“A Collision of Prose and Politics: A prominent professor’s attack on a best-selling memoir sparks debate among Iranian scholars in the U.S.”

Richard Byrne in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Like many Americans of Iranian descent, Hamid Dabashi read an article in the April 17 issue of The New Yorker with anxious dismay.

In that article, Seymour Hersh reported that President Bush’s administration was preparing an airstrike against Iran, including the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.

The president himself dismissed the report as “wild speculation.” But Mr. Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University who has been active in the antiwar movement since the attacks of September 11, 2001, heard a call to action.

The article prompted him to dust off an essay that he had written a few years before and publish it in the June 1 edition of the Egyptian English-language newspaper Al-Ahram. His target? Not President Bush or the Pentagon, but Azar Nafisi, author of the best-selling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran and a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington.

Ms. Nafisi’s memoir, published by Random House in 2003, blended a harrowing portrayal of the life of women in post-revolutionary Iran with a powerful personal testimony about the power of literary classics. The book found a wide audience, and its success made Ms. Nafisi a celebrity.

More here.

A cache of unpublished letters from the novelist Virginia Woolf and scores of first editions inscribed by leading writers and poets of the early 20th century has emerged in the contents of the library of Lady Ottoline Morrell, the society hostess who became one of the most flamboyant, loved and mocked associates of the Bloomsbury group.

Among the letters to be sold is one to her from Woolf. “I hate being a passive bucket,” she wrote. “In short, great men bore me to death.” Woolf wondered: “How on earth does Ottoline suck enough nourishment out of the solitary male? I was thinking of your tea parties and I thought of Stephen Spender talking about himself and of old Tom [TS] Eliot also enlarging on the same theme and then in comes shall we say Siegfried [Sassoon] and it all begins again. Now in human intercourse I like the light to strike on more angles than one. And all clever men become frozen stalactites.”

More here.

From BBC:

Sustainability is the motto of the Western Harbour (Vaestra Hamnen) project in the southern city of Malmo. There are futuristic buildings sporting massive glass windows and glinting solar panels. But turn a corner and you find a green courtyard with a little pond and some modest timber structures that remind you of Swedish villages. “I really like the diversity of houses – and they’ve made it easy here to live in a sustainable way,” says Helena Parker, who was among the first to move into the area in 2001.

A former shipyard and industrial site is being turned into a green residential area based on 100% use of renewable energy. The first phase of Western Harbour, called Bo01, now has 1,000 homes, covering 25ha (62 acres). But eventually the area will accommodate 10,000 residents and 20,000 employees and students.

More here.

From The Economist:

Since the early 1970s, the two grandest patterns of life—how species are arranged in space and how they are arranged in time—have divided their opposing camps quite neatly. Those who squabble over space disagree about why there are more species in the tropics than anywhere else. To them, the tropics are either where species are more often born (cradles of diversity) or where they tend not to die (museums of diversity). By contrast, biologists concerned with patterns in time tenaciously debate whether new species come into being in a smooth and gradual manner, or whether the history of life is actually a series of bursts of change that are interspersed with periods when nothing much happens.

Two papers just published in Science have cast light on these questions, and their findings, if not necessarily resulting in compromise, do show the value of taking leaves out of other people’s books. The “space biologists” have looked into time, namely the fossil record over the past 11m years. Meanwhile the “time biologists” have looked at the here and now and found evidence in living species for periods of rapid evolution in their genes.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Bob Woodward’s disclosure of the influence of Henry Kissinger on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy both is and is not a surprise. After all, we have known for a long time that the bungling old war criminal has his admirers within the White House. Did not the president, almost but not quite incredibly, call on him as the first chairman of the 9/11 commission? Kissinger’s initial acceptance of that honor was swiftly withdrawn after it was pointed out—first of all in this space, if I may say so—that he would have to make a full disclosure of the interests of Kissinger Associates in the Middle East. This condition was too much for him. (I added that, since he was wanted for questioning by magistrates in France, Chile, and Argentina, in connection with offenses of state terrorism, his appointment to a position of such high eminence at such a time might expose the United States to ridicule, not to say contempt.)

Then the Bush administration took the decision to appoint Paul Bremer, a former partner of Kissinger Associates, as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority…

More here.

Max Hastings in the London Times:

Michael Burleigh forged a formidable reputation as a historian of Germany, and consolidated it with Earthly Powers, his study of the influence of religion upon European politics between 1789 and 1918, published last year. Sacred Causes takes the story up to the present day.

Its first half addresses in masterly fashion the relationship between the churches and the totalitarians. The later chapters are part narrative, part an outpouring of rage about the manner in which Europe over the past 40 years has abandoned itself to the worship of false idols, of which secularism, multiculturalism and indulgence of Irish republican gangsterism are among the most damaging.

Burleigh is at his best analysing the relationship between Christianity and the Nazis, about whom he knows as much as any man. Of Hitler, he writes: “There is something faintly ridiculous about the weight of learning brought to bear in the last six decades on this less than fascinating figure, a cavernous blank behind the impassioned postures.”

More here.

Jay Alexander reviews Modern Man, a film by Justin Swibel:

MODERN MAN, filmmaker Justin Swibel’s feature debut, wordlessly weaves the fractured tale of an unnamed central character trying desperately to fight the boredom of his mysterious isolation. He cleans his pool, grooms the tennis court (at least he’s not impoverished), plays on the jungle gym, and waters the garden. The meticulous documentation of these processes may turn off moviegoers with a more Pirates of the Carrebeanish attention span. No, MODERN MAN is not for those who require explosions, booming heroic music cues, and glib one-liners. Yet perhaps it is…

More here.

Sughra Raza. Still Life With People. 2000.

Acrylic on canvas.

Private collection of my sister and 3QD editor, Dr. Azra Raza. Posted with permission.

“Feel like the fiction you’ve been reading has been missing something — aliens perhaps, or the occasional occult incursion of rabbits? A new literary movement, based in Northampton, has just the thing for you.”

Jessica Winter in the Boston Globe:

A subdued group of middle-aged friends sits around a table over cards and beer. They’re benumbed by their jobs and uninterested in their dusty, adulterous marriages. They’re tired; they have no secrets between them. They decide to call a phone-sex line, where the seductive voice on the other end spins a yarn about the devil and a cheerleader. And then the cheerleader herself unravels a tale–weirder than the one she’s in–about clones and potions and imminent alien visitations and a troubled husband and wife. And then the husband starts telling a story about a time machine…

Welcome to “Lull,” the story that closes Kelly Link’s collection “Magic for Beginners” and, with its potent blend of the supernatural and the everyday, might just encapsulate one of the most fertile literary movements of recent years.

Like many genre categories, this one is a shape-shifter with an array of aliases, including “slipstream,” “new weird,” and even a variation that combines “weird” with a common scatological term. The jacket copy of “Magic for Beginners” invokes “kitchen-sink magic realism,” but perhaps the most evocative label is “new wave fabulists,” denoting those writers who are currently staking out ground between mainstream literary fiction and the more specialized domains of science fiction and fantasy.

More here.

V. S. Ramachandran in Seed Magazine:

What is consciousness? This really breaks down into two questions: The first is the nature of qualia–how does the awareness of sensations like bitter, or painful, or red arise from the activity of neurons? The second: How does the sense of self—the person who experiences qualia—arise?

It has been suggested that the first problem is more tractable and should be tackled before going on to the issue of the self, which has elements of unity, continuity, a sense of agency and less obviously, the attachment of meaning to mere sensations. I disagree. I suggest that qualia (e.g., visual awareness) and self are two sides of a coin; you cannot solve the qualia problem without understanding the self. The reason is obvious: You cannot have “free floating” qualia without a self to experience them and to give them meaning.

More here.

“Knitta began in August 2005, when AKrylik and PolyCotN were discussing their frustration over unfinished knitting projects: half-knitted sweaters and balls of yarn gathering dust. That afternoon, they knit their first doorknob cozy. Then it dawned on them… A tag crew of knitters, bombing the inner city with vibrant, stitched works of art, wrapped around everything from beer bottles on easy nights to public monuments and utility poles on more ambitious outings. With a mix of clandestine moves and gangsta rap — Knitta was born! Today, Knitta is a group of more than 10 ladies of all ages, races, nationalities, religions, sexual orientation… and gender.”

More here.

“South-Central” was more than just a vague place name; it was vernacular. It was a shape-shifter; it was quick and wily; it had legs. It moved east. It moved west, north. For a long time, it was code for wherever it was in the city that black people kept their houses, conducted their business, kicked up their mess—where they happened to pop into frame. I will never forget returning home late one night, tired and despondent after reporting on the ’92 “civil unrest”/”uprisings”/”riots”/”insurrection” (like everyone else, I was searching for something precise, something to call not just the chaos but the rage), and tuning in to a TV reporter doing a stand-up at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, right in front of the May Co. department store. All my life I knew this intersection to be in the Miracle Mile, yet the graphic marked the spot: “South-Central L.A.”

“South-Central” was “down there”—a wave of the hand, south of Olympic, certainly south of the 10 Freeway. Someplace many Angelenos didn’t venture into because, well, what was really there?

more from the West Magazine here.

Scepticism about the merits and even the possibility of a philosophical aesthetics has been the subject of irreconcilable controversies among thinkers. It is by no means self-evident that problems of aesthetics should be an object of philosophy: many philosophers have held that issues relating to art and beauty cannot be the object of philosophical work. The rationalist thinkers simply denied aesthetics a place in their systems of thought, while positivist and neo-positivist thinkers argued that it could not be part of philosophical enquiry.

Although classical Greek philosophers commented about both art and beauty, they didn’t regard these problems as deserving a discipline of their own within philosophy. The classical tripartition of the subject into theoretical philosophy (what is there in the world and how can we know about it), practical philosophy (what should we do) and logic (how should we think) leaves open the question of where, if at all, aesthetics fits in.

more from Philosophy Now here.

The Pope has decided to keep the issue of limbo in a state of limbo. Pope Benedict XVI was widely expected to consign the place outside Heaven, Hell and Purgatory inhabited by the souls of unbaptised children to the theological scrapyard. But at an early morning mass to celebrate the end of a two-year investigation into the subject by the Vatican’s leading 30 theologians he decided not to decide.

“The Pope did not mention it in his homily,” said Archbishop Bruno Forte, who attended the mass.

“We are still working on the document. No vote has been taken.”

The Vatican has made it clear that the concept of limbo is outdated and the Pope has said that it is merely “a hypothesis” and that he would “let it drop”.

more from The Telegraph here.

In 1918, Robert Frost inscribed a new poem, “War Thoughts at Home,” in a copy of North of Boston, his second book. In the eighty-eight years since, the poem never quite resurfaced—until now. Published here for the first time, “War Thoughts at Home” embodies the stories of two great friends in Frost’s life. The first was Edward Thomas—who died in the trenches during World War I—and the poem narrates Frost’s ambivalence about the war that claimed Thomas’s life. The story of the other friend picks up where the first leaves off. It is the story of a new beginning for Frost in his friendship with Frederic G. Melcher, a rising star in the book trade, and it was Melcher who preserved this lost passage of Frost’s poetic thoughts about the war. By placing the stories of these two friends side by side, we may begin to put this lost poem in context.

more from Virginia Quarterly Review here.

From Harvard Gazette:

Think about this the next time someone cuts you off in traffic or in a grocery store line: Anger can bring on a heart attack or stroke.

That’s the conclusion of several studies at Harvard Medical School and elsewhere. One study of 1,305 men with an average age of 62 revealed that the angriest men were three times more likely to develop heart disease than the most placid ones.

Angry older men, as stereotypes go, are most vulnerable. But excessive ire can take a toll at any age. Researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine tracked 1,055 medical students for 36 years. Compared with cooler heads, the hotheads were six times more likely to suffer heart attacks by age 55 and three times more likely to develop any form of heart or blood vessel disease.

The conclusion is clear: Anger is bad for you at any age.

More here.

From The Guardian:

A recent poll in the New York Times named Toni Morrison’s Beloved as the greatest work of American fiction in the past 25 years. But what about over here? On the eve of this year’s Booker Prize, we asked 150 literary luminaries to vote for the best British, Irish or Commonwealth novel from 1980 to 2005. If this Observer poll has any consequence it derives from the fact that we have consulted mainly with professionals. These included several writers who, neglected this time, might reasonably expect to attract the attention of critics and readers a generation hence. We are especially pleased to have enthusiastic responses from Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Kirsty Gunn, Kate Grenville, Ali Smith, MJ Hyland and Sarah Waters, among others.

And so to our winner. JM Coetzee’s Disgrace received nominations from writers across the English-speaking world. This unforgettable novel of the South African crisis has already brought its author a record-breaking second Booker Prize in 1999. It is part of an oeuvre (including Waiting for the Barbarians, The Age of Iron and The Life and Times of Michael K) that was honoured by the Nobel in 2003.

More here.

Peter Matthiessen in the New York Review of Books:

Wild northern Alaska is one of the last places on earth where a human being can kneel down and drink from a wild stream without being measurably more poisoned or polluted than before; its heart and essence is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in the remote northeast corner of the state, the earth’s last sanctuary of the great Ice Age fauna that includes all three North American bears, gray wolves and wolverines, musk ox, moose, and, in the summer, the Porcupine River herd of caribou, 120,000 strong. Everywhere fly sandhill cranes and seabirds, myriad waterfowl and shorebirds, eagles, hawks, owls, shrikes and larks and longspurs, as well as a sprinkling of far-flung birds that migrate to the Arctic slope to breed and nest from every continent on earth. Yet we Americans, its caretakers, are still debating whether or not to destroy this precious place by turning it over to the oil industry for development.

More here.

From LiveScience.com:

There is no evidence that animals possess a mysterious sixth-sense allowing them to predict natural disasters. Their keen senses of smell, hearing, and sharp instincts alone are enough to send them scattering for the hillsides during a hurricane or tsunami. And even so, animals often die during natural disasters, so if they do have some sort of sixth sense, it’s not worth much.

More myths busted here.  [Photo of Frederica Krueger by Margit Oberrauch.]

Presented by Scott Atran to the National Security Council at the White House on September 14th, from Edge.org:

Ever since the end of the Second World War, Rational Actor models have dominated strategic thinking at all levels of government policy and military planning. In the confrontation between states, and especially during the Cold War, these models were insightful and useful in anticipating a wide array of challenges and in stabilizing the world peace enough to prevent nuclear war. But now our society faces a whole new range of challenges from non-state actors who are committed to die in order to kill and terrorize enough of our citizens to change the course of history. The darkest fear in the current struggle with terrorism is a nuclear bomb exploding in a major city. 

Given the operational demise of Al Qaeda and the still generally amateurish capabilities of its spiritual descendents, the present probability of such an event is low. Nevertheless, low probability events do occur and they are responsible for most of the cataclysmic and cascading changes that move human history from one phase to the next. Yet even attacks on the scale of September 11th, such as the recently foiled plane bombing plot out of London, with several thousand casualties and tens of billions of dollars in losses, can cause great and unpredictable changes, just as September 11 set the stage for the Iraq War and its spiraling aftermath.

The ability of a few deeply committed terrorists to change the world is a strategic challenge that standard, rational state actor models do not adequately address. We need new ways of thinking about the Devoted Actor who is routinely willing to make extreme sacrifices that are all out of proportion to the likely prospects of success. That’s what my research tries do.

More here.  And see also this.