A winkle in time

Winkles may sleep for a period as long as three years. From Proceedings of the Ever So Strange.

Digby spotted a great retroactionary quote from Michael O'Hanlon, in a 2008 discussion of remarks made by Sarah Palin, and in defense of her deep understanding of foreign policy:

Also her speech yesterday about going over to defend us against those who committed the attacks of 9/11, to troops headed for Iraq, is also correct because in fact al Qaeda is in Iraq now, even if it wasn’t then.

Not that Digby actually uses the word "retroactionary", but she knows intuitively that the passage needs some mocking attention, and that's why she bolded it.

O'Hanlon provides a more sophisticated example of the retroactionary than the kind we've looked at up to now. He doesn't believe in a literally reverse time, in which the troops could be able to drive Al Qa'eda out of Iraq, return the country to the terrorist-free condition it was in in 2003, and raise the Twin Towers. He realizes it was the Al Qa'eda in Afghanistan that brought the towers down.

What he does, rather, is a reversal of causality in respect to time. By arriving in Iraq behind the Yankees, Ali Musab al-Zarqawi and his Qa'eda in Mesopotamia organization made themselves the cause of the fall of the towers, the tragedy the US forces were trying retroactively to prevent. It's no different, really, than the way Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson made themselves responsible for slavery in the U.S. by being Democrats...

Sunday breakfast links

Juan Cole, whom we depend on for interpretations of mid-East events, has been adding something quite new to his bag of tricks: translations from the Persian of Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi al-Khayyami (1048-1131), better known to the rest of us as Omar Khayyam. Unlike the heavily scented Victorian versions of Edward FitzGerald, Cole's translations are as clean and crunchy as celery, sometimes funny and always bracing:

If a stranger proves faithful,
I adopt him into the family.
But if a relative sins,
I take a dim view of him.
If poison proves helpful,
it is actually an antidote,
and if an antidote attacks me,
it is really a toxic sting.

I don't think we know when they're going to show up, you just have to follow the blog.

The Friendly Bear. Persian miniature, 18th century.

The above illustration is from the extraordinary blog (multilingual, but mostly in English, sometimes not quite idiomatic) Poemas del río Wang, and a very lengthy post on bears, which ranges from an excerpt from a dialogue by Erasmus in which a bear and a lion discuss correct Latin pronunciation to a very recent short-short story translated from the Czech.

 Gill Mann at Rumproast offers an answer to the age-old question of what if Michael O'Hanlon were an advice columnist. The Brookings Institution wunderkind warrior (actually in his 50s, but tousle-haired as ever) would definitely have his own distinctive voice.

The website Letters of Note collects letters by the famous and not-so-famous, from Billie Joe Armstrong to E.B. White and so on, including this masterpiece, written or dictated in August 1865 by the freedman Jourdon Anderson and addressed to his erstwhile owner, Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, in response to an invitation to come back and work on his farm.