Eos, the goddess of dawn, persuaded Zeus to bestow immortality on her human lover Tithonus. But she forgot to ask for enduring youth as well. Big mistake. Eventually, Tithonus became a withered old wreck, and Eos shut him away for eternity. We all know the feeling, or soon will. Death may be our common fate but our common fear is the nightmare that comes first: growing old. Aristotle saw ageing as a nasty process that turns us into cynical, emotionally shrivelled Scrooges. In As You Like It, Shakespeare panned life’s last act as “second childishness and mere oblivion. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Martin Amis, in his recent novel The Pregnant Widow, likens ageing to “auditioning for the role of a lifetime; then, after interminable rehearsals, you’re finally starring in a horror film – a talentless, irresponsible, and above all low-budget horror film, in which (as is the way with horror films) they’re saving the worst for last”.

more from Donald Morrison at the FT here.

In 1941, a doctor told Georges Simenon that he had two years to live. The famously prolific author eventually learned the diagnosis was wrong (he died in 1989), but the experience prompted him to start filling notebooks with anecdotes about his childhood in Liège, Belgium to his then 2-year-old son. He showed the material to André Gide, who told him to start over in the third person. Five years later, “Pedigree” was published. Simenon went on to dismiss the label “autobiographical novel,” but Luc Sante, who has written the excellent introduction to this reissue, isn’t buying it — and I don’t either. For the Mamelin household, read Simenon. For the character of Roger, read Georges. At the center is a mother, Élise (read Henriette), tormented and tormenting, “a girl from the other side of the bridges, a girl who, when she was with her sisters, spoke a language nobody could understand” married to Désiré (Simenon didn’t bother changing his father’s name). A stolid insurance salesman, Désiré adores routine so much that he sometimes seems more mechanism than man.

more from Liz Brown at the LAT here.

With Bolaño you rarely feel beset by monotony. Certainly not in “Antwerp,” a tiny, unclassifiable book that will be of interest mainly to his most devoted fans. Bolaño completed it in 1980, but didn’t publish it until a year before he died. “I wrote this book for myself, and even that I can’t be sure of,” he tells us in the preface. The short sections are like prose poems — a bridge of sorts between Bolaño’s fiction and poetry — with such cryptic titles as “A Monkey,” “There Was Nothing,” “Big Silver Waves.” Though not easily comprehensible, each section presents the reader with at least one startling line. A boy and a girl in “Cleaning Utensils,” for example, weep “like characters from different movies projected on the same screen.” In an essay titled “Literature + Illness = Illness,” in “The Insufferable Gaucho,” Bolaño confronts his own impending death, at the age of 50, from liver disease. He compares a patient’s voyage on a gurney — “from his room to the operating theater, where masked men and women await him, like bandits from the sect of the Hashishin” — to a hazardous 19th-century voyage where the traveler gives up everything. The best of these stories confirm Bolaño’s ideal of literature as a voyage to the zero degree of human existence, to the abyss, as Baudelaire, another of his heroes, would call it, where we lose the self in order to find it again.

more from Michael Greenberg at the NYT here.

Go here to see the video.

From Hyperbole and a Half:

At some point during my childhood, my mother made the mistake of taking me to see an orthodontist. It was discovered that I had a rogue tooth that was growing sideways.

My mom and I were told that the tooth, if left unchecked, would completely ruin everything in my life and turn me into a horrible, horrible mutant.

Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my natural life chained in a windowless shed to avoid traumatizing the other citizens, I was going to need surgery to remove the tooth.

I was accepting of the idea until I found out that my surgery was scheduled on the same day as my friend's birthday party. My surgery was in the morning and the birthday party wasn't until the late afternoon, but my mom told me that I still probably wouldn't be able to go because I'd need time to recover from my surgery. I asked her if I could go to the party if I was feeling okay. She said yes, but told me that I probably wouldn't be feeling well and to try not to get my hopes up.

But it was too late. I knew that if I could trick my mom into believing that I was feeling okay after my surgery, she'd let me go to my friend's birthday party. All I had to do was find a way to prove that I was completely recovered and ready to party. I began to gather very specific information about the kinds of things that would convince my mom that the surgery had absolutely no effect on me.

More here. [Thanks to Jennifer Oullette.]

Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books:

Miłosz was born in 1911 in what was then Russian Lithuania. Indeed, like many great Polish literary figures, he was not strictly “Polish” by geographical measure. Adam Zagajewski, one of the country’s most important living poets, was born in Ukraine; Jerzy Giedroyc—a major figure in the twentieth-century literary exile—was born in Belarus, like Adam Mickiewicz, the nineteenth-century icon of the Polish literary revival. Lithuanian Vilna in particular was a cosmopolitan blend of Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Russians, and Jews, among others (Isaiah Berlin, like the Harvard political philosopher Judith Shklar, was born in nearby Riga).

Raised in the interwar Polish republic, Miłosz survived the occupation and was already a poet of some standing when he was sent to Paris as the cultural attaché of the new People’s Republic. But in 1951 he defected to the West and two years later he published his most influential work, The Captive Mind.³ Never out of print, it is by far the most insightful and enduring account of the attraction of intellectuals to Stalinism and, more generally, of the appeal of authority and authoritarianism to the intelligentsia.

Miłosz studies four of his contemporaries and the self-delusions to which they fell prey on their journey from autonomy to obedience, emphasizing what he calls the intellectuals’ need for “a feeling of belonging.”

More here.

From The Economist:

Of all Pakistan’s main actors, only the armed forces have emerged from the disaster strongly in credit. Bringing boats and helicopters that the civil powers lacked, they have rescued tens of thousands of stranded people and dispensed much of the government’s aid. Over 70,000 troops have been dedicated to this work. “It was the army’s duty to come in aid of the civil power,” says the army’s spokesman, Major-General Athar Abbas. “It just set to work.” Thanks goodness for that. Then again, considering that by one estimate the armed forces lay claim to a third of Pakistan’s budget, quite right too.

In any event, the army has done itself no harm: burnishing an image sullied during the turbulent end to the regime of Pakistan’s last military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, who stepped aside in 2008. Army relief trucks, emblazoned with the slogan the “Pakistani army and the people are together” draw respectful glances as they surge through thronging Karachi and Lahore, capitals of Sindh and Punjab. Rumour has it they surge around in circles, twice or thrice, for maximum effect.

In a country ruled by generals for much of its history, any upset invites rumours of a coup, and these are now abroad. Indeed, one of the PPP’s coalition partners, Altaf Hussain, leader of the Karachi-based Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), seemed to call for one. From London, where he lives in exile accused of many crimes in Pakistan, Mr Hussain challenged “any patriotic general” to take “martial-law-like action” against corruption.

According to Punjab’s chief minister, many army officers are itching to intervene to intervene; their chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, demurs. Mr Sharif also expressed two other flood-related fears: that disaffected victims could turn to Islamist militancy, which is entrenched in southern Punjab, or that they might otherwise rise up.

More here.

Pottery Lessons

hokte hokte honvnwv*

begin here
with the clay she says
under her breath….. a handful of earth
from silt-bottomed streams
loosens between fingers ……….. water
echoes in an empty bowl
………………. hokte
………………………… hokte hacet os

I was birthed of mud …… blood
and bone ……. hokte
……………………….. hokte… hecet os

glass globes
inside my tin belly….. echo of
water in an empty bowl
I remember the sound of her soft
body….. hokte
………………… hokte ….. honvnwv

Have just begun
to bleed today
thought I might be dying
walked barefoot beyond the backyard
over the cattleguard hokte
hokte honvnwv

each blade of grass
a rusted glint
in the circular basin
of bison grazing…… clay
rims the water-colored sky

in an empty bowl …… water
echoes …… when we walk
horizons shift
how to call them
closer ……. feel their white tufts
between fingertips
………. hokte
…………………… hokte honvnwv

by Jennifer Elise Foerster
from The Kweli Journal;
August 2010

*Muscogee Language
hokte: woman
honvnwn: man
hecet os: to see

David Quammen in National Geographic:

Most of us don't enter upon our life's destiny at any neatly discernible time. Jane Goodall did.

On the morning of July 14, 1960, she stepped onto a pebble beach along a remote stretch of the east shore of Lake Tanganyika. It was her first arrival at what was then called the Gombe Stream Game Reserve, a small protected area that had been established by the British colonial government back in 1943. She had brought a tent, a few tin plates, a cup without a handle, a shoddy pair of binoculars, an African cook named Dominic, and—as a companion, at the insistence of people who feared for her safety in the wilds of pre-independence Tanganyika—her mother. She had come to study chimpanzees. Or anyway, to try. Casual observers expected her to fail. One person, the paleontologist Louis Leakey, who had recruited her to the task up in Nairobi, believed she might succeed.

More here.

From Salon:

I spent most of August more or less disconnected from TV, the Internet and print news outlets, so when I caught up with a friend on the phone, I asked him to brief me on which stories had captured the nation's attention. He tried to explain the controversy over the Park51 Islamic culture center, but it wasn't easy. “So, why is this anti-Muslim panic coming up now?” I asked. “What triggered it?” “I keep going back to Richard Hofstadter's 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics,'” he replied. “It's not necessarily about Islam. These people need an enemy.”

I took that as my cue to return to the Pulitzer-winning historian's seminal essay on American political crackpottery. Originating as a 1963 speech delivered in Oxford and first printed in Harper's magazine in 1964, it can currently be found in a collection, also called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” reprinted by Vintage Books. Hofstadter, who died in 1970, made a minor specialty of analyzing right-wing fringe movements — what he called “pseudo-conservatives” — particularly the groups clustered around Barry Goldwater's 1964 political campaign. In-the-moment political analysis doesn't always hold up over time unless you really strain to find contemporary parallels, and not all of the book still rings true. Hofstadter himself felt moved to write a qualifying update to an earlier, influential 1954 essay, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt” (also included in this book), to encompass the Goldwater movement and its satellites.

That said, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (along with most of the essays in the collection) never seems to get old.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

A specific region of the brain appears to be larger in individuals who are good at turning their thoughts inward and reflecting upon their decisions, according to new research published in the journal Science. This act of introspection — or “thinking about your thinking” — is a key aspect of human consciousness, though scientists have noted plenty of variation in peoples' abilities to introspect. In light of their findings, this team of researchers, led by Prof. Geraint Rees from University College London, suggests that the volume of gray matter in the anterior prefrontal cortex of the brain, which lies right behind our eyes, is a strong indicator of a person's introspective ability. Furthermore, they say the structure of white matter connected to this area is also linked to this process of introspection.

It remains unclear, however, how this relationship between introspection and the two different types of brain matter really works. These findings do not necessarily mean that individuals with greater volume of gray matter in that region of the brain have experienced—or will experience—more introspective thoughts than other people. But, they do establish a correlation between the structure of gray and white matter in the prefrontal cortex and the various levels of introspection that individuals may experience.

More here.

The court usher’s voice rang out in the courtroom at the Old Bailey: “Call Kingsley Amis!” Amis, the well-known British comic novelist, was nowhere to be seen. The defense, in the case of Regina v. Penguin Books Limited, moved on to its next witness. Later, Amis would apologize to Penguin’s solicitor, Michael Rubinstein, writing that he had left his house in Swansea “just in time to miss” Rubinstein’s letter specifying the time he was expected to testify, “and got back six hours or so after I should have been available in court.” A week later, one of Amis’s buddies, Robert Conquest, explained to another, Philip Larkin, just why the witness was absent: “He was at the time participating in an adulterous rendezvous. Pity he didn’t just make it, breathing heavily, smeared with lipstick and fly-buttons mostly undone, to testify that Lady C was a sacred monogamous work.” Amis’s escapade might have served as a motivation for Lar­kin to kick his own personal life up several notches.

more from Ben Yagoda at The American Scholar here.

“Do you like the Stooges?” Michel Houellebecq asked me on the second day of our interview. He put down his electric cigarette (it glowed red when he inhaled, producing steam instead of smoke) and rose slowly from his futon couch. “Iggy Pop wrote some songs based on my novel The Possibility of an Island,” he offered. “He told me it’s the only book he has liked in the last ten years.” France’s most famous living writer flipped open his MacBook and the gravelly voice of the punk legend filled the kitchenette, chanting: “It’s nice to be dead.” Michel Houellebecq was born on the French island of La Réunion, near Madagascar, in 1958. As his official Web site states, his bohemian parents, an anesthesiologist and a mountain guide, “soon lost all interest in his existence.” He has no pictures of himself as a child. After a brief stay with his maternal grandparents in Algeria, he was raised from the age of six by his paternal grandmother in northern France. After a period of unemployment and depression, which led to several stays in psychiatric units, Houellebecq found a job working tech support at the French National Assembly. (The members of parliament were “very sweet,” he says.)

more from Susannah Hunnewell at The Paris Review here.

Healthy, sane humans do not stab themselves in the thighs, or bathe their eyes in lemon juice. So why do we so love to assault one of the most sensitive organs in the human body, the tongue, with what amounts to chemical warfare? Chillies are unique among foods that we should otherwise not enjoy. For example, humans also have natural aversions to the bitterness of coffee or the harshness of tobacco, but those substances have some addictive qualities, which might make them desirable. Capsaicin, the compound that provides the mouth-watering punch of chillies, does not seem to have any addictive qualities whatsoever. And yet the preference for capsaicin is almost universal; nearly every culture has incorporated it into their cuisine in some way, for milllennia. Rozin writes: “There are records suggesting use of chilli pepper dating back to 7000BC in Mesoamerica; they were domesticated some thousands of years after this. These fiery foods made their debut in the Old World when they were brought back by Columbus and other early explorers.”

more from Jason Goldman at The Guardian here.

Michael Atkinson in In These Times:

Not so long ago, in a typical conniption fit, Glenn Beck blubbered to his TV audience about the loss of America’s greatness. No one faklempts like Beck, and on this October evening he was very moist. He was mourning the America best represented, he thought, by several 1970s network TV ads, including one for Kodak (children, butterflies) and one for Coke (game-losing Mean Joe Green accepting a conciliatory cola from a grade-school boy). Beck whined and moaned and waxed reactionary, choking back saline, pleading with us to remember “what life used to be like!” and “how it felt!”

It was not an unusual performance. Watching the clip is like watching a clinical video of a beleaguered schizophrenic.

Beck seems aware that his constituency has lost the capacity to discern TV fantasy from what’s real. And we can overlook, for now, the fact that if America “used to be united!” as he cried, it was united over unchallenged racism, women’s subjugation and the presumption of a white president.

The substance of Beck & Co.’s discourse is odious trash, of course. But the question remains why it has gained such audience share. Theories abound, most of them unkind to a big chunk of American voters. But watch Beck spin a fable about the glory days of America by way of something as transparently disingenuous as a TV commercial, and you begin to see the structural trump card—story.

The right has long been adept at spinning yarns, at limning fictions. Storytelling is as old in human culture as parts of our frontal lobe. Scores of psychological studies have suggested that we have an innate capacity to understand life via stories, to use storytelling as an evolutionary advantage (learning decision-making skills, avoiding danger), and to adapt socially using empathy.

Novelist Michael Chabon writes in Manhood for Amateurs about how, although he is a Jew and a pretty irreligious one at that, he’s never felt slighted by the social predominance of the Jesus-birth story at Christmas—not even in the form of the school Nativity plays in which his kids take part. In fact, he loves it. What he loves is the story itself, which tells the truth “about the hope and the promise that ought to attend to the birth of every child, however mean or difficult the conditions of that birth,” and “about the dangerous and woefully unredeemed state of the world and the potential that all children have to redeem it.”

False Documents

They ran the numbers twice for you
giving you the benefit of the doubt
but you knew the computer at the other
end of the officer’s PDA would not find
your brown number in its little black index.
You drove exactly one mile per hour below the speed
limit. You buckled your baby into his car seat according
to instructions. You signaled for exactly three seconds
before you turned left. You wanted to hide the Subway wrappers,
the empty box of Orbitz gum. Evidence of Big Macs.
You wanted to drink the Mountain Dew before it turned toxic
in the hot Phoenix sun as you asked, doesn’t this green
sludge make me American enough? But you didn’t
move because you knew the officer would have taken
that for gun-finding or drug-hiding or some other supposed
Mexican sport. You with your hands at ten and two
wondered how long the bus ride the officer would take you
on would last and whether they would provide any water.
You wondered, as the officer put hand to holster,
how dangerous it would be to down that Mountain
Dew then and there, in the wide-open American air.

by Nicole Walker
Boston Review; July/August 2010

Julian Young is a well-known scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy. I put six questions to him about his new book, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography.

Scott Horton in Harper's:

2. Nietzsche wrote that a “deadly insult” had come between himself and Wagner. You suggest that you’ve learned what it was.

Wagner had long disapproved of Nietzsche’s close friendships with men–love he held could only exist between the sexes–and by 1877 he was offended by the developing anti-Wagnerian tenor of Nietzsche’s thought. To Nietzsche’s doctor he wrote that the cause of the patient’s many health problems–which included near blindness–was “unnatural debauchery, with indications of pederasty.” His former disciple was, in other words, (a) incipiently gay and (b) going blind because he masturbated. Somehow Nietzsche learned not only of the existence of the letter but of its the exact wording. That was the “deadly insult.”

More here.