance.

The team of evolutionary psychologists, led by Joseph Carroll at the University of Missouri in St Louis, applied Darwin's theory of evolution to literature by asking 500 academics to fill in questionnaires on characters from 201 classic Victorian novels. The respondents were asked to define characters as protagonists or antagonists, rate their personality traits, and comment on their emotional response to the characters.

They found that leading characters fell into groups that mirrored the cooperative nature of a hunter-gatherer society, where individual urges for power and wealth were suppressed for the good of the community.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

Pro-Israel demonstration in New York City, January 11, 2009:

The first time I saw Odia Ofeimun was at a party in Lagos. We came late, Toni Kan and I. It was a Friday, we had left the office and stopped at several barrooms on the way, and by nine o’clock, when we arrived at the party, we were tipsy. But we were in good company: almost everyone was high. There was an air of euphoria in the room; it was the same all over the country. This was November 1999. The country had just emerged from fifteen years of military dictatorship. Everyone was savouring that feeling of having survived a shipwreck, or a plane crash. The future looked bright, especially for the people gathered in this room: over a hundred of them, poets and writers and playwrights. In everyday life they were journalists and teachers and out-of-work graduates, a handful who had narrowly survived General Abacha’s elite-exterminating agenda which saw a lot of pro-democracy intellectuals killed or exiled or compromised. Those who could not afford to go into exile during the reign of terror, and who refused to become turncoats, had lived in a sort of limbo, occasionally bringing out a book of poems or stories or essays whose oblique metaphors and idioms made sense only to other writers. Tonight these writers were being hosted by Maik, a novelist and journalist, and the booze was flowing. They were exchanging stories about fellow writers exiled in foreign capitals. Next to me two young men were arguing about a poet who had been found strangled in his car the year before.

more from Granta here.

THE past year has been a bad one if you hold to the old-fashioned belief that the work of gifted writers constitutes a warning against forms of oppression, whether of the piously conventional or the totalitarian varieties. I assume that Norman Mailer (who died, aged 84, on November 10, 2007) held Alexander Solzhenitsyn in high regard, just as I imagine that Solzhenitsyn (who died, aged 89, on August 4) looked on Mailer as a decadent. But in retrospect we can see that the careers of the two writers were more in harmony than might appear. The American, it is true, burst on the literary scene as a wunderkind of sorts in 1948 with The Naked and the Dead; the older Russian had to wait until 1962 for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to plant his foot in similar style. But each established his reputation through his first publication, both were colossally ambitious (and egoistic in proportion), both became public figures (albeit in very different ways), both unexpectedly (indeed, reluctantly) found nonfiction to be their most effective medium, and for both their native land was an overwhelming obsession. (That Solzhenitsyn was as Russian as borsch goes without saying; but it is odd to note how uncosmopolitan both writers were. Mailer was well travelled but rarely wrote on non-American topics.)

more from The Australian here.

TA Frank in The Guardian:

No one thought Al Gore would be a loveable president, but, after eight years in the White House, he has gotten truly tiresome. The droning voice, the purchase of an eco-friendly robot dog, the campaign for carbon-free diamonds – all these things were hard to take, and he has been way too smug about reversing global warming. I think we've gone too far in the opposite direction, especially in light of the glacier that recently crushed Wasilla.

I think I started to dislike Gore when he stirred up a media storm after the Feds broke up the terrorist ring conspiring to fly airplanes into buildings back in 2001. He could have let it pass quietly, as Bill Clinton did with the millennium plot arrests in 2000. Instead, Gore held a press conference to milk it for political gain and scare us into a 15 cent per gallon gas tax. But who can afford to pay over a dollar and a half per gallon? No wonder we're resorting to electric cars these days.

And why did he pressure the universally admired Fed chairman Alan Greenspan to step down early in 2002? Replacing him with that old warhorse Paul Volcker was a nasty surprise, especially when Volcker choked off a promising housing boom in 2002 and imposed old, outdated regulations on lenders. Some properties lost as much as 8% of their value that year. Now housing prices are rising really slowly, and GDP barely grew by 3% this year.

More here.

///
Runaway
—1728 Advertisement for the Recovery of an Indian Servant
Jill McDonough
…….
I'll miss her smoky cooking, beans
in molasses, coffee with cream. Warm
mornings, her clean kitchen. Soapy streams
of fresh-pumped water on her arms.
Her Narrow Stript pink Cherredary
Goun turn'd up with a little flour'd
red & white Calico. Contrary
very pretty. And vain. Spent hours
at her sewing. Everything in a birch
bark basket. Clean. She had a pretty
body, worked hard in the kitchen, stitched
quick, tidy stitches. Used too little
nutmeg, to much mace. In A stript
Homespun Quilted Petticoat, plain
muslin Apron. She loved the ripe
pears from the pear tree, glazed with rain.
her hair in tidy plaits: plain Pinners
& a red & white flower'd knot.
…….
Come back, beloved. Oils, paper
whatever you lack. An apricot
tree, blue ribbons. A necklace to match
your green Stone Earrings. A dozen pairs
of White Cotton Stockings, a latch
for your door, lace, linen aprons to wear
if you'd come back to Pinckny Street,
this narrow brick house with its new
porch. Over the cobbled pavers. Neat
in your Leather heel'd Wooden Shoes.
//

Nathan Schneider in The Smart Set:

Satellite TV in Jordan, I discovered on my recent trip there, is a chaotic pleasure. When my American friends talk about watching it, taxiing home after a long day, there’s a little dread mixed with the hope of going into the kind of coma that only television can put one. The standard satellite setup, dauntingly, has more than 500 channels shooting out their signals in languages from all over the world. Finding something conventionally decent to watch is next to impossible for all but the practiced viewer. When you find your way around, you can preset your favorite stations and forget all the rest. But for those of us doomed to the full variety, the Jordanian boob tube becomes an obligatory tour of the human universe.

When all you want is Friends (or even its Arabic equivalent), prepare to weed through Italian soaps, Iranian talk shows, the Pentagon channel, Egyptian poetry, Russian porn, Mecca 24/7, Italian porn, state-run news, Kurdish divas, soccer, fútbol, American rap on Arab MTV, Bollywood revels, false prophets from Holland, German business commentary. When you finally come to Courteney Cox and Jennifer Aniston, they’re dubbed in Japanese.

I suppose the price you pay for living in a country that doesn’t produce too much TV for its own good is that you’re forced to learn about the rest of the world. This learning shouldn’t be confused with CIA World Factbook-learning. It’s more like what you’d get from a good intercontinental love affair. At the very least, watching the satellite means being subjected to the fact that this planet is crowded and teeming with desires for every kind of stardom. Amidst them all, our little languages and preferences are the tiniest of snowflakes falling in six continents’ worth of static.

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Essay written and published in America by King Abdullah I of Jordan six months before the Israeli/Arab war of 1948:

Palestine is a small and very poor country, about the size of your state of Vermont. Its Arab population is only about 1,200,000. Already we have had forced on us, against our will, some 600,000 Zionist Jews. We are threatened with many hundreds of thousands more.

Our position is so simple and natural that we are amazed it should even be questioned. It is exactly the same position you in America take in regard to the unhappy European Jews. You are sorry for them, but you do not want them in your country.

We do not want them in ours, either. Not because they are Jews, but because they are foreigners. We would not want hundreds of thousands of foreigners in our country, be they Englishmen or Norwegians or Brazilians or whatever.

Think for a moment: In the last 25 years we have had one third of our entire population forced upon us. In America that would be the equivalent of 45,000,000 complete strangers admitted to your country, over your violent protest, since 1921. How would you have reacted to that?

Because of our perfectly natural dislike of being overwhelmed in our own homeland, we are called blind nationalists and heartless anti-Semites. This charge would be ludicrous were it not so dangerous.

No people on earth have been less “anti-Semitic” than the Arabs. The persecution of the Jews has been confined almost entirely to the Christian nations of the West.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Arthur Rimbaud, one of the most revolutionary poets of 19th-century France, grew up in a small town, Charleville, in the north-east corner of the country near the Belgian border. As a child he'd been obedient to his strict mother (his father was a soldier who'd vanished after rapidly siring four children) and he'd been the best student in the region, excelling in the classics and French. But Rimbaud's real interest was poetry. He haunted the local bookstore and read all the latest poetry coming out of Paris. So attracted was Rimbaud to the capital that he ran away from home, arrived in Paris on 30 August 1870 – and was instantly arrested for not paying the correct fare on his train ticket. He was put in prison, and only his favourite teacher from back home was able to get him out. Despite this ignominious beginning, Rimbaud – who was 16 going on 17 – made several other attempts to reach the capital, even though the Prussians had invaded and Paris had declared itself a commune between 26 March and 30 May 1871.

The penniless and friendless Rimbaud could never survive for long away from home during these chaotic times. But in the early autumn in 1871 he fired off a letter to Paul Verlaine, his favourite poet. Without waiting for a response, Rimbaud sent off a few more poems to Verlaine two days later. Then came the fateful response from Paris: “Come, dear great soul, we call you, we await you.” Verlaine enclosed the train fare.

More here.

From Science:

If your cup of joe starts talking to you, chances are you're a caffeine addict. People who drink a lot of coffee or other caffeinated beverages are more likely to report hearing voices or having out-of-body experiences than those who go easy on the strong stuff, according to a new study. The link between caffeine and hallucinations makes sense physiologically. When stressed, the body amps up its production of the hormone cortisol, which can cause people to see and hear things that aren't there. Cortisol is also regulated by caffeine, which increases hard-core coffee and tea drinkers' responses to stress. Intrigued by the connection, psychologists Simon Jones and Charles Fernyhough of Durham University in the U.K. designed an online survey that was e-mailed to university students. The 200-plus participants, most of them women, answered questions such as “How often do you drink … brewed coffee?” and ranked the relevance of statements such as “I have had a sensation … that I left my body temporarily.”

On average, the students drank the caffeine equivalent of about three cups of strong tea or instant coffee per day, Jones and Fernyhough report today in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. More importantly, the data show that individuals who consumed more caffeine were more likely to hallucinate.

More here.

///
First Laws
Teresa Cader

Every body continues in its state of rest, but tonight I have
to tell you we have divided yours into two principalities:
domain of black box on the linen closet's top shelf—
…………………
out of reach of over-zealous cleaners, myself included,
who might discard you without thinking, or
grandchildren who might dump you into tea cups—

and domain of nature, fistfuls of ash tucked into humous
and peatmoss in pits dug in the yard, fertilizing the roots
of two kousa dogwoods and the stewartia,
…………………
matter which cannot (remember, cannot) be destroyed. Each at rest
continuing, or of uniform motion in a straight line, straight through
the summer when drought turned the leaves to cylinders,
…………………
when Dad began screaming that the trees were dying, why
couldn't I do anything. I hung a thimble of ash from a dead branch,
soaked the roots. A body in linear movement unless it is compelled to change
…………………
that state by forces impressed upon it. And what could have pressed
you, Mother, if love did not? I just want one more cigarette before I die,
you begged from under your oxygen mask, Take me to the back porch.
…………………
To every action force there is an equal and opposite reaction force,
and so breath is its own resistence, its own memorial. My opposite,
my appositive. My pleas to quit. The pen presses back against my hand.
…………………

Our own Kris Kotarski in the Calgary Herald:

On natural gas, the Russians get it and the Europeans don't. Gazprom (read: Putin) has found an area where Russia has leverage on the European Union (especially in the winter), and by signing individual contracts with states such as Germany and Italy, the Russians have driven a wedge into European politics and European unity. The reason?Russia wants its traditional buffer areas to stay friendly, and not to turn toward NATO and the EU.

Europe is too rich and too necessary to Russian industry to be treated like this, yet despite the obvious solution visible to all, on matters of energy security, the European Union is still not mature enough to present a common front.Until it does, Russia is wise to stoke up antagonism between those who have and who have-not, pitting Poland against Germany, or Romania and Slovakia against Ukraine. Just as it looks as if the Europeans will finally get smart and get together on a common negotiating position, the summer comes, the prices drop, and Gazprom smiles a wide and reassuring smile. The sense of urgency dissipates, Gazprom offers favourable deals to some but not others, and slowly but surely, the buffer states are isolated, one by one, as the sun shines down on the old continent.

More here.

At a dinner party that will forever be green in the memory of those who attended it, somebody was complaining not just about the epic badness of the novels of Robert Ludlum but also about the badness of their titles. (You know the sort of pretentiousness: The Bourne Supremacy, The Aquitaine Progression, The Ludlum Impersonation, and so forth.) Then it happily occurred to another guest to wonder aloud what a Shakespeare play might be called if named in the Ludlum manner. At which point Salman Rushdie perked up and started to sniff the air like a retriever. “O.K. then, Salman, what would Hamlet’s title be if submitted to the Ludlum treatment?” “The Elsinore Vacillation,” he replied—and I find I must stress this—in no more time than I have given you. Think it was a fluke? Macbeth? “The Dunsinane Reforestation.” To persist and to come up with The Rialto Sanction and The Kerchief Implication was the work of not too many more moments. This is the way, when discussing Rushdie and his work, that I like to start. He is sublimely funny, and his humor is based on a relationship with language that is more like a musical than a literary one. (I here admit to my own worst plagiarism: invited to write the introduction to Vanity Fair’s “Black & White Issue” some years ago, I took advantage of Salman’s presence in my house to ask him to riff on the two keywords for a bit. He free-associated about everything from photogravure to the Taj Mahal, without a prompt, for about 30 minutes, and my piece was essentially done.) And this is a man whose first language was Urdu!

more from Vanity Fair here.