Few thought he was even a starter.
There were many who thought themselves smarter.
But he ended PM,
CH and OM,
A peer and a Knight of the Garter.

Clement Attlee’s neat summary of his career might be adapted for William Golding. He too was a late starter, one oppressed in youth by doubts and feelings of social, and perhaps intellectual, inferiority. Until his middle forties he was a poor, reluctant and unsatisfied provincial schoolmaster. But, like Attlee, he outstripped many who had a head-start on him and he ended with a knighthood and the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first English novelist to be awarded it since Galsworthy. His life was transformed in 1954 by the publication of Lord of the Flies, the novel to which his biographer has thought fit to call to our attention in his subtitle – in case Golding’s name might otherwise be unfamiliar. Yet Lord of the Flies came close to sharing the fate of three novels Golding had already written, which had failed to find a publisher. Five publishers and one literary agency returned it, and the reader for Faber & Faber recommended its rejection as an “absurd and uninteresting fantasy . . . . Rubbish and dull. Pointless”.

more from Allan Massie at the TLS here.

Reading Sartre to a Pear Tree

When I was pruning a dead limb
from a dying pear tree, I thought
for some reason of a line from Sartre:
We must act out passion before we can feel it.
Though my favorite line has always been:
I confused things with their names: that is belief.
And the impatient sound the rain
was making on the stone steps—
the great embellishment as monologue
or messenger or megaphone—made me think
next of a quote from Rilke spilling and chastising
from the page: I won’t endure these half-filled
human masks. So do we mourn the pear
that never was by imagining Eve’s teeth marks
pressing into the white fruit? Or do we quote
a few last lines in the rain to a severed limb
and then toss it in the buttonbushes?

by Doug Ramspeck

from Brick & Mortar Review

From Scientific American:

It's no secret that binge drinking and faulty decision-making go hand in hand, but what if poor judgment lingered long after putting the bottle down and sobering up? A new study with rats suggests that heavy alcohol consumption in adolescence could put people on the road to risky behavior.

Several studies have associated heavy drinking in youth with impaired judgment in adulthood, but these studies didn't resolve whether alcohol abuse actually predisposes people to develop bad decision-making skills, or if the people who indulged in excessive inebriation were risk-taking types to begin with. As Selena Bartlett, a director in the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco, explains, you cannot put adolescents in a room and ask them to consume alcohol to see what happens. But scientists can conduct these kinds of experiments with rats, an animal that Bartlett, who was not part of the study, says is “excellent for modeling changes in behavior” as a result of alcoholism.

In the new study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists at the University of Washington (U.W.) in Seattle fed alcohol to a group of rats and found that their ability to make good decisions was impaired even long after they stopped consuming booze.

More here.

From Nature:

Now, a team led by David Reich of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lalji Singh of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India, has probed more than 560,000 SNPs across the genomes of 132 Indian individuals from 25 diverse ethnic and tribal groups dotted all over India. The researchers showed that most Indian populations are genetic admixtures of two ancient, genetically divergent groups, which each contributed around 40-60% of the DNA to most present-day populations. One ancestral lineage — which is genetically similar to Middle Eastern, Central Asian and European populations — was higher in upper-caste individuals and speakers of Indo-European languages such as Hindi, the researchers found. The other lineage was not close to any group outside the subcontinent, and was most common in people indigenous to the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Bay of Bengal.

More here.

Gary Sick in The Daily Beast:

Iran has been a critical issue for the United States and Israel for a very long time. Seventeen years ago, in January 1992, the U.S. Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the House Republican Research Committee, asserted that there was a “98 percent certainty that Iran already had all (or virtually all) of the components required for two to three operational nuclear weapons.” That same month, Binyamin Netanyahu told the Knesset that “Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb… (The nuclear threat) must be uprooted by an international front headed by the U.S.” In that same year, Robert Gates, then director of the CIA, asked, “Is [Iran’s nuclear program] a problem today?” He answered, “Probably not. But three, four, five years from now it could be a serious problem.” Three years later, a senior Israeli official declared: “If Iran is not interrupted in this program by some foreign power, it will have the device in more or less five years.”

Officially, both the United States and Israel now agree that Iran is unlikely to be able to produce a bomb until about 2013 or 2014—the same five-year window that was being predicted seventeen years ago in 1992.

More here. [Thanks to Tony Karon.]

From The Telegraph:

Scientists in the United States are trying to map the twisting ''tubes'' so they can be used to cut the cost of journeys in space.

Each one acts like a gravitational Gulf Stream, created from the complex interplay of attractive forces between planets and moons.

Depicted by computer graphics, the pathways look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies and snake between them.

The pathways connect sites called Lagrange points where gravitational forces balance out.

Professor Shane Ross, from Virginia Tech in the US, said: ''Basically the idea is there are low energy pathways winding between planets and moons that would slash the amount of fuel needed to explore the solar system.

''These are freefall pathways in space around and between gravitational bodies. Instead of falling down, like you do on Earth, you fall along these tubes.

''Each of the tubes starts off narrow and small and as it gets further out it gets wider and might also split.

More here.

This NPR contest “has a simple premise: Listeners send in original short stories that can be read in three minutes or less. We're posting our favorite entries here every week until The New Yorker's James Wood picks our winning story and reads it on the air.” Amitava Kumar's piece:

The nurse left work at five o'clock.

She had seen the dead woman's husband sitting, near the entrance, under the yellow sign that Doctor Ahmed had hung some months ago. “While You Wait, Meditate.” He was sitting with his arms crossed, elbows cupped in the palms of his hands and hadn't looked up when she passed him on her way out.

Just before lunch, a convoy had come from the Army camp. A dark-skinned soldier, holding a small rifle in his left hand, threw open the office door and announced the Colonel. Doctor Ahmed had automatically stood up.

The Colonel was plump. He looked calm and extremely clean, the way bullfrogs do, gleaming green and gold in the mud. He put his baton on the table and asked the nurse to leave the office.

When Doctor Ahmed rang his bell, the nurse went back in and was told to get his wife, Zakia, from their home on the top floor. Usually, he just called her on the phone. The nurse hurried up, carrying news of the Colonel.

Which brings me to that Trilling essay I read before I saw Linklater’s Welles: It’s got to be considered in any consideration of genius. It’s a somewhat tortured meditation that goes to considerable lengths to argue that the one reason we should value Orwell is that he was not a genius. While this sounds like a negative virtue, not one you’d put on a résumé, Trilling gives it a positive spin: “Not being a genius” means “fronting the world with nothing more than one simple direct undeceived intelligence and a respect for the powers one does have. … We admire geniuses, we love them, but they discourage us. … They are great concentrations of intellect and emotion, we feel they have soaked up all the available power, monopolizing it and leaving none for us. We feel that if we cannot be as they, we can be nothing.” (The italics are mine.) Who knew that being a genius could be so contentious? And yet it’s a worthy sentiment: We should not use lack of genius as an excuse for ourselves to do nothing because we won’t do anything geniuslike.

more from Ron Rosenbaum at Slate here.

These days, the debate over how to write about reading is a cold affair: a de-militarized zone. I avoid the terms literature and criticism here, and perhaps even debate is too hifalutin a word to describe what has amounted to a decades-long pissing match between creative writers and critics. The current steely silence is evidence only of empty bladders; the combatants have become preoccupied with internal skirmishes. Not long ago, Cynthia Ozick, weighing in on a writers’ spat between Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus in Harper’s, announced that there was no good literary criticism happening despite the ongoing deluge from academic presses. Franzen and Marcus, arguing over how far fiction should bend toward publishing’s fickle sun, weren’t good models, either, Ozick said, and her proclamation was as much plea as elegy. Yet Ozick herself (Art & Ardor, Fame & Folly, etc.) is a pioneer of a wholly different kind of writing about reading, work that reads the self as closely as it reads the examined text and that is every bit as creative as it is critical. Writers are often reviewers—John Updike produced a smooth-flowing river of work, and Joyce Carol Oates’s hurried affairs appear often enough—but there is as well a kind of personal literary analysis, criticism that contemplates rather than argues, and while it’s never amounted to a formal trend or school, a consistent flow of this kind of response to literature has trickled along like an underground stream all the while the piss battles poisoned the surface.

more from J.C. Hallman at The Quarterly Conversation (my new favorite magazine) here.

With a few exceptions – Walt Whitman called him an “old Octopus” – Americans have been decidedly tolerant of Johnson’s bile, rarely taking his invective at face value. Instead we have looked past the bluster to the character of the man behind it. Without Johnson, America wouldn’t have had its own great dictionary – his collection of moral essays, “The Rambler,” inspired a young Noah Webster to dedicate his life to pursuing “a most exact course of integrity and virtue,” and to compiling his massive American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828. Two hundred and twenty-five years after Johnson’s death, it’s hard not to wonder if the great man’s eloquent venom was actually a case of “protesting too much.” The man whose own fortune was so closely tied to the burgeoning British empire, who roared in defense of the establishment even while charting his own enterprising course, may well have noticed a touch of himself in those ambitious rebels 3,000 miles away.

more from Joshua Kendall at The Boston Globe here.

Laura Miller in Salon:

You could do a lot worse with the next 220 days of your life than to begin each one by reading an entry from the freshly published “A New Literary History of America” — the way generations past used to study a Bible verse daily. You could do a lot worse, but I'm not sure you could do much better; this magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture.

Editors Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors have pitched the biggest tent conceivable, pegging each of the chronologically arranged essays in the book to “points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being, when new questions were raised, when what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable.” With this in mind, they've produced a compendium that is neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too.

More here.

The Yin and Yang of It

For every peony, fifty ants.
For every waxing hive, a bear.

For each blossom the broodfouled
bee sticky with fungus, bumbling.

For every gut, a bot. For your beating
heart, the surgeon’s stent.

A brass knuckle on each finger,
in every nose a brass ring.

Dust in both your blue
irises, planed from a stubborn plank.

For each stump an ax, and for every ax
handle, a falling tree no one hears

before it rolls like a thoroughbred
over the jockey—

for every anxious hero sniffs
the plumed riderless horse

that will carry his empty boots
backwards in the stirrups.

by Joyce Peseroff

from Breakwater Review, 2009

Ana Finel Honigman in Interview:

Many publications parse the minutiae of celebrities' beauty regimes. But few of those forums actively engage with the potential psychological or sociological significance of beauty rituals for the famous faces, and the fans who follow them. New York- and Los Angeles-based video artist Alia Raza is addressing that arena. Raza has developed a video project that deconstructs the relationships between outward beauty, internal awareness of ones' own body and the peculiar tensions among people whose physical appearance is intimately linked with their professional or creative standing.

For “The Fragile White Blossoms Emit A Hypnotic Cascade Of Tropical Perfume Whose Sweet Heady Odor Leaves Its Victim Intoxicated” Raza presents ten silent videos in which Chloe Sevigny, Kim Gordon, Devendra Banhart, Patrik Ervell and figures in Lower East Side fashion engage distinctive beauty rituals, some of which Raza designs and some which exaggerate their own regimes, without interruption for twenty-eight minutes. A portion of the series will be presented at Paris's Palais de Tokyo, as part of Diane Pernet's A Shaded View on Fashion Film Festival.

Here we discuss distinctions between art and fashion, and between personal maintenance and philosophical self-consciousness:

ANA FINEL HONIGMAN: Did this project begin with your own beauty rituals?

ALIA RAZA: It really began with wanting to portray anxiety and self-consciousness. I don't mean self-conscious like being shy, I mean literal consciousness of our physical being, and the fact that we have to present ourselves to others. Some people go into the world with a lack of self-consciousness while others always feel uncomfortable in their own skin. A lot of times physical beauty is looked to as a cure for this discomfort. And there's an entire culture and several industries that support that notion, not to mention biology, society, and who knows what else. People think of beauty or the search for it as frivolous or vain. I definitely don't. I find it more disturbing, and that's what the project is about.

More here.

From Science:

Richard Prum suffered a bad break for someone who studies birds for a living: major hearing loss that rendered him unable to appreciate his subjects' songs. “I live in an acoustically flat world,” says Prum. So he's had to narrow his attention to what he could see: avian plumage. For the past decade or so, Prum has combined the studies of evolution and development to analyze feathers as “a kind of a tough problem in the evolution of novelty.” That's turned out to be more rewarding than Prum, a Yale University professor, ever imagined: Today he received $500,000 in an unrestricted 5-year gift from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Prum, 48, is one of seven scientists, two physicians, and an engineer among this year's 24 recipients of the MacArthur “genius” awards.

More here.

Jordan Davis in the Boston Review:

Poets steal. T.S. Eliot concealed this offhand assertion in plain sight 90 years ago in his essay on English playwright Philip Massinger: “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” It had the effect of recalibrating readers’ expectations for originality. All readers. Granted, this was the same effect Emerson achieved in his essay, “Quotation and Originality,” but the recursion supports Eliot’s point. Literary culture alternates between those periods when it refuses to look at anything new, and those when almost nothing like the old is allowed. As for the literary influence of other times and places, the emphasis shifts between defensive isolation and expansive engagement. At the moment, major anthologies of contemporary poetry from Germany, Russia, and Vietnam are appearing in the United States. Though the influence of these poetries on American letters has been muted, or at least restricted to a narrow list of headliners for the last fifty years, that may be about to change.

More here.

Reza Sayah at CNN:

As a little girl, Maria Toor Pakay would beat up boys.

Now, she dispenses of anyone who takes her on within the walls of a squash court.

Pakay, 18, is Pakistan's No. 1-ranked women's squash player. But what makes her story remarkable is that she hails from the country's tribal region of South Waziristan.

The region, along the border with Afghanistan, is home to the Taliban.

There, suicide attacks are a way of life. And the militants, bent on imposing a strict form of Islamic law, punish girls who attend school — let alone play sports.

“They have no future,” Pakay said. “They spend their entire lives in four walls in their home. Their ability is destroyed.”

But Pakay wasn't like most girls growing up. She sported a buzz cut and mixed with the boys.

More here.

Anthony Swofford (author of Jarhead) in the Barnes and Noble Review:

The best books succeed because they offer the reader a glimpse into a world that might otherwise be unknown, or unknown to most of us. The book at hand, Last Journey: A Father and Son in Wartime, is one of those books. The number of parents who have lost children in the current American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a small, albeit growing, number. The distinction is an awful one, the mark of experience that tears families apart, that leaves a wake of grief, anger, and remorse.

Last Journey is by Darrell Griffin Sr. and Darrell “Skip” Griffin Jr., a self-educated and widely read staff sergeant in the U.S. Army. His areas of interest were philosophy and theology. From his high school years and to the moment of his death, he devoured the giant works of the canon, books by Kierkegaard, Hume, and Nietzsche as well as more esoteric works such as Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotlean Tradition in Islam, by F. E. Peters.

The reader can't help but think that if senior members of the Bush administration had been as hungry for knowledge about the Middle East as Staff Sergeant Griffin the war would have turned out differently or might never have been fought. Skip's journal entries range from questions of being and justice to mind searing renderings of the suffering of Iraqi civilians and the deaths of fellow soldiers.

More here. See the New York Times review here.

Muntazer al-Zaidi in The Guardian:

When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, George Bush, I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, my rejection of his killing my people. My rejection of his plundering the wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure. And casting out its sons into a diaspora.

If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I apologise. All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day. The professionalism mourned by some under the auspices of the occupation should not have a voice louder than the voice of patriotism. And if patriotism needs to speak out, then professionalism should be allied with it.

I didn't do this so my name would enter history or for material gains. All I wanted was to defend my country.

More here.