On Sentimentality

Robert Albazi at 3AM Magazine:

At the Mildura Writer’s Festival in 2019, on a panel with Craig Sherborne and Moreno Giovannoni, Helen Garner spoke about Raymond Carver’s unedited stories. She hated them for all of their sentimental scenes—ones that would be removed by Carver’s editor Gordon Lish for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Lish took a knife to the cushy scenes and Carver became a master of the spare and cutting. When we arrived home from the festival, my partner and I compared the un-edited stories in Beginners with their edited counter-parts in What we Talk About. For a long time, I had preferred the un-edited versions, yet it had been at least six years since I last read through the stories. We sat on the couch, looking for differences, reading them aloud and deciding which version was better. Garner was right—in What We Talk About large sections of emotive description are gone and, when characters are presented under a harsh light, their crudest actions can leave the reader with sharper impressions of their personality.

more here.

Crime Doesn’t Pay in ‘The Killing’

David Lehman at The American Scholar:

The Killing ends with the greatest money shot in the movies, its nearest competition being the shower of love bestowed on James Stewart on Christmas Eve at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life. Johnny and Fay are at the airport about to board a flight to Boston and freedom. He doesn’t want to let go of the suitcase, but it is too big for the overhead compartment, so he reluctantly yields it. He and Fay watch the suitcase totter atop the checked luggage in the cart taking it from terminal to plane. When a spectator’s dog runs into the cart’s path, the driver swerves, and the suitcase falls off. It pops opens, and the money flies around like snow in a swirling wind.

The set-up has been executed perfectly and yet, because of a stray event, a tiny happenstance, all is for naught—all the blood spilled, all the careful calculation.

more here.

At World’s End

David Steensma in ASH Clinical News:

We could and should have seen something like this coming, and some did. For example, biotech investor Brad Loncar predicted a pandemic in his December 2019 list of “10 Things Likely To Happen In 2020,” while novelist Dean Koontz wrote about a dangerous virus called “Wuhan-400” in a 1981 thriller. Still, seeing this event coming would not have made the reality of it any easier to bear, nor would it have helped us predict what will happen next. In addition to killing tens of thousands of people from China to Canada to Chile – perhaps the worldwide death toll will be in the millions by the time this essay is in print in May – COVID-19 has harmed the world’s economies and altered its social fabric in ways we won’t fully understand for many years. Our hematology patients who have gone through hematopoietic cell transplantation have watched as the rest of the world adopted the “social distancing” and infection precautions that are so familiar to them.

For physicians, nurses, and other health-care workers, the pandemic has completely disrupted how we practice medicine and go about our daily work. I never imagined I would begin each day waiting in a queue at the door of a hospital, carefully marked with masking tape lines placed 6 feet apart, to be screened by security and receive my mask for the day. That daily mask ration has become something I take more care of than my smartphone, even though the phone is 1000 times more costly. The pandemic also has upended our routines outside the hospital and clinic – especially if we have children who are now home from school indefinitely. Many of us have already lost friends, acquaintances, or loved ones to the virus, and there will undoubtedly be more grieving to come.

The worst of humanity has been on display amid this crisis, as happens in all disasters. We’ve seen hoarding of food, toilet paper (!), personal protective equipment (PPE), and – at least in America – guns and ammunition. Doomsday preppers, who have endured years of ridicule, suddenly don’t seem quite so outré. We’ve witnessed far too much willful ignorance from political leaders, suppression of data, and spreading of disinformation. The reputation of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) – its laboratories still full of terrific staff scientists and technicians, but its leaders muzzled and its managers influenced by lightweight partisan appointees – will take a long time to recover from this debacle.

The Crazy Uncles and charlatan healers of the world have been busy touting unproven COVID-19 therapies on social media and television, citing misleading data and hyped-up anecdotes.

More here.

‘A glimpse of something wonderful’: great pivotal moments – in pictures

From The Guardian:

‘Philippe Halsman flew out to Hollywood and photographed Marilyn in her small apartment, as well as doing things around her neighbourhood. LIFE loved the photos and the relatively unknown Monroe was chosen to be on the cover of the 7 April, 1952 issue. This legitimised her appeal and star status, allowing her to sign a multi-year film contract. This image is an outtake from the famous shoot, which was a turning point in her career.’

More here.

Aging Is a Communication Breakdown

Jim Kozubek in Nautilus:

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the 18th-century poet and philosopher, believed life was hardwired with archetypes, or models, which instructed its development. Yet he was fascinated with how life could, at the same time, be so malleable. One day, while meditating on a leaf, the poet had what you might call a proto-evolutionary thought: Plants were never created “and then locked into the given form” but have instead been given, he later wrote, a “felicitous mobility and plasticity that allows them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places.” A rediscovery of principles of genetic inheritance in the early 20th century showed that organisms could not learn or acquire heritable traits by interacting with their environment, but they did not yet explain how life could undergo such shapeshifting tricks—the plasticity that fascinated Goethe.

A polymathic and pioneering British biologist proposed such a mechanism for how organisms could adapt to their environment, upending the early field of evolutionary biology. For this, Conrad Hal Waddington became recognized as the last Renaissance biologist. This largely had to do with his idea of an “epigenetic landscape”—a metaphor he coined in 1940 to illustrate a theory for how organisms might regulate which of their genes get expressed in response to environmental cues or pressures, leading them down different developmental pathways. It turned out he was onto something: Just a few years after coining the term, it was found that methyl groups—a small molecule made of carbon and hydrogen—could attach to DNA, or to the proteins that house it, and alter gene expression. Changing how a gene is expressed can have drastic consequences: Every cell in our body has the same genes but looks and functions differently only due to the epigenetics that controls when and how genes get turned on. In 2002, one development biologist wondered whether Waddington’s provocative “ideas are relevant tools for understanding the biological problems of today.”

More here.

Tuesday Poem

The Schools Have Shut

We’d almost forgotten that the city can slowly
go quiet, can whisper: ‘Stay at home today.’
That by staying home you can find a new
meaning of freedom.
That a weekend without football can improve your relationship.
That extra toilet paper won’t save you.
That quarantines don’t really exist
but are invented so that we can read.
That you read to forget yourself.
That a Sunday afternoon can last a whole week,
but that every second still counts.
That we are vulnerable,
that this makes us strong.
That doctors and nurses are really superheroes.
That the wind is a warning
for our heartbeats to recover.
We’d almost forgotten that we exist in relation
to each other, that we are together.
That we’ll stay at arm’s length for a while
so that we can slowly
grow closer to each other.

by Gershwin Bonevacia
from
Het Parool, 3/16/20
translation: Michele Hutchison,2020
Read more »

“We Should Form in Us the Shadows of Ideas…”

by Joseph Shieber

When I think back on when I realized that I think differently than most people, what surprises me most is that I didn’t realize it sooner.

The earliest indication that I can explicitly recall would have occurred to me some time in the 1990’s. It was around then that I’d learned about the “method of places” technique for memorization — also known as the “memory palace” technique.

The technique works like this. Choose a location that you know very well from memory — say, the street where you grew up. Visualize yourself walking down the street, observing landmarks along your walk. Now, when you want to memorize items in a list in order, simply visualize those items at locations along the familiar path in your mind.

I could pretend that I first learned about the method of places from Jonathan Spence’s 1984 book The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, but it’s likely that I actually encountered it first in Thomas Harris’s 1999 novel Hannibal. Harris would have led me to Spence’s book — as well as to Frances Yates’s 1966 book The Art of Memory.

The technique is one of the most widely used strategies by mnemonists — like the journalist Joshua Foer, who wrote about how he employed the technique to win the 2006 U.S. Memory Championship in his 2011 book Moonwalking With Einstein.

Now, the technique is not easy. It took Foer a year of concentrated effort to prepare for the Memory Championship, for example. But when I set out to try it for myself, I found that I was unable even to get started.

The problem was that first step: visualization. I can’t do that. I’ve never been able to. Read more »

Monday Poem

On the Edge of a Joke

on the tip of my tongue
a funny thing is on edge

an ambivalent thing I think,
as if a comedian on a brink
in a no-nonsense universe
of serious laughs is set to sail or sink

but all anticipation feels this way
in the space before a punch line,
in the knot between chuckle or groan,
waiting for a laugh or its dark doppelganger
in the world between cozy dream and
I-really-need-to-wake-up-now-unalone

Jim Culleny
5/6/18

Thanks to A. R. for a dream he shared which included the line,
“…on the edge of a joke,“ which now seems even more apropos.

Home

by Abigail Akavia

Social Distancing with Kids, Leipzig 2020

A few thoughts about working from home, about “home”, about writing and about not-writing. About myself, with full realization of the incredible privilege that allows me to write—in normal days and, a fortiori, in days of pandemic.

When the reality of the COVID19 tsunami began to hit us here in northeast Germany, my husband suggested we should pack a suitcase or two and go to Israel, or “go back” to Israel, where we both grew up, where most of our immediate relatives and many of our closest friends live. But where—I repeatedly countered in the anxiety-ridden conversations we had in those faraway times of three weeks ago—we don’t live anymore. We haven’t lived there for over a decade. We don’t have a house or an apartment there, we don’t have a home there. The thought of living in a rented space for the foreseeable future without most of my stuff, without my routines, however blanched-out they are these days, forbidden by law to see my kids’ grandparents and my friends, was panic-inducing to me. I’d rather stay here, where I don’t have to relearn where the coffee mugs are shelved.

It was around the time that videos of quarantined neighbors singing from their windows and balconies starting pouring out of Italy. This was never explicitly said between us, but if I had to explain the terror my husband (and even if to a lesser extent, definitely I, too) felt at staying confined and socially isolated in Germany, I would put it like this: the thought that our neighborhood would start singing—a song we don’t know, in German—and that we would feel a sense of alienation and exclusion, rather than solidarity and belonging. So far, this hasn’t happened (partially, but certainly not only, because the restrictions here are less severe than elsewhere, and people are still allowed to leave their houses to take walks, for example). And who knows, maybe if it does happen, the hipsters of our block will opt for some internationally beloved civil rights movement anthem in which we can join. Either way, like all anxieties, this one too—being cooped up in our apartment, fearing that food will soon run out, surrounded by East-Germans—tells us more about our psyche than about the likelihood of an actual scenario in the world.  Read more »

Who Will Bear the Costs of Coronavirus?

by Thomas Wells

Among other things Covid-19 is a moral crisis. It requires suspending the usual rules about who deserves what, firstly because it is impossible for many of us to pay what we owe in these conditions, and secondly because of the priority of the humanitarian duty to save as many lives as possible. Nevertheless we must not forget about justice. In particular we must make sure that the costs of this crisis are not born disproportionately by the poor, those least able to afford the burden but also least able to escape it.

An economy is a complex web made up of the promises we are continually making to each other. Those promises may not always be perfectly fair, but they are generally quite precise. They tell us what is expected from us and what we have the right to expect from others, from what time to take our kids to school to how many months of unemployment insurance we can count on if we lose our job. The trouble is that our ability to keep our promises depends on other people and organisations keeping their promises to us. If any particular link fails, it can be repaired, compensated, worked around, and so on. But if multiple links fail at the same time we are plunged into a moral crisis wherein our usual moral scripts cannot provide guidance. We need suddenly to look up from our tidy little life-worlds and think from the perspective of the whole (even global) society.

Many people, including leaders of government agencies and firms, have clearly struggled to get their heads around this breakdown of business-as-usual morality. They still see things in terms of what is fair or not under the old rules about what people deserve. Hence their slowness to recognise that gig workers need unemployment benefits even if they never paid the premiums, and that the uninsured need to know their medical care will be (almost) free. This is perhaps not so strange. As leaders well know, humans are very sensitive to promise-breaking and free-riding, and in normal times there is nothing more toxic to the functioning of any organisation or community. Fortunately most governments and even some businesses have recognised the need for a more humanitarian moral compass. Read more »

How the pandemic exposes irrationalities in our social system

by Emrys Westacott

The current Covid 19 pandemic is undoubtedly a disaster for millions of people: for those who die, who grieve for the dead, who suffer through a traumatic illness, or who, suddenly lacking work and income, face the prospect of dire poverty as the inevitable recession kicks in. And there are other bad consequences that one might not describe as ‘disastrous” but which are certainly significant: the stress experienced by all those providing care for the sick; the interruption in the education of students; the strain put on families holed up together perhaps for months on end; the loneliness suffered by those who are truly isolated; and the blighted career prospects of new graduates in both the public and the private sectors.

No-one knows what the long-term, or even the short-term consequences of the pandemic will be, either for any particular country or for the world as a whole. It’s conceivable that in some places things could eventually tilt toward the sort of apocalyptic break down of civil society often depicted in dystopian fiction. Perhaps more plausibly, it could lead to the further erosion of democratic rights in at least some countries. This has already happened in Hungary, where the parliament recently voted to give the Prime Minister, Victor Orban, the power to rule by decree for an unlimited period, during which time there can be no elections. But it is also possible that the current crisis will be the occasion for a fundamental rethink about the character of the society we wish to live in. Let us hope so.

This hope could, of course, be just naïve wishful thinking. History offers plenty of example of well-intentioned pledges to learn from the past being buried beneath forgetfulness, indifference, incompetence, prejudice, ideology, and vested interests. But the pandemic is undeniably effective at exposing some of the most obvious flaws in the socio-economic organization of countries like the US (and, to a lesser extent, other modernized capitalist societies). And by “flaws,” here, I don’t mean minor inefficiencies that can be removed with a bureaucratic tweak, but profound irrationalities linked to objectionable values. Read more »

Learning from COVID

by Robert Frodeman

The coronavirus amounts to an ongoing, real-world experiment in societal response to an international calamity. The pandemic will be studied for decades, but COVID has already taught us much about the relationship between science and decision-making.

Two recent essays begin the process of making sense of our predicament. In Pandemic Science and Politics, Dan Sarewitz claims that the unique features of the COVID-19 virus reveal central truths about the connection between facts and values. In COVID-19: the Medium is the Message, Laurie Garrett believes that in an age of misinformation, underfunding communication staffs at agencies like WHO becomes a deadly mistake.

For Sarewitz, COVID reveals the nature of the relation between science and politics. The virus brings clarity that stands in contrast to our usual “disagreements around climate change, nuclear energy, mammograms, K–12 public education, chemicals in the environment…” For in the case of COVID,

  • We all have the same value – to save lives
  • Causality is clear – everyone agrees about what’s causing illness
  • Facts are sufficient to create a plan of action – even if they turn out to be wrong

COVID highlights the fact that “science’s place in politics is determined not by the logic of facts, but by the fundamental influence of human values.” Science gains its centrality in the current crisis because we already line up on questions of value. Read more »

From Pakistan: COVID Diary

by Samia Altaf

“Will we survive this?” my husband asks me as we lounge around the living room, glued to our laptops. “We are in the vulnerable group.” I look up at a bald man with thinning gray tufts over his ears, peering anxiously at me over black-rimmed glasses. Yes, we are certainly in the vulnerable group. What happened to that bright-eyed young man with fifteen pounds of black hair on his head, the one sporting sideburns that put Elvis to shame? Over his shoulder I see our son also looking expectantly at me, Camus’s The Plague in hand, open halfway.

“Dr. Rieux was only too well aware of the serious turn things had taken.” I think of our other boy, locked down in New York where the virus is on a vicious rampage. I send my child a panic-stricken WhatsApp message even though it is the middle of the night there. He answers, “I am fine ma, don’t stress,” and goes back to sleep. He is brave, that one, and sensible too.

So finally it has come marching in, with remarkable audacity and crackling energy, generating fear, closing down schools, colleges, businesses, shops, restaurants, hotels. Blowing away vendors and hawkers, leaving streets deserted and even the public parks locked. It comes, this COVID-19, not with the saints but with spring. Those glorious, wondrous, fragrant, colorful couple of weeks in Punjab when normally you can imagine that all is well with the world. A time when gulmohar trees burst into brilliant red flaming flowers, regular ordinary vegetation replicates itself overnight, as if possessed of some wild crazy RNA, in places you could not think possible. Rows upon rows of bluish-purple petunias, golden nasturtiums, hollyhocks, snapdragons, gleeful sunflowers, bold dahlias, and lush bougainvillea laden with voluptuous bunches of magenta, violet, and burned-orange clusters draped over walls. And roses! Read more »

Apocalyptic Pop Culture in the Age of a Pandemic

by Mindy Clegg

https://etgeekera.com/2013/09/18/the-walking-deads-getting-a-spin-off/the-walking-dead-comic-vs-tv-show-header/
This image comes from https://etgeekera.com/

The taste for the end times as a dramatic backdrop well preceded our current pandemic lock-down, but now seems as good a time as any to explore the popularity of end-of-time dramas as any other. Perhaps we can take some solace from a discussion of others surviving worse situations than our own, even if fictional. Philosopher and pop culture theorist Slavoj Žižek (or it might have been Fredrick Jameson) once noted that the popularity of apocalyptic culture tended to be driven by the all-encompassing power of our current global system, noting that it’s easier for us to imagine the world’s end rather than it’s transformation.1 This seems to break with earlier popular culture that imagined some level of continuity between our present and the future, such as Star Trek. If today we have a harder time imagining productive change to our globalized system, at least our visions of its collapse are numerous and offer compelling viewing. The Walking Dead comic and TV series are a prime example of that sort of entertainment. I argue here that although the series and comic seem on the surface to explore only the collapse of our modern systems of governance and our globalized economy, the focus instead rests on what we keep and what we leave behind as we rebuild in the wake of some kind of wide-spread devastation. In many ways, the Walking Dead offers an alternative to ideologies like the Milton Friedman “shock doctrine” that turns disasters into fodder for privatization.2

Just a note for fans of the show or comic: I’ll include spoilers here for what I’ve watched thus far and for the comic, as that has recently concluded. Read more »

Will the Taste Revolution Survive?

by Dwight Furrow

I’m sitting in front of my window on the world sipping a disappointing Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley and thinking about travel plans for next summer and fall. I’m proceeding as if everything were normal knowing full well they won’t be, especially not with our “leadership”. Every time I try to write something insightful about wine, these lyrics from the bard of Duluth run through my mind:

Here comes the blind commissioner
They’ve got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tightrope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they’re restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row

—Bob Dylan, Desolation Row

There are many tragedies unfolding as Covid-19 ravages the planet. With the massive loss of life and livelihood, the fate of the wine and restaurant industry is not among the worst outcomes, but it nevertheless saddens me when I think about it. Small, artisan wineries, independent restaurants and their employees are going to take a big hit. That’s a lot of skill, creativity, imagination and determination gone to waste. The chains and mammoth, commercial wine companies will survive by doing what well- financed firms with market power and lobbyists do. But it will be hard for the little guy to survive in a business as tough as the restaurant business or the artisan winery business. (I’m writing from the perspective of the U.S. but I imagine the situation is similar worldwide.) These small businesses are the heart and soul of the wine and restaurant industries and they face an uncertain future. Read more »

Like No One They’d Ever Seen

Ed Park in the New York Review of Books:

Younghill Kang; drawing by Karl Stevens

What if the finest, funniest, craziest, sanest, most cheerfully depressing Korean-American novel was also one of the first? To a modern reader, the most dated thing about Younghill Kang’s East Goes West, published by Scribner’s in 1937, is its tired title. (Either that or its subtitle, “The Making of an Oriental Yankee.”) Practically everything else about this brash modernist comic novel still feels electric.

East Goes West has a ghostly history: at times vaguely canonical, yet without discernible influence, it has been out of print for decades at a stretch, and surfaces every quarter-century or so as a sort of literary Brigadoon. (Last year’s Penguin Classics edition is its third major republication.) Kang’s debut, The Grass Roof (1931), captures the twilight of the Korean kingdom in the first two decades of the twentieth century, as Japan colonizes the peninsula. Its narrator, Chungpa Han, is a precocious child whose thirst for education takes him from his secluded home village to Seoul, three hundred miles away; into the heart of Japan; and finally to America, where East Goes West picks up on the pilgrim’s progress.

Though both novels were first published to great acclaim by Maxwell Perkins—the legendary editor of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe—they stand as the alpha and omega of Kang’s fiction career: an explosion of talent, followed by thirty-five years of silence.

More here.