He lived at the highest energy level every day, and despite his dread of being the subject of a biography (a life written down could only be a life approaching its end) left such abundant traces of himself that Cohen’s six hundred pages can be little more than an abbreviated résumé. Consider his activities in a single unremarkable week in May 1966, when he was sixty-seven: sleeping three hours a night, he scored the Frank Sinatra film Assault on a Queen, performed concerts in Wichita, Little Rock, and San Francisco, recorded the Sinatra score in Los Angeles while playing a three-night gig at Disneyland, then left the morning after the last show for a two-week tour of Japan, all the while carrying on an incandescent social life.

via The New York Review of Books.

Some headlines are hailing her as the bravest woman in Mexico. Marisol Valles Garcia, all of 20 years old, says she's just tired of everyone being afraid. Valles Garcia, a criminology student, became the police chief this week of Praxedis G. Guerrero, one of the most violent municipalities in the border state of Chihuahua. She was the only person who accepted the top job in a police force whose officers have been abducted and even killed.

"Yes, there is fear," Valles Garcia said Wednesday in an interview with CNN en Español. "It's like all human beings. There will always be fear, but what we want to achieve in our municipality is tranquility and security."

There's good reason for the fear. Just this past weekend, a 59-year-old local mayor, Rito Grado Serrano, and his 37-year-old son, Rogoberto Grado Villa, were killed in a house in which they they were hiding in nearby Ciudad Juarez. Another area mayor was killed in June.

Juarez is the bloodiest city in Mexico, with a reported 2,500 people killed in drug violence this year.

via CNN.com.

Two years ago in Rangoon, I met a toothpick-thin, boisterous young Burmese man called Somerset. He had conferred this nickname on himself at age sixteen, after renting a collection of stories by W. Somerset Maugham from one of the bookstalls on Pansodan Road. By memorizing sentences from the collection, Somerset taught himself a somewhat formal and archaic English. Then he moved on to Charles Dickens. His identification with the works of these long-dead British writers was total. “All of those characters are me,” Somerset explained. “Neither a British nor American young man living in the twenty-first century can understand a Dickens as well as I can. I am living in a Dickens atmosphere. Our country is at least one or two centuries behind the Western world. My neighborhood—bleak, poor, with small domestic industries, children playing on the street, the parents are fighting with each other, some are with great debt, everyone is dirty. That is Dickens. In that Dickens atmosphere I grew up...

via Lapham’s Quarterly.

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Somerset helped make sense of an impression that had been hovering in my mind, just beyond articulation, for many years during travels through countries in Africa and Asia that are a century or two behind the Western world. Talking with an itinerant used-clothing peddler in eastern Uganda, or a Nigerian girl newly arrived in Lagos who had to prostitute herself to work off a debt, or an educated Iraqi who made his living selling cigarettes and secondhand books, I would experience a sense of déjà vu that took me entirely out of my own life and time. It felt as if I were meeting a character from one of the great novels of the late-nineteenth century.

From AC Grayling's review of "The Berlin-Baghdad Express" by Sean McMeekin:

Under the influence of the irrepressible Middle Eastern scholar and enthusiast Baron Max von Oppenheim, the Germans devised the stratagem of having Jihad, Holy War, pronounced in fatwas (in Turkish, fatvehs) against all infidels except Germans, Austrians, Americans, and any other ally of the Porte or any significant neutral. Some thought this message was likely to prove confusing to fanatics bent on murdering anyone who did not look Turkish or Arab, and the thought proved prescient. Its main aim was to get the huge number of Muslim subjects of the British Empire to rise against their masters, thus saving Germany and its allies the trouble of defeating Britain themselves.

In the words of the American ambassador to the Porte, Henry Morgenthau, “the Kaiser’s desire” was “to let loose 300,000,000 Mohammedans in a gigantic St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Christians.” One of the pamphlets distributed by the Germans blamed what it called “the state of degradation to which the World of Islam as arrived” on the European Christians who in India, Egypt and the Sudan had subjugated hundreds of millions of Muslims. And the worst of these “enemies of God,” said the pamphlet, were “the infidel English”. The pamphlet told Muslims everywhere “that from today Holy War has become a sacred duty and that the blood of the infidels in the Islamic lands may be shed with impunity (except those who enjoy the protection of the Muslim power and those to whom it has given security and those who confederate with it).” And in a phrase that remains chillingly resonant today, the pamphlet concluded, “The killing of the infidels who rule over the Islamic lands has become a sacred duty, whether it be secretly or openly; as the great Koran declares in its word: ‘Take them and kill them wherever you come across them’.”

via The Barnes & Noble Review.

I've got to read this book.

If accurately framed, this is horrible:

As soon as he could, Churchill charged off to take his part in “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples.” In the Swat valley, now part of Pakistan, he experienced, fleetingly, an instant of doubt. He realized that the local population was fighting back because of “the presence of British troops in lands the local people considered their own,” just as Britain would if she were invaded. But Churchill soon suppressed this thought, deciding instead that they were merely deranged jihadists whose violence was explained by a “strong aboriginal propensity to kill.”

He gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, writing: “We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.” He then sped off to help reconquer the Sudan, where he bragged that he personally shot at least three “savages.”

The young Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn. When the first concentration camps were built in South Africa, he said they produced “the minimum of suffering” possible. At least 115,000 people were swept into them and 14,000 died, but he wrote only of his “irritation that kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men.” Later, he boasted of his experiences. “That was before war degenerated,” he said. “It was great fun galloping about.”

via Book Review - Churchill’s Empire - Richard Toye - NYTimes.com.

Frank Kermode provoked me to think in fresh ways about the Bible.

Frank Kermode, who rose from humble origins to become one of England’s most respected and influential critics, died Tuesday [August 17, 2010] at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 90.

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...in his best-known book, “The Sense of an Ending,” Mr. Kermode analyzed the fictions we invent to bring meaning and order to a world that often seems chaotic and hurtling toward catastrophe. Between the tick and the tock of the clock, as he put it, we want a connection as well as the suggestion of an arrow shooting eschatologically toward some final judgment.

via NYTimes.com.