The dead seal near McClure’s Beach

1.

……….Walking north toward the point, I came on a dead seal. From a few feet away, he looks like a brown log. The body is on its back, dead only a few hours. I stand and look at him. There’s a quiver in the dead flesh. My God he is still alive. A shock goes through me, as if a wall of my room had fallen away.
……….His head is arched back, the small eyes closed, the whiskers sometimes rise and fall. He is dying. This is the oil. Here on its back is the oil that heats our houses so efficiently. Wind blows fine sand back toward the ocean. The flipper near me lies folded over the stomach, looking like an unfinished arm, lightly glazed with sand at the edges. The other flipper lies half underneath. The seal’s skin looks like an old overcoat, scratched here and there, by sharp mussel-shells maybe…
……….So I reach out and touch him. Suddenly he rears up, turns over, gives three cries. Awaark! Awaark! Awaark! — like the cries from Christmas toys. He lunges toward me. I am terrified and leap back, although I know there can be no teeth in that jaw. He starts flopping toward the sea. But he falls over, on his face. He does not want to go back to the sea. He looks up at the sky, and he looks like an old lady who has lost her hair.
……….He puts his chin back on the sand, rearranges his flippers, and waits for me to go. I go.

2.

Today I go back to say goodbye. He’s dead now, but he’s not—he’s a quarter mile further up the shore. Today he is thinner, squatting on his stomach, head out. The ribs show more—each vertebra on the back underneath the coat is now visible, shiny. He breathes in and out.
He raises himself up, and tucks his flippers under, as if to keep them warm. A wave comes in, touches his nose. He turns and looks at me—the eyes slanted, the crown of his head looks like a boy’s leather jacket bending over his bicycle bars. He is taking a long time to die. The whiskers white as porcupine quills, the forehead slopes…goodbye brother, die in the sound of waves, forgive us if we have killed you, long live your race, your inner-tube race, so uncomfortable on land, so comfortable in the ocean. Be comfortable in death then, when the sand will be out of your nostrils , and you can swim in long loops through the pure death, ducking under as assassinations break above you. You don’t want to be touched by me. I climb the cliff and go home the other way.

by Robert Bly
from News of the Universe
Sierra Club Books, 1980
.

A talk given in Berlin on November 10 on receiving the 2016 Welt Literature Prize.

Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books:

First I would like to acknowledge the absurdity of my position. Accepting a literary prize is perhaps always a little absurd, but in times like these not only the recipient but also the giver feels some sheepishness about the enterprise. But here we are. President Trump rises in the west, a united Europe drops below the horizon on the other side of the ocean—but here we still are, giving a literary prize, receiving one. So many more important things were rendered absurd by the events of November 8 that I hesitate to include my own writing in the list, and only mention it now because the most frequent question I’m asked about my work these days seems to me to have some bearing on the situation at hand.

The question is: “In your earlier novels you sounded so optimistic, but now your books are tinged with despair. Is this fair to say?” It is a question usually posed in a tone of sly eagerness—you will recognize this tone if you’ve ever heard a child ask permission to do something she has in fact already done.

Sometimes it is put far more explicitly, like so: “You were such a champion of ‘multiculturalism.’ Can you admit now that it has failed?” When I hear these questions I am reminded that to have grown up in a homogeneous culture in a corner of rural England, say, or France, or Poland, during the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, is to think of oneself as having been simply alive in the world, untroubled by history, whereas to have been raised in London during the same period, with, say, Pakistani Muslims in the house next door, Indian Hindus downstairs, and Latvian Jews across the street, is thought of, by others, as evidence of a specific historical social experiment, now discredited.

More here.

J. Hoberman at the New York Times:

Originally a painter, Bresson was a proponent of pure cinema, something he elaborates throughout “Bresson on Bresson.” Interviewed during the making of “Pickpocket,” he asserted his desire “to make a film of hands, glances, objects, refusing everything that is theatrical.” To that he later added: “More and more in my films, I’m trying to suppress what people call plot. Plot is for novelists.” In an interview given while “Pickpocket” was in release, he asserted that “films should not have subjects at all.”

In fact, Bresson’s films tended to focus on individual figures. Most of his movies can be seen as dramas of faith and bids for redemption — both on the part of the filmmaker and the central character, who in “Au Hasard Balthazar,” the 1970 movie widely considered his masterpiece, happens to be a donkey.

“Impossible tasks attract me,” Bresson told Le Figaro in 1949. “It’s good to create obstacles. I, at least, don’t work well without obstacles,” he said in a radio interview, conducted in English, at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, where “The Trial of Joan of Arc” won a special jury prize. Five years later, he ended a conversation with the critic Georges Sadoul by musing, “I wonder if my films are worth the effort they require.”

more here.

Tyler Malone at the LA Times:

Novelist Vladimir Nabokov is not only one of the midcentury masters of prose but also, arguably, our greatest literary cartographer. The author of such masterworks as “Lolita” and “Pale Fire” often sketched maps of the settings of his favorite novels. One can easily find online his diagram of the trek Leopold Bloom takes across the Dublin of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” his layout of the Samsa family flat in Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and his topography of Sotherton Court from Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park.” The ability to create maps from text, to envision spatially the events of a novel in detail, is a special one, and it typifies the obsessive creativity of Nabokov, one of the gods of both Russian and American letters.

Alex Beam, in his new literary biography, “The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship,” becomes a cartographer of a different type as he maps out the contours of a friendship-turned-feud. Edmund Wilson, Nabokov’s foil here, is less known now than his Russian competitor, but there was a time when he was one of the premier American critics.

Beam’s book gives us a brief but detailed sketch of how two erudite men of letters went from intimate confraternity to bitter enmity in the span of a few decades.

Their friendship began in 1940 when Nicolas Nabokov, an émigré composer who rented a house across the street from Wilson in Wellfleet, Mass., asked his neighbor if he would help his cousin Vladimir, a struggling novelist who had recently arrived in the States. “Do whatever you can,” he implored.

more here.

Ashutosh Jogalekar in The Curious Wavefunction:

Physics, unlike biology or geology, was not considered to be a historical science until now. Physicists have prided themselves on being able to derive the vast bulk of phenomena in the universe from first principles. Biology – and chemistry, as a matter of fact – are different. Chance and contingency play an important role in the evolution of chemical and biological phenomena, so beyond a point scientists in these disciplines have realized that it's pointless to ask questions about origins and first principles.

The overriding “fundamental law” in biology is that of evolution by natural selection. But while the law is fundamental on a macro scale, its details at a micro level don't lend themselves to real explanation in terms of origins. For instance the bacterial flagellum is a product of accident and time, a key structure involved in locomotion, feeding and flight that resulted from gene sharing, recombination and selective survival of certain species spread over billions of years. While one can speculate, it is impossible to know for certain all the details that led to the evolution of this marvelous molecular motor. Thus biologists have accepted history and accident as integral parts of their fundamental laws.

Physics was different until now. Almost everything in the universe could be explained in terms of fundamental laws like Einstein's theory of general relativity or the laws of quantum mechanics. If you wanted to explain the shape and structure of a galaxy you could seek the explanation in the precise motion of the various particles governed by the laws of gravity. If you wanted to explain why water is H20 and not H30 you could seek the explanation in the principles of quantum mechanics that in turn dictate the laws of chemical bonding.

More here.

Raja Halwani in Aeon:

The 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that human beings tend to be evil. He wasn’t talking about some guy rubbing his hands and crowing with glee at the prospect of torturing an enemy. He was thinking about the basic human tendency to succumb to what we want to do instead of what we ought to do, to heed the siren-song of our desires instead of the call of duty. For Kant, morality is the force that closes this gap, and holds us back from our darker, desiring selves.

Once desire becomes suspect, sex is never far behind. Kant implicitly acknowledged the unusual power of sexual urges and their capacity to divert us from doing what is right. He claimed that sex was particularly morally condemnable, because lust focuses on the body, not the agency, of those we sexually desire, and so reduces them to mere things. It makes us see the objects of our longing as just that ­– objects. In so doing, we see them as mere tools for our own satisfaction.

Treating people as objects can mean many things. It could include beating them, tearing into them, and violating them. But there are other, less violent ways of objectifying people. We might treat someone as only a means to our sexual pleasure, to satisfy our lust on that person, to use a somewhat archaic expression. The fact that the other person consents does not get rid of the objectification; two people can agree to use one another for purely sexual purposes.

More here.

Colm Tóibín at The Guardian:

Part of the power of the book comes from the grim, unearthly picture it draws of London. Since London was a collection of villages in which anyone moving from a posh square to an important public building could catch a glimpse down the many side streets that housed the poor, in which privileged and pauper passed each other daily, then the novel itself gained nourishment from the friction between classes, from the closeness of the little streets to the great. In the later 19th century, a number of writers saw the startling possibilities such contrasts offered, where the London of Dickens, so sprawling, vast, and filled with drama, could be rendered as a ghostly place where substance became shadow.

In books such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) or Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), London could become a place of secrets, a city in which many people, otherwise normal and sane, could change their form as they moved from street to street, or from drawing room to attic.

Henry James would set his novel of 19th-century terrorism in this London. The Princess Casamassima (1886) “proceeded quite directly,” he wrote, “during the first year of a long residence in London, from the habit of walking the streets.

more here.

Simon Winchester in The New York Times:

It was in an earlier best-selling volume that Weatherford persuasively argued that the 25-year blitzkrieg mounted by Genghis and his cavalries — who, in “the most extensive war in world history” beginning in 1206, swept mercilessly and unstoppably over the Altai Mountains to their west and the Gobi Desert to their south — brought civilization, fairness, meritocracy and avuncular kindliness to legions of undeserving satrapies across Eurasia. Those who believed Genghis to be a tyrant of monstrous heartlessness have thus lately come to think otherwise: Weatherford’s writings present us revisionist history on a grand scale, but one as scrupulously well researched (with ample endnotes) as such an intellectual overhaul needs to be. Now, with “Genghis Khan and the Quest for God” he has taken his thesis still further, arguing with equal fervor and conviction that the Khan, though godless himself, favored total religious freedom for his subjugated millions. While his empire encompassed “Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, Confucians, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Hindus, Jews, Christians and animists of different types” (Weatherford’s passions for lists can sometimes seem like stylistic overkill), he was eager that all should “live together in a cohesive society under one government.” No walls to be built, no immigration bans, no spiritual examinations. To be reminded of such secular civility is one thing; but what is most remarkable about this fine and fascinating book is Weatherford’s central claim that the Great Khan’s ecumenism has as its legacy the very same rigid separation of church and state that underpins no less than the American idea itself. The United States Constitution’s First Amendment is, at its root, an originally Mongol notion.

Many might think this eccentric in the extreme, until we learn that a runaway 18th-century best seller in the American colonies was in fact a history of “Genghizcan the Great,” by a Frenchman, Pétis de la Croix, and that it was a book devoured by both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Moreover, the quoted rubric of the Mongol and United States laws is uncannily similar: Among other passages, Mongol law forbids anyone to “disturb or molest any person on account of religion,” and Jefferson, after reading its strictures, went on to suggest in his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, a precursor of the First Amendment, that “no man shall . . . suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief.” The link between Genghis and Jefferson may seem tenuous to the point of absurdity; but Weatherford argues his case very well — and in doing so offers further amplification of the notion that so many of the West’s claimed achievements in fact have their true origins in the East, and that countries like Mongolia, far from being, as those hapless British diplomats once believed, at the utter ends of the earth, are very much more central than most of us nowadays like to imagine. In a sense we are all Mongols; we are all one.

More here.

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in The New Yorker:

In 2003, we reviewed “Moneyball,” Michael Lewis’s book about Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s. The book, we noted, had become a sensation, despite focussing on what would seem to be the least exciting aspect of professional sports: upper management. Beane was a failed Major League Baseball player who went into the personnel side of the business and, by applying superior “metrics,” had remarkable success with a financial underdog. We loved the book—and pointed out that, unbeknownst to the author, it was really about behavioral economics, the combination of economics and psychology in which we shared a common interest, and which we had explored together with respect to public policy and law.

Why isn’t the market for baseball players “efficient”? What is the source of the biases that Beane was able to exploit? Some of the answers to these questions, we suggested, might be found by applying the insights of the Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, on whose work behavioral economics greatly relies. Lewis read the review, began to take an interest in the whole topic of human rationality, and, improbably, decided to write a book about Kahneman and Tversky. He kindly even gave us credit for setting him down this path.

Though we were pleased that Lewis was taking an interest in our field, we admit to being skeptical when we heard about his book plan. Granted, Lewis has shown many times before—not only with “Moneyball” but also with “The Big Short,” his book about the real-estate market, and “Flash Boys,” which is about high-speed trading—that he can write a riveting book about an arcane subject. And we did not doubt the appeal of the book’s main characters: one of us had written several papers with Kahneman, and the other had known Kahneman and Tversky since 1977 and had collaborated with both men. (Tversky died in 1996, at the age of fifty-nine. Kahneman, now eighty-two, is blessedly still very much with us.) Both of us had been deeply influenced by their joint work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making. Still, how was Lewis going to turn a story about their lives into the kind of page-turner that he’s known for?

More here.

David V. Johnson in The Baffler:

Future historians may well mark the date of April 6, 2014, as a watershed moment in the media’s epic bid to redefine itself in the digital age. For this was the day that Vox.com went live, heralding the golden dawn of a new journalistic epoch. Cofounded by Washington Post Wonkblog creator and liberal pundit Ezra Klein, prolific contrarian policy blogger Matt Yglesias, and former Post director of platforms Melissa Bell, Vox has not only challenged assumptions about what journalism is and how it should be done, but has altered ideas of what a digital media business can be.

In its brief history, Vox has become a model in an industry that’s moved from entrenchment to retrenchment. Vox’s rapid growth, its dream team of policy bloggers, its cachet with the White House, its ability to attract blue-chip advertisers such as Chevrolet and Campbell’s Soup, and its tech innovation have become the envy of competitors. Why? What is the secret of Vox.com and its thriving parent company

Vox Media, which, according to a report this spring in Bloomberg Technology, is profitable and valued at $1 billion? Are there applicable lessons for the dwindling segments of the media industry that still care primarily about journalism? Or, is the Vox Media success story largely the product of clever—perhaps even deceptive—marketing?

The Vox creation myth begins, suitably enough, in a mood of liberal dissatisfaction. Ezra Klein conceived Vox from a trio of frustrations he had with old media institutions like the Washington Post.

More here.

CJ Hopkins in CounterPunch:

Sometime circa mid-November, in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat (i.e., the beginning of the end of democracy), the self-appointed Guardians of Reality, better known as the corporate media, launched a worldwide marketing campaign against the evil and perfidious scourge of “fake news.” This campaign is now at a fever pitch. Media outlets throughout the empire are pumping out daily dire warnings of the imminent, existential threat to our freedom posed by the “fake news” menace. This isn’t the just the dissemination of disinformation, propaganda, and so on, that’s been going on for thousands of years … Truth itself is under attack. The very foundations of Reality are shaking.

Who’s behind this “fake news” menace? Well, Putin, naturally, but not just Putin. It appears to be the work of a vast conspiracy of virulent anti-establishment types, ultra-alt-rightists, ultra-leftists, libertarian retirees, armchair socialists, Sandernistas, Corbynistas, ontological terrorists, fascism normalizers, poorly educated anti-Globalism freaks, and just garden variety Clinton-haters.

Fortunately, for us, the corporate media is hot on the trail of this motley of scoundrels. As you’re probably aware, The Washington Post recently published a breathtaking piece of Pulitzer-quality investigative journalism shamelessly smearing hundreds of alternative publications (like the one you’re reading) as “peddlers of Russian propaganda.”

More here.

Joshua Alvarez at Bookforum:

In 1840, soon after Napoleon Bonaparte's spectacular rise and fall, the always-provocative Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle declared, “The History of the world is but the Biography of great men”: Individual heroes who changed the world through sheer willpower, charisma, or exceptional virtue. Carlyle's pantheon included Napoleon, as well as Luther, Shakespeare, Cromwell, and others. The “Great Man” theory of history launched a public debate, one Carlyle would ultimately lose to Herbert Spencer and his enduring thesis that even “great men” must be understood as products of their society.

In 1849, Carlyle penned a vicious pro-slavery screed, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” in which he argued that Africans cannot rule themselves and therefore need European masters. Carlyle pointed to one country in particular:

“Alas, let him look across to Haiti, and trace a far sterner prophecy! Let him . . . banish all white men from the West Indies, and make it all one Haiti, with little or no sugar-growing, black Peter exterminating black Paul, and, where a garden of the Hesperides might be, nothing but a tropical dog-kennel and pestiferous jungle.”

There may not be an obvious connection between his pro-slavery and “Great Man” theories, but a reader could take pleasure in imagining Carlyle, as he wrote those words about Haiti, trying to suppress unpleasant thoughts about how, from those “pestiferous jungles,” emerged the extraordinary leadership of a great black man: Toussaint Louverture.

more here.

Jeff Seroy at The Paris Review:

A woman in housedress and slippers, scarf wound round her head, stands on a ladder staring at the desert. This arresting image, a photograph taken by Bruce Chatwin, was chosen by the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena to represent the themes of this year’sArchitecture Biennale in Venice, which closed November 27. The woman, whom Chatwin encountered in southern Peru, was a German archeologist. She was there to study the Nazca lines, which look like random gravel from the ground but from a small elevation take shape as geoglyphs, or man-made images of animals and plants. The point? A slight shift in perspective achieved by modest means can alter our experience of the world.

More than sixty countries were represented in the Biennale’s two locations, the Gardens and the Arsenale. At both sites, Aravena, who recently received the Pritzker Architecture Prize, constructed compelling entry halls from over ninety tons of scrap material left over from previous Biennales. Out of plasterboard and the metal posts it attaches to, he formed cavernous spaces with textured walls and sculptural ceilings. The boards were cut with ragged edges and stacked like tiles, leaving small ledges here and there, or tiny gaps for windows, while lengths of torqued aluminum stalactites hung just above our heads. The spaces felt like primitive shelter: cave, hut, igloo, ger.

more here.

Matt Wolfe at The New Republic:

Early one summer morning, Son Yo Auer, a Burger King employee in Richmond Hill, Georgia, found a naked man lying unconscious in front of the restaurant’s dumpsters. It was before dawn, but the man was sweating and sunburned. Fire ants crawled across his body, and a hot red rash flecked his skin. Auer screamed and ran inside. By the time police arrived, the man was awake, but confused. An officer filed an incident report indicating that a “vagrant” had been found “sleeping,” and an ambulance took him to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Savannah, where he was admitted on August 31, 2004, under the name “Burger King Doe.”

Other than the rash, and cataracts that had left him nearly blind, Burger King Doe showed no sign of physical injury. He appeared to be a healthy white man in his middle fifties. His vitals were good. His blood tested negative for drugs and alcohol. His lab results were, a doctor wrote on his chart, “surprisingly within normal limits.” A long, unwashed beard and dirty fingernails suggested he had been living rough. But the only physical signs of previous trauma were three small depressions on his skull and some scars on his neck and his left arm.

Psychologically, though, something was obviously wrong. Doe refused to eat or speak. He kept his eyes shut.

more here.