The toxic yet vacuous phrase “self-indulgent” was often used by the detractors of David Foster Wallace (as if it isn’t self-indulgent to write anything at all). Another accusation, that Wallace was overly cerebral, misses the point completely. As a writer, the guy was as large-hearted as he was big-brained. Don Gately, the recovering narcotics addict in Infinite Jest, is one of the most compassionately drawn and convincingly real characters in contemporary fiction, close in intention, conception, and articulation to a latter-day Leopold Bloom.

I don’t think an essay more hilarious than “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” — Wallace’s account of a botched vacation on a cruise ship — has been written. It ranks with Twain and will endure as long as people want to laugh. His essays often brought forth a sense of exuberant joy, with their meanderings and addictive, often imitated footnotes and mock-scholarly sensibility. Yet Wallace’s fiction also portrays terrible mental darkness, especially what doctors call “major depression.” Wallace’s father told The New York Times that his son suffered from this disease for years, leading to two recent hospitalizations before his apparent suicide.

more from The Smart Set here.

///
Workingman’s Blues #2
Bob Dylan

There’s an evenin’ haze settlin’ over the town
Starlight by the edge of the creek
The buyin’ power of the proletariat’s gone down
Money’s gettin’ shallow and weak
The place I love best is a sweet memory
It’s a new path that we trod
They say low wages are a reality
If we want to compete abroad

My cruel weapons have been put on the shelf
Come sit down on my knee
You are dearer to me than myself
As you yourself can see
I’m listenin’ to the steel rails hum
Got both eyes tight shut
Just sitting here trying to keep the hunger from
Creeping it’s way into my gut

Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues

Now, I’m sailin’ on back, ready for the long haul
Tossed by the winds and the seas
I’ll drag ‘em all down to hell and I’ll stand ‘em at the wall
I’ll sell ‘em to their enemies
I’m tryin’ to feed my soul with thought
Gonna sleep off the rest of the day
Sometimes no one wants what we got
Sometimes you can’t give it away

Now the place is ringed with countless foes
Some of them may be deaf and dumb
No man, no woman knows
The hour that sorrow will come
In the dark I hear the night birds call
I can hear a lover’s breath
I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall
Sleep is like a temporary death

Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues

Well, they burned my barn, they stole my horse
I can’t save a dime
I got to be careful, I don’t want to be forced
Into a life of continual crime
I can see for myself that the sun is sinking
How I wish you were here to see
Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking
That you have forgotten me?

Now they worry and they hurry and they fuss and they fret
They waste your nights and days
Them I will forget
But you I’ll remember always
Old memories of you to me have clung
You’ve wounded me with words
Gonna have to straighten out your tongue
It’s all true, everything you have heard

Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues

In you, my friend, I find no blame
Wanna look in my eyes, please do
No one can ever claim
That I took up arms against you
All across the peaceful sacred fields
They will lay you low
They’ll break your horns and slash you with steel
I say it so it must be so

Now I’m down on my luck and I’m black and blue
Gonna give you another chance
I’m all alone and I’m expecting you
To lead me off in a cheerful dance
Got a brand new suit and a brand new wife
I can live on rice and beans
Some people never worked a day in their life
Don’t know what work even means

Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues

///

From The Guardian:

A Turkish court has banned internet users from viewing the official Richard Dawkins website after a Muslim creationist claimed its contents were defamatory and blasphemous. Adnan Oktar, who writes under the pen name of Harun Yahya, complained that Dawkins, a fierce critic of creationism and intelligent design, had insulted him in comments made on forums and blogs. According to Oktar’s office, Istanbul’s second criminal court of peace banned the site earlier this month on the grounds that it “violated” Oktar’s personality. His press assistant, Seda Aral, said: “We are not against freedom of speech or expression but you cannot insult people. We found the comments hurtful. It was not a scientific discussion. There was a line and the limit has been passed. We have used all the legal means to stop this site. We asked them to remove the comments but they did not.”

Oktar, a household name in Turkey, has used hundreds of books, pamphlets and DVDs to contest Darwin’s theory of evolution. In 2006 his publishers sent out 10,000 copies of the Atlas of Creation, a lavish book rejecting evolution on every one of its 800 pages. Dawkins, one of the recipients, described the book as “preposterous”. On his website the British biologist and popular science writer said he was at “a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content”. It is the third time Oktar and his associates have succeeded in blocking sites in Turkey. In August 2007 Oktar persuaded a court to block access to WordPress.com. His lawyers argued that blogs on the site contained libellous material that it was unwilling to remove. Last April he made a libel complaint about Google Groups, which was subsequently blocked.

He failed to ban Dawkins’ book The God Delusion in Turkey after a court rejected his claims that it insulted religion. The God Delusion has provoked strong criticism from believers for insisting on the hypocrisy and unreliability of scripture and for lampooning creationists.

More here.

From Scientific American:

• Einstein’s general theory of relativity says that the universe began with the big bang singularity, a moment when all the matter we see was concentrated at a single point of infinite density. But the theory does not capture the fine, quantum structure of spacetime, which limits how tightly matter can be concentrated and how strong gravity can become. To figure out what really happened, physicists need a quantum theory of gravity.
• According to one candidate for such a theory, loop quantum gravity, space is subdivided into “atoms” of volume and has a finite capacity to store matter and energy, thereby preventing true singularities from existing.
• If so, time may have extended before the bang. The prebang universe may have undergone a catastrophic implosion that reached a point of maximum density and then reversed. In short, a big crunch may have led to a big bounce and then to the big bang.

More here.

A chain of elephants, trunks and tails linked, wanders, with a mixture of upbeat energy and complacent pride, along the endpapers of a children’s book. So begins one of the stories that most please the imagination of the modern child and his distant relation the modern adult—Jean de Brunhoff’s “The Story of Babar,” published in 1931. The Babar books are among those half-dozen picture books that seem to fix not just a character but a whole way of being, even a civilization. An elephant, lost in the city, does not trumpet with rage but rides a department-store elevator up and down, until gently discouraged by the elevator boy. A Haussmann-style city rises in the middle of the barbarian jungle. Once seen, Babar the Frenchified elephant is not forgotten. With Bemelmans’s “Madeline” and Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” the Babar books have become part of the common language of childhood, the library of the early mind. There are few parents who haven’t tried them and few small children who don’t like them. They also remain one of the few enterprises begun by a father and continued by his son in more or less the same style. Laurent de Brunhoff, who was twelve when his father died, at the age of just thirty-seven, picked up the elephant brush after the Second World War and has gone on producing Babar books, with the same panache, almost to this day. (Audubon’s sons’ continuation of their father’s “Quadrupeds” is another instance, but in that case the father was alive when the sons began to carry on the work.)

more from The New Yorker here.

Perched on a hill overlooking a dusty town stands a three-foot statue of Prime Minister Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd. Acknowledged by all but the most die-hard of supporters as an unrivaled villain in South African history, Verwoerd is known as the architect of “grand apartheid.” While “petty apartheid” had ensured that restaurants and other public places would be subject to the same sort of segregation found in Jim Crow America, it was Verwoerd who, with the mad zeal of the social scientist, implemented a policy of forced removal by which the government razed homes, loaded blacks onto trucks, and deposited them in remote Bantustans. A statue of Verwoerd (who was knifed to death by a parliamentary messenger in September 1966), however diminutive, seems totally out of place in the new South Africa, that country born in 1994 and constantly touted as a land transformed. Over the past fourteen years, symbols of South Africa’s apartheid history have been removed and painted over, from the national anthem to Afrikaans street signs to the name of the Johannesburg airport. But this town, Orania, is like none other in South Africa. Like the “black spots” of the apartheid era—small pockets of black-inhabited land in designated white areas—Orania is an island unto itself. A large sign beside an (always open) entrance gate that abuts the highway reads: orania: afrikanertuiste—the Afrikaner homeland.

more from VQR here.

Behind most published writings lie hinterlands of notes, drafts, corrected proofs, forgotten prose pieces, diary entries and letters – relics and records of lives and works in progress, which often offer valuable leads to biographers exploring creative processes and scholars searching for figures in carpets. The Creator As Critic contains some 350 pages of previously uncollected Forster material (some hitherto unpublished), and 400 pages of editorial notes, attempting thereby to satisfy both scholar and general reader. The Forster pages are a mixture of lecture notes, essays, radio broadcasts, and memoirs (including a fine one of Cavafy), spanning most of his adult life, and encompassing literary interests from Dryden to Hemingway. The notes afford an illuminating subtext to this absorbing if heterogeneous assemblage.

The volume of BBC Talks includes a selection of Forster’s contributions as the Corporation’s chief book reviewer between 1930 and 1960. As a pioneer broadcaster and advocate of high culture, he was influential in the creation of the Third Programme (which expired just two months before his own death in 1970).

more from the TLS here.

///

Time Does Not Pass
Rajendra Bhandari

Baje has become incapable of going down to the fields
Last year, using a stick, he could reach the yard
This time he only made it to the porch
After a three-day confinement, Baje passed away.
Boju passed away
Then mother began to pass away
At first she passed from the yard to the porch
At the porch she became a scarecrow to the grain
drying in the yard
The light passed from her eyes,
from her legs, the strength to stand
even as her desires were passing,
she passed away herself.
One day, a wild young thing flirted with me
But like a calm lake, I pooled by her side
Youth was passing from me
In the yellow autumn, in the fields
the paddy was passing into haystacks
the grain had passed and become manure
The world itself is passing every day
The atmosphere is passing into the ozone hole
With the passing of seedling, and of plant
the passing of flower and dead leaves
the passing of leaf and shoot
the passing of bud and flower
with these passages
the venerable lotus passed from the face of the earth
But time has not passed
Time is just not there
Time would pass, if at all it existed.

///

From The Atlantic Monthly:

In January, Christian Lander — a 29-year-old Toronto-raised, McGill-educated Ph.D. dropout who worked as a corporate communications manager in Los Angeles — started a blog called Stuff White People Like. By February, the site was a runaway hit, garnering 30,000 hits daily. By March, it was getting 300,000. SWPL — which catalogs the tastes, prejudices, and consumption habits of well-off, well-educated, youngish, self-described progressives — was refreshing because it’s everything a blog, almost by definition, is not. Rather than serving up unedited, impromptu, self-important ruminations on random events and topics, the tightly focused, stylishly written, precisely observed entries eschew the genre’s characteristic I (though Lander in fact writes nearly all of them) and adopt a cool, never snarky though sometimes biting, pseudo-anthropological tone.

Lander’s White People aren’t always white, and the vast majority of whites aren’t White People (he doesn’t even capitalize the term). But although Lander’s designation is peculiar, he’s hardly the first to dissect this elite and its immediate predecessors (see for instance Mark E. Kann’s Middle Class Radicalism in Santa Monica, Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, and David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise — Brooks calls these people variously “bourgeois bohemians,” the “educated elite,” and the “cosmopolitan class”). Lander, like many of these writers, traces this group’s values to the 1960s, and there’s clearly a connection between a politics based on “self-cultivation” (to quote the Students for a Democratic Society’s gaseous manifesto, the Port Huron Statement) and what Lander defines as White People’s ethos: “their number-one concern is about the best way to make themselves happy.” That concern progresses naturally into consumer narcissism and a fixation on health and “well-being”: Lander’s most entertaining and spot-on entries dissect White People’s elaborate sumptuary codes, their dogged pursuit of their own care and feeding, and their efforts to define themselves and their values through their all-but-uniform taste and accessories (Sedaris/Eggers/The Daily Show/the right indie music/Obama bumper stickers/uh, The New Yorker).

So why call this group “White People”? Lander is almost certainly being mischievous.

More here.

From The Independent:

Nick Hornby’s 1992 debut Fever Pitch, itself indebted to Frederick Exley’s 1968 meditation A Fan’s Notes, made the intelligent fan’s memoir a sort of sub-genre. Ever since, it has been difficult to write about one’s passion for a sport without inviting some comparison to Fever Pitch. Ask me: I’ve been there myself with my memoir, You Must Like Cricket?.

My hunch is that this occurred to Lawrence Booth, one of England’s funniest and most engaging cricket writers, when he was planning his own book. So he presents his memoir of an English cricket fan not as such, but as an addict’s guide to the game, with chapters on the teams, the umpires, the media and so on. He need not have bothered. First, because it’s no bad thing to be compared to Hornby. Secondly, because Cricket, Lovely Cricket? is a wry, self-deprecating and amusing look as much at the “world’s most exasperating game” of the subtitle as at the most exasperating experience of following it – especially if you happen to be an England fan. And I love that question mark, which encapsulates the dualities that underscore the life of a cricket fan – why, as Booth explains, the sport matters so much and yet not at all.

The anecdotes – and there are many of them – are excellent. Graham Gooch said that the only reason he liked to see Phil Tufnell bowling was because it meant Tuffers wasn’t fielding. The gags are funny: England fans stick by their side, Booth tells us, “through thin and thinner”; and “revenge is a dish best served at the temperature of Australian lager”. And Booth wages a delightful war against the clichés that disfigure daily cricket writing. Why, he asks, “are young fast bowlers ‘raw’ when the truth is they are just not very good?”

More here.

Dagmar Herzog in AlterNet:

Evangelical sexual conservatives took up some of the main concerns of the feminist women’s movement of the 1970s-1980s. An interest in intensifying women’s sexual pleasure has been a central focus of evangelical sex advice from the start. Many women’s frustration at male fascination with pornography and emotional non-presence during sex — another feminist theme — and the need to help men get comfortable with physical and emotional mutuality, have also been taken up. So too have the classic women’s movement themes of concern about domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and sexual exploitation of women. More recently, evangelicals have moved to adapt both feminist and mainstream advice about body image, in addition to generating a vast Christian dieting and addiction recovery industry. There is also an antiauthoritarian evangelical youth counterculture.

In its activism around issues of sexuality, the Religious Right has found ways as well to incorporate the insights of the New Age men’s movement in its own program to transform an Internet-ogling insecure bumbler into a virile he-man who is competent at male-male friendship and rivalry as well as hot heterosexual romance. The movement has been wildly successful in part because of its extraordinary ability to present its own program as therapeutic. None of this, however, should distract from the fact that right-wing evangelicals have also been sadistic and punitive, eager to play to the most base human desires to feel superior to others who fail to live up to the expected norms.

While the roots of the Religious Right lie in anti-black racism (a history that has now been largely overcome but still goes woefully underacknowledged), it got its start in American national politics by organizing against abortion and homosexuality.

The video and audio of the conversation can be found over here at the NYPL.

With storytelling that mixes political intrigue and high drama, romance and magic, Jeffrey Eugenides and Salman Rushdie discuss the ways in which the novel is a reflection on war and politics, gender and society, fantasy and rumor, individuality and public life, and how the brutal past still influences our present world.

David Chandler argues against the Bosnia model for Georgia:

[T]he internationalisation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia is a real possibility. It appears that, as I have previously argued on spiked, Russia’s recognition of the republics was an attempt not to strengthen control over these territories but to distance the Kremlin from annexationist claims (see Russia’s first ‘Western-style’ war, by David Chandler). The act of recognition seems to have been motivated by the desire to distance Moscow from the consequences of military intervention and the destabilising assumption that Russia would militarily threaten the annexation of other territories with separatist Russian claims.

Internationalising the question of the sovereign status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia would enable Russia to put responsibility in the hands of international institutions, and thereby pass the buck for maintaining the divide between North and South Ossetia and for undermining Georgia’s territorial claims, while, of course, still being a decisive influence in the region. It is possible, therefore, that we may see some movement towards the ‘Bosnian model’ in the Caucasus, with the EU and international institutions being drawn into the Georgia-Russia stand off.

[H/t: Alex Cooley]

More on the creationism controversy:

Britain’s national academy of science parted company with its director of education yesterday after a furore over the teaching of creationism in schools.

Michael Reiss, a professor of education at the Institute of Education in London and an ordained Church of England clergyman, agreed to step down from his position at the Royal Society, which claimed he had unintentionally caused damage to the organisation’s reputation.

Reiss was widely reported to be in favour of teaching creationism in school science lessons after a speech he gave in Liverpool last week, but the following day he issued a clarification arguing his comments had been misinterpreted.

The Royal Society announced Reiss’s resignation in a statement yesterday. It said: “Some of Professor Michael Reiss’s recent comments, on the issue of creationism in schools, while speaking as the Royal Society’s director of education, were open to misinterpretation. While it was not his intention, this has led to damage to the society’s reputation. As a result, Professor Reiss and the Royal Society have agreed that, in the best interests of the society, he will step down immediately as director of education.”

In his speech, Reiss said that while creationism had no scientific basis, science teachers risked alienating pupils who believed in the idea by dismissing it out of hand. “They should take the time to explain how science works and why creationism has no scientific basis,” he said.

To read or to write, that is the question!‎ In the Name of Almighty God-the All-Knowing, the Most Lovingly ‎Compassionate

Since my last post on the blog, a few months have passed. But this doesn’t ‎mean that I have not been keeping my promise of spending fifteen minutes per week ‎on it. As a matter of fact, I have spent more than the allocated time on the blog. The ‎magnitude of the reception and acclamation from the viewers was beyond ‎expectations. So I had to decide how to spend the limited time that I have allocated ‎for the blog; should I write new notes or respect those viewers who kindly and ‎generously have shared their thoughts and opinions with me and sent messages and read ‎their numerous received messages. ‎

‎***‎

As you know, the purpose of running this blog is to have a direct and mutual ‎contact and communication with the viewers and even though I have received many ‎messages from the viewers to update the blog and write new notes, I preferred to write ‎less and spend more time on reading the viewers’ messages – and not let this ‎communication tool become just a one-way medium.‎

more here.

Mr. Kirsch is the not the first to take Disraeli’s Jewish mythmaking seriously, and to explore what it did for him. Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin, both outsiders to English political culture, wrote in a similar vein decades earlier. But Mr. Kirsch is the first to explore at length how these ideas functioned not only imaginatively but also politically, suggesting concrete ways in which Disraeli’s mythmaking informed his conduct of politics, especially his relations with the Tory notables whom he led in Parliament. This is the most speculative part of his book, but also the most original. Historians of British politics may balk, but Mr. Kirsch’s Disraeli is a more human, more complex, and more sympathetic figure than the one they conventionally present.

more from the NY Sun here.

In a long introduction to the discussion that ensued, Putin complained that there was “mishmash” (kasha) in the heads of teachers of history and social sciences, and that this dire situation in the teaching of Russian history needed to be corrected by the introduction of “common standards. ” (Four days later, a new law, introduced in the Duma and passed with record speed in eleven days, authorized the ministry of education and science to determine which textbooks be “recommended” for school use and to determine which publishers would print them.) There followed some instructive exchanges:

“A conference participant: In 1990-1991 we disarmed ideologically. [We adopted] a very uncertain, abstract ideology of all-human values…. It is as if we were back in school, or even kindergarten. We were told [by the West]: you have rejected communism and are building democracy, and we will judge when and how you have done…. In exchange for our disarming ideologically we have received this abstract recipe: you become democrats and capitalists and we will control you.

Putin: Your remark about someone who assumes the posture of teacher and begins to lecture us is of course absolutely correct. But I would like to add that this, undoubtedly, is also an instrument of influencing our country. This is a tried and true trick. If someone from the outside is getting ready to grade us, this means that he arrogates the right to manage [us] and is keen to continue to do so.

more from TNR here.

///
Playing With Big Numbers
Ajmer Rode

The human mind
is essentially qualitative.
As you know,
we are easily excited by
pinks and purples,
triangles and circles
and we endlessly argue
over true and false,
right and wrong.

But quantitative analyses
rarely touch our souls.

Numbers were invented mainly
by men to trick each other.
I am almost certain women had
nothing to do with them. They
had more vital tasks, survival, for example,
at hand.

But playing with big numbers
could be interesting.
In fact it could be really fun. Say
if I were to sit on a gravel pit and
count one billion pebbles non-stop
it will take me some 14 years;
or if I were to count what Africa
owes to rich
foreigners – some 200 billion
dollars,
it is impossible. I will have to
be born 40 times and do nothing
but keep counting 24 hours.

Although things could be simpler on a
smaller scale. Suppose as a result
of the debt, five million children die
every year , as in fact they do,
and each dying child cries
a minimum of 100 times a day
there would be a trillion cries
floating around
in the atmosphere just over a
period of five years.
Remember a sound wave once
generated never ceases to exist
in one form or the other,
and never escapes the atmosphere.

Now one fine morning, even if
one of these cries suddenly hits
you, it will shatter your soul into
a billion pieces. It will take
14 years to gather
the pieces and put them back
into one piece.

On the other hand, maybe all the
trillion cries could hit your soul
and nothing would happen.………………………………
……………………………….

Translation: 1990, Ajmer Rode
From: Poems At My Doorstep
Publisher: Caitlin Press, Vancouver, 1990

…more big numbers

///

From The Washington Post:

Thomas Jefferson’s contradictions have long baffled historians. His clarion assertion of human equality in the Declaration of Independence became the battle cry of the abolitionist movement. Yet he lived on the fruits of slave labor and never risked political capital (or his own comfort) to oppose the institution of slavery. He regarded blacks as odorous, intellectually inferior and incapable of creating art. Yet, as Annette Gordon-Reed convincingly argues in this monumental and original book, he cohabited for more than 30 years with an African American woman with whom he conceived seven children.

Liberating the woman known to Jefferson’s smirking enemies as “dusky Sally” from the lumber room of scandal and legend, Gordon-Reed leads her into the daylight of a country where slaves and masters met on intimate terms. In so doing, Gordon-Reed also shines an uncompromisingly fresh but not unsympathetic light on the most elusive of the Founding Fathers.

In Sally Hemings’s day, Gordon-Reed writes, she was “the most well-known enslaved person in America.” Her connection to Jefferson was brutally exposed and mocked by his political opponents during his first presidency, while black churchmen in the early republic preached sermons on her “family situation.” The publicity was sufficiently embarrassing that Jefferson’s partisans and descendants crafted a sanitized and sexless version of life at Monticello that continued until our own day. Although controversy persists, recent DNA research has caused most historians to accept Jefferson’s paternity of Hemings’s children.

More here.

From The Root:

It may be a tight race in America, but the globe is tilting toward Obama.

In the BBC poll, when respondents were asked whether the election of Obama, as an African-American man, would “fundamentally change” their perception of the United States, 46 percent said it would, compared to 27 percent who said it wouldn’t.

We all know that the mind starts to play tricks once the impossible starts to seem possible. You start to have expectations. Once dreams are suddenly within reach, it’s common to forget what the previous reality was like. In these last several weeks of the election season, as the stakes seem to grow unimaginably high, it is worth pausing to remember how far we’ve already come during this election cycle. The political and cultural landscapes have already been permanently changed for the better, regardless of who the victor is on November 4.

More here.