Quitting Time

The hosed-down chamfered concrete pleases him.
He’ll wait a while before he kills the light
on the cleaned up yard, its pails and farrowing crate,
And the cast-iron pump immobile as a herm
Upstanding elsewhere, in another time.
More and more this last look at the wet
Shine of the place is what means most to him —
And to repeat the phrase “My head is light,”
Because it often is as he reaches back
And switches off, a home-based man at home
In the end with little. Except this same
Night after nightness, redding up the work,
The song of the tubular steel gate in the dark
As he pulls it and starts his uphill trek.

by Seamus Heaney
from District and Circle
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006

Helena de Bres in LARB:

HAVE YOU NOTICED lately that everything is shit? Things were very shitty the year before last, they became even shittier last year, and now everything is just indescribably shit. As a species, we’ve been stuck with this aspect of the human condition for around 300,000 years. But the question of how to respond to it intellectually and emotionally arises with fresh urgency in each new generation. And in the face of each fresh piece of shit. Traditionally, one role of philosophy has been to aid us in this task. Friar Lawrence advises Romeo, banished from his city and the arms of his girl, to sip “Adversity’s sweet milke, Philosophie.” However, over the past couple of centuries, with the transformation of philosophy into an academic discipline, its connection with self-help has largely been severed. The aim of Kieran Setiya’s new book Life Is Hard is to recapture philosophy’s ancient mission of “helping us find our way” in the face of life’s afflictions.

One storied philosophical response to our situation is to claim that, when you really think about it, Nothing Is Shit. The 17th-century poster child for this view was Gottfried Leibniz, who argued that everything that’s apparently terrible and senseless is in fact a necessary, even beautiful part of God’s benevolent scheme. Today we’re more likely to find the suggestion on Instagram, in a sunset-saturated image exhorting us to exude “GOOD VIBES ONLY” or “MANIFEST JOY.” I don’t know about you, but the bare reading of these phrases makes me bust out bad vibes like octopus ink, and Setiya is a kindred spirit here. It’s pretty clear that the universe contains significant pointless suffering, and we do ourselves no favors in denying the fact. “What we need in our affliction,” Setiya writes, isn’t self-deception or distraction but “acknowledgment.” Engage that core and lean in.

More here.

Robin Wright in The New Yorker:

The girls and women of Iran are just bitchin’ brave, flipping the bird at its Supreme Leader in a challenge to one of the most significant revolutions in modern history. Day after dangerous day, on open streets and in gated schools, in a flood of tweets and brazen videos, they have ridiculed a theocracy that deems itself the government of God. The average age of the protesters who have been arrested is just fifteen, the Revolutionary Guard’s deputy commander claimed last week. In the process, they have captured the world’s imagination; sympathy rallies have been held from London to Los Angeles, Sydney to Seoul, and Tokyo to Tunis.

Iran’s protests may well be the first time in history that women have been both the spark and engine for an attempted counter-revolution. “The role played by Iranian women right now seems very unprecedented,” Daniel Edelstein, a political scientist at Stanford and an expert on revolutions, told me. One of the few possible parallels was the role of Parisian female poissonières, or market workers, who stormed Versailles to prevent the king from turning against the National Assembly and crushing the nascent French Revolution, he said. In that case, however, “the women were seeking to prevent counter-revolution, not contributing to it.” During the Russian Revolution, bread riots led by women in Petrograd played a pivotal role in the tsarist empire’s collapse, Anne O’Donnell, a Russia historian at New York University, told me. But Iran’s protests have been unique because, she said, “this is not just an upheaval involving women, it is an upheaval about women and women’s freedom, and that makes it very special.”

More here.

Fredric Jameson in Sidecar:

After decades in which inscrutable titles signed Godard popped up as regularly as clockwork in the film festivals, while the image of their maker deteriorated from rebel into dirty old man, if not technologically obsessed sage, it is stunning, leafing through the filmographies, to remember how much these films counted as events for us as we waited for each new and unexpected one in the 1960s, how intensely we scrutinized the political engagements of the Dziga Vertov group, with what genuinely engaged curiosity we asked ourselves what the end of the political period would bring, and later on what we were to do with the final works of the ‘humanist’ period, where they came from, and whether they meant a falling off or a genuine renewal.

Throughout all this we were entertained or provoked by the increasingly ignoble ‘thoughts’ or paradoxes which either demanded meditation or inspired a mild contempt, tempered by the constant reminder that visuality, if it thinks, does so in a way not necessarily accessible to the rest of us; while his films went on ‘thinking’ in chiasmatic images: Belmondo imitating Bogart, Piccoli inviting Bardot to use his bathwater (‘I’m not dirty’), the world conquerors exhibiting their picture postcards, Mao’s Cultural Revolution taking the form of the most infectious music, the world ending in a traffic jam, a character scarfing up yoghurt with a finger in the bathroom, two African garbage collectors reciting Lenin, our favourite film stars baffled by their new roles, an interpolated series of interview-interrogations in which ten-year-olds are asked about class struggle, and fun-loving models, about the latest decisions of the CGT, ‘la musique, c’est mon Antigone!’ – narrative deteriorating steadily all the while only to end up in 3-D or in images as thick as butterflies in front of the face.

More here.

Alden Young in Phenomenal World:

On May 1, 2014, Nigeria’s then-president, Goodluck Jonathan, addressed a crowd of workers in the country’s capital Abuja.  He declared that “the challenge of the country is not poverty, but redistribution of wealth.” The prompt for his comment was a report issued only a few days prior, which labeled Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, as one of only five nations that are home to two-thirds of the world’s population living in extreme poverty. Rejecting the categorization of Nigeria as a poor country, President Jonathan pointed to the country’s Gross Domestic Production (GDP), which he declared was “over half a trillion dollars.” Moreover, the economy, he maintained, was “growing at close to 7 percent.”

It was only a week before the president’s address that the official figure for Nigeria’s GDP had been significantly revised. The first reexamination of the structure of the Nigerian economy since 1990 showed an increase in the country’s 2013 GDP by 89 percent. Scholars were surprised by the dramatic growth in the banking and telecommunications sectors and the significant decline in the relative size of the hydrocarbon sectors.

More here.

Blake Smith in American Affairs:

Raymond Geuss, Cambridge philosopher, is a prominent critic of liberalism and neoliberalism, and of the tradition of anglophone analytic political philosophy that he sees as their ideological prop. His scholarship, since the 1970s, can be read as an attempt to model another form of thinking, an approach inspired by classical antiquity, Nietzsche, and the Frankfurt school. Against what he sees as the pallid abstractions of Anglo-American political philosophy, Geuss presents himself as a champion of a more skeptical, historically informed way of thinking about politics. In his new book, Not Thinking Like a Liberal, Geuss gives an account of the autobiographical origins of this mode of thought and, more ambitiously, though also more vaguely, gestures toward an alternative to liberalism.¹

Not Thinking Like a Liberal traces Geuss’s education, first at an unusual Catholic boarding school in the 1950s, and then at Columbia University with figures such as Sidney Morgenbesser. As a memoir, the book is not particularly compelling. It contains little in the way of events, psychology, or gossip. Geuss underplays, for example, the con­flict with Morgenbesser that eventually led to their break and, in a notable silence, avoids discussion of Robert Nozick, who was also Morgenbesser’s student (as an undergraduate) during that era. Nozick became one of the most prominent philosophers in the tradition Geuss despises and is a frequent target of his polemic in other writings.

Not Thinking is rather a paean to Geuss’s influences. This mode of exposition allows him to express his political and philosophical commit­ments without having to argue for them, presenting them instead as aspects of his character acquired through engagement with his teachers. Geuss sees it as his good fortune that these influences equipped him to avoid the almost irresistibly stultifying influence of liberalism on Ameri­cans’ minds. He was able to escape this stupefaction, he writes, thanks to the peculiar combination of Catholic and Marxist influences among the refugee clergymen who staffed his school.

More here.

Nesrine Malik at The Guardian:

It’s beginning to seem like Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay How to Write About Africa might be, after the Bible, the most read English-language text on the African continent. It skewered cliched writing with a roll call of stereotypes that appear to be obligatory in descriptions of the continent. “Readers will be put off,” he writes, “if you don’t mention the light in Africa. And sunsets – the African sunset is a must.”

The essay touched a nerve, and alongside the short story Discovering Home, which won the Caine prize for African Writing in 2002, established the Kenyan author as both a literary talent and an uncompromising commentator. But neither of these pieces fully does him justice. His death in 2019, at just 48, deprived us of a fierce talent, a real pan-African in both experience and orientation.

more here.

Jennifer Szalai at the New York Times:

One of the funny things about adolescence is that the world can seem enormous, brimming with possibility, while at the same time the urgency to define oneself — fastidiously curating likes and dislikes, ruthlessly sorting people according to their musical tastes — can make the world feel extremely small.

In his quietly wrenching memoir, “Stay True,” the New Yorker writer Hua Hsu recalls starting out at Berkeley in the mid-1990s as a watchful teenager who had cultivated a cramped sensibility. “I fixated on the lamest things people did,” he writes, delineating who he was by what he rejected — music by Oasis and Pearl Jam, anything “uncool” or “mainstream.” He identified as straight edge — no drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes — less out of punk-rock principle than out of fear: “I couldn’t imagine letting down my inhibitions around people I’d be silently judging the whole time.”

more here.

Melanie Freeman in The Christian Science Monitor:

A glassy sweeper egg, moments from hatching, is seen through a microscope at Roger Williams University’s Wet Lab in Bristol, Rhode Island, where parent offspring are bred for the New England Aquarium’s aquaculture program. The round bubble is an oil droplet, which is a nutritional source similar to an egg yolk.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

A colony of Baya Weaver were nesting in a tall Acacia tree in a forested area in Singapore. I focused my attention on a newly completed nest and waited for the return of its inhabitants, using a 600 millimeter telephoto lens and a fast shutter speed to “freeze” the image of the bird’s approach.

More here. (Note: Once driving from Islamabad to the Northern areas, we found a Baya nest. It had several entrances and many “rooms” tunneled into the intricately woven retort shaped architecture. My mother who had treasured one of these as a little girl was ravished. Watching the obvious delight she experienced upon this unexpected roadside re-discovery sent waves of joy coursing through my body as a little girl. Since then, I have had a special bond with Baya. How strange that even as I write this note, I am re-living that joy. Call it my Proustian madeleine moment or my Homecoming)

Love Poem

My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases,
At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,
Whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen,
And have no cunning with any soft thing

Except all ill-at-ease fidgeting people:
The refugee uncertain at the door
You make at home; deftly you steady
The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.

Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers’ terror,
Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime
Yet leaping before apoplectic streetcars—
Misfit in any space. And never on time.

A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only
With words and people and love you move at ease;
In traffic of wit expertly maneuver
And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.

Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,
Your lipstick grinning on our coat,
So gaily in love’s unbreakable heaven
Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float.

Be with me, darling, early and late. Smash glasses—
I will study wry music for your sake.
For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.

by John Frederick Nims 

Josh Lambert in JSTOR Daily:

You don’t have to dig deeply to discover the stress produced in many academics and writers by the constant stream of requests for letters of recommendation and book blurbs from former students, current ones, and colleagues.

These requests provoke anxiety not only because of the time they absorb, but also because of the ethical questions they pose: Can I in good conscience blurb this book despite the problems I have with it? Is it right that the students with the confidence to ask for letters get more support than the shy ones? Must I blurb this book effusively, simply because its author blurbed my own with enthusiasm? (The terror that a cycle of reciprocity might spiral forever upward is captured in a 1992 poem in The American Scholar, “A Farewell to Blurbs,” which ends with one poet asking another to just call the whole thing off: “I still ask you to agree / That if I say no more about your poems, you’ll do the same for me.”)

If such anxieties sound familiar, be glad that you’re not Lionel Trilling. When he was flying high in the 1950s, as possibly the most celebrated professor in the country, his recommendations held astonishing power. He knew they got results.

More here.

Davide Castelvecchi and Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Three chemists who pioneered a useful technique called click chemistry to join molecules together efficiently have won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Barry Sharpless at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, and Morten Meldal at the University of Copenhagen laid the foundation for click chemistry, and both independently discovered a pivotal reaction that could link two molecules — an azide and an alkyne — with relative ease^1,2,3. This reaction has been used to develop a host of molecules, including plastics and potential pharmaceuticals.

The third winner, Carolyn Bertozzi at Stanford University in California, used click chemistry to map the complex sugar-based polymers called glycans on the surface of living cells without disturbing cell function⁴. To do this, she developed processes called bioorthogonal reactions, which are now being used to aid the development of cancer drugs.

More here.

Rachel Fraser in the Boston Review:

Love hungers for knowledge. For someone newly in love, nothing is better than learning about the beloved, nothing better than revealing yourself to them in turn. “The talk of lovers who have just declared their love,” writes Iris Murdoch in The Bell (1958), “is one of life’s most sweet delights. . . . Each one in haste to declare all that he is, so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.”

At times, such hunger makes for epistemic crisis. When someone falls in love, Alasdair MacIntyre notes, they are “apt to rediscover for themselves versions of the other-minds problem.” How, exactly, can one know what another person is thinking or feeling? In ordinary life the question feels forced and sterile. Most of the time the minds of others are simply open to us: I can see that you are in pain, say, just by looking at you. Then one falls in love, and suddenly things are different: no question is more urgent. One searches, desperately, for a sign, a trace, a clue of what one craves—that one’s love is returned—all whilst being tormented by the certainty that any such sign is mere suggestion. It might hint at the truth, but it cannot reveal it. The beloved’s mind is hidden; only an avowal of love will do.

More here.

Gili Ostfield at Bookforum:

“I have always wanted to write the sort of book that I find it impossible to talk about afterward, the sort of book that makes it impossible for me to withstand the gaze of others,” writes Annie Ernaux’s narrator near the end of her 1998 autofiction, Shame. Ernaux takes the sentiment further in the opening lines of her 2008 book, The Possession: “I have always wanted to write as if I would be gone when the book was published. To write as if I were about to die—no more judges.”

This is a thread that ties together much of Ernaux’s writing, one pulled taut by a certain anxiety about truth on one end and the endurance of a self on the other. The frank admissions that pepper her work expose the radical nature of her long writing career.

more here.

Alex Ross at The New Yorker:

The Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck, who lived from 1886 to 1957, is little known outside his native land, but his moments of fame have been as striking as they are strange. For one thing, Schoeck gained the admiration of several leading writers of the twentieth century. Hermann Hesse ranked Schoeck’s songs alongside those of Schubert and Schumann; James Joyce considered him a rival to Stravinsky; Thomas Mann also thought highly of him. A further quiver of notoriety followed in the nineteen-seventies, when, as Calvin Trillin related in this magazine, students at Amherst College launched an absurdist organization called the Othmar Schoeck Memorial Society for the Preservation of Unusual and Disgusting Music. The group is best remembered for having precipitated the meeting of the illusionists Penn and Teller. At the time of their fateful encounter, Penn was riding a unicycle and Teller was selling pencils emblazoned with Schoeck’s name.

more here.

How to Have a Child

Begin on the day you decide
you are fit
to carry on.
Begin with a quailing heart
for here you stand
on the fault line.
Begin if you can at the beginning.
Begin with your mother,
with her grandfather,
the ones before him.
Think of their hands, all of them:
firm on the plow, the cradle,
the rifle butt, the razor strop;
trembling on the telegram,
the cheek of a lover,
the fact of a door.
Everything that can wreck a life
has been done before,
done to you, even. That’s all
inside you now.
Half of it you won’t think of.
The rest you wouldn’t dream of.
Go on.

by Barbara Kingsolver
from How to Fly
Harper Collins