Michael Taeckens in Poets & Writers:

Laila Lalami is well known for her extraordinary fiction; she is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (Algonquin Books, 2005), Secret Son (Algonquin Books, 2009), and The Moor’s Account (Pantheon, 2014), the most recent of which appeared on the longlist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and was named a finalist for that year’s Pulitzer Prize. But she is equally well known for her sagacious literary criticism and writings on politics and culture. Over the past thirteen years she has written book reviews for a wide array of outlets, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe. Lalami reviewed fiction and nonfiction for the Nation from 2005 to 2016, at which point she started writing the Between the Lines column for the magazine. Since 2016 she’s also been a critic-at-large—along with nine other writers, including Alexander Chee, Marlon James, and Viet Thanh Nguyen—for the Los Angeles Times, where she writes mostly about the literary life. Lalami, who was born in Rabat, Morocco, and educated there as well as in Great Britain and the United States, is likewise highly regarded because of her popular literary blog, Moorish Girl, which she launched in 2001 and, after the publication of Secret Son, folded into her website, lailalalami.com. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of California in Riverside. You can follow her on Twitter, @LailaLalami.

You got your start writing for the Oregonian in 2005, reviewing books by Reza Aslan, Luis Alberto Urrea, Salman Rushdie, and Zadie Smith. What path led you to literary criticism, and how did that relationship with theOregonian begin?

At the time I had just moved to Portland from Los Angeles and was working on my first collection of short stories. It was a lonely time in my life—I knew perhaps two or three people in the entire city—so the book section of the Oregonian became a kind of conversation I missed having about books. I also had a literary blog where I wrote about stories or novels I was reading, and that helped me broaden my reading interests. I think I was drawn to criticism because it gave me an opportunity to articulate what I thought about a piece of writing—what it tried to do, whether it succeeded, and, if so, how it succeeded.

More here.

Rupam Jain and Tom Lasseter at Reuters:

During the first week of January last year, a group of Indian scholars gathered in a white bungalow on a leafy boulevard in central New Delhi. The focus of their discussion: how to rewrite the history of the nation.

The government of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi had quietly appointed the committee of scholars about six months earlier. Details of its existence are reported here for the first time.

Minutes of the meeting, reviewed by Reuters, and interviews with committee members set out its aims: to use evidence such as archaeological finds and DNA to prove that today’s Hindus are directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants many thousands of years ago, and make the case that ancient Hindu scriptures are fact not myth.

Interviews with members of the 14-person committee and ministers in Modi’s government suggest the ambitions of Hindu nationalists extend beyond holding political power in this nation of 1.3 billion people – a kaleidoscope of religions. They want ultimately to shape the national identity to match their religious views, that India is a nation of and for Hindus.

Nick Ripatrazone at Poetry Magazine:

Matthew Dickman’s new book, Wonderland, is full of characters who feel forsaken by God. Much of this new collection—Dickman’s fourth—takes place in Catholic school, where God and Christ are as physical as the poet’s bullied body but are rarely sources of comfort. To the contrary, God is a source of dissonance in Dickman’s poetry. Growing up in Portland, Oregon, Dickman was an Episcopalian in a Catholic world, and although he plunders the rituals and ceremonies of Catholicism, he clearly feels distant from that religion. Wonderland suggests that Dickman is not just a spiritual poet, or a devotional one in the mold of Wright, but a poet whose worldview, language, and themes are rooted in the pageantry of the Catholic Church. He represents a tendency in contemporary Catholic poetry—also evident in the work of Natalie Diaz, Patricia Lockwood, and C. Dale Young, for example—to drop doctrinal adherence while retaining a fascination with symbolism. His work occupies a middle ground in which Catholicism is meaningful yet still evokes pessimism, conflict, and doubt.

In a 2015 interview in Granta, the poet Barbara Ras asks Dickman, “Do you think our religious roots dig so deep they become ghosts we can’t shake off?” Dickman replies, “My personhood is in a great part defined by religion…and so my poems are too.” He goes on to explain that “you have to swim through a bunch of blood” to attain whatever is healthy in life, which includes, according to him, “ideas about transformation, forgiveness, empathy, wonder, metaphor…”

more here.

Martin Tyrrell at the Dublin Review of Books:

Orwell’s self-conscious ordinariness went beyond his writing. Some who knew him recalled that he supped his tea from a saucer, often with a satisfied slurp, like Steptoe senior, and that he even affected a kind of cockney accent. “The FACK that you’re black … and that I’m white, has nudding whatever to do wiv it”, William Empson remembered him saying to one of the scriptwriters from the BBC’s Eastern Service.

It is the ordinary people, says Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn, who, with their bluff carthorse stoicism and love of country, will take on the dictators, the totalitarians. Look to them, he suggests in My Country Right or Left, not the “boiled rabbits of the Left” if you’re seeking revolution, resistance, signs of life even. Who would guess from that essay, which appeared a year after war was declared, or from any of his other wartime writings, that Orwell had been exactly such a boiled rabbit himself, and not that long ago either. As Steele informs us, Orwell was a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a party of the far left fringe that ran the Pythonesque London Bureau, the so-called “Three and a Half International”. That ILP phase finds Orwell an eloquent propagandist for his party’s distinctive line on the coming war, which is to oppose it. All talk of fascism versus democracy is eyewash, says pre-war Orwell, the usual demonisation of the prospective enemy.

more here.

Alexandra Mullen at The Hudson Review:

Even Jane Austen devotees might have reached peak saturation in 2017, the bicentenary of her death, which, since her novels were published late in her life, follows on the bicentenaries of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park(1814), and Emma (1815). And, since Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published together posthumously in 1818, there is another bicentenary this year. It would be a shame if some of the critical and popular work on her gets buried, because a remarkable percentage of writers on Austen are terrific: clear, passionate, informative, insightful, and very often good writers to boot.

In the 135 years since the first dissertation on Jane Austen appeared in 1883, scholarship on Austen has grown apace. By around the end of the First World War, large contours of the landscape had been shaped: Austen as moralist and humorist, Austen’s use of contemporary thinkers, Austen as cool-eyed artist. By the Second World War, the territory had expanded to include linguistic issues, such as Austen’s narrative experimentation and use of irony. Starting in the sixties, explorations into her juvenilia, letters, and manuscripts turned scholars back to revisit much of this ground; since the eighties, the application of various theoretical tools—historicist, political, postcolonial, feminist, narrative and so forth—have tested the soil samples with ever increasing intensity.

more here.

Kimberly Meyer in Orion Magazine:

In the weeks leading up to the flood, Constant Ngouala pulled weeds to prepare the beds for his fall seedlings. During those mid-August days, steeped in Houston’s humidity, he hadn’t known about the tropical wave forming off the western coast of Africa, hadn’t paid any attention as it gathered into a tropical storm and began dragging itself across the wide Atlantic. In the mornings, in the strip across the street, Tejano music blasted from the K-K Barber & Beauty Shop while cars pulled in and out of the N&M Washateria and the Shop-N-Carry. By afternoon, as the damp air burned away to something clearer and harder, so did the music—Latino rap, Luis Fonsi, Maluma. Late in the week, at the fifty-cent carwash, a group of African American men convened in the shade of one of the bays on folding chairs, laughing and calling out to each other. Smoke from a barbecue pit hauled by a black truck filled the air. Cars surged past in waves. Insects buzzed like static.

Shopping Alone Only For Myself
at the Neighborhood Hy-Vee

The young woman with the perfect banjo butt
can't make up her mind: peaches or beans?
With a full cart and her perfect postern
she is blocking aisle 4,
so I take the long way around.

She has soft dark eyes. Into her cart
I place secretly a jar
of cara mia artichoke hearts,
adrift in oil. She takes
both the peaches and the beans.

Yesterday, in a paper, one of my students wrote
I picture Helen of Troy with long dark hair
and big brown eyes. A flawless complexion
and a perfect size 6. Into her cart
I slip a small brown bulb of garlic.

She doesn't know I exist. She
rejects a dozen immaculate sunkist oranges
before choosing one. Into her cart,
just under the bacon,
I place a lemon.

The more numerous the foreign items
I snake into her cart
the more beautiful
she becomes. At the cash register
she doesn't so much as blink an eye

as one by one the items are tallied. Such poise!
Without description Marlow describes the wife of Menelaos:
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Under the overhang
I watch her all the way to her car,
rain making a seaport of the vast lot.

When at last
I move from the harbor
I am pulling toward some sense of beauty
I must retrieve,

whatever the cost,
my resolve that suit of armor
perfectly tempered by rhyme and reason
and blessed by the high improbability
of the gods.

by William Kloefkorn
from Going Out, Coming Back
White Pine Press 1993
.

David Naimon in VQR:

Ursula K. Le Guin left behind a legacy unparalleled in American letters when she passed away this January at the age of eighty-eight. Named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress for her contributions to America’s cultural heritage—the author of more than sixty books of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, children’s literature, drama, criticism, and translation—she was one of only a select few writers (the others being Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth) to have their life’s work enshrined in the Library of America while still actively writing. She joined the likes of Toni Morrison, John Ashbery, and Joan Didion in receiving the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation, and her work garnered countless awards: the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud, six Nebulas, six Hugos, and twenty-one Locus awards among them. Her name regularly appeared on the Nobel Prize for Literature short list, and writers as varied as Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, and Zadie Smith herald her as an influence. I believe you could start anywhere in her vast canon of work—with her poems, her translations of Gabriela Mistral or Lao Tzu, her remarkable book reviews, or her activism on behalf of writers, women, and the environment—to begin to understand the importance of Ursula K. Le Guin to both the world of letters and the world at large. But she was best known for her fiction, most notably her novels, and most specifically her books of science fiction and fantasy. And fiction, the genre she admittedly felt most comfortable talking about, was the occasion for the conversation that follows.

More here.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff in the New York Times:

Shadi Hamid, Vanda Felbab-Brown, and Harold Trinkunas in The Atlantic:

The Taliban claims to adhere to a strict interpretation of Islamic law, but that didn’t stop them from learning to love the poppy. The Islamic State developed an unforgiving set of laws to govern its caliphate, even as it engaged in widespread smuggling of antiquities and the synthetic drug Captagon. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the farc) were once puritanically anti-drugs but turned wholeheartedly to supporting the cocaine economy following their Eighth Party Congress in 1982. This isn’t necessarily surprising. Despite initial protestations, militant groups often engage in criminal operations—drugs, trafficking, and smuggling—to fund their activities.

But crime is not their primary calling—they also seek to govern. These groups may be evil but they can also be rational, calculating, and sometimes surprisingly effective, outperforming existing governments. Yet this fundamental point is often lost on policymakers.

The Trump administration has made a lot of noise about defeating groups like the Islamic State, but it has said little about how to prevent them from reemerging in the future. In fairness, President Trump is only building on the “counterterrorism first” policy of his predecessor, President Obama. And the Trump administration’s hard line on illegal drugs coming from Mexico—setting aside the issue of the border wall—has echoes in that of previous Republican and Democratic administrations. But what if the true cause of instability isn’t terrorism or crime but the absence of effective governance?

More here.

Ezra Klein in Vox:

There’s a lot of backstory to this podcast, which is covered in more detail in this piece.

The short version is that Sam Harris, host of the Waking Up podcast, and I have been going back and forth over an interview Harris did with The Bell Curve author Charles Murray. In that interview, which first aired almost a year ago, the two argued that African Americans are, for a combination of genetic and environmental reasons, intrinsically and immutably less intelligent than white Americans, and Murray argued that the implications of this “forbidden knowledge” should shape social policy. Vox published a piece criticizing the conversation, Harris was offended by the piece and challenged me to a debate, and after a lot of back-and-forth, this is that debate.

But even if you’re not interested in the backstory, I think this discussion — which is also being released on Harris’s podcast — is worth listening to. Harris’s view is that the criticism he and Murray have received is a moral panic driven by identity politics and political correctness. My view is that contemporary IQ results are inseparable from both the past and present of racism in America, and to conduct this conversation without voices who are expert on that subject, and who hail from the affected communities, is to miss the point from the outset.

So that’s where we begin.

More here.

John Mullan in The Guardian:

For a long time, the sedulous student who wants to see Shakespeare in the act of creation has been able to go to the extracts contained in the eight fat volumes of Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Here you can find the stories that he pilfered and changed. You can see how he twisted two completely separate tales together to make The Merchant of Venice, for example, or decided to kill Lear and Cordelia at the end of King Lear when in his chronicle source both survived, or made Othello Desdemona’s murderer, when in Cinthio’s original Italian story, it is Iago who does the deed. The volumes give a dizzying sense of the playwright’s narrative dexterity as you see him extracting and welding together the elements from others’ narratives. Read John Kerrigan’s intense, condensed account of the playwright’s creative borrowing and the dizziness only increases. Focusing on a handful of plays, Kerrigan, one of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholars, shows that Bullough has recorded only the more obvious half of it. Kerrigan takes us beyond Shakespeare’s primary sources into the deeper texture of his allusions and passages of imitation. His originality, by this account, was largely a gift for the alchemical transformation of what he had read, heard recited, or remembered from his days on a hard bench at Stratford grammar school.

Kerrigan’s introduction ruminates about the meanings of originality, a concept unknown to critics before the later 18th century. Shakespeare inhabited a literary culture in which imitation of earlier models was applauded. Rhetoric (the Renaissance version of creative writing) approved of “invention”, but specified that this meant the clever combination of inherited elements. Yet Shakespeare is also different from his contemporaries: he is not showing off his literary knowledge but adapting narrative patterns and fragments of dialogue lodged in his memory. Kerrigan quotes Emerson observing that “All minds quote”; yet most of Shakespeare’s quotations – or inventive misquotations – would not have been spotted by his first audiences. A chapter devoted to Much Ado About Nothing reveals a play that is “pieced and patched and recycled” out of various Italian tales, its radical novelty a matter of the “piecemeal superflux” of reused materials.

More here.

David Bentley Hart at First Things:

I do not know if it is quite correct to say that public interest in the work of David Jones (1895–1974) is enjoying something of a revival just at the moment, since it was never very lively to begin with. In his own time, Jones was recognized by the discerning as an artist of remarkable originality and range, and by the most discerning as perhaps the finest British artist of the twentieth century. Certainly he was the greatest “modernist” Britain ever produced, and among modern British Catholic poets and painters he was unequaled. He belonged to that very rare class of visionary artists who, like Blake, produce works that seem to reach into other realms of being. He seemed to have discovered worlds of mythic, religious, and aesthetic meaning that had never before been revealed, but that nevertheless felt as ancient and familiar as this world; and, also like Blake, he explored those other realms through both literature and the visual arts. Yet somehow his name never quite carried as far as the names of many of his contemporaries. Even the very literate are far more likely to have heard of the host of luminaries who knew him and praised his work than they are to have heard of him. Yeats, Eliot, and Auden thought him a genius—as did Stravinsky, Herbert Read, Christopher Dawson, Stephen Spender, Evelyn Waugh, Basil Bunting, R. S. Thomas, Geoffrey Hill, and many others. But still, to this day, his admirers are anything but legion; they constitute at most a coterie.

more here.

Richard Canning at Literary Review:

The pair had met at a party given by Lincoln Kirstein, cofounder of the New York City Ballet, and immediately developed a strong rapport. The friendship was eventually to span four decades and is richly documented in this well-edited collection of their letters. Laughlin, 6’6”, liked his diminutive, apt pupil Williams, who was in fact three years his senior (but notoriously prone to dissemblance). He also sincerely respected Williams’s verse. Indeed, Jay (as Williams usually called Laughlin) never stopped considering his friend first and foremost a poet. Just two collections of verse came from their collaboration: In the Winter of Cities (1956) and the cringingly titled Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977), one of Williams’s better-forgotten later works, written as the mental fog descended. Williams trusted Laughlin with all his prose writings too, excepting another late work of ill repute, the opportunistic Memoirs (1975), many of whose ‘truths’ were more fictional than strange.

The wildly transgressive subject matter of the stories New Directions published happily escaped wider notice, even as Williams’s dramatic career took flight with The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). The cultishness of the New Directions list, as well as Williams’s careful interventions to influence the packaging, marketing and distribution of his titles and to set their prices high, effectively kept tales such as ‘One Arm’ and ‘Desire and the Black Masseur’ at a decent remove from the wider public.

more here.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett at The New Statesman:

Daniel Kalder was living in Moscow in the early years of this century when, switching on his television, he saw a Brobdingnagian book. It was candy-pink and green, and as high as several houses. On its front cover was embossed the golden bust, in profile, of a dictator.

By the time Kalder travelled to Turkmenistan in 2006 the self-styled Turkmenbashi (Father of all Turkmen) was dead. The mechanism of the gigantic book, which opened to display, each night, a different double-page spread of his thoughts, had failed, but the book still loomed, floodlit, over the capital, “ominous and immense and exceedingly kitsch”. A symbol of the vanity of human hubris to rival Ozymandias’s trunkless legs, it set Kalder off on an investigation of the curious fact that dictators from Lenin to Kim Jong-il, not content with absolute power over their people’s lives, have aspired to be, as Stalin put it, “engineers of souls” as well, and – in pursuit of that object – have written some very long and very tedious books.

Kalder’s own book, on the other hand, is brisk, and full of antic fun. Here are some of the words and phrases he uses to describe the works under consideration: “turgid”, “boring”, “entirely vapid”, “aggressively stupid”, “obscure”, “repetitive and violent”, “staggeringly incompetent”, “rote pap”, “sub-fascist waffle”, “virulently awful”, “the worst books ever written”.

more here.

Stephanie Russell-Kraft in The New Republic:

When Marc Lépine murdered 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989, he claimed that he was “fighting feminism.” When Anders Breivik murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011, he was in large part motivated by his hatred of feminism, which he considered a poison and threat to the future of European men. And when Elliot Rodger killed six people in Isla Vista, California, in 2014, he said he did it to punish young women for rejecting him and sleeping with other men instead.

These massacres were painted as the acts of lone mad men, but they have a clear common thread: a desire to dominate women and a conviction that society oppresses men in favor of women. Those misogynistic beliefs, so depressingly familiar and widespread, have hardened into a more distinct force in recent years, and have been fueled by the election of Donald Trump and the resurrection of white supremacist groups in American political life.

In February, the Southern Poverty Law Center added two male supremacist websites to its list of hate groups, for the first time categorizing male supremacy as an explicit ideology of hate. The ideology of male supremacy, according to the SPLC, represents all women as “genetically inferior, manipulative, and stupid” beings who exist primarily for their reproductive and sexual functions. Gender-essentializing male supremacists rely on cherry-picked science and anthropology to bolster their claims that men are inherently dominant. Not only do women owe men sex, they believe, but men are entitled to take it from them.

More here.

Jason Daley in Smithsonian Magazine:

No matter how you feel about them, cockroaches are something special. Cut a few legs off a nymph, and they grow back. Leave a few cookie crumbs in the carpet, and the critters seem to instantly zero in on them. Expose them to fecal material, bacteria and other pathogens, homemade antibiotics will keep them healthy. On top of it all, they can eat just about anything, live in brutal conditions and laugh in the face of the toughest insecticides.

So what gives them these seeming superpowers? As Maggie Fox at NBC News reports, a new study suggests the answer is in their genes. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai sequenced the genome of the American cockroach, Periplaneta Americana, revealing a Swiss army knife-like set of genes that makes the insects uber adaptable.

It turns out that cockroaches have a massive genome; of the insects yet studied, the cockroach is second only to the locust. The genes of the American cockroach—which isn’t really American: it was likely transported to the Americas from Africa as early as 1625—is more closely related to termites than to the German cockroach, another major house pest that had its genome sequenced earlier this year. That’s not surprising, since termites turn out to be “eusocial cockroaches” and were moved into the same order as roaches earlier this year.

GenomeWeb reports that 60 percent of the cockroach’s genome contains repetitive elements. But it also includes 21,336 protein-encoding genes, 95 percent of which actually produce proteins. Many of those genes give cockroaches the tools to survive in urban environments.

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Daniel Morgan at IAI News:

Addiction is often connected with the idea of powerlessness, compulsion, or having one’s agency ‘hijacked’. That idea shows up, for example, in the first of Alcoholics Anonymous’s 12 steps:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.

AA is an incredibly popular organization. Organizations that take the same approach to addiction, but focus on different objects of addiction – e.g. narcotics, food, sex – are also globally successful. So, the idea that addiction involves powerlessness has resonated with a vast number of people who have first-hand experience of addiction. It deserves to be taken seriously. Should we also take it literally? Well, that depends on working out what it would mean to take it literally. And that turns out not to be obvious.

It might help to focus on this question to have an example in view. Susan is an alcoholic who is having some early success in being abstinent and is slowly putting her life back together. She has constructed a daily routine designed to minimize stressors and triggers for her drinking. Now along comes something to trip her up, the delayed fall-out of her unmanageable past – e.g. a debt or an affair that has just been discovered. The thought of drinking, which has perhaps been a regular unwelcome but fleeting visitor, now impresses itself on her with incredible tenacity. She runs through the script she has developed for this kind of scenario. She takes some deep breaths. She rehearses her reasons not to drink. She contemplates ringing her sponsor, knowing that they will likely offer to come round and escort her to a meeting. At a certain point, she nevertheless succumbs. She drinks. In what sense, if any, was she powerless over alcohol?

More here.