Jesse McCarthy in Harvard Magazine:

Black studies, or African American studies, emerged out of the revolutionary fervor of the late 1960s, as students and faculty members demanded that universities recognize the need for departments engaged in scholarship on race, slavery, and the diasporic history and culture of peoples of African descent. Since its institutionalization, these departments have grown many branches of inquiry that maintain a rich interdisciplinary dialogue. One is a school of thought known as jazz studies, which investigates the intersections of music, literary and aesthetic theory, and politics. Moten is arguably its leading theoretician, translating jazz studies into a vocabulary of insurgent thought that seeks to preserve black studies as a space for radical politics and dissent. In his work he has consistently argued that any theory of politics, ethics, or aesthetics must begin by reckoning with the creative expressions of the oppressed. Having absorbed the wave of “high theory”—of deconstruction and post-structuralism—he, more than anyone else, has refashioned it as a tool for thinking “from below.”

Moten is best known for his book In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003). “The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist,” is the book’s arresting opening sentence, announcing his major aim: to rethink the way bodies are shaped by aesthetic experience. In particular, he explores how the improvisation that recurs in black art—whether in the music of Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, the poetry of Amiri Baraka and Nathaniel Mackey, or the conceptual art of Adrian Piper—confounds the distinctions between objects and subjects, individual bodies and collectively experienced expressions of resistance, desire, or agony. Since 2000, Moten has also published eight chapbooks of poetry, and one, The Feel Trio, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2014. He is that rare literary figure who commands wide and deep respect in and out of the academy, and who blurs the line between poetics as a scholarly pursuit, and poetry as an act of rebellious creation, an inherently subversive activity.

More here.

Melissa Beck at The Quarterly Conversation:

Bakkhai continues to be one of Euripides’s (c. 484-406 b.c.e.) most popular plays to stage, translate, and interpret, even though it was never performed in its author’s lifetime. The ancient Greek playwright and Athenian wrote Bakkhai in the last few years of his life in Macedonia, where he had fled after becoming disillusioned with his native city-state. The play was found among his papers after his death and produced posthumously by either his nephew or his son at the Dionysia, the festival held annually for the eponymous god in Athens. The drama presents the god Dionysos arriving in Thebes disguised as a mortal to establish his cult in that city and exact a brutal punishment on his cousin, King Pentheus, who denies the existence of the god. Anne Carson’s unconventional new translation of Bakkhai is a fitting interpretation of what is arguably Euripides’s most enigmatic tragedy.

Dionysos is the first character to appear on stage in the play, and he tells us that he is harboring anger for his maternal family who have denied his immortality. Dionysos is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman, Semele, daughter of the king of Thebes. When Semele is pregnant with Dionysos, she is tricked by Hera into viewing Zeus, undisguised, in all his glory as the mighty god of sky and lightning.

more here.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post:

“No Time to Spare” and “Don’t Save Anything” collect, respectively, the recent essays and the freelance journalism of two distinguished, but very different American writers. There are, however, at least three reasons to link Ursula K. Le Guin, an outspoken feminist and award-winning creator of imaginary lands and ambiguous utopias, and James Salter, the courtly chronicler of fighter pilots, intense love affairs and dissolving marriages.

First, each writes fiction of wondrous serenity and authority. Just consider the opening paragraphs of Le Guin’s “A Wizard of Earthsea” or the final one of Salter’s “A Sport and a Pastime.” The language is limpid, the sentences deliberate and grave, their cumulative power . . . immeasurable. Go see for yourself.

Second, both Salter and Le Guin are moralists. Courage and heroism, the testing of character, doing the right thing, the acceptance of responsibility, the getting of wisdom — these themes run through all their writing.

more here.

Naomi Wolf at the TLS:

In 1903 Edith Wharton met the writer Vernon Lee in Italy, and started reading John Addington Symonds. By 1905 she had begun an intimate friendship with Henry James and the circle of male homosexual writers around him, and was soon reading Walt Whitman and Nietzsche, while having an affair with the American journalist Morton Fullerton. Through these influences, Wharton was drawn away from American discourses about sexuality in fiction (which were generally moralistic in this period, regardless of the gender of the writer), and towards British and European aestheticism and sexual liberation. It is after this period that we begin to see the multiple echoes of Oscar Wilde in her work. Wharton used Wilde in order to engage in a necessary, indeed central, argument about what happens to the aestheticist and sexual liberationist project once it is undertaken by heterosexual women.

From 1905 to the end of her career Wharton at times imitated Wilde’s phrasing, and not always successfully. She attempted Wildean paradoxes: in The Fruit of the Tree (1907), for example, the household confidante Mrs Ansell notes that “Most divorced women marry again to be respectable”, to which Mr Langhope, the heiress’s father, replies, nearly quoting Wilde, “Yes – that’s their punishment”.

more here.

Carl Wislon in The New York Times:

John Ashbery’s death in September gave my world a lurch, as the 90-year-old eminent American experimentalist was my favorite living poet. But the compensation was to discover how many others felt the same way. The appreciations became a rare public conversation about poems rather than about Poetry, and what it is or isn’t (as in last year’s exhausting brouhaha over Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize) or whether it’s “dead,” or corrupted by elitist obscurism, or replaced by popular music, or secretly thriving. On social media, people posted their favorite Ashbery poems and passages, like this one from 1977’s “The Other Tradition,” which might seem to refer to those cyclical debates: “They all came, some wore sentiments / Emblazoned on T-shirts, proclaiming the lateness / Of the hour … ” It was sweet while it lasted. But now the T-shirts have come a-blazing again, because the 25-year-old Canadian poet Rupi Kaur has published her second book, “The Sun and Her Flowers.” Kaur is the kind of poet who prompts heated polemics, pro and con, from people you never otherwise hear mention poetry, because among other things she is young, female, from a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant family, relatively uncredentialed and insanely successful. Her first collection, “Milk and Honey,” has sold two and a half million copies internationally since it was published in 2014. “The Sun and Her Flowers” debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times paperback fiction best-seller list in October, and has remained near the top ever since.

These are airport novel numbers, not poetry ones. Ashbery’s publishers were delighted if any of his books sold north of 10,000 copies, which generally happened only if he’d won the Pulitzer or National Book Award that year. But Kaur established herself not in poetry journals but on platforms like Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram (where she has 1.8 million followers, and posts glamorous shots of herself). And she’s only the biggest of several popular “Instapoets” who have graduated from being retweeted by Kardashians to publishing books, including Tyler Knott Gregson, Lang Leav, Amanda Lovelace and the pseudonymous Atticus.

More here.

Salman Rushdie in Vogue:

Salman Rushdie with sisters Sameen and Nevid

When I was growing up in Bombay (which wasn't Mumbai then, and still isn't in my personal lexicon), Christmas wasn't really a thing. Not only were we not Christians, we weren't a religious household, so December 25 was just that: the 25th of December. New Year's Day was much more significant. The above paragraph is not completely true. For one thing, the school I went to was called the Cathedral School, or, in full, the Cathedral and John Connon Boys' High School, run "under the auspices", whatever "auspices" were, of the Anglo-Scottish Education Society, whatever that was. As a result there were hymns at assembly every day of the year and "O Come, All Ye Faithful" and "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" in December, and all of us, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Parsi, had to sing along. And because we were, after all, schoolboys, we learned the comic version of "Hark!" also. "Hark! the herald angels sing/ Beecham's Pills are just the thing./ If you want to go to heaven/ Take a dose of six or seven./ If you want to go to hell,/ Take the whole damn box as well."

Also, my sisters and I had a wonderful Christian ayah, Mary Menezes from Mangalore, a devout Roman Catholic who helped to raise us, and because of whom my mother put up a (very small) tree and made us sing carols to her on Christmas morning. Other than the brief appearance of the tree and the singing, though, there was nothing. Turkey? Mince pies? Brussels sprouts? Of course not. We had much tastier food to eat. And presents were for birthdays and Eid.

More here.

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Sophie Pinkham in The Nation:

Commemoration can consolidate national feeling through celebration or mourning. It can remind a country of its gravest mistakes, or it can whitewash them. Evolving national historical narratives turn defeats into victories and villains into heroes, and vice versa. Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, a new history of the famine, illustrates the perils of using the past in the service of today’s politics. Drawing on archives opened after the fall of the Soviet Union, newly available oral histories, and recent scholarship, Applebaum provides an accessible, up-to-date account of this nightmarish but still relatively unknown episode of the 20th century. Her historical account is distorted, however, by her loathing of communism and by her eagerness to shape the complicated story of the famine into one more useful for the present: about a malevolent Russia and a heroic, martyred, unified Ukraine.

In 1928, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union had a food problem. Because of policies that gave farmers little incentive to sell their grain, the state could no longer feed the urban population. Stalin became convinced that counterrevolutionary “kulaks”—a mostly imaginary class of fat-cat capitalist peasants—were hoarding grain. He ordered requisitions that angered the peasants and discouraged production, leading to further grain shortages, which in turn were followed by even more requisitions. Stalin had quickly made his own suspicions come true: Peasants began to hoard and hide grain—in protest and as a means of survival.

In response to this crisis, the Communist Party’s Central Committee decided to collectivize agriculture in 1929.

More here. [Thanks to Corey Robin.]

Éric Chevillard at Music and Literature:

But here’s the rub: pummeled by Peter and the Wolf, knocked senseless, saturated, the child ends up definitively and permanently associating the instruments with the characters they arbitrarily play in the story. I’m a victim of that syndrome myself, and it’s left me lost to music forever. Because while the story expressly written for Prokofiev’s instrumental playlet obviously works very nicely, the same is not true of all the other pieces in the classical repertory. But for me, you understand, the muttering bassoon will always be a grumpy grandfather, the melancholy oboe a duck, the airy, twittering flute a bird, the mellow clarinet a velvet-pawed cat, the bass drum a hunter, the severe, somber horn a wolf emerging from the forest, and the violin that happy, fun-loving little hoodlum Peter.

Imagine, then, the nightmarish visions that come to me when I listen, for example, to Tchaikovsky’s Pathetic Symphony: the melancholy duck eats the eyes of the velvet-pawed cat, its claws shredding happy, fun-loving Peter’s belly as it dies. Then the muttering grandfather marries the melancholy duck while the hunters slaughter each other and the airy, twittering bird carries off the severe, somber wolf to devour it in its aerie! And Mahler’s Song of the Night: the severe, somber wolf is a finance minister, calling for a vote on a law that will sentence the velvet-pawed cat to shell peas. The airy, twittering bird vomits up wallpaper paste. Happy, fun-loving Peter plucks the melancholy duck alive, and the hunters shoot the grumpy grandfather in his bath. It’s horrible, but that’s nothing compared to the goings-on in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony: happy, fun-loving Peter rapes his grumpy grandfather, the velvet-pawed cat has succumbed to alcoholism, the airy, twittering bird and the melancholy duck appear only in the form of terrines three days past their sell-by dates, the severe, somber wolf and the hunters divide the world between them, in four pieces, like an orange.

more here.

Dmitri Levitin at Literary Review:

Indeed, the book at points reads almost like an enthusiast’s attempt to catalogue everything Leonardo ever did. This is by no means a bad thing. Isaacson is up to speed with the latest discoveries, from the definitive identification of Leonardo’s mother earlier this year, to the relatively early drawing of St Sebastian that was brought to a small French auction house in 2016, to the results of the infrared analyses that have helped date the two different versions of The Virgin of the Rocks. He does a good job of reminding readers that Renaissance art was almost always collaborative and of explaining how workshop collaboration actually worked. Above all, he conveys well the sense of his subject as an irrepressible perfectionist who could almost never finish the projects that hopeful patrons kept commissioning – among them the huge equestrian statue for Ludovico Sforza of Milan, the vast painting of the Battle of Anghiari for what is now the Palazzo Vecchio during his second period in Florence, and a scheme to divert the River Arno.

Perhaps most illuminating is Isaacson’s comparison of Leonardo’s theoretical statements about painting in his notebooks with their application in those artworks that have survived. Isaacson’s own art historical analyses are bold and he goes so far as to disagree with renowned specialists.

more here.

Jenny Uglow at the NYRB:

A single Modigliani portrait or nude is strikingly beautiful—the elongated face, the tilted head, the lithe pose. Yet when a host of them crowds together, as they do in a major retrospective currently at the Tate Modern, the initial impact is oddly diluted. Surrounded by portraits from his first years in Paris, my first response was, “Surely they couldn’t all have had V-shaped eyebrows and sunken, oval eyes?” The mannerisms display a young man out to make a mark, to signal his presence in an immediately recognizable style. It’s irresistible to quote Jean Cocteau, who left Amedeo Modigliani’s portrait of him in the studio because, he claimed, he couldn’t afford the cab-fare to take it home. “It doesn’t look like me,” he said. “But it does look like Modigliani, which is better.”

To emphasize the sameness of the portraits, though, is to ignore the subtle modulations, the rough backgrounds that let the figure stand out, the urgent quest for expression, perhaps a striving to understand the nature of identity itself. Sometimes, Modigliani suggests the spirit of his subjects so acutely that we can almost hear them talking, as in the portraits of his dapper, nervy patron, Paul Guillaume. And in the Tate show, two people escape his formula altogether, as if their personalities were too large to fit the frame. One is an unrecognizable, bubble-faced Picasso, the other a marvelously forceful Diego Rivera, filling the canvas with rolling energy.

more here.

Steven Rosenfeld in Alternet:

For months, readers of the New York Times and other influential mainstream media have heard about how “fake news” soiled 2016’s election. But they haven’t heard how poorly the Times and its peers covered the election, especially in its pivotal final months. Now a major report in the renowned Columbia Journalism Review has presented a detailed analysis showing the most influential mainstream media—with the New York Times as Exhibit A—was as superficial and scandal-obsessed as any online outlet trafficking in political gossip in the 2016 campaign. “We agree that fake news and misinformation are real problems that deserve serious attention. We also agree that social media and other online technologies have contributed to deep-seated problems in democratic discourse such as increasing polarization and erosion of support for traditional sources of authority,” Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild write in a lengthy article, "Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media." “Nonetheless, we believe that the volume of reporting around fake news, and the role of tech companies in disseminating those falsehoods, is both disproportionate to its likely influence in the outcome of the election and diverts attention from the culpability of the mainstream media itself.”

From Phys.Org:

A perplexing question in immunology has been, how do immune cells remember an infection or a vaccination so that they can spring into action decades later? Research led by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with investigators at Emory University, has found an answer: A small pool of the same immune cells that responded to the original invasion remain alive for years, developing unique features that keep them primed and waiting for the same microbe to re-invade the body.

Miriam Markowitz in GQ:

The people of Louisiana first began to call themselves the Cajun Navy during Katrina, when people like Todd Terrell went to rescue their neighbors in New Orleans. They revived the name last year when Baton Rouge experienced what residents now call the Great Flood. In swampy Louisiana, the old joke says, at any one time half the state is under water and the other half is under indictment. There are the big storms that capture the attention of the public, like Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and Katrina, 40 years later—but every year that Louisiana doesn’t get a named storm, it floods just the same. Today there are at least three separate outfits who go by the Cajun Navy moniker, and dozens more who’ve been inspired by it, including but not limited to the Cajun Army (for people without boats), the Cajun Special Forces, the Cajun Airlift, and the Cajun Green Cross, as well as the Texas Navy and the Cracker Navy in Florida, which was formed during Hurricane Irma. In Texas, during the week that Harvey hit, pretty much every Louisiana man with a boat identified himself as Cajun Navy, as did many more who weren’t from Louisiana but were among the thousands who converged in Texas from across the country.

More here.

Robbie Gonzalez in Wired:

On July 1, 2013, Amos Joseph Wells III went to his pregnant girlfriend's home in Fort Worth, Texas and shot her multiple times in the head and stomach. He then killed her mother and her 10-year-old brother. Wells surrendered voluntarily within hours, and in a tearful jailhouse interview told reporters, "There's no explanation that I could give anyone, or anybody could give anyone, to try to make it seem right, or make it seem rational, to make everybody understand."

Heinous crimes tend to defy comprehension, but some researchers believe neuroscience and genetics could help explain why certain people commit such atrocities. Meanwhile, lawyers are introducing so-called neurobiological evidence into court more than ever.

Take Wells, for instance. His lawyers called on Pietro Pietrini—director of the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy and an expert on the neurobiological correlates of antisocial behavior—to testify at their client's trial last year. “Wells had several abnormalities in the frontal regions of his brain, plus a very bad genetic profile," says Pietrini. Scans of the defendant's brain showed abnormally low neuronal activity in his frontal lobe, a condition associated with increased risk of reactive, aggressive, and violent behavior.

More here.

Dag Herbjørnsrud in Aeon:

As the story usually goes, the Enlightenment began with René Descartes’s Discourse on the Method (1637), continuing on through John Locke, Isaac Newton, David Hume, Voltaire and Kant for around one and a half centuries, and ending with the French Revolution of 1789, or perhaps with the Reign of Terror in 1793. By the time that Thomas Paine published The Age of Reason in 1794, that era had reached its twilight. Napoleon was on the rise.

But what if this story is wrong? What if the Enlightenment can be found in places and thinkers that we often overlook? Such questions have haunted me since I stumbled upon the work of the 17th-century Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob (1599-1692), also spelled Zära Yaqob.

Yacob was born on 28 August 1599 into a rather poor family on a farm outside Axum, the legendary former capital in northern Ethiopia. At school he impressed his teachers, and was sent to a new school to learn rhetoric (siwasiw in Geéz, the local language), poetry and critical thinking (qiné) for four years. Then he went to another school to study the Bible for 10 years, learning the teachings of the Catholics and the Copts, as well as the country’s mainstream Orthodox tradition. (Ethiopia has been Christian since the early 4th century, rivalling Armenia as the world’s oldest Christian nation.)

More here. [Thanks to Ruth Marshall.]

Sue Rabbitt Roff in The Independent:

Jeremy Hutchinson, who died earlier this month aged 102, was one of England’s finest criminal barristers, and the counsel of choice for some of the most high-profile cases of his era. He defended the likes of Christine Keeler and Great Train robber Charles Wilson and also obscenity cases against novels such as Fanny Hill and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Later known as Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, his role defending Penguin Books after it published the unexpurgated version of the DH Lawrence classic is particularly memorable. It remains the landmark case in British obscenity law. But look at the details and something extraordinary emerges: Penguin’s decision to publish 200,000 copies on the advice of Hutchinson and joint lead counsel Gerald Gardiner was a massive gamble. It set up a case that were it not for the incompetence of the prosecution could easily have gone the other way.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover had only ever been legally published in abridged versions in the UK, starting in 1932. Though by 1960 the unexpurgated edition was sold in Europe and America and could be obtained under the counter in London if you knew where to go, Penguin co-founder Allen Lane wanted to publish a cheap paperback of the full thing. The idea was to put it out at 3s 6d, the same price as 10 cigarettes, to make it affordable for the “young and the hoi polloi”. The excuse was the 30th anniversary of Lawrence’s death from tuberculosis at the age of 45. When Penguin consulted Hutchinson and Gardiner, the lawyers retreated to reflect. A trial under the new Obscene Publications Act seemed inevitable. The act’s first paragraph stated that material will be deemed obscene if it contains elements that tend as a whole “to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely … to read, see or hear” it. The act included a new defence in cases where the offending segments were “for the public good on the ground that [they are] in the interests of science, literature, art or learning”. In consultation with several literary experts, Hutchinson and Gardiner felt most of the racy scenes and bad language – including (30) “f***s” and (14) “c***s” – could fall under this defence. Lawrence, after all, was one of the most highly regarded writers of his era.

More here.