I wrote this as a little tribute to Cohen back in 2008. I link to it now as a memorial tribute to the great singer and poet. It was originally published at The Smart Set:

Never has a blowjob sounded so sad. But Leonard Cohen is the sort of man who could read Mother Goose aloud and make it sound like Swinburne. The blowjob in question is rumored to have come from the lips of Janis Joplin, an extraordinary thing to ponder in the first place. The song, of course, is “Chelsea Hotel #2.” The lines in question go:

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.

Cohen once said, “My voice just happens to be monotonous, I’m somewhat whiney, so they are called sad songs. But you could sing them joyfully too. It’s a completely biological accident that my songs sound melancholy when I sing them.” Well, I think that’s bullshit. Leonard Cohen is great because he captured the sound of sadness. Real sadness.
Meaningful sadness. Meaningful sadness is just to this side of stupid, pointless. That’s because real sadness comes from the realization that nothing really matters, that the world is simply too big to be grasped, metaphorically or otherwise.

more here.

Brian Dillon at Cabinet Magazine:

How exactly to describe Hardwick’s singular style? For sure, it is a kind of lyricism, a method that allows her as a critic to bring the reader close to her subject via the seductions first of sound and second of image and metaphor. (In the Times Literary Supplement in 1983, the British novelist David Lodge called Hardwick the first properly lyric critic since Virginia Woolf, but this cannot be true: the lyric mode is indispensable even to a criticism that imagines it’s doing something quite else.) Joan Didion has approved Hardwick’s “exquisite diffidence,” and in an interview for the Paris Review, she herself remarked: “The poet’s prose is one of my passions. I like the offhand flashes, the absence of the lumber in the usual prose.” There is a sense always that Hardwick’s sentences stand alone, pay little or no attention to one another, that each is a self-involved and sufficient whole. She advances (if that’s the word) paratactically: impression piled upon impression, analogy stacked against analogy, till she runs out of conceits and gives it to us relatively strict and straight.


The metaphors in Hardwick’s essays are always unusual, which is what one wants from a metaphor. They are often simply bizarre, or strained as far as they will go. She can be straightforwardly graceful and apposite, as in the opening sentence of “Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf”: “Bloomsbury is, just now, like one of those ponds on a private estate from which all of the trout have been scooped out for the season.”

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Paul Keegan at the London Review of Books:

Parker is interested in the daisies and dandelions, the untidy and contingent evidences of Housman’s continuing presence in an England whose further reaches include Morse or Morrissey. In the West Country you can drink Shropshire Lad ale or you could (until recently) be drawn by a locomotive of that name. But Housman had foresuffered all, with his lads who down their troubles in ‘pints and quarts of Ludlow beer’; or in a letter to his brother Laurence in 1920: ‘I have just flown to Paris and back, and I am never going by any other route, until they build the Channel Tunnel.’ Housman was already in full possession of the Housman effect. If it is time to move on, moving on is what Housman makes difficult. ‘Housman has left no followers,’ MacNeice wrote in 1938, while also suggesting that he was the poet ‘with whom any history of modern English poetry might very well start’. Opinion about his relation to his age has always been self-divided. He said he had no relation to it. Edmund Wilson wrote in 1938 that the poems ‘went on vibrating for decades’, despite their lethal pastoral of condemned men and suicides, soldiers and doomed lovers, their stopped clock of velleities and arrested intimacies.

The poems have often been mothballed as the sum of their props, starting with Pound’s ‘Song in the Manner of Housman’: ‘People are born and die,/We also shall be dead pretty soon/Therefore let us act as if we were/Dead already’; Woolf in 1936 summarised the personal mythology as ‘May, death, lads, Shropshire’; Orwell in 1940 listed ‘suicide, unhappy love, early death’; Forster in 1950 ticked off ‘the football and cherry trees, the poplars and glimmering weirs, the red coats, the darnel and the beer … the homesickness and bed-sickness, the yearning for masculine death’.

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Toni Morrison in The New Yorker:

Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black people—they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause. The comfort of being “naturally better than,” of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished.

So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble. On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness” (once again), the family chooses murder.

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Laurel Nakanishi in Orion:

I remember standing in a forest of tamarack in early spring, near Siyeh Glacier in western Montana. High in the branches, clutches of needles sprouted the color of parakeets. The grove was old, so old that the trees grew giant and mossy. They had lived in this valley for over 150 years. I leaned against a stump where Allie sat. No one was looking at my body or at Allie’s body. No one was wondering what we were doing holding hands, our fingers interlaced. There was no need for words like lesbian or queer or bisexual. There was no need for any label at all. Siyeh Glacier is on land that’s thought of as wild: a place in which traces of human civilization are hard to find. The glacier itself once covered more than fifty acres, and it’s been frozen for millennia. But when we finally crested the pass and looped around to the north side of the mountain, we found only a field of dirty snow, dripping into a little stream. Climate change had melted the ice that had been here for thousands of years. It was a reminder that, while we felt free on that mountain, there can be no complete escape from where we come from. Not even in wilderness, not even with Allie.

Like our carbon pollution, we bring parts of our culture everywhere we go. Matthew Shepard, Gwen Araujo, the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida—all the stories I hear about queer people are violent and sad. And while I know that there are many queer families living happily in communities around the country, I find that, more often, I carry the violence with me—as fear, as self-hate, as distrust. I carry it even to the tops of melted glaciers. Maybe that is what the wilderness has taught me, continues to teach me: that while the violent and polluting parts of our culture are inescapable, they don’t define me. We are all part of a grander ecosystem, an interconnected natural world that is larger than our civilization and its discontents. We are both bigger and smaller than the identities that we create for ourselves, and when we want to get distance from them, we can go out into those areas we call wilderness and find ourselves, once again, as human animals.

More here.

Maxine Helfman. Enin, Historical Corrections Series, 2012.

More here, here, and here.

Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker:

Two weeks ago—when the election of Donald Trump was still, to many people, an almost comedic idea—Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, visited the Social Science Research Council, in Brooklyn, to talk about the fate of democracy with some graduate students. He had just won the Berggruen Prize, which is awarded, along with a million dollars, to a philosopher “whose ideas are intellectually profound but also able to inform practical and public life.” Taylor’s books tell the story of how some sources of value (love, art, individuality) have grown in relevance, while others (God, king, tradition) have declined. When we met, Taylor’s newest work was a lecture called “Some Crises of Democracy.” Citizens in Western democracies, he argued, used to find personal fulfillment in political participation; now, they were coming to feel that the democratic process was a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and that democratic politicians were con artists. Their desperation and cynicism seemed capable of turning these beliefs into self-fulfilling prophecies.

Taylor, who is eighty-five, is tall and handsome, with athletic shoulders and a thinker’s high, domed forehead. He radiates kindliness and thoughtful equanimity. Leaning back in his chair, he spoke softly, pausing frequently to cough—he had a cold—or to chuckle, in self-deprecation, at his own philosophical eloquence. (A typical laugh line: “How people understand democracy is different from epoch to epoch—that’s what the term ‘social imaginary’ is meant to capture!”) Economists, psychologists, political theorists, and some philosophers share a view of personhood: they think of people as “rational actors” who make decisions by “maximizing utility”—in other words, by looking out for themselves. Taylor, by contrast, understands human behavior in terms of the search for meaning.

More here.

Jonah Kanner and Alan Weinstein in Nautilus:

At 2:40 a.m., my phone woke me up. At least one of us was always on shift, and that night in September of 2010, I had volunteered to respond to automated text messages from our alert system.

As a graduate student at the time, I (Jonah) had helped build the first quick-response alert software pipeline for two gravitational-wave observatories, called LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) and Virgo. This system was designed to search for astrophysical signals in data as it arrived, to alert people who could check if a signal seemed valid, and share the message with astronomers around the world if needed. Every alert carried the possibility of a positive detection—humanity’s first direct observation of waves traveling through the fabric of spacetime, predicted by Einstein in 1916.

I got out of bed and made a sleepy-eyed walk to the small workstation we kept in our apartment. I didn’t know it, but the alert was the beginning of a professional and emotional rollercoaster. I logged into our event database and started browsing plots. I didn’t stay sleepy-eyed for very long. The plots showed an unusually loud signal. More dramatically, the waveform showed the “chirp” pattern that we were all hoping to see, something characteristic of the gravitational-wave emission from a pair of black holes spiraling together and then merging. The chirp was familiar to me from simulations, but nobody had ever seen one appear naturally. I plugged in headphones and jumped on to a conference call.

Nine of us—spread across the United States and Italy—began to talk the results over, wrestling with something too good to be true. Our hearts were racing. We needed to make a fast decision. If this dramatic signal was some kind of mistake, then there was no need for it to go further. After about 30 minutes of discussion, we agreed that the signal seemed valid, and pushed a button that spurred a collection of robotic telescopes to swing their gaze to the source location. Our log notes, usually dry, captured what we were all thinking that night: “Exciting!!!!! Very strong significant event …”

More here.

Bernie Sanders in the New York Times:

Millions of Americans registered a protest vote on Tuesday, expressing their fierce opposition to an economic and political system that puts wealthy and corporate interests over their own. I strongly supported Hillary Clinton, campaigned hard on her behalf, and believed she was the right choice on Election Day. But Donald J. Trump won the White House because his campaign rhetoric successfully tapped into a very real and justified anger, an anger that many traditional Democrats feel.

I am saddened, but not surprised, by the outcome. It is no shock to me that millions of people who voted for Mr. Trump did so because they are sick and tired of the economic, political and media status quo.

Working families watch as politicians get campaign financial support from billionaires and corporate interests — and then ignore the needs of ordinary Americans. Over the last 30 years, too many Americans were sold out by their corporate bosses. They work longer hours for lower wages as they see decent paying jobs go to China, Mexico or some other low-wage country. They are tired of having chief executives make 300 times what they do, while 52 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent. Many of their once beautiful rural towns have depopulated, their downtown stores are shuttered, and their kids are leaving home because there are no jobs — all while corporations suck the wealth out of their communities and stuff them into offshore accounts.

Working Americans can’t afford decent, quality child care for their children. They can’t send their kids to college, and they have nothing in the bank as they head into retirement. In many parts of the country they can’t find affordable housing, and they find the cost of health insurance much too high. Too many families exist in despair as drugs, alcohol and suicide cut life short for a growing number of people.

President-elect Trump is right: The American people want change. But what kind of change will he be offering them?

More here.

Joan Williams in Harvard Business Review:

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.

Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,” an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals.

More here.

Lost my Voice? Of Course

—for Beanie*

Lost my voice?
Of course.

You said “Poems of
love and flowers are
a luxury the Revolution
cannot afford.”

Here are the warm and juicy
vocal cords,
slithery,
from my throat.

Allow me to press them upon
your fingers,
as you have pressed
that bloody voice of yours
in places it could not know
to speak,
nor how to trust.

Alice Walker
from Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Harvest Books, 1991

*A childhood bully

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JD Taylor in New Statesman:

Twenty years ago, I published a novel called English Settlement. It attracted what is known in the trade as “mixed reviews”, which is to say that a handful of people remarked that clearly a new star had risen in the cultural firmament, while a rather larger number declared themselves surprised that a fine old firm like Chatto & Windus should waste its money on such talentless dreck. Absolute nadir among the detractors was plumbed by the gallant ornament of the Sunday Times’s books section – a chap named Stephen Amidon who concluded, after much incidental savagery, that the book was “about as much use as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking competition”. If this sounds bad – and it was no fun at all to sit at the kitchen table reading the ­review while one’s three-year-old romped around wondering why Daddy was looking so glum – then I should point out that this was an era in which wounding disparagement was, if not absolutely routine, then a frequent feature of newspaper books pages. Comparable highlights from the period include Philip Hensher’s dismissal of James Thackara’s The Book of Kings in the Observer (“could not write ‘Bum’ on a wall”) and, a little later, Tibor Fischer noting of a below-par Martin Amis that being seen reading it would be like your uncle getting caught masturbating in the school playground. Even I once submitted, to this very magazine, a review of a collection of journalism by Jon Savage called Time Travel, which the then literary editor ran under the headline “All the young pseuds”.

There are several questions worth asking about these outpourings of bygone critical spleen, in which the pretence of objective criticism very often disappears beneath a tide of ad hominem bitchiness. One of them is: would anyone be prepared to print this kind of thing on a magazine or newspaper in Britain in 2016? Another is: would anyone – writer, publisher, reader – or literary culture, in general, benefit in any way if they were? The answer to the first question, as the merest glance at a modern-day newspaper arts section suffices to demonstrate, is no. Here, by way of illustration and picked at random from the recycling pile by the back door, are an edition of the Saturday Guardian’s Review and a six-page review section taken from the Spectator.

More here.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton in PNAS, from a little while ago:

There has been a remarkable long-term decline in mortality rates in the United States, a decline in which middle-aged and older adults have fully participated (1⇓‒3). Between 1970 and 2013, a combination of behavioral change, prevention, and treatment (4, 5) brought down mortality rates for those aged 45–54 by 44%. Parallel improvements were seen in other rich countries (2). Improvements in health also brought declines in morbidity, even among the increasingly long-lived elderly (6⇓⇓‒9).

These reductions in mortality and morbidity have made lives longer and better, and there is a general and well-based presumption that these improvements will continue. This paper raises questions about that presumption for white Americans in midlife, even as mortality and morbidity continue to fall among the elderly.

This paper documents a marked deterioration in the morbidity and mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanics in the United States after 1998. General deterioration in midlife morbidity among whites has received limited comment (10, 11), but the increase in all-cause midlife mortality that we describe has not been previously highlighted. For example, it does not appear in the regular mortality and health reports issued by the CDC (12), perhaps because its documentation requires disaggregation by age and race. Beyond that, the extent to which the episode is unusual requires historical context, as well as comparison with other rich countries over the same period.

Increasing mortality in middle-aged whites was matched by increasing morbidity. When seen side by side with the mortality increase, declines in self-reported health and mental health, increased reports of pain, and greater difficulties with daily living show increasing distress among whites in midlife after the late 1990s. We comment on potential economic causes and consequences of this deterioration.

More here.

Livia Gershon in Aeon:

The Free State Project began life in 2001 with a call-to-arms by Jason Sorens, then a political science PhD student at Yale. Sorens suggested that a few thousand activists could radically change the political balance in the small state. ‘Once we’ve taken over the state government, we can slash state and local budgets, which make up a sizeable proportion of the tax and regulatory burden we face every day,’ he wrote. ‘Furthermore, we can eliminate substantial federal interference by refusing to take highway funds and the strings attached to them.’

Sorens’ views — which focus on problems with taxes and regulations and don’t dispute the government’s role in protecting commerce and conducting foreign policy – suggest a more-Republican-than-the-Republicans sort of outlook. But some people who’ve responded to his call subscribe to an entirely different ideology: an anarchism that sees government as a tool of wealthy capitalists. The rest fall somewhere in between. Free Staters say that what brings them together is a common belief that government is the opposite of freedom.

The crowd that gathered in February for Liberty Forum 2014 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Nashua was a pretty good reflection of the US libertarian movement: mainly male, and overwhelmingly white. A few people openly carried guns, which is thoroughly legal in New Hampshire.

One of the first speakers, Aaron Day, a Republican activist and member of the Free State Project board, railed against government plans to expand Medicaid. His PowerPoint flashed images comparing President Barack Obama’s health insurance reforms to the Soviet famine of the 1930s, when Stalin shipped away Ukraine’s wheat, leaving its people to starve. Day announced he’d be running for state Republican Party chair and called for everyone in the audience to seek local office. If I was looking for the embodiment of right-wing libertarianism, here he was, a true believer in cutting the government down to size from within – starting with programmes that benefit the poor.

More here.