From The Washington Post:
Two new books disagree sharply about how big a threat Osama bin Laden and his allies pose.
We should strike the term “terrorist group” from the lexicon of those charged with beating Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and its allies. Although “insurgent” is not a perfect fit either, the term far better describes al-Qaeda and the other Islamists attacking America. These zealous groups are large, multi-functional, media-savvy, well-funded, superbly led and religiously motivated. Their focus is on winning, not strutting on the world stage. Numerous No. 2, No. 3 and No. 4 leaders of al-Qaeda are gone, but the organization’s threat remains. Most important, al-Qaeda and its ilk — unlike traditional terrorist and insurgent groups — have no return address; they are not confined to one state or reliant upon its patronage. Islamist groups can hit America with impunity and high confidence that U.S. military forces cannot annihilate them in response. Al-Qaeda is many things, including a proliferating ideology and a unique, multi-ethnic insurgent organization. It is also a growing threat to U.S. security, in part because our leaders do not accept these realities. Abdel Bari Atwan fully grasps the foregoing in his excellent, very personal book, The Secret History of al Qaeda.
One can only hope that Louise Richardson’s What Terrorists Want will prove the last shriek from the academy’s antiquated terrorism experts, who are reluctant to admit that al-Qaeda poses a unique menace.
More here.
David Shrigley’s work has become enormously popular. There are Shrigley books, Shrigley greeting cards and postcards, Shrigley LPs, CDs and 7in singles. There are probably people doing Shrigley imitations and dissertations. Should we take Shrigley seriously? What does “serious” mean?
All sorts of inflated claims have been made for Shrigley. His voice has been likened to that of early Thomas Pynchon, and his drawings have been likened to those of serial killer Denis Nilson (you can thank Will Self for the second comparison). Shrigley himself has said he admires the novels of Donald Barthelme and Joseph Conrad, and the art of Philip Guston. His own art manages to be both clever and moronic, relentlessly stupid and occasionally profound. Somehow, he seduces many of us into thinking of him as a major talent.
more from The Guardian here.
At least in Brezhnev’s time you knew where you stood. We had no illusions. Public life was black and white. Censorship was overwhelming. Journalists wrote under instruction and according to the social and political orders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Now, in the new Russia of sushi bars and oligarchs, the situation is more shameful and rotten than it was then. The attempted assassination of Alexander Litvinenko might not be all that it seems, and yet it does fit a pattern. It follows only a few weeks after the murder of my good friend, the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya. There have since been other, less publicised, cases. Another investigative reporter, Fatima Tlisova, was poisoned two weeks ago in north Caucasus; on 18 November the former head of security in Chechnya, who had fallen out with the region’s prime minister, was gunned down in the centre of Moscow in broad daylight by Chechen and Russian police. And then this . . . the mysterious poisoning of Litvinenko (in a sushi restaurant, naturally), but this time in the centre of Russia’s second city, London.
more from The New Statesman here.
As long as reputable sovereign and financial entities have issued value-bearing notes, disreputable personages have attempted to imitate them for nefarious purposes. At times the counterfeiters have been nearly as productive as the legitimate mints. In the mid-nineteenth century, some forty percent of all American currency was fake. But “fake” here is a relative term. With literally thousands of currencies circulating at the time, legal tender in Cincinnati might be little more than tinder-box fodder in Columbus. National currencies, too, often ended up stoking the auto-da-fé; those of the French Bank Royale, the Continental Congress, and the Confederate States are only the most notorious examples. Under such turbulent circumstances, the difference between value and valuelessness, between “real money” and ornate scrap paper, does not admit of definite boundaries.
Perhaps no one has challenged this distinction more effectively than the forgotten Portuguese entrepreneur and swindler Arturo Alves Reis. The latter epithet, though certainly apt, fails to capture the true essence of his crimes, which were both outlandishly reckless and touchingly devoid of malice.
more from Cabinet here.
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Charles McGrath in the New York Times Magazine:
For some reason, Northern Ireland produces poets the way the Dominican Republic does baseball players. The M.V.P., the Pedro Martínez, is of course Seamus Heaney — or Famous Seamus, as he became known after winning the Nobel Prize in 1995. In the next generation there are a number of up-and-coming stars, including Frank Ormsby, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian and the poet most likely to inherit Heaney’s mantle, if he hasn’t already, Paul Muldoon. The first meeting of Heaney and Muldoon, at a county museum in Armagh in the late 60s, has been embroidered in some accounts into a mystical laying on of hands and a landmark of Irish literary legend — an occasion as momentous in its way as the first meeting of James Joyce and the 21-year-old Samuel Beckett.
More here.
From The Economist:
If you have ever sat alone in a bar, depressed by how good-looking everybody else seems to be, take comfort—it may be evolution playing a trick on you. A study just published in Evolution and Human Behavior by Sarah Hill, a psychologist at the University of Texas, Austin, shows that people of both sexes reckon the sexual competition they face is stronger than it really is. She thinks that is useful: it makes people try harder to attract or keep a mate.
Dr Hill showed heterosexual men and women photographs of people. She asked them to rate both how attractive those of their own sex would be to the opposite sex, and how attractive the members of the opposite sex were. She then compared the scores for the former with the scores for the latter, seen from the other side. Men thought that the men they were shown were more attractive to women than they really were, and women thought the same of the women.
Dr Hill had predicted this outcome, thanks to error-management theory—the idea that when people (or, indeed, other animals) make errors of judgment, they tend to make the error that is least costly. The notion was first proposed by Martie Haselton and David Buss, two of Dr Hill’s colleagues, to explain a puzzling quirk in male psychology.
More here. [Photo shows average looking schmo Paul Newman, who I once stupidly believed is better looking than me.]
Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books:
Anyone seeking to understand what has become the central conundrum of the Iraq war—how it is that so many highly accomplished, experienced, and intelligent officials came together to make such monumental, consequential, and, above all, obvious mistakes, mistakes that much of the government knew very well at the time were mistakes—must see beyond what seems to be a simple rhetoric of self-justification and follow it where it leads: toward the War of Imagination that senior officials decided to fight in the spring and summer of 2002 and to whose image they clung long after reality had taken a sharply separate turn. In that War of Imagination victory was to be decisive, overwhelming, evincing a terrible power—enough to wipe out the disgrace of September 11 and remake the threatening world. In State of Denial, Woodward recounts how Michael Gerson, at the time Bush’s chief speechwriter, asked Henry Kissinger why he had supported the Iraq war:
“Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,” Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.” The American response to 9/11 had essentially to be more than proportionate—on a larger scale than simply invading Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban. Something else was essential. The Iraq war was essential to send a larger message, “in order to make a point that we’re not going to live in this world that they want for us.”
Though to anyone familiar with Kissinger’s “realist” rhetoric of power and credibility his analysis will come as no surprise, Gerson, the deeply religious idealist who composed Bush’s most soaring music about “ending tyranny” and “ridding the world of evil,” seems mildly disappointed: Kissinger “viewed Iraq purely in the context of power politics. It was not idealism. He didn’t seem to connect with Bush’s goal of promoting democracy.”
More here.
Anita Bath at Say No to Crack:
This kid is easily the best baby breakdancer I’ve seen. OK, so he’s the only baby breakdancer I’ve seen, but still … my son is almost the same age and has trouble climbing onto the couch, so in comparison this kid is just amazing:
More here.
Beyond Belief, via Edge.org:
Just 40 years after a famous TIME magazine cover asked “Is God Dead?” the answer appears to be a resounding “No!” According to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine, “God is Winning”. Religions are increasingly a geopolitical force to be reckoned with. Fundamentalist movements – some violent in the extreme – are growing. Science and religion are at odds in the classrooms and courtrooms. And a return to religious values is widely touted as an antidote to the alleged decline in public morality. After two centuries, could this be twilight for the Enlightenment project and the beginning of a new age of unreason? Will faith and dogma trump rational inquiry, or will it be possible to reconcile religious and scientific worldviews? Can evolutionary biology, anthropology and neuroscience help us to better understand how we construct beliefs, and experience empathy, fear and awe? Can science help us create a new rational narrative as poetic and powerful as those that have traditionally sustained societies? Can we treat religion as a natural phenomenon? Can we be good without God? And if not God, then what? This is a critical moment in the human situation, and The Science Network in association with the Crick-Jacobs Center brought together an extraordinary group of scientists and philosophers to explore answers to these questions. The conversation took place at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA from November 5-7, 2006.  |
Session 1
(watch) | Steven Weinberg, LawrenceKrauss, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer | Session 2
(watch) | Neil deGrasse Tyson; Discussion: Tyson, Weinberg, Krauss, Harris, Shermer | Session 3
(watch) | Joan Roughgarden, Richard Dawkins, Francisco Ayala, Carolyn Porco | Session 4
(watch) | Stuart Hameroff, V.S. Ramachandran |
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Session 5
(watch) | Paul Davies, Steven Nadler, Patricia Churchland | Session 6
(watch) | Susan Neiman, Loyal Rue, Elizabeth Loftus | | Session 7 (watch) | Mahzarin Banaji, Richard Dawkins, Scott Atran | | Session 8 (watch) | Scott Atran, Sir Harold Kroto, Charles Harper, Ann Druyan |
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Session 9
(watch) | Sam Harris, Jim Woodward, Melvin Konner; Discussion: Harris, Woodward, Konner, Dawkins, Paul Churchland | | Session 10 (watch) | Richard Sloan, V.S. Ramachandran, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Terry Sejnowski |
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Bryan Appleyard in The Times of London:
Jane Austen had a lesbian affair with her older sister, Cassandra. It’s obvious, really. There was “the passionate nature of the sibling bond” so evident in the letters. There were her descriptions of women, betraying “a kind of homophilic fascination”. And, of course, there was her fascination with the “underlying eros of the sister-sister bond”. Case closed, I’d say.
Well, no. All these quotations come from a 1995 article in the London Review of Books by Terry Castle, an American academic. Castle was simply noting certain important preoccupations in her writing. An eager subeditor, however, had other ideas. “Was Jane Austen Gay?” was the headline. The LRB had barely hit the newsstands when Newsnight went on air with an earnest discussion of the sexual proclivities of one of our greatest novelists. Good grief! Was Mr Darcy really a woman, the bulge in his breeches a clumsy prosthetic? We had to know. But why? Literary biography is one of the dominant forms of our time. Almost weekly, big fat books emerge to reveal new truths about our greatest writers. Among the current fatties are Zachary Leader’s The Life of Kingsley Amis and the second volume of John Haffenden’s life of William Empson. The first has drunkenness and promiscuity; the second a bisexual fascination with troilism. And, yes, Austen is in for another doing-over, as a film released next year, Becoming Jane, about “a little-known but true love affair with the brilliant, roguish and attractive young Irishman Tom Lefroy”. One way or another, it seems, we shall just have to accept the awful, the incredible truth: Jane Austen had sex. Gosh.
More here.
It was a soldier’s story, set in battlefields of rotted corpses and the tortured soul of a young teenager who went off to serve his country, and when the novel was published in 1991 it brought Bao Ninh the closest thing in Vietnam to instant literary celebrity.
Ninh never published again – although he is believed to have finished another novel about the war, called Steppe, that he has hesitated to submit for publication.
‘I stopped myself. I kept holding myself back,’ Ninh told The Observer in a rare interview at his home in a section of central Hanoi favoured by middle-ranking officials. ‘I compared everything I wrote to everything I wrote in the past, and it’s not natural like it was before.’
more from The Guardian here.
From Guardian: It has been a good year for polemics on the war in Iraq, poetry, graphic novels and a late 18th-century wood engraver. Writers and critics make their picks of 2006.
Monica Ali
I’ve spent far too much time this year reading kitchen books. One that I particularly enjoyed was Anthony Bourdain’s collection, The Nasty Bits (Bloomsbury), especially his commentaries on his own essays in which he tends to say: “I think I had my head up my ass when I wrote this thing.” Another was Molecular Gastronomy by Hervé This (Columbia University Press), which brings the instruments and experimental techniques of the laboratory into the kitchen. In fiction, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (Fourth Estate) was outstanding.
Tariq Ali
Patrick Cockburn’s The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso) is an excellent account of a disastrous imperial war and should be required reading for the newly elected Democrats in the US Senate and House of Representatives. America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier by Robert Vitalis (Stanford University Press) is a devastating critique of the oil giant Aramco and how strike-breaking and racism cemented the US-Saudi relationship. Atiq Rahimi’s exquisitely crafted novel, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear (Chatto & Windus), describes two days in Kabul. The native communist regime is crumbling and the Soviet Union is about to invade. Rahimi’s prose poem evokes the terror of the period, which would lead to endless war and destruction.
More here.
From The New York Times:
IN “Against the Day,” his sixth, his funniest and arguably his most accessible novel, Thomas Pynchon doles out plenty of vertigo, just as he has for more than 40 years. But this time his fevered reveries and brilliant streams of words, his fantastical plots and encrypted references, are bound together by a clear message that others can unscramble without mental meltdown. Its import emerges only gradually, camouflaged by the sprawling absurdist jumble of themes that can only be described as Pynchonesque, over the only time frame Pynchon recognizes as real: the hours (that stretch into days) it takes to relay one of his sweeping narratives, hours that do “not so much elapse as grow less relevant.”
In “Against the Day,” Pynchon’s voice seems uncharacteristically earnest. He interrupts his narrative from time to time to lay down pronouncements that, taken together, probably constitute the fullest elaboration of his philosophy yet seen in print. One of the novel’s idées fixes is that mysterious agents are trying to send messages to individuals and to humanity at large in surprising ways: through bloody detonations of shells or dynamite I.E.D.’s (think of this as percussive Morse code that explodes into shrapnel as it’s received); a tornado nicknamed Thorvald that students attempt to communicate with by telegraph; garrulous whirls of ball lightning; coal gas (people wear special headsets to interpret the fumes and hang upside down to inhale messages through their stoves); and massive explosions on the level of the Tunguska Event or Hiroshima, which may be the footprints of angels, communicating through murder on a cataclysmic scale. In a singularly disturbing imaginative leap, he seems to make a ghoulish association with the gas chambers of the Holocaust.
More here.
Friday, November 24, 2006
It took me about 30 seconds to do this one:
Go here to make your own. (Just move the mouse around, click to change color.)
From the London Review of Books:
Military intervention won’t stop the killing. Those who are clamouring for troops to fight their way into Darfur are suffering from a salvation delusion. It’s a simple reality that UN troops can’t stop an ongoing war, and their record at protecting civilians is far from perfect. Moreover, the idea of Bush and Blair acting as global moral arbiters doesn’t travel well. The crisis in Darfur is political. It’s a civil war, and like all wars it needs a political settlement. Late in the night of 16 November Kofi Annan chaired a meeting at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa at which he, the AU and the UN Security Council reaffirmed this basic fact. When he promised to bring the government of Sudan and the rebels who are still fighting around the table within weeks, the outgoing UN secretary general was adopting a simple and correct rationale: fix the politics first and the peacekeeping will follow. It’s not a distant hope: the political differences are small.
More here.
“Milton Friedman was a highly original economic thinker. But even in the one area he was proved correct, his work is likely to be outshone by that of another economist.”
Paul Ormerod in Prospect Magazine:
Milton Friedman, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek: the three great famous economists from the middle decades of the 20th century. What were the similarities and differences between them, and how do they stand in the discipline of economics as it develops in the 21st century?
All three were tremendous self-publicists. Keynes had a long involvement in public policy advocacy. Hayek’s 1944 book The Road to Serfdom sold an incredible 2m copies. Friedman’s Free to Choose was the bestselling non-fiction book of 1980. All were iconoclasts, never afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom, whether within academia or more widely.
Many of the obituaries of Friedman have focused on his work on monetary policy, on his assertion that inflation, in the long run, is purely a monetary phenomenon. But his monetary work was just one of three areas explicitly mentioned in his Nobel prize citation in 1976. Just as well, because economists and policymakers have subsequently qualified Friedman’s hypothesis very substantially.
More here.
There’s been much talk about the moody silences of Hopper’s spaces and the oddly disturbed figures around or in them — they seem to be living the lives of quiet desperation that Thoreau spoke of. But I suggest that the people are distractions from Hopper’s real concern: buildings. They abound in Hopper’s works, often dwarfing the figures into insignificance — Night Shadows (1921) is a characteristic example — or using them as foils to offset structure and space. Buildings are man-made constructions of geometrical space, and as such inherently abstract and autonomous. They have a charismatic quality of their own, independently of the people who use them. Hopper is a kind of Cubist, treating buildings as abstract structures with a life of their own, and often more uncannily alive than the people who use them.
more from Artnet here.
Thomas Pynchon is the apostle of imperfection, so it is arguably some sort of commendation to say that his new novel, “Against the Day” (Penguin; $35), is a very imperfect book. Imperfect not in the sense of “Ambitious but flawed.” Imperfect in the sense of “What was he thinking?”
The book is set in the period between 1893 and around 1920, and this is the plot: An anarchist named Webb Traverse, who employs dynamite as a weapon against the mining and railroad interests out West, is killed by two gunmen, Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno, who were hired by the wicked arch-plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe. Traverse’s sons—Kit, a mathematician; Frank, an engineer; and Reef, a cardsharp and ladies’ man—set out to avenge their father’s murder. (Webb also has a daughter, Lake, but she takes up with one of the killers.) This story requires a thousand and eighty-five pages to get told, or roughly the number of pages it took for Napoleon to invade Russia and be driven back by General Kutuzov. Of course, there are a zillion other things going on in “Against the Day,” but the Traverse-family revenge drama is the only one that resembles a plot—that is, in Aristotle’s helpful definition, an action that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
more from the New Yorker here.
IN “The Coast of Utopia” Tom Stoppard throws his arms around a subject so big it cannot be contained in a single play. Chekhovian in spirit, and Tolstoyan in scale, it requires three linked plays, more than 70 roles and a fictional time span of more than 30 years to cover the politics, the literature and the tangled personal relationships that animated Russia in the mid-19th century.
The historical allusions fly thick and fast, and the names, in most cases, are less than familiar. Most audience members will vaguely recall that Mikhail Bakunin, the central figure in “Voyage,” which opens Monday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, was an anarchist. Beyond that, probably, nothing. The novelist Ivan Turgenev requires no introduction, but the Socialist Aleksandr Herzen and the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky do. Belinsky dominates “Shipwreck,” the second part of the trilogy, and Herzen takes center stage in “Salvage,” the third and final installment. If ever a play required a reading list, “The Coast of Utopia” is it. So let’s get started.
more from The New York Times here.
From BBC:
Image of an elephant foetus in a womb. A series of different representations, using ultrasound scans and computer graphics, have been created for a documentary called Animals in the Womb that will be screened in the UK on Channel 4 over Christmas.
More here.
