The Accompanist

Don’t play too much, don’t play
too loud, don’t play the melody.
You have to anticipate her
and to subdue yourself.
She used to give me her smoky
eye when I got boisterous,
so I learned to play on tip-
toe and to play the better half
of what I might. I don’t like
to complain, though I notice
that I get around to it somehow.
We made a living and good music,
both, night after night, the blue
curlicues of smoke rubbing their
staling and wispy backs
against the ceilings, the flat
drinks and scarce taxis, the jazz life
we bitch about the way Army pals
complain about the food and then
re-up. Some people like to say
with smut in their voices how playing
the way we did at our best is partly
sexual. OK, I could tell them
a tale or two, and I’ve heard
the records Lester cut with Lady Day
and all that rap, and it’s partly
sexual but it’s mostly practice
and music. As for partly sexual,
I’ll take wholly sexual any day,
but that’s a duet and we’re talking
accompaniment. Remember “Reckless
Blues”? Bessie Smith sings out “Daddy”
and Louis Armstrong plays back “Daddy”
as clear through his horn as if he’d
spoken it. But it’s her daddy and her
story. When you play it you become
your part in it, one of her beautiful
troubles, and then, however much music
can do this, part of her consolation,
the way pain and joy eat off each other’s
plates, but mostly you play to drunks,
to the night, to the way you judge
and pardon yourself, to all that goes
not unsung, but unrecorded.

by William Matthews
from Poetry 180
Random House 2003

Anjali Enjeti in Guernica:

In the opening of The Other Americans, Laila Lalami’s fourth novel, a man is killed in a hit-and-run collision. The victim is Driss Guerraoui, an immigrant and small business owner who, after fleeing political unrest in Casablanca, eventually settles in a small town in California’s Mojave Desert to open a business and raise his family. His immigrant story is one his younger daughter Nora, a jazz composer, considers with mixed feelings. “I think he liked that story because it had the easily discernible arc of the American Dream: Immigrant Crosses Ocean, Starts a Business, Becomes a Success.” And it’s this clichéd American-immigrant narrative that Lalami sets out to deconstruct in her book.

The Other Americans grapples with a host of complex issues facing American immigrants today. And although it’s a murder mystery—focused on finding Guerrauoi’s killer—it’s also a provocative commentary on migration, identity, assimilation and bigotry. Lalami, a Moroccan American immigrant, has a PhD in linguistics and is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. Her novel The Moor’s Account was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and she writes a column about human rights and foreign policy for The Nation.

I spoke with Lalami over the phone recently. She shared with me her tricks for how best to depict racist characters; her fears about being an immigrant and an outspoken critic of the Trump administration’s immigration policies; and her upcoming nonfiction book, Conditional Citizens, which examines the relationship of nonwhite citizens to America through Lalami’s own personal immigration story.

More here.

Matt Simon in Wired:

This week, amid devastating flooding, Indonesia announced it’s planning to move its capital out of Jakarta, which really is nothing new—the country’s first president was talking about it way back in 1957. Part of the problem is extreme congestion, but today the city of more than 10 million is facing nothing short of obliteration by rising seas and sinking land, two opposing yet complementary forces of doom. Models predict that by 2050, 95 percent of North Jakarta could be submerged. And Jakarta is far from alone—cities the world over are drowning and sinking, and there’s very little we can do about it short of stopping climate change entirely.

Jakarta is a victim of climate change, the fault of humans the world over (though mostly the fault of corporations), but it’s also a victim of its own policies. The city is sinking—a process known as land subsidence—because residents and industries have been draining aquifers, often illegally, to the point that the land is now collapsing. Think of it like a giant underground water bottle: If you empty too much of it and give it a good squeeze, it’s going to buckle. Accordingly, parts of Jakarta are sinking by as much as 10 inches a year.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Skeptical Inquirer:

If someone says, “I guess it’s in my DNA,” you never hear people say, “DN—what?” We all know what DNA is, or at least think we do.

It’s been seven decades since scientists demonstrated that DNA is the molecule of heredity. Since then, a steady stream of books, news programs, and episodes of CSI have made us comfortable with the notion that each of our cells contains three billion base pairs of DNA, which we inherited from our parents. But we’ve gotten comfortable without actually knowing much at all about our own genomes.

Indeed, if you had asked to look at your own genome twenty years ago, the question would have been absurd. It would have been as ridiculous as asking to go to the moon. When scientists unveiled the first rough draft of the human genome in the early 2000s, the final bill came to an Apollo-scale $2.7 billion.

More here.

Paul Krugman in the New York Times:

For a few months in 2008 and 2009 many people feared that the world economy was on the verge of collapse…

“Firefighting” is a brief account of that crucial moment by three of the most important actors. Ben S. Bernanke was the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, then and now the most influential economic position in the world. Henry M. Paulson Jr. was George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary. Timothy F. Geithner was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — another key position in the Fed system — then became Paulson’s successor under Barack Obama.

There are a number of forms a book by central players in a historic episode can take. “Firefighting” could have been a juicy tell-all; it could have been an exercise in boasting about how its authors saved the world; it could have been a litany of excuses, explaining why none of what went wrong was the authors’ fault. And the truth is that there’s a little bit of each of these elements — but not much, considering.

What Bernanke et al. — I’m going to call them BGP for short — have given us, instead, is a primer on why the crisis was possible (and why, even so, almost nobody saw it coming); a ticktock on how the crisis and the financial rescue unfolded; and a very scary warning about the future.

More here.

Theodore Dalrymple in Standpoint:

Cyril Connolly once wrote: “The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” This is tosh, of course, for if every book were a masterpiece, no book would be a masterpiece and we could not know a masterpiece when we read it. They also serve who only sit and write trash. To know the good, we have to know the bad. The precise quantity and degree of the bad that we have to know in order to appreciate the good is debatable, and certainly there is no great difficulty in finding the bad, whether it be bad food, bad films, bad theatre productions, bad behaviour or bad books. Indeed, the only thing that can be said in favour of the current overwhelming prevalence of the bad is that it adds to the pleasure of finding the good — the piquancy both of discovery and relief.

But quite apart from the valuable function that the bad performs in helping us to appreciate the good, I would amend Connolly’s dictum as follows: the more books we read, the clearer it becomes that there is no book, however bad or merely mediocre it may be, that has nothing to say to us, for every book tells us something. Thus reading a book may be a relative waste of time, for we might be doing something better or more useful than reading it, such as reading a better book. But it is never a waste of time in the absolute sense, at least for the inquisitive or reflective mind. For the uninquisitve or unreflective mind, of course, Armageddon itself would be dull and without interest or lessons.

Every contact leaves a trace, said the great French forensic scientist, Edmond Locard; and likewise, every book tells us something (even if, unlike every crime, it appears to leave no trace). This is especially so for those, which is almost all of us, who have access to the internet.

More here.

Tom Whyman in The Baffler:

OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS—slowly at first through the aftermath of the 2008 economic meltdown, but especially since the 2016 Trump and Brexit votes—a certain polite consensus has developed. In a world marked by profound, multifaceted, and still-worsening crisis, there is—or so the story goes—one big thing wrong with people, on both the left and the right alike. They are becoming increasingly hardened in their views, increasingly hostile to those who disagree. Amid all the urgency of our political situation, people are becoming unpleasantly, perhaps unsalvageably, uncivil.

Unsurprisingly, the apostles of embattled civility point to social media as one of the big culprits here. In this view of things, the algorithms that filter content for Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and Facebook are prone to produce endlessly recursive “echo chambers”—feedback loops of agreement through which no dissenting views can penetrate. This summer, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey announced in an interview with the Washington Post that he was planning to alter his website’s algorithm in order to promote alternative perspectives on users’ timelines. The idea was to burst social media’s suffocating bubbles of self-congratulation, as well as tackling related problems—such as the rampant proliferation of conspiracy theories and “fake news” across the social mediasphere.

The other big problem we tend to see cited is the intractability and censorious moral certainty of the left. In Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle blamed an online left-wing culture of “hysterical” call-outs and “ultra-sensitive” identity politics for driving many young people into the arms of the alt-right. This hypothesis was initially popular among those on the left who objected to a certain sort of puritanical posturing: a recognizable phenomenon, albeit one whose prevalence and influence tends to get wildly overblown. And, naturally, the same claim was then enthusiastically endorsed by Nagle’s more recent fans on the political right. (Tucker Carlson, hello.) Calm down lefties, the argument seems to go, or else we’ll start believing things that you find really foul.

More here.

The Printer’s Error

Fellow compositors
And press workers!

I, Chief Printer
Frank Steinman,
having worked fifty-
seven years at my trade,
and served five years
as president
of the Holliston
Printer’s Council,
being of sound mind
though near death,
leave this testimonial
concerning the nature
of printers’ errors.

First: I hold that all books
and all printed
matter have
errors, obvious or no,
and these are their
most significant moments,
not to be tampered with
by the vanity and folly
of ignorant, academic
textual editors.
Second: I hold that there are
three types of errors, in ascending
order of importance:
One: chance errors
of the printer’s trembling hand
not to be corrected incautiously
by foolish professors
and other such rabble
because trembling is part
of divine creation itself.

Two: silent, cool sabotage
by the printer,
the manual laborer
whose protests
have at times taken this
historical form,
covert interferences
not to be corrected
censoriously by the hand
of the second and far
more ignorant saboteur,
the textual editor.
Three: errors
from the touch of God,
divine and often
obscure corrections
of whole books by
nearly unnoticed changes
of single letters
sometimes meaningful but
about which the less said
the better.
Third: I hold that all three
sorts of error,
errors by chance,
errors by workers’ protest,
and errors by
God’s touch,
are in practice the
same and indistinguishable.

Therefore I,
Frank Steinman,
typographer
for thirty-seven years,
and cooperative Master
of the Holliston Guild
eight years,
being of sound mind and body
though near death
urge the abolition
of all editorial work
whatsoever
and manumission
from all textual editing
to leave what was
as it was, and
as it became,
except insofar as editing
is itself an error, and

therefore also divine.

by Aaron Fogel
from The Printer’s Error
Miami University Press, 2001

Chauncey Devega in Salon:

If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything,” as an old piece of political folk wisdom holds. The Democratic Party has apparently not learned this lesson. This is why (among other reasons) Donald Trump will likely defeat the Democratic nominee — whoever that may be — and win the 2020 presidential election. On Wednesday, Attorney General William Barr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report about obstruction of justice and Donald Trump and his inner circle’s collusion with Russia.

Barr again showed himself to be Donald Trump’s henchman and a man who does not serve the American people or the rule of law. In that role, Barr basically argued that Donald Trump is a king who is above the law; repeatedly lied and misrepresented Mueller’s findings; deflected what Mueller in (now) two separate letters has communicated as serious concerns about how Barr distorted the findings of the Trump-Russia investigation; and in total sullied the office of the attorney general and the Department of Justice. Barr and the Trump regime have contempt for basic democratic norms such as checks and balances. As such, Barr refused to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday. Political consultant David Rothkopf described the importance of Barr’s testimony before the Senate this way:

I don’t think we fully realize the profundity of Barr’s assertions yesterday. The ideas that a president can determine whether or not he ought to be investigated or that a president is incapable of committing obstruction are not just outrageous assaults on Constitutional values.

Taken in the context of this administration’s systematic rejection of the oversight role of Congress and of the law — whether it is the emoluments clause of the Constitution or the obligation of the IRS to hand over tax returns to the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee — what we are seeing is nothing less than a coup, to use a word the president has grown fond of. Trump and Barr are seeking to eliminate the checks and balances that are a hallmark of our system and to effectively render the Congress subservient to the presidency.

This was less a story of the Democrats forcing Barr out of the shadows and shaming the devil than of Barr showing the world, out of his own hubris, who he really is — Trump’s vassal and human puppet. How did Senate Democrats respond to this? With somewhat flummoxed but generally polite annoyance. There was little if any fury and fire given Barr’s behavior and the threat to American democracy he represents.

More here.

Steven Poole in The Guardian:

When Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek met a fortnight ago in Toronto to do battle on the theme “Happiness: Capitalism v Marxism”, it cost US$14.95 (£11.60) to watch online, and touts were selling tickets for hundreds of dollars. Peterson, not having found time to read any of Žižek’s books, launched instead into an attack on The Communist Manifesto. In response, Žižek riffed about China, Trump, liberals, antisemitism and cheese. In the end, both men agreed that well-regulated capitalism was a good thing. It was billed as the “debate of the century”, and in a way it might as well have been: it was a perfect, if mostly harmless, illustration of why debate itself is such a bad idea.

We are told debate is the great engine of liberal democracy. In a free society, ideas should do battle in the public forum. Those who seek to lead us should debate with one another, and this will help us make the best possible informed judgments. Schoolchildren should be taught debating skills to better prepare them for the intellectual cut-and-thrust of the adult world. The rise in formal debating events such as those organised by Intelligence Squared enables citizens to better understand complex problems. People whose views we find abhorrent should not be ignored. We should debate with them, and so point out the flaws in the arguments. The more we debate, the happier and more civilised we will be.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, modern debate has a structural bias in favour of demagoguery and disinformation. It inherently favours liars. There is no cost to, and much potential advantage in, taking the low road and indulging in bullying and personal attack. There’s a reason why we talk about “point-scoring” in debates, and it is because we think of a debate as like a boxing match: it’s a competition rather than a collaboration. (If you can bear it, you can watch online a 2005 debate between Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway on the Iraq war: the result was that everyone lost.) In a recent Pew poll, just a quarter of Americans agreed that “the tone of debate among political leaders is respectful”.

More here.

Soraya Roberts in Longreads:

I didn’t do my homework last weekend. Here was the assignment: Beyoncé’s Homecoming — a concert movie with a live album tie-in — the biggest thing in culture that week, which I knew I was supposed to watch, not just as a critic, but as a human being. But I didn’t. Just like I didn’t watch the premiere of Game of Thrones the week before, or immediately listen to Lizzo’s Cuz I Love You. Instead, I watched something I wanted to: RuPaul’s Drag Race. What worse place is there to hide from the demands of pop culture than a show about drag queens, a set of performance artists whose vocabulary is almost entirely populated by celebrity references? In the third episode of the latest season, Vietnamese contestant Plastique Tiara is dragged for her uneven performance in a skit about Mariah Carey, and her response shocks the judges. “I only found out about pop culture about, like, three years ago,” she says. To a comically sober audience, she then drops the biggest bomb of all: “I found out about Beyoncé legit four years ago.” I think Michelle Visage’s jaw might still be on the floor.

“This is where you all could have worked together as a group to educate each other,” RuPaul explains. It is the perfect framing of popular culture right now — as a rolling curriculum for the general populace which determines whether you make the grade as an informed citizen or not. It is reminiscent of an actual educational philosophy from the 1930s, essentialism, which was later adopted by E.D. Hirsch, the man who coined the term “cultural literacy” as “the network of information that all competent readers possess.” Essentialist education emphasizes standardized common knowledge for the entire population, which privileges the larger culture over individual creativity. Essentialist pop culture does the same thing, flattening our imaginations until we are all tied together by little more than the same vocabulary.

More here.

Melissa Anderson at Bookforum:

First published in 1952, Lillian Ross’s Picture, an eyewitness report of director John Huston’s adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage, remains the paradigm of a slim genre, the nonfiction account of a movie’s making (and unmaking): from shooting to editing to studio meddling to publicity planning to preview screening to more studio meddling to, finally, theatrical release. The book is populated by raffish heroes (Huston) and tyrannical philistines (Louis B. Mayer), by the beleaguered (producer Gottfried Reinhardt) and the overweening (MGM head of production Dore Schary), and by various hypocrites, toadies, greenhorns, and wives. Envisioned by Ross as “a fact piece in novel form, or maybe a novel in fact form,” Picture endures as a key work of proto–New Journalism. Though Ross, a writer for more than sixty years at the New Yorker—where Picture, under the title “Production Number 1512,” was first published, in five installments—was renowned for her fly-on-the-wall reporting, she is not always invisible in the book; “I” pops up intermittently.

more here.

Mark Prince at the TLS:

In the era of Instagram and YouTube, when photography has mostly become a means of projecting oneself into the world to gauge its reaction, it takes an imaginative leap to recognize how revolutionary Diane Arbus’s murky photographs of some of the more disturbing corners of New York life must have looked back in the late 1950s, when they first appeared. Before her, photographers who wanted to be artists strove for impartiality, as if the camera were the eye of a stern god. Photographing passersby, they might tuck a camera into an overcoat to conceal from the subject (and viewer) the exchange being enacted between seeing and being seen. Arbus changed all this, taking pictures that record a direct encounter between photographer and stranger, and in so doing transformed a documentary medium, which had evolved out of the myth of its own objectivity, into a meeting of two pairs of eyes, with the lens standing in for one of the pairs. We never see her, but her presence, as an implicated observer, is everywhere apparent. These are pictures which never claim we can assume their images apply to any other viewpoint than her own.

more here.

Alexander Larman at The Guardian:

In our increasingly secular age, it comes as a shock to discover that one in three people believe in the existence of angels. This is attributed more to the egocentric idea that we have a “guardian angel” watching over us, ready to intervene in our ill fortune, rather than any wider appreciation of angelology.

Peter Stanford’s thorough and engaging study recognises the way in which popular culture – from Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North sculpture to the messengers in the films It’s a Wonderful Life and Wings of Desire – portrays angels as present within our own lives. This may be because they are possessed of a secular accessibility that makes them easier to believe in than other supernatural beings. As Stanford acknowledges, when Robbie Williams sang “I’m loving angels instead” on his 1997 hit Angels, he was not doing so in the context of religious belief, but in the universally applicable form of a love song.

more here.

From ANOW:

In this episode Fred Weibull interviewed Abbas to learn about the origins and intentions of 3QD, the reasons behind its extraordinary commitment to public service and the emphasis on the art of curation over content production. Abbas expands on 3QD’s process of locating and discerning content, about the organisation of the editorial team, scattered across the world and the particular work discipline and practices of a skilled curator…

Now in its 15th year 3 quarks daily occupies an interesting place in the world of ideas, which belongs neither to the intellectual establishment institutions nor its commercial media counterpart. Yet it is frequented by the intellectual elite, indicated by endorsements from the thinking world’s upper echelon…

More here.

Molly Crabapple in the NY Review of Books:

American sex workers are today more organized, and more oppressed, than they have been in years. Last year the US government passed the twin laws of SESTA and FOSTA—the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, respectively, which have closed online spaces where sex workers found clients and shared information—forcing them to work with pimps or to work on the streets where they may be beaten and murdered. Sex workers have responded with ferocious activism. Collectives like Survivors Against SESTA and the Sex Workers Project are lobbying, marching, and canvassing to overturn these laws. More surprisingly, Democratic politicians like New York state senators Jessica Ramos and Julia Salazar have listened to them, canvassed with them, and even promised to introduce laws to decriminalize prostitution.

On February 22 sex trafficking made its way into the headlines when New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, a billionaire septuagenarian and Trump crony, was arrested during a series of prostitution stings on massage parlors in three Florida counties and charged with two misdemeanor counts of soliciting prostitution. During the seven months police spent investigating the parlors, they secretly installed cameras in massage rooms and made videos of the women as they gave handjobs to their customers. The Vero County police department refused to answer questions from sex workers’ rights advocate Kate D’Adamo as to whether their officers had had sexual contact with any of these women in the course of their investigation, but one detective confirmed to the sports website Deadspin that he had.

Police described the investigation as an anti-trafficking operation, but no trafficking charges have been made. Four women who ran the massage parlors were arrested. Among other crimes, they were all charged with prostitution. All of them have spent more time in jail than any of the men they allegedly serviced.

More here.

Nicholas Mulder in n+1:

Where most of the charges that the right levels against the EU are hard to take seriously, the left has produced cogent and sophisticated critiques of the organization. Leftist skepticism about the project of integration goes back to the beginnings of the European Economic Community, but was generally a minority current; the Eurozone economic crisis and Britain’s ongoing attempts to depart from the EU have reanimated this tradition, with some arguing for a left exit, or “Lexit.” The Lexit position points to a split among the Union’s left-wing critics: varying diagnoses of the EU’s democratic deficit and neoliberal bias in turn suggest different paths to a more progressive and democratic Europe.

Currently, there are two broad varieties in left-wing anti-Europeanism. The first line of criticism is that the EU is an unaccountable technocracy constitutionally opposed to democracy. On this reading, unelected Eurocrats at the European Commission threaten national sovereignty as they enforce budgetary rules, laws, and regulations with no accountability. A related but distinct accusation is that the EU is terrible for national democracy because it is a vehicle for German empire. On this reading, the technocrats are either simply doing the Germans’ bidding, or else the Germans are responsible for long ago having rigged the rules of the union in favor of the continent’s largest and most powerful country.

These left-wing analyses focus on a real problem: the constraints of current EU and Eurozone economic policies, which have deepened and prolonged the continent’s crisis. Yet in their urge to counter the tyranny of the market, left nationalists misread the nature of the neoliberal project in European politics. 

More here.