Rowan Williams at Literary Review:

In a late poem about a friend’s death, Czesław Miłosz writes of the long passage between youth and age as one of learning ‘how to bear what is borne by others’. It could be a summary of his own poetic witness. Eva Hoffman’s moving and eloquent essay traces the ways in which that simultaneously guilty, compassionate and fastidious response characterises Miłosz’s work from its earliest days. Bearing what is borne by others is, for Miłosz, close to the heart of the poetic task, but it is also fraught with risk. Hoffman pinpoints how Miłosz’s hypersensitivity to the risks of sentimentality and grandstanding led to what many readers saw as an evasion of necessary commitment. He stood aside during the Warsaw Rising of 1944, wary of the overheated and unrealistic rhetoric surrounding it; he saw his first duty as being to the integrity of his poetry, not to the mythology of a sacrificially heroic Poland. Yet, as Hoffman stresses, the poetry itself reveals his full awareness of ambivalent motives and the dangers of willed detachment. Was he nervous of ‘being overwhelmed by emotions from which no detachment was possible’? The lines (from 1945), ‘You swore never to touch/The deep wounds of your nation’ – indeed, the whole poem in which they occur – reveal both a concern not to cheapen such wounds by sacralising the agonies of others and a recognition of the unbearable character of the pain involved: ‘My pen is lighter/Than a hummingbird’s feather. This burden/Is too much for it to bear.’

more here.

Humans

To think we gathered here, however briefly,
on a strip of sand soon swallowed by the future,

to eat and drink and laugh, as if it mattered,
then turn, refreshed, toward ordinary ends—

by whose authority took we that pleasure
in the herons and the foxes and the whales,

yellow butter, orange lilies, cottontails
bouncing in the green of turnip beds—and then

by night, the wine and music in a glowing spiral,
spread above our lightened heads, the fragrant table

and the rest that emptied every hand of book or plough,
of weapon, needle, pen—and in whose mind

do we remember it, our loving, which is less than half the story
for we creatures rarely grateful, seldom sorry,

bent on shortening the temporary—who will stay?
Just this: by wondering, we learned to pray.

by Michael Quatrone
from The Ecotheo Review

Anne Matthews in The American Scholar:

Willa Cather loathed biographers, professors, and autograph fiends. After her war novel, One of Ours, won the Pulitzer in 1923, she decided to cull the herd. “This is not a case for the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” she told one researcher. Burn my letters and manuscripts, she begged her friends. Hollywood filmed a loose adaptation of A Lost Lady, starring Barbara Stanwyck, in 1934, and Cather soon forbade any further screen, radio, and television versions of her work. No direct quotations from surviving correspondence, she ordered libraries, and for decades a family trust enforced her commands.

Archival scholars managed to undermine what her major biographer James Woodress called “the traps, pitfalls and barricades she placed in the biographer’s path,” even as literary critics reveled in trench warfare over Cather’s sexuality. In 2018, her letters finally entered the public domain, allowing Benjamin Taylor to create the first post-ban life of Cather for general readers.

Chasing Bright Medusas is timed for the 150th anniversary of Cather’s birth in Virginia. The title alludes to her 1920 story collection on art’s perils, Youth and the Bright Medusa. (“It is strange to come at last to write with calm enjoyment,” she told a college friend. “But Lord—what a lot of life one uses up chasing ‘bright Medusas,’ doesn’t one?”) Soon she urged modern writers to toss the furniture of naturalism out the window, making room for atmosphere and emotion. What she wanted was the unfurnished novel, or “novel démeublé,” as she called it in a 1922 essay. Paraphrasing Dumas, she posited that “to make a drama, all you need is one passion, and four walls.”

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

In 2015, while working as an undergraduate researcher at the North Carolina Zoo, Laura Lewis became friends with a male chimpanzee named Kendall. Whenever she visited the chimps, Kendall would gently take her hands and inspect her fingernails.

Then she disappeared for the summer to study baboons in Africa. When she returned to North Carolina, she wondered if Kendall would still remember her face. Sure enough, as soon as she stepped into his enclosure, Kendall raced up and gestured to look at her hands. “The feeling I got was that he clearly remembered me after four months away,” said Dr. Lewis, now a comparative psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “But I didn’t have the data to prove it.” Now she believes that she does. In a study published on Monday, Dr. Lewis and her colleagues have demonstrated that chimpanzees and bonobos can recall faces of other apes that they have not seen for years. One bonobo recognized a face after 26 years — a record for facial memory beyond our species.

More here.

Debbie Urbanski at Literary Hub:

Let’s imagine, for the purpose of this essay, that the following statement is true: An AI writes a novel.

Actually, forget about the imagining. This is already happening. Today’s AIs—large language models (LLMs) specifically, like GPT-4—can write. If you’ve glanced at the headlines this year, you probably know this. They can write papers for high school students, they can write bad poetry, they can write sentences, they can write paragraphs, and they can write novels.

The problem is, for now, the creative writing that LLMs produce isn’t that great.

To demonstrate this point, I recently gave GPT-4 a few lines from my novel that describe a post-human world. Then I asked it to complete the paragraph.

More here.

Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist:

The road to hell might be paved with good intentions, but the roads to pretty much everywhere else are paved with the corpses of animals. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb explores the outsized yet underappreciated impacts of the, by one estimate, 65 million kilometres of roads that hold the planet in a paved stranglehold. These extend beyond roadkill to numerous other insidious biological effects. The relatively young discipline of road ecology tries to gauge and mitigate them and sees biologists join forces with engineers and roadbuilders. This is a wide-ranging and eye-opening survey of the situation in the USA and various other countries.

More here.

Ruth Scurr in The Guardian:

French author Mathias Énard, winner of the Prix Goncourt and nominated for the International Booker prize, begins his new novel by quoting the Buddha: “In our former lives, we have all been earth, stone, dew, wind, fire, moss, tree, insect, fish, turtle, bird and mammal.” The central conceit of The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is the great “wheel of suffering” through which the souls of all living things are reincarnated in a new form immediately after death. Murderers, for example, come back as red worms slithering “cheek by jowl” under a dank shower tray in a rundown rural annexe rented by an anthropologist who is writing a thesis on “what it means to live in the country nowadays”.

The novel is also a long love letter to the Deux-Sèvres, where Énard spent his childhood: a predominantly rural area, situated east of the Vendée and 100km inland from the Atlantic seaport La Rochelle.

More here.

This shot of melt water pouring through the Austfonna ice cap on the Arctic island of Nordaustlandet, Norway, won the Nature category in the 2023 Drone Photo Awards. “I have visited this place several times before, but last year it was disheartening to witness the sea ice melting as early as June,” said photographer Thomas Vijayan.

More images here in Nature.

Stanley Fish in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

University administrators faced with the challenge of responding to the various (and opposed) constituencies invested in the Hamas-Israel war have come up with a number of strategies.

• • Condemn one side and express sympathy with the other, a sure loser.
  • Condemn both sides, an even surer loser; all parties will feel aggrieved.
  • Support the legitimate aspirations of both sides and reject violence; you will be faulted for occupying a perch so lofty that the pressing issues of the day disappear.
  • Issue a general statement in support of peace and diplomatic negotiation; you will be accused of trafficking in pious platitudes that provide no firm guidance.
  • Stay silent, say nothing.

Staying silent and saying nothing is the right thing to do, but it has been criticized by leaders like Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, who declared that “neutrality is a cop-out.” But staying silent, properly understood, is not neutrality. Neutrality is a position you take after considering the alternatives and affirmatively deciding not to come down in either direction. It is in the fray, even if it pretends to be above the fray. Staying silent, as I urge it, means refusing to have a position.

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend Sharon Cameron)

Ben Lerner in Harper’s Magazine:

At twenty-six, in 2006, the year before the iPhone launched, I found myself driving a red Subaru Outback—the color was technically “claret metallic,” the friend who’d lent me the car had told me, in case I ever wanted to touch up the paint—on Highway 12 in Utah. I was heading to the East Bay after a painful breakup in New York. I remember, wrongly, that I was listening to a book on tape, a work by a prominent linguist, as I moved through the alien landscape, jagged formations of red rock towering against a cloudless sky.

Consider the metaphorical association of argument and war, the linguist says in my memory, the way we speak of “attacking” or “defending” our “position.” If we frame an argument metaphorically as armed conflict then we will think of our interlocutor as an enemy. But what would happen, the voice asked me as I gripped the wheel with both hands, tense from fifteen hours of continuous driving, having pulled over only for gas and Red Bull and granola bars and Camels since departing Omaha, where I’d napped and showered at the childhood home of a college friend—what would happen if we shifted the metaphorical frame and thought of argument as a kind of dance, as a series of steps undertaken with the goal of mutual expression, satisfaction, even pleasure?

More here.

Dear Hermano

Again people are being taken away,
I read the news of kids
like your daughter & son,
like our family, our neighbors,

they wake in a state of temporary,
that lasts longer & longer &
longer than we can remember.
I read online the Smithsonian

purchased children’s drawings
of them in camps: grey beds,
red, black, & orange people in them,
archaeology happening in real time.

Is remembrance joy? I once asked abuela,
she said, “It takes work until it becomes
second nature to you, like breathing,
like knowing the earth gave you a voice

to sing across generations like this:
My voice, the land, my voice, the land
sings my story, my voice
the land, my voice, the land

the clouds look
like they’re going on forever;
do they ever die?
or are they constantly reincarnating?

Life, aqui, a deep possibility,
of memories: a translation of living,
a brief swell of air along a saguaro’s needles,
the way we eat: alive,

but Hermano, there are still camps,
& when I’m eating a fruit salad, I crunch
into the body of lettuce, the crispness
has a cost, but all of this always did, remember?

by Moncho Alvarado
from Split This Rock

Charlie Wood in Quanta:

Marco D’Eramo in Sidecar:

Aux armes, citoyens! So begins the refrain of ‘La Marseillaise’, adopted as the French national anthem by the Revolutionary Convention of 1795. No longer serfs, nor subjects, nor vassals, but equals. Citizen: a political category that had vanished with the ancient world (cives romanus sum) re-emerged to encapsulate the rights won by the Revolution and bind together the imagined community of the nation-state. The rights of citizenship would be augmented over time (the right to education, right to health, right to work…) along with their corresponding duties (conscription, jury duty, tax impositions…). Herein lies a key distinction with contemporary human rights: the aim to give positive content to an equality that is otherwise formal and theoretical, as expressed in the principle of ‘one person, one vote’.

This conception of citizenship – and thus of the state – peaked in the 1960s, and then began to decline. It continues to be considered a form of belonging, one that can be conferred by birth (ius soli), by bloodline (ius sanguinis) or by an extended period of residence. Yet citizenship has ‘thinned’, as the expression goes. Rights were diminished (the demise of the welfare state) and duties shrank (easing the tax burden), when they were not abolished entirely (conscription). With the triumph of neoliberalism it was transformed into a commodity, that is, into something that can be bought and sold. There is now, as the American sociologist Kristin Surak writes in The Golden Passport, a ‘citizenship industry’ spanning the globe. The book contains a treasure trove of information, data, and first-hand accounts of the history of this industry’s first forty years.

More here.

Ed Pavlić in Boston Review:

Now we are here not only to mourn those children, who cannot really be mourned,” said James Baldwin in his address to a crowd of seven thousand that filled Foley Square in lower Manhattan on September 22, 1963. It was the Sunday following the Sunday morning bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, one of the most heinous hate crimes since the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board had sparked a modern Black protest movement—and with it, a resurgence of white backlash. Over the past year, the traditionally standoffish 16th Street Baptist congregation had increasingly engaged the freedom movement. During protests in April and May of that year the church served as a base from which thousands of marchers—many of them children—departed on their way to being intercepted and jailed by police. On the morning of Sunday, September 15, the inaugural Youth Day at the church, a small group of girls had stopped in the women’s lounge to attend to their hair and straighten each other’s outfits between sessions. At 10:22 a.m. a bomb hidden under the stairs the previous night by Klansmen blasted out the wall and stained-glass window of the lounge. Four girls, ages eleven to fourteen—Addie Mae Collins, Carole Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson—were killed in the explosion. Later that day, teenagers Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware were fatally shot in separate racist attacks. In one day, six Black kids in Birmingham were dead.

The crowd to which Baldwin spoke had gathered as part of a “National Day of Mourning for the Children of Birmingham,” as had crowds in three dozen other cities across the country, from Seattle to Pasadena to Tucson, from Chicago to Shreveport, from Miami to Bridgeport. “We are here to begin to achieve the American Revolution,” Baldwin continued, warning that if organized mass action wasn’t taken, “this country will turn out to be in the position, let us say, of Spain, a country which is so tangled and so trapped and so immobilized by its interior dissension that it can’t do anything else.”

More here.

Ignacio Silva Neira in Phenomenal World:

On September 11, 1980—seven years after Augusto Pinochet seized power from democratically elected Salvador Allende in a brutal US-backed military coup—the dictatorship passed a constitution that laid the groundwork for one of the world’s earliest and most enduring neoliberal experiments. The results of this experiment have been well documented: with the privatization of education, pensions, health, public transportation, and essential natural resources like water, Chile became one the most economically unequal countries in the OECD.

The protests that erupted over rising transportation fares in October 2019 forced a national reckoning around this political and economic infrastructure. Weeks of mass strikes and public protests reinvigorated discussion about Chile’s future. A year later, nearly 80 percent of the country’s citizens voted in favor of a new constitution in a nationwide referendum. With the 2021 election of social democratic candidate Gabriel Boric—a former student activist who gained prominence through the campaign for a Constitutional Convention—it seemed that a political transformation was underway.

But the path forward has proved meandering and vague. In September 2022, the Convention’s proposed constitution, one of the most progressive in history, was rejected by 62 percent of the public. A far-right Constitutional Council, elected in June of this year, has since proposed a new, right-led charter. On December 17, the country will return to vote on this constitutional proposal, marking the culmination of a fierce battle over Chile’s identity.

The Boric government’s dramatic reversal of fortune is the result of conflict over the position of indigenous communities within the Chilean state, the patriarchal mobilization against feminist demands, and the role of the state in economy and society. On this final point, the ongoing debates on the Chilean constitution reflect deep-rooted divisions that have plagued the country throughout its recent history.

More here.

Pratinav Anil at The Guardian:

This is, by my count, Robert Service’s 12th book that touches on the Russian Revolution, either substantively or tangentially. So far, we’ve had a biographical triptych on Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin; a trilogy on the last; two broad surveys of modern Russia; a monograph on the last tsar and another on the Bolsheviks; and a general account for students. By now, he could churn out another history on autopilot. He is, thankfully, too clever for that. What we have here is the work of a lifetime, a reflective volume alert to local and geopolitics, art and culture, high society and the affairs of ordinary people. If he had served up a larger slice of history, encompassing the consolidation of Stalinism rather than ending the narrative with Lenin’s demise, he could have claimed with some justification to have written the definitive word on the revolution.

Over the years, Service has acquired a reputation for impeccable, almost smug, even-handedness. This has strengths and weaknesses.

more here.