Michael Getler in The Washington Post:

THE BUSH TRAGEDY by Jacob Weisberg.

After five years of war in Iraq, it remains remarkable how little we know about exactly how, why, when and in whose presence one of the most important — and maybe one of the worst — decisions in recent American history was made. Nor can we be sure what, if anything, the complex relationship of two presidents, father and son, both of whom have gone to war against Saddam Hussein, had to do with it.

Indeed, we may never know to what extent George W. Bush, who famously labeled himself “the decider,” consciously sees himself as the “anti-Poppy” — the opposite of his cautious, deliberative, internationalist father. But The Bush Tragedy is a serious, thought-provoking effort to penetrate what instinct tells us must be an extraordinary family drama.

This is not a book of extensive original reporting. Rather, it is one of analysis built upon much that has already been reported, and much that is observable but not so often reported. Pulling together Bush’s personal history and his relationship to his family, to his faith and to his surrogate family in the White House, Weisberg concludes that the decision to invade Iraq grew out of a predisposition “to vindicate his family and outdo his father” by “completing a job his dad left unfinished” when the senior Bush allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in power at the conclusion of the first Gulf War.

Well, maybe.

More here.

From Nature:

Looking for artistic longevity? Work in stone, not paint.

So conclude researchers who have found that old-master sculptors lived longer than painters. They suggest that the physical rigours of sculpting boost the immune system. This might explain why, for example, neither Raphael nor Caravaggio celebrated their fortieth birthday, whereas Donatello and Giovanni Bernini lived into their 80s.Biologist and art enthusiast Phillip Greenspan, of the University of Georgia in Athens, had a brainwave while helping his wife, who is a sculptor. “It is hard work,” he says. “The idea came to me right then — I knew there weren’t many sculptors who died early, but many painters have.”

Greenspan and his colleagues looked at the lifespans of 406 artists, ranging in time from the German sculptor Peter Parler (1330–1399) to the Belgian painter Henri Evenepoel (1872–1899). Lifespans ranged from Titian’s 99 years to sculptor Pierino da Vinci, dead at 23. With an average life of 67.4 years, the 144 sculptors surveyed lived significantly longer than the 262 painters, who averaged 63.6 years of life.

More here.

Thomas Erdbrink in the Washington Post:

On Saturday, Shiites all over the world will commemorate Ashura, the day their third imam, or holy leader, was killed in battle in the 7th century. The story of Hussein’s death inspires many deeply religious people in this overwhelmingly Shiite society and helps explain Iran’s “culture of resistance,” as politicians here refer to their international posture.

Assadi, a gray-haired man of 54, organizes the yearly commemoration in a working-class south Tehran neighborhood centered along Tous Street, where he owns an ice cream parlor. He also manages the area’s privately run takyeh, or religious community center, where he not only handles the light switches but also takes care of the chains used for harmless self-flagellation during Ashura processions and leads the 20-member kitchen staff. During the 10-day tribute, workers serve 1,200 meals a night.

Ashura at Assadi’s center is a family party and a yearly reunion for former neighbors who travel from across Tehran, and sometimes farther, to participate. On Friday, excited children played outside, and women in traditional black chadors that covered all but their faces laughed with friends wearing loosely draped head scarves. Cups of hot milk warmed hands in the frigid Tehran winter. “I like everybody to feel at home here,” Assadi said.

More here.  [Thanks to Zara Houshmand.]

This is a Monday column that appeared on 3quarksdaily last year. I am re-posting it to commemorate Ashura or the 10th of Moharram (which is today):

By Abbas Raza:

Even now, many people who hear these terms daily on the news are confused about what the real differences are between Sunni and Shia Muslims, so I, having been brought up in a very devout Shia household in Pakistan, thought I would explain these things, at least in rough terms. Here goes:

It all started hours after Mohammad’s death: while his son-in-law (and first cousin) Ali was attending to Mohammad’s burial, others were holding a little election to see who should succeed Mohammad as the chief of what was by now an Islamic state. (Remember that by the end of his life, Mohammad was not only a religious leader, but the head-of-state of a significant polity.) The person soon elected to the position of caliph, or head-of-state, was an old companion of the prophet’s named Abu Bakr. This was a controversial choice, as many felt that Mohammad had clearly indicated Ali as his successor, and after Abu Bakr took power, these people had no choice but to say that while he may have become the temporal leader of the young Islamic state, they did not recognize him as their divinely guided religious leader. Instead, Ali remained their spiritual leader, and these were the ones who would eventually come to be known as the Shia. The ones who elected Abu Bakr would come to be known as Sunni.

This is the Shia/Sunni split which endures to this day, based on this early disagreement. Below I will say a little more about the Shia.

So early on in Islam, there was a split between political power and religious leadership, and to make a long story admittedly far too short, this soon came to a head within a generation when the grandson of one of the greatest of Mohammad’s enemies (Abu Sufian) from his early days in Mecca, Yazid, took power in the still nascent Islamic government. Yazid was really something like a cross between Nero and Hitler and Stalin; just bad, bad in every way: a decadent, repressive dictator (and one who flouted all Islamic injunctions), for whom it became very important to obtain the public allegiance of Husain, the pious and respected son of Ali (and so, grandson of Mohammad). And this Husain refused, on principle.

Yazid said he would kill Husain. Husain said that was okay. Yazid said he would kill all of Husain’s family. Husain said he could not compromise his principles, no matter what the price. Yazid’s army of tens of thousands then surrounded Husain and a small band of his family, friends and followers at a place called Kerbala (in present day Iraq), and cut off their water on the 7th of the Islamic month of Moharram. For three days, Husain and his family had no water. At dawn on the third day, the 10th of Moharram, Husain told all in his party that they were sure to be killed and whoever wanted to leave was free to do so. No one left. In fact, several heroic souls left Yazid’s camp to come and join the group that was certain to be slaughtered.

On the 10th of Moharram, a day now known throughout the Islamic world as Ashura, the members of Husain’s parched party came out one by one to do battle, as was the custom at the time. They were valiant, but hopelessly outnumbered, and therefore each was killed in turn.  All of Husain’s family was massacred in front of his eyes, even his six-month old son, Ali Asghar, who was pierced through the throat by an arrow from the renowned archer of Yazid’s army, Hurmula. After Husain’s teenage son Ali Akbar was killed, he is said to have proclaimed, “Now my back is broken.” But the last to die before him, was his beloved brother, Abbas, while trying desperately to break through Yazid’s ranks and bring water back from the Euphrates for Husain’s young daughter, Sakeena. And then Husain himself was killed.

The followers of Ali (the Shia) said to themselves that they would never allow this horrific event to be forgotten, and that they would mourn Husain and his family’s murder forever, and for the last thirteen hundred years, they have lived up to this promise every year. This mourning has given rise to ritualistic displays of grief, which include flagellating oneself with one’s hands, with chains, with knives, etc. It can all seem quite strange, out of context, but remembrance of that terrible day at Kerbala has also given rise to some of the most sublime poetry ever written (a whole genre in Urdu, called Marsia, is devoted to evoking the events of Ashura), and some of us, religious or not, still draw inspiration from the principled bravery and sacrifice of Husain on that black day.

More pictures here.

In January of 1958, three months after Sputnik triggered an educational panic in America much like today’s angst about the global talent race, a 14-year-old boy from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn made headlines: Bobby Fischer became the youngest U.S. champion in a cerebral sport long associated with genius—and long dominated by the Russians. The game, of course, was chess, and 15 years later—during his antic showdown with Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972—Fischer became, of all things, America’s best-known sports celebrity. For the football nation, heretofore bored by the slow-moving board game and generally ambivalent about super-braininess, Fischer (“the greatest natural player in history”) had become an emblematic figure: proof that innate talent will triumph in America, even—or especially—without Soviet-style systematic, elite, professionalized training. It didn’t hurt that Fischer, with his fabulous suits and snits—even the way he snatched up an opponent’s pieces—had a rock star’s gift for upstart drama.

It’s a whole different ball—I guess I should say chess—game now than when Fischer was growing up, due in no small part to Bobby himself.

more from Slate here.

Expelled from high school in Amsterdam, Arnon Grunberg rapidly became a literary wunderkind and enfant terrible. The author of audacious tragicomedies, he won a prestigious award, the Netherlands’ Anton Wachter Prize for debut fiction, twice, although initially no one realized it. In 1994, at age 23, Grunberg received the award for “Blue Mondays.” Then, in 2000, a Viennese writer, Marek van der Jagt, who had been attacking Grunberg and other Dutch writers in the press for being frivolous, won the prize for his first novel, “The Story of My Baldness.” Except that Van der Jagt was actually Grunberg.

Twice a recipient (as himself) of the AKO Literature Prize, which is the Dutch equivalent of the British Man Booker Prize, this transgressive, bestselling, prolific, gimlet-eyed scamp once again raises the controversy quotient. In his eighth harrowing novel, “The Jewish Messiah,” Grunberg, the son of Jews from Germany, detonates the promise of a Jewish messiah and satirizes the persistence and insidiousness of anti-Semitism and the dire consequences of malignant messianic missions.

more from the LA Times here.

Gloomy poets are rarely very good, and good poets rarely very gloomy. There was Edgar Allan Poe, of course, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, denizens of that funereal, willow-shadowed decade of the 1840s, a decade half in love with Keats and half in love with easeful death. Thomas Hardy had his black moods, but also his moments of sour levity. For more than 50 years, however, Geoffrey Hill has written a pinch-mouthed, grave-digger’s poetry so rich and allusive his books are normally greeted by gouts of praise from critics and the bewilderment of readers who might have been happier with a tract on the mating rituals of the earwig.

Hill has made brutally plain that the common reader is of no interest to him. Indeed, he believes that sinking to common ground betrays the high purpose of verse; with a withering pride he has refused, time and again, to stoop to such betrayals. This has made him a poet more despised than admired, and more admired than loved. His poetry has been composed of harsh musics, the alarums of battle and the death struggles under the reading lamp — it takes to contemplation the way some men take to religion (Hill’s relation to Christianity has been famously cryptic). Such poetry lies deep in the long wars of English kingship and a long shelf of books on the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

We are looking at something that probably not one of us has ever seen before. We are staring in perfect colour close-up at the slow, rhythmic uncoiling of a slimy proboscis. But what are we to make of the strange and oddly beautiful sight before our eyes? The camera pulls back a fraction. The answer is revealed. We are looking at a snail. A familiar garden snail. And as our recognition dawns, the background music, a gently impelling blend of harps and violins, fades slightly, and we hear the characteristic hushed intensity of one of the most famous voices in the world. “We don’t often see a snail that way”, says David Attenborough. “And that’s because we’ve only recently had the tiny lenses and electronic cameras we need to explain this miniature world.”

We are entering, burrowing into, the first part of Attenborough’s most recent BBC series, Life in the Undergrowth: by the time the five episodes are over another four hours of screen time will have been added to the ninety or so hours of extraordinary television footage that he and his various teams have compiled for television viewers over the last 30 years.

more from Eurozine here.

In his essay “The Duce’s Portraits,” Italo Calvino tells us that he “spent the first 20 years of his life with Mussolini’s face always in view, in the sense that his portrait was hung in every classroom as well as in every public building or office.” The invasion of public spaces by dictators’ likenesses in all kinds of media was nothing new in Mussolini’s time but, with mechanical reproduction and the photographic medium in full bloom, a leader’s face could imprint itself on memory as it had never done before. With a friendly if humorous wink at the semiological analyses of his contemporary Umberto Eco, Calvino in his article revisits his quasi-photographic childhood memories of Mussolini. And, what Calvino remembers most acutely is that from the start of his leadership, Mussolini struck an odd note amid his contemporaries by having neither a mustache nor a beard.

Now, the mustaches and beards that Calvino remembered are not what we today associate with current men’s facial fashion, be it an unshaved shadow of a beard or a small tuft of hair above or below the mouth. No, unlike the archetypal elder statesman figure in Calvino’s mind, what Mussolini did not have was an abundance of erotically placed silky hair adorning his lips. For Calvino, this clean-shaven look was a sign of modernity, a sign needing interpretation by historians. “I don’t think that there are historians who emphasize the facial hair dimension in various epochs,” he wrote in Hermit in Paris (2004), “and yet those are certainly messages that have a meaning, especially in periods of transition.”

more from artnet here.

Stephen Kotkin in The New Republic:

In Vietnam, the United States lost the war but is now well on the way to winning the peace. Could that be Vietnam’s real lesson for the American involvement in Iraq? A gateway to both northeast Asia and southeast Asia, Vietnam is a hinge country with enormous strategic significance. Much of the credit for America’s positioning to win the peace in Vietnam belongs to communist China. Beginning in 1979, China’s Communist Party leadership under Deng Xiaoping tentatively and (many say) reluctantly opened the economy to legal market transactions. Over time, the market experimentation was allowed to deepen, and it was combined with an opening of China to the world. This colossal turnabout — as much as the collapse of the Soviet Union — has transformed the world.

China’s incredible success on the capitalist road — alongside Vietnam’s desperate postwar poverty through the 1980s and the perceived threat of a much invigorated China on Vietnam’s northern border — induced the Vietnamese communists to launch their own “renovation” (doi moi, in Vietnamese) in December, 1986. Much of the party’s old guard in Hanoi resigned. A decade or so of mixed results ensued, nothing like China’s boom. And then, around 1999-2000, the Vietnamese economy finally did take off when an enhanced law on private enterprise gave the green light to small and medium-size businesses. Also important, in 2004 the Vietnamese Communist Party encouraged its members to amass wealth openly and on a large scale.

More here.

Chuck Mertz has earned a following stirring up politics on WNUR, but can he move on?

Jordan Weismann in the Daily Northwestern:

It’s 8:58 a.m., two minutes until show time and there he is, rushing through the studio door with his graying, shoulder length mane bobbing behind. Chuck Mertz, the host of WNUR’s This Is Hell, is a bit late, which is to say right about on schedule. The last show tune from Breakfast With Broadway cuts off and an ambient track fills up the dead air. Mertz darts around, shuffling papers, pulling them up just an inch or two from his door-wedge of a nose so he is able to read the page. For the next few minutes, he is a 45-year-old, legally blind flurry. Then at 9:08, he is seated and ready, script in hand and a bottle of RC Cola at his side.

For nine years, this has been Mertz’s Saturday morning ritual. More than 60 hours of his time each week go into planning This Is Hell, a four-hour, current affairs marathon, which he presides over like a Gonzo Charlie Rose, careening between pot jokes, wry observations, dive-bar schtick and serious, long-form interviews. Noam Chomsky has been a guest four times; Howard Zinn, Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Moore have chatted with him on air; so do Hugo Chavez supporters, war reporters and experts on Chicagoland gangs. Guests often speak for up to forty minutes, giving listeners a rare window into their thinking. By many accounts the hard work has made This Is Hell WNUR’s flagship show, with a cult audience that, thanks to the web, listens in from Chicago, England, Australia and even Senegal. This would be Mertz’s dream job, if only it paid.

More here.  The shows podcast feed is: feed://www.thisishell.net/rss.xml and its website is http://www.thisishell.net/   The January 12th show (available in the archives: http://www.thisishell.net/archives.html ) featured Fatima Bhutto and Patrick Cockburn, along with other guests. [Thanks to Bryon Giddens-White.]

Dan Chiasson in the New York Times:

Louis Zukofsky (1904-78) is the author of an enormous poem called simply “A,” an 800-plus-page work written over the course of more than 50 years in a mélange of styles and forms, from Poundian free verse to Italian canzoni. “A”-21 — the poem was composed of 24 parts, mirroring the hours of the day — translates an entire play by Plautus. “A”-24, the final section, is the score of a masque composed by Zukofsky’s wife, Celia. “The most hermetic poem in English,” a “long intent eccentric unread game,” was the critic Hugh Kenner’s judgment of “A,” and Kenner liked it.

Reading “A” is hard; in its time, even getting the chance to try was hard. Until 1979, a year after Zukofsky’s death, when it was finally published in its entirety, only privately printed partial editions circulated, including a beautiful “A” 1-12 set by the poetry impresario Cid Corman in Japan in an edition of 200. (You had to know Corman personally in order to be allowed to buy one.) Zukofsky, who like Joyce died of a perforated ulcer that had long caused him pain, would seem the very model of the cantankerous, obscure, even obscurantist modern poet.

“The Poem of a Life,” Mark Scroggins’s terrific new biography, never strays far from Zukofsky the poet.

More here.

William Booth in Smithsonian Magazine:

“I admit it does sound crazy,” says Michael Wong of his idea to use gold to clean up toxic waste. Wong plans to combine gold with palladium—an even more precious metal—to treat polluted groundwater beneath waste dumps and contaminated factories and military sites. “It not only works faster [than current methods], but a hundred times faster,” Wong says, “and I bet it will be cheaper too.”

A golden detergent? Here is Wong’s trick: he creates nanoparticles of gold. In his realm, the work product is measured not in carats but in atoms. A thimbleful of coffee-colored solution contains 100 trillion gold spheres—each only 15 atoms wide, or about the width of a virus. Upon every golden nanosphere, Wong and his team dust a dash of palladium atoms. Think of an infinitely small ice-cream scoop flecked with sprinkles.

The 35-year-old Caltech and MIT graduate says he had not given toxic waste much thought until three years ago when one of his colleagues at Rice University (where he is a recently tenured professor of chemical engineering) came to him and said, “I have a problem,” meaning something interesting to work on.

More here.

Morgan in The Smart Set:

These days, we’re weary of being weary. But that gets us nowhere. Then, into the midst of all the funk and gloom, comes one of the most boring books of our time. And it is as deeply satisfying a dull torpor as we’ve been gifted in recent memory. The book is Peter Gay’s Modernism. It is something akin to a high school textbook, with categories like “Prose and Poetry,” “Music and Dance,” “Architecture and Design,” and the like. Gay, in explaining the difficulties presented to anyone trying to write a history of Modernism, says:

Not surprisingly, then, cultural historians intimidated by the chaotic, steadily evolving panorama they are trying in retrospect to reduce to order have sought refuge in a prudential plural: “modernisms.” This compliment to the turbulence that pervades the modern marketplace for art, literature, and the rest shows due respect for an imaginative individuality that has for almost two centuries ignited spirited debate over taste, its expressiveness, morality, economics, and politics, and over their psychological or social origins and implications.

The turbulence, Gay suggests in 510 pages, is very much over. And he has the prose to prove it. Modernism is dead. We all knew this, of course, but we still didn’t necessarily believe it. We needed to go to the funeral. We wanted to see the body. Now we have. Peter Gay is our undertaker. We needed someone to do the job of writing the final obituary for Modernism and it was such an immensely tiresome task that we left it off for more than 20 years. We were bad. Peter Gay, a good man, has finally stepped to the fore. He has written one of the least engaging books of our time. And this, I submit, is the perfect antidote to our lingering discontent. Peter Gay is a hero.

A few years ago, my first novel was published. It did pretty well, won an award, was translated and sold around the world; the movie rights were even optioned. Now I want to put it online — no charge, no hook, no catch. My motivation is simple: greed.

My publishers are resolutely opposed to this idea. They fear it will “devalue the brand” and set a dangerous precedent. They fear, intuitively but wrongly, that fewer people will buy a book that is also given away for free. But most of all, they fear the future — and with good reason. Book publishing is a dinosaur industry, and there’s a big scary meteor on the way.

more from The Walrus here.

After his famous ‘Age of . . .’ trilogy on the 19th century, E. J. Hobsbawm published a coda (best-selling but in my view much less satisfactory) on the history of the 20th century. It begins with a bleak page of epigraphs, among others from Isaiah Berlin — ‘the most terrible century in Western history,’ William Golding — ‘the most violent century in human history,’ and René Dumont — ‘I see it only as a century of massacre and war.’ This theme of ‘mankind’s worst century’ has become something of a cliché, and deserves closer examination, not least because it almost implies that the horrors of the age were natural catastrophes, like hurricanes or epidemics.

If you blink, then a perfectly obvious case can be made that the 20th century was far and away the best in human history. Any horrors it endured came not from evolutionary change but from unnatural aberrations, in the form of what men did to one another in the name of ideologies. Bernard Wasserstein takes the title of his excellent new book from Walter Benjamin: ‘There is no document of civilisation that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism.’ This is a nice line, but it deserves the examiner’s ‘Discuss’. For much of European history, the Whig view — onward and upward — did not seem absurd, and that was never less so than 100 years ago, in that golden age so memorably apostrophised by Keynes. What any historian thus has to address is why Europe relapsed so terrifyingly into catastrophic war, despotism and mass murder.

more from The Spectator here.

For most of his life and more than a century after his death, Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) was known for two things – having his name hitched to a city and being Britain’s best painter of candlelight. Never mind the quirky portraits and the moonlit waterways, never mind the extraordinary scenes of scientific revelation for which he is now deservedly famous; what mainly struck the public, it seems, was Wright’s gift for making a drama out of candles in darkness.

This will seem odd to anyone who has ever seen his great work, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, in which a group of spectators is transfixed but also terrified by the theatre of science. Spooky lighting admittedly plays its part – the living faces, especially the showman-scientist, the pickled skull in the foreground, the cockatoo trapped in the deadly glass: all are illuminated by a single candle – but what compels is the terrible possibility that the bird will eventually be starved of oxygen altogether in order to demonstrate the novelty of the vacuum pump.

more from The Observer Review here.

Vikram Seth, author of the lyrical feast Golden Gate, gives us some monosyllabic poems inspired by George Herbert and tells of the source of the inspiration (via Amitava Kumar):

Host

I heard it was for sale and thought I’d go
To see the old house where
He lived three years, and died. How could I know
Its stones, its trees, its air,
The stream, the small church, the dark rain would say:
“You’ve come; you’ve seen; now stay.”

“A guest?” I asked. “Yes, as you are on earth.”
“The means?” “. . . will come, don’t fear.”
“What of the risk?” “Our lives are that from birth.”
“His ghost?” “His soul is here.”
“He’ll change my style.” “Well, but you could do worse
Than rent his rooms of verse.”

Joy came, and grief; love came, and loss; three years –
Tiles down; moles up; drought; flood.
Though far in time and faith, I share his tears,
His hearth, his ground, his mud;
Yet my host stands just out of mind and sight,
That I may sit and write.

In the NY Sun:

As if it didn’t already have enough, the East River seems to attract water: Last summer, its big draw was a floating swimming pool; this summer, it will be waterfalls — created by an artist.

Olafur Eliasson, a Danish–Icelandic artist whose installation “The Weather Project” drew 2 million people to the Tate Modern in 2003 and 2004, has designed what will likely be the city’s biggest public art project since Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates”: a series of freestanding waterfalls in the East River.

Mayor Bloomberg and the Public Art Fund, a private nonprofit organization that produced, among other works, Anish Kapoor’s “Sky Mirror” and Jeff Koons’s “Puppy,” both at Rockefeller Center, are scheduled to announce Mr. Eliasson’s project at the South Street Seaport tomorrow.

According to a source whom the mayor told about the project, the waterfalls will rise about 60 to 70 feet above the water — more than half as high as the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge. They will be visible from the area around the Seaport, from Brooklyn Heights, and from the Governors Island Ferry.

That mirror
   Which makes of men a transparency,
      Who holds that mirror
And bids us such a breast-bare spectacle see
      Of you and me?

      That mirror
   Whose magic penetrates like a dart,
      Who lifts that mirror
And throws our mind back on us, and our heart,
      Until we start?

      That mirror
   Works well in these night hours of ache;
      Why in that mirror
Are tincts we never see ourselves once take
      When the world is awake?

      That mirror
   Can test each mortal when unaware;
      Yea, that strange mirror
May catch his last thoughts, whole life foul or fair,
      Glassing it–where?

Thomas Hardy, Moments Of Vision And Miscellaneous Verses