Jeffrey Zuckerman at The Quarterly Conversation:

The novels of J. M. Ledgard are, as he says in an interview with Philip Gourevitch, “an attempt at what I would call planetary writing.” In the shadow of “global novels” that only hint at an astonishingly interconnected world, it comes as a pleasant surprise to see that word: planetary. It seems scientific, but not clinical. Certainly not milquetoast nature writing: “it’s more political, more discarnate.” More conscious, perhaps, of the hundreds of forces that drive the visible world.

It is the planet we live on, more than any human consciousness or ambition, that anchors the two slim novels of J. M. Ledgard—Giraffe, which was acclaimed upon its 2006 publication, and Submergence, which despite its greater stature has been slower in finding an Anglophone audience since its British publication in 2011. Ledgard, who was born on the chilly Shetland Islands, has spent much of his working life writing forThe Economist and has been stationed thousands of miles away as a foreign correspondent in western America, central Europe, central Asia, and eastern Africa. It comes as no surprise, then, that Giraffe and Submergence owe their prose to the direct (and at times detail-dense) style of magazine reportage, nor that they’re set in various corners of the world—Kenya, France, the Czech Republic, Somalia. These books are every bit as cosmopolitan as their author.

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Tim Dee at The Guardian:

Halfway through this book, John Lewis-Stempel writes about a midsummer day he spent hand-scything a meadow on his farm in Herefordshire. He looks up and, surveying the scene, says: “Almost all the things I love are to do with grass. Geese, sheep, cows, horses. Even dogs eat grass.” On the same page he mentions two great farm-working poets, Robert Frostand John Clare, who found poems in the fields. “There is nothing,” he writes, “like working land for growing and reaping lines of prose.” And then, once again, he stoops to his tools until interrupted by a brown vole that tries to flee the scythe by running up his leg. The hay cutters “of yore”, he adds, tied string around their ankles to foil such rodent adventures.

Against the odds (agribusiness, the common agricultural policy, foot-and-mouth disease, bovine TB, the near extinction of the skylark and the lapwing), the pastoral is alive and (sort of) well in British letters. Western writing has been drawn to lines of mowers strung across a field since the first poems of Greece and, among the cutting men, there have long been those who went to mow seeking something other than a swath of useful drying grass. Pastoral literature grew up in fields such as Lewis-Stempel's and he joins an unlikely but distinctive parade of scythe-wielding, haymaking writers from the last 100 years that includes Tolstoy, DH Lawrence, John Fowles, John Berger, Ted Hughes and even, briefly, Franz Kafka.

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Barbara Kingsolver in The New York Times:

“What Is Visible,” a fictional biography, opens with two disparate glimpses of one life. A year before her death, elderly Laura Bridgman meets a busy-handed child named Helen Keller. Next we witness a much earlier historic encounter when Laura, at 12, meets Charles Dickens. The elder Laura is grumpy; the adolescent loops between self-aggrandizement and epic self-doubt. We’re asked to forgive all, because of circumstances more dire than any invented by Dickens or borne by Keller. As a baby, Laura suffered an illness that took her sight, hearing, and senses of smell and taste.

Historical fiction may be the literary equivalent of cilantro; consumers tend to love or hate it irrationally, and rare is the artist who can rally a conversion. I’m of the former persuasion, keen for the surprise bits of fact that shake out of a well-researched story. The first-time novelist Kimberly Elkins has done her job here, giving the reader to know how the doilies on furniture arms earned the bizarre name “antimacassars”; that Braille was a French invention initially condemned by some American educators of the blind; that relations between congressional adversaries have been worse than they are now. (In 1856, on the Senate floor, Representative Preston Brooks beat Senator Charles Sumner nearly to death with his cane.) The novel dishes up dirt on a pantheon of 19th-century heroes of civil reform, including Samuel Gridley Howe, Julia Ward Howe, Sumner and Dorothea Dix. And it revives the memory of a forgotten public figure: 50 years before Helen Keller there really was a Laura Bridgman.

More here.

Sarah Jeong in The Guardian:

Paul Krugman snorts up crushed Adderall and re-reads Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Inequality in America is at an all-time high. The golden age of Keynesianism has dissolved into darkness. But no cadre of plutocrats can keep me or Thomas Piketty in check and holy shit I feel like a fucking champion right now.

Some may allege errors in Piketty's work, but their assertions are inherently fallacious. You see, I can out-analyze you with one hand tied behind my back while pacing frantically back and forth trying to pronounce Piketty's name while dry-mouthed. Pik-etty. Piketty Piketty Piketty Piketty.

Irregular data? I'll show you irregular. Feel my fucking heartbeat.

I'd hardly go so far as to claim that a certain columnist at the Financial Times is a lapdog for the oligarchic elite. But his irresponsible claims have been trumpeted throughout the media, despite fundamental fucking flaws in his data analysis … GOD I want to SHOUT at the TOP OF MY LUNGS RIGHT NOW.

Cui bono? The oligarchs. As I already told you, in 2008.

Hey, who wants to run down the street and jack Larry Summers's car?

More here.

Nivedita Majumdar in Jacobin:

Jhumpa Lahiri does not like to be categorized as an immigrant writer, and her latest novel, The Lowland, is her strongest argument against that pigeonhole. Her discomfort with the label is understandable. After all, she has refreshingly little in common with diasporic writers like Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, or Chitra Divakaruni. Unlike them, she does not brandish her immigrant status as an epistemologically superior vantage point, nor is she anxious to prove herself as a worthy native informant. Her writing is free of the exotic.

A second-generation immigrant, she is firmly grounded in the culture in which she was raised. Yet, growing up with parents for whom home would always be elsewhere, she gets the immigrant experience, especially its melancholia. Of what she knows, she writes masterfully. Indeed, prior to The Lowland, her fiction has been almost exclusively an engagement with immigrant angst in its many hues.

For The Lowland, partly set in Calcutta in the sixties and seventies, during the throes of the Maoist Naxalite movement, her ambitions are of a different order. She steps out of the sphere of navel-gazing immigrant fiction and frames the novel with a political movement of which she has no experiential knowledge.

More here.

Amar Sindhu in Herald:

Fahmida Raiz, writer, human rights activist and the author of more than 15 books on fiction and poetry, has always remained at the centre of controversies. When Badan Dareeda, her second collection of verse, appeared, she was accused of using erotic and sensual expressions in her poetry. The themes prevalent in her verse were, until then, considered taboo for women writers. The feminist scholarship and women’s movement, however, not only acknowledged her expressions but welcomed them with applause. Riaz was also faced with challenges due to her political ideology. More than 10 cases were filed against her during General Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship. She was forced into exile during the same regime, only to return to Pakistan after Haq’s death in 1988. The poems from her collection Apna Jurm Sabit Hae are politically charged and reflect the torment her homeland experienced under dictatorship. In terms of using creative expression for political discourse, Riaz stands among literary greats such as Nazim Hikmet, Pablu Neruda, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Following are excerpts of a conversation she had with Herald on her literary journey and issues confronting Pakistan’s literati.

Amar Sindhu: Does creativity need ideology?

Fahmida Riaz: Once creativity expands beyond the very personal, almost biological paradigms, it seeks some ground to stand upon. Creativity is very often rooted in some idea. Our folk songs and stories do not seem to be ideological but they seem to have ideas, when looked at closely. The question of ideology is raised mostly in the context of progressive literature that sees individuals in a web of external circumstances and class conflicts. Literary creativity does not have to emanate from this consciousness, nor does this consciousness hamper creativity. In the 20th century, great writers such as Pablo Neruda, Paul Nizan, Nazim Hikmet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Gabriel García Márquez declared themselves to be Marxists. An artist like Pablo Picasso, who revolutionised the world of painting, was a member of the Communist party of France. On the other hand, two literary giants before these writers, Leo Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, saw the individual and the society in the context of Christian teachings and sought the answers of all human problems in Christ. You may notice, though, that too was a kind of ideology.

More here.

Shane Parrish in Farnam Street:

In March of 1933, Eudora Welty, then 23 and looking for writing work, sent this beautiful letter to the offices of The New Yorker. “It’s difficult,” writes Shaun Usher in his introduction to the letter in Letters of Note, “to imagine a more endearingly written introduction to one’s talents.”

March 15, 1933

Gentlemen,

I suppose you’d be more interested in even a sleight-o’-hand trick than you’d be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can’t have the thing you want most.

I am 23 years old, six weeks on the loose in N.Y. However, I was a New Yorker for a whole year in 1930– 31 while attending advertising classes in Columbia’s School of Business. Actually I am a southerner, from Mississippi, the nation’s most backward state. Ramifications include Walter H. Page, who, unluckily for me, is no longer connected with Doubleday-Page, which is no longer Doubleday-Page, even. I have a B.A. (’ 29) from the University of Wisconsin, where I majored in English without a care in the world. For the last eighteen months I was languishing in my own office in a radio station in Jackson, Miss., writing continuities, dramas, mule feed advertisements, santa claus talks, and life insurance playlets; now I have given that up.

As to what I might do for you— I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15¢ movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment, I think; in fact, I recently coined a general word for Matisse’s pictures after seeing his latest at the Marie Harriman: concubineapple. That shows you how my mind works—quick, and away from the point. I read simply voraciously, and can drum up an opinion afterwards.

More here.

Evan DeFilippis in the Boston Review:

After his son Christopher was gunned down near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara on May 23, Richard Martinez sounded what has become a famous plea.

“Why did Chris die?” he asked, choking back tears. “Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the [National Rifle Association]. They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live?” He went on, “When will this insanity stop? . . . We don’t have to live like this.”

In response to Martinez’s impassioned appeal for gun control, the cavalcade of bumper-sticker slogans rolled in—“guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” “control criminals, not guns,” “don’t punish law abiding citizens,” and so on.

The NRA has been silent on the shooting, as is its usual media strategy following high-profile gun violence. But we know its position: the solution to gun violence is always more guns.

Thus the express goal of the NRA and other pro-gun groups is to promote the concealed carrying of firearms on college campuses. As the NRA puts it, “Colleges rely on colorful ‘no gun’ signs, foolishly expecting compliance from psychopaths.”

To this end, the NRA and state legislators are pushing guns at every level of schooling. The lobby backed a new Indiana law that allows guns on school property, so long as they are contained within parked cars.“Teachers have to leave their 2nd Amendment rights at the front door when they go to work,” said Indiana Senator Brent Steele, explaining why he supported the measure, in spite of the fact that the courts have never wavered on the constitutionality of gun bans on school property.

More here.

Zoe Williams in The Guardian:

It is a mark of where we are in our political discourse that even to say “neoclassical economics is not the only school” seems radical. This is where Ha-Joon Chang starts, in a book that is more sober and less effervescent than his bestselling 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, but is just as page-turning.

Since no single economic theory has beaten the others, it follows, Chang writes, that there is no objective truth on which every economist is agreed. Economics can never be a science in the way that physics is; it cannot reach a consensus on its fundamental questions, let alone what the answers are. This isn't some extended handwringing, a trashing of his discipline dressed up as a mea culpa. Chang isn't looking for a formula: fundamentally, he argues, economics is politics. As such, we shouldn't be thinking in terms of an ideal answer – the discussion should never close.

If there is a sense in which economics has “failed”, Chang argues, it is not because it should have “predicted” the crash and the disasters of the last seven years, nor for thoseKrugmanian reasons that range the state against the market, regulation against self-interest, cooperation against moral hazard. Rather, we are witnessing a failure of plurality. Our current landscape has been created by the acceptance of a few core principles – the individual as perfectly selfish, perfectly rational, able to create perfect markets by acting in her own interests; we have ignored plausible competing theories and have suffered for it.

More here.

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

Midway through my maiden visit to the derelict Domino Sugar refinery near the Williamsburg Bridge, while gaping in awe at Kara Walker’s great gaudy monstrosity, her towering naked sphinx with the head scarf and features of a black mammy, I had something like a vision. That’s the crazy comical power Walker’s best work can have. Particularly this work, elliptically and archaically titled A Subtlety: Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the ­demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. This behemoth, part Cecil B. ­DeMille parade float, part alien, is accompanied by a retinue of life-size deformed black figures, boys carrying bananas or baskets with parts of other boys, all made from molasses and brown sugar.

I imagined this mad theatrical 35-ton thing—more than 35 feet high and 75 feet long, fashioned in refined white sugar over blocks of Styrofoam—pulled across the United States by the crew of misshapen brown attendants. I saw its ambiguous anarchic meanings, its otherness, stunning all who saw it. I fancied this an American ghost ship, never coming to rest until … what? I don’t know.

more here.

Ryan Ruby at n+1:

It’s hard not to be sympathetic to the majority of the European population that doesn’t show up to the polls, whether out of discontent or apathy. The inherent logistical difficulties of coordinating the opinions and interests of more than a half a billion people in almost thirty countries who speak over twenty languages notwithstanding, the EU has never done a good job of erasing the so-called “democracy deficit” between it and its citizens.

The reason for this is partially historical. The EU doesn’t have its origins in popular movements, but in an expanding series of trade and travel liberalizations undertaken over the heads of the people by ministerial elites from the large Western European nations over a period of fifty years. However integrationist they may be on principle, the heads of the member states jealously guard their decision-making prerogatives, meaning that at best a European citizen’s relationship to EU legislation remains largely indirect, mediated by his or her national citizenship and national identity.

more here.

Sam Stephenson at The Paris Review:

“Trane” might as well have come from Krypton. The man “John Coltrane” is hard to locate in other people’s memories today, or in the existing studio or club recordings of his music, which document the known pinnacles, not the fits and starts and hours and years of rigor and anxieties. A list of facts doesn’t help much, either: his formative years in North Carolina are difficult to excavate and easy to summarize or skip over. Plus, the iconographic mid-century jazz photography makes Coltrane look seven feet tall (a 1947 Naval photograph shows him to be under five-foot-ten, a normal-size man). The legend is overwhelming.

Distance, distraction, and apathy make the devastating chaos of the 1960s and early seventies difficult to feel today, too. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. The Vietnam War was going nowhere. The country was on fire, literally in some places, and reactionary forces clamped down, creating a weird climate of both chaos and torpor. In the 1972 presidential election, the sitting president, Nixon, carried forty-nine states.

more here.

Jonathan Gottschall in Seed:

Why do some people pay a 100,000 percent premium for a Rolex when a Timex is such a sleek and efficient timepiece? Why do others kill themselves at work just so they can get there in a Lexus? Why do we pay 1,000 times more for designer bottles of water when the stuff that gushes from our taps is safer (because it’s more regulated), often tastier, and better for the planet? And how do we convince ourselves that more stuff equals more happiness, when all the research shows that it doesn’t? In Spent, University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller contends that marketing—the jet fuel of unrestrained consumerism—“is the most dominant force in human culture,” and thus the most powerful shaper of life on Earth. Using vivid, evocative language, Miller suggests that consumerism is the sea of modern life and we are the plankton—helplessly tumbled and swirled by forces we can feel but not understand. Miller aims to penetrate to the evolutionary wellsprings of consumerist mania, and to show how it is possible to live lives that are more sustainable, more sane, and more satisfying.

Spent is about “display” consumerism. It leaves aside strictly utilitarian purchases like baloney or tampons. Understanding display consumerism, according to Miller, requires adding one part Thorstein Veblen to one part Darwin. From Veblen’s classic Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Miller appropriates the concept of “conspicuous consumption,” whereby people live and spend wastefully just to flaunt the fact that they can. From Darwin, Miller appropriates sexual selection theory—“costly signaling theory” in modern parlance—whereby animals compete by sending signals of their underlying genetic quality. As with the gaudy displays of peacocks, purchasing decisions frequently represent attempts to advertise “fundamental biological virtues” like “bodily traits of health, fitness, fertility, youth, and attractiveness, and mental traits of intelligence and personality.” Why spend $160,000 on a prestigious university degree? To make a “narcissistic self-display” of one’s intelligence and diligence. Why stuff yourself into a push-up bra and smear pigment across your lips and cheekbones? To try to enhance—or fake—your fertility signals.

More here.

Songbirds

There are songbirds
That live near-by
Whom I count as friends
& will sing goodbye
When I go down the road
And out of town

To this flock
This I ask
Sing high
Sing low
Continue to swoop, dart
Chase & play
Until you too, must go

No need to follow
My feathery friends
It is okay
This, my fate
Perhaps somewhere
Other songbirds wait.
.

by Terry McLarnan

H. A. Hellyer in Foreign Policy:

Egyptians moved their clocks forward an hour a couple of weeks ago following a decision by the country's new rulers to reinstitute daylight saving time, which had been eliminated following Hosni Mubarak's ouster in 2011. For the rather embattled group of revolutionaries who reject the domination of both the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, this inspired a joke: “They are taking away the revolution's only lasting achievement!” It's dark humor, to be sure, but humor in itself can be something quite potent — and to some in Cairo, quite threatening.

Egypt just got a rude wake-up call about that fact. On Monday, Bassem Youssef — the man described as Egypt's “Jon Stewart,” who ran a program gleefully satirizing the country's predominant political narrative —announced that his show was, at least for now, over. The program, calledEl-Bernameg, had already been forced to suspend shooting a few weeks ago, under the pretext that it would unduly influence Egyptian voters in the run-up to the Egyptian presidential election in late May. Of course, all other television shows — including those that unapologetically tried to politically influence viewers — were left untouched. The program was nevertheless due to return on Friday, May 30 — but didn't.

This is the second time Youssef has stopped airing his program.

More here.

Mike Rose in the Boston Review:

It is early in the morning on a hazy Southern California day, and students are walking or riding old bicycles into the community college campus, headed for 7:00 a.m. classes in English or math, nursing or automotive technology. The college is packed into twenty-five acres on the economically depressed periphery of the city’s thriving financial core, and it draws on one of the poorest populations in the area. Men sleep under newspapers and blankets in doorways right outside the school. One block away a line is already forming along the wall of a social service agency. The short, bare walkway into the campus is for many a luminous road into another world.

This college could serve as ground zero for Suzanne Mettler’s important new book Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream, which analyzes diminishing postsecondary educational opportunity over the past thirty years, particularly for students in the lower half of the income distribution. If they are not deterred from attending college, students face soaring tuition, inadequate financial aid, and increased debt. To make matters worse, most states have been slashing higher education budgets, forcing colleges to offer fewer classes and services. That trend is beginning to reverse, though spending still is below what it was a decade ago.

Mettler explains how this came to be: how our extreme political partisanship and the increasing influence of big money have contributed to this mess.

More here.

The following was adapted from a commencement speech delivered to the Independent Concentrators of Brown University at their diploma ceremony on Sunday, May 25, 2014, in Providence, Rhode Island. Miriam Markowitz is deputy literary editor of The Nation.

Miriam Markowitz in The Nation:

Dear graduates,

Standing here, looking at you today, I am in awe. Not of your accomplishments, which I believe are many, or your character, which I’ve no doubt is stalwart and true, but at the thing I can see with my own eyes: your youth.

Seriously, I’m impressed. Which can only mean one thing: I’m old.

I mean, not that old, just a decade further along than you lot. But at 32, a few centuries ago I’d be middle-aged, or older. Maybe close to dead. Now that 30 is the new 20—or something like that, I don’t know—there’s a lot of confusion these days about whom we consider “adults” and who are “just kids.” So let’s say, for now, that because I am standing at this lectern, having been asked to dispense some words of wisdom about life going forward, that I am an adult. And I am going to do one of the things adults like doing best: I’m going to talk at you.

By that I mean I’m going to tell you a story, and I’m hoping that it won’t be a boring one. It isn’t supposed to be, according to conventional wisdom, because it’s a story about what many adults would say is your favorite subject: yourselves.

More here.