As regular readers of 3QD may remember, our own editor Morgan Meis was in Vietnam earlier this year to cover the 30th anniversary of the reunification of North and South Vietnam for the Virginia Quarterly Review. [See here.] He was briefly detained by security services there before being summarily deported. Now, we finally have a detailed account of what happened, by Morgan and his friend Tom Bissell in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

MORGAN—11 A.M., APRIL 28, HANOI:

…The phone rang. Nguyen went upstairs. We could hear him speak in growingly agitated Vietnamese, then he came down in a state of even greater agitation. “You’re being watched,” he told us. “Followed.”

Joe and I looked at each other. For some reason Joe was smiling, and then, even as the word followed stabbed at me with a little shiv of fear, I was smiling. There was a sense of converse accomplishment that the things we were doing here could matter enough for government tails to be dispatched, papers filed, operatives consulted. This feeling did not last long. Minutes later, eight Vietnamese men—five in drab olive uniforms that looked shipped from Leningrad in 1974, three in plainclothes, looking like anyone you might pass in the street—burst into Nguyen’s house and rushed into his living room. One man was videotaping the whole thing. They ordered Joe to stand back from his mounted camera and began questioning us. In an instant, the room was rich with the faintly stupefying air of bureaucratic wheels turning. God only knew what button of paranoia had been pushed, what man at what Party level in what city in what office had decided that some unknowable line had been crossed.

I tried to stand up and make the transition from feeling I had been caught doing something wrong to projecting a sense of outrage and indignation at a plainly absurd state of affairs, but the fact is Joe and I were terrified. These officials were the kind of officials who were good at being officials. They exuded officialness. They had a cool stance of authority, conducting themselves with an air of simultaneous annoyance and triumph. As it quickly became clear, their goal was to intimidate us into revealing our purpose, CIA- or Viet Kieu-dissident-related or otherwise. I looked over at Nguyen, an expert in affairs of stormtrooper management, and noticed a distinct glaze of concern on his face. Was Nguyen scared too?

“What are you doing here?” one of the stormtroopers asked. It was the fifth time he had asked this question. Not waiting for an answer, he asked another.

“How do you know Nguyen?”

“Through a friend in New York.”

“Who?”

I was utterly in the thrall of saving myself; I suddenly understood why captured revolutionaries ratted out their fellow insurrectionists, however beloved they might have once been. “Sam Henderson,” I said, and felt the disgrace in my throat.

“Where are your passports?”

My passport was in my pocket. But I had an idea. “At the hotel,” I said.

More here.  [File photo of Morgan, not from Vietnam.]

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

We celebrated Thanksgiving with traditional fervor and gaiety in the American capital. Being an expatriate, we have coveted invitations to native Thanksgiving dinners in years past but recently have been able to manage something on our own; Turkey, drunkenness, familial tension. It really is a wonderful sort of holiday as we all thank our Gods or each other for being where we are, kind of like that song that goes, “It’s not where you’re from/ It’s where you’re at.”

Thanksgiving produces great drama: there’s drama in the way the turkey is pulled out from the oven, arrives on the table, and in the way the knife is held in abeyance over the large bird, typically with the largest hands of a particular clan. And the inevitably drunk patriarch may rise up after the meal, bang his belly against the edge of table, and make slurred pronouncements causing bottles to fall, faces to redden. Some run out to sniffle or smoke. Others, in attempting to steady the old man, take elbows in the jaw. You get the picture.

Through this weekend, we watched several movies including “Capote” – all critically feted, none dramatic. Capote, the New York Review of Books notes, “might have been about anything…a bittersweet coming-of-age story with a triumphantly happy ending…[or of the] genre of celebrity decline” but it is instead the “story of how Capote came to write and publish In Cold Blood.” And strangely, we were underwhelmed (and find ourselves not only in the minority but in the company of the cantankerous octogenarian, Stanley Kauffmann). The problem is that a writer writing about something, anything, is not dramatic – even a flamboyant, voluble writer writing about a couple of grisly murders.

So how does a director, even one as able as Bennett Miller, depict a series of writerly crises on screen? Facial twitches? No. Falling bottles? Perhaps. Facial twitches and falling bottles? More likely. It is, to be fair, a tall order. Bottles do fall and knives are held in abeyance in films that feature writers including “Barfly“ and “Misery“ but neither is attempting to transcribe a writer’s inner life. In fact, the only comparable project that comes to mind is the Coen Brothers’ “Barton Fink“, another pretty, flat film. Joel may tell you that drama was not his ambition but acknowledging the lack of drama doesn’t make it okay.

Dellilo, for instance, has attempted the lack of drama as an aesthetic project. The following is characteristic the prose in Cosmopolis, a pretty, flat, generally poorly reviewed novel: “He didn’t know what he wanted. Then he knew. He wanted to get a haircut.” Not only is there no drama in the narrative trajectory of the book – man gets haircut – but there’s no drama syntactically; read together, the effect of the sentences is of briskness and there is no drama in sustained briskness.

On the other hand, there is more drama in Updike’s prose (even though Updike is not known to be a great dramatist): “With an effort of spatial imagination he perceived that a mirror does not reverse our motion, though it does transpose our ears, and gives our mouth a tweak, so that the face even of a loved one looks familiar and ugly when seen in a mirror, the way she – queer thought! – always sees it. He saw that a mirror poised in its midst would not affect the motion of an army…and often half a reflected cloud matched the half of another beyond the building’s edge, moving as one, pierced by a jet trail as though by Cupid’s arrow.” You will, of course, notice that the rich, sonorous cadence of the coupled sentences is broken by the short, comma-less, next sentence: “The disaster sat light on the city’s heart.” This is drama.

So if you’ve had enough drama this weekend, lie on the couch, arms dangling, reading Cosmopolis, watching Capote. On the other hand, if your old man didn’t get up, drop things and yell at everybody, pick up Franzen’s Corrections – a dramatic book that ends with Thanksgiving dinner – and watch the Oscar nominated “Affliction” – a character study in a bleak setting that beats “Capote” hands down. For more pointers, pontification, and of course, dramatic digressions, ladies and gentlemen, remain tuned. Right here.

Other Critical Digressions:
Gangbanging and Notions of the Self
Dispatch from Cambridge (or Notes on Deconstructing Chicken)
Literary Pugilists, Underground Men
The Naipaulian Imperative and the Phenomenon of the Post-National
Dispatch from Karachi
The Media Generation and Nazia Hassan

Untitled, 2003. Goauche and mixed media on wasli.

Aisha Khalid, Hasnat Mahmood, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Talha Rathore, and Saira Wasim.

From Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration.

More here and here.

Sidney Blumenthal looks at Dick Cheney’s career in the various halls of power.

Elected to the House of Representatives in 1978, Dick Cheney became the Republican leader on the House Intelligence Committee, where he consistently fought congressional oversight and limits on presidential authority. When Congress investigated the Iran-Contra scandal (the creation of an illegal, privately funded, offshore US foreign policy) in 1986, Cheney was the crucial administration defender. At every turn, he blocked the Democrats and prevented them from questioning vice-president Bush.

Under Cheney’s leadership, not a single House Republican signed the special investigating committee’s final report charging “secrecy, deception and disdain for law.” Instead, the Republicans issued their own report claiming there had been no major wrongdoing.

Benedict O’Donohoe makes a case for the vaildity and relevance of Jean-Paul Sartre’s work, in Philosophy Now.

For both the range and the merit of Sartre’s opus are quite amazing: he is the author of modern classics in several fields – the novel, Nausea 1938; the short story, The Wall 1939; the play, No Exit 1944; philosophy, Being and Nothingness 1943; criticism, What is Literature? 1948; biography, Saint Genet, Comedian and Martyr 1952; the polemical essay and reportage – numerous issues of his periodical Les Temps modernes, founded 1946 – and ten volumes of Situations; and, not least, autobiography, Words 1964, widely regarded as his finest literary achievement. As if this body of work were not enough, he also wrote screenplays, journalism, art criticism, theses on theoretical psychology – notably the emotions and the imagination – and copious correspondence. Moreover, he made (admittedly, ill-fated) forays into radio and television. In short, Sartre was, in the phrase he borrowed from Chateaubriand as an epigraph to the final section of Words, ‘a book-making machine’, and the products of his ‘machinery’ had an impact across the spectrum of the arts, media and social sciences.

However, Sartre does not matter simply because he was a great writer, nor even primarily so, although his exceptional command of styles and genres expertly complements his missionary purpose. No, Sartre matters because so many fundamental points of his analysis of the human reality are right and true, and because their accuracy and veracity entail real consequences for our lives as individuals and in social groups. His distinction is to have obeyed his own injunction of ‘commitment’, and to have persisted in trying to convey his messages to as wide an audience as possible, by exploiting every medium available to the writer.

From Economic and Political Weekly, a case for reforming the governance structure of the internet.

The US and the European Union are in the midst of another spat – this time on internet governance. The dispute is important enough to be raised by president Bush with the European Commission president, Jose Manuel Barroso. It has been the subject of newspaper editorials on both sides of the Atlantic and, lately even here in India. The main sources of contention are the present role of the US government, the possible role of other governments and intergovernmental organisations and whether any governmental oversight is needed.

It all started at Geneva in December 2003 at the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). At that time the dispute was mainly between the developing countries and the OECD bloc. It could not be resolved and a multi-stakeholder working group was set up under the chairmanship of Nitin Desai, the former CEA and UN under-secretary general, who is now India-based but continues to be the UN’s special adviser for the Information Summit. The issue is supposed to be resolved at the second phase of the summit that is to be held at Tunis from November 16 to 18.

From The Washington Post:

Like Pascal, Kierkegaard and Baudelaire, Franz Kafka (1883- 1924) is one of the great masters of spiritual desolation. We don’t actually read his work, we are harrowed by it. In German of classical directness and purity, this desk functionary of the Prague Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute presents tableau after tableau of what Pascal called ” la misre de l’homme sans Dieu ,” the misery of man without God. All of Kafka’s unfortunate protagonists — Georg Bendemann in “The Judgment,” Gregor Samsa in “The Metamorphosis,” Josef K. in The Trial — struggle against the one great, serious truth about life: Each of us is fundamentally and inescapably alone, especially in the face of death.

Reiner Stach’s Kafka builds on much of this research. (Drawing by Franz Kafka and a portrait taken in 1910 (From “Kafka”).

From Harvard Gazette:

We spend about a third of our lives asleep. What really goes on during this time? The answer: more than anyone ever dreamed. This research is based on well-established findings that the brain doesn’t stop working when we sleep. During as much as 20 percent of our sleeping time, we exhibit rapid bursts of eye movements, and our brains are almost as active as when we are awake. Called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, these are periods of vivid dreaming. During the rest of our sleep, even though consciousness is greatly diminished, our brain cells remain surprisingly active.

“Studies show that hallucinatory mental content is lowest during active waking and highest during REM sleep,” says Allan Hobson, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “The incidence of thinking is highest during quiet waking and lowest during REM sleep. The implication of these findings is that the sleeping brain can either generate its own perceptions or it can think about them. It cannot do both at the same time. Therefore, dreaming is as hallucinatory and thoughtless (delusional) as so-called mental illness.”

Think of that next time you try to make sense out of your dreams.

More here.

Jenny Turner reviews Ayn Rand by Jeff Britting, in the London Review of Books:

If you try to find out about the legacy of Ayn Rand, your search engine will probably direct you first to aynrand.org, a website run by the Ayn Rand Institute in California. The ARI was founded in 1985, three years after Rand’s death, by Leonard Peikoff, her friend and heir. It runs a newsletter called Impact and, via the Objectivist Academic Center, undergraduate courses in the Randian world vision.

Objectivism was the name Rand gave to the system of philosophy she developed in a 30,000-word speech that took her two years to write and which forms the centrepiece of her bestselling novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957). It was later elaborated in speeches, lectures and interviews, in the six non-fiction books Rand published in her lifetime, and a further dozen-odd published after her death. Objectivism is also promulgated by the Objectivist Center in Washington DC, until recently run by David Kelley, the author of A Life of One’s Own: Individualism and the Welfare State. Kelley split from the ARI in 1990, ‘dismayed’ by ‘the exploding excesses’ of its ‘official, dogmatic approach’. The Center supports lectures and social events, a journal called the New Individualist (until recently the Navigator), a venture called the Atlas Society and an online Objectivism Store selling T-shirts, bags, hats, badges and inspirational posters such as Morality Made Visible, which features the Manhattan skyline, Twin Towers intact, with a quotation from The Fountainhead, Rand’s bestselling novel of 1943.

More here.

Barry Bearak in the New York Times Magazine:

For the earth, it was just a twinge. Last Dec. 26, at 7:59 a.m., one part of the planet’s undersea crust made an abrupt shift beneath another along a 750-mile seam near the island of Sumatra. The tectonic plates had been grating against each other for millenniums, and now the higher of the two was lifted perhaps 60 feet. For a planet where landmasses are in constant motion across geological time, the event was of no great moment. But for people – who mark the calendar in days and months rather than eons – a monumental catastrophe had begun, not only the largest earthquake in 40 years but also the displacement of billions of tons of water, unleashing a series of mammoth waves: a tsunami. These surging mounds of water raced toward land with the speed of a jet aircraft and then slowed as they reared up to leap ashore at heights of 50 feet and higher. They were long as well as tall, stampeding inland and carrying with them all they were destroying. People caught in the waves became small ingredients in an enormous blender, bludgeoned by concrete slabs and felled trees, stabbed by jagged sheets of glass, tangled up in manacles of wire.

The number of the dead and missing is now estimated at 232,000.

More here.

From Wired News:

The Library of Congress is kicking off a campaign Tuesday to work with other nation’s libraries to build a World Digital Library, starting with a $3 million donation from Google.

Librarian of Congress James Billington said he is looking to attract further private funding to develop bilingual projects, featuring millions of unique objects, with libraries in China, India, the Muslim world and other nations.

This builds on major existing digital documentary projects by the Library of Congress — one preserving an online record of Americana and another documenting ties between the United States and Brazil, France, the Netherlands, Russia and Spain.

“The World Digital Library is an attempt to go beyond Europe and the Americas … into cultures where the majority of the world is,” Billington said.

As an example, Billington said the Library of Congress is in discussions with the national library of Egypt to include a collection of great Islamic scientific works from the 10th through the 16th century in the World Digital Library.

More here.

Paul Boutin in Slate:

Lawrence Krauss, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University, has a reputation for shooting down pseudoscience. He opposed the teaching of intelligent design on The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. He penned an essay for the New York Times that dissed President Bush’s proposal for a manned Mars mission. Yet in his latest book, Hiding in the Mirror, Krauss turns on his own—by taking on string theory, the leading edge of theoretical physics. Krauss is probably right that string theory is a threat to science, but his book proves he’s too late to stop it.

String theory, which stretches back to the late 1960s, has become in the last 20 years the field of choice for up-and-coming physics researchers. Many of them hope it will deliver a “Theory of Everything”—the key to a few elegant equations that explain the workings of the entire universe, from quarks to galaxies.

More here.

Dusan Stojanovic of the AP at ABC News:

Serbia’s president on Thursday formally proposed dividing Kosovo between its independence-seeking Albanian majority and a Serb minority as the chief U.N. mediator met with government officials.

Martti Athisaari, the envoy who was appointed earlier this month by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and is on his initial fact-finding mission in the Balkans, said the troubled province’s final status will ultimately be decided by the Security Council after his report.

More here.  [Thanks again to Samad Khan.]

Review of Sen’s The Argumentative Indian from The Nation:

The sage of Bengal has pronounced. Pluralism, we are informed, has an ancient pedigree in Indian history. It is embedded in the oldest known texts of Hinduism and, like a river, has flowed through Indian history (including the Mughal period, when the country was under Muslim rule) till the arrival of the British in the eighteenth century. It is this cultural heritage, ignored and misinterpreted by colonialists and religious fanatics alike, that shapes Indian culture and goes a long way toward explaining the attachment of all social classes to modern democracy. The argumentative tradition “has helped to make heterodoxy the natural state of affairs in India,” exerting a profound influence on the country’s politics, democracy and “the emergence of its secular priorities.” This view informs most of the thought-provoking essays in Amartya Sen’s new book, a set of reflections on India written in a very different register from his other books on moral philosophy and poverty. It is designed not so much for the academy but as a public intervention in the country of his birth, to which he remains firmly attached despite the Nobel Prize and his latest posting at Harvard as a Boston Brahman…

Given the title of Sen’s book, it would be churlish to prove him wrong by simply nodding in approval, as is so often the case in our wonderful subcontinent. What follows, then, from this argumentative Pakistani is the expression of a few doubts concerning his central thesis and the odd complaint with regard to some omissions.

More here.  [Thanks to Samad Khan.]

From The New York Times:

Fiction & Poetry

BEYOND BLACK. By Hilary Mantel. (John Macrae/Holt, $26.) Neurotic, demanding ghosts haunt a British clairvoyant in this darkly comic novel.

A CHANGED MAN. By Francine Prose. (HarperCollins, $24.95.) A neo-Nazi engages a Jewish human rights leader in this morally concerned novel, asking for help in his effort to repent.

COLLECTED POEMS, 1943-2004. By Richard Wilbur. (Harcourt, $35.) This urbane poetry survived the age of Ginsberg, Lowell and Plath.

EMPIRE RISING. By Thomas Kelly. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A muscular historical novel in which the Irish erect the Empire State Building in a cheerfully corrupt New York.

ENVY. By Kathryn Harrison. (Random House, $24.95.) A psychoanalyst is unhappy but distant until Greek-tragedy things start happening in this novel by an ace student of sexual violation.

More here.

Carl Zimmer writes about venom and the origin of snakes:

“Back in February I discovered the remarkable work of Australian biologist Bryan Grieg Fry , who has been tracing the evolution of venom. As I wrote in the New York Times, he searched the genomes of snakes for venom genes. He discovered that even non-venomous snakes produce venom. By drawing an evolutionary tree of the venom genes, Fry showed that the common ancestor of living snakes had several kinds of venom, which had evolved through accidental “borrowing” of proteins produced in other parts of the body. Later, these genes duplicated to create a sophisticated cocktail of venoms–a cocktail that varied from one lineage of snakes to another.”

More Here

In First Monday, a sprawling piece by Beth Noveck on the collaboration, deliberation, representation and identity on the internet.

Participating in a group — in whatever form — is also not the same as deliberation. Deliberation — or the public exchange of reasoned ideas through face–to–face conversation — can be one of the central activities of group life. But groups can now engage in “conversation” without talking. Much recent political theory describes experimental forms of idealized deliberation that is perfectly representative or pluralist or equal. These strictures make the institutionalization of deliberation impossible in an imperfect world of busy people. They also constrain our ability to “scale” deliberation into a widespread practice by means of the Internet. This contributes to a perception of deliberation as an elite pastime. This is not to say that there is no place for socially engineered conversations but that the Internet is enabling forms of collective dialogue that produce social interaction without formal deliberation in any technical sense. Members of a group can create a shared map or diagram to represent the state of mind of the group as, if not more, easily than they can have a conversation in real time. Representative politics has co–opted the term deliberation. Not everyone needs to converse face–to–face about every issue every time to achieve collective action. Technology is beginning to replace the vast array of social and visual clues, cues and customs that we depend upon to organize the public exchange of reason. Technology is changing what it means to deliberate.

Groups may be institutionalized or decentralized. They may participate in representative political life or they may just as well be a non–incorporated collection of people committed to a particular issue, such as the Dean Corps or a Meetup. Yet these groups can have real political power, produce real affective loyalty from their members and shape the political culture of a society.

In frontwheeldrive, an interview from February with the musician Mike Ladd.

frontwheeldrive: Tell me about Negrophilia. What were your aims with this record and how did it all come together?

Mike Ladd: The concept has been with me for a long time. I think in a way, all of my records have touched on this topic, especially when you are a Black artist doing stuff that doesn’t make the mainstream or is esoteric, and you have to contend with a large portion of your audience being white (especially when that wasn’t your primary intended audience). That said, when Patrine Archer Straw’s book came around, I had to read it, and it touched on at least some of the origins of the Negrophilia phenomenon. A phenomenon that has grown beyond Elvis and is as bizarre as Michael jackson, Eminem, and Condeleza Rice having tea and smoking stems in a drum circle in Norway.

Charles V. Peña of the Cato Institute looks at runaway U.S. defense spending, in Issues in Science and Technology.

For fiscal year (FY) 2005, military spending will be nearly $500 billion, which is greater in real terms than during any of the Reagan years and surpassed only by spending at the end of World War II in 1945 and 1946 and during the Korean War in 1952. The White House is asking for an FY 2006 Department of Defense (DOD) budget of $413.9 billion, which does not include funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The administration argues that increased military spending is a necessary part of the war on terrorism. But such logic assumes that the war on terrorism is primarily a military war to be fought by the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. The reality is that large conventional military operations will be the exception rather than the rule in the war on terrorism. Instead, the military’s role will mainly involve special operations forces in discrete missions against specific targets, not conventional warfare aimed at overthrowing entire regimes. The rest of the war aimed at dismantling and degrading the al Qaeda terrorist network will require unprecedented international intelligence and law enforcement cooperation, not expensive new planes, helicopters, and warships.

From Slate:

Dick Cheney calls it “dishonest,” “reprehensible” and “not legitimate” to claim that the administration misled the public about prewar intelligence. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Nov. 21, the vice president added for good measure that “any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false.” Most Democrats in Congress think that prewar intelligence was indeed distorted and hyped—though not “fabricated,” which, like the accusation that they have accused Bush of “lying,” is a straw man of Cheney’s. Democrats believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and others misrepresented what our government knew about Saddam Hussein’s WMD capacity and his links to terrorists in order to make a stronger case for invading Iraq.

So, who’s right? Did Bush officials mislead us, or didn’t they?

More here.