It is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in America. This is the full text of MLK’s heroic and devastatingly moving speech delivered on August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.  I strongly urge you to read it again, if you haven’t done so in a while, and I defy you to remain unmoved by it. An audio version is available here.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest — quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day — this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride,

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

                Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

                Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of
                Pennsylvania.

                Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

                Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

                But not only that:

                Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

                Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

                Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

                Free at last! Free at last!

                Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

[This post was inspired, at least partly, by my brilliant niece Sheherzad Preisler who memorized the whole speech at age five.]

Stewart Home reviews the book by Mark Kurlanski, at Nth Position:

Treating a single year as better, worse or more significant than those around it is tricky. Mark Kurlansky understands this, writing in the final chapter: “In history it is always imprecise to attribute fundamental shifts to one exact moment. There was 1967 and 1969 and all the earlier years that made 1968 what it was. But 1968 was the epicenter of a shift, of a fundamental change, the birth of our postmodern media-driven world. That is why the popular music of the time, the dominant expression of popular culture in the period, has remained relevant to successive generations of youth.” That said, while Kurlansky is writing popular history, his coverage of political events carry as much weight as what he has to say about youth culture.

More here.

Another remarkable new work by Tomaselli, 2005’s Organism, shows a man with transparent skin plunging headless into a crystal chaos of stars, spiderwebs, and fractured mandalas. The piece seems to literally embody the difficult human transition between meat and mental ecstasy, but its full resonance only becomes clear when compared to the similarly semitransparent bodies in the work of Alex Grey, another Brooklyn artist and one of the most dominant painters in the largely marginalized world of contemporary psychedelic art. Though Grey’s art graces rave fliers and New Age calendars, he is no naïf—the declarative intensity of his strongest paintings depends in part on his sly appropriation of textbook medical imagery, whose hyperreal rhetoric paradoxically lends an air of actuality to his visionary bodies. But Grey is too much of a mystic literalist for his work to ever make it to the walls of MoCA; transcendence, even if it is just a trick of immanence, is still taboo. Whereas Grey’s transformed figures confidently ascend into rainbow mind-lattices, Tomaselli’s organism plunges into the fractured rag-and-bone shop of the head, delivering the more assimilable message that ecstasy is rarely far from the abject.

more from Artforum here.

What is needed is something quite different. The sceptical challenge to the idea of literary value cannot be brushed aside with reference to an existing “body of knowledge” about literature. It has to be shown that the knowledge in such a body of knowledge actually is knowledge. Thinking about literature cannot but be philosophical. There is no reason why laxer standards should be permissible. This anthology sometimes seems to imply that philosophy is to be defined as that which happens to come out of the mouth of a person currently in the pay of a Department of Philosophy. But for such persons to be of use to an account of literary value, they need also to be able to match the erudition and judgement of the best literary critics. All the humanities are philosophical through and through. They cannot simply ask some other department to do their thinking for them and then plonk it on top of their own material. The philosophy of literary “form”, however, is still in its infancy – so much so that it is even unclear whether “form” is the right word for what is to be discussed. An admission of the difficulty of addressing this subject may, strangely, be of more assistance in capturing the imagination of future readers, scholars and critics, than an assurance that the “science of literature” would be given back entire to us could we only delete the fashionable nonsense with which it is supposed currently to be encumbered.

Simon Jarvis reviewing a new anthology of lit. theory, “Theory’s Empire” in the TLS.

THE only thing I really like is that brain,” said the painter Dana Schutz, sitting on a stool in her Brooklyn studio and pointing to her detailed study of a strangely shaped human brain in gangrenous shades of green and gray. Ms. Schutz, 29, has been widely praised for her ecstatically expressive figurative paintings, recognizable by their thick, lush surfaces and flamboyant palette of hot pinks, leafy greens and eggy yellows. But after churning out a dozen vibrant new works for a fall show in Berlin, she found herself in a restlessly experimental frame of mind, casting about for new ideas.

more from the NY Times here.

From BBC News:

The deer is unique among mammals in being able to regenerate a complete body part – in this case a set of bone antlers covered in velvety skin. Antlers are large structures made from bone that annually grow, die, are shed and then regenerate. They grow in three to four months, making them one of the fastest growing living tissues. After the antlers have reached their maximum size, the bone hardens and the velvety outer covering of skin peels off. Once the velvet is gone, only the bare bone remains – a formidable weapon for fighting.

At the end of the mating season, the deer sheds its antlers to conserve energy. Next spring, a new pair grows out of a bony protuberance of tissue at the front of the animal’s head. The research suggests that stem cells – the master cells of the body, with the ability to develop into many specialised cell types – underpin this process.

More here.

From despardes.com:

Chelsea, 25, is dating the son of “disgraced ex-congressman” Ed Mezvinsky, who is currently serving a nearly seven-year jail stint for fraud. According to the magazine, Chelsea’s beau wanted her to visit his dad at the Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Alabama, but Hillary was having none of it. Her dash to Rajasthan with Mark, boyfriend, was a killing-two-birds-with-one-stone “political” strategy. Chelsea, who arrived in Rajasthan four days ago on a week-long private visit, avoided media glare to such an extent that not a single picture of hers and her boyfriend Mark have appeared in local newspapers despite the fact that they deployed an army of photographers and reporters in the pursuit.

Preferring to remain incognito, Chelsea arrived in the Lake City of Udaipur, in Rajasthan, where she spent four days at luxury Udaivilas hotel of the Oberois. During her Udaipur visit, Chelsea did boating, shopping and little sightseeing. The former US president’s daughter also tried some local delicacies and spent some time in hotel gymnasium and bar. In the hotel she was served traditional Mewari cuisine, which included makkai ki roti, bread made of maize flour.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Tête à Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Hazel Rowley: Sartre’s pet name for de Beauvoir was Beaver. In French the word is castor, which happens to be the title of the literary magazine to which the hero of Murger’s Scenes de la vie de boheme contributes. But Sartre – who had a taste for tough American crime novels, with their lexicons of misogynistic slang – probably knew that in English the word refers, none too flatteringly, to the pudendum. Actually, he soon tired of de Beauvoir’s nether parts; as a substitute for sex, they pimped for each other and shared titillating reports of their latest conquests.

Sartre, a wall-eyed gnome who reeked of tobacco, prided himself on the success of his seductive blather, and throughout his life maintained a harem of abject women, between whose apartments he commuted. Usually they began as his pupils, or as subjects of the amateur psychoanalysis he doled out: this placed them in a convenient position of inferiority, ready to be plucked. When Sartre declared her to be physically superannuated, de Beauvoir solaced herself with toy boys and – while a schoolteacher – had extracurricular liaisons with selected female students.

Once, when she and Sartre were together in Brazil, she fell ill with typhoid and spent a week in hospital. Outside visiting hours, Sartre concentrated on seducing ‘a 25-year-old Brazilian journalist, a virgin, with flaming red hair’, to whom he idly proposed marriage. He dismissed such forays by explaining – with Clintonian finesse – that they were just a species of masturbation. He sadistically specialised in denying himself to his partners, and practised coitus interruptus to punish them, not as a contraceptive precaution.

More here.

Will Knight in New Scientist:

Structural redesign and subtle crowd management techniques could reduce the risk of further tragedies during the stone throwing ritual of the Hajj pilgrimage, experts say.

362 people were killed on Thursday in a stampede that occurred as pilgrims tried to reach the three pillars that symbolise the devil in Mina, Saudi Arabia. More than 2.5 million people had converged on Mina, just east of Mecca, for the Hajj pilgrimage.

The stoning ritual is especially perilous because more than a million pilgrims may congregate at the pillars after prayer time. Those at the front will also often jostle one another in an effort to hit one of the three pillars with stones.

Officials say the tragedy occurred on Thursday when pilgrims tripped over baggage left at the entrance to the Jamarat Bridge – an upper level providing access to the pillars. As those behind rushed forward, the fallen were killed in the fatal crush.

But experts say the sheer scale of the stoning ritual makes it inherently dangerous. “There’s a huge risk and potential for accidents whenever you have so many people in a tightly confined space,” says Keith Still, an expert on crowd behaviour at UK company Crowd Dynamics. “There’s a limit to what can be done.”

More here.

Dennis Dutton in The Australian:

Throughout history and across cultures, the arts of homo sapiens have demonstrated universal features. These aesthetic inclinations and patterns have evolved as part of our hardwired psychological nature, ingrained in the human species over the 80,000 generations lived out by our ancestors in the 1.6 million years of the Pleistocene.

The existence of a universal aesthetic psychology has been suggested, not only experimentally, but by the fact that the arts travel outside their local contexts so easily: Beethoven is loved in Japan, Aboriginal art in Paris, Korean ceramics in Brazil, and Hollywood movies all over the globe.

Our aesthetic psychology has remained unchanged since the building of cities and the advent of writing some 10,000 years ago, which explains why The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, remain good reading today.

We haven’t lost Pleistocene tastes for fat and sweet foods, nor have we lost our ancient tastes for artistic entertainment.

The fascination, for example, that people worldwide find in the exercise of artistic virtuosity, from Praxiteles to Renee Fleming, is not a social construct, but an evolutionary adaptation; the worldwide interest in sports comes from a similar source.

More here.

Geov Parrish interviews Noam Chomsky at AlterNet:

Geov Parrish: Is George Bush in political trouble? And if so, why?

Noam Chomsky: George Bush would be in severe political trouble if there were an opposition political party in the country. Just about every day, they’re shooting themselves in the foot. The striking fact about contemporary American politics is that the Democrats are making almost no gain from this. The only gain that they’re getting is that the Republicans are losing support. Now, again, an opposition party would be making hay, but the Democrats are so close in policy to the Republicans that they can’t do anything about it. When they try to say something about Iraq, George Bush turns back to them, or Karl Rove turns back to them, and says, “How can you criticize it? You all voted for it.” And, yeah, they’re basically correct.

How could the Democrats distinguish themselves at this point, given that they’ve already played into that trap?

Democrats read the polls way more than I do, their leadership. They know what public opinion is. They could take a stand that’s supported by public opinion instead of opposed to it. Then they could become an opposition party, and a majority party.

More here.

“Ismail Kadare has turned the decline and fall of Albania’s bloodthirsty dictator into a superb thriller, The Successor, says Ian Thomson.”

Review of Kadare’s The Successor (translated by David Bellos), in The Guardian:

Albanians are descended from the most ancient of European races, the Illyrians. For many in the West, though, Albania remains as remote as the fictional Syldavia of the Tintin comics. The country came into existence only in 1912 with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Its first ruler, the fantastically named King Zog, was ousted by Mussolini when he invaded in 1939. Five years later, Mussolini’s troops were expelled in turn by Albanian nationalist Enver Hoxha. Following 50 years of communism under Hoxha, the Balkan nation is now a fledgling democracy. However, it will be many years before Albania shakes off Hoxha’s brutal legacy.

Outwardly a Stalinist, Hoxha was an Ottoman dandy whose politburo was united less by Marxist-Leninism than by the Balkan revenge cult of gjak per gjak (blood for blood). For 40 years, Hoxha terrorised Albania by retaliatory murders and government purges. His dictatorship was inimical to literary expression, yet Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare has produced marvellously subtle critiques of Hoxha even under his censorship. Kadare was never a party member, but he was chairman of a cultural institute run by the dictator’s dangerous wife, Nexhmije Hoxha. As Minister for Propaganda during the early Sixties, she helped run Albania’s feared Sigurimi secret police.

Kadare’s first novel, The General of the Dead Army, nevertheless defied the authorities by refusing to mention the word ‘party’. It told the story of an Italian army officer who returns to Albania at the war’s end to bury his fallen compatriots, and remains a magnificent allegory of life under dictatorship. Kadare was accommodated by the regime until he finally incurred the wrath of the Sigurimi in 1990, and defected to Paris.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

Last year was the hottest on record, or the second hottest, depending on the records climatologists look at. The planet has warmed .8 degrees C over the past 150 years, and scientists are generally agreed that greenhouse gases have played a major part in that warming. They also agree that the warming will continue in the decades to come. Many experts are concerned that warming may make two unpleasant things more common: extinctions and diseases. In tomorrow’s issue of Nature (link to come here), a team of scientists report on a case that ties these two dangers together: frogs have become extinct as climate change spreads a deadly fungus. It’s an important study, but it can’t be boiled down to simple slogans. It highlights the dangers of global warming, but it shows that global warming’s effects can be counterintuitive and unpredictable.

More here.

Anita Hill in Ms. Magazine:

Whatever the criticism of Miers’ nomination, however, I believe that it was predictable given the way the president introduced her to the public. In previously announcing John Roberts’ nomination, President Bush touted him as the gold standard for nominees. Bush declared that he was chosen from “among the most distinguished jurists and attorneys in the country,” and cited his “intellect, experience and temperament.” The presence of Roberts’ wife and two children rounded out the picture of what the president wanted the public to accept as the rarefied image of judicial leadership.

In contrast, President Bush introduced Miers by citing “the past five years” of service to his administration. He gave her few accolades for her outstanding legal mind, her specific legal experiences and her long career. Physically, she appeared as a single woman without family members— as though kin other than a spouse and children are insignificant.

Days after Miers’ withdrawal from the nomination process, President Bush introduced her replacement, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., by referring to his “distinguished record, his measured judicial temperaments and his tremendous personal integrity.” Alito, like Roberts, was accompanied by his wife and two children. From all appearances, the president had hastily returned to the kind of nominee that had been successfully confirmed weeks before: a white male with an Ivy League education, federal judicial experience and a traditional family.

Anita F. Hill is professor of social policy, law and women’s studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

More here.

From The New York Times:

‘Gate of the Sun,’ by Elias Khoury. Narrated by a peasant doctor talking to a comatose, aging fighter, “Gate of the Sun” relates a swirl of stories: of grandmothers and grandfathers, midwives and children, wives and lovers – the lucky and the hapless, the mad and the hopeful. Employing a strategy that’s an inversion of “A Thousand and One Nights” (whose narrator, Scheherazade, tells stories to save herself), Khalil half believes that these stories are keeping his dying friend Yunes alive. Between November 1947 and October 1950, some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to flee their homes as the British departed and the Israelis took control. Disputed and complicated, the refugee problem has been a sticking point in more than five decades of war, terrorism and failed peace talks.

Elias Khoury is one of a handful of contemporary Arab novelists to have gained a measure of Western attention. He is also one of the few to write about the Palestinian experience, albeit from the perspective of an outsider. As a Christian born in Beirut in 1948, at the moment of Israel’s inception, Khoury was too young to know firsthand the events that “Gate of the Sun” encompasses.

More here.

Steve Shapin in The New Yorker:

On January 20, 2003, the English journalist William Leith decides he has to lose weight. That’s the day he gets on the bathroom scale and finds that it’s “the fattest day of my life”: he’s just over six feet tall and he weighs two hundred and thirty-six pounds. He feels lousy. He feels repulsive. In fact, he is repulsive. His girlfriend tells him to stop tucking his shirt into his trousers—“It just bulks you out”—and she doesn’t want to have sex with him anymore. He resolves, not for the first time, to do something about it. He gets on a plane and goes to New York to see Dr. Atkins, and he decides, more or less at the same time, to write a book about his eating problems. “The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict” (Gotham; $25) is the result: Bridget Jones with a Y chromosome, a significant coke habit, and a sneaky sort of intellectual ambition.

Leith’s book is about food addiction, but he’s interested in all sorts of addictions and what it is about our culture that makes it so easy to stuff ourselves, leaving us filled but unfulfilled: “This is the fat society. This is where people come, so they can have exactly what they want. And what they want is . . . more.”

More here.

Maggie Wittlin in Seed Magazine:

There is a real distinction between authentic laughter, that which is caused by a stimulus, and laughter used to manipulate social situations, say Binghamton University researchers. In fact, these two kinds of laughter may have evolved millions of years apart…

“If you do a literature search on laughter, a lot of the material you’re going to come up with is really about humor,” Provine said. “But humor is really a sort of subcategory of the topic of laughter, instead of vice versa, because laughter is ancient and instinctive, while humor is something of relatively modern origin. So there was laughter long before there was humor.”

The authors begin their evolutionary tale of laughter well before humor came into the mix, arguing that laughter is a more basic function than even language. “Not only does it precede language developmentally…it probably preceded language in terms of evolution,” Wilson said. “So, there was a time in our history when we were laughing before we were talking.”

Laughter-like behavior started before we split from apes, the researchers say. As they tickle each other and horse around, apes give a pant-grunt, which Wilson said is a clear precursor to laughter.

More here.

From The Economist:

The brave seamen whose great voyages of exploration opened up the world are iconic figures in European history. Columbus found the New World in 1492; Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; and Magellan set off to circumnavigate the world in 1519. However, there is one difficulty with this confident assertion of European mastery: it may not be true.

It seems more likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called “The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft”.

Next week, in Beijing and London, fresh and dramatic evidence is to be revealed to bolster Zheng He’s case. It is a copy, made in 1763, of a map, dated 1418, which contains notes that substantially match the descriptions in the book. “It will revolutionise our thinking about 15th-century world history,” says Gunnar Thompson, a student of ancient maps and early explorers.

More here.

Seth Mnookin in Slate:

Based on all the evidence, it seems Frey’s weird, macho fear of seeing himself as a “victim” led him to fabricate a life that was painful and extreme enough so as to explain the sadness and despair he felt. Instead of a crack-binging street fighter, ostracized by both his peers and society, the Smoking Gun investigation indicates Frey was more likely a lonely, confused boy who may or may not have needed ear surgery as a child and felt distant from his parents and alienated from his peers. He drank too much, did some drugs, got nailed for a couple of DUIs and ended up, at age 23, in one of the country’s most prestigious drug-and-alcohol treatment centers. When Frey writes that, after one of his fictitious arrests, he hated himself, saw no future, and wanted to die, I believe him. I grew up in a well-off suburban household with loving parents and no clear traumas in my past. I was popular enough in high school, I joined the newspaper and acted in plays, and I got into a good college. I was also miserably, sometimes almost suicidally, depressed, and, from the age of 15, I was taking drugs and drinking almost every day. Frey must have felt that his real, very scary, and very lonely feelings would have seemed weak if it was only preceded by standard-issue suburban teenage angst.

More here.  And Slate also has “Lying writers and the readers who love them” by Meghan O’Rourke:

It’s been quite a week for literary scandals. First, The Smoking Gun made a persuasive case that Oprah-anointed author James Frey had fabricated crucial swathes of his best-selling addiction-and-recovery memoir A Million Little Pieces. Second, the New York Times offered its own strong case that the cult novelist JT LeRoy—a former child prostitute and recovered heroin addict, whose raw and “honest” writing had made him a celebrity darling—was merely a persona invented by writer Laura Albert and “played” in public by a friend. You might conclude from all the media hoopla that these hoaxes have upended our long-held ideas about truth and literary merit. But are we really all that surprised?

Long before his book was exposed as fraudulent, the James Frey phenomenon was itself Display A of what has become a deep-seated conviction of our therapeutic culture: Not only is the line between what is factually true and what is purveyed as “authentic” blurry indeed, but the inspirational power of a work of imagination or memory is the most relevant currency by which to judge its value.

More here.  And see this previous post about Frey with many comments from 3QD readers.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft in Slate:

On Capitol Hill, as well as Westminster, drink once oiled the political process. “Cactus” Jack Garner, the genial Texan reactionary who was FDR’s vice president in the 1930s and who famously said that his job wasn’t worth a bucket of warm piss, confined his work to asking senators in to “strike a blow for liberty” over a flask of bourbon, so much of which flowed that Cactus Jack had a malodorous urinal installed in a corner of his office. If he wasn’t the best advertisement for the virtues of booze, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a notably serious drinker who was also several cuts morally and intellectually above most of his Senate colleagues.

More alarming were Richard Nixon’s last years at the White House. After a good many evening martinis, he would call Henry Kissinger, and the secretary of state would grin silently as he passed around the telephone so that others could listen to their commander in chief’s unbalanced ramblings. Since Nixon was in a position to blow us all up, this suggests a somewhat esoteric sense of humor on Kissinger’s part…

In 1911, Winston Churchill wrote to his wife about Prime Minister H.H. Asquith: “On Thursday night the PM was very bad: and I squirmed with embarrassment. He could hardly speak and many people noticed his condition. … [O]nly the persistent freemasonry of the House of Commons prevents a scandal.”

There is a certain irony here, given Churchill’s own reputation. Few people ever saw him grossly drunk, but in 1935, Neville Chamberlain reported almost good-naturedly that “Winston makes a good many speeches considerably fortified by cocktails and old brandies,” and his all-day-long consumption of champagne, whisky, and brandy, not least in the years 1940-45, would have him marked down by many contemporary doctors as a functional alcoholic.

More here.