Month: August 2014

E.M. Forster’s Letters Of Rejection

by Dish Staff

The great gay, English novelist first went there to see a young Indian man, Syed Ross Masood, with whom he had fallen in love, prompting him to start writing A Passage to India – a novel it would take him nearly 11 years to complete. Why the delay? Damon Galgut speculates that he was hung up on the famous scene involving Adela Quested and Dr. Aziz in the Marabar caves, and that a second trip to India to see Masood, one in which Forster’s hopes for love were dashed and they abruptly parted way, gave him the material he needed to move beyond the writer’s block:

The impact of this parting goes almost entirely unremarked in his diaries and letters, and yet itNPG 4698,Edward Morgan Forster,by Dora Carrington must have been of huge importance to him. There are only faint but significant clues as to how he felt. In his diary on 27 January, the night before he leaves, he admits that he has had a “long and sad day”. Then we find this cryptic entry: “Aie-aie-aie – growing after tears. Mosquito net, fizzling lamp, high step between rooms. Then return and comfort a little.”

It seems that something happened between the two men that night. But what? He apparently never spoke about it to anybody else and the diary entry is frustratingly opaque. But it’s almost certain that this incident, whatever it was, involved Masood and some kind of rejection. Whether he tried to touch or kiss his friend, it’s clear that he made some sort of overture and was rebuffed. And the sparse, telegrammatic style of the words indicate – in his case – how deeply felt they were.

It was in this state of mind that he set off to the caves the next morning.

In fact, the visit had been organised by Masood, perhaps as some kind of consolation, though he didn’t get up to see his English friend off. In his journal Forster tersely notes: “Left at 6.30. After one glimpse the raw greyness.” His mood, one senses, was saturated with the feeling of loss – and he carried this feeling with him into the caves a few hours later.

Is it too fanciful to imagine that everything Forster must have been experiencing that day – a confusion of love, sadness, disappointment and possibly anger – was projected on to the caves, and took form in the imagined attack? It’s never explicitly stated in the novel, but it’s obvious that Miss Quested is attracted to Aziz. If the assault is a fantasy, it’s because her desires have no outlet – and the same could be said for Forster.

(A portrait of Forster by Dora Carrington, circa 1924-25, via Wikimedia Commons)

Policing The Police With Cameras, Ctd

A reader writes:

Your recent post about equipping police forces with video cameras struck a chord with me, as I recently sat on a jury where the lack of video played a central role. The case was not particularly exceptional, and the lesson obviously anecdotal, but it was a major eye-opener for me.

A young Hispanic male from a nearby town known for its drug trade was targeted and arrested by a drug task force, although no drug charges were presented. He was charged with two counts of assault with a deadly weapon (ramming the undercover cruiser behind him with his car), operating a motor vehicle to endanger (driving on the sidewalk to evade the ad hoc police blockade), leaving the scene of an accident, negligent operation (running stop signs) and failure to stop for police.

The very first question the defense lawyer asked was, “Where’s the video?” Of course there was none, and in the absence of actual evidence, video or otherwise, the six middle/upper-middle class white people that composed our jury took it on faith that four police officers would casually perjure themselves and voted not guilty on the assault and endangerment charges. At one point, one of the jury members asked “Why are there no witnesses?” I’m no friend of the police, but I felt I had to remind the group that technically the State presented four witnesses – the four police officers.

In the end, we voted to convict on the negligent operation and failure to stop charges, based on the defendant’s own account of the episode during his testimony. I couldn’t help but think that the police have a real, existential problem when the juror I expected to be most sympathetic to the police – the contractor who told the court he knew a few cops from the neighborhood – turned out to be the one most adamant that the officers’ testimony should be completely disregarded.

The day may be fast approaching when any officer who wants to be believed in court will welcome video evidence to back them up, and that will surely be a win for anyone interested in justice.

What Do-It-Yourself Funerals Can’t Offer

by Matthew Sitman

It’s an interesting question, how we’ll handle death and grief as religion’s place in our lives declines. I don’t mean that the old answers about what “happens” when we die will need to be reworked, exactly, because it seems clear that, no longer believing in the afterlife, most will just acknowledge that nothingness awaits us. There only will be the “sure extinction that we travel to,” as Larkin put it. But that still leaves the issue of how to mourn the dead, in the very practical sense of what to do when a loved one dies. Emma Green looks at Candi Cann’s recent book, Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century, on how this post-religious dilemma is being handled:

For most of human history, religious ceremony has helped people deal with death, providing explanations about souls and the afterlife along with rituals to help the living deal with their grief. Not all religions do death the same way. “There are certain denominations within Christianity and certain religions in general that do a better job of remembering the dead,” said Cann. “Like the Catholics: There’s a very set calendar for remembering, and it’s still tied down to the religious calendar.”

Tattooing yourself with a dead person’s remains is one new way of memorializing death in the absence of faith, she said. “As society becomes more secular, and people are more and more turning to that ‘spiritual but not religious category,’ they’re forming their own do-it-yourself ways of remembering the dead.”

Green goes on to describe other trendy options, from personalized caskets to “theme” funerals to arranging the deceased in scenes taken from their actual lives. I find all this fascinating, and, especially if a family isn’t religious, don’t begrudge them personalizing the funeral in whatever way they’d like. I do, however, wonder how this changes the grieving process, and would like to say a good word for the old-fashioned religious rituals.


Perhaps the most attractive feature of the do-it-yourself remembrance of the dead is how it allows for a celebration of the deceased’s life, in all its idiosyncratic particularities. I certainly get that. But I also would argue that depersonalizing the grieving process, if that’s the right phrase for it, offers solace of a different sort. To fall back on the patterns of religious liturgy, to feel that it’s not up to you to conjure the right way to honor the dead, to turn to words and rituals handed down for centuries – all this can be powerfully comforting as well. It allows for a sense of participation in the ongoing human drama of life and death, of not being the first to experience the pain of loss. You aren’t grieving from scratch. There’s a relief to knowing your experience is not unique, a consolation from the solidarity doing what so many others have done before you, and will do after you are dead too. Green cites a funeral director who describes ritual as “mindless,” and not in a pejorative way, which is another way of saying that religious ritual allows you to get out of your own head in a way that can be a relief.

There’s also the beauty of certain religious funeral rites that can’t easily be replaced, beauty which provides its own salve to the grieving. A friend of mine once said that as you’re dying, you want to be Roman Catholic, because the priest can be counted on to come and give you the sacraments, to be predictable and orderly as the end nears. But after you die, then you want to be an Anglican, such is the beauty of the Book of Common Prayer’s Rite I funeral service, with it’s psalms and prayers in the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. I think he’s right about that. It’s how I want my funeral done – you can read it here.

The Hawk Gap

by Dish Staff

Last week, after observing that the prospective 2016 candidates are taking much more hawkish positions on foreign policy issues than public opinion would suggest, Beinart suggested that this might be one more deleterious effect of money on our political system:

For a century, Americans have responded to disillusioning wars by demanding a less interventionist foreign policy. It happened after World War 1, after Korea, after Vietnam, and it’s happening again in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq. The difference between this moment and past ones is the role of money in politics. As on so many issues, politicians’ need to raise vast sums from the super-rich makes them ultra-responsive to one, distinct sliver of the population and less responsive to everyone else. The way campaign finance warps the political debate over financial regulation is well known. What we’re witnessing this year is a case study in the way it warps the foreign-policy debate as well.

Daniel Drezner’s not so sure about that, pointing out that foreign policy talk is about as cheap as it gets:

Beinart’s thesis is that this gap has grown even more in recent years, but I’m not sure that’s what going on. The most important fact about American foreign policy and public opinion is that Americans just don’t care all that much about the rest of the world. Sure, they’ll express less interventionist preferences when asked, but most of the time they don’t think about it. It’s precisely this lack of interest that gives presidents and foreign policymakers such leeway in crafting foreign policy. … Statements about how one would do things better on the foreign policy front are among the best examples of cheap talk you’ll find in Washington. Why? Because the world will look different in January 2017 than it does today. So of course these proto-candidates can say they’d do things differently. No one will hold them to these claims if they’re elected, because the problems will have evolved.

Larison agrees with Drezner. In another post touching on this opinion gap, he takes down the notion of a “paradox” in the public’s attitude toward Obama’s foreign policy:

According to this story, Obama has given Americans the foreign policy they say they want, but they now disapprove of Obama’s foreign policy, so we’re supposed to believe that there is a “strange duality” at work. Instead of coming to the much more straightforward conclusion that Obama is not giving Americans the foreign policy they want (and that his foreign policy is still too activist and meddlesome), elite interventionists of different stripes engage in a lot of groundless speculation that the public actually wants the same things that the interventionists themselves want. It’s not obvious that most Americans “want a president to lead” in this case. The obsession with such “leadership” is primarily one shared by elites, and their idea of “leadership” requires a degree of U.S. activism overseas that the public hasn’t supported for years. The public-elite gap on foreign policy has rarely been wider than it is now because most Americans have no real interest in the “leadership” role for the U.S. or the president that foreign policy elites demand.

The Meaning Of #Ferguson

by Dish Staff

Over the weekend, David Carr marveled at how well Twitter has matured as a tool for journalism:

For people in the news business, Twitter was initially viewed as one more way to promote and distribute content. But as the world has become an ever more complicated place — a collision of Ebola, war in Iraq, crisis in Ukraine and more — Twitter has become an early warning service for news organizations, a way to see into stories even when they don’t have significant reporting assets on the ground. And in a situation hostile to traditional reporting, the crowdsourced, phone-enabled network of information that Twitter provides has proved invaluable. …

In and of itself, Twitter is not sufficient to see clearly into a big story; it’s a series of straws that offer narrow views of a much bigger picture. But as a kind of constantly changing kaleidoscope, it provides enough visibility to show that something significant is underway.

Along those lines, Amma Marfo focuses in on how important Twitter has become to the black community, particularly over the past week:

Twitter’s lack of algorithms to control the display of content means that posts are elevated in popularity only by the people who favorite, Retweet, and share screen captures of impactful or informative messages. Such a structure allows the insight of the observant but relatively unknown amateur, alongside high-profile and highly educated (another population that uses Twitter in high volume), to stand alongside one another. This egalitarian information sharing model is welcome for historically disenfranchised populations. This could be key for its popularity with other minority groups such as Hispanics. Its use among African-Americans continues to rise, as does the increasing use of Twitter as a credible means to gauge public opinion and the newsworthiness of given topics.

But it’s worth noting that the overall social media ecosystem is not always like this. Last week, Zeynep Tufekci pointed out the difference in following the Ferguson protests on Twitter, which shows you all the tweets from whoever you follow in real time, and Facebook, which uses an algorithm to determine both what you see and when you get to see it. To highlight the frenzy of Ferguson tweets last Wednesday night she flagged this graph:

1-Iiwrv_8HH3EkUZqPtwtouw

But when she checked her Facebook feed during that spike, there was nothing at all about the story, not until the next morning:

Overnight, “edgerank” –or whatever Facebook’s filtering algorithm is called now — seems to have bubbled [the Ferguson items] up, probably as people engaged them more. But I wonder: what if Ferguson had started to bubble, but there was no Twitter to catch on nationally? Would it ever make it through the algorithmic filtering on Facebook? Maybe, but with no transparency to the decisions, I cannot be sure.

Would Ferguson be buried in algorithmic censorship?

And as she goes on to note, Twitter already does use an algorithm to determine what topics trend nationally, which may have partially delayed the onset of Ferguson’s social media attention last week. Also, it looks like Twitter is now messing even further with what their users see, as Jay Yarow explains:

Until now, your timeline was filled only with tweets from the people you follow, or retweets from those same people. In other words, you got only the content for which you opted in. [The new policy] opens up the possibility for Twitter to start putting tweets from people you don’t follow in your feed.  … By doing this, Twitter makes its timeline more like Facebook’s News Feed, which populates based on algorithms that measure likes and interests.

“The Politics Of Respectability”

by Dish Staff

Coates is beyond tired of the continual “transmutation of black protest into moral hectoring of black people”:

Don Imus profanely insults a group of black women. But the real problem is gangsta rap. Trayvon Martin is killed. This becomes a conversation about how black men are bad fathers. Jonathan Martin is bullied mercilessly. This proves that black people have an unfortunate sense of irony.

The politics of respectability are, at their root, the politics of changing the subject—the last resort for those who can not bear the agony of looking their country in the eye. The policy of America has been, for most of its history, white supremacy. The high rates of violence in black neighborhoods do not exist outside of these facts—they evidence them.

Ioffe likewise addresses the “troubling self-flagellation in Ferguson’s black community”:

Respectability, in essence, is about policing the behavior in your community to make sure people are behaving “properly,” so as to not attract unwelcome attention from whites—“with ‘properly’ being a normatively white middle class presentation,” says [political scientist Michael] Dawson. In feminist discourse, a similar phenomenon among women is described as internalizing the patriarchal gaze. That is, women see themselves as the men in charge want to see them—feminine, sexy, pliant—and then behave and dress accordingly. Respectability is the same thing, but with blacks internalizing the white gaze. …

In some ways, this is an understandable response: If you are in the minority, and are disadvantaged and exposed to danger because of it, it is natural to try to minimize the downsides by trying to live according to the laws of the ruling majority and not call attention to one’s differences from them. It also provides a modicum of comfort, a sense that one can have control over the amount of discrimination one is exposed to even when in fact it is out of your control. “There’s good empowerment and false empowerment,” says [Jelani ] Cobb. “But if you think that the problem is within us, then at least it gives you the idea that you have the capacity to change it.” It also sidesteps the issue of institutionalized racism, the real reason for the fact that, in Chicago, blacks and Latinos were four times more likely to be stopped by the police than whites. “Really, what we’re dealing with is racism that is entrenched, and that we have limited capacity to determine how much of it we’re exposed to in our lives,” says Cobb.

Reading Your Way Through Life: More Reader Reax

by Matthew Sitman

After asking readers about the novels, poems, and short stories that have meant the most to them, the response has been so affirming – at a time when we all wonder about the future of reading, writing, and publishing, it’s good to be reminded of why those questions matter at all. Many more of you have been in touch with us since Monday, for which I’m grateful. One reader writes:

For me, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities has been that understanding, consoling companion you wrote of. I came across it fresh out of high school, and I remember feeling like these little prose poems were systematically presenting all my own faults and shitty tendencies to me – but so beautifully and carefully articulated that I couldn’t help feeling proud of identifying with them. It followed me through university, across a couple continents, and it’s rare now that I go more than a month without opening the copy beside my bed, seeking comfort in its perfectly precise bittersweetness. The book opens (sort of) by evoking, then puncturing, the same nostalgic feeling I now often try to get out of rereading it:Invisible Cities

The special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.

And it ends with what still probably amounts to the full extent of my theology:

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Thanks for giving the good stuff space!

Another writes:

I love the idea of sharing favorite passages and poems. While I think the notion of consolation, that finding previously unknown common ground in the world with a person you have never met is an element of the encounter with literature, I have long been suspect of the healthiness of such experiences, whether they are “good for a person.” We often hear that reading literature is “good for you,” that it produces all sorts of desirable qualities, but this has never resonated with me. Indeed, I find it specious.

Literature is dangerous. I don’t consider it consolation but rather a deeply destabilizing experience in which my lens through which I interpret the world is disrupted, in which the safe world of understanding that I have constructed is broken into by another soul, intruded upon violently and the protective conceptual and interpretative structures I have fashioned fall away and I am left bare with nothing but the words of another beating throughout my head. I don’t think connecting with Hamlet has been “good for me.” It ripped my life apart and torched my understandings of the world. Far from leading to consolation, it made me distraught and vulnerable. This is what good literature does. This is what the communion you spoke of does.

But anyway, enough of me. On to my passage. This is a passage from Swann’s Way, Vol. 1 of In Search of Lost Time. Very few works help one “see the world with fresh eyes” quite like Proust’s masterpiece. It sets the world aflame. There are countless passages I could choose from this work – the episode of the madeleine and the description of the hawthorns stand out immediately – however, I’m going to go for Swann’s experience of hearing the “little phrase” of the (fictional) composer Vinteuil’s music.

Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed latent in his mind on the same footing as certain other notions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of physical Swanns Waypleasures, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothingness. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lit, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which even the memory of the darkness has vanished. In that way Vinteuil’s phrase, like some theme, say, in Tristan,  which represents to us also a certain emotional accretion, had espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of humanity that was peculiarly affection. Its destiny was linked to the future, to the reality of the human soul, of which it was one of the most special and distinctive ornaments, Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.”

This isn’t some adolescent form of death denial, of trying to make palatable the reality of the tragic circumstances of human life, nor some Malraux-esque artistic existentialism. I find in it one of the most beautiful evocations of the richness of man’s interior life and how it corresponds with the exterior, the dreams and hopes and imaginings of Swann intertwined irrevocably with a flutter of music. This is Proust at his best and what puts him up there with Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare.

 I should add that I wasn’t trying to contribute to the trope that literature is “good for you,” and I’m glad for this pushback about what kind of “communion” a reader can have with an author or text. Another reader:

Thanks for asking about favorite passages. This is from Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory (which is better than most novels):

Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike Speak Memorytheir dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then—not in dreams—but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

This reader revisits a favorite poem:

I too retreat into books when the world is depressing. And the world is depressing quite a bit of the time, so I am reading constantly. Recently, while working through a collection of poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, I discovered this gem:

“Heaven-Haven”
(A nun takes the veil)

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

The peace in this poem is palpable. Yes, I have desired to go there as well.

Another shares this story:

My wife died at the age of 49 three years ago, after a long illness. I chose this poem by Pablo Neruda to be read at her funeral. We loved Neruda, and I had read to her Neruda poems when we first dated in the early 1980s. It seemed fitting to close out our relationship with Neruda. Every few months I find myself rereading it, and it brings back the moment she died with me next to her, as she softly stopped breathing, her pain and suffering finally released.  The poem has no title.

And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels, and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.
No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go, we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me, only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.
Your hands have already opened their delicate fists and let their soft drifting signs drop away; Your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move
After, following the folding water you carry, that carries me away.  The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.

Here’s our first Orwell reference:

The following passage from 1984 has stayed with me, always. A reminder that there is hope in dystopian times:

Years ago – how long was it? Seven years it must be – he had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: ‘We shall meet in the place where1984 there is no darkness.’ It was said very quietly, almost casually – a statement, not a command. He had walked on without pausing. What was curious was that at the time, in the dream, the words had not made much impression on him. It was only later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance. He could not now remember whether it was before or after having the dream that he had seen O’Brien for the first time, nor could he remember when he had first identified the voice as O’Brien’s. But at any rate the identification existed. It was O’Brien who had spoken to him out of the dark.

Winston had never been able to feel sure – even after this morning’s flash of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure whether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy. Nor did it even seem to matter greatly. There was a link of understanding between them, more important than affection or partisanship. ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,’ he had said. Winston did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it would come true.

Another reader writes:

The book I return to again and again is Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. Reasons: Wallace Stegner. The opening sentence. Friendship. Madison. Battell Pond. Sally’s polio. Growing old. When I’m blue, this book just makes me feel better about life.

But there is one passage that is perhaps my most favorite, one that I return to over and over. At the end of chapter 4 in Part II, Larry and Sally are talking at the end of a day spent in the Italian countryside that featured a difficult encounter with an injured laborer.

“When you remember today, what will you remember best, the spring countryside, the company of friends, or Piero’s Christ and that workman with the mangled hand?”

She thought a minute. “All of it,” she said. “It wouldn’t be complete or real if you left out any part of it, would it?”

“Go to the head of the class,” I said.

It reminds me of Buechner’s line about how “in the last analysis, all moments are key moments.”

I was waiting for someone to mention the following story:

Joyce’s “The Dead,” and particularly that sublime final paragraph. Enough has been written about it, and I’ve no desire to earn a Poseur Alert. But I’ve always felt that our existence – its bleakness and its possibility – is perfectly captured in this word-painting’s layers of textured feeling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched the deadsleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

That Joyce paints with adverbs (softly, thickly, slowly, faintly) and adjectives (dark, mutinous, lonely, crooked, little, barren, last), which contemporary writers are instructed to avoid, is all he more remarkable and humbling. The “way it feels to be” that Joyce is evoking is nearly conjured by that list of words alone.

Another poetry selection:

It may be cliche, but the last stanza of “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold always calms me (I know it by heart):

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another!
for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Sometimes cliches exist for a reason – that Arnold poem is oft-quoted for a reason, I think. This reader offers a selection from James Baldwin:

I could have chosen from any number of novels, poems, and short stories, but today I’ll go with James Baldwin’s “Sunny’s Blues.”  Though a short story, its levels and layers of story and meaning are novelistic and stand up to – in fact, demand – multiple readings.  This is one of my favorite passages:

“Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

That passage hits me every time.

Here’s a nod to George Eliot:

This passage at the conclusion of Middlemarch repeatedly pops into my mind and each time it does, I am moved, inspired, comforted, and convicted once again:Middlemarch

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

I was waiting for a Dune reference, too:

I have many favorite passages from many different books, but the following passage from Frank Herbert’s Dune has followed me since I first read the novel as a kid some 40 years ago. It has gotten me through more than one sticky situation:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

This reader is the first to mention a play, and also points to a fitting poem with which to conclude:

These lines at the very end of the play “My Dinner With Andre” have intrigued me for 30-some years now, a reminder of how easy one can miss the person – with all his or her mystery and sacredness – by getting caught up instead with that person’s label:

[P]eople hang on to these images of father, mother, husband, wife … because they seem to provide some firm ground. But there’s no wife there. What does that mean? A wife. A husband. A son. A baby holds your hands, and then suddenly there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?

Also, this poem by Wendell Berry, for its soulful, anarchic in-your-facedness. These days I lean on the line “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts” like a crutch:

“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

More of your selections will be posted in the days ahead. Keep them coming to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Policing The Police With Cameras, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Ferguson is exploring outfitting its officers with dash and body cameras. Sara Libby points out a problem San Diego has had with its body cams:

Here in San Diego, our scandal-plagued police department has begun outfitting some officers with body cameras, and the City Council has approved a plan to roll out hundreds more. Officers wearing the cameras were present during at least two shootings earlier this year. Yet we’re still not any closer to knowing what happened in those chaotic moments—whether the perpetrators can be easily identified, what kind of interactions the officers had with those present, nothing.

That’s because the department claims the footage, which is captured by devices financed by city taxpayers and worn by officers on the public payroll, aren’t public records. Our newsroom’s request for footage from the shootings under the California Public Records Act was denied. Once footage becomes part of an investigation, the department says it doesn’t have to release them. SDPD also said during the pilot phase of the camera program that it doesn’t even have to release footage from the cameras after an investigation wraps.

Kriston Capps sees limits to what police cameras can accomplish in Ferguson:

A survey of the available research conducted by the Office of Justice Programs Diagnostic Center shows that most of the claims about police body cameras have not been fully tested, while many of the consequences for law-enforcement agencies, labor unions, and communities have not even been explored.

But city leaders have other, better, more immediate options if they truly want to “demonstrate the transparency of our city departments.” Namely, leaders in Ferguson should require officers to put their badges back on their vests and ask the Federal Aviation Administration to put the news choppers back in the air.

T.C. Sottek expresses more skepticism:

Body cameras would be a welcome improvement for many in Ferguson, but even dash cameras, used by other police departments across the United States, haven’t been installed there. The city’s police chief revealed last week that the department purchased two dash cameras and body cameras, but never installed them due to cost.

Scott Shackford, for his part, thinks cameras may help. He points out that Rialto, California “has made national news for making officers wear vest cameras, reducing the use of force by police and complaints against the police.” Earlier Dish on the cameras-for-cops debate here.

How Far Will Obama’s Iraq War Expand? Ctd

by Dish Staff

Refugees Fleeing ISIS Offensive Pour Into Kurdistan

Saletan chronicles how the limited intervention in Iraq has already outgrown its original parameters:

In his weekly address on Aug. 9, Obama added a third mission to the military agenda: “We will protect our citizens. We will work with the international community to address this humanitarian crisis. We’ll help prevent these terrorists from having a permanent safe haven from which to attack America.” He repeated that point in a press conference: “We will continue to provide military assistance and advice to the Iraqi government and Kurdish forces as they battle these terrorists, so that the terrorists cannot establish a permanent safe haven.” That’s a huge undertaking. Any land controlled by ISIS can be construed as a safe haven. Does Obama plan to drive ISIS out of places such as Fallujah, which it held for months while the United States looked on? Does he plan to push ISIS all the way back to Syria?

Obama hasn’t forgotten all the principles that limited his commitment. He continues to insist that the solution to Iraq’s crisis is political, that Iraqis must achieve that solution themselves, and that putting U.S. troops on the ground creates a dangerous rationale for additional deployments to protect them. But 12 days into the military campaign, he’s showing signs of slippage. He’d better watch himself.

Larison stresses that mission creep is the rule, not the exception, when it comes to such interventions:

Once a president has committed to using force in a foreign conflict, all of the effective political pressure is on the side of escalation.

Having conceded that the U.S. should be involved militarily in a conflict, the president is bombarded with demands for deeper involvement in order to pursue the illusion of victory. If he doesn’t agree to these demands, he will be steadily pilloried in the media until he does, and any adverse development in the affected country will usually be attributed to insufficient American involvement. Since the initial decision to intervene was driven in part by the same sort of pressure, it is more than likely that the president will keep yielding to calls to “do more.”

Keating wonders what “mission accomplished” will mean in Iraq this time around:

The cynical answer is that the goal seems to be for Iraq to become just stable enough that we can go back to not paying attention to it. And I suspect that in the end, that may have more to do with how long the U.S. media continues to treat Iraq as a major story than with what’s actually happening there.

And Benjamin Friedman argues that “Americans, the president included, need to admit being out of Iraq potentially means letting it burn”:

The collapse of the fiction that U.S. forces stabilized Iraq before exiting forces us to confront the unpleasant contradictions in U.S. goals there. We want to avoid the tragic costs of U.S. forces trying to suppress Iraq’s violence. We want a stable Iraqi federal government and we want Iraqis to live peacefully. Each of those goals conflicts with the others. Even if the new Prime Minister is amenable to Sunni demands, U.S. bombing is unlikely to allow Iraqis to destroy ISIL and its allies. Large-scale violence will likely continue. Suppressing insurgency will likely require resumption of U.S. ground operations. And even that, we know, may not help much.

(Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)