closing out the Bolaño decade

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Next year marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Roberto Bolaño, the prolific genre-bender whose narratives and exile from Chile began seriously enchanting the literary world in 2005, the year The New Yorker began publishing his short stories. Altogether, nine stories have appeared in the magazine, including January’s “Labyrinth,” which accompanied a curious photograph. But I’ll get to that in a moment. First, a bit about Bolaño’s following, which may be credited in part to his early exit from said world at the age of 50, by way of liver failure. For the uninitiated, “Gomez Palacio,” his posthumous New Yorker debut about a tormented writer interviewing for a teaching post in a remote Mexican town, tends to work a kind of magic. A ragged copy of the issue in which “Gomez Palacio” appeared caught critic Francine Prose in a waiting room: “I was glad the doctor was running late,” she wrote later in reviewing Last Evenings on Earth, “so I could read the story twice, and still have a few minutes left over to consider the fact that I had just encountered something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new.”

more from R.B. Moreno at The Millions here.

debating occupy

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On September 24, 2011, Michael Kazin published an important essay in the New York Times, “Whatever Happened to the American Left?” In it he examined the “populist left’s” historic role in shaping politics and policy discussions in the United States, especially in moments of past capitalist crisis and the relative failure of this Left to gain influence in the current crisis. A week before this essay was published, unremarked by almost everyone in America, several hundred protesters, inspired by developments in Tahrir Square in Cairo, had gathered in lower Manhattan to protest economic inequality and the decline of democracy in America. By the middle of October, Occupy Wall Street had riveted the attention of the nation. Until winter weather and municipal police forces shut down Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park and scores of other encampments that had sprung up around the country, the Occupy movements created a space for left politics that had not existed for a very long time. IN LIGHT of these unexpected developments, it seemed appropriate to ask Kazin to revisit his New York Times essay and the pessimistic reading of post-1960s left politics it presented. In “The Fall and Rise of the U.S. Populist Left,” an updated and revised version of the New York Times piece, Kazin discerns possibility in the Occupy movements, while expressing skepticism about their desire to be “leaderless” and warning how hard it will be to escape America’s history of “failed ideas and strategies on the left.”

more from Dissent here.

prince of parataxis

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Parataxis is Édouard Levé’s best friend. Parataxis—also John Ashbery’s best friend—concerns the placement, side by side, of two sentences whose meanings don’t transparently connect. Parataxis, however, as concept, has leached its glories onto the landscape at large; any reader of contemporary culture is contaminated by paratactic energies, a stylistic phenomenon that Levé defends in his penultimate book, a work of unrepentantly naked yet stylistically errant autobiography, Autoportrait. He writes: “Raymond Poulidor is one of the least sexy names I know. I like salad mainly for the crunch and the vinaigrette.” Levé is a French writer and photographer whose work had overtones of the Conceptual (for one project, he photographed American towns that “share a name with a city in another country: Berlin, Florence, Oxford, Canton, Jericho, Stockholm, Rio, Delhi, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Mexico, Syracuse, Lima, Versailles, Calcutta, Baghdad”). He is most famous now for having committed suicide in 2007 a few days after giving his publisher a slim novel called Suicide, written entirely in the second person, and addressed to a “you” who has already slain himself: “To portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random.”

more from Wayne Koestenbaum at Bookforum here.

Summer, Mangoes, Birds, Bombay — Disjecta Membra

by Gautam Pemmaraju

The hot summer months of April and May allow for some indolence. Slack jawed, enervated street dogs, seem somehow to be the most suffering. If their parched tongues say it all, their blinking eyes, bereft of the sharp darting aggression of cooler nights, seem to offer urgent supplication. In part alleviation, they sleep through whole afternoons in the reasonable comfort of a shady spot, on occassion lifting up their heat-stricken heads to cast a listless, impecunious glance at the fools who walk the hot streets. Asleep

Offering vivid descriptions of city life, the hustle-bustle, street hawkers and dwellers, SM Edwardes, in By-Ways Of Bombay (1912), writes,

During the hot months of the year the closeness of the rooms and the attacks of mosquitoes force many a respectable householder to shoulder his bedding and join the great army of street-sleepers, who crowd the footpaths and open spaces like shrouded corpses. All sorts and conditions of men thus take their night's rest beneath the moon,–Rangaris, Kasais, bakers, beggars, wanderers, and artisans,–the householder taking up a small position on the flags near his house, the younger and unmarried men wandering further afield to the nearest open space, but all lying with their head towards the north for fear of the anger of the Kutb or Pole star.

In Sleepy Sketches (1877), the diarist, troubled by the ‘endless accounts’ of Englishmen of privilege and high office, which he finds to ill represent the reality of Bombay life (and life in Bombay), sets out to correct some. Asserting quite vigorously at the outset that the native has ‘no prejudice either in favour of truth or falsehood’ and that they cannot but help mixing the two, he finds issue with “hot glare of the sun and constant heat”, which to his mind “destroy the mystery of life and lead one to look on death as the end of all things” [sic]. The climate threatens the European, the writer adds, and it is so enervating for the professional man, that upon return home at the end of a hardworking day “we have little desire for recreation, and so no recreation is to be found”. The month of May, he writes on,

…brings thirty-one days of close, oppressive heat, and thirty-one nights of close, oppressive heat…when all possibility of sound sleep is gone, and we wake every hour and minute wet with perspiration; when even the crows have lost every power but that of cawing, – a power, confound them! that they never lose, – and stand desolate, with their hot wings held comically apart from their hot bodies…but still in Bombay we go to bed with the thermometer at 89°.

Read more »

I Have A Dream: Obama’s Second Term

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

Obama_cool_ap_imgFirst thing, a raft of Guantanamo cases are brought in civil courts. The prisoners who aren't in court, are in a plane on their way to Iraq or Afghanistan. Guantanamo prison turns into a tourist attraction, with luxury hotels, gambling, and highly-educated Marxist prostitutes from Cuba.

Next thing, Bradley Manning is pardoned. He leaves his cell, becomes a hero on the progressive circuit, and breaks up Barney Frank's marriage.

The Glass-Stegall Act is brought back and reinstated. The big banks all break in two, between commercial and investment banks. Their lamentations fall on deaf ears.

After a few Wall Street big wigs are prosecuted for fraud, finance capitalism finds itself hogtied by a weird wave of ethical behavior.

Following the example of North Dakota, all the states start their own banks. They withdraw all the money they have in Wall Street and pour it into their state banks.

Wall Street shrinks. There is a tax on all financial transactions. Many firms go bankrupt or close up for business. They just don't have as much money to play with as before. High-end prostitutes flee Wall Street for Qatar.

All companies registered in America have to declare their profits and losses as single entities. They are not allowed to have branches for tax purposes in other places, like the Cayman Islands. Therapists do a thriving business in tax lawyers when all tax loopholes are closed. For the first time in years, General Electric and Goldman Sachs pay actual taxes — at an actual rate of 30% plus. Their lamentations fall on deaf ears.

The Bush tax cuts are gone. All of us pay more taxes. But millionaires pay the most: a 50% rate. There is a one-time wealth tax of 15% on all holdings of the superrich, which wipes out our deficit in one mighty swoop.

The country has a surplus again, like it did under Clinton. The GOP goes into a megasulk.

Marijuana is legalized, and the economy of California makes a startling recovery.

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The Birth, Decline, and Re-Emergence of the Solid South: A Short History

by Akim Reinhardt

Slave saleSince the Civil War, the American South has mostly been a one-party region. However, by the turn of the 21st century, its political affiliation had actually swung from the Democrats to the Republicans. Here’s how it happened.

It is not an oversimplification to say that slavery was the single most important issue leading to the Civil War. For not only was slavery the most important on its own merits, but none of the other relevant issues, such as expansion into the western territories or states’ rights, would have mattered much at all if not for their indelible connection to slavery.

Initially, Northerners rallied around the issue of Free Soil: opposition to slavery on economic grounds. Small farmers and new industrial workers did not want to compete with large slave plantations and unpaid slave labor. This was the philosophy that bound together the new Republican Party.

No friends of African Americans, most Free Soilers were openly racist, as were the vast majority of white Americans at the time. Abolitionists, who were fired by religion and opposed human bondage on moral grounds, were actually a small minority of the population However, as the bloody war raged on, Northerners began to seek moral assurance in their cause. For more and more people, the mere political goal of saving the union did not seem to justify the unholy slaughter of men by the tens of thousand. Though preserving the union was always Abraham Lincoln’s primary goal, he astutely played to this concern by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and establishing abolition as the war’s moral compass. It worked. The North persisted, won the war, abolished slavery, and forced the South to return.

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Deus in Machina: poetic technique in Derek Walcott’s Omeros

Andrew Singer in Open Letters Monthly:

Omeros-192x300Much has been written about Derek Walcott’s epic book-length poem, Omeros, since its publication in 1990 — deservedly so — but little has been attempted of direct poetic analysis. Poetry, especially formal verse, spans a territory that borders music on one side and meaning on the other. A masterful poet unfolding verse is keenly attuned to both, exploring and playing on their interrelation in continually surprising ways. Recognizing this interplay between sound and sense is one of the great refined pleasures of reading an accomplished poem. Suffusing every part of Omeros, regardless of action or complexity, philosophical meaning or depth of thought, is its music. To get at this most directly, let us examine a section where nothing special happens, where no particularly overarching complexity of meaning will distract.

Omeros is presented in seven Books, totaling 64 chapters, of three sections each. All but Chapter XXXIII, section 3, are written in hexameters, echoing Homer’s Odyssey, albeit playing with the meter freely. The lines are further grouped in triplet stanzas, acknowledging Dante, albeit without adhering to Dante’s rhyme scheme. Omeros is fully rhymed, although, like the meter, its rhyme scheme is fluid and proceeds from the music, with deeply refined effect. Every line in Omeros has a rhyme somewhere nearby.

More here.

What Money Can’t Buy: Michael Sandel on a society where everything could be up for sale

Tana Wojczuk in Guernica:

ScreenHunter_17 May. 07 09.00Author Michael Sandel’s new book What Money Can’t Buy is troubling in the best sense of the word—it “troubles” the complacency with which Americans have received the rapid encroachment of the market into private life. Economics has expanded in the post-freakonomics world and in a global market, according to Sandel, and that expansion has resulted in an historically intrusive use of market forces into “non-market spheres” like education.

In his book, Sandel explains in both intellectual and historic terms how expansionist ideas of the role of economics coincided with the Reaganite elevation of lassiez-faire economics into something like a religion. Sandel frames the issues he finds problematic and shows how “intrinsic values” such as the love of learning for its own sake, can be threatened when market forces are applied—for example, bribing students to do better in school or public schools seeking out corporate sponsors due to budget cuts.

The framework Sandel provides will ideally challenge readers to see the world differently, like the moment in the cult classic They Live (see Jonathan Lethem’s book-length criticism of the film) where the hero puts on a pair of bodacious ray-ban sunglasses and suddenly sees billboards advertising sunny vacations in fact read “OBEY.” What Money Can’t Buy identifies a few of the many areas where market encroachment is problematic (paying to kill an endangered rhino, paying for the right to pollute, branded education) and equips readers with the questions that, Sandel hopes, will begin a public debate about what money should or shouldn’t buy.

More here.

How to End This Depression

Paul Krugman in the New York Review of Books:

ScreenHunter_16 May. 07 08.55The depression we’re in is essentially gratuitous: we don’t need to be suffering so much pain and destroying so many lives. We could end it both more easily and more quickly than anyone imagines—anyone, that is, except those who have actually studied the economics of depressed economies and the historical evidence on how policies work in such economies.

The truth is that recovery would be almost ridiculously easy to achieve: all we need is to reverse the austerity policies of the past couple of years and temporarily boost spending. Never mind all the talk of how we have a long-run problem that can’t have a short-run solution—this may sound sophisticated, but it isn’t. With a boost in spending, we could be back to more or less full employment faster than anyone imagines.

But don’t we have to worry about long-run budget deficits? Keynes wrote that “the boom, not the slump, is the time for austerity.” Now, as I argue in my forthcoming book*—and show later in the data discussed in this article—is the time for the government to spend more until the private sector is ready to carry the economy forward again. At that point, the US would be in a far better position to deal with deficits, entitlements, and the costs of financing them.

More here.

Synesthesia May Explain Healers’ Claims of Seeing People’s ‘Aura’

From Science Daily:

ScreenHunter_15 May. 07 08.51Researchers in Spain have found that at least some of the individuals claiming to see the so-called aura of people actually have the neuropsychological phenomenon known as “synesthesia” (specifically, “emotional synesthesia”). This might be a scientific explanation of their alleged ability.

In synesthetes, the brain regions responsible for the processing of each type of sensory stimuli are intensely interconnected. Synesthetes can see or taste a sound, feel a taste, or associate people or letters with a particular color.

The study was conducted by the University of Granada Department of Experimental Psychology Óscar Iborra, Luis Pastor and Emilio Gómez Milán, and has been published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. This is the first time that a scientific explanation has been provided for the esoteric phenomenon of the aura, a supposed energy field of luminous radiation surrounding a person as a halo, which is imperceptible to most human beings.

More here.

In the Shadow of Things

From Lensculture:

This is a strange book about a difficult subject: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Yet it is profoundly effective in conveying the confusion, frustration and mystery that permeates the lives of everyone touched by this type of overwhelming psychological condition, including the afflicted and their family members, lovers and friends.

For over a decade, Bron, the mother of photographer Léonie Hampton, found it impossible to empty the packing boxes which had filled her new home since the collapse of her first marriage. The boxes, along with stuffed plastic bags and accumulated artifacts from her former life, were a constant physical reminder to her family of Bron’s long-running battle with OCD and depression.
In 2007, a deal was struck: Hampton would help her mother empty the boxes and organize the house on the condition that she be allowed to document that process. (This in itself presents another sort of compulsive behavior — that driven nature of the photographer herself.)

More here.

Your Breasts Are Trying To Kill You

Lindy West in Slate:

Williams' journey begins when, alarmed by a news article about toxins in breast milk, she decides to get her own milk tested. And, surprise! It's packed with toxins—specifically, chemical flame retardants—that Williams is funneling directly into her baby. (“Well, at least your breasts won't spontaneously ignite!” her husband jokes, because that's exactly what you want to hear when adjusting to the news that you're a human baby-poison factory.) This sends her down a rabbit hole in search of deeper understanding of her own anatomy— into the evolutionary history of mammals, to Peru to investigate nursing and weaning, back to the first breast augmentation surgery, and all over the world to interview more boob experts than you can shake a pasty at. And she discovers that breasts are complicated. Impossibly so. She learns that it’s the breast’s permeability that make it such an evolutionary powerhouse (lots and lots of estrogen receptors help human puberty occur at the optimal time; nutrient-rich breast milk makes for giant brains)—but that same permeability is also, partially, what causes one in eight women to develop breast cancer. Our breasts make us great but they also make us vulnerable, and you can’t help but come away from Williams’ book feeling a bit helpless. (Self-examinations! Self-examinations are key!) While she makes the story as dynamic as possible, there’s no escaping that this is science journalism—there are lots of PBDE levels and octa-203 and penta-47 and dioxin and “lobule type 4” and other such enemies of lively prose. But that’s OK—there are enough surprises and genuinely horrifying learning moments to keep a reader (especially a lady-reader), uh, latched on.

Five Things I Learned About Breasts From Florence Williams' Breasts

1. Women: Your boobs are trying to murder you. Right now. All the time. The day you were born, your boobs took one look at you and were like, “Oh, no. No. Absolutely not. Hey, does anyone know where I can get some poison?” Turns out, everywhere! Breasts are largely made up of fatty tissue, and chemicals looooooooooove to accumulate in fatty tissue. Here’s a partial list from Williams: “paint thinners, dry-cleaning fluids, wood preservatives, toilet deodorizers, cosmetic additives, gasoline by-products, rocket fuel, termite poisons, fungicides, and flame-retardants.” So what can you do to keep your chest-sponges safe from marauding chemicals? Nothing, pretty much, short of becoming a trillionaire and taking over literally every drug company and industry on earth. So get on it, concerned citizens! Step one: CoinStar.

More here.

Sunday Poem

The Madwoman of Cork

Today
Is the feast day of Saint Anne
Pray for me
I am the madwoman of Cork.

Yesterday
In Castle street
I saw two goblins at my feet
I saw a horse without a head
Carrying the dead
To the graveyard
Near Turner’s Cross.

I am the madwoman of Cork
No one talks to me.

When I walk in the rain
The children throw stones at me
Old men persecute me
And women close their doors.
When I die
Believe me
They’ll set me on fire.

I am the madwoman of Cork
I have no sense.

Sometimes
With an eagle in my brain
I can see a train
Crashing at the station
If I told people that
They’d choke me.
Then where would I be?

Read more »

Behold The Forbidden Flu: A Loom Explainer

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

ScreenHunter_13 May. 05 18.23Here, for your viewing pleasure, is a very important part of a very special flu virus. It may look like an ordinary protein, but in fact it’s been at the center of a blazing debate about whether our increasing power to experiment on life could lead to a disaster. Not that long ago, in fact, a national security advisory board didn’t even want you to see this. So feast your eyes.

For those who are new to this story let me start back at the beginning, in 1997.

In that year, a child in Hong Kong died of the flu. Doctors shipped a sample of his blood to virus experts in Europe, but they didn’t bother taking a look at it for months. When they did, they were startled to discover that it was unlike any flu they’d seen in a human being before.

Each year, several different flu strains circulate from person to person around the world. They’re known by the initials of the proteins that cover their surface–H3N2, for example, is one common strain. The H stands for haemagglutinin, a protein that latches to a host cell so that the virus can invade. The N stands for neuraminidase, which newly produced viruses then use to hack their way out of the cell.

Birds are the source of all our flu strains. Our feathered friends are hosts to a huge variety of H and N type viruses, which typically infect their guts and cause a mild infection. From time to time, bird flu viruses have crossed the species barrier and adapted to human hosts, infecting our airways and then spreading in air droplets. Since flu spreads so fast around the world, a fair amount of the planet’s population has had some exposure–and thus some immunity–to the flu strains in circulation today. But if a new bird flu should manage to make the leap, we could face a very grim situation–a situation that some scientists worry could rival the 1918 pandemic, which killed some 50 million people.

More here.

David Graeber in conversation with Rebecca Solnit

From Guernica:

ScreenHunter_12 May. 05 18.08In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, author and Occupy Wall Street intellectual founder David Graeber debunks myths that have shaped the general discourse on debt for centuries. The assumptions, myths, and outright falsities permeating our conceptions of debt and money—and why the latter is superior to bartering—blend history and fiction in ways that usually fail to see. Who is constructing these narratives about our preoccupation with money, and why do we insist on believing them? Is there a better alternative that can break the myths of history, shatter their latent presumptions, and build a brighter and equitable future?

In discussing topics ranging from the origins of free market capitalism (Islam) to the virtues of anarchism, Graeber and his conversation partner, Rebecca Solnit, make the case that we do not need to satisfy ourselves with the politico-socioeconomic status quo. To raise the level of discourse on these issues, terms need redefining and social dynamics reconfiguring. Graeber maintains that by thinking of “capitalism as a really bad way of organizing communism,” we can improve cooperation among exchanging parties and the quality of human social relations. For Solnit, the Occupy movement has heralded a radical revolution toward this effort: “It turns out that we’re actually capable of something other than neoliberalism and actually we’re really capable of enjoying ourselves more than we do under neoliberalism. It feels that if neoliberalism is first about privatizing desire and imagination before the economy, then we’re in this process of publicizing it again.”

More here.