From The New Criterion:

In 1750, Jean-Jacques Rousseau won the prize at the Academy of Dijon for his essay answering the set question, “Has the restoration of the arts and sciences had a purifying effect upon morals?” Rousseau’s answer, in what came to be known to posterity as the First Discourse, was a resounding, if also a prolix, No. “Our minds,” said the sage of Geneva, “have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and sciences have improved.” How’s that for challenging expectations? Rousseau excelled at that. Common, unenlightened people might think that the arts and sciences are beneficent because they elevate the spirit and lighten the burdens of everyday life. Rousseau, a beneficiary of centuries of human ingenuity, came to tell them that the arts and sciences are dangerous distractions from virtue, which he urged his readers to pursue with single-minded devotion. “Virtue! Sublime science of simple minds . . . . Are not your principles graven on every heart? Need we do more, to learn your laws, than examine ourselves and listen to the voice of conscience?” In this artfully turned piece of rhetoric, Rousseau disparaged men who “know how to speak” in favor of those who “know how to act aright.” “Let men learn,” he intoned, “that nature would have preserved them from science, as a mother snatches a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child. Let them know that all the secrets she hides are so many evils from which she protects them.”

Take, for example, the art and science of printing, which Rousseau argued was a baneful invention. “The frightful disorders which printing has already caused in Europe,” he wrote in his widely disseminated essay, will convince responsible sovereigns “to banish this dreadful art form from their dominions.” But presumably not until after everyone had had the benefit of reading this bulletin by J.-J. Rousseau.

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David Salle in The New York Review of Books:

After we’re done shaking our heads at what they had to endure, we project onto our long-lived women artists a mystique that’s as old as history—that of the sorceress or the good witch. These women have a secret. We want them to tell us everything, but maybe they don’t want to. If we can gain access to their magical workshop, squeezing through a narrow corridor to find the door, we might be privy to some important mysteries. The veils will be unwound, and finally we will look life in the face and weep for all that was lost to get us here. In her long life, Louise Bourgeois experienced both extremes of the female artist story—marginalization, even invisibility early on, and decades later a fierce and passionate following by younger artists and curators. Her status was based on an independence from fashion, and on calling attention to emotions that most people prefer to keep hidden: shame, disgust, fear of abandonment, jealousy, anger. Occasionally, joy or wonder would surface, like a break in the clouds. But Bourgeois was an artist, not a therapist. Her imagination was tied to forms, and how to make them expressive. Her gift was to represent inchoate and hard-to-grasp feelings in ways that seem direct and unfiltered.

Dylan Scott and Alvin Chang in Vox:

America’s rich have gotten richer for decades, while the middle class and poor have seen meager gains. Since the mid-20th century, the top 1 percent have more than doubled their share of the nation’s income, from less than 10 percent to more than 20 percent.

Donald Trump said he was going fix it — that he would represent the forgotten men and women, the people who had been left behind in this widening of income inequality.

But the tax overhaul his Republican Party passed through the Senate early Saturday morning would make America’s income inequality worse. Maybe a lot worse, economists say.

“The bill is investing heavily in the wealthy and their children — by boosting the value of their stock portfolios, creating new loopholes for them to avoid tax on their labor income, and cutting taxes on massive inheritances,” Lily Batchelder, a New York University professor who worked as an economist under President Barack Obama, said. “At the same time, it leaves low- and middle-income workers with even fewer resources to invest in their children, and increases the number of Americans without health insurance.”

The centerpiece of the Republican tax plan is a massive corporate tax cut, from 35 percent to 20 percent, which is expected to disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

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Joseph Schreiber at The Quarterly Conversation:

Long after he escaped East Germany to settle in the West, where he continued to reside until his death in 2007, Wolfgang Hilbig remained bound to the darkened landscapes of the GDR. He was not one to downplay the bleak and oppressive qualities of life amid the abandoned mines and crumbling factories of his hometown, Meuselwitz, and his dense, swirling prose evokes a world of strange, suffocating beauty. But his emotional attachment to his birthplace and his complicated misgivings about the benefits of reunification, left him forever torn between East and West—a conflict captured clearly in the stories that comprise the second part of the collection The Sleep of the Righteous. By contrast, Old Rendering Plant, the latest Hilbig offering to be released in English, presents a narrative firmly planted in the GDR that does not travel far beyond the immediate environs of the narrator’s home; yet this tightly defined arena affords the perfect space for a multi-layered exploration of one man’s struggle to define himself against the restrictions and expectations imposed by family, class, history, and circumstance.

Wolfgang Hilbig was born in 1941 in Meuselwitz, near Leipzig. His father disappeared at Stalingrad, so he was raised by his mother and grandparents. His illiterate Polish-born grandfather served as an important father figure, encouraging his aptitude for sports. However, as translator Isabel Fargo Cole notes in her afterword to the novel I, his early obsession with reading and writing soon alienated him from his own family.

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Craig Morgan Teicher at the LA Times:

Galway Kinnell was often compared to his favorite poet, Walt Whitman, whose “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Kinnell movingly read aloud every year on the far side of the Brooklyn Bridge at a benefit for the New York poetry library Poets House. Like Whitman, Kinnell — who died in 2014 having won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and a MacArthur, among other honors for books published between the 1960 and 2006 — was a poet of capacious interest in the natural world, profound commitment to social justice, and deep sympathy for the people he saw.

He was a poet of his time, meaning both that he depicts the world, concerns and values of the last third of the 20th century, and that his poems are like those of many of his peers born at the end of the 1920s — A.R. Ammons, Philip Levine, W.S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich — who broke free of the strict formalism of 1950s American poetry to create the more impressionistic, sometimes surreal, nature-focused poetry of the late 1960s and 1970s. For many, Kinnell’s poems are exactly what one thinks of when one thinks of contemporary poetry. All of his books are collected here, along with a handful of late poems. It is impossible to consider the landscape of the last 50 years of American poetry without Kinnell.

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Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

As that suggests, “Ka” is nothing if not syncretic. More than a book of stories nested in stories, it is, as the Skeleton implied, a book about Story. Dar Oakley discovers that he himself is “inside a story, which was also inside him.” The well read will pick up faint echoes and submerged allusions to, for example, Robert Graves’s “The White Goddess,” the Brazilian myths decoded by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the legendary voyages of Saint Brendan, the allegorical visions of William Blake, Native American legends, any number of bird and animal fables, striking lines from Christopher Marlowe and Walt Whitman, and, at one point, wordplay that recalls Wallace Stevens’s famous poem about the snowman who beholds “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

In sum, “Ka” is just the kind of deeply moving, deeply personal “late work” that a great artist sometimes produces at the end of his or her career. I mustn’t, however, close without indicating something of the serene beauty of Crowley’s prose.

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Simon Winchester in The New York Times:

Recently in our household it was stir-up Sunday, the invariably chilly late autumn afternoon when all gather in the kitchen to give the last ritual touches to the making of this year’s Christmas pudding. The fragrant, brandy-soaked mess of fruits will have been readied in its great earthenware bowl, to be steamed in the Aga’s lower oven for 12 full hours. But before then everyone will place a firm hand on the big wooden spoon and together give the mixture a ceremonial last turn, always east to west in honor of the wise men coming to Bethlehem, to add a final dash of quite another kind of spirituality to the booze-sodden ingredients.

The old cookbooks — as Lizzie Collingham reminds us in her joyously delicious account of Britain’s gastronomic influence on the world — employed Christmas recipes like this to offer children a geography lesson. The currants, we were told, were Australian, the raisins from South Africa, the suet from New Zealand. Demerara sugar was shipped in from Barbados, the eggs came from chickens in the Irish Free State. The cinnamon was from Ceylon, the cloves from Zanzibar. There was Malayan nutmeg, Cypriot brandy, Jamaican rum. Only the bread crumbs, the flour and the porter came from home, from England. My mother would buy all these ingredients each Christmas season, invariably at the closest thing to a supermarket in the London suburb where I grew up — which was called, appropriately, The Home and Colonial. It was one of a chain of grocery stores so familiarly central to English life of the 1950s that it came to be memorialized in poetry. John Betjeman, known for his sentimental odes to the ordinary, wrote of his Welsh sylph Myfanwy with a still-remembered stanza: “Smooth down the Avenue glitters the bicycle,/ Black-stockinged legs under navy blue serge/ Home and Colonial, Star, International,/ Balancing bicycle leant on the verge.” Few here in America could imagine the Safeway or the Piggly Wiggly to be deserving of such verse or such sentiment.

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Nancy Fraser in American Affairs:

At first sight, today’s crisis appears to be political. Its most spectacular expression is right here, in the United States: Donald Trump—his election, his presidency, and the contention surrounding it. But there is no shortage of analogues elsewhere: the UK’s Brexit debacle; the waning legitimacy of the European Union and the disintegration of the social-democratic and center-right parties that championed it; the waxing fortunes of racist, anti-immigrant parties throughout northern and east-central Europe; and the upsurge of authoritarian forces, some qualifying as proto-fascist, in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific. Our political crisis, if that’s what it is, is not just American, but global.

What makes that claim plausible is that, notwithstanding their differences, all these phenomena share a common feature. All involve a dramatic weakening, if not a simple breakdown, of the authority of the established political classes and political parties. It is as if masses of people throughout the world had stopped believing in the reigning common sense that underpinned political domination for the last several decades. It is as if they had lost confidence in the bona fides of the elites and were searching for new ideologies, organizations, and leadership. Given the scale of the breakdown, it’s unlikely that this is a coincidence. Let us assume, accordingly, that we face a global political crisis.

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