After Apple Picking

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still.
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples; I am drowsing off.
I cannot shake the shimmer from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the water-trough,
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and reappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
And I keep hearing from the cellar-bin
That rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking; I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall,
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised, or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

by Robert Frost
from Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose and Plays

Claire Messud in the New York Review of Books:

November 7 of this year marks Camus’s centenary. The artist and essayist—the author of L’Étranger (1942) and L’Homme révolté (1951)—has consistently held the reading public’s admiration and imagination. But his attitudes on the Algerian question—excoriated by his contemporaries on all sides, and subsequently by critics as diverse as Conor Cruise O’Brien and Edward Said—remain controversial.

The recent publication, for the first time in English, of Camus’s Algerian Chronicles, edited and introduced by Alice Kaplan and beautifully translated by Arthur Goldhammer, affords Camus the belated opportunity to make his own case to the Anglophone public. This book, in slightly different form, proved his final public word on the Algerian question when it was originally published in June 1958. Ending two and a half years of public silence that followed his failed call for a civilian truce in Algiers in January 1956—a silence that became, according to Kaplan, “a metonymy for cowardice” but that my relatives would have recognized as agony—Algerian Chronicles was published in France in 1958 to “widespread critical silence.”

The lack of interest that greeted the book can be attributed in part to its publication fast upon the heels of Henri Alleg’s The Question, the vivid and disturbing autobiographical account of the author’s torture in the Barberousse prison in Algiers, an immediate best seller subsequently suppressed by the French authorities.

More here.

Jon Baskin in The Point:

Dave Eggers’s The Circle is so carelessly written, so predictably plotted, and so thinly conceived that it threatens to make a mockery of anyone who would attempt seriously to review it. Granted it has been a long time—perhaps as far back as A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)—since Eggers put much thought into his sentences, and granted this may in part be due to an intentional decision to prioritize topicality and accessibility over style. Still, even alongside recent efforts, like the comparatively elegant A Hologram for the King (2013), his newest novel distinguishes itself for its clumsy prose, its one-dimensional characterization, and the utter absurdity of many of the situations it asks its reader to imagine. It would be possible to spend the next several paragraphs offering evidence for these (harsh, I know) judgments, but this is already being done elsewhere—and even Eggers’s defenders admit that we should not expect to find gratuitous flourishes like “nuance or thoroughly rounded characters” in The Circle.

So why write about this book at all? Well, there is something interesting about The Circle: Eggers has, and not for the first time, picked a compelling topic.

More here.

Via Andrew Sullivan, J. C. Hallman interviews Walter Kirn in Tin House:

J.C. Hallman: Do creative writers have an obligation to act as critics, to offer up alternatives to traditional critical methodologies and assumptions?

Walter Kirn: Creative writers have no obligation do anything, including their own creative work. That’s what makes them “creative” in the first place, not merely productive. That being said, a novel or a short story is an implicit piece of criticism. It suggests that the job – some job; that of telling a story, say, or representing reality with language, or torturing reality with language – can be done better, or at least differently, than it has been done before. I think I learned that from Harold Bloom. Or James Joyce. Ulysses is a splendid work of criticism, and more influential, I dare say, than any piece of criticism proper written during the same period. Criticism proper is simply an attempt to catch up with the latent criticism offered by such exciting, fertile artifacts.

JCH: As you see it, what happened to criticism? That is, how did we move from Arnold and Pater and Wilde to the kind of academic criticism produced in English departments?

WK: What happened to criticism is that it became a profession, even a guild, heavy on trade craft and jargon and dedicated to exclusion and self-protection. It became a way of credentialing an insider class and assuring its members of an income inside of the academy. As such, criticism took up a specialized vocabulary whose chief function, as I see it, was to signal loyalty to the executive board of the approved critical class. There are all these words in contemporary criticism – “gendered,” “hegemonic,” “interrogate,” etc. – that strike me as verbal secret handshakes. They might have been meaningful once, but more and more they feel like coded transmissions between the troops and their leaders. And they make for very ugly sentences. Critical prose of the type that includes them is singularly ugly prose, and I’m with Einstein and similar physicists in believing that elegance bears a close relation to truth.

More here.

Robert Bolger reviews Nathan Schneider's God in Proof : The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet, in the LA Review of Books:

In a culture that worships scientific progress, we often act as if acquiring faith is something of an intellectual transaction: the proof is presented, we process it rationally, and, voilà, belief sprouts forth from the fertile ground of a well-functioning mind. As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, philosophers “constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does.” This, for better or worse, has been the fate of the proofs for God’s existence. We aren’t usually drawn to the truths of science because we fear death; science is too hard-nosed and rigorous for such subjectivity. “Scientific” proofs for faith, then, are taken to be at their finest when they are separated from the whims, fears, and desires of human existence. Nothing less than theintellect’s best work is acceptable if our faith is to be given recognition in a culture that tends toward worshiping at the altar of science.

In his recent book, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet, Nathan Schneider recognizes the strangeness of the proofs for faith, which are ripped from human life:

The proofs show up in textbook after textbook, torn away from the flesh from which they came. They’re taught, argued about, and forgotten, sometimes saving a person’s particular faith, sometimes eroding it, and usually neither. There’s no surer way of knowing than proof, by definition, and it’s hard to imagine any more enticing knowledge than that of a God. Still, the world goes on in disagreement, in belief and unbelieving, with so many forms of each.

This is not an insignificant point. If proofs for God don’t work like “proofs” in general do, then they are either not proofs at all or function in a really unique, even queer way. It is the latter suggestion that God in Proof seeks to present and defend. In a sense, the book offers a “grammar” of proofs; that is, a way of showing their meaning without diminishing their importance.God in Proof aims at bringing proofs back home and covering their nakedness with the garb of human flesh. Schneider breathes life back into proofs, the life they once had in the heady days before “knowledge” became synonymous with “scientific knowledge.”

More here.

Mark O'Connell in Slate:

In her journal in the mid-1960s, Susan Sontag vowed “to give no interviews until I can sound as clear + authoritative + direct as Lillian Hellman in Paris Review.” Sontag’s ongoing investment in the development and definition of herself always seemed less like self-obsession than a kind of existential industriousness. Reading through the odds and ends that have been published since her death almost 10 years ago—the two volumes of her journals, in particular—you get the sense of a person who was always working toward an ideal version of herself. The ideal changed in its particulars over time, but the ideal of change remained constant. She’s often a reassuringly pretentious figure in the early diaries, which are themselves a useful reminder that being a pseudo-intellectual is a necessary stage on the way to being a nonpseudo-intellectual, and that the two classifications aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. Being an intellectual is often, after all, a matter of getting away with trying to be seen as one.

Holland Cottor in The New York Times:

In 2003, the Metropolitan Museum mounted an exhibition of just under 100 drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and pulled in close to half a million visitors in just over two months. This fall, the Morgan Library & Museum is presenting a miniature — very miniature — version of that show called “Leonardo da Vinci: Treasures From the Biblioteca Reale, Turin,” and it, too, should generate serious traffic, particularly as it includes two outstanding items — a book and a drawing — that the Met didn’t have. Leonardo is magnetic. Even if you know nothing about art, you probably know his name. And with him, scale is relative. On the one hand, he’s titanic, god-size, this painter-sculptor-draftsman-architect-inventor-writer who was also a self-taught physicist, botanist, zoologist, musician, moral philosopher and ballistics expert. But he’s also human, our size. He was a chronic procrastinator; he was bad at languages; he was a left-hander who wrote in a quirky, backward script.

He was one of Western culture’s sublime geeks. He seems to have lived in a state of perpetual brainstorming, as if life were a theoretical proposition to be tested daily. Did he ever power down, take a vacation? Maybe, but his version of kicking back was our version of doing extra homework. His observational curiosity was unsleeping, and he carried notebooks everywhere. Anything that crossed his eye, from bugs to battlements, was worth dwelling on, sketching, writing about, thinking about, figuring out.

More here.

Edward Luce at The Financial Times:

Most of all, Teddy was the progressive movement’s answer to the acute disparities of the gilded age. To his foreign contemporaries Roosevelt was larger than life. At a moment of incipient British decline, Roosevelt’s preternatural energy hinted at a new age to come. He had an Obamaesque ability to pull crowds. When he toured Europe more than a year after leaving the White House, tens of thousands thronged the streets of Paris, London and other cities to catch a glimpse of the “Rough Rider”. Even his enemies, notably Mark Hanna, who epitomised the corrupt Republican machine Teddy had sidelined, could not help but admire him – “that damned cowboy” was Hanna’s description.

The Bully Pulpit is more than just a biography of this most tireless of US presidents. It is also a tribute to America’s “golden age of journalism”. From early in his career, Roosevelt saw the benefit of having allies in the media. By the time he became president in 1902, they could be found mainly at the legendary McClure’s magazine, which housed the most talented stable of journalists in the US. Writers such as Lincoln Steffens, who chronicled the railroad barons, Ida Tarbell, who dissected Standard Oil, and Ray Baker, who exposed the rat-infested conditions of Chicago’s meat factories, became confidantes of the young president.

more here.

David L. Ulin at The LA Times:

“I didn't want this to be about bravery,” he insists, “but about carnage and its aftereffects. There was such enthusiasm on both sides. This was where you had to be if you were a young man of a certain age. But where does it lead? Even when I was drawing, I wanted to think about these things. I always knew that the battle would be at the center, but I also wanted to illustrate the trenches, and how they kept feeding, always feeding, the beast.”

This is the difference between history and journalism, which we might define as the difference between the big picture and the small. When it comes to journalism, in other words, it is important to see the faces of the soldiers, whereas history involves too many faces to see them all.

“As someone who has done a lot of work with conflict,” Sacco says, “I begin to wonder about the species. Not just the British and the Germans; I'm thinking about humanity and our enthusiasm for war. A journalist goes to the next conflict, but in the end, to me, you see the same thing. It's cooperative, but what is it that we cooperate on? What do we put our shoulder to? It never goes away, this great human endeavor that is war.”

more here.

Rich Benjamin at The New York Times:

A gay black man, Als portrays gay black men’s longing to cherish what they cannot sexually love, the putative opposite of themselves, yet the emblem with which they deeply identify: white girls. Als admires and loathes white girls, mocks and mimics white girls, is ignored by white girls, is depended on by white girls, is perceived to be a white girl. “White girls,” he shows, is not just literal people. It’s a state of mind, an art of being.

Witness, in one essay, the black drag queen wearing jeans, a halter top and an upswept hairdo, who plunks herself on the lap of an older white gentleman and announces: “That’s what I want you to make me feel like, baby, a white woman. A white woman who’s getting out of your Mercedes-Benz and going into Gucci to buy me some new drawers because you wrecked them. Just fabulous.”

Als owns up to the sadomasochistic nature of white-girl worship. Watching “Gone With the Wind” for the first time, he fell in love with Vivien Leigh, who as Scarlett “suffers, and says she will never suffer again, and I loved her so much I didn’t want her to suffer.” He adds, “I would have made her forget that I was colored and that she could lynch me if she wanted to because I knew I could make her love me.”

more here.

Isaac Chotiner at The New Republic:

What most interested me was Gladwell’s claim about the book’s religious content. On this subject, Gladwell seconded what he had said to Beck, essentially arguing that different people read the book in different ways. “It’s a very interesting experience—I was in Salt Lake City…and everyone read the book that way,” Gladwell told me. “I must have done six interviews and all they talked about was the faith part. I think it depends where you stand.” He added, in a phrase that one could hear Beck uttering, that “people on the coast” seemed to be ignoring the faith-based aspects of the book. (On his show, Beck claimed that the book was something he himself could have written.)

Gladwell’s book has an index: Neither “faith” nor “God” nor “religion” appear in it. Faith is not mentioned on the cover flap. It’s true that some of the stories he tells involve religious people, but he shies away from religious language and lays almost no stress on the religious dimensions of the various tales.

more here.

Howard Hampton at Artforum:

BY AN INTERESTING COINCIDENCE, Warner Bros. is releasing its new Blu-ray of the 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives at the same time as a box set of all three of James Dean’s films: Rebel Without a Cause (1955), East of Eden (1955), and Giant (1956). Most everyone who is serious about cinema has seen Dean’s movies (Giant maybe not so much), but I can’t help wondering how many people under fifty-five have ever watched The Best Years of Our Lives. It was the sort of picture you’d expect the parents in Rebel Without a Cause to relate to—meticulously designed to speak to the people who lived through World War II, valorizing their sacrifices and aspirations. Dean, film noir, and the artifice-baring melodramas of Douglas Sirk—with their collective angst, upfront neuroses, and unsettled entanglements—came along as rebellions against, or subversions of, precisely that type of big, square, ultra-schematic exercise in civic-minded drama and social duty. Where they have the cachet of the perpetually hip, The Best Years of Our Lives is weighed down by its ambitions toward universality (American-style), not to mention its seven Academy Awards: Almost by definition, anything Hollywood embraced so wholeheartedly must be suspect.

more here.

Thomas Micchelli at Bookforum:

Though Berenson would become, in today's dollars, a millionaire many times over as well as a host to an endless parade of celebrities and scholars at his Florentine villa, I Tatti (whose grounds and library he eventually left to Harvard), his life “from the age of ten, had been a scramble to maintain a surface impression of belonging, with all the while a sense of incoherent and alien depths roiling underneath.” His compromised solution was “to work in a trade that, though more luxurious and outwardly significant [than his father's], still seemed to him sordid.” Up until the end of his life, Berenson's self-worth remained as fragile as the veneer of old-world sophistication put forth by his clients in the newly wealthy classes.

Berenson died on October 6, 1959, at the age of 94. Two years earlier, he wrote, “I wanted to become and be a work of art myself, and not an artist.” In her remarkable biography, Cohen approaches Berenson's life as a panorama full of artifice and profundity, whose brilliant flashes of color are inextricable from its substrates of shadow. The book leaves an indelible impression, not merely in the way it catalogues Berenson's accomplishments and failings, but also in its dissection of the struggle between desire and alienation that characterizes American art—and life—to this day.

more here.

James Guida in Orion Magazine:

IN ONE OF Aesop’s fables, “The Rogue and the Oracle,” a man approaches the Oracle at Delphi. In his hand, which he keeps hidden under a cloak, he has a little bird. The plan is to ask the oracle whether the bird is dead or alive: if the answer is “dead,” he will simply produce the living creature; if “alive,” he’ll crush it. But an oracle is not an oracle by being easily tricked, and the reply is this: “Stranger, whether the thing that you hold in your hand be alive or dead is a matter that depends entirely on your will.” I was reminded of that line while looking at artist and architect Maya Lin’s recent exhibition at New York’s Pace Gallery. There, from projectors attached to the ceiling of one of the gallery’s side rooms, ferries of sentence traveled across the wall, turning when they reached a corner as if hitting a bend or rapid. The words included historical accounts of the wolves that used to live in Manhattan, the oyster beds that once flourished around the Hudson, and a seven-foot sturgeon spotted in 1950 on the river’s New Jersey side by the writer Joseph Mitchell.

Lin is best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, a competition she won in 1981 while still a student. The finished site, together with the precocious grit with which she met the obstacles to realizing it, turned her into a celebrity. Since then Lin has gone on to do other memorials, including the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, but for a long time she has said her last such project is in the works. Launched in 2011, the new memorial is ongoing, dispersed, collaborative, a kind of museum—that room at Pace with the running text is a part of it, though just one of many. There are satellite sculptures and multimedia installations planted throughout various cities, but the core of the project lives online, on an unusually cool website called What Is Missing? As for the “missing,” well, that would be animals and their habitats. The site honors extinct or endangered species, ecosystems lost or degraded, and, on a positive note, conservation efforts that have done some good.

More here.

A couple of months ago, Adam Kampe of the National Endowment of the Arts wrote to me telling me that the theme of their upcoming quarterly magazine was going to be “the intersection of art and science” and that they had identified 3QD as a good exemplar and that he wanted to interview me for the magazine. We did the interview but then publication of the magazine was delayed because of the shutdown of the U.S. federal government. It has now finally been published, and here it is, in NEA Arts Magazine:

Abbas Raza: There should be no dividing line between science and the arts. I think they should all be taught as equally important intellectual activities. And that’s what we have tried to do at 3QD; we try to find things that are interesting. It doesn’t matter what subject area they’re in.

Adam Kampe: That’s Abbas Raza, the founding editor of the filter blog, 3 Quarks Daily, or 3QD. Welcome to NEA Arts online. In this issue, we’re exploring the intersection of the arts and sciences. Blurring the line between these seemingly different worlds—art and science—is something 3QD does very well.

The original site praised by all sorts of heavy-hitting scientists such as Harvard professor Stephen Pinker and artists like David Byrne because it features such a unique and rich body of material. Just in the past month or so, I read an article about director Richard Linklater’s animated film, Waking Life; I stumbled into a documentary about the enigmatic Argentine, Jorge Luis Borges; I saw an article about how the brain generates consciousness, “How the Light Gets Out” and then of course there’s the series of point/counterpoints called Science vs. the Humanities. Poetry, philosophy, politics; it runs the gamut. The short video documentary of starlings in flight is one small example of the kind of art-meets-science material you can find at 3 Quarks. Okay, now back to Abbas Raza. He’ll explain how the blog works.

Abbas Raza: I felt very strongly that we should include a lot of science because science is often neglected by the literary humanities crowd, and I felt very strongly that we should look at all intellectual fields including those of science and so we started doing this. And 3 Quarks kind of took off in its readership and we got more and more readers and also some very prominent names like Richard Dawkins who wrote to us saying, “I really love 3 Quarks,” and that thrilled us.

More here, including the audio.

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

What is philosophy? One possible answer is that it is the intellectual project that disdains money. Or at least pretends to do so.

Such disdain forms a central part of the founding myth of Western philosophy as told by Plato in his relation of the trial and execution of his mentor Socrates. Here we learn that Socrates has been wrongly charged by the court at Athens on what may be reduced to two principal counts: that he teaches doctrines, and that he accepts money for this teaching. The denial of the first charge is important to the story we would like to tell here, too, but we will return to it soon enough. As to the second charge, Socrates protests: “As little foundation is there for the report that I am a teacher, and take money; that is no more true than the other. Although, if a man is able to teach, I honor him for being paid.” Socrates relates of a certain teacher named Evenus that he would admire anyone who “really has this wisdom, and teaches at such a modest charge. Had I the same, I should have been very proud and conceited; but the truth is that I have no knowledge of the kind.”

Thus philosophy, on this understanding, cannot be remunerated, because there is no real exchange, at least if this is thought of in terms of the offering of goods or services. Philosophy does not give its adepts a new body of knowledge, but only leads them through a dialectical method that shows what they already knew, or thought they knew, in a new light. There is nothing to sell here, and thus nothing to pay for.

Except that philosophy often does quite a bit more.

More here.

Amardeep Singh in his blog:

Today, then, I want to talk a little about my own experience with ethnic slurs. As you know I am a Sikh, with family from India. I wear a turban and full beard as part of the custom for Sikh men. All of the adult men in my family have worn turbans, going back many generations. Given what has happened on campus this week, I want to talk a little about the damage that can come from ethnic slurs – but also about the strange and sometimes paradoxical thinking that leads them to be uttered in the first place. I will use some personal experiences I have had as examples, but my goal is to use those examples in connection with some general ideas about ethnic and racial slurs on a college campus. This is a personal essay, yes, but it's not really about me.

In the books we have read in this class, slurs have sometimes entered into the story somewhat ambiguously. In T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain, slurs for Mexicans are used but in one instance at least Candido Rincon doesn't read enough English to understand what's being said — though he certainly understands the message since the vandals who spray-painted the words “Beaners Die” on a rock near his makeshift camp also destroyed his personal property. With Henry Park and Chang Rae-Lee’s Native Speaker, we had some discussion about the slur “gook,” that American soldiers coined with reference to the North Koreans they were fighting in the Korean War in the early 1950s. (As we discussed, “gook” would also be applied to other Southeast Asian people, especially the Vietnamese.)

More here.

Blues From a Bull

Like the voom! of a volcano
Molten rocks spew
Lava gushes and flows
Each time the cape floats
He explodes . . .

At every glance
The wild reds bloom.

This, for him, is
Not a thriller, not an entertainment
Not a gamble, nor a crowning escapade
Nor an artistic heirloom of a tradition . . .
For him
This is
Retribution
Revenge
The warzone, the battleground, a life for a life.

He has
No anesthetic gun
No Fabian and Machiavellian tactics
No chaining and pertaining techniques
No forbidding thick walls of a hoosegow
No heavy metal shackles
No VIP corner, No sniper at the ready
No parade music, No crispy-wispy Champaign nights!

He has
Nothing
No . . . thing . . . at . . . all . . . but
his agility as his guardian angel.
His muscles are his vow.
At the tip of his nose
His will to escape gusts like a tornado.

Success or defeat, for him
Exiting through the door of death is always possible . . .

Wild reds in bloom
On his back
On his mind
On his life.
Once and for all,
Today, all the infiltrators
Will be shaken off
Onto this green ring.

Watch out!
His virtue of uprightness is
At the tip of his horns.

by Eaindra
from Eaindra: As if It Were for a Poem
publisher: The Eras, Rangoon/Yangon , 2012
translation: ko ko thett
Poetry International, 2013