Sean O’Brien at Literary Review:
The earliest letters are sometimes very funny, as Larkin tries on attitudes. At Oxford he claims to be lumbered with ancient and/or mentally defective tutors; his work appears in magazines but is no good; he is upbraided when he reads for pleasure. He tailors his tone to the recipient: bluff and undeluded for Sydney Larkin (‘Pop’), safely and tenderly domestic for Eva (‘Mop’) and affectionately satirical for his older sister, Kitty. He includes some moody Oxford scenery: ‘the playing fields wait for the games of this afternoon; through the unecstatic street the gowned bicycles are whirling.’ This is pretty sophisticated for an eighteen-year-old – partly a parody of the promised bicycle races in Auden’s ‘Spain’, partly the kind of ‘real’ thing that finds its way into Larkin’s poetry and fiction. His description of trying to access a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover at the Bodleian is a small-scale classic that would slot perfectly into Lucky Jim. You enjoy the voice without ever quite believing what Larkin says, but ‘what he says’, the making over of the humdrum world of college and digs into curmudgeonly comedy, is what matters. This spirit of negation persists into his maturity, but it hardens from playfulness into habit.
more here.
Culture shapes who we are, so it follows that it would also shape our manifestations of stress, mental disorder, emotion. Yet, that also implies a kind of messiness that modern psychology and psychiatry, particularly the American kind, have spent the last 100 years struggling to tidy up.
It is worth noting
However inclined by their training to vacillate, scholars in the humanities are increasingly being asked to take sides. Should they support or oppose their students’ efforts to ban a reactionary speaker from campus? Should they defend the feminist philosopher who affirms the possibility of transracial identity or join those demanding her article be retracted? Should they remove an influential writer from the syllabus because of his fascist sympathies? Should they sign the petition urging their professional organization to join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel? So much of academic life seems colored by high-stakes political struggles, and so many decisions large and small are now treated as gestures of allegiance to particular ideological camps and as betrayals of others. It’s difficult to even list these polarizing campus scenarios without attracting political labels.
Are we doomed?
I met Rene Magritte a few weeks ago at the Starline Social Club in Oakland. A surprisingly jolly fellow, it turns out he’s working these days as a pedicab driver in San Francisco. Surrealism isn’t my jam, but when he offered me a pickup the next morning at the BART and mushrooms and tickets for two to the retrospective of his work at SFMoMA, well—I had to accept.
I recently rewatched “12 Angry Men” with The Philosophy Club at the University of Iowa as part of their “Owl of Minerva” film series. The 1957 film has the late, great Henry Fonda as the lone holdout on a jury ready to convict a poor, abused 18-year-old boy for allegedly stabbing his father to death. Over one long, tense evening (shown in something close to real-time), juror #8 – none of the jurors are identified by name, only number – forces the rest of the jury to methodically reexamined the evidence. It’s not a courtroom drama, it’s a jury-room drama in which only 3 of 1:36 minutes of running time take place outside the sweaty, claustrophobic jury room. The film is intense, moving, and effective. Afterwards, I made the following remarks.
It’s getting colder now in Beijing, and I can’t help but feel for the clothing left outside to dry. They had to hang through the night and on through the weak sunrise, doing their best to catch the wind before the temperature drops again. How do they feel being out there for passers-by to see, all exposed, caught up in the dust and very small toxic particles? 
“You start with a scarf…each 90-by-90-centimeter silk carré, printed in Lyon on twill made from thread created by the label’s own silkworms, holds a story. Since 1937, almost 2,500 original artworks have been produced, such as a 19th-century street scene from Ruedu Faubourg St.-Honore, the company’s home since 1880. The flora and fauna of Texas. A beach in Spain’s Basque country” –- this is a fragment from an advertisement article for Hermès in this month’s issue of a luxury magazine. The article is called “The Silk Road.” Does it refer to the “Silk Road” in any way that justifies the title, beyond the allure of legend? No. Does it mention that the first scarves created for this very label, in 1937, were made with raw silk from China? No. Not necessary, not relevant to the target reader. In fact, the less we mention the “East” while trying to sell such luxury designer items, the better, aiming as we are for the rich collector, the global consumer of fashion (whether belonging to the East or West) willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a small square of silk, and more likely to associate such status symbols with Western Europe rather than with the “underdeveloped,” impoverished, overpopulated, conflict-ridden East.
A few months back my boss and I had lunch with the person who, wearing a t-shirt that read “black death spectacle”, stood in protest in front of a painting of Emmett Till by Dana Schutz called Open Casket at the last Whitney Biennial. Shortly after his gesture another artist penned an open letter about how Schutz’s painting uses “black pain” as a medium, and how this use by non-Black artists needs to go. I’m not sure what the ethical verdict is (of whether or not Schutz made a gravely racist error), or whether the artist’s letter voiced an instance of over-reaching aesthetic censorship, nor will I make any attempt at trying to resolve that issue here; it would take far more space than what is available and is not my aim. Consider reading Aruna D’Souza’s recent book Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts for a thorough treatment (which, not so incidentally, the above mentioned protestor provided images for).
In Mohammed Hanif’s third novel Red Birds, US Air Force Major Ellie despairs of mission simulations being “dreamt up by some kid who’d never seen the inside of a cockpit”. Readers of literary fiction about war, if not of fiction in general, may feel a similar despair. Does the writer have enough authority to make their simulation convincing? Before Hanif was a Booker-longlisted author, or wrote for the New York Times and BBC, he trained as a pilot in Pakistan’s air force. What Major Ellie says about ejector seats and fireproof suits has the confidence of truth. But much more importantly, Hanif knows about the absurdity of war in a way that a civilian never could.
Zhen Dai holds up a small glass tube coated with a white powder: calcium carbonate, a ubiquitous compound used in everything from paper and cement to toothpaste and cake mixes. Plop a tablet of it into water, and the result is a fizzy antacid that calms the stomach. The question for Dai, a doctoral candidate at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her colleagues is whether this innocuous substance could also help humanity to relieve the ultimate case of indigestion: global warming caused by greenhouse-gas pollution.
In the United States today, the rich lay claim to a higher share of our nation’s wealth than they have at any point since the Gilded Age — and foreign-born residents account for a higher share of our nation’s population than at just about any time since that same era.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that 72,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2017, up from some 64,000 the previous year and 52,000 the year before that—a staggering increase with no end in sight. Most involved opioids.