The strain Hazlitt caught in Wordsworth’s face can be attributed in part to the project he and Coleridge set themselves: looking beyond or through “outward appearance”, often cruel and contradictory, to an underlying unity and benevolence. Sisman somewhat undervalues this strain in discussion of the poetry. He is writing biography not criticism, but he might have said more about the poetry’s often divided character, the struggle of the poets to sustain their faith in nature and the powers of the imagination. “Though he could no longer feel the ‘aching joys’ and ‘dizzy raptures’ of his boyhood”, writes Sisman, of the speaker in “Tintern Abbey”, “he had found ‘abundant recompense’ elsewhere”. This is a reading of the lines “for such loss, I would believe [italics added], / Abundant recompense”, one of several disquieting or disturbing notes in the poem (“If this / Be but a vain belief”, “And so I dare to hope”). In later poems – “Resolution and Independence”, “Ode: Intimations”, “Elegiac Stanzas” – similar notes sound more ominously; the assertion in “Tintern Abbey” that “Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her” becomes increasingly dubious. From the start, what Harold Bloom calls a “dark undersong”, that of nature as “hidden antagonist”, shadowed Wordsworth’s faith in the one life. Coleridge’s poems are even more divided, likewise in ways that call his and Wordsworth’s “joint labour” into question. Beneath the biographical factors which Adam Sisman so vividly and movingly recounts lies the difficulty of the labour itself.

more from the TLS here.

Still, when it comes to the state of the novel, to the future of the novel, I feel rather optimistic. Numbers don’t count where books are concerned, for there is only one reader, each and every time only one reader. That explains the particular power of the novel and why, in my opinion, it will never die as a form. Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.

I have spent my life in conversations with people I have never seen, with people I will never know and I hope to continue until the day I stop breathing.

It’s the only job I’ve ever wanted.

more from the Guardian Unlimited here.

From a new HRW study written by Farida Deif and our friend Lucy Mair:

A significant number of women and girls in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) are victims of violence perpetrated by family members and intimate partners. While there is increasing recognition of the problem and some Palestinian Authority (PA) officials have indicated their support for a more forceful response, little action has been taken to seriously address these abuses. Indeed, there is some evidence the level of violence is getting worse while the remedies available to victims are being further eroded.

Defenders of the status quo on this issue typically justify the PA’s failure to take more decisive action by highlighting the many critical political, economic, and security matters facing the PA, a situation only exacerbated by events following the electoral victory of Hamas in January 2006. While it is true that Israeli actions since the outbreak of the current intifada in September 2000—including attacks on PA institutions and security services, and Israel’s current refusal to remit tax revenues, among others—have significantly weakened PA capabilities, this is no excuse for inaction. There is much that PA officials could be but are not doing to end violence against women inside the family. This report offers concrete suggestions for change, some of which are highlighted in the key recommendations listed at the end of this section.

Update: Also see The New York Times article on the study here. Lucy Mair:

“The problem is that no one sees this abuse as a crime,” Lucy Mair, a researcher in the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch and a co-author of the report, said in an interview. “It’s seen as a family or social problem, and some behavior is not even criminalized.”

Stanley Fish in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Some years ago, just after Salman Rushdie was made the object of a fatwa, I found myself at an academic conference listening to a panel address the issues raised by his situation. A member of the audience rose and, without a trace of irony, gave voice to this question/accusation: “What’s the matter with those Iranians? Haven’t they ever heard of the First Amendment?” The empirical answer to the question was maybe yes, maybe no. Some individual Iranians and many members of the Iranian legal community would have heard of (and studied) the First Amendment, but even those who had read it could not have been counted on to affirm the assumptions informing it — the assumption that expression as an abstract category is to be valued over the content of what is expressed; the assumption that no content is to be either stigmatized or embraced in advance of its having been subjected to the test of rational scrutiny; the assumption that contents (ideas, ideologies, opinions, hypotheses) are equal before the law, and none is to be prohibited unless it is put into (dangerous) action; the assumption that religious pronouncements, even those that issue from revered authorities, are in no way privileged, exempt from criticism, or entitled to a place in the policy deliberations of the state; the assumption that the holding of views, however unpopular or even sacrilegious, cannot be a reason for the denial of rights, the withholding of privileges, or the distribution of rewards.

More here.

In the LRB, Ed Harriman explores corruption and waste in the reconstruction of Iraq.

American military spending on Iraq is now approaching $8 billion a month. Accounting for inflation, this is half as much again as the average monthly cost of the Vietnam War; the total spent so far has long surpassed the cost of the entire Apollo space programme. Three and a half months of occupation costs the equivalent of Iraq’s estimated oil revenues for the current financial year. We now know, thanks to the leaked report of James Baker’s Iraq Study Group, that if US troops withdrew, they would in all probability be redeployed to neighbouring countries, increasing the already massive expenditure and inevitably threatening new arenas of conflict. Here’s an unimaginable alternative. If the US army left the region, and if the money was instead handed out to every Iraqi man, woman and child, they would each receive more than $300 a month.

They need it: Iraq has run out of reconstruction money. The funds in the so-called Development Fund for Iraq – some $20 billion of Iraqi money – were spent by Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority in the first year of the occupation. The US Embassy in Baghdad has spent virtually all of the $18.4 billion that Congress appropriated for ‘rebuilding’ the country; $5.6 billion of it was used to run the embassy, promote American ‘values’ and set up the new armed forces and police. Most of the American money never even gets to Iraq. The bulk of it has gone to American consultants, or into American contractors’ international bank accounts…

One thing is certain: the Coalition has created and fostered the least accountable and least transparent regime in the Middle East.

The Lancet has a series of article on global sexual behavior and reproductive health, a sort of global Kinsey report. In EurekaAlert:

The paper1 analyses data from 59 countries worldwide to answer questions such as when people start to have sex, how many sexual partners they have and whether they practise safer sex. The authors explore what the patterns and trends mean for sexual health and they review the literature on preventive approaches to improve sexual health status.

The paper contains a number of unexpected findings. In an age in which scare-stories about underage sex and promiscuity abound, there has in fact been no universal trend towards earlier sexual intercourse.

Another surprising finding is that it is the developed nations that report comparatively high rates of multiple partnerships, not those parts of the world which tend to have higher rates of HIV and AIDS, such as African countries. This has led the authors to suggest that social factors such as poverty, mobility and gender equality may be a stronger factor in sexual ill-health than promiscuity, and they call for public health interventions to take this into account.

Monogamy was found to be the dominant pattern in most regions of the world. Despite substantial regional variation in the prevalence of multiple partnerships, which is notably higher in industrialised countries, most people report having only one recent sexual partner. Worldwide, men report more multiple partnerships than women, but in some industrialised countries the proportions of men and women reporting multiple partnerships are more or less equal.

You can listen to Lancet Editor Richard Horton introducing the launch of the series here.

In Eurozine, Ted Cantle asks whether multiculturalism in Europe is a failure, and, if so, what can be salvaged?

The concept “multiculturalism” is no longer adequate to describe the extent and nature of diversity and has become seen as a means of legitimising separateness and division. It did provide a very useful way, in the past, of emphasising that “difference” should be respected and celebrated rather than feared. But it has also been used as a “catch-all”, encompassing a wide range of differences – economic, political, social, cultural, physical, etc – and conflates concepts of nationality, national identity, and group and personal affinities, and now has very little real meaning.

The lack of clarity about multiculturalism has enabled opponents of diversity to continue to present “Britishness” in narrow and homogenising terms, rejecting all other conceptions and trying to demonstrate that these differences are incompatible and based on “natural” or primordial distinctions. They use terms such as “people like us” to describe their idea of identity. This is a dangerous line of argument and it seems that even liberal-minded commentators can easily fall into the trap this language creates. People are not made up of genetically defined groups, and the ethnic, faith, and other boundaries that we create – and defend – are almost entirely socially and politically defined.

From media responses and online polls in the Middle East, there seems to be a sense that the trial of Saddam Hussein was flawed or “unfair”. If the trial’s intent (in addition to trying a thug and war criminal) was truth and reconciliation, to break with the past and legitimize the new political and legal order, it seems to have failed severely. There is division in Iraq and dissatisfaction even among the Kurds. Mufid Abdulla in Kurdish Media:

This trial was unprecedented from the very first day. It seemed to me that nothing other than the mercy of the American power in Baghdad towards the Iraqi people would bring a speedy and conclusive end. There was also always the question of how to manage a trial of this nature, given the magnitude and complexity of the alleged atrocities.

For me too, the result of this trial is nothing but part of a political game played by the Americans: for their own ends and purpose. I personally have not gained any satisfaction from the outcome: it does not give me back my childhood, my youth, or my country, all of which I lost when we had to escape the situation. So now it is ended? But it is too late for me and others like me!

In the Daily Star (Beirut), the jurist Chinli Mallat reflects on the trial and verdict.

Difficulties started well before the 2003 invasion, and it is unfortunate that a tribunal was not set up as early as 1991, when the German foreign minister at the time, Hans Genscher, suggested that Saddam should be held judicially accountable for the invasion of Kuwait. With colleagues from the Iraqi opposition then, I helped establish in 1996 “Indict,” an international NGO which sought to bring Saddam Hussein and his aides to trial in a neutral court for their unique record of crimes against humanity. Not enough support was garnered to establish an international tribunal. This is the more unfortunate since the delayed establishment of the Iraqi court proved to be another instance of victors’ justice.

Since then, the court has failed almost every single test of a fair trial under basic standards: The main accused and his acolytes were given deference which choice world criminals should have never been allowed to exercise, a plethora of lawyers postured to the world without judges questioning who was paying for all their fees and expenses. Since Saddam Hussein, his family and supporters were footing the bill, the court did not question where those funds came from, while killings by Baathists remained high, and continue to date to be supported by the main accused in open court. Lack of fairness extended in all directions. Two defense lawyers were killed, as well as a number of witnesses, while the court saw a dramatic turnover of leading personnel.

Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders) has released a list of 13 enemies (national governments) of the internet. (Via the BBC)

Three countries – Nepal, Maldives and Libya – have been removed from the annual list of Internet enemies, which Reporters Without Borders publishes today. But many bloggers were harassed and imprisoned this year in Egypt, so it has been added to the roll of shame reserved for countries that systematically violate online free expression.

Countries in alphabetical order :

-Belarus

The government has a monopoly of telecommunications and does not hesitate to block access to opposition websites if it feels the need, especially at election time. Independent online publications are also often hacked. In March 2006, for example, several websites critical of President Alexandre Lukashenko mysteriously disappeared from the Internet for several days.

Burma

The Burmese government’s Internet policies are even more repressive than those of its Chinese and Vietnamese neighbours. The military junta clearly filters opposition websites. It keeps a very close eye on Internet cafes, in which the computers automatically execute screen captures every five minutes, in order to monitor user activity. The authorities targeted Internet telephony and chat services in June, blocking Google’s Gtalk, for example. The aim was two-fold: to defend the profitable long-distance telecommunications market, which is controlled by state companies, as well as to stop cyber-dissidents from using a means of communication that is hard to monitor.

From Guardian:

American writer Jonathan Littell won France’s prestigious Goncourt prize today with a 900-page novel narrated by a Nazi SS officer – and written in French. Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) has garnered wide attention in France both for its subject matter and the nationality of its author. The Goncourt is France’s most prestigious literary honour.

After an extensive bidding war the book, which has topped French bestseller lists for weeks, will be published in the United States by HarperCollins in 2008 and in the UK by Chatto and Windus.

The 38-year-old Littell grew up in the United States, but wrote his debut book in French as a tribute to two of his favorite authors, Stendhal and Flaubert. Littell’s father, Robert Littell, is known for such spy novels as “Legends” and “An Agent in Place.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Our body movements always convey something about us to other people. The body “speaks” whether we are sitting or standing, talking or just listening. On a blind date, how the two individuals position themselves tells a great deal about how the evening will unfold: Is she leaning in to him or away? Is his smile genuine or forced?

The same is true of gestures. Almost always involuntary, they tip us off to love, hate, humility and deceit. Yet for years, scientists spent surprisingly little time studying them, because the researchers presumed that hand and arm movements were mere by-products of verbal communication. That view changed during the 1990s, in part because of the influential work of psycholinguist David McNeill at the University of Chicago. For him, gestures are “windows into thought processes.” McNeill’s work, and numerous studies since then, has shown that the body can underscore, undermine or even contradict what a person says. Experts increasingly agree that gestures and speech spring from a common cognitive process to become inextricably interwoven. Understanding the relationship is crucial to understanding how people communicate overall.

More here.

Ahmed Rajput. “Haal” (trance) at a Sufi festival, 2006.

Photograph. Posted with the artist’s permission.

Thanks to Imran & Nighat Mir for sending me this young aspiring artist’s recent photographs.

ScienceNOW Daily News on the first attempt to unionize postdocs:

An attempt to form what would have been the first major union of postdocs in the United States has ended in failure. But supporters of the controversial effort at the University of California (UC) system say they haven’t given up.

U.S. postdocs began joining together more than a decade ago to press for improvements in their working conditions and to clarify their ambiguous status on most campuses. But they have traditionally avoided affiliations with labor unions. So it was a shock to many in the scientific community when the United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Workers Union (UAW) filed a petition in July with California’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) seeking to represent 6000 UC postdocs based on having collected a majority of their signatures. Some UC postdocs alleged that UAW representatives had collected signatures from many of their colleagues without fully explaining the implications of forming a union. Under state rules, signing up a simple majority of workers is enough to declare victory.

But yesterday, before PERB had ruled on the validity of the organizing drive, the UAW withdrew the petition. “About 500 to 600 of the signatures we had submitted were from individuals who are no longer postdocs,” explains UAW’s Maureen Boyd, who organized the drive although she’s not affiliated to UC. “That left us 100 signatures short of the required majority, and we decided to withdraw.”

PERB officials say that several UC postdocs had asked that their signatures be revoked. “But the petition was withdrawn before we got to the stage of counting signatures,” says PERB’s acting general counsel Robin Wesley.

I wonder which side Hitchens will choose. In the New York Times Magazine:

Instead of empowering Iraqis, Bremer set up an advisory panel of Iraqis — one that included Chalabi — that had no power at all. The warmth that many ordinary Iraqis felt for the Americans quickly ebbed away. It’s not clear that the Americans had any other choice. But here in his London parlor, Chalabi is now contending that excluding Iraqis was the Americans’ fatal mistake.

“It was a puppet show!” Chalabi exclaims again, shifting on the couch. “The worst of all worlds. We were in charge, and we had no power. We were blamed for everything the Americans did, but we couldn’t change any of it.”

It’s three and a half years later now. More than 2,800 Americans are dead; more than 3,000 Iraqis die each month. The anarchy seems limitless. In May 2004, American and Iraqi agents even raided Chalabi’s home in Baghdad. He has been denounced by Bremer and by Bush and accused of passing secrets to America’s enemy, Iran. At the heart of the American decision to take over and run Iraq, Chalabi now concludes, lay a basic contempt for Iraqis, himself included.

“In Wolfowitz’s mind, you couldn’t trust the Iraqis to run a democracy,” Chalabi says. “ ‘We have to teach them, give them lessons,’ in Wolfowitz’s mind. ‘We have to leave Iraq under our tutelage. The Iraqis are useless. The Iraqis are incompetent.’

“What I didn’t realize,” Chalabi says, “was that the Americans sold us out.”

Andrew Gelman comments offers some comments on some simulations by Joe Bafumi, Bob Erikson, and Christopher Wlezien, which predicts Democrats gaining 32 seats in the House of Representatives on Tuesday.

Compared to our paper on the topic, the paper by Bafumi et al. goes further by predicting the average district vote from the polls. (We simply determine what is the vote needed by the Democrats to get aspecified numer of seats, without actually forecsasting the vote itself.) In any case, the two papers use similar methodology (although, again, with an additional step in the Bafumi et al. paper). In some aspects, their model is more sophisticated than ours (for example, they fit separate models to open seats and incumbent races).

Slightly over-certain?

The only criticism I’d make of this paper is that they might be understating the uncertainty in the seats-votes curve (that is, the mapping from votes to seats). The key point here is that they get district-by-district predictions (see equations 2 and 3 on page 7 of their paper) and then aggregate these up to estimate the national seat totals for the two parties. This aggregation does include uncertainty, but only of the sort that’s independent across districts. In our validations (see section 3.2 of our paper), we found the out-of-sample predictive error of the seats-votes curve to be quite a bit higher than the internal measure of uncertainty obtained by aggregating district-level errors. We dealt with this by adding an extra variance term to the predictive seats-votes curve.

The arrest of Augusto Pinochet a few days ago for torture during his dictatorship has received far less attention than I would’ve thought. From Human Rights Watch:

The arrest of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, who for the first time faces prosecution for torture, is a milestone in the struggle for justice in Chile, Human Rights Watch said today.

Pinochet is charged with the torture of 23 people, as well as the kidnapping of 34 and one homicide, which were carried out at a secret government detention center after he came to power in the 1973 military coup. The former dictator, who was placed under house arrest yesterday, is already being prosecuted on kidnapping charges in connection with the “disappearance” of 119 people in 1975. Until yesterday, Pinochet had never been charged with torture, which was a systematic practice throughout his rule.

The government-appointed National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture reported in 2004 that more than 18,000 people were tortured during the four months after the September 1973 coup, and another 5,266 people from January 1974 until August 1977.

“This is an important moment for the thousands of victims of torture in Chile,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “The man who ran the regime that brutalized them is finally being made to answer for these crimes.”

In the Asia Times, David Isenberg reviews Robert Young Pelton’s new book about mercenaries military contractors.

Licensed to Kill is divided into three sections, comprising 12 chapters. Some of these have been news stories in their own right. The first is about the exploits of legendary US Special Forces veteran and Central Intelligence Agency contractor Billy Waugh who, after September 11, 2001, was asked by the CIA to recruit contractors to operate in Afghanistan against Osama bin Laden and his forces. It was here that Blackwater got its first CIA contract, to bolster personal-protection teams for CIA officers.

It is here that one appreciates Pelton’s eye for detail – details that are always generalized about in the mainstream press, but never clearly explained. Such as, what are security contractors actually paid? What is the difference between Tier 1, 2, 3 and 4 operators? What the heck is a tier? All these questions get answered.

It bears remembering, because this is not an academic work with hundreds of endnotes, that this is an extremely well-researched book. Pelton has gained access to an enormous amount of insider information that normally never sees the light of the day. Researchers could undoubtedly spend years happily sifting though all the material he has accumulated.

One gets the answers to these questions only by hanging out with a wide variety of people where they live and work over the years. And while Pelton has spent the past three years sitting down with security contractors on different continents, often while they were on the job, whether doing convoy runs from the Green Zone in Baghdad to the airport or roaming the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, it is clear that his prior years touring the world’s killing zones have conferred on him a special sort of street credibility that has given him a special access to a tribe that does not normally talk to outsiders.

In the New Left Review:

At the time of his death, Weber’s only book publications were the two texts necessary for an academic career, while the main body of his work—the vast mass of Economy and Society; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—either languished in manuscript or had appeared in specialist journals. It was Marianne who assembled these studies into posthumous collections and edited the unpublished texts, thus ensuring a growing but still limited reputation in the Weimar Republic. International sacralization came with Talcott Parsons’s rendition of The Protestant Ethic into English in 1930 and highly selective use of Weber for the construction of his own structural functionalism. It was this edulcorated transatlantic version that was re-imported into the fledgling Federal Republic as a ‘good’ German, tainted neither by Nazi collaboration nor Marxist sympathies.

In 1959 this image was decisively challenged by Wolfgang Mommsen’s Max Weber and German Politics. Mommsen’s meticulous reconstruction of Weber’s ‘unsentimental politics of power’ created a furore in Adenauer’s Germany. The counter-attack—and, to some extent, successful recapture—was led by Parsons himself at the Heidelberg Soziologentag in 1964. Weber’s influence as a far-sighted liberal advocate of the ‘ethics of responsibility’, theorist of modernity and a founder of the distinctively modernist enterprise of sociology continued to grow, both in Germany and internationally. Less a distinct tendency or school than an ether in which the social sciences are bathed, his generic concepts—‘the Protestant ethic’, ‘charismatic leadership’, ‘rationalization’, ‘disenchantment’ and ‘ideal types’—have entered the lexicon of modern intellectual life, if all too often stripped of the originary contexts of their formulation. Weber’s standing remains such that Lawrence Scaff could argue that whoever is ‘able to have his own Weber interpretation accepted could determine the further progress of the social sciences’: ‘Weber is power’.

From The New York Times:

FIRST we said they were ruining their health with their bad habit, and they should just quit. Then we said they were repulsive and we didn’t want to be around them. Then we said they were costing us loads of money — maybe they should pay extra taxes. Other Americans, after all, do not share their dissolute ways.

Cigarette smokers? No, the obese.

Last week the list of ills attributable toobesity grew: fat people cause global warming. This latest contribution to the obesity debate comes in an article by Sheldon H. Jacobson of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and his doctoral student, Laura McLay. Their paper, published in the current issue of The Engineering Economist, calculates how much extra gasoline is used to transport Americans now that they have grown fatter. The answer, they said, is a billion gallons a year.

More here.

From Time:

Meet Peter. Peter is a 79-year-old English retiree. Back in WW II he served as a radar technician. He is now an international star.

One year ago, this would not have been possible, but the world has changed. In the past 12 months, thousands of ordinary people have become famous. Famous people have been embarrassed. Huge sums of money have changed hands. Lots and lots of Mentos have been dropped into Diet Coke. The rules are different now, and one website changed them: YouTube.

Let’s be clear: we know who started it. That would be three twentysomething guys named Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. At a Silicon Valley dinner party one night in 2004 they started talking about how easy it was to share photos with your friends online but what a pain it was to do the same thing with video.

So they did something about it. They hacked together a simple routine for taking videos in any format and making them play in pretty much any Web browser on any computer. Then they built a kind of virtual video village, a website where people could post their own videos and watch and rate and comment on and search for and tag other people’s videos. Voilˆ: YouTube.

But even though they built it, they didn’t really understand it. They thought they’d built a useful tool for people to share their travel videos. They thought people might use it to pitch auction items on eBay. They had no idea. They had opened a portal into another dimension.

More here.