Alicia Broggi at The Quarterly Conversation:

Particularly since the publication of Elizabeth Costello (2003), a strong academic conversation on literature and philosophy has developed around the writings of J.M. Coetzee. As literary scholars and philosophers have approached this nexus, they have confronted questions about what counts as “philosophy” or “literature,” and what benefits are afforded by conversing across the disciplines. So, as this dialogue continues moving forward, there may be some benefit in also slowing down, pausing, and looking back at the one monograph to expressly locate Coetzee’s writings on a spectrum between literature and philosophy. Although not the most recent publication on the topic, Jan Wilm’s The Slow Philosophy of J.M. Coetzee (2016) merits renewed attention for its use of both literary and philosophical tools in explicating how Coetzee’s texts act upon their readers’ very modes of thinking.

more here.

Ben Yagoda in The Atlantic:

I am staring at a photograph of myself that shows me 20 years older than I am now. I have not stepped into the twilight zone. Rather, I am trying to rid myself of some measure of my present bias, which is the tendency people have, when considering a trade-off between two future moments, to more heavily weight the one closer to the present. A great many academic studies have shown this bias—also known as hyperbolic discounting—to be robust and persistent. Most of them have focused on money. When asked whether they would prefer to have, say, $150 today or $180 in one month, people tend to choose the $150. Giving up a 20 percent return on investment is a bad move—which is easy to recognize when the question is thrust away from the present. Asked whether they would take $150 a year from now or $180 in 13 months, people are overwhelmingly willing to wait an extra month for the extra $30.

Present bias shows up not just in experiments, of course, but in the real world. Especially in the United States, people egregiously undersave for retirement—even when they make enough money to not spend their whole paycheck on expenses, and even when they work for a company that will kick in additional funds to retirement plans when they contribute.

That state of affairs led a scholar named Hal Hershfield to play around with photographs. Hershfield is a marketing professor at UCLA whose research starts from the idea that people are “estranged” from their future self. As a result, he explained in a 2011 paper, “saving is like a choice between spending money today or giving it to a stranger years from now.” The paper described an attemptby Hershfield and several colleagues to modify that state of mind in their students. They had the students observe, for a minute or so, virtual-reality avatars showing what they would look like at age 70. Then they asked the students what they would do if they unexpectedly came into $1,000. The students who had looked their older self in the eye said they would put an average of $172 into a retirement account. That’s more than double the amount that would have been invested by members of the control group, who were willing to sock away an average of only $80.

More here.

LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryan in The New York Times:

April 13, 1947, holds little significance in the American historical memory, and yet that day was one in a long series that led to the legal desegregation of American schools. On that morning, Marguerite Daisy Carr, a 14-year-old black girl from Washington, D.C., attempted to enroll at Eliot Junior High School, the all-white middle school closest to her home. Carr’s efforts to integrate the school, which were supported by her family and local black community, preceded the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education by seven years.

Recognizing the young black girls and women who were at the forefront of the civil rights movement is the central achievement of Rachel Devlin’s meticulously researched history, “A Girl Stands at the Door.” Devlin’s interest in the role such women played in the struggle for desegregation leads her briefly back to 1850, to Sarah Roberts, a 5-year-old African-American who lived closer to several white schools than to the one designated for black students, and who became a plaintiff in the country’s first school desegregation case: Roberts v. City of Boston. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of Boston, which resisted the desegregation effort on the grounds that adequate provisions had been made for black students in the form of separate schools. Roberts’s case was later cited to support the “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, but it also shed public light on the underfunding and inadequate conditions prevalent in black schools — conditions that endured, virtually unchanged, for another 120 years. Devlin’s account is necessarily situated largely in the 20th century and includes the stories of Ruby Bridges and Melba Pattillo Beals (one of the “Little Rock Nine”), among many others; she reveals the creative tactics these young people used — sometimes successfully, sometimes not — to integrate public schools, a battle in which black girls outnumbered black boys as plaintiffs two to one.

More here.

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

by Mark Strand
from New and Collected Poems
Alfred A. Knopf, Publishing 2007

Nick Ripatrazone at Poetry Magazine:

4:30 Movie, then, is a book about the general ambience of film, although Masini does invoke specific titles—most notably, the original drive-in version of The Blob (1958), which screened in the 4:30 slot during Masini’s childhood and inspired the title of her book. In the film’s final scene, the hero—“his name was Steve in the movie and Steve in real life,” Masini writes, referring to lead actor Steve McQueen—and the police douse the blob with fire extinguishers to freeze it. A police officer observes that the gelatinous creature can’t be killed but can be stopped. The Air Force drops the blob into the Arctic, and then The End? appears on screen, a playful hint that perhaps the terror isn’t over. Masini is bemused by how hokey and silly the film is, the blob “mindless, deadly, malignant. Amorphous, devouring monster. / Why didn’t we laugh?” But by the end of the poem, she asks herself, “Why am I so frightened?” The whiplash of the question mimics the way viewers abruptly surrender to the magic of film.

more here.

Anthony Domestico at Commonweal:

On almost every page, The Five Quintets praises conversation’s endless interplay—“those evenings when time’s rigid arrow bends,” as we dance from one topic to another. So it’s appropriate that, when I came into New York to discuss the book with O’Siadhail (pronounced “O’sheel”), I first spotted him on a street corner, leaning into a conversation. The seventy-one-year-old O’Siadhail is hard to miss. He has published more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including his eight-hundred-page Collected Poems in 2014, and he looks every inch the poet: tall and handsome, with a craggy face, deep-set eyes, and a hawk-like nose. And there he was, a few blocks from Commonweal’s offices, where we’d agreed to meet, asking a woman where he might grab a bite to eat. He was “feeling a bit peckish,” he later told me, and was thinking about getting a snack. He wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk first and then eat or have lunch and then talk.

more here.

Brian Doyle at the American Scholar:

When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

more here.

Ernesto Londoño in the New York Times:

The giant antenna rises from the desert floor like an apparition, a gleaming metal tower jutting 16 stories above an endless wind-whipped stretch of Patagonia.

The 450-ton device, with its hulking dish embracing the open skies, is the centerpiece of a $50 million satellite and space mission control station built by the Chinese military.

The isolated base is one of the most striking symbols of Beijing’s long push to transform Latin America and shape its future for generations to come — often in ways that directly undermine the United States’ political, economic and strategic power in the region.

The station began operating in March, playing a pivotal role in China’s audacious expedition to the far side of the moon — an endeavor that Argentine officials say they are elated to support.

More here.

Jennifer Schuessler in the NYT:

Since its founding in 1865, The Nation has published some of the most important voices in American poetry, including Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Amiri Baraka and Adrienne Rich.

But last week, the venerable progressive weekly published what may have been a first: an apology for one of its offerings that ran twice as long as the poem itself.

The 14-line poem, by a young poet named Anders Carlson-Wee, was posted on the magazine’s website on July 5. Called “How-To,” and seemingly written in the voice of a homeless person begging for handouts, it offered advice on how to play on the moral self-regard of passers-by by playing up, or even inventing, hardship.

But after a firestorm of criticism on social media over a white poet’s attempt at black vernacular, as well as a line in which the speaker makes reference to being “crippled,” the magazine said it had made a “serious mistake” in publishing it.

More here.

Agustin Fuentes in National Geographic:

“YOU NEED TO have your throat cut out and your decomposing, bug-infested body fed to wild pigs.” An anonymous Facebook user wrote that—and more that’s unprintable—to Kyle Edmund after the British pro tennis player lost in a 2017 tournament. After University of Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard spoke about the history of male suppression of female voices, she received Twitter threats, including “I’m going to cut off your head and rape it.” On Martin Luther King Day this year, an anonymous Twitter user lionized the man who killed King some 50 years ago: “RIP James Earl Ray. A true fighter for the white race.” The same month, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted that his “Nuclear Button … is a much bigger & more powerful one” than Kim Jong Un’s. This capped weeks of dueling statements in which Trump called the North Korean leader “Rocket Man” and “a madman” and Kim called Trump “a gangster” and a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” The internet is a particularly volatile place of late. Aggression on social media has reached such a pinnacle of acrimony that some U.S. House members proposed designating an annual “National Day of Civility.” The proposal drew civil responses—but also tweets and posts of wrath, ridicule, and profanity. Is this aggression on social media giving us a glimpse of human nature, one in which we are, at our core, nasty, belligerent beasts?

Ian Leslie in More Intelligent Life:

IT WAS THE fifth set of a semi-final at last year’s US Open. After four hours of epic tennis, Roger Federer needed one more point to see off his young challenger, Novak Djokovic. As Federer prepared to serve, the crowd roared in anticipation. At the other end, Djokovic nodded, as if in acceptance of his fate. Federer served fast and deep to Djokovic’s right. Seconds later he found himself stranded, uncomprehending, in mid-court. Djokovic had returned his serve with a loose-limbed forehand of such lethal precision that Federer couldn’t get near it. The nonchalance of Djokovic’s stroke thrilled the crowd. John McEnroe called it “one of the all-time great shots”. Djokovic won the game, set, match and tournament. At his press conference, Federer was a study in quiet fury. It was tough, he said, to lose because of a “lucky shot”. Some players do that, he continued: “Down 5-2 in the third, they just start slapping shots …How can you play a shot like that on match point?”

Asked the same question, Djokovic smiled. “Yeah, I tend to do that on match points. It kinda works.”

Federer’s inability to win Grand Slams in the last two years hasn’t been due to physical decline so much as a new mental frailty that emerges at crucial moments. In the jargon of sport, he has been “choking”. This, say the experts, is caused by thinking too much. When a footballer misses a penalty or a golfer fluffs a putt, it is because they have become self-conscious. By thinking too hard, they lose the fluid physical grace required to succeed. Perhaps Federer was so upset because, deep down, he recognised that his opponent had tapped into a resource that he, an all-time great, is finding harder to reach: unthinking. Unthinking is the ability to apply years of learning at the crucial moment by removing your thinking self from the equation. Its power is not confined to sport: actors and musicians know about it too, and are apt to say that their best work happens in a kind of trance. found that the less information people were given about a brand of jam, the better the choice they made. When offered details of ingredients, they got befuddled by their options and ended up choosing a jam they didn’t like.

More here.

Prague TV

Instead of Most Wanted
by the FBI, each week
they profile the life
of a dissident, a former
inmate of Bariscov prison.
He came home every evening
to his flat after a day of cranking
the presses for the Communist daily
and he uncovered his ancient Corona,
and inserted seven layers of onionskin
and seven layers of carbon
because that’s how many sheets
the keys could imprint
and he typed each letter
of a banned novel
keeping the margins thin
to get the most words in
except he left the white space
around Ginsberg and
Ferlinghetti.

by Simki Ghebremichael
from Split This Rock

Michael Mewshaw in the Washington Post:

Ernest Hemingway influenced generations of writers with his terse, understated prose, his stoic code of grace under fire and his commitment to producing a strict number of pages each day. In his private life, he showed no such discipline. Married four times and chronically unfaithful, a prodigious drinker and gourmand whose weight ballooned to 240 pounds, a man of savage mood swings, alternately bellicose and sloppily sentimental, a blowhard and relentless self-promoter who claimed to crave privacy, he passed himself off as an icon of machismo, yet wrote a novel, “The Garden of Eden,” rife with cross-dressing and gender fluidity. It would have taxed Sigmund Freud and all his psychoanalytic acolytes to tease out the implications of Hemingway’s rigorous literary standards and his slovenly personal style.

“Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse” focuses on the final turbulent decade of a life, but Andrea di Robilant captures the full panoply of quirks and conflicts that often made Papa and those closest to him miserable. Lovers, ex-wives, friends, publishers, even complete strangers were forced to dance to the tune he piped. (Di Robilant portrays a hilarious scene of Hemingway hounding the man beside him on an airplane to read his manuscript and agree that it was a masterpiece.) Still, di Robilant, an Italian American with deep roots in Venice and relatives who were part of Papa’s crowd, never fails to empathize with the aging author’s predicament. Staring down the gun barrel of his 50th birthday, Hemingway brooded about his health, his eroding powers and the opinion of critics that he was finished.

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette in Quanta:

In the 1920s, decades before counterculture guru Timothy Leary made waves self-experimenting with LSD and other psychedelic drugs at Harvard University, a young perceptual psychologist named Heinrich Klüver used himself as a guinea pig in an ongoing study into visual hallucinations. One day in his laboratory at the University of Minnesota, he ingested a peyote button, the dried top of the cactus Lophophora williamsii, and carefully documented how his visual field changed under its influence. He noted recurring patterns that bore a striking resemblance to shapes commonly found in ancient cave drawings and in the paintings of Joan Miró, and he speculated that perhaps they were innate to human vision. He classified the patterns into four distinct types that he dubbed “form constants”: lattices (including checkerboards, honeycombs and triangles), tunnels, spirals and cobwebs.

Some 50 years later, Jack Cowan of the University of Chicago set out to reproduce those hallucinatory form constants mathematically, in the belief that they could provide clues to the brain’s circuitry. In a seminal 1979 paper, Cowan and his graduate student Bard Ermentrout reported that the electrical activity of neurons in the first layer of the visual cortex could be directly translated into the geometric shapes people typically see when under the influence of psychedelics.

More here.

Maarten Boudry in Quillette:

The Pakistani-Canadian writer Ali Rizvi is a fierce critic of Islam, the religion in which he grew up. But unlike many other critics who maintain that Islam is inherently incapable of modernization, and that the Muslim world is sliding ever further into backwardness and fundamentalism, Rizvi is refreshingly optimistic about the future. The seed of a new Enlightenment has been planted in the Arabic world, he told me in Antwerp, and there’s no way to eradicate it.

In his book The Atheist Muslim, Rizvi speaks directly to the many closeted atheists, agnostics, and secularists in the Muslim world. These people are obliged by the societies in which they live to present themselves outwardly as Muslims, but in private, they harbor different ideas. Rizvi’s book is often polemical in tone, but also humane and sympathetic to the plight of Muslims around the world. He is keenly aware of the consolations which faith provide to some, and he never stoops to condescension.

If Rizvi is right, freethinkers in the Muslim world are more numerous than most of us suspect. Not only are their numbers growing, but they are becoming more and more emboldened. With eloquent and outspoken ex-Muslims such as Rizvi, who offer a message of hope and liberation from dogma, religious conservatives around the world should start to worry.

More here.

School of the Americas

Sergio has ink-pot eyes, girlish wrists.
He draws superheroes extremely well—
Avengers, Wolfman, El Toro Rojo,

any one wearing a mask. Monday nights
we drive to the art club meeting
in the cream-colored Sunbird

I bought with babysitting money.
I don’t know how he ended up with his mom
in the South, just the two of them, but

I spend 9th grade sitting next to him,
translating a Georgia O’Keefe painting
into pastel chalk: a lily dusted with pollen.

One day during class, Sergio tells me he saw
his grandparents shot before his eyes
back in Colombia. The phrase sticks out

in his heavy accent, like a child repeating
something just overheard. After a few minutes,
we go back to our drawings.

In the evenings that year I sign my name
to stock letters sent by Amnesty International
and mail them to faraway dictators

of the 1990s: Mubarak, Mobutu, Marcos.
All the while a quarter of a tank away,
at the School of the Americas (now the

Western Hemispheres Institute for Security
Cooperation) hundreds of Colombian
soldiers train in truth extraction,

how to intimidate, the best ways
to torture. In the yearbook,
I list my hobbies: poetry

and human rights. I have yet
to draw a picture of anything
from life—the art teacher seems

disappointed that Sergio and I
are mere copyists. After graduation,
Sergio finished a year

of art school in Chicago,
got cancer and died.
I guess I had a crush on him

when we were fourteen,
and I sat next to him,
copying those sexual flowers.

One has to start somewhere.
Just start: before my eyes could see,
I drew things like that lily.
.
by Rebecca Black
from Split This Rock, 2014

Amit Chaudhuri in The Guardian:

Not long ago, at a conference that brought together academics, writers and artists in Kochi in south India, the historian Vivek Dhareshwar unsettled his audience by saying that there was no such thing as caste – that it was a conceptual category the British used to understand and reduce India, which was internalised almost at once by Indians. “Caste” was not a translation of “jaati”, said Dhareshwar; “jaati” was a translation of “caste” – that is, the internalisation by Indians of the assumptions that the word caste involve meant they took its timelessness and authenticity for granted. Dhareshwar seemed to be implying – forcefully and outlandishly – that caste was at once a colonial inheritance and a habit of thinking, whose provenance no one felt the need to inquire into any longer. This was deeply nervous-making. For one thing, no doubt the predominantly upper-caste right – rigorously free-market Brahminical in tone even if not always in caste origin – would love such an argument as further support for its article of faith: that Hinduism is a wonderful religion, and any blemish it might have has been caused by outsiders or by colonial interference. It does seem a bit tendentious to attribute such inventive conceptual powers wholesale to the British. If Indians subscribe to invented versions of their culture, they must take responsibility and credit for having created a very large number themselves.

Caste has been the author of such violence in India – people were dying of caste-based violence even as we sat and listened to Dhareshwar in that hotel – that to deny its existence would have seemed like denying the Holocaust. This violence continues despite the fact that “untouchables, backward and scheduled castes, and scheduled tribes” form the majority of India’s population.

Ezra Klein in Vox:

In 2008, Barack Obama held up change as a beacon, attaching to it another word, a word that channeled everything his young and diverse coalition saw in his rise and their newfound political power: hope. An America that would elect a black man president was an America in which a future was being written that would read thrillingly different from our past. In 2016, Donald Trump wielded that same sense of change as a threat; he was the revanchist voice of those who yearned to make America the way it was before, to make it great again. That was the impulse that connected the wall to keep Mexicans out, the ban to keep Muslims away, the birtherism meant to prove Obama couldn’t possibly be a legitimate president. An America that would elect Donald Trump president was an America in which a future was being written that could read thrillingly similar to our past. This is the core cleavage of our politics, and it reflects the fundamental reality of our era: America is changing, and fast. According to the Census Bureau, 2013 marked the first yearthat a majority of US infants under the age of 1 were nonwhite. The announcement, made during the second term of the nation’s first African-American president, was not a surprise. Demographers had been predicting such a tipping point for years, and they foresaw more to come.

White voters who feel they are losing a historical hold on power are reacting to something real. For the bulk of American history, you couldn’t win the presidency without winning a majority — usually an overwhelming majority — of the white vote. Though this changed before Obama (Bill Clinton won slightly less of the white vote than his Republican challengers), the election of an African-American president leading a young, multiracial coalition made the transition stark and threatening. This is the crucial context for Trump’s rise, and it’s why Tesler has little patience for those who treat Trump as an invader in the Republican Party. In a field of Republicans who were trying to change the party to appeal to a rising Hispanic electorate, Trump was alone in speaking to Republican voters who didn’t want the party to remake itself, who wanted to be told that a wall could be built and things could go back to the way they were. “Trump met the party where it was rather than trying to change it,“ Tesler says. “He was hunting where the ducks were.”

More here. (Note: Thanks to Jehanzeb Kayani)