The Stranger

A man came up to me as I was walking home from the pharmacy: “Are you Jose Hernandez Diaz?” “Yes,” I said, “who’s asking?” “Do you enjoy sipping tea before bedtime?” “Well, I do, but what is it to you?” I asked. “In the ninth grade, did you get cut from the basketball team?” “I did, in fact, get cut from the team.” “Do you sometimes wonder what life would’ve been like had you married Margot Cisneros?” “Maybe, sometimes, yes,” I said. “Are you afraid of small talk and long walks in the city?” “I’m just a little introverted,” I said. “Does the night sky resemble a dragon of your dreams?” “Yes, thank you for asking,” I said. “Did you cry when Muncy hit that home run in the World Series?” “I did cry at that moment. Proud of it!” “Were you born and raised back and forth between L.A. and Orange County?” “Story of my life; yes,” I said. “Does the night sky resemble a dragon of your dreams?” “Yes, thank you for asking. Yes!”

by Jose Hernandez Diaz
from The Yale Review, 3/9/22

Nic Johnson and Robert Manduca in Boston Review:

On or around 1939 debates about international political economy changed. Over the course of the Cold War, economic nationalism—the attempt to use the state to advance a country’s economic interests—was crowded out of official discourse by two competing universalisms, communism on one side and liberalism on the other. Over the last few decades, however, this opposition has been scrambled. First Marxist universalism failed; the Sino-Soviet split fractured the communist project before the USSR collapsed altogether. Then, after a brief period in the sun on the international stage, liberal universalism too began to falter in a declining arc from Iraq and the Global Financial Crisis to Donald Trump’s victory on an “America First” platform.

In the wake of these declensions, two political economic developments have muddied the earlier Cold War waters. In October last year the Biden administration announced that it would leave tariffs on two-thirds of Chinese exports intact. This came as a surprise for those who were hoping that Trump administration policies were pathological aberrations. Trade wars, it seems, have come to enjoy bipartisan support, in the unlikeliest of places—the ostensible headquarters of neoliberal globalization.

More here.

Robert Wright interviews Suzanne Schneider.

Gregory Brew in Phenomenal World:

In October 2021, the price of gasoline in the United States rose to its highest level in seven years. There were many reasons for this: surging demand following a year-and-a-half of lockdown, a slower than expected recovery of oil production, and imbalances in products inventories due to energy shortages in Europe and East Asia. Experts believed prices would fall in the new year. Instead, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sent them to new and historic heights, rattling markets and increasing the US price of gasoline to more than $4 a gallon.

It is easy to see that the price of oil is one of Joe Biden’s biggest problems, but harder to figure out whether Biden can do much about it. If he can’t, who can? An entire industry exists to predict future changes in the price of oil. Oil companies themselves try to imagine where the price will be, so that they can schedule capital expenditures to meet future demand, often without much success.

Today, the volatility of oil prices is taken for granted. But this was not always the case.

More here.

Grier and Gass in The Christian Science Monitor:

Columbine. Parkland. Pulse. Virginia Tech. Sandy Hook. Las Vegas.

Now Buffalo and Uvalde. Two more tragic mass shootings, added to the heartbreaking list of the worst such incidents in American history. Does nothing change? That is what it can seem like. Politicians make familiar utterances about thoughts and prayers, and there’s a spurt of citizen energy and media attention, but that fades, and big things intended to lower the nation’s shocking level of deaths caused by firearms don’t happen.

It may be true that Washington has taken little concerted action on gun violence in recent years. It’s a difficult, complex issue – and national politics is polarized and too often gridlocked. But some states and cities have taken significant steps to respond to gun tragedies, says Daniel W. Webster, co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Grassroots organizing against gun violence is growing. And it is important to push back against the fatalist attitude that terrible shootings will continue, says Professor Webster. Accepting them as inevitable becomes a self-fulling prophecy. There are things that work to curb such violence. They can be implemented, realistically.

Two tragedies in a month could be a tipping point.

More here.

Victoria Gill in BBC:

The Poet with His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need any more of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just slightly touched

by the passing foil of water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

by Mary Oliver
from The Best American Poetry 2006
Scribner Poetry, 2006

Lucy Scholes at The Paris Review:

The poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks wrote her third novel, The Bloater, in just four weeks in the autumn of 1967, which would have been impressive by any standards but her own. She had originally set out to finish it in half the time and had hoped it would earn her “a lot of red-hot money.” (Here, she fell short too). But the result was a dizzying, madcap story that was a hit with the critics. Again, most writers would have been over the moon with such a reception, but Tonks could never be so predictable. “It just proves the English like their porridge,” she once reportedly replied to congratulations from her editor. To borrow a confession from The Bloater’s canny narrator—a young woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Tonks herself: “I knew perfectly well what I was doing.”

Between 1963 and 1972, Tonks published two collections of poetry, six novels, a large body of literary journalism, and an experimental sound-poem. She was a serious stylist, writing in the tradition of French nineteenth-century novels and those preeminent portraitists of the modern metropolis: Baudelaire and Rimbaud.

more here.

Tyler Malone at the LA Times:

When you get into a car with John Waters, the infamous filmmaker behind transgressive classics such as “Pink Flamingos,” “Hairspray” and “Serial Mom,” there’s a part of you that wonders if you’re being kidnapped, or at least conscripted into one of his anarchic characters’ outrageous crimes. If you too might be found guilty of “first-degree stupidity” in Divine’s kangaroo court or forced to star in a film by a “cinematic terrorist” like Cecil B. Demented.

The reality is more mundane but entertaining nonetheless. On a crosstown drive from the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel to the Aratani Theatre in Little Tokyo, Waters’ stylish plaid suit of Easter pastels is the loudest thing in the vehicle, aside from my laughter at his witticisms. He’s a subversive and playful conversationalist, but — not to ruin his reputation — also sweet, gentle, almost subdued.

more here.

The Same Inside

Walking to your place for a love feast
I saw at a street corner
an old beggar woman.

I took her hand,
kissed her delicate cheek,
we talked, she was
the same inside as I am,
from the same kind,
I sensed this instantly
as a dog knows by scent
another dog.

I gave her money,
I could not part from her.
After all, one needs
someone who is close.

And then I no longer knew
why I was walking to your place.

by Anna Swir
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harvest Books, 1996
translated from Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan

Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine:

SPEAKING AT HARVARD LAW SCHOOL’S 2022 Class Day ceremonies on Wednesday, May 25, former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch ’81, J.D. ’84, said that justice—the fight for freedom—is something each generation must defend. She reminded the audience that exactly two years ago to the day, George Floyd had “lost his life under the knee of a uniformed Minneapolis police officer. It was a shocking crime,” she said, “a senseless tragedy. It did not have to happen. And for those of us who have worked on police reform over the years it stood as a literal rebuke to all of our efforts.”

…She concluded by sharing the words of one of her favorite philosophers, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, to underscore the long-term, multi-generational commitment required:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime. Therefore, we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good, makes complete sense in any immediate context of history. Therefore, we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we must be saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe, as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

More here.

Michael Sainato in The Guardian:

Evan Seyfried, 40, a Kroger employee for nearly 20 years in Milford, Ohio, died by suicide on 9 March 2021, after experiencing months of harassment, bullying and abuse in the workplace, according to a lawsuit against Kroger filed by his family in 2021 that is still pending in court. Jana Murphy, a close friend of the Seyfried family, organized Justice for Evan, a group that has organized several protests over the past year demanding action from Kroger. The group is pushing for not only justice for the Seyfried family, but for legislation to protect workers from workplace bullying and harassment such as Evan Seyfried allegedly endured. “No one was helping him. They didn’t want to be the target,” said Murphy. “There are these people now who have called me, crying their eyes out, feeling like they could have saved his life because they didn’t do anything.”

According to the lawsuit, Seyfried began experiencing bullying and harassment from his store manager for wearing a face mask at work and turning down her sexual advances. Then the bullying turned into sabotaging his department, intimidation, threats and surveillance. The harassment continued despite reports and complaints made with Kroger and the local union.

“He took all the proper channels that we’re told to utilize when these things happen, only to be shut down and not have it handled whatsoever,” said Erica Erskine, a Kroger employee in the south-west US for 24 years who has volunteered with the Justice for Evan group since 2021. “This goes on not only at Kroger, but in every job sector, private and public, all over the country. This is the time to bring this to light because of everything that transpired with the pandemic. Workers are finally standing up to say, we’re not going to tolerate this kind of treatment any more, we’re sick and tired of being abused.”

More here.

Joshua Judd Porter in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Talking sponges, spelling snails, dogs whose howls can be triggered from 1,000 miles away — these are but a few of the many historical examples upon which Justin E. H. Smith draws to illustrate the persistence of the telecommunicative imaginary throughout human history. Working in the same vein of scholarship as Ian Hacking’s “historical ontology,” Smith presents a view of technology in his new book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning, that is the exact antithesis of much fashionable continental theorizing. Unlike a Kittler or Virilio — who see the technological object as forming the human subject who comes in contact with it, teaching him or her how to use it, its operation and value not explicitly designed but latent within its form, waiting to be discovered — Smith sees technology as a prosthesis, designed to meet stable desires: “[N]otwithstanding the enormous changes in the size, speed, and organization of the devices we use from one decade or century to the next, what these devices are, and how they shape our world, has been substantially the same throughout the course of human history.” In Smith’s view, the technological object is not “a discursive product forever trapped within the confines of a single epoch’s epistēmē,” but rather a continued striving toward what he presents as the dominant end of human technological innovation: the facilitation of communication.

More here.

Daniel Jassby in Inference Review:

In recent years, a steady flow of press releases from nuclear fusion research projects has hailed breakthrough advances and new record yields. Despite the relentlessly optimistic tone of these announcements and the repeated claims that the prospects for commercialization have never looked brighter, the stark reality is that practical fusion-based electric power remains a distant prospect. It is likely unachievable anytime in the next half a century.

Even then, it may still remain beyond our grasp.

The most readily accessible nuclear fusion process combines the hydrogenic isotopes deuterium and tritium to release energy in the form of energetic neutrons and helium ions. There are two broad approaches toward achieving terrestrial fusion. In magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), magnetic fields are used to confine the hot fusion fuel in the form of a fully ionized gas or plasma that persists for seconds or longer. In inertial confinement fusion (ICF), laser or particle beams are used to compress and heat a tiny capsule of fusion fuel to generate a micro-explosion of a nanosecond duration.

More here.

Keith Frankish in his blog:

Rainbows are real, aren’t they? You can see them with your own eyes — though you have to be in the right position, with the sun behind you. You can point them out to other people — provided they take up a similar position to you. Heck, you can even photograph them.

But what exactly is it that’s real? It seems as if there’s an actual gauzy, multi-coloured arc stretching across the sky and curving down to meet the ground at a point to which you could walk. Our ancestors may have thought rainbows were like that. We know better, of course. There’s no real coloured arc up there. Nor are there any specific physical features arranged arcwise — the rainbow’s “atmospheric correlates”, as it were. There are just water droplets evenly distributed throughout the air and reflecting sunlight in such a way that from your vantage point there appears to be a multi-coloured arc.

More here.

Jeffrey Meyers at Salmagundi:

Nabokov and Balthus were intellectually and emotionally connected by their lifelong interest in Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan Poe, and by their hatred of Sigmund Freud. Carroll epitomized the surprisingly large group of sexually repressed, dysfunctional and miserable English writers in the Victorian age, including Carlyle, Ruskin, Swinburne, Pater, Hopkins, Wilde and Housman. Carroll was a pseudonym, like Balthus and V. Sirin. A Cheshire cat appears in Alice in Wonderland and in many pictures by Balthus. At Cambridge, Nabokov translated Alice into Russian, and he describes Lolita as “a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing her Alice-in-Wonderland hair.”
Carroll, whose temperament was morbid and taste perverse, liked to photograph half-naked pubescent girls. His provocative image of the beautiful Alice Liddell, the model for the fictional Alice, foreshadowed Balthus’ paintings and was the visual representation of Lolita.

more here.

N. S. Thompson at The American Scholar:

A social anthropologist may already have asked this question, but what was it in the 1960s that caused so many young British men to become dedicated fans of American blues? Usually what went with it was a radical rejection of all they had been brought up to believe in. If you were lucky to live in the London area, you formed a band and could thump out some Muddy Waters. And if you were born in Glasgow? Interests there were more acoustic. A flourishing folk scene accommodated accomplished guitar pickers like Bert Jansch and even spawned psychedelic groups such as the Incredible String Band. Along with all this music, a vibrant poetry scene thrived in the city’s pubs and clubs.

Born in Glasgow in 1951, James Campbell was plunged into this eruption of words and music, even if he was slightly behind the curve, since the ’60s Underground was fashioned by those born a decade earlier. Two elder sisters, however, along with their friends and boyfriends, educated him in the Underground’s particular strain of cultural rebellion, passing on the paperbacks and vinyl by which it was transmitted.

more here.