Virginia Woolf in Berfrois:

The man was Coleridge as De Quincey saw him, standing in a gateway. For it is vain to put the single word Coleridge at the head of a page — Coleridge the innumerable, the mutable, the atmospheric; Coleridge who is part of Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley; of his age and of our own; Coleridge whose written words fill hundreds of pages and overflow innumerable margins; whose spoken words still reverberate, so that as we enter his radius he seems not a man, but a swarm, a cloud, a buzz of words, darting this way and that, clustering, quivering and hanging suspended. So little of this can be caught in any reader’s net that it is well before we become dazed in the labyrinth of what we call Coleridge to have a clear picture before us — the picture of a man standing at a gate:

That was in 1807. Coleridge was already incapable of movement. The Kendal black drop had robbed him of his will. “You bid me rouse myself — go, bid a man paralytic in both arms rub them briskly together.” The arms already hung flabby at his side; he was powerless to raise them. But the disease which paralysed his will left his mind unfettered. In proportion as he became incapable of action, he became capable of feeling. As he stood at the gate his vast expanse of being was a passive target for innumerable arrows, all of them sharp, many of them poisoned. To confess, to analyse, to describe was the only alleviation of his appalling torture — the prisoner’s only means of escape.

Thus there shapes itself in the volumes of Coleridge’s letters an immense mass of quivering matter, as if the swarm had attached itself to a bough and hung there pendent. Sentences roll like drops down a pane, drop collecting drop, but when they reach the bottom, the pane is smeared.

More here.

The Little Vagabond

But if at the Church they would give us some Ale.
And a pleasant fire, our souls to regale;
We'd sing and we'd pray, all the live-long day;
Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray,

Then the Parson might preach & drink & sing.
And we'd be as happy as birds in the spring:
And modest dame Lurch, who is always at Church,
Would not have bandy children nor fasting nor birch.

And God like a father rejoicing to see,
His children as pleasant and happy as he:
Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel
But kiss him & give him both drink and apparel.
.

by William Blake (1757-1827)
from Songs of Innocence and Experience
Dover Thrift Editions

Alice Gregory in The Atlantic:

My husband and I got married last fall because we wanted to have a party. I doubt our friends, our family, or anybody else we know would have been surprised if we’d never done it at all: if we had continued living together, loving each other, one day having children, all without exchanging rings. The wedding was ideal—great cake, accessible by subway—but our life didn’t change after it was over. It never occurred to us that I would take his name; I didn’t want to (and didn’t) get pregnant. We live in the same small Brooklyn apartment we’d lived in before, and our finances are still only haphazardly half-combined. We weren’t expecting that our affection would either grow or diminish, and it hasn’t. Getting married wasn’t a romantic leap; neither was it merely, or even mostly, a pragmatic step. Whatever it was—delightfully unnecessary wrapping on an already very good present, perhaps—we made sure that there was more than plenty to drink. We represent the demographic (white, heterosexual, college-educated) that looked poised to lead an exodus from marriage and its fusty shackles as the family-values debate raged. But now, when data suggest that fewer Americans—across the income spectrum—are getting married than ever before, our cohort is playing the opposite role. We are the group most likely to wed, as marriage rates among lower-income men and women without college degrees rapidly decline. We’re also among those who count least on the symbolic and actual benefits of the institution: my husband and I aren’t battling for social validation of our love or for the conditions of middle-class stability.

…Arriving not just at the peak of wedding season but also amid this newly vocal worry over the marriage gap, The Marriage Book: Centuries of Advice, Inspiration, and Cautionary Tales From Adam and Eve to Zoloft is an especially well-timed counterpoint to all the earnest, alarmist policy talk. Scaled for an oversize Restoration Hardware coffee table, the glossy anthology presumes to be preaching to a converted, yet far from reverent, audience: readers ready to examine, from an amused anthropological distance, the best, worst, and most equivocal aspects of marriage. The book’s editors, the long-wedded writers Lisa Grunwald and Stephen Adler, aren’t wringing their hands over a cultural crisis or a precarious social rite, or trying to hammer out a marriage-promotion agenda. Rather, their trove of artifacts, collected over six years, is a revelation of the resilience, persistence, and capaciousness of, to quote Gabriel García Márquez, “the conjugal conspiracy.”

More here.

Claire Cain Miller in The New York Times:

Hiring and recruiting might seem like some of the least likely jobs to be automated. The whole process seems to need human skills that computers lack, like making conversation and reading social cues. But people have biases and predilections. They make hiring decisions, often unconsciously, based on similarities that have nothing to do with the job requirements — like whether an applicant has a friend in common, went to the same school or likes the same sports. That is one reason researchers say traditional job searches are broken. The question is how to make them better. A new wave of start-ups — including Gild, Entelo, Textio, Doxa and GapJumpers — is trying various ways to automate hiring. They say that software can do the job more effectively and efficiently than people can. Many people are beginning to buy into the idea. Established headhunting firms like Korn Ferry are incorporating algorithms into their work, too.

If they succeed, they say, hiring could become faster and less expensive, and their data could lead recruiters to more highly skilled people who are better matches for their companies. Another potential result: a more diverse workplace. The software relies on data to surface candidates from a wide variety of places and match their skills to the job requirements, free of human biases. “Every company vets its own way, by schools or companies on résumés,” said Sheeroy Desai, co-founder and chief executive of Gild, which makes software for the entire hiring process. “It can be predictive, but the problem is it is biased. They’re dismissing tons and tons of qualified people.”

More here.

George Soros in the New York Review of Books (Pete Souza/White House):

International cooperation is in decline both in the political and financial spheres. The UN has failed to address any of the major conflicts since the end of the cold war; the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference left a sour aftertaste; the World Trade Organization hasn’t concluded a major trade round since 1994. The International Monetary Fund’s legitimacy is increasingly questioned because of its outdated governance, and the G20, which emerged during the financial crisis of 2008 as a potentially powerful instrument of international cooperation, seems to have lost its way. In all areas, national, sectarian, business, and other special interests take precedence over the common interest. This trend has now reached a point where instead of a global order we have to speak of global disorder.

In the political sphere local conflicts fester and multiply. Taken individually these conflicts could possibly be solved but they tend to be interconnected and the losers in one conflict tend to become the spoilers in others. For instance, the Syrian crisis deteriorated when Putin’s Russia and the Iranian government came to Bashar al-Assad’s rescue, each for its own reasons. Saudi Arabia provided the seed money forISIS and Iran instigated the Houthi rebellion in Yemen to retaliate against Saudi Arabia. Bibi Netanyahu tried to turn the US Congress against the nuclear treaty the US was negotiating with Iran. There are just too many conflicts for international public opinion to exert a positive influence.

In the financial sphere the Bretton Woods institutions—the IMF and the World Bank—have lost their monopoly position. Under Chinese leadership, a parallel set of institutions is emerging. Will they be in conflict or will they find a way to cooperate? Since the financial and the political spheres are also interconnected, the future course of history will greatly depend on how China tackles its economic transition from investment and export-led growth to greater dependence on domestic demand, and how the US reacts to it. A strategic partnership between the US and China could prevent the evolution of two power blocks that may be drawn into military conflict.

More here.

Jaime Lowe in the NYT Magazine (photo by Olaf Otto Becker):

The manila folder is full of faded faxes. The top sheet contains a brief description of my first medically confirmed manic episode, more than 20 years ago, when I was admitted as a teenager to U.C.L.A.’s Neuropsychiatric Institute: “Increased psychomotor rate, decreased need for sleep (about two to three hours a night), racing thoughts and paranoid ideation regarding her parents following her and watching her, as well as taping the phone calls that she was making.”

I believed I had special powers, the report noted; I knew ‘‘when the end of the world was coming due to toxic substances’’ and felt that I was the only one who could stop it. There was also an account of my elaborate academic sponsorship plan so I could afford to attend Yale — some corporation would pay for a year of education in exchange for labor or repayment down the line. (Another grand delusion. I was a B-plus student, at best.)

After I was admitted to the institute's adolescent ward, I thought the nurses and doctors and therapists were trying to poison me. So was the TV in the rec room. I warned my one friend in the ward that its rays were trying to kill him. The generator outside my window was pumping in gas. The place, I was sure, was a death camp.

I refused meds because they were obviously agents of annihilation. It took four orderlies to medicate me: They pinned me to the floor while a nurse plunged a syringe into my left hip. Over time, I became too tired to refuse medication. Or perhaps the cocktail of antipsychotics started working. The Dixie cup full of pills included lithium, which slowly took hold of my mania. After a few weeks, I stopped whispering to the other patients that we were all about to be killed. Eventually, I stopped believing it myself.

More here.

Randy Kennedy at The New York Times:

THE chief virtue of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” G. K. Chesterton once wrote, was Lewis Carroll’s celebration of flux, an escape “into a world where things are not fixed horribly in an eternal appropriateness, where apples grow on pear-trees, and any odd man you meet may have three legs.”

But for the generations that have surrounded the Alice tales with a fiercely protective love, the attraction of such mutability might not extend to the book itself and its sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass.” Consider the following nightmarish alternate universe: An author with the starchy pen name of Edgar Cuthwellis publishes a book with the flat-footed title “Alice’s Doings in Elf-Land,” or maybe the slightly less awkward but still pedestrian “Alice Among the Goblins.” His later book includes a mock-tragic ballad not about a walrus and a carpenter but about a walrus and a butterfly. Or maybe a baronet. Does a baronet sound better?

The Morgan Library & Museum’s captivating “Alice: 150 Years of Wonderland,” which opens on Friday as the newest entry in the crowded worldwide celebration of the 1865 publication of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” tells these kinds of unsettlingly Carrollian stories about the making of the stories Carroll began spinning for the three Liddell sisters — Lorina, Edith and Alice — on that famous Friday afternoon rowing trip up the Thames in 1862.

more here.

Chris Clarke at The Quarterly Conversation:

Sphinx is a typical love story only in the way that it’s the tale of two people who have fallen in love, and things don’t go smoothly. Beyond that, there is something drastically different going on here. I’m afraid I’ll have to let the cat out of the bag: as reader, you have no idea of the gender of either half of this romantic equation. This information is artfully withheld by the author (and again in English by the translator, Emma Ramadan). While explaining the constraint at play is necessary to us for the purposes of this review, I’ll refrain from a full-out spoiler by not unveiling the final solution to the enigma. In Sphinx, which is told in the first-person, there are two principal characters. I, the genderless “me” of the narrator, and the object of this person’s desire, A***. It can take a little while to notice; as in some literary works, this sort of descriptive information is released gradually, over time, but eventually it becomes clear that we are missing a detail that we are not used to going without. Eventually the Oulipian constraint becomes not only evident but demandingly so. Is the narrator a man or a woman? What about A***? Is this a gay couple? Straight? Unconsciously mimicking the division of which the reader is beginning to become hyper-aware, the act of reading is also split in two. Or, if you read like me, in three. First, the love story goes on. Beautifully, musically, and tragically. Second, the hunt for hints or clues that will solve this riddle becomes equally important. And third, curiosity and wonderment at the craftsmanship involved in concealing such a simple detail.

more here.

David L. Ulin at the LA Times:

I'm a walker in the city. For me, the sidewalk is the cornerstone of urban life. In my Los Angeles neighborhood, I go days without getting in a car, walking to the bank, the dry cleaner, the grocery store, strolling the streets in the late summer evenings, watching the sky turn purple, black.

We think of cities as anonymous, as sprawling — and they are. But they are also private, intimate, landscapes suspended between loneliness and community. This is what urban walking offers, a way to navigate the boundary between ourselves as individuals and part of the collective: city as identity.

Such an interplay sits at the center of Victor Hussenot’s beautiful, ethereal “The Spectators” (Nobrow: 96 pp., $22.95), a graphic novel — or is it? — about city walking, city haunting, all the ways the metropolis can get beneath our skins. The city here is Paris; Hussenot is a French artist who has published three books in his native country, although this is the first to appear in the United States.

There is no story per se, just a series of riffs, imaginative leaps. “Each of us,” he observes in a prologue, “sees the city in our own way .… From the rift between sleep and waking bursts of lights .… The mind’s eye is set free .… The invisible is revealed.”

more here.

Monolith
.

At the foot of a northern pylon of the Harbour Bridge 
I have kept my vigil since the mighty span was built. 
I come early in the day from worn-out corners of the area 
and sit when the sun is out until the waning afternoon, 
thence to another role, another manifestation of duty. 
On my way I pass a cavern echoing with traffic noise. 
When the sun is setting it blazes up like a testing tunnel 
of the cosmic fire at the beginning and ending of universes. 
It reminds me we are not that far in time from a kalpa’s ending. 
More than four thousand million years in the lives 
of the starry and the planetary entities 
who influence us and are never truly seen. 
At the pylon’s base I meet with seeming fools and sages, 
more of the former, alas, but it was ever the same 
at the other Thebes. The great towering stone columns could fittingly house 
the troglodytic priests and harbour an inward turning flame 
in bifurcated flowering for the known and unknown god 
and my own dilapidated dispensation. 
The only way the scene differs now  
is in the lack of overt piety, 
the thinning out of conscious pilgrims passing by me 
here upon the seasonally withered grass.

by Bruce Beaver
from Charmed Lives
University of Queensland Press, St Lucia QLD, 1988

Aisha Harris in Slate:

From Science Daily:

When rats rest, their brains simulate journeys to a desired future such as a tasty treat. Researchers monitored brain activity in rats, first as the animals viewed food in a location they could not reach, then as they rested in a separate chamber, and finally as they were allowed to walk to the food. The activity of specialized brain cells involved in navigation suggested that during the rest the rats simulated walking to and from food that they had been unable to reach. The study, published in the open access journal eLife, could help to explain why some people with damage to a part of the brain called the hippocampus are unable to imagine the future.

“During exploration, mammals rapidly form a map of the environment in their hippocampus,” says senior author Dr Hugo Spiers (UCL Experimental Psychology). “During sleep or rest, the hippocampus replays journeys through this map which may help strengthen the memory. It has been speculated that such replay might form the content of dreams. Whether or not rats experience this brain activity as dreams is still unclear, as we would need to ask them to be sure! Our new results show that during rest the hippocampus also constructs fragments of a future yet to happen. Because the rat and human hippocampus are similar, this may explain why patients with damage to their hippocampus struggle to imagine future events.”

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

A cancer drug that boosts the lifespan of fruit flies is the latest addition to a small roster of compounds shown to lengthen life — although none has yet been proven in humans. Trametinib (Mekinist), which was developed by the London-based pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline, is already used to treat advanced melanoma. It extends the lifespan of adult fruit flies by about 12%, although the later in life the drug is started, the less effect it has, says Linda Partridge, a geneticist at University College London and the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne, Germany, who led the work. Her team’s research is reported on 25 June in Cell¹. But Partridge cautions against rushing to take trametinib in search of a longer life. “That would be mad,” she says. “We just don’t know enough about the long-term consequences.”

Trametinib’s effects are connected to a biochemical pathway controlled by a family of proteins collectively called Ras which seem to be important to both cancer and ageing. They are activated when cells need to grow and proliferate, for example to replace damaged tissue. Mutations in the proteins are associated with cancer — which has led to a decades-long pursuit of drugs that target Ras. At the same time, Ras proteins are involved in other pathways that have been firmly linked to ageing. In yeast, deleting a gene for Ras extends lifespan², notes Valter Longo, director of the University of Southern California’s Longevity Institute in Los Angeles. And Partridge’s team showed that trametinib’s benefits in fruit flies depended on suppressing a pathway regulated by Ras. Flies genetically modified to have this pathway permanently switched on did not live longer on trametinib.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Hilton Kramer, longtime chief art critic for the New York Times, was never a shy man, at least in print. He thought of art criticism as a battle. There was a war, as Kramer saw it, between good art and bad art or – maybe more crucially – between art and non-art. Kramer saw himself as a warrior on the side of Art and The Good. In this war, it did not pay to be nice.

Reviewing an exhibit at the Whitney Museum by the young artist Richard Tuttle in 1975, Hilton Kramer wrote, “To Mies van der Rohe’s famous dictum that less is more, the art of Richard Tuttle offers definitive refutation. For in Mr. Tuttle’s work, less is unmistakably less.”

Among Tuttle’s works that Kramer hated were wire pieces from the early 1970s. Here’s what Tuttle does to make a wire piece. First, he enters into a meditative state. He considers the nature of the line he is about to draw, in pencil, on the wall. Then, he draws a line in one fluid motion. Next, he takes a length of florist wire (thin, flexible wire) and tacks one end of the wire to the end of the line he just drew. Then, he unspools a length of wire and tacks the other end of the wire back to the wall where the line terminates. The wire dangles and bends and assumes its own shape. Then, there are two elements: a two-dimensional line drawn on a wall, and a three-dimensional length of wire that hangs, semi-sculpturally, off the wall. Actually, there are three elements, since the wire casts a subtle shadow.

More here.

Andrew Sullivan over at The Daily Dish:

As Gandhi never quite said,

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.

I remember one of the first TV debates I had on the then-strange question of civil marriage for gay couples. It was Crossfire, as I recall, and Gary Bauer’s response to my rather earnest argument after my TNR cover-story on the matter was laughter. “This is the loopiest idea ever to come down the pike,” he joked. “Why are we even discussing it?”

Those were isolating days. A young fellow named Evan Wolfson who had written a dissertation on the subject in 1983 got in touch, and the world immediately felt less lonely. Then a breakthrough in Hawaii, where the state supreme court ruled for marriage equality on gender equality grounds. No gay group had agreed to support the case, which was regarded at best as hopeless and at worst, a recipe for a massive backlash. A local straight attorney from the ACLU, Dan Foley, took it up instead, one of many straight men and women who helped make this happen. And when we won, and got our first fact on the ground, we indeed faced exactly that backlash and all the major gay rights groups refused to spend a dime on protecting the breakthrough … and we lost.

In fact, we lost and lost and lost again. Much of the gay left was deeply suspicious of this conservative-sounding reform; two thirds of the country were opposed; the religious right saw in the issue a unique opportunity for political leverage – and over time, they put state constitutional amendments against marriage equality on the ballot in countless states, and won every time. Our allies deserted us. The Clintons embraced the Defense of Marriage Act, and their Justice Department declared that DOMA was in no way unconstitutional the morning some of us were testifying against it on Capitol Hill. For his part, president George W. Bush subsequently went even further and embraced the Federal Marriage Amendment to permanently ensure second-class citizenship for gay people in America. Those were dark, dark days.

I recall all this now simply to rebut the entire line of being “on the right side of history.”

More here.

Rubén Martínez in the LA Review of Books:

HEYBELIADA, Turkey: On the eve of the release of Pope Francis’s historic encyclical on climate change, I sat in a conference room with windows that offered a view across the Sea of Marmara toward the skyscrapers, mosques, and ancient Christian churches of Istanbul, fabled crossroads between East and West, or, if you prefer, between the developed world and the “global south.” It was a fitting site for the Halki Summit II called by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, who has long been known as the “green patriarch” for his commitment to environmentalism. Among the few dozen delegates were theologians, environmentalists, and artists of various disciplines, the majority hailing from Great Britain and the United States (the conference was co-sponsored by Southern New Hampshire University), with a sprinkling from other continents. Our charge? To cultivate a connection between, as the summit’s subtitle put it, “Theology, Ecology, and the Word” in the context of the fight against climate change.

One would expect that a gathering convened by an august personality such as the patriarch would hold to punctilious form. It did, for a while. And then the two keynoting Terrys — American naturalist and feminist author Terry Tempest Williams and everyone’s favorite British Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton — took center stage in consecutive addresses that revealed a deep divide in a gathering where everyone was nominally on the same ideological team. The fissures, of language and culture, of experience and discipline, highlighted the challenges in bringing not just a few conferees into some semblance of order, but of reeling in disparate actors on a global stage into a cohesive movement that joins (as Francis’s Laudato Si’ does) moral, scientific, political, and even aesthetic authority.

More here.

Over at the New York Times, “Must a book review take the form of prose — or can it be pure image? For this first art-themed issue of the Book Review, five pathbreaking contemporary artists create visual works of literary criticism, paying homage to the inspiration they’ve found in fiction, philosophy and poetry.”

Wangechi Mutu on “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy

I read Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things” many, many years ago, at a time when I was considering the idea of what home meant to me. I’d been away from home for over a decade, and yet wasn’t used to being away, was deeply homesick, missing my birth home and rethinking what family meant. I was completing my M.F.A. in sculpture at Yale University and was thinking about belonging, transience and sacrifice. I found myself working through the very large imprint made on my psyche by this book: a story of a family in India that reads like a metaphor for the entire dysfunction and history of a country. Through this, I began to piece together personal narratives to reflect larger stories about a people and their trauma. This book helped me reflect on how important the personal experience is in describing the shared, and even the universal.

More here.

Peter Brown at Lapham's Quarterly:

When Christians of late antiquity thought of religious giving, they went back to what for them was the beginning—to the words of Jesus. The words of Jesus to the Rich Young Man described a transfer of “treasure” from earth to heaven: “Jesus said to him, ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.’ ”

Jesus repeated this challenge to his disciples: “Sell your possessions and give alms; provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys.”

The transfer of treasure from earth to heaven was also current in Jewish circles. In the Jerusalem Talmud of the late fourth century, there is a story about King Monobazos, the Jewish king of Adiabene on the Euphrates. He was said to have spent his fortune providing food for the poor in Jerusalem. His infuriated relatives accused him of living up to his name, which was derived from the word bazaz—“to plunder.” Monobazos was plundering his earthly inheritance. He answered them: “My fathers laid up treasure for below, but I have laid up treasures for above. They laid up treasures in a place over which the hand of man may prevail: I in a place over which no hand can prevail.”

more here.

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

Clay reappeared in the art world about ten years ago. Long disparaged as a craft material, it was — like the demeaned paper silhouette that Kara Walker excavated in the early 1990s — something artists turned to in reaction to the processed, slick Jeff Koons–Damien Hirst movement toward jobbing art out to production teams. Clay represented a way to retake ancient territory and techniques and redefine skill with less expensive, labor-intensive, malleable material that takes on aspects of the body. Unlike the navel-gazing, marketable Zombie Formalists, who have also defined themselves by their unslickness, artists who turned to clay and papier-mâché weren’t making tame-looking art about art. Not only does worked clay show the traces of its making; it’s a tremendous support for painting, twisted, smooth, shaped, with insides and outsides, battered, eternally hard but always liquid-looking. Surprises of glazing are built in, the way surprise is built into painting. Women instinctively understood clay as unprotected territory, as they’d seen photography in the early 1980s — something no one cared about, and thus available. Hutchins, Huma Bhabha, Sterling Ruby, Shio Kusaka, Sarah Lucas, and others have made ceramics almost as ubiquitous in galleries as painting and sculpture. Glazed clay is so sexy that it’s become a gateway material for other “lesser” processes, like weaving and embroidery.

Hutchins was a standout in Francesco Bonami’s 2010 Whitney Biennial, notable in part for showcasing more women than men — hallelujah! By then, she’d shown in New York, fantastically, for a decade.

more here.