Daniel Green at The Quarterly Conversation:

Friedman’s work is most often considered as a contribution to the emergence of “black humor” in American fiction, but his first novel, Stern (1962), could at the time have easily enough been regarded as absurdist, an existential comedy about the angst of Jewish assimilation. The novel’s title character finds himself in alien territory—the American suburbs—confused and beset by a series of humiliations he struggles to understand. The story of his misadventures is funny, but in the way the plays of Beckett and Ionesco are funny, in a detached and deadpan manner that can also be disconcerting. The same is true of Friedman’s second novel, A Mother’s Kisses (1964), although here the subject, a meddling Jewish mother, is more conventionally “comedic” in its overtones. In this novel the humor comes from the straight-faced way in which the narrator relates his mother’s speech and actions, as if it is simply expected in the ordinary course of things for a mother to say outrageous and embarrassing things and behave erratically enough that she would fly with her son to Kansas on his first day of college and remain with him for several weeks as he adjusts to the place, staying in a hotel room the two occupy together.

By the time Friedman published A Mother’s Kisses, this sort of unadulterated comedy delivered in an impassive tone had come to be called black humor. Indeed, Friedman himself edited an influential anthology of black humor fiction that did much to delineate and draw attention to this newly prominent mode of fiction (not literally new, since Friedman traces it as far back as Gogol, and one of the included writers is Céline). Friedman doesn’t insist on too strict a definition of black humor, just that “the work under discussion, if not black, is some fairly dark-hued color,” while “the humor part of the definition is probably accurate although I doubt that the writers are bluff and hearty joke-tellers who spend a lot of time at discotheques.”

more here.

Jackie Wullschlager at the Financial Times:

When Joseph Mallord William Turner told a friend that “no one would believe, upon seeing my likeness, that I painted those pictures”, he pinpointed the tragic irony that would jinx every presentation of his life and work.

Turner is still outwitting his stalkers. His secrecy, and embarrassment about his crudeness, has always forced either a defensive blandness — AJ Finberg, author of the standard 20th-century life, concluded that Turner was “a very uninteresting man” — or a sensationalising prurience. The two new biographers here try to escape the traps, mostly by amplifying historical context; neither wholly succeeds.

more here.

Robert Fisk in The Independent:

The Near East School of Theology in Beirut is housed in a bland grey and brown building near the Mediterranean Sea. A few days ago, the audience in its underground lecture theatre was witness to one of the most remarkable lectures on ancient and modern Islam in recent times, which – had it been more widely advertised – might have had just about every shade of religious protester huffing and puffing outside in the aptly named Jeanne D’Arc Street. The speaker was Dr Tarif Khalidi, one of Islam’s foremost scholars and translator of the latest English-language edition of the Koran, whose earlier works on Jesus in Muslim stories match his most recent anthology of Arab literature. The title of his address was an almost frightening world-beater: Does Islam need a Martin Luther? Khalidi’s short answer was “yes, please”, the more Luthers the merrier – despite Luther’s violent indictment of Islam. It wasn’t clear whom Luther disliked more, the terrible Turk or the terrible Pope, and if you’ve got to shake up any religion you might as well do it “in as wonderful a cascade of rhetoric as his”.

Khalidi recalled Lucretius’ castigation of all religions – “to so much evil can religion urge mankind” – and evil was all too obvious these days. It was obvious in all monotheistic religions, Khalidi insisted, “among certain so-called fundamentalist and apocalyptic sects in the US, among racist and fundamentalist settlers in Israel, among Daesh [Isis] and other horrifying groups in our own immediate neighbourhood.” Khalidi, a generously-bearded Palestinian who talks English with TS Eliot precision, called all this the “Age of Dis-enlightenment”, which should move us to study “how and why religions can from time to time get lost, and mistake the road to heaven for the road to hell.” Every 100 years in Islamic history, Khalidi observed, a renewer of faith – a mujaddid – would arise to breathe new life into the religion. The two “great wings” of Islam began their careers as reform movements, the Sunnis emphasising the importance of the unity of the community, the Shias emphasising the integrity of government, each splintering of these wings a form of reconstruction which now appear “like two great trees with numerous branches”.

And the most urgent task today? To “unpack” the ideas of Isis and to show how and why “its path leads to hell”.

More here.

John Freeman interviews the writer at Literary Hub:

Annie Proulx is 80 years old and still not sure where she belongs. Standing in the atrium of her home in the Snoqualmie Valley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist eyes a photograph of the cottage she once occupied in Newfoundland, the setting of her 1993 novel, The Shipping News. “I fell in love with that landscape,” Proulx says, speaking in the tone of a woman describing an ex-lover.

“But ultimately, I did not belong there.”

After 20 years in Wyoming—several spent building a dream home she later sold—Proulx had a similar epiphany about that state. As she did about Vermont, and Texas, and New Mexico, and any number of places where she has lived. In an age of itinerary writer-teachers, Proulx’s boomerangs back and forth across North America are exceptional.

Now she’s made a similar discovery of the wooded idyll east of Seattle.

For months Proulx struggled to figure out why she was having reactions to foods she typically ate. At last she learned she was allergic to red cedar, the trees that rise up fragrantly around her house. Proulx laughs as she describes this, partly out of annoyance, but also because she moved to this home to finish her massive and extraordinary new masterpiece, Barkskins, a novel about climate change and landscape in which one of the book’s central characters is the forest itself.

More here.

From the MIT Technology Review:

Back in 1995, Kurt Vonnegut gave a lecture in which he described his theory about the shapes of stories. In the process, he plotted several examples on a blackboard. “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers,” he said. “They are beautiful shapes.” The video is available on YouTube.

Vonnegut was representing in graphical form an idea that writers have explored for centuries—that stories follow emotional arcs, that these arcs can have different shapes, and that some shapes are better suited to storytelling than others.

Vonnegut mapped out several arcs in his lecture. These include the simple arc encapsulating “man falls into hole, man gets out of hole” and the more complex one of “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.”

Vonnegut is not alone in attempting to categorize stories into types, although he was probably the first to do it in graphical form. Aristotle was at it over 2,000 years before him, and many others have followed in his footsteps.

However, there is little agreement on the number of different emotional arcs that arise in stories or their shape. Estimates vary from three basic patterns to more than 30. But there is little in the way of scientific evidence to favor one number over another.

Today, that changes thanks to the work of Andrew Reagan at the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont in Burlington and a few pals. These guys have used sentiment analysis to map the emotional arcs of over 1,700 stories and then used data-mining techniques to reveal the most common arcs. “We find a set of six core trajectories which form the building blocks of complex narratives,” they say.

More here.

From Dawn:

Born to a family of traders in Gujarat, Mr Edhi arrived in Pakistan in 1947.

The state’s failure to help his struggling family care for his mother – paralysed and suffering from mental health issues – was his painful and decisive turning point towards philanthropy.

In the sticky streets in the heart of Karachi, Mr Edhi, full of idealism and hope, opened his first clinic in 1951. “Social welfare was my vocation, I had to free it,” he says in his autobiography, ‘A Mirror To The Blind’.

Motivated by a spiritual quest for justice, over the years Mr Edhi and his team created maternity wards, morgues, orphanages, shelters and homes for the elderly – all aimed at helping those who cannot help themselves.

The most prominent symbols of the foundation – its 1,500 ambulances – are deployed with unusual efficiency to the scene of terrorist attacks that tear through the country with devastating regularity.

More here.

Jeff Sparrow at Sydney Review of Books:

‘Robeson’s sterling success on athletic battlefields,’ says Horne, ‘unsettled the rudiments of white cum male supremacy, paving the way for desegregation.’ Robeson came to agree. In the fifties, when he wrote his memoirs, he consciously exaggerated his own physical clashes on the football field. As he explained to his son, ‘it’s good and healthy in today’s America for white people who view me as their favourite Negro to understand that I might deliberately kill a lyncher.’

In 1940 Robeson sang a tribute (with music by Count Basie and lyrics by Richard Wright) to the legendary fighter Joe Louis. As Mike Marqusee says, ‘King Joe’ presents Louis as ‘a creation of black America’ – a political as well as sporting hero.

But that all came later. In the twenties, the young Robeson was appalled at the invitation he take up prize-fighting, a sport associated with thuggish criminality. ‘I would have done anything rather than that,’ he later said. ‘Anything!’ Yet he soon encountered the restrictions that Ali spoke of, the racist boundaries limiting the options of talented African Americans. Though he graduated with a legal degree from Columbia, he abandoned his practice when a stenographer told him, ‘I never take dictation from a nigger’.

more here.

Charlie Fox at Cabinet Magazine:

On the afternoon of Christmas Day 1956, in a snow-covered field on the outskirts of the small Swiss town of Herisau, some children and their dog discovered the body of a dead man, hand clutched tight to his stilled heart. It was the writer Robert Walser, who had died that day, aged seventy-eight, while out walking far from the mental institution where he had dwelled for the previous two decades. A photograph taken by his friend Carl Seelig shows the body at rest, left arm thrown out as in the style of a sleeper midway through a restless night, while two shadowy figures at the margins look on. The sorrow of the scene is rather gently assuaged by the odd fact that Walser’s hat, perhaps moved by a breeze, lies at a modest distance from his body, as if it has leapt off his head to cartoonishly express surprise at its owner’s death. A few distant trees squeeze into the top of the frame like awkward mourners paying their respects. The snow, even on the ground but for a few shaggy lumps close to his boots, appears at first to be nothing more than a dazzling absence, as if the dead Walser were floating on a white winter sky.

In his essay on Walser, William H. Gass takes the perspective of one of those marginal witnesses and studies the photograph as a peculiar abstraction: “I like to think the field he fell in was as smoothly white as writing paper. There his figure … could pretend to be a word—not a statement, not a query, not an exclamation—but a word, unassertive and nearly illegible, squeezed into smallness by a cramped hand.”⁶ Another photograph of the scene by Seelig taken from a different angle reveals the fateful trail of footprints—the only other marks in the snow. Examine them with a Gass-like slant and they become an ellipsis on this near-blank page, trailing away from a last, unfinished thought.

more here.

Claus Leggewie at Eurozine:

To label Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and its like-minded European counterparts “populists” is gradually to trivialize the true nature of these parties. Populists traditionally feed upon the opposition between the “big nobs” and “the people”, on the alienation of the wider population from career politicians, top managers and opinion leaders. Such antielitist movements came into existence in the nineteenth century. In America and Russia respectively, the People's Party and Narodniks mobilized against the powerful and the people's representatives who pursued politics as a profession. Then came the Peronists and Chavistas in South America, followed by tax rebels like Mogens Glistrup, who attracted protest votes in 1970s Scandinavia and who considered the welfare state too expensive. And, lastly, there came the sceptics who consider both the euro and the EU (that is, the Brussels bureaucrats) to be fundamentally flawed and mistrust The Beltway (Washington DC).

Inherent to the groupings of people united against the powers that be was always the exclusion of people who apparently did not belong – from the Know Nothings in the United States who railed against Catholic immigrants and Asians to today's indiscriminate haters of Islam who fear for the Christian West even if they have never set foot in a place of worship themselves, or are simply hooligans. Along these lines, nationalist populists distinguish themselves from social reformers, which in today's America means: xenophobic supporters of Donald Trump who want to chuck out Muslims and Mexicans, as distinct from supporters of Bernie Sanders who make the case for social justice independent of skin colour and religion.

more here.

Kali Holloway in AlterNet:

The first thing Lavish Reynolds did after a police officer shot her boyfriend multiple times was pick up her cellphone and start livestreaming to Facebook. I am hung up on this detail, and I keep coming back to it. It is not so much the start of a horrific story, but a critical element of the story itself—of Philando Castile’s brutal murder by police, and of what it means to be black in America. By this I mean that Lavish Reynolds, like all black folks in these United States, knew the drill. We have long been aware that to tell the personal stories of police brutality, even when there are unarmed black bodies and citizen eyewitnesses, means nothing. In the last few years, cellphones have made it possible to document the truth that black people have begged this country to acknowledge about the terror carried out by police against our communities. Even that has not brought justice. Television networks have learned that footage of black death is a reliable ratings booster, a loopable backdrop for news reporters more concerned with criminalizing the dead than the shooter. It does not erase racism from our justice system, and it does not bring about convictions of police officers. But shoving black death in the face of white America is often the only hope of inspiring outrage, and so we continue to film.

If you have seen the video, you should recognize the danger Reynolds faced as she held her phone, speaking into it, describing the scene. An agitated cop is screaming at her, pointing a gun at her as he yells. It is the same gun he has just unloaded into her loved one, who sits barely a foot from her; the same gun he fired into a car despite the fact that it contains her 4-year-old daughter, who is in the back seat. Her boyfriend’s shirt is soaked with blood, his moans audible as life leaves him. It is astounding to watch Reynolds' composure in these seconds, as she carefully responds to the cop’s shouted instructions while ensuring that every second goes out live. That she chose, or had the wherewithal in those terrifying minutes, to Facebook Live stream what was happening instead of merely recording it is important, too. Reynolds created a real-time S.O.S. that went out to her network of friends and family, one that couldn't possibly be erased by authorities later. This was an act of resistance and a necessary safeguard; possibly the only way to ensure the violence didn’t go any further by using the only means most of us have to police the police. And yet just as easily, a reason they might have used to justify another death.

More here.

Julie Gould in Nature:

On the morning of Tom Marshall's PhD defence, he put on the suit he had bought for the occasion and climbed onto the stage in front of a 50-strong audience, including his parents and 6 examiners. He gave a 15-minute-long presentation, then faced an hour of cross-examination about his past 5 years of neuroscience research at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. A lot was at stake: this oral examination would determine whether he passed or failed. “At the one-hour mark someone came in, banged a stick on the floor and said 'hora est',” says Marshall — the ceremonial call that his time was up. “But I couldn't. I had enjoyed the whole experience far too much, and ended up talking for a few extra minutes.” Marshall's elaborate, public PhD assessment is very different from that faced by Kelsie Long, an Earth-sciences PhD candidate at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. Her PhD will be assessed solely on her written thesis, which will be mailed off to examiners and returned with comments. She will do a public presentation of her work later this year, but it won't affect her final result. “It almost feels like a rite of passage,” she says.

PhDs are assessed in very different ways around the world. Almost all involve a written thesis, but those come in many forms. In the United Kingdom, they are usually monographs, long explanations of a student's work; in Scandinavia, science students typically top-and-tail a series of their publications. The accompanying oral examination — also called a viva voce or defence — can be a public lecture, a private discussion or not happen at all. There is wide variation across disciplines and from one institution to the next. “It is a complicated world in doctoral education. One format does not fit all,” says Maresi Nerad, founding director of the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education at the University of Washington in Seattle. This isn't necessarily a problem in itself, but some researchers worry that the decades-old doctoral assessment system is showing strain. Time-pressured examiners sometimes lack training and preparation for PhD assessments, which can lead to lack of rigour. “Two or three examiners come together to go through the thesis in a perfunctory way. They tick the boxes, everyone is happy, and then a PhD walks away,” says Jeremy Farrar, director of the biomedical research charity the Wellcome Trust in London.

More here.

THEN AY KNOW

THEN AY KNOW my horse,
let alive and out of days,
hide now paled, hind legs slow
to drag, lower head to lift,
hoof-split, burred and rough from the dirt.

Strange when Ay speak to him.
Tremble runs under him.
What owned him fills him.

Same horse Ay tamed are you the same?
Mane-tangled, lank, and under brow,
hims eye as from a coal half-burnt
sparked up. Ay pulled my body on-

start, rear, run-
and did not loose but stormed and shaken
held as leaf to stem. Sky could hear
the finding cry Ay made.

by Joan Houlihan
from AY
Tupelo Press, 2014
.

Eliott C. McLaughlin at CNN:

by Ali Eteraz

There is Yazid in every man able to instruct a slaughter.
There is a gun in every hand but ‪#‎blacklivesmatter‬.

In the Land of Or is there a messiah to articulate an And?
Even when every saint is a policeman, #blacklivesmatter.

The ashes of my coal are blown away by rancor.
What is the flavor I smoke to make #blacklivesmatter.

When every scream is a highway built by tears.
Is there a song I can sing to make #blacklivesmatter.

Eteraz has no theology to fix bereavement, America.
No howl is hot enough when black lives don’t matter.

Zack Kopplin in The Daily Beast:

Abdullah Muflahi sat on a beer cooler inside the Triple S Food Mart and described what it was like to watch police kill his friend.

“It was a nightmare, it was a nightmare,” Muflahi, the owner of this small convenience store, told The Daily Beast over and over. “I kept expecting to wake up.”

Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, was standing in the parking lot selling CDs as he had for years when two white cops arrived on Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning he was dead and protesters were in the city’s streets. Calls erupted from Congress and the NAACP for an independent investigation into the shooting, which the Justice Department announced within hours.

More here.

Aziza Barnes in Winter Tangerine:

bijan been dead 11 months & my blue margin reduced to arterial. there’s a party at my house, a house held by legislation vocabulary & trill. but hell, it’s ours & it sparkle on the corner of view park, a channel of blk electric. danny wants to walk to the ledge up the block, & we an open river of flex: we know what time it is. on the ledge, folk give up neck & dismantle grey navigation for some slice of body. it’s june. it’s what we do.

walk down the middle of our road, & given view park, a lining of dubois’ 10th, a jack n jill feast, & good blk area, it be our road. we own it. I’m sayin’ with money. our milk neighbors, collaborate in the happy task of surveillance. they new. they pivot function. they call the khaki uniforms. i swift. review the architecture of desire spun clean, & I could see how we all look like ghosts.

3 squad cars roll up at my door & it’s a fucking joke cuz exactly no squad cars rolled up to the mcdonald’s bijan was shot at & exactly no squad cars rolled up to find the murders & exactly no one did what could be categorized as they “job,” depending on how you define time spent for money earned for property & it didn’t make me feel like I could see less of the gun in her holster because she was blk & short & a woman, too. she go,

“this your house?”
I say, “yea.” she go,
“can you prove it?”

Continue reading this poem here.

Bo Winegard with Ben Winegard and Brian Boutwell in Quillette:

Most people believe that race exists. They believe that Denzel Washington is an African American, that George Clooney is a Caucasian, and that George Takei is an Asian.* Many intellectuals, however, contend that this belief results from an illusion as dangerous as it is compelling. “Just as the sun appears to orbit the earth”, so too do humans appear to belong to distinct and easily identifiable groups. But, underneath this appearance, the reality of human genetic variation is complicated and inconsistent with standard, socially constructed racial categories. This is often touted as cause for celebration. All humans are really African under the skin; and human diversity, however salient it may appear, is actually remarkably superficial. Therefore racism is based on a misperception of reality and is as untrue as it is deplorable.

With appropriate qualifications, however, we will argue that most people are correct: race exists. And although genetic analyses have shown that human variation is complicated, standard racial categories are not arbitrary social constructions. Rather, they correspond to real genetic differences among human populations. Furthermore, we believe that scientists can and should study this variation without fear of censure or obloquy. Racism isn’t wrong because there aren’t races; it is wrong because it violates basic human decency and modern moral ideals. In fact, pinning a message of tolerance to the claim that all humans are essentially the same underneath the skin is dangerous. It suggests that if there were real differences, racism would be justified. This is bad science and worse morality. Promoting a tolerant, cosmopolitan society doesn’t require denying basic facts about the world. It requires putting in the hard work and effort to support the legal equality and moral dignity of all humans.

More here.