Vivian Gornick at the New York Times:

It is a truism that every great book survives the literary and cultural conventions of its time and place because the emotional intelligence in it speaks to a reader a hundred years down the road. If I read a Hardy novel, for instance, I ignore the melodramatics — the lost letter, the unexpected storm — because the depth and clarity of Hardy’s understanding carries me well past it. With “Howards End,” I now found I could not get beyond the implausible plot turns; repeatedly, they stopped me in my tracks, even as they seemed to stop Forster himself. When the plot served him least, he gave his characters speeches that were clearly meant to signal his intentions but did not; some inchoateness there that deepened rather than dispelled a lack of clarity. It was as though the writing was speaking in code, the writer’s wisdom operating somewhere behind the prose rather than emerging from it.

Suddenly I realized that I’d been here before. I remembered how struck I was as a student by the sense that something was stirring in the writer that he himself could not work out on the page. At the time, it was this very incapacity that seemed to infuse the novel with mystery and significance. My literary young heart felt something profound afoot, and it knew the thrill of awe and pity. Now, some 40-odd years later, here I was looking once again at the very same conundrum. I no longer found it either profound or mysterious, but yes, it was still delivering awe and pity.

more here.

Barrett Hathcock at The Quarterly Conversation:

Is there a more chastening figure in contemporary American letters than Marilynne Robinson? Is there anyone else who seems, by her small but distinguished oeuvre, to call into question our literary predilections—for Franzonian cultural diagnostics, for confessional self-help, for vast, historical, double-hanky weepers? Or, more generally, is there a writer whose very presence—her unironic devotion to Christianity, her almost creepy level of calm, her spiritual maturity, her belief—undermines our own hectic cultural preoccupations—with Twitter icons, racist presidential candidates, our daily NASDAQ of microaggressions? Perhaps the only person who offers the same level of rebuke to contemporary life is Cormac McCarthy, a kind of grumpy, nihilistic older brother. Together they stand like Easter Island statues, implacable in the bleak gulf stream of our culture.

Which isn’t to say Robinson isn’t any fun. After publishing the almost universally heraldedHousekeeping in 1980 and then becoming something of a modern day Harper Lee, she returned to fiction, like a woken giant, with Gilead in 2004. Since then she has published two more novels in her Gilead trilogy, and they each contain her unassuming, uncondescending sense of magnanimous patience. Reading these novels is not unlike receiving a type of spiritual hug, offered even to the unbelieving.

Her newest book, the collection of essays The Givenness of Things, continues her spiritual exploration even more overtly.

more here.

Duncan Kelly at the Financial Times:

Realpolitik began as an argument about the possibilities of German unification following the European revolutions of 1848. Its originator was August Ludwig von Rochau, a radical who was jailed for his politics as a student, worked in exile as a travel writer, then returned home to Germany to become a political journalist and, eventually, a politician. In 1853 he published Grundsätze der Realpolitik (roughly translated as “Foundations of Realpolitik”), whose arguments applied particularly to the ramshackle confederation of German states. Rochau’s book suggests all the things you might think of when you hear the word Realpolitik: that politics is about power, about manoeuvring coalitions, about social forces (he focused on the rising middle class in Germany) and their capacity to influence politics, and about the power of ideas in shaping political possibilities — though it takes work to pull that out of his convoluted text.

Rochau published a second version of Realpolitik in 1869, now calling for a strong German national-liberal state able to defend itself against Bonapartist tyranny and to extricate itself from its Austro-Hungarian neighbour. It took a powerful Prussia under Otto von Bismarck make that happen — and, when it did, the German chancellor quickly became regarded as a political visionary. For admirers and critics alike, his name became synonymous withRealpolitik. And as Bew suggests, the subsequent story of Realpolitik is really one of how a historically contingent German idea became divorced from its origins, morphing into a polemical term signalling hardheaded realism (as opposed to “moralism”) about politics.

more here.

Richard Spencer in The Telegraph:

China has a strange image in the West. It is seen as remote and not really comprehensible. As such, the things that are strangest about it are sometimes accepted as part of its difference, even defended. The one-child policy is a curiosity; there is a tendency to believe the Chinese government’s claim that however undesirable, it has been necessary: ren tai duo – too many people. The Communist Party says the whole world should be grateful for this self-sacrifice, says it has prevented the births of 400 million people, a number that would have put a strain on not just China’s economic resources but the earth’s environmental ones.

One of the principal merits of this book is Fong’s demolition of this hocus-pocus. She describes in turn the extraordinarily violent methods with which the policy has been enforced, interviewing victims of compulsory sterilisation, forced abortion, and the theft of babies to be sold into adoption; and expert statistical analysis showing that the effect on population has been much less than claimed – most likely 100, or at most 200 million lives not lived, a small percentage of China’s 1.4 billion, hardly worth the suffering.

More here.

Epitaphs

The Auctioneer
Just before the Coffin-Lidder
nails the eternal ceiling on,
tell the next-to-highest-bidder
I am going, going, gone.

The Magician
I pulled a rabbit from my hat,
rejoined the severed ends of flannel;
I left them guessing at all that
then stepped into this secret panel.

La Grande Dame
People would tell me what they’d heard.
I thought their prophecy would miss.
I’d been taught that, in a word,
I was better than all this.

The Writer
Let the devil play the zither.
Let the angels play their harps.
Given choice, I’d rather
leave a corpus than a corpse.

The Weaver
When Clotho says
you’re out of thread,
that’s not what she means.
She means you’re dead.
.

by John Stone
from In All This Rain
Louisiana State Press, 1980
.
.

Helen Fisher in Nautilus:

George Bernard Shaw knew the power of romantic love and attachment. Both, I will maintain, are addictions—wonderful addictions when the relationship is going well; horribly negative addictions when the partnership breaks down. Moreover, these love addictions evolved a long time ago, as Lucy and her relatives and friends roamed the grass of east Africa some 3.2 million years ago.

Take romantic love. Even a happy lover shows all of the characteristics of an addict. Foremost, besotted men and women crave emotional and physical union with their beloved. This craving is a central component of all addictions. Lovers also feel a rush of exhilaration when thinking about him or her, a form of “intoxication.” As their obsession builds, the lover seeks to interact with the beloved more and more, known in addiction literature as “intensification.” They also think obsessively about their beloved, a form of intrusive thinking fundamental to drug dependence. Lovers also distort reality, change their priorities and daily habits to accommodate the beloved, and often do inappropriate, dangerous, or extreme things to remain in contact with or impress this special other.

Even one’s personality can change, known as “affect disturbance.” Indeed, many smitten humans are willing to sacrifice for their sweetheart, even die for him or her. And like addicts who suffer when they can’t get their drug, the lover suffers when apart from the beloved—“separation anxiety.”

Trouble really starts, however, when a lover is rejected. Most abandoned men and women experience the common signs of drug withdrawal, including protest, crying spells, lethargy, anxiety, sleep disturbances (sleeping way too much or way too little), loss of appetite or binge eating, irritability, and chronic loneliness.

Lovers also relapse the way addicts do. Long after the relationship is over, events, people, places, songs, or other external cues associated with the abandoning partner can trigger memories. This sparks a new round of craving, intrusive thinking, compulsive calling, writing, or showing up—all in hopes of rekindling the romance. Because romantic love is regularly associated with a suite of traits linked with all addictions, several psychologists have come to believe that romantic love can potentially become an addiction.

More here.

Rich Yeselson over at Crooked Timber:

A few days ago, Matt Yglesias wrote me an email which asked a great question about American politics and the seeming movement to the left of the Democratic Party. In the wake of Bernie Sander’s landslide victory in New Hampshire over Hillary Clinton, Matt’s question seems even more pressing and interesting. With his permission, I quote it below:

What’s your theory as to how the labor-liberal forces inside the Democratic coalition seem stronger than every (Hillary is now against TPP and facing a fierce challenge from a socialist) even as actual labor unions seem weaker than ever. This is 180 degrees the opposite of the trajectory that I and everyone else were forecasting 10 years ago where either there would be a labor revival (card check, etc.) or else Dems would drift right without an anchor.

Here’s how I responded to Matt, with a bit of editing and revision to convert it from private e-mail prose into something a bit more formal:

One should note, too, regarding the context of your question, Obama’s recent executive orders, which have benefited millions of workers. And, of course, the Sanders campaign. It’s a fascinating thing, isn’t it? I think it’s a case of something about which Marx would have been skeptical: a powerful cultural superstructure constructed on top of an emaciated base which, in turn, becomes grounded in a nascent materiality of its own. Even theorists of the base-superstructure divide like Raymond Williams did not imagine that “residual” cultural formations would influence “emergent” ones without themselves passing through a “dominant” ideological stage—but that seems to have happened here in the case of the “old unionism” presaging a “new laborism” atop a weakened contemporary labor movement. So unions and a kind of union ideology have spawned this laborism even as labor’s own political, cultural and economic power continues to wane. Unions have succeeded not in organizing a greater percentage of workers into union members, but, instead, in organizing a significant sub-sector of the educated elite into becoming advocates for labor: academics and writers, and the students that become not only academics and writers, but also go on to work directly for unions. We also see this dynamic in the organizing drives taking place throughout the “new media” landscape, something I wrote about in TNR last year:

For about 30 years, a goal of the most sophisticated sectors of the labor movement has been to import the talents and commitment of the college educated middle class onto union staffs, and to export, via programs like Union Summer, the Organizing Institute, and organizing campaigns on college campuses, the ethos of unionism to colleges and other precincts of the professional liberal elite. One milestone in this effort, for example was the union-intellectuals conference at Columbia in 1996, for example, which called for an explicit alliance between leftist intellectuals and unions and featured keynote addresses by Betty Friedan, Richard Rorty, and Cornel West and John Sweeney, then president of the AFL-CIO. And this strategy worked!

More here.

Meghan O’Gieblyn in the Boston Review:

There are two kinds of technology critics. On one side are the determinists, who see the history of technology as one of inexorable progress, advancing according to its own Darwinian logic—the wheel, the steam engine, the autonomous car—while humans remain its hapless passengers. It is a fatalistic vision, one even the Luddite can find bewitching. “We do not ride upon the railroad,” Thoreau said, watching the locomotive barrel through his forest retreat. “It rides upon us.” On the opposite side of the tracks lie the social constructivists. They want to know where the train came from, and also, why a train? Why not something else? Constructivists insist that the development of technology is an open process, capable of different outcomes; they are curious about the social and economic forces that shape each invention.

Nowhere is this debate more urgent than on the question of artificial intelligence. Determinists believe all roads lead to the Singularity, a glorious merger between man and machine. Constructivists aren’t so sure: it depends on who’s writing the code. In some sense, the debate about intelligent machines has become a hologram of mortal outcomes—a utopia from one perspective, an apocalypse from another. Conversations about technology are almost always conversations about history. What’s at stake is the trajectory of modernity. Is it marching upward, plunging downward, or bending back on itself? Three new books reckon with this question through the lens of emerging technologies. Taken collectively, they offer a medley of the recurring, and often conflicting, narratives about technology and progress.

While the constructivists have gained ground in scholarly circles in recent decades, a strain of determinism persists, particularly among those most animated about the future. In fact, the determinist history lessons of Ray Kurzweil, Ramez Naam, and Andy Clark seem to have become a token of new books about technology. No exception is Malcolm Gay’s The Brain Electric: The Dramatic High-Tech Race to Merge Man and Machine, which traces the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), electrodes surgically implanted in the brain. In an early chapter, Gay looks to history to assure us that BCIs are merely the latest instance of a very old trend: “In some essential sense, we’ve been enmeshing our lives with tools ever since Homo sapiens emerged from the hominid line some 200,000 years ago.”

More here.

Robert Paxton in The New York Review of Books:

One needs also to ask what the main purpose of resistance was. De Gaulle took a predominantly military view of it. He wanted the movements to prepare a secret underground force within France whose aid to an eventual Allied landing would be so important that France would emerge from the war as a significant power, with Free France as its undisputed ruling force. The general, who always looked ahead, was determined to prevent the German occupation from being replaced by either an American or a Soviet protectorate. But this strategy, in the judgment both of de Gaulle and of the Allies, required the “secret army” to lay low until the Allies arrived.

The Communist Party, by contrast, favored immediate action, to prepare a national revolutionary insurrection at the moment of liberation. But the Party did not come to this position right away. Between the outbreak of the war in September 1939 and the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, the French Communist Party was, as a result of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, a de facto ally of the Germans. Communist propaganda called for fraternization with German soldiers and for immediate peace, since it should not matter to workers whether the Germany of Hitler and the Krupps or the Britain of Churchill and the City won the capitalist duel.

This policy was immensely unpopular with the Communist rank and file, whom Vichy pursued even more vigorously than did the Nazis. The Party could later claim to have resisted Vichy from the beginning, but only some individual Communists engaged in anti-German activity in these early days; their high point was a great strike in the northern coal fields in May 1941. The Communist leaders expected in 1940 to be tolerated by the Germans, and notoriously tried to publish their newspaper L’Humanité in occupied Paris.

More here.

Hussein Ibish at The Baffler:

There’s an especially bitter irony in Sade’s image as a cheap pornographer: he was not in any recognizable sense creating pornography at all—nor can he be neatly pigeonholed into any other literary tradition. Sade was an astonishingly prolific writer who produced an enormous oeuvre covering a huge variety of genres. Much of it is mediocre to the point of being unreadable, particularly his conventionally sentimental or comedic dramas and stories. There seems little doubt that without his notorious “libertine novels,” most notably Justine, Juliette,Philosophy in the Boudoir and, especially since its rediscovery in the early twentieth century, 120 Days of Sodom, Sade would have been quickly forgotten. Instead, these works, and a few others, have assured him of a profound—albeit highly contested and unstable—artistic and intellectual influence.

Because of the centrality of his erotic novels to his legacy, later critics have often caricatured Sade as not only a pornographer, but as the arch-pornographer, representing either the worst or the best of the genre. But this is deeply misleading. Insofar as pornography is a commodity of mass-marketed and stylized representations of sexual practices, Sade is better seen as an anti-pornographer. His work is unquestionably obscene, and transgressive in the extreme, but its impact is neither conventionally pornographic nor erotic. Although much of his fiction bears a great deal of similarity to the Gothic novel genre (of which he was a noted and serious critic), his best work, in the “libertine” series of fiction, is sui generis.

more here.

Pablo Calvi at The Believer:

There’s a steel vein running through the Andes from east to west, a warm, hollow line that sucks out the guts of the jungle, four hundred thousand oil barrels at a time. It is known as SOTE (Sistema de Oleoductos Transecuatoriano), but for those who live close to it, the roughly three-hundred-mile-long pipeline serves more immediate purposes. María de los Ángeles Criollo uses SOTE, which can reach body-heat temperatures, to keep her chickens warm at night. Lilia Melendres has turned the pipe into a TV stand.

Thick as a young kapok tree, the pipeline slinks along the Papallacta highway, twines around the Great Divide, scales the freezing heights of the páramo, near the Virgin of Our Lady of the Moors, and drains in a delirious gush into coastal Ecuador, a chemical reflux resurrecting the route first opened by conquistador Francisco de Orellana, who starved along with an army of forty-nine men in his attempt to reach the golden city of El Dorado. Although for most of its trajectory the pipeline creeps belowground, now and then its rusted spine surfaces to lurk under the sun, resting on a silent skeleton of H-shaped metallic trestles.

Between 1972 and 1974, SOTE spilled more than one hundred fifty thousand barrels of poisonous crude over untouched territories in the northern Amazonia and the Andes, the Ecuadorian rivers and the coast—and that was just one quarter of what it would eventually hemorrhage over the next four decades.

more here.

Michael Burleigh at Literary Review:

Books on resource wars are ten a penny and usually focus on oil or water conflicts. David Abraham’s attractively written book is unusual because it deals with commodities lurking in plain sight within cars, planes, fibre-optic cables, structural steels, LED lights, cameras, computers, televisions, MRI scanners, military night-vision goggles, missile guidance systems and smart phones – the rare metals.

Take niobium. When Gustave Eiffel built the tower that bears his name, he needed seven thousand tons of steel. With the addition of a pinch of niobium to each ton of steel, a modern replica could be built using five thousand tons fewer. A Boeing 747 has six million components per plane, including about seventy earth metals, such as rhenium, which enables jet engines to run at high temperatures, and titanium, which lightens the fuselage. Both of these reduce the amount of aviation fuel burned.

With little exaggeration Abraham speaks of ‘a war to control the periodic table’, for these ninety-four naturally occurring elements are not evenly distributed and they have very obvious military applications. For example, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is like a flying periodic table, containing 920 pounds of beryllium, gallium, lithium and tantalum, not to mention the titanium used for a quarter of the airframe.

more here.

Why

—After Faiz Ahmed Faiz's Kuttey

.
Not even dogs
Go as quietly as these men

Battered and bruised
Idle and begging
Homeless and hearthless
Stabbing each other for scraps
Starving in silence

Why

What myth is it
That keeps you
Divided
Amongst yourselves
That keeps you
Blind
To your strength
.

by Anjum Altaf
.
.

Nika Knight interviews Brian Boyd in Guernica:

The author on what evolutionary science can teach us about art and literature, his enduring interest in Nabokov, and why a good joke never dies.

Why do we tell stories? According to Brian Boyd, author and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Auckland, evolutionary science has the answer. In On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, published in 2009, Boyd argues that recent advances in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology can help us not only to better understand our greatest and most enduring works of art, but also to make an empirical claim for their importance. “An evolutionary understanding of human nature has begun to reshape psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, economics, history, political studies, linguistics, law, and religion,” Boyd writes. “Can it also help explain even art, even human minds at their freest and most inventive?” Boyd defines art as “cognitive play with pattern,” characterizing a piece of artwork as “like a playground for the mind.” Our urge to play—shared with all mammals—is not a waste of energy or a simple frivolity but, in fact, a seminal method by which we ensure our own survival. Fictional narratives, Boyd claims, lend insight into how others experience the world, and thus aid in establishing and developing our capacity for empathy, a necessary precursor to cooperation—an ability not only unique to humans but also critical to our continuity as a species.

More here.

Vinson Cunningham in The New York Times:

On an unnervingly balmy November day, the scene at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn was restless and expectant. Ta-Nehisi Coates was scheduled to appear on campus for a discussion about his best-selling book, ‘‘Between the World and Me.’’ Evers has a student body that is over 80 percent black, and interest in the event was palpable. Outside, on Bedford Avenue, a diasporic survey of music — reggae, soca, R.&B., trap — flew out the windows of rusted sedans as a slow parade of students filed into the building: a group of young men in near-identical oxfords and knit ties; a woman in a knee-length camouflage hoodie, black tights and Timberland boots; kids wearing mohawks, flattops, cornrows and uncountable Afros. Coates was running late, and the director of the school’s Center for Black Literature, a stocky man with yellow-brown skin, closely cropped hair and a heather gray goatee, was worried about the time. He turned to the man standing next to him: Chris Jackson, Coates’s book editor. ‘‘When do you think he’ll get here?’’ he asked. ‘‘We set up a greenroom for him to relax and have some water before the talk, but we’ve only got so much time.’’

‘‘He’s . . . ’’ Jackson said, trailing off. ‘‘He’s on his way. He had a thing right before this, and he’s got a thing right after. It’s crazy these days.’’ That was perhaps an understatement. That year, Coates won a MacArthur ‘‘genius’’ grant, was tapped to write a new installment of Marvel’s ‘‘Black Panther’’ comic series and saw ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ nominated for the National Book Award. Coates’s book — and his ongoing tour of the country to promote it — was the latest peak in Jackson’s career. Over the last decade and a half, Jackson has ushered into being the works of category-defying novelists like Victor LaValle and Mat Johnson, polemicist-experientialists like Coates and the civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson and pop-cultural vanguardists like the chef-memoirist Eddie Huang and the rapper-entrepreneur Jay Z. To the extent that 21st-century literary audiences have been introduced to the realities and absurdities born of the phenomenon of race in America, Jackson has done a disproportionate amount of that introducing.

More here. (Note: At least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month throughout February)

Nicola Twilley in The New Yorker:

Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light, releasing great shudders of gravitational energy. Space and time became distorted, like water at a rolling boil. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. As it smoothed itself out, assuming the shape of a slightly flattened sphere, a few last quivers of energy escaped. Then space and time became silent again.

The waves rippled outward in every direction, weakening as they went. On Earth, dinosaurs arose, evolved, and went extinct. The waves kept going. About fifty thousand years ago, they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo sapiens were beginning to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet’s dominant species of ape. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the species, predicted the waves’ existence, inspiring decades of speculation and fruitless searching. Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth.

More here.