The art of reading a novel involves a dash of experiment, conjecture, even risk. It requires readers to try out different narrative perspectives, styles, even personalities, and so to explore the inherent variousness of experience, and to recognise the vein of arbitrariness that runs through any possible version of events. Novels, in short, are implicitly pluralistic. In this respect they resemble essays, which, as it happens, came into existence at more or less the same time (Montaigne launched the form in 1580, with Bacon following in 1597). Essays tend to be classier, more learned and more demanding—there is no essayistic equivalent of the “popular novel”—and even when written in a perfectly casual style, they are likely to be strewn with half-concealed quotations or allusions to flatter or perhaps annoy the smarter class of reader. As exercises in hesitation, exploration and experimental self-multiplication, they are like novels, only more so. You might even say that the novel aspires to the condition of the essay, and there is certainly no shortage of novelists who have aspired to be essayists too. Think of Eliot or Henry James, Woolf, Forster or Orwell, or Mann, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus and Mary McCarthy. And as the four recently published books now lying open on my kitchen table demonstrate, the essay-writing novelist is still a literary force to be reckoned with.

more from Prospect Magazine here.

Is it possible to oppose the death penalty and still be in favor of killing tyrants? That is, I think, my own position, but the botched execution of Saddam Hussein, which looked more like savage revenge than impartial justice, made it much harder to hold on to both those views. Still, they seem to me contradictory but not incompatible. I don’t believe that the state should kill people convicted of crimes against other people, even of terrible crimes. Except when it is resisting military attack or helping others who are under attack, the state should not be in the killing business; its first commitment is to the preservation of life. But a tyrant has committed crimes not simply against individuals but against the solidarity of the citizens, against the commonwealth, against the very idea of a political community. And that seems to raise the stakes; a tyrant is not an ordinary criminal.

more from Dissent here.

You just can’t argue with this work of art. You can’t fault it. I’ve examined it with the critical equivalent of a jeweller’s eyepiece. I compared it to Holbein’s anamorphic skull in The Ambassadors, as well as the turquoise Aztec skull in the British Museum. It is comparable to those masterpieces, not derivative.

It’s something no artist could ever do before – that is, as a modern work of art. The objects it resembles – from Tutankhamun’s gold death mask to a silver monument to Alexander Nevsky in the Hermitage – were commissioned from nameless craftsmen by all-powerful rulers. No modern ruler has the authority to do such a thing, and up until now, no artist was in a position to emulate them. So Hirst truly has created an exceptional object. It is not merely an expensive work of art, but a great one. It has a primitivism that renews art for our time just as Picasso’s discovery of African and Oceanic masks renewed art a century ago: it promises that art in this century might yet become as new and as ancient as the best art of all ages. I can’t think of a period that wouldn’t be amazed and delighted by it: Edgar Allan Poe, Shakespeare and the Aztecs would all be flocking to White Cube. You should go, too.

more from The Guardian here.

Horace Elisha Scudder in The Atlantic Monthly: [Ed. Note. This review first ran in the Atlantic Monthly, June 1886.]

It might be supposed, at first glance, that Mr. James in The Bostonians was not going to let us off, but intended to drag us with him into the labyrinth of the woman question. Nothing could be more unjust. Mr. James, with the quick instinct of an artist, saw his opportunity in the strange contrasts presented by a phase of Boston life which is usually taken too seriously for purposes of fiction. We do not remember any more striking illustration of Mr. James’s general self-expatriation. He comes back, as it were, to scenes once familiar to him, bringing with him habits of thought and observation which make him seize upon just those features of life which would arrest the attention of an Englishman or a Frenchman. The subtle distinctions between the Laphams and Correys are nothing to him, but he is caught by the queer variety of humanitarianism which with many people outside Boston is the peculiar attribute of that much suffering city. He remembers, we will suppose, the older form, the abolition sentiment which prevailed in his youth, and now is curious about the later development, which he takes to be a medley of women’s rights, spiritualism, inspirationism, and the mind cure. He notices a disposition on the part of what a clever wit called Boston Proper to break away from its orbit and get entangled in this nebulous mass, and so he takes for his main figure a woman who is young and old by turns, according to the need of the novelist, a Bostonian of the straighter sect, who has yet, by the very force of her inherited rigidity of conscience, martyred herself, and cast in her lot with a set of reformers who are much the worse for wear.

More here.

From The New York Times:

When Albert Einstein was starting out on his cosmological quest 100 years ago, the universe was apparently a pretty simple and static place. Common wisdom had it that all creation consisted of an island of stars and nebulae known as the Milky Way surrounded by infinite darkness. We like to think we’re smarter than that now. We know space is sprinkled from now to forever with galaxies rushing away from one another under the impetus of the Big Bang. Bask in your knowledge while you can. Our successors, whoever and wherever they are, may have no way of finding out about the Big Bang and the expanding universe, according to one of the more depressing scientific papers I have ever read.

If things keep going the way they are, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer of Vanderbilt University calculate, in 100 billion years the only galaxies left visible in the sky will be the half-dozen or so bound together gravitationally into what is known as the Local Group, which is not expanding and in fact will probably merge into one starry ball.

More here.

Thomas Laqueur looks at Five Germanys I have Known by Fritz Stern, in the London Review of Books:

Stern’s ancestors stood at the pinnacle of the Bildungsbürgertum, the cultivated middle class, who regarded culture generally and Wissenschaft – science in the broadest, purest sense – as the core of an ethical and useful life, both private and public. All four of his great-grandfathers, both grandfathers and his father were successful, well-regarded doctors. The physician’s white coat, as Stern writes, ‘was the one uniform of dignity to which Jews could aspire and in which they could feel a measure of authority and grateful acceptance’. Although medicine was in the 19th century, as it is today, far from a pure science, it held out the promise of a dispassionate, unideological, rational approach to the ills of the body, both social and individual. It was, in Max Weber’s sense, ‘a calling’, a secular equivalent to being chosen by God for his purposes. Germany’s Jews embraced this calling: at the beginning of the 19th century, perhaps 2 per cent of German doctors were Jews; by the early 20th century, at a time when Jews constituted something like 1 per cent of the population, they provided 16 per cent of all doctors. The proportion was far higher in big cities. Excluded from the higher ranks of the civil service and the military, medicine offered them entry into the life of the nation.

For Stern’s people, the ‘German question’ had been settled in 1871; Bismarck was their hero; they were, if anything, more German than the Germans.

More here.

This is from “Best of Craig’s List,” on Craig’s List:

I think “Will and Grace” has instructed an entire generation of women that gay men are dying – DYING! – to be your friend and indulge your every co-dependent and neurotic whim. We’ll be there in a clinch with a “you go girl!” or “you look fierce!” Because we all love to say that stuff and many other quippy zingers.

Last Monday night, a woman at a bar came up to me and asked me if I was single. Not to disparage her, but let’s just say I was happy to shut her down right away with an abrupt “I’m gay.” And you know what? THAT DID NOT DETER HER.

She LIT up and said, “We can go shopping together and you can watch me play with myself with my Rabbit.”

Ugggggghhhh… Do you ever not even know where to begin?

I wanted to say, “Yes, please, I am in the habit of befriending bar skanks in the first ten seconds of talking to them. And despite my lack of sexual attraction to women, I would simply LOVE to watch you get yourself off. JACKPOT!”

As far as the shopping thing goes: I love saying “I’m not really into shopping” and I just stand back and wait for their heads to explode. Their precious “Will and Grace” never prepared them for that possibility!

More here.  And other “Best of” entries here.

Salil Tripathi in the New Statesman:

A year ago, a group of Hindu activists attacked two paintings by Maqbool Fida Husain, India’s best-known painter. The artist, now aged 91, had offended their sensibilities by drawing Hindu goddesses in the nude. Judging the zeitgeist – the attack happened during the time of the dispute about the Danish Muhammad cartoons – the organisers hastily closed the exhibition. It was not the first attack on Husain’s work; for nearly a decade, he has borne the brunt of Hindu nationalists’ anger. Today he lives in self-imposed exile, dividing his time between Dubai and London. What was unusual about this particular act of mob censorship and vandalism, however, was that it occurred in the heart of central London, at Asia House.

A sale at Bonhams and Asia House this month will include 85 works by major Indian artists, including Husain. The profits from “Art for Freedom” will go towards another champion of freedom of expression, the Indian weekly newspaper Tehelka, which is backed by such luminaries as V S Naipaul and Arundhati Roy, and for which I also write. Since its launch in 2000, the publi cation has used investigative guile, outright subterfuge and spycam techniques to break several stories in India – betting scandals in international cricket, corruption in defence deals and, most recently, unlawful killings of Muslims in Gujarat. The paper was closed down by the government after breaking a story on corruption, only to relaunch in 2004. Appropriately, the word tehelka means sensation.

The defence of free speech seems particularly important this year, as India marks the 60th anniversary of her independence.

More here.

Ian Black in The Guardian:

It was Moshe Dayan, the hero of Israel’s 1967 victory, who set the tone for what was to follow: “We are waiting for a telephone call,” the one-eyed general said disdainfully as the frontline Arab states – Egypt, Jordan and Syria – reeled from their crushing defeat. Of the Palestinians – the newly conquered population of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip – little was said at the time. But the six-day war put them back at centre stage in their conflict with Israel. They have stayed there ever since.

“Rarely has so short and localised a conflict had such prolonged, global consequences,” commented the historian Michael Oren. “Seldom has the world’s attention been gripped, and remained seized, by a single event and its ramifications.” Israel’s triumph, someone else observed wisely, was “a cursed blessing”.

Perceptions have changed so much in 40 years that it is hard now to recapture the sympathy that was felt for Israel as Egypt mobilised, and residents of Tel Aviv filled sandbags. If the country’s leaders talked emotively about the vulnerable “Auschwitz borders” left after their 1948 war of independence, blood-curdling Arab rhetoric bolstered the image of Israel as the underdog.

More here.  And more on the subject from The Economist here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Taking stock of his habit of reporting from dangerous places, Ryszard Kapuscinski once told an interviewer, “Mine is not a vocation, it’s a mission. I wouldn’t subject myself to these dangers if I didn’t feel that there was something overwhelmingly important—about history, about ourselves—that I felt compelled to get across. This is more than journalism.” Kapuscinski’s celebrated chronicles of war and revolution in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and points elsewhere made him a darling of literary circles, and you hear a lot from his admirers about how he transcended the limits of journalism, how he was a practitioner of “a kind of magic journalism,” as fellow journalist Adam Hochschild has put it. Academics and others have questioned his facts and methods, but Kapuscinski , as he freely admitted, was after something different; literalism wasn’t the point.

more from Bookforum here.

Embarking upon a 12-day tour of Africa earlier this year, Chinese President Hu Jintao likely expected a warm welcome. Over the past five years China had emerged as a new power on the continent: Trade between China and Africa is growing by nearly 50 percent annually, Beijing may soon become Africa’s top aid donor, and in the winter China hosted nearly every African leader for a historic summit in Beijing. On Hu’s previous trip to the continent, in 2004, African leaders basked in China’s new interest.

But this time around, Hu found a far different welcome. Though he received polite applause from leaders across Africa, he had to cancel part of his trip to Zambia amid fears of street protests over poor safety records at a Chinese-owned mine there. In South Africa and other countries, he faced condemnation in the media for China’s human rights abuses, while across the continent African opinion leaders wondered why China was not doing more to help stop the genocide in Darfur. Before Hu’s visit, Nigerian militants had kidnapped Chinese workers; in April, Ethiopian militants killed nine Chinese oil workers.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Simon Baron-Cohen in Entelechy:

In what sense might something as intrinsically human as the imagination be biological? How could the products of the imagination – a novel, a painting, a sonata, a theory – be thought of as the result of biological matter? After all, such artefacts are what culture is made of. So why invoke biology? In this essay, I will argue that the content of the imagination is of course determined more by culture than biology. But the capacity to imagine owes more to biology than culture.

Let’s start with a few definitional issues. What do we mean by ‘imagination’? I do not mean mere imagery, though clearly the imagination may depend on the manipulation of imagery. Imagery is usually the product of one of the five senses (though it can also be generated without any sensory input at all, from the mere act of thinking or dreaming). Imagery typically comprises a mental representation of a state of affairs in the outside, physical world. I don’t want to put you off from reading this essay by littering it with jargon, so let’s just think of a mental representation as a picture in your head. That is what we are going to be calling an image, but that is not the same as imagination. Consider why not.

When we create a visual image of a specific object in our mind, the image as a picture of the object has a more or less truthful relationship to that object or outside state of affairs. If the image is a good, faithful, representation, it depicts the object or state of affairs accurately in all its detail. So, mental images typically have ‘truth relationships’ to the outside world.

More here.

John Otis in the Houston Chronicle:

When a passenger train crawled into the station bringing Gabriel Garcia Marquez back to his hometown for the first time in 24 years, tears welled up in the Colombian writer’s eyes.

So many well-wishers showed up at the white-washed terminal in Aracataca — the setting for the surreal village of Macondo in his epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude — that police officers struggled to clear a path for him. Everywhere the Nobel Prize-winning author paraded under overcast skies in a horse-drawn carriage, people chanted his nickname, breaking it into two distinct syllables, “Ga-bo! Ga-bo! Ga-bo!”

But the full-throated welcome for the man people here reverently call “El Nobel” also may prove to be a final farewell.

Now a silver-haired 80-year-old who was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1999, Garcia Marquez is clearly slowing down. Although friends say he continues to write for two or three hours a day, it’s uncertain when he’ll finish his next book, the second part of a planned three-volume memoir.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Gustav Jaboda reviews Abducted by Susan A. Clancy, in Metapsychology:

Half a century ago, during the cold war, the social psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues studied a millennial sect who believed that the earth was going to be destroyed, but that they would be saved by extra-terrestrials. The book by Susan Clancy deals, in lively semi-popular fashion, with a similar topic. It opens with a refreshingly candid account of how she came to embark on such unusual research. She presents extracts from interviews with people of varying backgrounds who shared a set of — to us — weird beliefs. For instance, a number of them were convinced that they had been taken aboard a space ship where they became the objects of sexual or medical experimentation.

The question asked is how it is possible for 21st-century Americans to have such strange thoughts. Clancy’s main approach was connected with her special interest in ‘false memories’, a phenomenon extensively investigated in relation to alleged child sex abuse. Such memories were often elicited by psychiatrists or other therapists, and similarly she found that most of her ‘abduction’ cases had ‘either sought out or fell into the hands of an abduction researcher [who was a believer] or therapist.’ These ‘experts’ apparently tended to reinforce the beliefs, if not actually shaping them.

More here.

Laura Hanna and Astra Taylor in The Nation:

Pointing imaginary guns and roughing up “Iraqi civilians”, a group of antiwar veterans brought the realities of the Iraq debacle to Manhattan, in a Memorial Day protest that briefly turned the streets of the city into a combat zone. In “Operation First Casualty,” a half-dozen members of Iraq Veterans Against the War employed the tactics of street theater to stage mini-dramas in Times Square, Union Square and the World Trade Center site, simulating sniper fire and staging mock arrests of fellow protesters who portrayed Iraqis. The group plans to take Operation First Casualty to the streets of Chicago June 17.

Jahanshah Rashidian in Butterflies and Wheels:

With the arrival of spring, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s police have launched this year their traditional crackdown on women’s dress. Such crackdowns have become a regular feature of life for Iranian women. The crackdown is to force women to respect the strict Islamic dress code.

Under Iran’s Islamic laws (Sharia) women are obliged to cover their body from head- to-toe with a black chador or at least long, loose-fitting clothes to disguise their whole figures. The Islamic dress code is severely imposed at this time. Violators can receive lashes, fines or imprisonment.

Since the existence of the IRI, not a day has passed without attack, physical assault, arrest, acid-throwing, harassment and psychological pressure on women in Iran. The IRI has clearly specified that for women no other sort of dress is permitted except the Islamic hijab.

The first question is: why does the IRI since 1979 stubbornly impose Islamic hijab on women of different social backgrounds, ethnic groups, and religious minorities?

More here.

Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

The war in Iraq is now four years old. It has cost more than 3,000 American lives and has run up a tab of $200 million a day, or $73 billion a year, since it began. That’s a substantial investment. No wonder most members of Congress from both parties, along with President George W. Bush, believe that we have to “stay the course” and not just “cut and run.” As Bush explained in a speech delivered on July 4, 2006, at Fort Bragg, N.C.: “I’m not going to allow the sacrifice of 2,527 troops who have died in Iraq to be in vain by pulling out before the job is done.”

We all make similarly irrational arguments about decisions in our lives: we hang on to losing stocks, unprofitable investments, failing businesses and unsuccessful relationships. If we were rational, we would just compute the odds of succeeding from this point forward and then decide if the investment warrants the potential payoff. But we are not rational–not in love or war or business–and this particular irrationality is what economists call the “sunk-cost fallacy.” The psychology underneath this and other cognitive fallacies is brilliantly illuminated by psychologist Carol Tavris and University of California, Santa Cruz, psychology professor Elliot Aronson in their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (Harcourt, 2007). Tavris and Aronson focus on so-called self-justification, which “allows people to convince themselves that what they did was the best thing they could have done.”

More here:

From Newsweek:

June 11, 2007 issue – It’s near midnight in a small Fairfax, Va., bar, and Omar Waqar stands on a makeshift stage, brooding in a black tunic and brown cap. He stops playing his electric guitar long enough to survey the crowd—an odd mix of local punks and collared preps—before screaming into the microphone: “Stop the hate! Stop the hate!” Stopping hate is a fairly easy concept to get behind at a punk-rock show, and the crowd yells and pumps its fists right on cue. But it’s safe to say that Waqar and his band, Diacritical, aren’t shouting about the same kind of hate as the audience. Waqar wants to stop the kind that made people call him “sand flea” as a kid and throw rocks through the windows of the Islamic bookstore he worked at on 9/11. Waqar, 26, the son of a Pakistani immigrant, is a Muslim—a punk-rock Muslim.

More here:  (Thanks to Hassan Usmani)

Tayseer Barakat. Untitled 1992.

Ink on paper.

More of this Palestinian artist’s work here and here.

From The Daily Dish:

“The effects of isolation, anxiety, fatigue, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger produce disturbances of mood, attitudes and behavior in nearly all prisoners. The living organism cannot entirely withstand such assaults. The Republicans Communists do not look upon these assaults as ‘torture.’ But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture…

The CIA KGB hardly ever uses manacles or chains, and rarely resorts to physical beatings. The actual physical beating is, of course, repugnant to overt Republican Communist principles and is contrary to C.I.A. K.G.B. regulations…

Prisoners are tried before “military tribunals,” which are not public courts. Those present are only the interrogator, the state prosecutor, the prisoner, the judges, a few stenographers, and perhaps a few officers of the court…

In typical Republican Communist legalistic fashion, the O.L.C. N.K.V.D. rationalized its use of torture and pressure in the interrogation of prisoners of war. When it desired to use such methods against a prisoner or to obtain from him a propaganda statement or ‘confession,’ it simply declared the prisoner an enemy combatant a “war-crimes suspect” and informed him that, therefore, he was not subject to international rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war,” – “Communist Interrogation,” The Annals of Neurology and Psychology, 1956.