John Williams at the New York Times:

Because there are many things to say about Susan Taubes’s remarkable 1969 novel “Divorcing,” and many of those things concern the grim side of both real life and life in the book, I’d like to start by saying that it’s funny. It’s not a comic novel, by any stretch, but neglecting to mention its humor would shortchange it and deform one’s initial idea of it.

Much of this humor comes at the expense of psychoanalysis. It’s possible there is more talk of analysis in “Divorcing” than in the entire filmography of Woody Allen. “Before you do anything,” one doctor in it says, “you need at least seven years of analysis. Minimum five; absolute minimum.”

more here.

Ann Wroe in MIL:

The day has been grey, dreary and drizzly, and evening is settling in – a typical covid evening, alone in my flat, with another radio concert playing from an empty hall. It seems a good moment for candles. Which means, even better, it’s time for matches. There’s no shortage of choice in the top kitchen drawer. Cook’s Matches, a hefty box with an efficient look. An equally big box of extra-long matches, to reach the oven pilot light if it blows out or to kindle anything successfully in the draughts that come through my windows. A little two-inch yellow box of Ship matches with a healthy rattle to it. Elegant, slim numbers from fancy restaurants and a few of the flimsy packs you can pick up in cafés like business cards.

From this hoard anyone would think I was a smoker or at least had a fireplace to attend to. Not so. A button sparks the ignition for the gas. The restaurant matches are never used, nor are the flimsy ones, but – like the wire ties and short lengths of string with which they keep company – they have a useful air about them. The little Ship box is there for purely sentimental reasons, because as a child I found no better container for tiny treasures such as shells and beads. The very slide of the tray into the cover is satisfaction in itself. Those matches are now old and probably have no virtue left – not that it matters. They represent childhood in suspension. Potential delight.

Matches themselves, too, are all about potential. Even when dormant, they sizzle with the thought of fire. It is all there, safe and portable, a dream that the Chinese inevitably engineered first when they soaked pine splinters in sulphur a whole millennium ago.

More here.

The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs

—for Dick

It takes more than gasoline and gumption
to get you to Zortman—more
than whimsy or a wild inkling
to rekindle history. It takes a primal prairie
need, a kinship with Old Man Winter, with Napi
hunkering in sunless gulches, a longing
for short Fourth of July parades, the bestkept-
secret-café with a waitress
who commutes 50 miles from Malta—
big city with its 5 p.m. rush
minute, she quips. Pavement—purt-near
all the way to the corrugated last
half mile into work—
through herd after mule deer herd,
excites her. What can anyone say in words
that Charles M. Russell has not
narrated in paint. Little Rockies, Larb Hills,
predator versus prey versus wind
still give this Indian-cowboy
landscape its animation.
Your eggs
jiggling over-easy, hashbrowns crisp,
roughcut slabs of real ham,
one pancake seat-cushioned over its own plate
(whole wheat toast sold out last month
to hot-shot fire crews), are all grilled
just right. The coffee, vintage-grind,
is brewed with water so mineralthick,
it’s panned first,
then filtered. Same goes for the décor—
local art collaged with faded Russell prints
above faux-brick wainscoting.
Read more »

Michael Maar in the New Left Review:

There is an ancient piece of classroom wisdom that is not entirely misguided when it states: steer clear of adjectives! Editors are unlikely to grumble about a missing adjective, but they will use up their pencils crossing out superfluous ones. When in doubt, leave it out. The critic Wolf Schneider provides an excellent illustration: ‘If the author of The Linden Tree had written’—instead of ‘By the well, before the gate, stands a linden tree’—‘“By the tumbled-down well, in front of the dilapidated, vine-clad gate, stands a gnarled old linden tree”, his poem would not have been set to music by Schubert.’ Quite so. Once the right verb and the right noun have been found, the writer has a full load and can set out for home (or embark on a Winterreise). That is the approach of the adjective sceptic. In the words of the poet-diplomat Paul Claudel, la crainte de l’adjectif est le commencement du style—fear of the adjective is the beginning of style.

Hemingway was the most effective propagator of this stylistic purism. As a journalist, he knew the value of concise speech. Every word counted, as each one had to be paid for when telegraphed to the news desk. Every decorative, non-informative adjective should be axed. The revolution detonated by the application of this approach to the novel can scarcely be exaggerated. All authors, especially the Anglo-Americans—Fitzgerald, Cheever, Carver, Ford—are indebted to this legacy, whether they like it or not. The only writers who have sought to distance themselves from it are the conscious champions of the adjective—Nabokov, Updike and their disciple, Nicholson Baker.

More here.

Andrew Jewett in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Back in 2013, another in a long line of tussles over scientism broke out. Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, told humanities majors at a Brandeis University graduation ceremony that they represented “the resistance” in a society dominated by “the twin imperialisms of science and technology.” Wieseltier sounded all the familiar themes — the enslavement of human beings to machines, the tyranny of numbers, the depredations of “technologism,” the unchallenged dominance of “utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience” in modern culture. The antidote, he claimed, was the humanities.

The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker fired back. Petulant humanists, he charged, welcomed science when it cured disease but not when it impinged on their professional fiefdom. The march of science and the Enlightenment had vastly improved the human condition. Only science, Pinker insisted, could address “the deepest questions about who we are, where we came from, and how we define the meaning and purpose of our lives.” Humanities scholars would remain irrelevant until they embraced the scientifically informed humanitarianism that constituted the “de facto morality” of the modern world. The ensuing controversy stretched through that summer and fall.

More here.

Nadav Samin in The Hedgehog Review:

When I was a graduate student in international relations in the early 2000s, my teachers would frequently invoke the famous, though possibly apocryphal, response of the late Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai to the question of whether the French Revolution had been a success: “It’s too soon to tell.” Contemplating the same arc of history that forms the subtext of Zhou’s reply, we might see the United States today bending gingerly away from populist indignation and toward a potentially gentler interval of governance. Though the nation’s attention is rightly focused on domestic matters, above all on contending with a devasting pandemic, changes at the helm mean that it is open season for grand visioning from the heights, particularly as concerns America’s place in the world. Are we dispensable? Indispensable? Exceptional? Banal? Imperialist? Heroic? Or simply unsound?

My grandfather, a citrus farmer in Israel, was skilled at hybridizing citrus trees, splicing branches from one orange tree onto a larger trunk and grafting them to grow as one. That process might also describe the shaping of an emergent American foreign policy, one that joins conservative nationalist principles with liberal internationalist ones. If this smells of nostalgia for a bygone foreign policy consensus, then that fruit is past ripe, because the state of America’s politics today permits no retreads. Rather, I hope that by fusing together some of the sentiments that seem to animate liberal and conservative opinion, including the former’s optimism about human nature and the latter’s emphasis on American sovereignty, we may be able to move toward a new consensus, one that better reflects the nation’s imperfect yet admirable character.

More here.

Montana Ray at The Point:

The Confederate immigrants didn’t impose their way of life in São Paulo’s rural interior. On neighboring plantations, enslaved women were raising the white artists who would become the country’s major modernists. Brazil’s most famous modernist painter, Tarsila do Amaral, muse of Antropofagia, grew up on her family’s coffee plantation, a half hour’s drive from the American colony. Antropofagia was a movement of “cultural cannibalism” based on a caricature of the Tupi indigenous people as cannibals; elite white Brazilians would “cannibalize” French styles in the production of Brazilian subject matter: Black people. A year before her death, do Amaral explained that the subject for her first anthropophagic painting, A Negra (1923), was a “female slave” she remembered from her youth, and described in vivid detail I won’t repeat how the woman had stretched her breasts so that she might breastfeed while working. Chattel slavery legally ended in Brazil on May 13, 1888, when do Amaral was one year old, so her explanation was technically anachronistic. Either emancipation passed without notice, or her family’s plantation hummed along under a new economic arrangement so closely resembling slavery that she still referred to wage workers as “slaves.”

more here.

Joanna Kavenna at Literary Review:

Samuel Johnson famously remarked, ‘It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know.’ Virginia Woolf politely added that Englishwomen also talk about the weather but thought there should be strict rules attached to all such discussions. A hostess or a novelist might talk about the weather to settle a guest or a reader, but they should move swiftly on to more interesting themes. A novel that considers nothing but the weather was most probably written by Arnold Bennett (I paraphrase). Mark Twain took this further, promising in the opening of The American Claimant that ‘no weather will be found in this book’ as ‘it is plain that persistent intrusions of weather are bad for both reader and author’.

more here.

Ceri Radford in The Independent:

Domestic Violence

1.

It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk
Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans.
Pleased to meet you meat to please you
said the butcher’s sign in the window in the village.

Everything changed the year that we got married.
And after that we moved out to the suburbs.
How young we were, how ignorant, how ready
to think the only history was our own.

And there was a couple who quarreled into the night,
Their voices high, sharp:
nothing is ever entirely
right in the lives of those who love each other.

2.

In that season suddenly our island
Broke out its old sores for all to see.
We saw them too.
We stood there wondering how

the salt horizons and the Dublin hills,
the rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes
we thought we knew
had been made to shiver

into our ancient twelve by fifteen television
which gave them back as gray and grayer tears
and killings, killings, killings,
then moonlight-colored funerals:

nothing we said
not then, not later,
fathomed what it is
is wrong in the lives of those who hate each other.

Read more »

Mizrahi and Barry in Nature:

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the development of an imaging method called cryo-electron microscopy. On bestowing the prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stated that this technique has “moved biochemistry into a new era”. Writing in Nature, Guo et al.¹ provide a compelling glimpse into this new age. The authors’ work reveals how a drug called bedaquiline, which has revolutionized the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis^2,3, interacts with its target.

The drug binds to the ATP synthase enzyme of the microorganism Mycobacterium tuberculosis that causes tuberculosis⁴. Adding to a rapidly growing body of work elucidating the structure of ATP synthases by cryo-electron microscopy^5,6, the details presented by Guo and colleagues — and particularly the videos (see Supplementary Videos 1 and 2 of ref. 1) generated from their structural data — are breathtaking in their ability to reveal how this macromolecular machine works. Moreover, the authors show how the drug binds to the enzyme and disrupts its synthesis of the molecule ATP, providing crucial information that had eluded detection through other, more conventional structural and biochemical investigative techniques.

More here.

Nayereh Doosti in Agni:

Nayereh Doosti/AGNI: Before the pandemic, “Story about a Boy” might have simply read as an absurdist narrative. It’s about a couple whose job involves offering assisted dying to individuals identified as “high-risk,” people who must live in camps or be euthanized—“drift away on crisp cotton sheets” if they buy the couple’s “Premium Plan.” Your setup is eerie, but oddly reminiscent of our current state, where “herd immunity” through uncontrolled infection is dangerously encouraged by some politicians, and where the same politicians have blatantly suggested seniors should be willing to sacrifice their lives to save the economy. To what extent did the pandemic inspire this story? How would you compare pandemic-era life to the strict and fear-driven atmosphere you’ve established here?

Hananah Zaheer: I started “About a Boy” long before the pandemic, as precisely what you said—an absurdist story about a group of people offering euthanasia as an escape from life. I was interested in playing with the idea of dystopia, especially in the context of South Asia and Pakistan, and what frustration with life under strict regimes might look like. Arguably, governance can be exciting and nearly dystopian at times anyway. I grew up watching Pakistan go from a democratic government to being under military rule and back to democracy, along with all the complicated and bizarre ways in which the pendulum of daily life swings under such changes—but this story was probably more influenced by what was happening in the U.S. (which I consider home) and the Philippines (where I currently live) after the virus hit. Watching the two governments respond to the disease in such opposite and extreme ways—denial from one and a complete shutdown with curfews and armed soldiers from the other—made me think about the choices ordinary citizens are left with.

More here.

Jim Baggott in Physics World:

“Surely, after 62 years, we should have an exact formulation of some serious part of quantum mechanics?” wrote the eminent Northern Irish physicist John Bell in the opening salvo of his Physics World article, “Against ‘measurement’ ”. Published in August 1990 just two months before his untimely death at the age of 62, Bell’s article outlined his concerns. As he further explained, “By ‘exact’ I do not of course mean ‘exactly true’. I mean only that the theory should be fully formulated in mathematical terms, with nothing left to the discretion of the theoretical physicist…until workable approximations are needed in applications.”

Although Bell spent the majority of his career as a theoretical particle physicist and worked on accelerator design at the CERN lab in Geneva, today he is best known for his contributions to deep, foundational questions that probe the meaning of quantum mechanics. Nearly a century after it was first formulated, there is still no consensus among physicists on how the theory should be interpreted. “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics,” Richard Feynman famously declared – a rather extraordinary admission for a foundational theory that underpins much of our understanding of modern physics.

Indeed, the debate about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, which began in 1927, continues to this day.

More here.

Lawrence B. Glickman in the Boston Review:

For many conservative pundits, the election of Donald Trump marked the moment when the Republican Party abandoned its longstanding claim to being the “party of ideas.” For example, in June 2017 longtime Republican policy advisor Bruce Bartlett wrote, “Trump is what happens when a political party abandons ideas.” For Bartlett, though, it had been a long decline, dating back decades. Likewise, Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell argued that “somehow the Party of Ideas stopped coming up with them circa, oh, 1987.”

As both of these comments suggest, the belief that the Republican Party was losing its status as the “party of ideas” long predated the rise of Trump. It went back to the 1988 presidential campaign, when critics fretted that George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s successor, lacked what Bush called the “vision thing.” By the early 1990s, conservative columnists were already worrying that, as Cal Thomas wrote, the GOP is “no longer identified as the party of ideas”—that it had, within a decade, become, as another columnist claimed, “intellectually spent, aimless, and exhausted.” Ever since, observations that the “GOP is no longer the party of ideas” have been a hardy perennial of punditry.

Yet even as we recognize the dramatic contrasts between the Republicans in the 1980s and those of our present moment, there remain several reasons to reject the “party of ideas” narrative.

More here.

Andrew Jewett in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Back in 2013, another in a long line of tussles over scientism broke out. Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, told humanities majors at a Brandeis University graduation ceremony that they represented “the resistance” in a society dominated by “the twin imperialisms of science and technology.” Wieseltier sounded all the familiar themes — the enslavement of human beings to machines, the tyranny of numbers, the depredations of “technologism,” the unchallenged dominance of “utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience” in modern culture. The antidote, he claimed, was the humanities.

The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker fired back. Petulant humanists, he charged, welcomed science when it cured disease but not when it impinged on their professional fiefdom. The march of science and the Enlightenment had vastly improved the human condition. Only science, Pinker insisted, could address “the deepest questions about who we are, where we came from, and how we define the meaning and purpose of our lives.” Humanities scholars would remain irrelevant until they embraced the scientifically informed humanitarianism that constituted the “de facto morality” of the modern world. The ensuing controversy stretched through that summer and fall.

Today a global pandemic grips the world. Societies face immediate, practical, life-or-death questions about how to incorporate science and expertise into their collective decisions. And yet the old refrains can still be heard. In Commentary, the conservative commentator Sohrab Ahmari argued that “the ideology of scientism” has plunged the world into “a half-millennial funk.” In the face of a deadly virus, Ahmari wrote, moderns lack any sense of why “life is worth living and passing on”; they cannot even assert that “being is preferable to nonbeing.” Pinker chimed in as well, arguing that political decisions favoring economic well-being over bodily health reflected the “malignant delusion” of evangelicals’ “belief in an afterlife,” which “devalues actual lives.”

And so the tired, decades-old pattern continues.

More here.

Barbara Graustark in The New York Times:

Could there possibly be an upside to the long, stressful periods of isolation that so many people have endured during the pandemic lockdown of 2020? When we emerge, will we see the world in a new way? Could there even be a silver lining to these months of quiet living and self-reflection?

Four decades ago, I heard firsthand how a long period of solitude changed an extraordinary figure who was determined to make his life have meaning: John Lennon, who is being mourned by millions on Tuesday, the 40th anniversary of his murder. There was no pandemic in late 1975 when Lennon and Yoko Ono, the most public of personalities, withdrew for what became a five-year hiatus from interviews and recording following the birth of their son, Sean. But for Lennon there was plenty of existential angst, and actual fear.

He was living in New York City, still seeking a green card and fighting deportation. Though the Beatles had stopped making music, it would take years to dissolve legal ties, and the band’s shadow enveloped his life. Collections of classic Beatles songs were recycling the Fab Four’s greatest hits, leaving Lennon to worry if he could ever live up to the public demand that the Dream Band reunite. Paul McCartney soared up the charts with Wings, but Lennon hadn’t had a No. 1 album since “Walls and Bridges” in 1974, with Elton John’s assist on “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.”

More here.

After the Election: A Father Speaks to His Son

He says, they will not take us.
They want the ones who love
another god, the ones whose
joy comes with five prayers and
songs to the sun in the mornings
and at night. He says, they will
not want us. They want the ones
whose tongues stumble over
silent e’s, whose voices creak
when a th suddenly appears
in the middle of a word.

They want the ones who cannot hide
copper skin like we can. He says,
I am old. I lived through one revolution.
We can hide our skin.
We have read the books.
He says, we are the quiet kind, the ones
who stay late and do not speak,
the ones who do not bring trumpets
or trouble. He says, we are safe in silence.
We must become ghosts.

I think, so many are already dust.
tried to stay thin, be small, tried
breaking bone and voice, tried
to be soft. So many tried to be
empty, to be barely breath. To be
still enough to be left alone. Become
shadows, trying not to be bodies.

It never works. To become nothing.
They come for the shadows, too.

by M. Soledad Caballero
from Split This Rock

M. Soledad Caballero reads
“After the Election: A Father Speaks to His Son.”