Guest posts

This used to be a quiet little blog, not too crowded and with only the broadest agenda: anything conceivably related to literature or society and their interaction. And up to now, almost always written by me. I was glad for Douglas C. Smyth's contribution on Venezuela, Will Chávez become a dictator?, posted in January 2007, but otherwise the only contributions by readers have been in the comments.

Now I want to invite more guest posts. A variety of voices on this blog should make it more interesting, and should make for more frequent postings.

If you would like to see some work of yours (text or image or both) published here on Literature & Society, just send me an email query (email address on profile page) with the subject "guest post" and your idea. I'll be most interested in literary reviews or a reasoned essay on any of the issues discussed here, especially the topics I've labeled as "consciousness". I'm no longer looking especially for Latin American or Spanish topics as I was in 2007, though I'm certainly not excluding them. I'll try to respond quickly.

Thanks to Kelly Diels and Dave Doolin for their Pro Blogger blog on guest posts.

Defining this blog

You've probably noted changes in the "About me" box to the right. My aim is to make my intentions clear to you and also to me; it's so easy to get distracted these days by whatever fascinating new thing comes up on the 'net that it takes effort to maintain focus.

One major editorial shift is that I'm no longer committing myself to that weekly essay on Spain. I didn't sense any great demand for it from my readers (though Dirk, as usual, made intelligent comments), so I'll shift my reflections on Spain to the other, Spanish-language blog, Lecturas y lectores. It was mainly for myself, as a way to try to understand some of the puzzling phenomena in the country where I now live. I'll leave a note here whenever something on the Spanish blog may be of interest to readers here, such as reviews of fiction.

Another thing. Somehow I've got onto a list of potential reviewers of new books, and publicists keep sending me proposals to interview authors on all kinds of things. Naturally the publicists have never actually looked at this blog to see what I do cover, so I get everything from astrology to diet to reconciliations of science with God to searches for undersea treasure. Not what I do. If you want me to critique serious fiction or something related to the topics I've listed in "About me," please do write. Otherwise don't be surprised to receive no answer. I've got other things to do.

Words that Change the World

Thanks to my son Joaquín for sending this marvelous "Radio Lab" audiofile (WNYC and NPR production) on language and how it works.

Words that Change the World

From the story of a deaf Mayan who only as an adult learned that there were words, through experiments showing how language allows us to connect discrete concepts of space, to Shakespeare's inventions from the throngs of words that clamored for entry into his brain. Listen, if you love and are perplexed by language. Columbia U.'s James Shapiro now has me reading "The Rape of Lucrece" — as a lesson in language and writing, besides all the emotions it directly talks about. He also has made me want to read his next-to-latest book, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.

For more stuff on language, click on — what else? — "language" in the labels beneath this post.

A Gift for the Sultan

Finally, after years of reflection, investigation, writing, rewriting, and mind-wandering, my most ambitious work of fiction to date is about to appear! Launch early next month (October 2010).

A GIFT FOR THE SULTAN is a historical novel about the great conflict between Orthodox Christian Constantinople and the mostly Muslim Ottoman horde in 1402, a siege that the city narrowly survived (51 years before the Ottoman conquest).

It is also a sociological novel, where I try to take the reader into the minds of a whole range of actors, including the emperor and the sultan but also Turkish warriors, Frankish and English mercenaries, slave women, and a young Christian princess being sent to the sultan as part of the "gift" of surrender.

I first got the idea on a visit to Istanbul in 1997. What took me so long was, first, learning everything I could about Byzantium in this period and about the Turks, Serbs, Armenians and others who were involved, and secondly, getting the words right and constructing a complex narrative that made sense.

It will be available from Amazon and other sellers, very soon. If you would like an advance copy for review, I can send you the pdf.

(Now available)

Interesting times

It was supposedly a Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." We do.

Curse? Yes, if what you, like most people everywhere, most want is predictability, to have some idea of what's going to happen and what will be the consequences of whatever action you take, "interesting times" are a curse.

Unsettled times are unsettling. And times that are as unsettled as ours, with the globe warming and the sea rising over isles and the rims of continents,  the climate producing heat waves in Moscow and hurricanes of unprecedented intensity, fish disappearing from the oceans, farmlands turning to desert, gigantic engineering projects turning valleys into seas, whole industries collapsing and economies crashing, while communications technology changes so fast that we can only wonder as it whizzes by, are enough to induce panic. Especially in those people most affected by one or several of these unsettlements.

So of course people are killing each other in the Sudan (and many other places), pirating ships in the Gulf of Aden, fleeing starvation or confusion or violence or ethnic or religious persecution or all those together, in short, resorting to any available method, including violence, to acquire or recover resources. It makes things interesting, all right.

And that, I think, is what drives so many people, in so many different societies and social conditions, to the extreme right. When everything else is falling apart or moving so rapidly it throws us off balance, we have to have some psychological stability. Something unchanging. God, for instance. Or the eternal superiority of our race. Some absolute truth to cling to. Sarkozy is re-inventing some absolutist idea of France (without Gypsies), religious nuts are burning one another's holy books or symbols and blowing up institutions, governments are punishing anyone who questions the government's truth, and so on.  We've seen this before, when the huge changes in chemistry, communications, manufacturing and everything else, upsetting class relations and population patterns coming ever faster toward the end of the 19th century made many people see the desirable solution in fascism and its kindred. After two world wars and and two atom bombs, daily life in some parts of the world became at least more predictable. The Cold War, awful as it was, was at least an understandable system. But then everything got moving again, ever faster, and here we are. The Soviet Union disappeared, the Internet appeared, and so on.

Of course a minority of us go in the other direction, to the left, recognizing that everything is changing and trying to prepare not only ourselves but all humanity to take advantage of the good things and avoid the worst of all the possible outcomes. This means the opposite of clinging to any absolute truth, denying that such a thing even exists or is knowable to us, the only absolute being a value, the value of our lives—all our lives, all of humanity.  And it requires us to be probing and watching to anticipate, if only by a microsecond, the next big change and position ourselves to duck or use it. And hoping to stay agile enough to recover if we misjudge and get slammed by something.

The rapid shifts in publishing are just one mix of currents in the maelstrom. None of us can say how things will turn out in, say, 50 years. What people will be reading, or how, or even if. But right now, trying to stay agile and to ride what seem the strongest currents, I'm hitching my novel to p.o.d. (print on demand) and plan also to take it to e-publishing on several platforms. Launch in mid October.

Side-trip to mysterious Nicaragua

This won't take you long, and you'll be glad you visited the Laguna del Vuelo in the Bluefields region of Nicaragua. Which may or may not exist, you decide.
f a i l b e t t e r . c o m

Spain's disloyal opposition

Please accept my excuses, lame though they be, for not writing anything of consequence about contemporary Spain since mid-July. First, nobody does any unavoidable work in Spain in August (that's really lame, I know, but it was hot—up to 38º [100.4º F] locally, though much worse in other parts of the country). Second, the current political scene here has been so depressing that I preferred to think of something else, anything else. Except of course the rise of the Know-Nothings of the Tea Party back in the US, which is even more depressing. Finally and most importantly, I was focused on the final corrections to my novel, now done. The printers just today wrote to say they have shipped me the author's proof, and if (as I expect) all is well, we plan to launch it early next month (October).

(A Gift for the Sultan—my 388-page novel—is totally unrelated to contemporary Spanish politics or to anything else I've written in the past; it takes place in and around Constantinople in 1402, and features Byzantine nobles and rabble, a princess, a Russian slave, English mercenaries and a Frankish knight, Ottoman Turkish warriors, soothsayers and connivers, a couple of Armenians and a young Serb woman. What fascinated me was the interaction—much conflict, but also collaboration and affection and mutual imitation—among all these very different people in the midst of open Muslim vs. Christian hostilities. Sort of like what's going on in our world today. The only Spanish connection is the fleeting reference to the 1403 visit by the Castilian knight Ruy González de Clavijo, who stopped in Constantinople while on a diplomatic mission to the terrible Tamerlane; his report to his king was a major source on the condition of Constantinople in this period. You'll be hearing more about A Gift for the Sultan soon.)

What is most depressing about Spanish politics is that the most unscrupulous, uncivic-minded band of thieves is very likely to return to power here, because the good (or at least somewhat better) guys are pusillanimous, confused about what to do and quarreling with one another. I am talking about the Partido Popular (PP) and the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, pronounced here as "soy").

That the PP is a den of thieves is amply demonstrated in the corruption investigations almost everywhere they govern, most notoriously in Valencia and Madrid. (See the many trials and revelations regarding Fabra and Francisco Camps & co. in Valencia.) They're not the only ones—the fragmentation of supervisory and judicial authority and the wide hiring and contracting powers of local executives in Spain practically invite corruption, and too many mayors and others have accepted the invitation. The PSOE has also had some notorious corruption cases, but far fewer and on more local levels.

That the PP is uncivic-minded, unpatriotic in the sense of desiring the best for the collective interest in Spain, has been evident in their campaign to discredit the PSOE government by undermining confidence in Spain's economy and by trying to sabotage the government's negotiations abroad, most notable with Morocco and Cuba. 

There's an ominous spat about nothing between Spain and some Moroccans right now at the border of Melilla, one of Spain's two remaining beachheads on Morocco's Mediterranean coast (the other one is Ceuta; both are tiny urban enclaves left over from colonial days). Relations between the two kingdoms (unlike Spain, Morocco is a real kingdom, that is, Muhammad VI actually rules) have been generally good, but lately two radical Moroccan organizations have been demanding that Spain "return" the territory to the Kingdom of Morocco (which actually never possessed it; Ceuta and Melilla have been Spanish since before the current Kingdom of Morocco existed), and staged a blockade preventing Moroccan produce from entering the enclaves. Whatever the merits of this campaign (given the disparities in wealth and civil rights between the two countries, it's unlikely that most Ceutis or Melillenses would opt for Moroccan rather than Spanish citizenship), what Spain needed to do was to calm things down by patient negotiations with the Moroccan government. The PP's José María Aznar seized the opportunity in a lightning visit to Melilla to denounce the passivity of the Spanish government in protecting its citizens against Moroccan insults, the only possible consequence of his intervention being to further anger the agitators. (See Aznar: "Melilla vive entre el acoso y la dejadez del Gobierno" — ELPAÍS.com)

And as for Spain's Cuba policy, it may not be brilliant but it has managed to get a lot of people out of prison, and for that the PP also denounces the government: the PSOE should not have deigned to deal with Raúl Castro, they say.

All of this is sad. But sadder yet is the inadequate response of the PSOE, fighting with the trade unions that have always been its major supporters and now riven by a primary battle for the autonomous region of Madrid. Primaries shouldn't weaken a democratic party, but Spanish politicians are not accustomed to them and the whole party structure is set up with top-down command, allowing very little discretionary maneuver by party members. The party chief, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who is also the president of the government, is pushing for one candidate, Trinidad Jiménez, for president of the region, and whatever he says should by law. Thus the candidacy by the current president of the PSOE organization in Madrid, Tomás Gómez, is seen as defiance of the president of the party and the government. If he wins, or even if he loses by a small margin, the opposition PP will ballyhoo the vote as further demonstration of the weakness of Zapatero.

eso es lo que hay —that's what we have and what we have to work with. The PP does not inspire much confidence among voters, but if the PSOE doesn't look to be better, it's potential supporters are likely to abstain from the next election or vote for any of the many minority parties, and let the crooks and opportunists triumph.

Updating Whorf

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com: "Did the opposite genders of “bridge” in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany?"

I remember being tremendously impressed by Benjamin Whorf's arguments back when I was in graduate school: the language you speak shapes the way you think. This was obvious to me as somebody who was learning other languages, even languages as closely related to my native English as French or Spanish. Then when I poked into Russian, Hebrew and Arabic, the effects of language on thought seemed even more obvious: for example, in Russian you have to have to be conscious of a verb's "mood" (subjunctive or imperative), and you lose the distinction that other European languages provide by the definite versus indefinite article ("a" vs. "the", "ein/eine" vs. "die/das/der", etc.).

But as Guy Deutscher points out in this article, there were some things in Whorf that just didn't make sense — like, that certain peoples can have no sense of time if they had no way to express past tense. In short, it now appears that Whorf, "a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University," was on to something important even if he misinterpreted his data. His hunch was right even though his facts were wrong. And that's something; the hunch has inspired some important further research.

Much to think about.  Deutscher has already done much of the updating of Whorf, though there's still a lot more to learn about language and thought. This line of inquiry should help us in our tense international relations. The sequence of ideas and the relative importance of aspects of reality must be very different if one is speaking English, or Farsi, or Korean, or Pashto or Dari.

Also, check out my earlier blog note on Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain.

Dreamers & doers at Black Bear commune

Here's a good, short video (7 minutes) to remind us (those who are old enough to remember) or to instruct us (if we've never known anything like it) about a long-lasting effort to live a communal ideal, where women didn't accept any subordinate role.

YouTube - Canal de fmindlin

The video is a good companion piece to this book about the Black Bear commune that I mentioned earlier. Great to have the pictures of the people, the mountain wilderness, and the ramschackle buildings and vehicles.

Literature, society, and me

As you know, I devote this blog to two themes with radically different discourses, literary arts and social analysis. The former is a discourse meant to appeal to all people who use and love language. However the vocabulary and tropes of the latter, including graphs and highly technical language, are too often accessible only to the specialist, and that's a pity. We need both: works of the imagination that explore the possibilities of language to suggest new possibilities of existence, and observation and measurement to understand the real limits of our present existence.

This is why my works of imagination — novels, short stories — are usually also explorations of real present or past situations. And my works of social analysis seek to tell their stories with the fluidity of a novel or epic poem, that is, social analysis as literature.

And now, in just a few weeks, you will be able to read my new novel, A Gift for the Sultan. It's written, edited, and with cover design approved, so all that remains before printing and posting as an e-book (cheap) are two dozen minor corrections to the interior design. (If you'd like a review copy and seriously intend to write a review, just let me know.)

This is my most ambitious effort to date combining literary play and social research, so you will be able to judge how well I've been able to pull it off. The setting is Constantinople and its environs in 1402, when that celebrated capital of Eastern Christianity was on the verge of collapse before an Ottoman and mostly Muslim siege. Getting the place and time right required a lot of research in all my languages (which regrettably include neither medieval Greek nor Turkish — I had to make do with French, Spanish and English). What fascinated me and kept me going was the multi phased conflict of that time, with so many parallels to the attack on New York in 2001 (our "9/11"), the siege and bombardment of Sarajevo in the 1990s, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan today. The chronological  (more than six centuries) and the technological distance (siege machines had to be much closer to the walls than today) helped to imagine objectively, if not dispassionately. I did get emotionally involved in the lives of those historical and fictional characters, and I hope you do, too. The dynamics of power, tribal solidarity, religious passion and cynicism — at least as I've imagined them, I think correctly — are not so different from today's. But soon, very soon, you will be able to read the novel (386 pages) and judge for yourself.

And this brings me (by the roundabout circuitry in my brain) to Amartya Sen's concept of "human development" as a measure of a social system's success: judging a system by the physical well-being, cultural development (literacy, etc.) and social opportunities of its citizenry in general, rather than by its GDP (which may be very unevenly distributed) or military triumphs or the size and splendor of the monuments glorifying its leader.

In the period of my novel, Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos of the Byzantine Empire (he called it "Romania") seems to have aspired to such a measure (you can read his letters to his son, advising on good government), but there was little he could do for the "human development" of his subjects in the precarious defense situation of his diminishing empire. Sultan "Yildirim" ("Thunderbolt") Bayezid of the Ottomans, however, held exactly the opposite notion, that his subjects existed only to enhance his power and glory.

But, as Amartya Sen might have predicted, it was Manuel and not the aggressive Bayezid who survived this episode. To read more about cross-country comparisons developed from Sen's approach, check out the essay (in English or Spanish, as you choose) by Gustav Ranis in the Revista Latinoamericana de Desarrollo Humano. To read more about the conflict between Sultan Bayezid and Manuel II's Constantinople, read A Gift for the Sultan (soon).