Education sometimes de-radicalizes Islamists . . .

Rafiullah Kakar
LinkedIn

Nicholas Kristof, writing his regular column, speaks of "[His] Friend, the Former Muslim Extremist" (NYT, February 20, 2016), and he tells us that education sometimes helps individuals de-radicalize. Take the case of this friend, Rafiullah Kakar, who was radicalized in high school by a charismatic teacher, but then headed off to college for the shock of his young life:

When Rafi attended college in the city of Lahore, he encountered educated women for the first time. Previously, he had assumed that girls have second-rate minds, and that educated women have loose morals.

"I'd never interacted with a woman," he said. "Then in college there were these talented, outspoken women in class. It was a shock." It was part of an intellectual journey that led Rafi to become a passionate advocate for girls' education, including in his own family. His oldest sisters are illiterate, but his youngest sister is bound for college.

Education, however, doesn't always help. Many radicals are highly educated:

"Education can be a problem," Rafi says dryly.

He's right. It's possible to be too glib about the impact of education: Osama bin Laden was an engineer. Ayman al-Zawahri, the current leader of Al Qaeda, is a trilingual surgeon. Rafi notes that Pakistani doctors or engineers are sometimes extremists because in that country's specialized education system they gain the confidence of a university degree without the critical thinking that (ideally) comes from an acquaintance with the liberal arts.

So, what's the solution? More liberal arts with an emphasis on critical thinking, for one. Educating more girls, for another.

Any suggestions from readers?

Lose Your Self in the Loss of a Moral Universe . . .

Philosoraptor

Dave Gottlieb's Website

Nina Strohminger and Shaun Nichols, reporting on "Your Brain, Your Disease, Your Self" (NYT, August 21, 2015), ask an increasingly relevant question for ageing populations:

When does the deterioration of your brain rob you of your identity?

Their answer? Not memory:

[But - one might protest - m]emory . . . is central to identity. And indeed, many philosophers and psychologists have supposed as much. This idea is intuitive enough, for what captures our personal trajectory through life better than the vault of our recollections?

Still, not memory, for as Strohminger and Nichols reveal:

We found [in our study] that disruptions to the moral faculty created a powerful sense that . . . [a] patient's identity had been compromised. Virtually no other mental impairment led people to stop seeming like themselves . . . . [N]either degree nor type of memory impairment impacted perceived identity. All that mattered was whether their moral capacities remained intact . . . . What makes us recognizable to others resides almost entirely within a relatively narrow band of cognitive functioning . . . . [and] only when our grip on the moral universe loosens . . . [does] our identity slip . . . away with it.

I wonder . . . would a 'newfound' moral skeptic's radical rejection of any 'true' morality have a similar effect on identity?

Alexandra Alter: On Julie Strauss-Gabel, Editor of Children's Books - or Should that be of Young Adults' Books?

Julie Strauss-Gabel
Photo by Josh Haner
The New York Times

I've just finished reading an article by Alexandra Alter about Julie Strauss-Gabel, editor and publisher of Dutton Children's Books, who's known for "Her Stinging Critiques [that] Propel Young Adult Best Sellers" (NYT, April 10, 2015), given that her editing almost invariably ensures critical and commercial success in the world of children's book publishing, and all that due to her rigorous standards:

"I am naturally exceedingly picky," she said. "If I'm not in love with someone's writing at the sentence level, then I'm not going to sign up the book."

Her knack for spotting and developing talent is apparent on this week's New York Times young adult best-seller list, where novels that she edited hold five of the top 10 spots. She has edited 22 New York Times best sellers . . . . Ms. Strauss-Gabel's unconventional taste and eye for idiosyncratic literary voices have helped her identify and build up some of young adult fiction's biggest breakout stars . . . . Ms. Strauss-Gabel, 42, remembers the precise moment she realized children's books could be just as sophisticated and challenging as adult literature. She was in eighth grade, already reading grown-up books, when her earth science teacher gave the class a trivia challenge for extra credit. The question - where is the East Pole? - stumped her. She learned it was in "Winnie the Pooh," and read the classic for the first time. "It was an utter revelation to me," she said. "I fell in love with the book. It's an extraordinary work of literature" . . . . Even in college, when most English majors tackle Proust and Tolstoy, Ms. Strauss-Gabel was obsessed with children's books. She took a course in children's literature and a seminar on the Brothers Grimm, and wrote her senior thesis on fairy tale tropes in young adult literature . . . . [She received] a master's degree in education from Harvard, where she took classes in comparative literature and folklore . . . . Ms. Strauss-Gabel's books are strikingly diverse, covering science fiction and dystopian worlds, psychological suspense and works of social realism. She favors realistic, contemporary fiction . . . . Sometimes she'll see potential in a manuscript that no one else will touch. Several years ago, the literary agent Sarah Burnes sent her a chapter of Mr. [Adam] Gidwitz's debut book. It had obvious problems . . . . [as] "an illustrated children's book, in which the children are decapitated by their parents," said Mr. Gidwitz . . . . But Ms. Burnes knew that Ms. Strauss-Gabel was a fan of dark fairy tales, and thought she might appreciate the book’s weirdness. When the three of them met, Ms. Strauss-Gabel said there was no market for the book but suggested that Mr. Gidwitz rewrite the story as a novel for older children. She offered to read it and give him notes, with no promise of publishing it. A year and three excruciating drafts later, she bought the book . . . . "A Tale Dark and Grimm," [which] turned into a best-selling trilogy that has more than 500,000 copies in print. It was listed as one of the best children's books of 2010 by Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal.

Mr. Gidwitz still remembers the pep talk Ms. Strauss-Gabel gave him before the book was published. She wasn't just hoping for a best seller; she aimed to make the book a children's classic. "She said, 'Our goal is for this book to never go out of print.'"

This dark, Grimm fairy tale sounds like one for me to read. See how effective Ms. Strauss-Gabel is? Just by reading about her, I've already fallen under her spell! I wonder if I should re-market my novella as children's literature - or more appropriately, as  young adult - and get her attention focused on my novella . . .

David Brooks on Three Kinds of Anti-Semitism

David Brooks
NYT

Since I've been speaking of religious intolerance lately, let's take a glance at an Opinion piece by David Brooks titled "How to Fight Anti-Semitism" (NYT, March 24, 2015), in which makes a threefold distinction among types of Anti-Semitism:

In the Middle East, anti-Semitism has the feel of a deranged theoretical system for making sense of a world gone astray . . . This sort of anti-Semitism thrives where there aren't that many Jews. The Jew is not a person but an idea, a unique carrier of transcendent evil: a pollution, a stain, a dark force responsible for the failures of others, the unconscious shame and primeval urges they feel in themselves, and everything that needs explaining. This is a form of derangement, a flight from reality even in otherwise sophisticated people . . .

In Europe, anti-Semitism looks like a response to alienation. It's particularly high where unemployment is rampant. Roughly half of all Spaniards and Greeks express unfavorable opinions about Jews. The plague of violence is fueled by young Islamic men with no respect and no place to go . . .

The United States is also seeing a rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents. But this country remains an astonishingly non-anti-Semitic place. America's problem is the number of people who can't fathom what anti-Semitism is or who think Jews are being paranoid or excessively playing the victim . . .

I would alter what Brooks says about Anti-Semitism in Europe. It's not primarily a response to alienation, not among Muslims, anyway. The "young Islamic men" who turn to violence are absorbing much of the Middle East's "deranged theoretical system." This system, as described by Brooks, sounds like a religious one, given the talk of Jews as "evil," as a kind of "pollution," as a "dark force," even as the reason for this "world gone astray."

An article by Bernard Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," is good for understanding why much of the Muslim world has grown delusional about its failures. You can read this article in The Atlantic (but after clicking on the link, you have to wait for about 15 seconds for some sort of ad to disappear).

Neil Gaiman on Kazuo Ishiguro's Buried Giant

Illustration by Peter Sis
NYT

To my surprise - because I think of him as writer, not as literary critic - Neil Gaiman has reviewed Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel, The Buried Giant, and he did so in the New York Times (February 25, 2015). For now, I'm more interested in what Gaiman says about writing than about Ishiguro's story, so I'll focus on Gaiman's thoughts on writing:

Fantasy is a tool of the storyteller. It is a way of talking about things that are not, and cannot be, literally true. It is a way of making our metaphors concrete, and it shades into myth in one direction, allegory in another. Once, many years ago, a French translator decided that my novel "Stardust" was an allegory, based on and around John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim’s Progress" (it wasn't), and somewhat loosely translated the book with footnotes to that effect. This has left me a little shy of talking about allegory, and very shy of ever mentioning "The Pilgrim's Progress."

Perhaps I can use some of Gaiman's insights on fantasy's relation to myth and allegory the next time I'm invited to an international conference on storytelling. I also like his remark about fantasy being "a way of making our metaphors concrete," a point particularly worth some exploration and explication. As an aside concerning Bunyan's famous allegory, Pilgrim's Progress, allow me to note that I recently helped my wife translate a Korean fantasy story by the nationalist Korean writer Sin Chae-ho (1880-1936), titled Dream Sky (1916), and I described Sin's story - set in 1907 (three years before Japan colonized Korea) - as follows:

Sin Chae-ho's nationalist novella Dream Sky, written in 1916, reads like a cross between The Apocalypse of St. John and Pilgrim's Progress. The first several lines depict the protagonist Hannom seeing a divine figure revealed in the heavens who announces the necessity of struggling for national survival. Battles in the sky follow and reflect battles on earth. Hannom, however, is called on not merely to observe and record, but also to join in a celestial battle against Japanese invaders. Yet, he encounters various tests and temptations along the way that distract him from his goal of reaching the battle, and that teach him of his own weaknesses and shortcomings. (Sin Chae-ho, Dream Sky, 1916, pages 3-4)

I think I had more cause to connect Sin's story to Bunyan's (also to St. John's), though perhaps I was making an error of judgement similar to that of the French translator. But back to Gaiman on writing:

Kazuo Ishiguro is a remarkable novelist, both for the quality of his work - because his novels share a careful, precise approach to language and to character - and because he does not ever write the same novel, or even the same type of novel, twice. In "The Buried Giant," his seventh and latest, he begins with clear, unhurried, unfussy language to describe the England of some 1,500 years ago, in a novel as well crafted as it is odd.

The words "careful, precise approach to language" and "clear, unhurried, unfussy language" sound like praise to my ears. Gaiman goes on to talk about the book itself, but in a way that reveals still more about his own views on writing:

"The Buried Giant" is a melancholy book, and the mist that breathes through it is a melancholic mist. The narrative tone is dreamlike and measured. There are adventures, sword fights, betrayals, armies, cunning stratagems and monsters killed, but these things are told distantly, without the book's pulse ever beating faster. They are described unflinchingly, precisely, sometimes poetically. Enemies are slain, but the deaths are never triumphant. A culmination of a planned trap for a troop of soldiers, worthy of a whodunit, is described in retrospect, once we already know what must have happened. Stories drift toward us in the narrative like figures in the mist, and then are gone. The excitements that the book would deliver were this a more formulaic or crowd-pleasing novel are, here, when they appear, not exciting, perhaps because they would be young people's adventures, and this is, at its heart, a book about two [old] people who are now past all adventure . . . . Fantasy and historical fiction and myth here run together with the Matter of Britain, in a novel that's easy to admire, to respect and to enjoy, but difficult to love. Still, "The Buried Giant" does what important books do: It remains in the mind long after it has been read, refusing to leave, forcing one to turn it over and over. On a second reading, and on a third, its characters and events and motives are easier to understand, but even so, it guards its secrets and its world close.

Ishiguro is not afraid to tackle huge, personal themes, nor to use myths, history and the fantastic as the tools to do it. "The Buried Giant" is an exceptional novel, and I suspect my inability to fall in love with it, much as I wanted to, came from my conviction that there was an allegory waiting like an ogre in the mist, telling us that no matter how well we love, no matter how deeply, we will always be fallible and human . . .

That expression "Matter of Britain" reveals that Gaiman is familiar with scholarly discourse on medieval Arthurian romance writing, which further tells me that I ought not be surprised that he would be chosen to review this book by Ishiguro. Gaiman admires Ishiguro's story, but worries that this fantasy novel might hide an allegory, which makes the story unlovable, at least for Gaiman. I seem to recall that Gaiman loved the Narnia stories as a child, but realized - as he grew older - that the stories were Christian allegory, which bothered him for the pretense at being one thing but actually being another, a kind of deception, to his mind. Or am I thinking of a character in a Gaiman story? Speaking of Gaiman's writing, he has a new book out, the story collection Trigger Warning.

I should note that my own story, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, borrows a Shoggath's Old Peculiar from Gaiman - and is not an allegory!

Irvin D. Yalom: On a 'Curious' Writer's Writing Block

The Writer's Block
Illustrated by Bill Bragg

My old Ozark friend Pete Hale, who's now a physicist - but whose son Ben is a up-and-coming novelist - sent me a somewhat breathless email yesterday:

I just read this at the New York Times: "A Curious Case of Writer's Block." Oh man! It had me at "Irvin Yalom," as I've read a couple or three of his books and he is really great. Kind of an Oliver Sachs who's more than ready to go fully-on literary. Anyhow, this little essay is a total blast, and seemed like something you'd really like. See what you think.

I read the column with interest, for it concerned a most peculiar man - call him "Paul" - a man with a fifty-odd-year writer's block who sought out the psychiatrist Dr. Yalom for an single, baffling session, namely, to read some of the long-term correspondence he'd had with a scholarly Nietzsche expert, from which I excerpt a short passage near the end, wherein Yalom gets a surprise:

"Paul," I said, "I'm uncomfortable because we're coming to the end of our session, and I've not really addressed the very reason you contacted me - your major complaint, your writing block."

"I never said that," he replied. "I know my words: 'I wonder if you'd be willing to see a fellow writer with a writing block.'"

I looked up at him expecting a grin, but he was entirely serious. He had said he had a writing block but had not explicitly labeled it as the problem for which he wanted help. It was a word trap, and I fought back irritation at being trifled with.

"Well then," I said, "let's make a fresh start. Tell me, how can I be of help to you?"

"Your reflections on the correspondence?" he asked. "Any and every observation would be most helpful to me."

"All right," I said, opening the notebook and flipping through the pages. "As you know, I had time to read only a small portion, but over all I was captivated by it, and found it brimming with intelligence and erudition at the highest level. There was no doubt he had the greatest respect for your comments and your judgments. He admired your prose, valued your critique of his work, and I can only imagine that the time and energy he gave to you must have far exceeded what he could possibly have provided the typical student. And of course, given that the correspondence continued long after your tenure as a student, there is no doubt that you and he were immensely important to one another."

I looked at Paul. He sat motionless, his eyes filling with tears, eagerly drinking in all that I said, obviously thirsting for yet more.

Finally, finally, we had had an encounter. Finally, I had given him something. I could bear witness to an event of extraordinary importance to Paul. I could testify that a great man deemed Paul to be significant. He needed a witness, . . . and I had been selected to fill that role.

I wrote back to Pete: "Interesting essay . . . or short story . . . or (very short) case study." Why 'interesting? Because it offers what every writer wants: recognition of the significance of one's writing.

I ought to read the New York Times Opinionator columns more often.

Stories are Metafictional . . . or are we less 'meta'?

Mohsin Hamid
Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

The NYT asks Mohsin Hamid, "How Has Parenthood Informed Your Writing Life?" (June 10, 2014), and he recounts a recent real-life interaction with his daughter and the lesson learned:

Dina specifies her nightly bedtime-story-on-demand.

Dina: Tonight I want you to tell me a story about . . . a story.

Mohsin: A story about . . . a story?

Dina: Yes.

Mohsin: There was a story. And it was very lonely. Because there was no one to hear it. So it went for a walk in the forest. . . .

(His daughter has just reminded him that all fiction is metafiction, that humans are born with the instinct to experiment with form.)

Great story beginning! And a good reminder! I recall making up stories for my kids when they were little, and they were always so caught up in the stories that they didn't distinguish between story and reality. Stories about "the bonies"' scared them, and the story about "The Bad Little Boy" had my son insisting, "En-Uk good boy!"

So, yeah, most stories are metafictional - or, rather, we, who tell and listen to stories, are less 'meta' than we think . . .

And now for something completely different: Graphene!

Graphene
Photo by Nicholas Petrone

I sometimes -- well, all right, often -- post on topics I know nothing about. Nick Bilton, for instance, in "Bend It, Charge It, Dunk It: Graphene, the Material of Tomorrow" (New York Times, April 13, 2014), just recently told me about my ignorance of graphene:

Graphene is the strongest, thinnest material known to exist. A form of carbon, it can conduct electricity and heat better than anything else. And get ready for this: It is not only the hardest material in the world, but also one of the most pliable.

I'm just smart enough to understand that this will bring about a radically new form of computing devices that will be thin, light, strong, and flexible. Oddly enough, I dreamt the night before last of an iPad-sized tablet that I could fold into a small rectangle and slip into my pocket, and the day after that dream, I read about graphene and its computing implications:

In 2012, the American Chemical Society said that advancements in graphene were leading to touch-screen electronics that "could make cellphones as thin as a piece of paper and foldable enough to slip into a pocket."

This leads me to suspect that I might have read that statement two years ago without paying attention and that my brain mulled it over for a while and finally decided to bring it to my mind's attention . . . but how did my brain know I'd read a report on stuff like this the next day? There's a bigger mystery here than the mystery of graphene itself. But graphene might also help accomplish this other über-phenomenal thing:

[A]n international team of researchers based at M.I.T. has performed tests [on graphene] that could lead to the creation of quantum computers . . .

Finally, there's a potential use for quantum mechanics! Subatomic physics hasn't been a waste of time after all!

Deconstructing Paul de Man?

Paul de Man

Google Images

I had never heard of Paul de Man until 1987, when a French woman who frequented Stephens Lounge at UC Berkeley -- where I worked part-time as a barista before baristas were even called baristas (but what's in a name?), though the extent of my coffee-brewing was French Roast or more French Roast -- anyway, as I was saying, I only heard of de Man when a French woman introduced me to his deconstructionist teaching and fascist scandal simultaneously.

The thought therefore already had occurred to me that there might be a link between de Man's emphasis on the elusive meaning of words and the need to slip away from the meaning of his youthful fascist-linked writings.

I had, of course, already heard of deconstructionism, along with other literary theories borrowed from watered-down continental philosophy, and I wasn't the only one to wonder about de Man's theory in light of his past:

De Man's photograph appeared in Newsweek, juxtaposed with images of Nazis on the march. And critics of deconstruction, inside and outside the academy, pounced, arguing that a school of thought long dismissed as cultish "critical terrorism" was something even more sinister.

De Man as "critical theorist" does sound like "critical terrorist," doesn't it? Especially with the continental pronunciation of "th"! Anyway, Jennifer Schuessler reminds us:

Those battles may seem like a distant memory. But now, the first full-length biography of de Man threatens to reopen the debate over his legacy, weaving together old and new charges to paint him not just as a collaborator, but also as a swindler, forger, bigamist and deceiver whose philosophical ideas grew out of "lifelong habits of secrecy." (Jennifer Schuessler, "Revisiting a Scholar Unmasked by Scandal," NYT, March 9, 2014)

In The Double Life of Paul de Man, which Schuessler is reviewing, Evelyn Barish makes similar such accusations:

[H]er verdict on his philosophy -- "this idea that meaning cannot be pinned down," and that "clear-cut moral judgments are impossible," as she put it -- is unstinting. "To me," she said, "it's just a waste of time."

Clearly, she thinks that moral judgements can be made, and her book is an indictment of de Man, though the man has his defenders, as Schuessler goes on to show, but you can read the article on that.

Deconstructionism, incidentally, plays a role in my own story . . .

Ginevra Elkann: About Whom I Knew Nothing . . .

Among the Treetops
Villa Borghese
Photo by Simon Watson

Rob Haskell, in his Jamesian-titled "Portrait of a Lady" (New York Times Style Magazine, February 14, 2014), goes even more literarily allusive with his opening lines:

In his novel "The Baron in the Trees," Italo Calvino writes of a young Ligurian aristocrat who, fed up with the world around him, climbs a tree and decides never to come down. It's tempting to imagine that a similar feeling urged Ginevra Elkann, the eldest granddaughter of Gianni and Marella Agnelli, into the fifth floor of a limestone palazzo among the treetops at the edge of the Villa Borghese gardens. This bright aerie affords views of the jewels of Rome: the Villa Borghese, the Villa Medici and the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, but best of all a long and uninterrupted line of the city's famous pini parasole, the umbrella pine trees whose leafy tufts hang over the ruins like a ribbon of low clouds.

But . . . while I appreciate the stacked literary allusions, I find myself asking, "Why?" Meaning why is it "tempting to imagine that a similar feeling urged Ginevra Elkann . . . into the fifth floor of a limestone palazzo among the treetops at the edge of the Villa Borghese gardens"? Okay, I get that the Agnelli family has suffered more than its share of tragedy, but Ms. Elkann has not retreated from the world:

Elkann has been busy indeed, with myriad film projects and as the president of the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, the Renzo Piano-designed museum in Turin built around her grandparents' trove of masterpieces from Canaletto to Matisse.

This is hardly the role of world renunciation! Is Haskell, then, guilty of stretching to reach more than he can grasp? Maybe not entirely. He forced me to grasp at what he meant, that retreat from worldly affairs is always relative to one's responsibility in the world, a point that spurred me to suspend disbelief and identify with the partial withdrawal of a lady from some worldly entanglements, even though this Jewish-Orthodox-Catholic aristocratic woman is more entangled in the world than I am.

A worthwhile exercise of the imagination . . . and I also learned a few things writing this.

Lucifer: Bad Break or Breaking Bad?

Google Images

My old Ozark friend Pete Hale sent me a link to an intriguing, Milton-themed article by Malcolm Harris, "Who Can Resist Satan?" (NYT, September 30), which opens like this:

In his 1998 book "Surprised by Sin," the scholar and critic Stanley Fish suggested a way to resolve the central debate around John Milton's "Paradise Lost": whether the author was on the side of the angels, or, as William Blake put it, "of the Devil's party without knowing it." Fish said that readers were supposed to fall for the charismatic insurgent Lucifer -- as Eve had before them -- so at the end they could recognize their own share of original sin, the reader's own eagerness to turn away from God and goodness.

Harris then adds:

"Breaking Bad" followed a similar path, letting us root for the underdog genius in his tighty whities until we realize we may have developed sympathies for the Devil.

Now, I still haven't seen the Breaking Bad series, so I don't know if Harris is right about the viewer's sympathies (though I have read elsewhere that the series offers a crypto-Calvinist view of human nature as totally 'depravable'), but I do know Milton, and I also know Fish's book -- Surprised by Sin sits on a shelf about twelve inches to my right as I type these words -- and I realized that I could add a small point about the book's publication date to the discussion going on in the comments:

Actually, Stanley Fish's book was first published way back in 1967, but kudos to Mr. Malcom Harris for calling attention to it and its clever interpretation of Milton's Satan.

Fish's reading has been broadly influential, and not just in academic studies of Milton. I've used Fish's ideas not only in journal articles on Milton but even in a story . . .

I've only recently become aware of "Breaking Bad" -- living in Seoul keeps me somewhat isolated from from American dramas -- but Harris's application of Fish to the Walter White character motivates me to try to find time for the series.

But I guess Harris didn't read my comment, for the 1998 date remained unaltered. As with Walter White, my own genius continues to go unremarked . . .

Are We Chimeras?

Chimera of Arezzo

Wikipedia

We may all be chimeras! Not the mythical sort depicted above, but the sort defined by scientists as "a single organism . . . composed of two or more . . . populations of genetically distinct cells" (Wikipedia). But why do I say we may all be chimeras? An article by Carl Zimmer titled "DNA Double Take" (NYT, September 16, 2013) informs us that "scientists are discovering that -- to a surprising degree -- we contain genetic multitudes." Walt Whitman would be proud! But I find this fact a bit scary, especially when I read the following:

One woman discovered she was a chimera as late as age 52. In need of a kidney transplant, she was tested so that she might find a match. The results indicated that she was not the mother of two of her three biological children. It turned out that she had originated from two genomes. One genome gave rise to her blood and some of her eggs; other eggs carried a separate genome.

Apparently, she and her nonidentical twin fetus had combined early in the womb. I wonder how doctors decided which genome the woman really was. The one making up the larger proportion? Suppose one's fat cells were a different genome -- lose weight and become a different person! Chimeras, by the way, don't result solely from two different genomes combining during early fetal development:

Women can also gain genomes from their children. After a baby is born, it may leave some fetal cells behind in its mother's body, where they can travel to different organs and be absorbed into those tissues. "It's pretty likely that any woman who has been pregnant is a chimera," Dr. Randolph said.

Evidence? Consider:

As scientists begin to search for chimeras systematically -- rather than waiting for them to turn up in puzzling medical tests -- they're finding them in a remarkably high fraction of people. In 2012, Canadian scientists performed autopsies on the brains of 59 women. They found neurons with Y chromosomes in 63 percent of them. The neurons likely developed from cells originating in their sons.

Foreign genomes get into our bodies in other ways, too, and can be a factor in various diseases, or even if not malignant -- and most apparently are not -- can distort the results of forensic DNA tests used as courtroom evidence, but some foreign genomes can also even be helpful. The article touches on all of this.

Nonlinearity: E-Books vs. Physical Books?

The Reading Device: A Short History
Illustration by Joon Mo Kang
New York Times

Lev Grossman, writing two years ago in "From Scroll to Screen" (NYT, September 2, 2011), made an incisive point about e-books and physical books:

We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet's underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don't turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It's no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That's the kind of reading you do in an e-book.

The codex is built for nonlinear reading -- not the way a Web surfer does it, aimlessly questing from document to document, but the way a deep reader does it, navigating the network of internal connections that exists within a single rich document like a novel. Indeed, the codex isn't just another format, it's the one for which the novel is optimized. The contemporary novel's dense, layered language took root and grew in the codex, and it demands the kind of navigation that only the codex provides. Imagine trying to negotiate the nested, echoing labyrinth of David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" if it were transcribed onto a scroll. It couldn't be done.

Nonlinear reading is easier in a codex than in an e-book, as I've recently discovered, though I'm happy with my e-books' convenience in other respects even though the e-book poses difficulties for "a single rich document like" my novella, given the "way a deep reader . . . [reads] it, navigating the network of internal connections" that offer the joy of enjoyment in reading.

I think, however, that solutions will be devised to overcome the e-book's limitations and render its reading fully as easy as a physical book.

Leo Strauss and the Art of Writing?

Leo Strauss
From Jenny Strauss Clay
New York Times

In the New York Times Sunday Book Review is an interesting article by Steven B. Smith, "Hidden Truths: Two Books About the Legacy of Leo Strauss" (August 23, 2013), which makes the following point:

Like all serious teachers, Strauss developed followers, and like all disciples these have split over the meaning of their teacher's work. Was Strauss on the side of the ancients or the moderns? Was he a defender of biblical revelation or philosophical rationality? Was he, as he often said, a "friend of liberal democracy" or its most severe critic?

The point about followers commonly disagreeing over a teacher's intellectual legacy is true, though I'd wager that such antithetical disagreement is rather rarer.

Perhaps we should attribute these radically opposed disagreements to Strauss's putting into practice the insights of his most prominent text, Persecution and the Art of Writing, in which he argues that a serious writer writes not openly, but esoterically, layering a work with multiple meanings, hiding them under allusion, irony, contradiction, and paradox.

But would such a reading be a hermeneutic of suspicion . . . or of belief?

Verlyn Klinkenborg on E-Books

To Have But Not Hold?
Amazon Preview

Verlyn Klinkenborg has some bad news for my e-book . . . well, for all e-books:

I finish reading a book on my iPad -- one by Ed McBain, for instance -- and I shelve it in the cloud. It vanishes from my "device" and from my consciousness too. It's very odd.

Um . . . just a brief aside, but does that "It's" misfire? Twice before ("it" and "It"), this pronoun refers back to the term "e-book," but the pronoun here ("It's") would seem more generally meant to refer back to the experience of reading, shelving, and 'banishing' the e-book. Could one better say: "How very odd"? Or does Klinkenborg literally mean that the e-book itself is very odd? It's possible . . . Anyway, back to his observations:

When I read a physical book, I remember the text and the book -- its shape, jacket, heft and typography. When I read an e-book, I remember the text alone. The bookness of the book simply disappears, or rather it never really existed. Amazon reminds me that I've already bought the e-book I'm about to order. In bookstores, I find myself discovering, as if for the first time, books I've already read on my iPad.

Though he says he remembers only the text of an e-book, even that doesn't seem tightly fixed, or he wouldn't need reminding by Amazon not to order an e-book he already has!

Whichever the case -- remember or not -- Klinkenborg, in "Books to Have and to Hold" (New York Times, August 10, 2013), conveys bad news for my own e-book, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer. It is eminently -- and imminently (but not quite immanently) -- forgettable!

Now, what was I talking about? Ah, yes, being wedded to the physical book . . .

Shayman, Lindall, Bulgakov, Griboyedov, and I . . .

The Naif Encounters Koroviev
The Bottomless Bottle of Beer

Illustration by Terrance Lindall

Meanwhile, a serendipitous encounter in the New York Times:

I speak three foreign languages and have friends and acquaintances from close to 100 countries, many of which I have visited. My education is exclusively American. And ethnically I am only half Russian. Why, then, is this sense of identity, engrained in civic nationalism, so deep and defining?

Is it because I can enjoy Bulgakov or Griboyedov at any one of a dozen theaters, each of them globally competitive?

A question that Vladislav Shayman asks himself in "Moscow My Home" (New York Times, July 23, 2013). I cannot ask myself such a question, for my city is not Moscow, but Seoul. Nonetheless, I love Bulgakov, and have encountered Griboyedov, as you can see below in the scene where Fagotto-Koroviev bum-rushes the Naif in my story, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer:

"The name's Fagotto," he suddenly announced, again grasping my hand and pumping it vigorously. "I'm meeting a friend at Café Griboyedov!"

That rattled me. "Griboyedov's?" I stared.

"Of course not!" he exclaimed, as though offended. "I wouldn’t be caught dead at Café Griboyedov's. Not at all. I've an appointment at Café Griboyedov." He gave me a peculiar look. "You're not headed to Café Griboyedov's, are you?"

Flustered, and unsure precisely where I was going, I stammered, "No, yes . . . no . . . I mean yes!"

Koroviev, or Fagotto, looked at me suspiciously, then smiled and broke into unexpected laughter. "I get it!" he exclaimed. "You're playing that childhood game, 'Yes-Means-No, No-Means-Yes.' Very amusing! I take it you're headed for Griboyedov's Café."

I thought for a tentative moment. "Is that where you're going?" I finally asked.

"Approximately!" he cried, still amused.

"I'm going to the same place . . . as you," I said carefully.

"Wonderful!" he exclaimed. "You can join me."

"I don't want to disturb your meeting," I objected.

"Nonsense! Hella will be damned happy to see you!"

"Mr. Fagotto . . ."

"Koroviev," he corrected. "Let's say it's Koroviev."

"Uh, Mr. Koroviev . . ."

"Just 'Koroviev,'" he insisted.

"Okay . . . Koroviev, are you sure this woman 'Hella' will really be glad to see me?"

"Why?" he replied, perplexed. "Have the two of you had an argument?"

"No, of course not!" I exclaimed.

"Why the worry, then?" he asked.

"I've never met Hella," I protested.

"All the better!" he exclaimed. "You've never met a woman like Hella. You'll just love her to death!" He then lapsed into an unexpected, brooding silence, as though reminded of a gloomy thought, and sat hunched over, staring at his feet for ten or fifteen minutes until we had reached some downtown stop or other, whereupon he abruptly unfolded himself, grabbed my arm, and practically dragged me from the bus. "Our stop!" he cried, joyful once more, and dashed up the sidewalk in a devil-may-care manner. I hurried to keep up with my arm, fearing I might otherwise lose it, his grip was so powerful. "Do you often go to Café Griboyedov?" he cried out as we rushed alongside the street, keeping pace with the bus, from which passengers stared out open-mouthed, like fish in an aquarium.

"Never," I confessed.

Koroviev stopped instantly. Every face on the bus twisted its neck to watch as the bus moved on. "You don't like Café Griboyedov?" His expression was of shock, his tone of offense. "But I thought I’d seen you there yesterday! Or was it tomorrow . . ." His voice trailed off as he grew pensive.

Again thoroughly confused by the odd fellow's rapid non-sequiturs, I barely managed to protest, "No! I have nothing against the place. I meant I'd never been there before." Hoping to placate him, I added, "I am going tomorrow."

"Ah, tomorrow," he concluded, as if that clarified everything. "And also today. Two consecutive days! You must really like the place! Let's hurry!" He again started off at a brisk walk on those long legs. We soon overtook the bus, which had paused at a stop. Its passengers now stared at us as if we were madmen. I thought them at least half right.

"Do you go often?" I inquired.

"Go where?"

"To Café Griboyedov," I said, wondering why I had to specify the very place we were currently discussing.

"Of course!" he exclaimed. "Every day!"

"Can you tell me about Griboyedov?" I asked, taking care to drop the "apostrophe s" to forestall misunderstanding.

"Certainly," he agreed, never breaking stride. "Griboyedov was an early nineteenth-century Russian writer and diplomat who wrote one great literary work, Woe from Wit, before his murder at the hands of an angry mob in Tehran during the winter of 1829 shortly after arriving in Persia, and though he suffered the misfortune of being clever, for it is folly to be wise, no record survives of his having made any witticism at the Persians' expense."

Momentarily taken aback, I collected my own wits. "I meant," I explained, "could you tell me about Café Griboyedov?"

"No need!" he cried, pointing with his left hand. "We're here!" I caught a brief glimpse of a large red sign with golden Cyrillic script that must have read "Café Griboyedov," as Koroviev dragged me inside.

To get the context to this passage, you'll need to read the book, available at Amazon, on Kindle. Perhaps I should contact Mr. Shayman and gauge his interest . . .

Nature Denatured . . .

Veryln Klinkenborg

Google Images

One of my favorite NYT writers, Veryln Klinkenborg, is residing in southern California this semester, and he recently wrote an article on industrial farming in the San Joaquin Valley, "Lost in the Geometry of California's Farms" (May 4, 2013), an unsettling literary piece depicting a complex agricultural monstrosity that leaves nature entirely artificial, utterly alien, boundlessly inhumane:

There is something stunning in the way the soil has been engineered into precision. Every human imperfection linked with the word "farming" has been erased. The rows are machined. The earth is molded. The angles are more rigid, and more accurate . . . . This is no longer soil. It is infrastructure . . . . The vast regiments of nut and fruit trees, casting sparse shade on bare earth, seem to defy the word "orchard" . . . . A kind of landscape that once seemed barely imaginable now seems inevitable and necessary: that's the logic and the illusion . . . . I can't help marveling and despairing at the transformation, the way agriculture, here and elsewhere, has created a landscape that is fundamentally inhuman, devoid of people.

How different from Klinkenborg's own farm in upstate New York, a farm with a variety of animals, both domesticated and wild, that change with the changing seasons, undergoing the rhythms of life and death.

What Klinkenborg describes here is neither alive nor dead, but undead, a terrain "[t]ransformed but not entirely unrecognizable," a zombie landscape . . .

Guy Trebay's Quiddities of London

Arab Hall
Leighton House Museum

Andrew Testa

New York Times

Here's a writer for me to remember: Guy Trebay. (Yes, I've read him before.) This past weekend, I happened to read an article of his about the "whatness" of London, "London's Odd and Empty Corners" (New York Times, March 8, 2013), and am so enthralled that I'm compelled to note it here in my blog! Trebay begins in medias res:

"You know, guv, that really gets on my goat," Billy Allardyce said from the front of the taxi, his amplified voice a warble of Abbey Road reverb.

We were barreling toward Portobello Road in a cold winter downpour, headed for an arcade I'd been tipped about by my friend, the antiquarian Alexander di Carcaci. Mr. Allardyce was griping about change. The peculiarities and quirks of his 1960s childhood, he said, had given way to the blight of center city sameness.

"When I was a boy you could still see all them little shops, streets of specialty shops," Mr. Allardyce told me. Back then, Columbia Market -- today a place of open-air flower stalls and hipster brunch spots -- was where East End families shopped for pet guinea pigs.

"Kittens, dogs, snakes, rabbits," Mr. Allardyce said. "They even had goats."

The image delights me -- a goat cropping grass in central London. It summons up both England's agrarian soul and also a capital city in which little-known spaces, odd corners and crooked byways have always had their place. It speaks to me of quiddity, that ineffable quality of what-ness. People have it -- places, too . . . .

[F]orgo the long lines and the touristic must-sees and practice instead some urban idling, the flânerie Balzac termed the "gastronomy of the eye." Walter Benjamin more famously characterized the flâneur as an essential urban figure, an amateur detective and investigator of urbanity. Predicting that rampant consumer capitalism would eventually spell doom for a flâneur's pleasures, Benjamin also neatly anticipated Billy Allardyce's gripe, and my own.

Not many writers could bring the quotidian goats of London's quiddity together with the erudite aesthete's flâneur eye and successfully bundle them all into a taxi for conversation with a driver who likely has all "The Knowledge" required of The City's best cabbies for rapidly getting passengers precisely where they want to be, say, Leighton House:

A visitor coming off the street and through a drab reception area (formerly the breakfast room) into Leighton House is thus plunged into an Orientalist delirium: Satsuma vases, scholar's rocks, a stuffed peacock perched on a railing, and the Arab Hall itself, a chamber whose blue tile panels, Genoa marble columns, gilded friezes and domed skylight were brought together, it would seem, to stun the viewer into aesthetic submission, a Victorian version of shock and awe.

That "aesthetic submission" is a clever play on the literal meaning of the word "Islam" -- less clever the Iraq War allusion, though nicely ironic, at least, since the Arab world is the astonishing, awe-inspiring one this time.

Read the entire article . . .

Whale of a Tale on the Trail . . .

'Mobile Trick'

NYT

The writer, critic, and editor Verlyn Klinkenborg, in "A Back-Seat Narrator by the Name of Ishmael" (New York Times, January 26, 2013), asks a couple of questions after a road trip across the US from New York State to Los Angeles, California with a friend and also 'Ishmael':

Is there a stranger figure in American literature than the narrator of "Moby-Dick"?

Why this question? Because:

He says, "Call me Ishmael" -- the very first words of the book -- but that isn't exactly the same as saying "My name is Ishmael." He could be anyone, of any name, but Ishmael is what the reader must agree to call him before the book can get under way.

Such is the first question and its reason. Perhaps Klinkenborg is right in his implied answer, namely, no stranger name than "Ishmael." And 'Ishmael' remains a stranger no matter how much we discover about him, for he has a very strange story to tell. Moreover, though he begins as Ishmael, one whom the Bible in Genesis 12:16 calls "a wild man," untameable, he appears at the tale's end as a servant, possibly, but we'll see about that in a moment. For now, the second question:

Why does Ishmael survive in italics?

I'd never noticed, but Klinkenborg must be right, so the question is a worthy one, and he notes:

The rest of the book is set in roman type, but the epilogue is not. What manner of being is this italicized survival?

That sounds like a third question, but what does Klinkenborg mean by "being"? Does he mean entity . . . or state? Anyway, I'm interested in the answers to these two -- or three -- questions because I allude to Melville's strange masterpiece in my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, quoting from the ending of Moby Dick:

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

That's also a quote from the King James Version of Job chapter one, a line repeated in verses 15, 16, 17, and 19, and it seems to imply that the one in each verse delivering the message of disaster to Job is one of Job's servants. The citation of this line at the end of Moby Dick perhaps implies that the one who called himself Ishmael -- or, rather, suggested that we call him that -- is no longer the wild man but a mere servant . . . except that in reporting the story of disaster, the first thing he tells us is to call him Ishmael. Moreover, the passage in Job does not explicitly refer to the one delivering the message of disaster as a servant, but as a messenger, literally a "mal'ak," a word that can also mean "angel." Was Melville aware of all this? He does offer the Hebrew word for "whale" in his etymologies, but he gets the Hebrew wrong. We are left with more questions.

Here's yet another: Was I aware of these things when I quoted from Job in part six of my story as a way of referring to both Melville and Job, within the context of a cursed canoe, a legend of old Quebec? Read my story to find out. There's a preview here, and if that interests you, the book can be ordered here.

Anyway, dear readers, any thoughts as to the answers to Klinkenborg's questions?

Mary Ruefle: Poet and Essayist . . .

Mary Ruefle

The Poetry Foundation

David Kirby, poet and professor, has written a New York Times review, "Priests of the Invisible" (January 11, 2013) of the poet Mary Ruefle's recent book of essays, Madness, Rack, and Honey, praising it as "one of the wisest books" that he's read in years, noting:

Typically, she begins a thought with a quotation from a sage ("Gaston Bachelard says the single most succinct and astonishing thing: We begin in admiration and we end by organizing our disappointment"), then develops the thought to give it her own spin (concluding, in the case of Bachelard, that we can at least dignify our dashed hopes "by admiring not the thing itself but how we can organize it, think about it"). Now this sounds like poetry to me . . .

But he also notes, if only implicitly here, that she does not take herself too seriously:

Her title essay begins, "I don't know where to begin because I have nothing to say, yet I know that before long I will sound as if I'm on a crusade."

Nicely ironic! And so is this:

Alternately smart and silly, Ruefle is best when combining those two properties -- dismissing the idea of theme in literature, for instance, by asking what it would be like to organize her books in terms of their themes. (She'd have to buy three copies of some so they'd fit into the different sections of her library, and saw others in half.) Yet at times she lays out ideas with a Zen minimalism, as when she notes the most important fact about our greatest playwright: "In the beginning William Shakespeare was a baby, and knew absolutely nothing. He couldn't even speak."

That Shakespearean fact gives hope to the writer in me. But what was the occasion for these essays? Kirby tells us:

For 15 years Ruefle, a much published poet, gave a lecture every six months to a group of graduate students, and those lectures are collected here.

They sound interesting. I believe I'll need to buy a copy.