A Road Atlas for Self-Reckoning

Erik Gleibermann in LA Review of Books:

HUMAN BEINGS ARE autobiographers by nature. Whether or not we ultimately write down any words, we can’t help mentally composing narratives out of our emotionally messy lives, attempting to seam coherence from chaos. Yet just as they provide a mode of self-discovery, so too can these autobiographical impulses cross over into self-deception—and the line between the two can be thin.

Dinaw Mengestu’s stunning new novel Someone Like Us follows an Ethiopian American man and his immigrant fatherlike figure, both of whom stumble along these kinds of shaky, self-constructed borders. The man—our narrator Mamush—is a lapsed journalist flying to Washington, DC, from Paris, where he lives with his wife, Hannah, and their toddler son. He’s en route to visit his mother and her lifelong friend Samuel, an overworked cabbie who has played an erratic avuncular role since Mamush was six years old and living with his mother in Chicago.

The novel builds around this two-day trip, including Mamush’s impulsive detour from Paris to Chicago and his subsequent arrival in DC, where he learns that Samuel has taken his own life. On the same day he receives this devastating news, Mamush opens the glove box of a taxi Samuel has recently driven to find a familiar US road atlas—one Mamush enjoyed studying as a child. Now, he’s too cynical to hope the worn booklet marked by Samuel’s initials might steer him to answers, “as if this were the kind of story where even minor objects were the source of great mystery and intrigue.”

More here.

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Two Paths for Jewish Politics

Corey Robin in The New Yorker:

My first and only experience of antisemitism in America came wrapped in a bow of care and concern. In 1993, I spent the summer in Tennessee with my girlfriend. At a barbecue, we were peppered with questions. What brought us south? How were we getting on? Where did we go to church? We explained that we didn’t go to church because we were Jewish. “That’s O.K.,” a woman reassured us. Having never thought that it wasn’t, I flashed a puzzled smile and recalled an observation of the German writer Ludwig Börne: “Some reproach me with being a Jew, others pardon me, still others praise me for it. But all are thinking about it.”

Thirty-one years later, everyone’s thinking about the Jews. Poll after poll asks them if they feel safe. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris lob insults about who’s the greater antisemite. Congressional Republicans, who have all of two Jews in their caucus, deliver lectures on Jewish history to university leaders. “I want you to kneel down and touch the stone which paved the grounds of Auschwitz,” the Oregon Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer declared at a hearing in May, urging a visit to D.C.’s Holocaust museum. “I want you to peer over the countless shoes of murdered Jews.” She gave no indication of knowing that one of the leaders she was addressing had been a victim of antisemitism or that another was the descendant of Holocaust survivors.

It’s no accident that non-Jews talk about Jews as if we aren’t there. According to the historian David Nirenberg, talking about the Jews—not actual Jews but Jews in the abstract—is how Gentiles make sense of their world, from the largest questions of existence to the smallest questions of economics.

More here,

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The Labor Intellectuals

Nelson Lichtenstein in Dissent:

After visiting the United Auto Workers convention in Atlantic City in 1947, C. Wright Mills wrote that the most impressive thing about the union was “the spectacle it affords of ideas in live contact with power.” While he considered union president Walter Reuther a dynamic leader, Mills was more impressed with the team of young men around him, the labor intellectuals who translated the radicalism and democratic enthusiasms of a boisterous rank and file into a set of concrete programs.

“One of the major clues to the politically disappointing history of American unions,” Mills wrote, “has been the absence of union-made intellectuals: men who combine solid trade union experience . . . with the self-awareness and wider consciousness that are the qualities of the intellectual. The key fact about the UAW is that there is a group of such men.”

Comparing them to the New York intellectuals—here he was undoubtedly thinking of Dwight Macdonald and writers for his magazine, politics—Mills called these UAW partisans “intellectuals without fakery and without neuroticism.” They were not academic strivers or little magazine impresarios. “The gap between ideas and action is not so wide as to frustrate and turn them inward; their ideas are acted out.” Unlike so many other intellectuals, wrote Mills, “they are not just waiting and talking their lives through.”

More here.

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Sexual sensation

David J Linden in Aeon:

Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1970s, I gradually came to realise that my father was not the stereotypical psychoanalyst. Yes, he had an office with enigmatic modern art on the walls, copies of The New Yorker in the waiting room and the requisite analytical couch. It’s true that said couch had a wedge-shaped pillow designed for the client to assume the supine posture so frequently portrayed in the cartoons from those same issues of The New Yorker. And, during psychoanalytic sessions, my father did indeed perch in a black leather Eames chair, notebook in hand. But beyond those trappings, he had the sceptical and logical mind of a physician (in those days, nearly all psychoanalysts were, like my father, MDs).

Starting when I was a small child and continuing until I left for university, my father and I would eat dinner together at one of several local restaurants every Wednesday night. Over matzoh ball soup at Zucky’s Delicatessen, we’d discuss anything and everything, including the progress of his psychoanalytic clients (with names and identifying details omitted of course). It was an odd way to grow up and I loved it. In our Wednesday night case studies, there would be the expected psychodynamic talk of dream interpretation and early childhood experiences, but it was all tempered by what would come to be known as neuroscience. He would say that, when the talking cure worked (as it did for most of his clients), it did so not in the nebulous realm of id, ego and superego, but rather by changing the cellular and molecular structure of the brain.

More here.

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Music and Mystery Adjust: Seamus Heaney and the end of the poetic career

Christian Winam in Harper’s Magazine:

This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I’m waking with Seamus Heaney sizzling through—not me, exactly, but the me I was thirty-four years ago when I first read him, in a one-windowed, mold-walled studio in Seattle, when night after night I woke with another current (is it another current?) sizzling through my circuits: ambition. Not ambition to succeed on the world’s terms (though that asserted its own maddening static) but ambition to find forms for the seethe of rage, remembrance, and wild vitality that seemed, unaccountably, like sound inside me, demanding language but prelinguistic, somehow. I felt imprisoned by these vague but stabbing haunt-songs that were, I sensed, my only means of freedom.

And then I read Heaney, specifically his first book, Death of a Naturalist, which he’d written, it seemed obvious to me, out of the same tangle of mute, inchoate pain and free-singing elation: “The plash and gurgle of the sour-breathed milk, / the pat and slap of small spades on wet lumps.” John of Patmos gets an angel to break his brain open. My own rapture required merely a table set with sonic objects. Butter, Heaney means in that last line, though you feel the words themselves are also the subject, rendered stark and palpable and ungainsayable from the linguistic “churn” of the poem (“Churning Day”).

More here.

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Sunday Poem

What The Fish Say

My godson wanted to go look at fish but I told him, today, beauty is canceled.
We cried. I felt bad. I counted the unbeautiful like broken ribs.
Shrapnel in the olive tree. Child-sized tourniquet.
Saint Porphyrius’ watching and weeping.
My father phones to tell me they’re down to vinegar; they pour into
open wounds. His friend found some wild tomatoes. Cooked them
in the street for his children. Over there, it’s a god-lent shovel.
A murmur in water. The dark between angels is still time spent waiting for light.
My father finds the photo albums to remember the streets that once existed.
My godson has not stopped describing his desire for fish.
Their bodies are neon and possible. The water is full of his daydreams.
I scavenge his tiny wants. And after, I dream of the hospital. Ice cream trucks
filled with bodies. A friend dies on that blacktop like a fish. So few people
will name him. I said today I am choosing the space between angels. There is
nothing left to choose. I sew beauty between layers of skin. It seeps out
without my noticing. When I see it I get angry because how dare life go on?
My godson phones to say the fish are possible. We are possible.
The sky is full of broken windows and so is the dream. My eye sees the way
the past lurches forward, covering ground like we cover old scars.
It says what the fish say: witness me.

by A.D. Lauren-Abunassar
from Split This Rock

—A.D. Lauren-Abunassar is a Palestinian-American writer, poet, and journalist.
Her work has appeared in Poetry, Narrative, Rattle, Boulevard, and elsewhere.
Her first book, Coriolis, was winner of the 2023 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. 

Friday, August 2, 2024

What the Epic of Gilgamesh Reveals About Sumerian Society

Paul Cooper at Literary Hub:

One Sumerian epic poem called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta gives the first known story about the invention of writing, by a king who has to send so many messages that his messenger can’t remember them all.

His speech was substantial, and its contents extensive… Because the messenger, whose mouth was tired, was not able to repeat it, the lord of Kulaba patted some clay and wrote the message as if on a tablet. Formerly, the writing of messages on clay was not established. Now, under that sun and on that day, it was indeed so.

The Sumerians had two things in virtually limitless abun­dance: the clay beneath their feet, and the reeds that grew on the marshes and riverbanks—and these combined to create the written word. They made marks on palm-sized tablets of wet clay with the ends of cut reeds, and the distinctive shape of these impressions gives this form of writing its name, from the Latin for “wedge-shaped”: cuneiform. The oldest cuneiform clay tab­lets come from the Sumerian city of Uruk, and date to the late fourth millennium BCE. They are ergonomically shaped to the human and, and as a result are roughly the dimensions of a mod­ern smartphone.

More here.

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Quantum information theorists are shedding light on entanglement, one of the spooky mysteries of quantum mechanics

William Mark Stuckey in The Conversation:

Today, researchers are looking toward building quantum computers and ways to securely transfer information using an entirely new sister field called quantum information science.

But despite creating all these breakthrough technologies, physicists and philosophers who study quantum mechanics still haven’t come up with the answers to some big questions raised by the field’s founders. Given recent developments in quantum information science, researchers like me are using quantum information theory to explore new ways of thinking about these unanswered foundational questions. And one direction we’re looking into relates Albert Einstein’s relativity principle to the qubit.

More here.

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Yascha Mounk: What America has lost since I moved here in 2007

Yascha Mounk at his own Substack:

I first came to the United States for an academic exchange at Columbia University in 2005, and have spent the bulk of my time here since starting my PhD at Harvard University in 2007. No country changes nature overnight, and America still retains many of the virtues with which I fell in love all those years ago. But there are days when I fear that the place has been transformed so deeply that the qualities that would once have been touted as quintessentially American have forever been lost.

Thinking highly of your compatriots and caring deeply about the fate of your country were once seen as virtues; now, such sentiments are rejected as proof of naïveté, perhaps even of an insidious commitment to the status quo. A young politician’s promise of “Hope and Change” once inspired America; today, many young Americans pride themselves on having awoken to the fraudulence of such illusions.

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Alice Munro And Sarah Manguso’s “Liars”

Jenessa Abrams at the LARB:

SHORTLY AFTER Alice Munro died, a line from the title story of her 2009 collection Too Much Happiness began circulating on the internet: “Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind […] When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.” The quote appeared in white font over a black background. The only attribution was to Munro, so at the time, I assumed it was something she had said in an interview. It felt piercingly ironic that the female winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature was being remembered for a remark she made about women’s supposed inability to live outside the context of men. Then, I learned the line was delivered by a character in “Too Much Happiness,” Munro’s fictional account of a real 19th-century woman, Sofya Kovalevskaya. Shortly afterward, the world learned of the sexual abuse Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, experienced as a child from her stepfather, Munro’s second husband. An abuse that Munro herself had learned of decades ago and chose to ignore.

more here.

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The mathematician who helps Olympic swimmers go faster

Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

The medals keep coming for US swimmers at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris — and that’s in part thanks to science.

Several of the athletes on Team USA have improved their times dramatically in recent years, and some of these improvements could be down to Ken Ono, a mathematician at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Working for years with students who are on the university’s swimming team, Ono has developed techniques to monitor the fine movements of the body in the pool. He and his collaborator Jerry Lu, who is at the Sports Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, then create 3D models of the athletes and suggest tiny changes that can shave off precious fractions of a second at every stroke.

Ono, whose day job is studying problems in number theory, spoke with Nature from Paris, where he is supporting the swimming team.

More here.

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On Art and Motherhood

Tanya Harrod at Literary Review:

This remarkable book begins dramatically and truthfully: ‘A monstrous child is blocking my view and has carved a nest in the soft darkness of my head. It eats the hours, this child, leaving me only crumbs.’ Motherhood can be overwhelming, however longed for. It is never a small thing, even if the rest of the world chooses to ignore it or view it as a block to professionalism. Cyril Connolly’s remark in Enemies of Promise (1938), ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’, was, of course, a reference to male creativity. But women have routinely been brainwashed into concurring with this dismissive observation – made, admittedly, before Connolly had children. In the 1950s, respected male tutors in colleges of art would dismiss female making as ‘frustrated maternity’. The sculptor Reg Butler asked Slade School of Fine Art students in 1962, ‘Can a woman become a vital creative artist without ceasing to be a woman except for the purposes of a census?’ 

The 20th century proved a surprisingly bleak period for the recognition of women’s artistic activity. The flood of books on women artists which had appeared in the 19th century dwindled. And the women’s movement of the 1970s grappled with a peculiarly limited art world, characterised by exclusionary boundaries and plenty of straightforward misogyny.

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Friday Poem

The Chilean Forest

Under the volcanoes, beside the snow-capped mountains,
among the huge lakes, the fragrant, the silent, the tangled
Chilean forest…

My feet sink down into the dead leaves, a fragile twig crackles,
the giant rauli trees rise in all their bristling height,
a bird from the cold jungle passes over, flaps its wings,
and stops in the sunless branches. And then, from its hideaway,
it sings like an oboe…

The wild scent of the laurel, the dark scent of the boldo herb,
enter my nostrils and flood my whole being…
The cypress of the Guaitecas blocks my way…

This is a vertical world: a nation of birds, a plenitude of leaves…

I stumble over a rock, dig up the uncovered hollow,
an enormous spider covered with red hair
stares up at me, motionless, as huge as a crab…
A golden carabus beetle blows its mephitic breath at me,
as its brilliant rainbow disappears like lightning…

Going on, I pass through a forest of ferns
much taller than I am: from their cold green eyes
sixty tears splash down on my face and, behind me,
their fans go on quivering for a long time…
A decaying tree trunk: what a treasure!…

Black and blue mushrooms have given it ears,
red parasite plants have covered it with rubies,
other lazy plants have let it borrow their beards,
and a snake springs out of the rotted body
like a sudden breath, as if the spirit of the dead trunk
were slipping away from it… Farther along,
each tree stands away from its fellows…

They soar up over the carpet of the secretive forest,
and the foliage of each has its own style, linear, bristling,
ramulose, lanceolate, as if cut by shears moving in infinite ways…

A gorge; below, the crystal water slides over granite and jasper…
A butterfly goes past, bright as a lemon, dancing between
the water and the sunlight… Close by, innumerable calceolarias
nod their little yellow heads in greeting…

High up, red copihues (Lapageria rosea) dangle like drops
from the magic forest’s arteries…

A fox cuts through the silence like a flash, sending a shiver
through the leaves, but silence is the law of the plant kingdom…

The barely audible cry of some bewildered animal far off…
The piercing interruption of a hidden bird… The vegetable world
keeps up its low rustle until a storm chums up all the music of the earth.

Anyone who hasn’t been in the Chilean forest
doesn’t know this planet.

I have come out of that landscape,
that mud, that silence, to roam,
to go singing through the world.

by Pablo Neruda
from Memoirs