Todd Gitlin in The Washington Post:

In the past few decades, plutocracy, globalization and compliant governments have betrayed workers, most of whom are white. Their decline began long before NAFTA, with the rise of low-wage foreign economies and a crushing, decades-long assault on the unions that had kept their wages up and their jobs in place. If Trump enters the White House, he cannot solve these problems. However often he fulminates against trade deals, he cannot conjure secure jobs for his fans. His “beautiful wall,” whether built or unbuilt, offers symbolic pleasures, but it would not make them walk taller or elevate their paychecks. Neither would tariffs, for which the price would be high. Then there are the cultural furies that fuel the Trump campaign: As a hefty share of white Americans see it, they’ve been forced to suffer the depredations of a black president whose middle name is Hussein — at this late date, 43 percent of Republicans still think he is a Muslim. What Trump holds out to his thwarted followers are the joys of instant, long-deferred gratification. When his supporters say “he says what he thinks,” they mean what they think and, even more, feel. How thrilling that, at last, a big shot, a winner, stands up for them, promises to wall off the bad guys, or punch them in the face, or both.

Most of all, though, there’s no respectable version of Trump — no Nixon — waiting in the wings to deliver on promises and contain the free-floating hatred. There’s no one to placate the enraged white working class, especially the men, and it’s hard to imagine policies that would make a re-greatened America “take the country away from you guys.” Neither Trump nor his GOP rivals can create that America — not soon, at any rate. Merely having a white president again is unlikely to mollify the angriest white voters. They want more than walls and nastiness; they want a viable, reliable economic life. They want a world where whites have secure, dignified jobs (better jobs, by the way, than immigrants and other upstarts who used to know their place). There’s every reason to believe that they’ll continue to feel victimized by malevolent interlopers: Barack Obama, China, immigrants, Muslims. Their frustration will have no outlet; no deliverance is in sight.

More here.

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in Aeon:

So what is a habit? There is consistent agreement throughout this long tradition that a habit is a learned behaviour repeated so often that it becomes involuntary. When it is a repeated behaviour that comports with ideals of health, righteousness, and wisdom, it can go by other names such as ‘spiritual practice’, ‘ritual’, and ‘routine’.

…If we are looking for the origin of the voracious American appetite for self-improvement, however, we have to go back two centuries before Covey, to Benjamin Franklin. For Franklin, cultivating wholesome habits was as crucial as discarding bad ones for the ‘bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection’. Franklin warned that those very behaviours that cunningly ‘took advantage of [our] inattention’ would keep us from ethical improvement. In his Autobiography, the 79-year-old Franklin recalled his youth when church services seemed to hold no promise for his moral perfection. So he took matters into his own hands. He developed a hierarchy of 12 virtues he wanted to become second nature: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity. When a Quaker friend gently reminded him that he had left out one virtue he could use a little more of – humility – Franklin conceded and added it to the list to bring it up to 13. He then figured out the habits that would help ingrain these virtues. For temperance: ‘Eat not to dullness, drink not to elevation.’ For tranquillity: ‘Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.’ And for the elusive humility he pulled out the big guns: ‘Imitate Jesus and Socrates.’ Franklin invented what he described as a ‘method’, and what the French philosopher Michel Foucault two centuries later would characterise as a ‘technology of the self’, to track his habits. Today’s habits writers would simply call it a chart. He put the days of the week along the X-axis, the virtues he sought to habituate on the Y-axis; a black dot meant he had slipped up on that day in that virtue, while a column of clear blocks meant a virtuous day – a clear conscience. He included mottos from Cato, Cicero, and the Proverbs of Solomon to inspire him and encourage his practice of particular virtues.

More here.

Matt Phillips in Quartz:

Branko Milanovic looks at the big picture.

During his dozen years as chief economist of the World Bank’s Research Department, he focused on making sense of the all-important economic question that many economists, paradoxically, seem uninterested in: How are people doing?

It’s a deceptively difficult question. To answer it you must determine what you mean by “people.” The average person? The median household? The poorest of the poor? The 1%?

Much also depends on the economic state of various countries and how living costs can be compared across nations. Determining how any one group of people is doing depends on how they rank among neighbors and rivals.

Set to be published next month (April 2016) Milanovic’s new book, Global Inequality, goes well beyond the narrative of rising inequality captured by French economist Thomas Piketty’s surprise 2014 best-seller, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. In his highly readable account, Milanovic puts that development into the context of the centuries-long ebbs and flows of inequality driven by economic changes, such as the Industrial Revolution, as well epidemics, mass migrations, revolutions, wars and other political upheavals.

More here.

I was interviewed about my cookbook by Shadab Zeest Hashmi for Modern Salt, a new British food magazine:

Shadab: Your book was written with homesick students in mind; you have to have been one yourself as a young Pakistani student in the US. What was the first thing your learnt to cook as a student?

Abbas: I can’t remember. What I do remember is that my roommate in college could cook and I could not, so he made me this offer that I foolishly accepted: “I will cook for both of us if you wash all the dishes and pots afterwards and clean up.” So, for some time, he got to do the fun part while I was stuck with the thankless, joyless, and universally loathed job of dishwashing. Such are the traumas that have shaped my worldview! But I caught on to the grave injustice of our arrangement eventually, and I probably learned to cook qeema (spicy ground beef) before anything else.

Shadab: What’s the childhood food that still haunts you? Have you replicated it successfully?

Abbas: The childhood food the memory of which haunts me to this day (and not in a good way) is papaya, which is unanimously considered to be the most vile fruit in the world by experts (such as myself!). For some reason my mother thought it would be great for my health if I were to consume a plateful of it after lunch one time. I tried and retched my way through a few bites but then refused to eat more. She decided in that moment that she had had enough of my finicky eating and told me that I was not allowed to get up from the dining table until I finished that plate of putrid pulp. An hour later, I was still sitting alone at the dining table with the papaya untouched when she came in and told me, “Get out,” and probably ate the papaya herself. I did not stick around to see.

More here. And one can buy the book here.

Hartosh Singh Bal in Caravan:

On 24 January, Amit Shah began his second term as president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, following a first stint that began in July 2014, soon after Narendra Modi assumed power. The controversy over the suicide of Rohith Vemula, on 17 January, was engulfing the party. Vemula was a PhD scholar and a member of the Ambedkar Students Association at the University of Hyderabad, whose stipend had been stopped after a fracas with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. Reports that the university’s actions may have resulted from interventions by the union minister Bandaru Dattatreya, a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh man, and the human resources minister, Smriti Irani, were damaging the BJP, which was already vulnerable to criticism that it was anti-Dalit. The party’s reaction—which was to question if Vemula was indeed a Dalit—utterly failed to contain the damage. Modi intervened, briefly and belatedly, to express anguish at the suicide, but the overwhelming tone of the party was to strongly defend Dattatreya and Irani.

Less than a month later, on 12 February, police arrested Kanhaiya Kumar, the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, on charges of sedition, after he attended an event where allegedly anti-India slogans had been raised. Once again, the ABVP—whose candidate had been defeated by Kanhaiya in the university’s union elections—was at the forefront of protesting “anti-national” activities. This time, to avoid a repeat of its embarrassment after the Hyderabad episode, the BJP took to branding all opposition to its actions as anti-national. Those leading the charge included the home minister, Rajnath Singh, who tweeted, “If anyone shouts anti India slogan & challenges nation’s sovereignty & integrity while living in India, they will not be tolerated or spared.” In the immediate aftermath, Modi did not offer up even a token statement, though the storm of controversy that followed sidelined an extravagant, week-long programme of events in support of the “Make in India” campaign, one of his pet projects.

Superficially, Shah’s reinstatement as the BJP’s head would seem to signal a continuation of the party’s ways during his first term. Back then, the party line was dominated by the combine of Shah, Modi and Arun Jaitley. But as these two incidents demonstrated, this will not be so in Shah’s second turn. The normally vocal Jaitley, who has never enjoyed the confidence of the Sangh, has been conspicuous by his almost complete silence. Meanwhile, the number of people speaking for the BJP has expanded to include leaders such as Singh and Sushma Swaraj, who enjoy the confidence of the Sangh and had lately been reduced to mere ciphers. And the line they echo is not set by Modi and his lieutenants, but by the RSS.

More here.

Gavin Jacobson in The Nation:

In December 1930, Stefan Zweig began writing a biography of Marie Antoinette. He was living in Salzburg, Austria, having moved there from Vienna in 1919 after World War I. He was almost 50 and at the height of his literary fame, living comfortably on the Kapuzinerberg in a large yellow villa crowned with turrets and ringed by high walls. When he wasn’t writing, he was traveling to Berlin or Paris, calling on the artistic celebrities of the day like a modern Boswell. When in Vienna, he went to the opera or lounged in cafés with Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schnitzler. It was a good life lived in the gloaming of interwar Europe.

“With diabolical cunning,” Zweig wrote of the French queen,

history began making a spoiled darling of Marie Antoinette, who had the Kaiserhof as a home in childhood, wore a crown before she was out of her teens, had charm and grace and wealth in liberal measure…. But destiny, having raised her to the pinnacle of good fortune, dragged her down again with the utmost refinements of cruelty…. Unaccustomed to suffering, she resisted and sought to escape. But with the ruthlessness of an artist who will not desist from his travail until he has wrung the last possibilities from the stubborn clay he is fashioning, the deliberate hand of misfortune continued to mould, to knead, to chisel, and to hammer Marie Antoinette.

Behind this portrayal of individual apocalypse lay self-description and prophetic vision. Like Marie Antoinette, Zweig was charming and graceful. Klaus Mann described him as the embodiment of Vienna’s cultural kaleidoscope, fusing “French suavity with a touch of German pensiveness and a faint tinge of Oriental eccentricity.”

He was also rich. His father was a businessman who turned a weaving mill in northern Bohemia into a booming industrial success. His mother had strong banking connections in Italy, and Zweig inherited a large portion of the family pile in his late teens. His apartment in Vienna was an epicurean domain of rare books set against walls of burning scarlet, of gold leaf dusted into goblets of heady liquor; the rooms were stuffed with the relics of genius, such as one of Beethoven’s desks, as well as cavernous, crimson leather armchairs. Whereas many of his Central European contemporaries sat down to write after spending a long day at the office (Kafka famously worked at an insurance firm), Zweig was able to devote himself to his writing full time.

More here.

David Shulman in NY Review of Books:

Israeli human rights activists and what is left of the Israeli peace groups, including joint Israeli-Palestinian peace organizations, are under attack. In a sense, this is nothing very new; organizations such as B’Tselem, the most prominent and effective in the area of human rights, and Breaking the Silence, which specializes in soldiers’ firsthand testimony about what they have seen and done in the occupied territories and in Gaza, have always been anathema to the Israeli right, which regards them as treasonous.¹ But open attacks on the Israeli left have now assumed a far more sinister and ruthless character; some of them are being played out in the interrogation rooms of Israeli prisons. Clearly, there is an ongoing coordinated campaign involving the government, members of the Knesset, the police, various semiautonomous right-wing groups, and the public media. Politically driven harassment, including violent and illegal arrest, interrogation, denial of legal support, virulent incitement, smear campaigns, even death threats issued by proxy—all this has become part of the repertoire of the far right, which dominates the present government and sets the tone for its policies.

There is now a palpable sense of danger, and also an accelerating decline into a situation of incipient everyday state terror. Palestinians have lived with the reality of state terror for decades—it is the very stuff of the occupation—but it has now seeped into the texture of life inside the Green Line, as many on the left have warned that it would. Israelis with a memory going back to the 1960s sometimes liken the current campaign to the violent actions of the extreme right in Greece before the colonels took power, as famously depicted in the still-canonical film Z.

The witch-hunt began this time with a targeting of the ex-soldiers’ organization Breaking the Silence by a strident chorus on the right, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, and other members of the cabinet, but also including prominent politicians and journalists from the wishy-washy center, including the highly popular Haaretz correspondent Ari Shavit. There have been calls to outlaw the organization entirely.

More here.

Sepoy in Chapati Mystery:

Husain remained a voice of hope, loss, reportage, critique, renunciation, vexation. I grew up reading his novels and short stories. When I discovered his columns and his critical writing, I also discovered the particular tension between re-framing past hopes with current despair. Professor Memon has a fine article discussing Husain’s fiction here and I quote from it to give you a sense of his artistic voice:

This corresponds fairly closely to my own descriptive taxonomy of Husain’s work, which I see, rather, in terms of a metaphor of journey. It starts with the realisation that while something has grievously gone wrong, something else, with abundant creative possibilities, has also been gained. I suggest a thematic triad to delineate the three stages of that journey as: (1) reclamation of memory, some initial success in this project, but, ultimately, failure, leading to (2) man’s moral perversion and fall, resulting in (3) the extinction of all the creative principle in life.

There is a lot to say, and others will say, about Husain’s extraordinary body of work. There is a need to archive his memories and writings. Yet, what one can and ought to say at this moment is that 1947 is indeed becoming the past for South Asia. The generation that not only witnessed it but dealt with its consequences in their words, deeds and thoughts, is leaving. Our understanding of nationalism and our engagement with the rights of citizens in South Asia remain indebted to this generation’s memories and writings.

Without seeing their words, hearing their voice, and being their selves, we can only see the border walls.

More here. (Note: For dear friend Ruchira Gupta who returned from Pakistan recently, deeply in love with the great Intizar Hussain)

Jared Daniel Fagan at The Quarterly Review:

Cioran’s idea of despair is largely informed by the decay of previous philosophical principles in which nature serves as a permanent, reliable structure for an objective vision of being. Susan Sontag echoes Cioran’s thoughts when she writes that “subjected to the attritions of change on this unprecedented scale, philosophy’s traditionally ‘abstract’ leisurely procedures no longer appeared to address themselves to anything.” Colonization, modernism’s response to the industrial revolution, and global warfare of unprecedented proportions all moved thinkers and artists to reexamine their perspective on our relationship to history, time, identity, and humanity. Additionally, Cioran argues, reason’s replacement of religion as the backbone of thought—a consequence of the Enlightenment—removed the veil of omnipotence that had traditionally propped up civilization. In his essay “On a Winded Civilization,” he writes that society “vacillates as soon as it exposes the errors which permitted its growth and its luster, as soon as it calls into question its own truths.” For Cioran, ironically, Enlightenment ideals of progress and discovery place civilized man in a permanent state of decadence: the meaning in his life now comes at the cost of being aware of his own faults, and working endlessly to repair those shortcomings.

Cioran finds a response to this shift from a once-reliable philosophical framework to an unsteady historical consciousness from anti-philosophers like Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein. The most significant influence on both his thought and style, however, is Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, Cioran believes that there is no truth, that truth itself is a systematized construct administered by history. Speaking of Twilight of the Idols, his text on cultural decadence, Nietzsche notes that the idol he recounts “is simply what has been called truth so far.” Here, the old systems of truth espoused from Socrates to Nietzsche’s contemporaries in nineteenth-century Germany are approaching their end. But while Nietzsche offers us the concepts of eternal recurrence and the Übermensch, there is no relief—or hope—in Cioran.

more here.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney at the Financial Times:

In its prime the largest black-owned business in the US, with hundreds of hit records and a roster of stars including Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, Motown is one of the most celebrated labels in the history of recorded music. But even today, 55 years after its first number one, the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr Postman”, the question of its legacy is unresolved.

No other record company has inspired so much contradictory commentary. Motown is held up as an emblem of black capitalism but has also been dogged by disputed allegations that it cheated its black acts. It is simultaneously lauded as a symbol of its home city Detroit and condemned for betraying it by relocating to Los Angeles in 1972.

Its ambition to make black pop music for all audiences — “whites, blacks, Jews, gentiles, cops and robbers”, in its founder Berry Gordy’s words — tallied with civil rights protests against segregation in the 1960s. However, Motown has also been criticised for diluting black culture and pandering to the mainstream.

more here.

This Might Be Real

How long in a cold room will the tea stay hot?
What about reality interests you?
How long can you live?
Were you there when I said this might be real?
How much do you love?
Sixty percent?
Things that are gone?
Do you love what’s real?
Is real a partial form?
Is it a nascent form?
What is it before it’s real?
Is it a switch that moves and then is ever still?
Is it a spectrum of cross-fades?
Is what’s next real?
When it comes will everything turn real?
If I drink enough tea to hallucinate, is that real?
If I know I’m waiting for someone but I don’t know who, is he real?
Is he real when he comes?
Is he real when he’s gone?
Is consequence what’s real?
Is consequence all that’s real?
What brings consequence?
Is it what’s real?
Is it what turned everything to disbelief, the last form love takes?
.

by Sarah Manguso
from Siste Viator
Four Way Books, 2006

>

David Oshinsky in The New York Times:

Few American jurists are as revered as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. A United States Supreme Court justice for close to 30 years, Holmes wrote seminal opinions that were clear and clever and elegantly phrased. It was Holmes who defined the limits of free speech in 1919 by noting that the law did not protect someone “falsely shouting fire in a theater.” And it was Holmes who thoughtfully amended those words a decade later by writing that nothing in the Constitution was more sacred than “the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” By most accounts, Holmes, an upper-crust Bostonian, served the nobler instincts of America’s privileged classes. That is why his reckless majority opinion supporting forced sterilization in a 1927 case remains an enigma. Was it an isolated misstep or something more: an indictment of Justice Holmes and the Progressive movement he appeared to embrace? America in the early 20th century was awash in reform. As giant corporations took root, so too did calls to check their power. Laws were passed setting maximum hours and minimum ­wages, limiting child labor, preserving natural resources and breaking up the “trusts” that were said to be destroying fair competition. Not all of these laws worked out as planned, and some were eviscerated in the courts. But a new force had been unleashed, aiming to serve the greater good not by destroying big business but by curbing its abuses. Progressivism was always more than a single cause, however. Attracting reformers of all stripes, it aimed to fix the ills of society through increased government action — the “administrative state.” Progressives pushed measures ranging from immigration restriction to eugenics in a grotesque attempt to protect the nation’s gene pool by keeping the “lesser classes” from reproducing. If one part of progressivism emphasized fairness and compassion, the other reeked of bigotry and coercion.

“Imbeciles,” by Adam Cohen, the author of “Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America,” examines one of the darkest chapters of progressive reform: the case of Buck v. Bell. It’s the story of an assault upon thousands of defenseless people seen through the lens of a young woman, Carrie Buck, locked away in a Virginia state asylum. In meticulously tracing her ordeal, Cohen provides a superb history of eugenics in America, from its beginnings as an offshoot of social Darwinism — ­human survival of the fittest — to its rise as a popular movement, advocating the state-sponsored sterilization of “feeble­minded, insane, epileptic, inebriate, criminalistic and other degenerate persons.” According to the New York attorney Madison Grant, whose immensely influential 1916 tract, “The Passing of the Great Race,” became standard reading for eugenicists — Hitler himself is said to have called it “my bible” — about 10 percent of Americans produced unworthy offspring and had to be stopped.

More here.

The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world.

Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic:

Friday, august 30, 2013, the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America’s reign as the world’s sole indispensable superpower—or, alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss and stepped back from the consuming void—began with a thundering speech given on Obama’s behalf by his secretary of state, John Kerry, in Washington, D.C. The subject of Kerry’s uncharacteristically Churchillian remarks, delivered in the Treaty Room at the State Department, was the gassing of civilians by the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.

Obama, in whose Cabinet Kerry serves faithfully, but with some exasperation, is himself given to vaulting oratory, but not usually of the martial sort associated with Churchill. Obama believes that the Manichaeanism, and eloquently rendered bellicosity, commonly associated with Churchill were justified by Hitler’s rise, and were at times defensible in the struggle against the Soviet Union. But he also thinks rhetoric should be weaponized sparingly, if at all, in today’s more ambiguous and complicated international arena. The president believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq. Obama entered the White House bent on getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan; he was not seeking new dragons to slay. And he was particularly mindful of promising victory in conflicts he believed to be unwinnable. “If you were to say, for instance, that we’re going to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and build a prosperous democracy instead, the president is aware that someone, seven years later, is going to hold you to that promise,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, and his foreign-policy amanuensis, told me not long ago.

More here.

Rachel Feltman in the Washington Post:

Until now, only humans seemed to use syntax this way. But a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications suggests that the Japanese great tit — a bird closely related to the North American chickadee — uses grammatical rules like these in its calls.

All language, human and otherwise, revolves around turning meaningless sounds into something more. It's widely accepted that many non-human animals use what's called referential communication — specific sounds mean specific things to the receiver. Beyond that, there are two kinds of syntax that make speech more complicated, but also more useful: phonological and compositional. Humans have both, and until this new study, non-human animals had only been shown to have the former.

Phonological syntax turns sounds that individually have no meaning into ones with meaning. Suffixes and prefixes are a good example in human language, and other animals use strings of different notes that are never used individually. The Campbell's monkey adds an “oooh” sound to the end of its vocalizations to increase the intensity of the message, and this sound is never used on its own — so that's another example. Another study found that some birds won't respond to calls unless the notes involved are made in the right order.

More here.

Joseph E. Stiglitz in Evonomics:

American inequality didn’t just happen. It was created. Market forces played a role, but it was not market forces alone. In a sense, that should be obvious: economic laws are universal, but our growing inequality— especially the amounts seized by the upper 1 percent—is a distinctly American “achievement.” That outsize inequality is not predestined offers reason for hope, but in reality it is likely to get worse. The forces that have been at play in creating these outcomes are self-reinforcing.

America’s current level of inequality is unusual. Compared with other countries and compared with what it was in the past even in the United States, it’s unusually large, and it has been increasing unusually fast. It used to be said that watching for changes in inequality was like watching grass grow: it’s hard to see the changes in any short span of time. But that’s not true now.

Addressing inequality is of necessity multifaceted—we have to rein in the excesses at the top, strengthen the middle, and help those at the bottom. Each goal requires a program of its own. But to construct such programs, we have to have a better understanding of what has given rise to each facet of this unusual inequality.

More here.

“Do-tin cheezaan Agha Sahab diyan” (Two-three items of Agha Sahib’s), she said in Punjabi, her voice cracking. She was referring to the pre-Independence poet and playwright Agha Hashar Kashmiri.

“Daagh vi gaana jay” (You must sing Daagh too), I said. “Othay sab Daagh de deewane ne” (Everyone there is crazy about Daagh)—Daagh Dehlvi, the nineteenth-century poet.

“Aa!” she said, and stared at me in appalled agreement, as if I had recognised an old vice of Calcutta’s citizens.

more here.

Thanassis Cambanis at The Boston Globe:

AMHERST COLLEGE GRADUATE Daniel Bliss founded the Syrian Protestant College in 1866, with high hopes to spread Christianity in the Levant. Instruction was in Arabic, and Bliss planned to quickly turn it over to local leadership. Within decades, however, Bliss had clashed with a faculty member who wanted to teach Darwin’s theory of evolution and shut down a student protest movement. English replaced Arabic, and “native instructors” were relegated to secondary status. Eventually, the institution gave up on its failed missionary aims and in 1920 adopted it modern name, the American University of Beirut.

It became a cornerstone of an era of ferment in Arab political life. Liberals, nationalists, revolutionaries, communists, and others were agitating throughout the Levant and the Arab region. In the half century that followed — through World War II and decolonization, the establishment of Israel and the displacement of Palestinians, and a long cycle of regional wars — it was an epicenter of political activism and research in and about the Arab world.

Until the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975, AUB hosted some of the most influential and prolific figures of Arab political and intellectual life.

more here.

Jake Marmer at Tablet:

Avant-garde poets are supposed to be difficult and incomprehensible, forgotten and miserable. The density ofdiscourse around Bernstein’s work, combined with the impressive number of domestic and international awards and distinctions he’s received in recent years, continues to baffle and inspire. The new collection of Bernstein’s essays Pitch of Poetry finally offers some insight into the seeming paradox of his mass appeal: For all of its classic avant-garde tropes—complexity, insider references, and elitism—the collection is also irresistibly entertaining, chatty, and thought-provoking—philosophically, politically, and technologically.

In the late 1970s, Charles Bernstein, along with poet Bruce Andrews, launched L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, a now-legendary literary journal. The journal’s name became both the signpost for a new literary community and a loosely defined set of poetic affinities shared by that community’s members. In an overview of the key tendencies associated with Language poetry, Bernstein points to the “new approach to the essay, averting exposition in favor of wild combinations, shifts of mood and tone, hyperbole, enigma, lyric exuberance, rhythmic propulsion, telegraphic immediacy, digression, aphorism, contradiction, investigation, and dialogue.”

more here.