Scott McLemee reviews Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies, in Inside Higher Ed:

In 1966, Roland Barthes published a short book—a pamphlet, really—called Criticism and Truth, in response to Raymond Picard, a distinguished professor and the biographer of the French classical playwright Racine, as well as the editor of Racine’s collected works. Barthes had published a structuralist analysis of Racine, and Picard’s response was titled New Criticism or New Imposture?—from which one may readily surmise the tone.

Barthes’s reply was polemical enough. He and his co-thinkers were self-consciously avant garde in both literary taste and theoretical commitments, and pulling the noses of establishment worthies was not a temptation easily resisted.

Barthes insinuated that Picard’s demand for “objectivity” and “evident truths” reduced scholarship to accumulate dust in libraries, while Barthes and company tried to formulate new questions and new ways of reading.

No code exists for judging the outcome of combat by pamphlet, alas, though it bears mention that Barthes’s remains in print in both French and English. Picard’s does not and is only remembered, just barely, for inspiring it. On the other hand, two or three generations of theory-bashing polemicists have recapitulated Picard’s grievances about academic criticism (e.g., jargon, trendiness, too much sex and psychoanalysis, etc.), without ever hearing of him.

Barthes goes unmentioned in Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (University of Chicago Press), although I suspect that the shared title and manifesto-like brevity of the newer book is more than coincidence. But the differences between them are more striking.

More here.

Damon Linker in the NYT:

Rana Foroohar in Washington Monthly:

Reading lists say lot about a person, or at least what they care to spend their time thinking about. Ben Harris, who served as chief economic adviser to President Joe Biden when Biden was still the VP, remembers prepping for his first day on the job in 2014. The vice president’s policy staff had sent Harris a large pile of documents designed to get him into Biden’s headspace. It was filled with esoteric papers on corporate governance, financial market short-termism, and labor policy. Still, Harris wanted to know more about the personality traits of his new boss. When he asked his predecessor, Sarah Bianchi, about Biden’s character, Bianchi said, “What can I tell you? This guy is the vice president of the United States, but he still gets up on a ladder and cleans his own gutters.”

He also stands in picket lines with UAW members. Biden is, of course, an excellent politician, and he’s long been a friend to labor. Still, few people would have expected, when he entered the White House, that his administration would herald the beginning of a sea change in America’s political economy, from trickle down to bottom up, or, as the president’s campaign slogan put it, to a core emphasis on “work, not wealth.”

The record on that score is unequivocal. His COVID-19 stimulus bailed out people, not banks. His domestic economic policy has been about curbing giant corporations and promoting income growth. His infrastructure bills invested in America in a way not seen since the Eisenhower administration. He has taken commerce back to an earlier era in which it was broadly understood that trade needed to serve domestic interests before those of international markets.

The contrast with the so-called neoliberal economics of recent decades, in which it was presumed that markets always know best, and particularly the Clintonian idea that “free” trade and globalization were inevitable, could not be starker.

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Alan Light at the New York Times:

One thing that remains intact for Stone at age 80 is the sense of wordplay and fun-house language that distinguished his lyrics (read the song/book title out loud), and some of the biggest pleasures in “Thank You” come when we witness him teasing out a theme. His response to other people telling his story and analyzing his struggles: “They’re trying to set the record straight. But a record’s not straight, especially when you’re not. It’s a circle with a spiral inside it. Every time a story is told it’s a test of memory and motive. … It isn’t evil but it isn’t good. It’s the name of the game but a shame just the same.”

Sylvester Stewart was born into a musical family (“There were seven of us, and the eighth member of the family was music”), and he started singing and recording with his siblings at a young age, soon joining a series of high school and regional bands.

more here.

Lindsey Carter in Science 1st:

Spanning from 625 BCE to 476 CE, the Roman Empire is still one of the most iconic of all time. At their highest, the Romans conquered Britain, Italy, much of the Middle East, the North African coast, Greece, Spain, and, of course, Italy. From their inventions to their way of life, Ancient Rome was one of the most influential cultures the planet has ever seen. Being the first city to have over 1 million people is just one of the things the time period has to its name, leading many to wonder what life in Rome was really like.

Men had all the power while women had none in Rome

Want to know what family hierarchy was like within Rome? It seems that men were the ones with all the power – while women had none. Men were the ones in charge of arranging marriages for the family, divorcing their wives if they pleased, and even rejecting newborns if they saw fit or couldn’t afford the addition.

More here.

Erik Hoel at The Intrinsic Perspective:

The first common argument for group minds is the argument from equivalence. I.e., a neuron is a very efficient and elegant way to transmit information. But one can transmit information with all sorts of things. There’s nothing supernatural about neurons. So could not an individual ant act much like a single neuron in an ant colony? And if you find it impossible to believe that an ant colony might be conscious, that it couldn’t emerge from pheromone trails and the collective little internal decisions of ants—if you find the idea of a conscious smell ridiculous—you have to then imagine opening up a human’s head and zooming in to neurons firing their action potentials, and explain why the same skepticism wouldn’t apply to our little cells that just puff vesicles filled with molecules at each other.

One can go further. What if, as philosopher of mind Ned Block has asked, each citizen of China devoted themselves to carrying out the individual signaling of a neuron? This would then create a “China brain” which mimicked in functionality a real brain (although you would need about two more orders of magnitude to get close to approximating a full human brain in terms of numbers of neurons/citizens).

more here.

Antonio Muñoz Molina at The Hudson Review:

Who knows how many times I stood before Carracci’s Venus, Adonis and Cupid without noticing a crucial detail, a tiny mark that holds as in a cipher the meaning of the tale. Perhaps I had not looked as closely as I thought. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” George Orwell’s remark about our observation of reality can be applied as well to works of art. Until recently, I had never noticed the speck of a red dot on Venus’ golden, shining skin, just on the edge of the small patch of shadow between her breasts, as if a pinprick had left behind a tiny trace of blood. I failed to see it even though the figure of Cupid was pointing from within the painting to where I should look. The picture itself discloses the key to decoding its riddle.

Renaissance painters eagerly pointed out the similarities between painting and poetry, renewing a debate that dates back to antiquity and is encapsulated in a single terse line of Horace: Ut pictura poesis.

more here.

pity this busy monster,manunkind

pity this busy monster,manunkind,

not.   Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim(death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
—electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange;lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on itself.
……………………………… A world of made
is not a world of born—pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones,but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence.    We doctors know

a hopeless case if—listen: theere’s a hell
of a good universe next door;let’s go.

by E. E. Cummings
from Literature and the Writing Process

Paul Bloom at Small Potatoes:

When I was in graduate school, I couldn’t make it through most of the talks presented in my department. I got bored and frustrated and tuned out. It was before smartphones, so I would doodle or fall asleep.

I figured it was my fault. Maybe, in part, it was—my attention span is not my strong suit. But I’ve heard a lot of talks since then, including many wonderful ones, and I’ve worked hard on improving my own presentation style. And I now think that it wasn’t just my fault. Most talks are bad—boring, hard to follow, and poorly delivered.

So here’s some advice on how to give good talks. Not great ones, perhaps, but at least better than average.

More here.

Benj Edwards at Ars Technica:

Last week, we related a story in which AI researcher Simon Willison spent a long time talking to ChatGPT verbally. “I had an hourlong conversation while walking my dog the other day,” he told Ars for that report. “At one point, I thought I’d turned it off, and I saw a pelican, and I said to my dog, ‘Oh, wow, a pelican!’ And my AirPod went, ‘A pelican, huh? That’s so exciting for you! What’s it doing?’ I’ve never felt so deeply like I’m living out the first ten minutes of some dystopian sci-fi movie.”

When we asked Willison if he had seen Her, he replied, “I actually watched that movie for the first time the other day because people kept talking about that,” Willison said. “And yeah, the AirPod plus ChatGPT voice mode thing really is straight out of that movie.”

More here.

Mark Jones at Project Syndicate:

This month marks an instructive centenary. On the morning of November 9, 1923, a 34-year-old Adolf Hitler led a column of 2,000 armed men through central Munich. The goal was to seize power by force in the Bavarian capital before marching on to Berlin. There, they would destroy the Weimar Republic – the democratic political system that had been established in Germany during the winter of 1918-19 – and replace it with an authoritarian regime committed to violence.

Marching alongside Hitler was a 50-year-old Bavarian regional court judge, Baron Theodor von der Pfordten, who carried a legal document that would have become the basis for the constitution of the new state. It included provisions to justify the mass execution of the Nazis’ political opponents, as well as especially drastic measures targeting Germany’s Jews, who accounted for around 1% of the population. Jewish civil servants were to be immediately dismissed and any non-Jewish German who tried to help them was to be punished with death.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g616rf9OWBc&ab_channel=KinoLorber

Sasha Frere-Jones at Bookforum:

Smith was a loud ghost running wires between worlds, a “gnomish” saint who made connections more often than he made stuff. Hostile to the existence of galleries and museums and other obstacles to free circulation, Smith spent his life feeling for a pattern that might connect all the holy detritus in his ark: crushed Coke cans, paper airplanes, Seminole quilts, Ukrainian eggs, books, records, dead birds, string figures. The movies he painstakingly built from Vaseline and dye and paper cutouts changed how filmmakers saw the material of film itself. The problem for the historian is that Smith excelled in eliminating his own “excreta” (his word), throwing films under buses and tossing projectors out of windows. His close friend during the “Berkeley Renaissance” of 1948, the artist Jordan Belson, said that Smith “had nothing but insults and sarcasm for most art and most artists.” (This quote comes from the fantastic American Magus, a collection of interviews with those in Smith’s close circle first published in 1996, and one of Szwed’s sources.)

more here.

Zachary Fine at The New Yorker:

Hals was not the second- or third-best Dutch painter of the seventeenth century; he was the best of the nineteenth. In the eighteen-sixties, the French art critic Théophile Thoré (who famously rescued Vermeer from oblivion) kicked off a revival of Hals, making him a favorite of art collectors and painters—Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, Mary Cassatt and James McNeill Whistler, Robert Henri and George Luks. (Luks reportedly said that the only two great painters in history were Hals and himself.) By 1900, the city of Haarlem had installed a statue of Hals in a public park. Even as he fell behind Rembrandt and Vermeer in the twentieth century, his paintings would retain a sheen of newness. According to the painter Lucian Freud, Hals was “fated always to look modern.”

His genius boils down to a contradiction: loose, unblended smears of paint that create the flesh-and-blood likeness of a human being. The late works of Titian, Velázquez, and Rembrandt would all head in this direction with their “rough” manner, but Hals achieved a kind of scary immediacy that seemed almost foreign to the medium—a photographer suddenly among painters.

more here.

The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rock
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

by Dylan Thomas

Jada Yuan in The Washington Post:

From Phys.Org:

Most people who have pulled an all-nighter are all too familiar with that “tired and wired” feeling. Although the body is physically exhausted, the brain feels slap-happy, loopy and almost giddy. Now, Northwestern University neurobiologists are the first to uncover what produces this punch-drunk effect. In a new study, researchers induced mild, acute sleep deprivation in mice and then examined their behaviors and brain activity. Not only did dopamine release increase during the acute sleep loss period, synaptic plasticity also was enhanced—literally rewiring the brain to maintain the bubbly mood for the next few days.

These new findings could help researchers better understand how mood states transition naturally. It also could lead to a more complete understanding of how fast-acting antidepressants (like ketamine) work and help researchers identify previously unknown targets for new antidepressant medications.

More here.