A Total Non-apology

Don’t ask my view of humankind, of God.
We’re eddies in the ocean mind of God.

I grin from yearbook pages, bright as pins
and primed to prick the fat behind of God.

O Holy Father, how can I revere you?
You suck the pulp and spit the rind of God.

Spices, rhinos, coffee-coloured bodies:
all dust beneath the awful grind of God.

I won!
……… Then she jujitsu-spun my head
and locked me in the double-bind of God.

It breaks my brickwork, howls through my walls,
the incoherent undefined of God.

Who scaled the spire of the abandoned church,
spray-painted All Is God, and signed off —God?

by Rachel Briggs
from Rattle #50, Winter 2015

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Mark English in The Electric Agora:

At the age of seven, I went with my mother, brother and baby sister on a long plane journey. We flew for many hours, landing once for refueling (late at night). It was a rough journey, and I recall a certain amount of nausea and vomiting, but the positives certainly outweighed the negatives as far as I was concerned. As was then the custom with young boys on long flights, I was invited into the cockpit to talk to the pilots: a significant experience for someone who had previously never traveled on anything more impressive than a trolleybus.

The highlight, however, was finally reaching our destination, a metropolis more than five times the size of my home city. The sun had set an hour or two before, and the runway and tarmac were wet after summer rain. I remember the wetness, and lights reflected in puddles, so many lights, as the plane taxied to the terminal. There was a sense of promise, magic in the air.

Of course, the magic didn’t last very long (it never does) and the promise was not quite fulfilled (it never is). But for many, myself included, it’s the prospect or at least the possibility of this kind of magic or something like it that makes life more than just tolerable.

So I’m certainly not blind to this dimension of life; but I don’t think we should extrapolate on or intellectualize these feelings in the way religions and religious philosophies (like Platonism or pantheism) tend to do. They take the feeling and tell a story about it (Plato’s anamnesis, for instance). I say all we’ve got is the feeling. And that’s enough. It’s got to be enough.

The old, Weberian concept of disenchantment – or Entzauberung – has recently come up on this forum, and it was suggested that those who wholeheartedly welcome a demystified world and are driven to promote the idea have a distorted or impoverished view of things.[1] I would certainly agree that any view is deficient which fails to appreciate the importance of the sorts of feelings I have been talking about. But I think it’s a mistake to extrapolate from how we feel to how things are, objectively speaking, or to take some of our natural ways of thinking at face value.

Arguably most of us crave a natural world which is at least to some extent responsive to human goals and purposes. In fact, we are wired to see the world in animistic terms, as the universal tendency to impute agency to inanimate objects and human-like agency to animals attests. (The latter is particularly evident amongst hunter-gatherers but is evident also in the way people relate to their pets.)

More here.

Rebecca Novelli in The Millions:

Readers new to Roberto Calasso’s work often feel a bit bewildered, as if his books ought to come with a warning: This book is unlike any you’ve ever read. In addition to addressing the actual subject of the book, the reviewer must therefore explain who Calasso is, unpack his unorthodox rhetorical strategy, and provide some orientation to his uncommon perspective. This is easier said than done.

The Art of the Publisher, Calasso’s most recent work, consists of only 150 smallish and deceptively simple pages containing his speeches, essays, and occasional pieces about publishing. Briefly, he argues that publishing is an art, books are art objects, and the publisher is an artist. The publisher’s art has always been to provide the guiding sensibility for the publishing house and for the works it publishes. This sensibility is the mythos or spirit, if you will, of the publishing house. Today’s publishing houses lack this kind of vision and thus do not produce art. And the every-writer-and-reader-for-himself universe of electronic publishing cannot be art either, because it, too, lacks a guiding vision and the art object, books.

There could scarcely be anyone more qualified than Calasso to make this case, and The Art of the Publisher offers entry into his fascinating world of leading edge literati. Intellectually, he is elegant and stylish in an Italian way: traditional, subtle, original. He writes from his formidable knowledge and from his experience as a founder and editorial director of Adelphi, an Italian publishing house of exceptional depth and quality with a backlist that includes the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche,Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov, and Leonardo Sciascia. He considers publishing itself a literary genre. He writes erudite and highly original works on subjects few have considered, never mind named. He has an international following.

Calasso’s rhetorical method is “always a mosaic.” [Paris Review, 2012] His PhD thesis concerned the theory of hieroglyphs in Sir Thomas Browne. He says, “[The] idea of a language made up of images is connected with all of my work.” [Paris Review.] His books often begin with an image, almost a digression, that he deconstructs bit by bit as he traces its presence here and there; explicating its relationship(s) within mythology, religion, art, literature, history, languages (he knows eight), and the classics; making unexpected and seemingly effortless connections; and finally arriving at a new meaning for which the original image is now an emblem of a much larger whole.

More here.

Lyndsey Stonebridge in Eurozine:

The end of the Second World War was as bad as the beginning. In Europe displaced persons filled old camps and necessitated new ones, as new political frontiers were drawn across the continent. More people waited on more boats and at more borders. As India and Pakistan took shape out of the ashes of British colonial rule in 1947, millions more found themselves forced on to the road. In 1948 the creation of Israel pushed out a new generation of refugees, the Palestinians, soon to become the first permanently stateless people of modern times. More followed from China, Tibet, Burma, Bangladesh and North Korea; the misfortunes multiplied, from land to land, continent to continent.

The reason why these refugees' misfortunes also belonged to the world was not simply because what they were experiencing was so awful. There was no grand collective revulsion at the fate of the millions who had been stripped of everything. Failure to recognize the sheer awfulness of refugee experience is a constant feature of refugee history. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm once observed that the twentieth century produced phenomena so atrociously unfamiliar that it had to invent new words to describe them. Nearly everyone in the world now knows the name and dreadful import of one of Hobsbawm's examples, “genocide”; his other example, “statelessness”, has yet to take root in our cultural memory of modern trauma, and yet to be recognized for the calamity it was and still is.

The misfortunes of modern refugees belonged not just to them but to everyone else too because their existence opened up a political, moral and existential faultline that has never closed. Their history doesn't provide us with a solution to our current troubles, but it can tell us something important about the origins of the current crisis. As a generation of writers and intellectuals clearly grasped at the time, the movement of so many people meant something important began to shift in the way it was possible to think about security, citizenship, belonging and human rights.

“Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others”, the French philosopher Simone Weil warned de Gaulle, shortly before her death in exile in Kent in 1943. Weil was not alone in recognising that the catastrophe of deracination cut deeply into the lives of all, including those who assumed that their national citizenship guaranteed them the right to a place on the planet. Just as the history of genocide has been woven into the moral and cultural fabric of world memory, so too do we need to understand how the modern history of refugees has shaped not only the lives of others but the lives, rights and securities of those who think of themselves as happily at home, too.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Nicolas Bommarito in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You’re interested in Buddhist philosophy. Owen Flanagan has three different styles working across the border of western and Buddhist philosophy: a comparative approach; a fusion approach ( where we try a unify them) and a cosmopolitan one (where we are ironically poised to accept whichever comes through as best). Do any of these help capture your own perspective on what you’re about?

NB: Of the options, I suppose I’m closest to the cosmopolitan approach (though I’m not sure I’d describe myself as ‘ironically’ positioned). I see my interaction with Buddhist philosophy in the same way I think of my interaction with people I know. When I meet a philosopher that I respect, I’m not interested in just comparing our ideas and I’m not really out to develop some fusion of our views. I’m going to listen to them and think about what they say. I won’t accept everything they argue, but they’ll likely show me things I’ve not really worked out or things I didn’t see before. I relate to Buddhist philosophy in the same way.

3:AM: You’ve written about Tibetan philosophy. Although Plato has Apollo and Descartes God its kind of easy to be philosophically interested in their work without any theological or mythical commitments. Is it the same with the religious content of Buddhism? It seems to be more tightly wrapped to religion.

NB: One wrinkle here is that it’s often hard to tell what counts as “religious content” – You suggested Apollo for Plato, but does his belief in The Forms count as religious? How about his belief in reincarnation or the immortality of the soul? Lots of Buddhists so dislike the idea of theological or mythical commitments that they don’t even like to call Buddhism a religion at all.

More here.

Michiko Kakutani at The New York Times:

Powerful and damning accounts of the Bush administration’s determination to work what Vice President Dick Cheney called “the dark side” and its elaborate efforts to legalize torture (including arduous attempts to narrowly define torture as leading to “serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage” is likely to result) can be found in two essential books, “The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib,” edited by Karen J. Greenbergand Joshua L. Dratel, and “Standard Operating Procedure,” by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris. An important personal perspective is now provided by Eric Fair’s candid and chilling new book, “Consequence,” which is at once an agonized confession of his own complicity as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib and an indictment of the system that enabled and tried to justify torture.

Mr. Fair, who worked for CACI, a private contractor that provided interrogation services at the prison, participated in or witnessed physical abuse, sleep deprivation and the use of what he calls “the Palestinian chair” (a monstrous contraption that forces a prisoner to assume an excruciating “stress position”). He sees naked men handcuffed to chairs, stripped of their dignity and their clothes. He and his colleagues “fill out forms and use words like ‘exposure,’ ‘sound,” ‘light,’ ‘cold,’ ‘food’ and ‘isolation’” — ordinary words that become shorthand for methods of inflicting fear and pain. He rips a chair out from underneath a boy and shoves an old man, head first, into a wall.

Of the Abu Ghraib torture photos broadcast by “60 Minutes” in April 2004, Mr. Fair writes: “Some of the activities in the photographs are familiar to me. Others are not. But I am not shocked. Neither is anyone else who served at Abu Ghraib. Instead, we are shocked by the performance of the men who stand behind microphones and say things like ‘bad apples’ and ‘Animal House’ on night shift.’”

more here.

Nirmala Jayaraman at The Quarterly Conversation:

Susan Howe reunites us with our ideals of what language can do in two new books that blend elements of poetry and essay: The Birth-mark and The Quarry. These essays are steeped in the history of American literature, and they make for an invitation into the wilderness of an untamed, early American writing. Howe is able to show that poetry is relevant regardless of place or time. In The Birth-mark she discovers what poets can do for the essayist’s practice; in The Quarry she compares the same poetic experience to the concrete existence of visual film. These explorations will appeal to anyone’s senses, as she examines the physical matter and tangible pieces of both mediums. However Howe’s real motive behind all of this work have to do with metaphorical transformation and a desire for a more substantial experience of reading.

In The Birth-mark Howe writes, “we are always returning to unconscious talking.” She evokes this by drawing the reader’s attention to the modest notes left behind by poets who identify as outsiders, people who lived on the margins. Howe argues that the notes they left behind are just as important as their published work because, “in its relation to desire, reality appears to be marginal.” In other words, poetry is unique for its ability to convey desire through an individual word or letter, rather than a complex idea. Howe is careful not to suggest that writers like Hawthorne, or poets like Emily Dickinson are to blame for their contemporaries’ rigid interpretation of their writing. Rather, they found the marks and spaces in their works so threatening because they do not align with a particular order they were used to when reading poetry or prose.

more here.

Jeffrey Fleishman at The LA Times:

The life and legacy of the apostle Thomas were a shimmer of myth and fact that sent Tom Bissell across oceans and down alleys; he scribbled notes with a high fever and cried with dysentery and diarrhea in a church bathroom on a mountaintop in India.

In researching his new book, “Apostle,” Bissell, a writer of wanderlust and obsessed curiosity, spent years hunting the supposed tombs of disciples who for centuries have been gauzed in ecclesiastical mist, including Thomas the doubter, whose bones and relics have been scattered from Rome to Kerala, India.

“Apostle” is a ride-along through unanswerable questions about 12 imperfect men who set out in the first century to spread the word of Jesus Christ. The book is a trip into faith, history and skepticism. The story glows with enchanting asides and stitches together how Jesus' life and meaning were edited and refined through the ages from contradictory accounts and incongruous translations.

“What Christianity promises, I do not understand,” Bissell writes. “What its god could possibly want, I have never been able to imagine, not even when I was a Christian.”

“Apostle” was a fitting undertaking for a fallen altar boy, beleaguered Peace Corps volunteer, adventure journalist and writer whose short fiction delights in the mishaps of expat Americans navigating foreign lands. When discussing the book the other day, Bissell, veering from biblical legends to primal urges, smiled like a man who had overheard an indiscreet whisper.

more here.

Theresa Saliba in The Feminist Wire:

I write beside the rainy sky

Tonight an unexpected an

American

Cease-fire to the burning day

that worked like war across my

empty throat before I thought to try

this way

to say I think we can: I think we

can.

–June Jordan, “To Sing a Song of Palestine”

For Arab feminists of my generation, June Jordan brought us out of our invisibility. She embodied transnational feminist solidarity long before it was in vogue. This bold Black woman, this brilliant poet, never retreated from speaking unspeakable truths. She visited Palestinian refugee camps after the massacre of Sabra and Shatilla in 1982. She returned to Lebanon after Israel’s massacre of refugees at a UN camp at Qana in 1996. Jordan turned the most gruesome horrors in our world—the world of Arab isolation and unabated imperial violence–into searing poems and essays that spoke to our shared humanity across the boundaries of race, class, creed and culture, and across oceans of ignorance and incomprehensibility. She shared Arabic coffee with those in mourning, bore witness to the strangulation of Israeli occupation and the US-sponsored arsenal of death, and through her writing tied our suffering to the terrors of anti-Black racism and police violence in the US. She affirmed our collective struggle, our resistance and resilience with a resounding “I think we can” (1985, 45-6).

Jordan was one of the first African American feminists to show her solidarity by traveling to Lebanon, producing haunting poetry that trenchantly indicted the US government and its citizens for the violence there. In “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon,” she lets her own complicity, as an American taxpayer, stand for the whole people: “I didn’t know and nobody told me and what/could I do or say, anyway?” After a litany of official excuses, and gruesome details of slaughter, she concludes, “Yes I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that/paid/for the bombs and the planes and the tanks/that they used to massacre your family. . . I’m sorry. I really am sorry” (1985, 106). This scathingly satirical piece exposes the excuses, the failure of recognition and solidarity, the emptiness of apology in the face of this brutally executed invasion.

More here.

Zia Haider Rahman in The New York Times:

TWENTY years ago, when New Yorkers asked me where I was from, all I’d say is that I grew up in Britain. Mentioning that I was born in Bangladesh drew only more questions, and New Yorkers simply wanted confirmation of what was to them the distinctive cultural marker: my British accent. That accent was learned from imitating BBC News announcers on a cassette recorder. As a boy, I read about the destruction of millions of Jews and was gripped by fear: If white Europeans could do that to people who looked like them, imagine what they could do to me. So I adapted, hoping to make myself less alien to these people so ill at ease with difference. I grew up not so long ago in a Britain that spat at nonwhites, beat us and daubed swastikas on walls. Britain frightens its natives with the specter of a fifth column, and exhorts immigrants to integrate better and adopt British values. Do it and you’ll earn your stripes. But the promise is hollow, for Britain has no intention of keeping its side of the bargain.

…If you’re not going to call me British when I grew up in Britain; when I hold a British passport and don’t hold a Bangladeshi one; when I don’t even speak Bengali; when, good citizen that I try to be, I help an elderly neighbor with his Ikea bed, or dig out the old lilac that another cannot uproot; when I was educated in Britain, worked in Britain, was “a body of England’s, breathing English air/Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home”; when I wash the dishes at the local church’s fund-raiser for the homeless (because regardless of faith, we surely all believe in the idea of community); and again — it bears repetition — when I hold a British passport “without let or hindrance,” then you can’t be surprised if, doubting your good faith, I grab my bags and get the hell out.

After all, how much more can I integrate? What more is it you want from us? To be white? To be you?

More here.

Charles McGrath in The New Yorker:

Knopf itself has been bought and sold several times, and now belongs, along with hundreds of other publishing imprints, to a mega-company created by the merger of Penguin and Random House. Yet somehow Knopf has held on to its identity as a publisher that prides itself on being singular—on publishing books that are not just good but good-looking and, without neglecting the bottom line, also caring about literary excellence. At last count, the company had published twenty-five Nobel laureates, sixty Pulitzer Prize winners, and more than thirty winners of the National Book Award. As much as it’s a business, it’s now practically a cultural institution.

The company’s founder, Alfred Knopf, was one of the first generation of Jews brash enough to infiltrate the stuffy Wasp citadel of book publishing. The son of a New York clothing manufacturer turned salesman and bank director, he brought to a nearly ossified business a much needed jolt of energy and advertising savvy. Unlike other publishers, he made his own sales calls and wrote his own ads, which were broadcast on the radio, displayed on Broadway billboards, and toted around by men wearing sandwich boards. Knopf was just twenty-two when, in 1915, he started the business with five thousand dollars from his father. His assistant and only employee, besides an office boy, was his fiancée, twenty-year-old Blanche Wolf, whom he married a year later and who worked for the company the rest of her life. Not always a reliable witness, she later claimed that they had an oral prenup guaranteeing her equal partnership in the fledgling business. But if Alfred ever made such a promise he failed to keep it. Her share never exceeded twenty-five per cent, and she never received the credit she deserved for the success of the firm that bore her husband’s name. In 1965, when a great fuss was made over its fiftieth anniversary, Blanche Knopf was barely mentioned.

In a new biography, “The Lady with the Borzoi: Blanche Knopf, Literary Tastemaker Extraordinaire” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Laura Claridge argues that Blanche was actually the more important and influential of the two Knopfs.

More here.

Michael Nielsen in Quanta:

In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue system defeated the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. At the time, the victory was widely described as a milestone in artificial intelligence. But Deep Blue’s technology turned out to be useful for chess and not much else. Computer science did not undergo a revolution.

Will AlphaGo, the Go-playing system that recently defeated one of the strongest Go players in history, be any different?

I believe the answer is yes, but not for the reasons you may have heard. Many articles proffer expert testimony that Go is harder than chess, making this victory more impressive. Or they say that we didn’t expect computers to win at Go for another 10 years, so this is a bigger breakthrough. Some articles offer the (correct!) observation that there are more potential positions in Go than in chess, but they don’t explain why this should cause more difficulty for computers than for humans.

In other words, these arguments don’t address the core question: Will the technical advances that led to AlphaGo’s success have broader implications? To answer this question, we must first understand the ways in which the advances that led to AlphaGo are qualitatively different and more important than those that led to Deep Blue.

More here.

Rana Foroohar in Time:

It’s hard to know where to start in tallying up the explosive revelations in the Panama Papers, an analysis of leaked documents from global law firm Mossack Fonseca revealed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Yes, we’ve known for a while now that the shadow financial system was growing. But it’s another thing to take in 11.5 million documents showing the way in which Mossack Fonseca was working with big name financial groups like UBS, HSBC, Société Générale, and many others to help elites from the Communist Party leadership of China, to soccer star Lionel Messi, to global financiers hide cash in offshore havens around the world.

It’s just the tip of a much bigger iceberg. “The size of the leak is unprecedented, but the tricks Mossack Fonseca has allegedly used for its clients are neither new nor surprising. Anonymous shell companies and the failure of governments to require lawyers, corporate service companies, or banks to collect beneficial ownership information on clients leave the door wide open for dirty money to flow around the globe virtually unhindered,” says Heather Lowe, the Director of Government Affairs for Global Financial Integrity, a Washington DC-based consultancy.

To me, this is one of the key issues at work in the U.S. presidential election. Voters know at a gut level that our system of global capitalism is working mainly for the 1 %, not the 99 %. That’s a large part of why both Sanders and Trump have done well, because they tap into that truth, albeit in different ways. The Panama Papers illuminate a key aspect of why the system isn’t working–because globalization has allowed the capital and assets of the 1 % (be they individuals or corporations) to travel freely, while those of the 99 % cannot.

More here.

M. R. O'Connor at Harper's Magazine:

Noah built a boat to preserve the world’s biodiversity; today, scientists build freezers. In the underbelly of Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History, I meet Julie Feinstein, the director of the Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection. I think we are somewhere beneath the Hall of Minerals or of Meteorites but, after the bewildering number of twists and turns we’ve taken—through the museum’s exhibits and down into storage facilities and then across the shipping room—it’s hard to tell for sure.

Feinstein’s laboratory is one of the museum’s hidden marvels. Among the world’s largest cryogenically frozen-tissue-sample collections, it exists in a tiny basement on the building’s western edge, near the corner of West Seventy-Seventh Street and Columbus Avenue. Not far from where we are standing is a 3,000-gallon liquid-nitrogen tank surrounded by eight-foot fences with six-inch metal spikes on top. The tank feeds liquid nitrogen into stainless steel vats inside the laboratory, and in these vats rest 100,000 organic samples—little pieces of whales and birds and monkeys and other nonhuman species taken from around the planet and now kept frozen at minus 160 degrees Celsius.

Around 10,000 samples have been added to the Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection each year since it was built in 2001, and it has the capacity to hold one million. The samples are the foundation of the museum’s efforts to map the evolutionary relationships among organisms through their genetic makeup, and many of the specimens are exceedingly rare: highly endangered Channel Island foxes; a nautilus from Vanuatu, in the South Pacific; leopard frogs from the Huachuca Mountains.

more here.

Francine Stock at Prospect Magazine:

The bathtub of HG Wells is not large. It sits even today in a private house in Essex, a sympathetic 18th-century residence where Wells and family spent much of the First World War. The tub is significant because it was a place for contemplation, off a room where Wells regularly worked at night. At his desk, wearing what biographer Michael Sherborne describes as a “Wellesian onesie,” he pondered how to address the great questions of the conflicted day.

Wells’s fictional counterpart Mr Britling, the central character of his acclaimed novel about the war Mr Britling Sees It Through—100 years old this year—is regularly found at his night desk, warmly wrapped in pyjamas of llama wool “working ever and again at an essay, an essay of preposterous ambitions, for the title of it was ‘The Better Government of the World.’”

Mr Britling pours forth opinions—columns, pamphlets, letters, arguments—with apparent facility from the Dower House in the fictional Essex village of Matching’s Easy. An American visitor even remarks on the repurposing of the outbuildings from agriculture to pleasure or the intellectual husbandry of a man of ideas. It’s a charming and comfortable place (as its inspiration is still) in which to sit out a global conflict.

The author’s sense of guilt infects the portrait of Mr Britling, not just for his persistent infidelities but for his armchair war. He harvests profitable verbiage from the misery of others, just as Wells would progress from the establishment of Charles Masterman’s War Propaganda Bureau in 1914 to the commercial success of Mr Britling via such attempts at post-conflict soothsaying as What Is Coming?

more here.

Nick Ripatrazone at The Millions:

We don’t know when it will happen — whether some April or July or December will be the cruelest month — but we know poets are fascinated with the end of the world. Novelists and essayists ponder the apocalypse, but poems are particularly suited toward capturing the anxiety of the end.

Consider Robert Penn Warren’s “Evening Hawk,” which narrows from the grand expansive — a hawk’s wing that “scythes down another day” along the “crashless fall of stalks of Time” — to the airless and anxious: “If there were no wind we might, we think, hear / The earth grind on its axis, or history / Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.” The relative brevity of Warren’s poem enables its power. We don’t need volumes upon volumes to proclaim the end: we need one final, focused gasp.

In a letter dated May 16, 1945, Wallace Stevens posed a question as a statement: “At the moment, the war is shifting from Europe to Asia, and why one should be writing about poetry at all is hard to understand.” Faced with destruction and death, the action of criticism feels cold and academic. Poetry, on the other hand, becomes necessary as the world crumbles. After 9/11, poetry seemed natural; many of us in New York City and its shadow carried folded copies of W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and “September 1, 1939” by W.H. Auden.

If we accept Stevens’s definition of the poetic act as “the desire to contain the world wholly within one’s own perception of it,” then poems about the end are simultaneously selfish and heroic attempts at survival. Here are 10 poems to prepare us for the end of the world.

more here.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
.

by Robert Frost
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George Packer in The New Yorker:

“You know what?” the novelist Rick Moody began hisSunday Times review of the novelist James McBride’s new book about James Brown, “Kill ’Em and Leave.” What thought compelled Moody to snag his reader’s attention with the print equivalent of a blind-side shove? This: “It’s an undeniable truth that when African-American writers write about African-American musicians, there are penetrating insights and varieties of context that are otherwise lost to the nonblack music aficionados of the world, no matter how broad the appeal of the musician under scrutiny.” By virtue of being black, Moody goes on, Stanley Crouch could plumb the depths of jazz and Nelson George could limn the contours of funk and soul more completely and knowledgeably than the most sensitive, music-literate, passionately enthusiastic white critic. Not only is this “undeniable,” it’s also, as Moody sees it, a really good thing: “This contemporary tendency in which black writers lay claim to the discourse of black music—this increasing tendency—is a much needed development for anyone who cares about modern music.” I read the rest of the review, because I’m interested in James McBride and his work, but I never got over that lede. Moody’s point—there’s no other way to read it—is that race endows writers and critics with an extra dose of perceptual acumen. We hear James Brown with our ears, our heart, our imagination, our muscles, but also with the color of our skin, and there are essential qualities in James Brown’s music (Moody never says what they are) that a listener who is not black like Brown simply can’t pick up.

In Moody’s defense, one might say—this is the best one can say—that we respond to music, as to all art, out of our own experience, and that, in America, racial identity is experience.

More here.

Sarah and Sarah in Avidly:

Elena Ferrante, as perhaps you know, is the pseudonym of a writer who has written some very wonderful novels. No one knows who Ferrante actually is, and since she (or he) refuses to tell us anything about the wonderful novels that so many love, readers are left grasping at straws — reaching for an interpretive cue about how we might best situate these novels. These novels feature a voice without a body to anchor it, allowing us all to indulge in endless (pleasurable!) conversation over what form “Ferrante” would or should take. Our opinions on this matter usually align with our values.

…As Sarahs, we would like to weigh in on the Ferrante covers. First, the general consensus (which is wrong): the covers of these novels are bad, either unthinkingly or purposefully.

…The covers, one after another, are no joke; they require no inside knowledge about artistic intention. They are straightforward, compelling, and absolutely devastating. What can we learn from them if we stop trying to pose ourselves as somehow more aesthetically sophisticated than they are? Because basically the problem is that we’ve been trying to reconcile these covers with our taste, and we cannot do that currently, because these covers love women, whereas, as we all know, taste is just another word for internalized misogyny. And so, a preliminary list, (because we do so love a list). What do we learn from the Ferrante covers? Well, we learn:

1. Marriage is a place you never fully get to.
2. A man’s shadow casts itself in two directions.
3. The scale of things is off kilter inside a marriage
4. There are vistas, and they remain forever in the distance.
5. Fitting together with another person is a comfort and a weight, like heavy knit or corduroy.
6. Youth starts to feel old inside a marriage.
7. Girlish fantasies fuel us forever.
8. A woman’s body disappears into a child as much as the other way around.
9. The presence of a child is always already a loss.
10. People rarely face us in full, but we walk with them anyway.

So please, reconsider.

More here.