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John Banville at the New Statesman:

In his introduction, Clark poses a more immediate question: “Shouldn’t we judge political art by its effects, not its beauty or truth?” Leaving aside the second clause, we find two questionable assertions implicit in the first: namely, that art can be political and that it can have an effect. In this context, he imagines the reader wondering why his book “makes room for Matisse and Jackson Pollock,” two artists who “reached the conclusion, in practice, that opinions had to be what art annihilated if it was to survive”. Their stance is one that Clark accepts: “The blankness was essential. It was reality as they lived it.”

And is not that blankness –“inutility” was the word Vladimir Nabokov favoured – the very essence of art? Surely we go to Velázquez’s Las Meninas, to Piero della Francesca’s Sansepolcro Resurrection, to Bonnard’s baigneuses series, not to be told things, not to be persuaded of this or that political solution to life’s problems, but to have an intensified sense of what it is to be alive in this exquisite and appalling world into which we have been thrown, and from which after a little interval we shall be summarily ejected.

more here.

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Gretchen Reynolds in The Washington Post:

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Constance Grady in Vox:

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Loose on Earth

A tiny spark, or
the slow-moving glow on the fuse
creeping toward where
ergs held close

in petrol, saltpeter, mine gas,
buzzing minerals in the ground,
are waiting.

Held tight in a few hard words
in a dark mood,
in an old shame.

Humanity,
……….. said Jeffers, is like quick

explosion on the planet
we’re loose on earth
half a million years
our weird blast spreading—

and after,
rubble—millennia to weather,
soften, fragment,
sprout, and green again.

by Gary Snyder
from Danger on Peaks
Shoemaker Hoard, 2004

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John Gallagher at the LRB:

It’s no secret that modern English is saturated with French. Insults and derogatory terms owe much to the French example – bastard, brute, coward, rascal, idiot. French oozes from the language of food and drink: chowder echoes the old French chaudière, meaning a cooking pot, while crayfish started out as escrevise before the English chopped off its initial vowel (something they also did with scarf, stew, slice and a host of others) and decided that the last syllable sounding like ‘fish’ was just too good to pass up. From arson to evidence, jury to slander, French runs through the language of the English law (and the ‘Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!’ of the US Supreme Court), such that the philologist Mildred Pope could write that the only truly English legal institution, at least from a linguistic perspective, was the gallows. With contemporary English including more than eighty thousand terms of French origin, Georges Clemenceau might have had a point when he argued that ‘the English language doesn’t exist – it’s just badly pronounced French.’ In this engaging and sometimes infuriating essay, Bernard Cerquiglini – linguist, medievalist, member of Oulipo, advisor to successive French governments on linguistic affairs – pushes Clemenceau’s statement further, arguing that ‘the global success of English is a homage to Francophonie.’ Anyone speaking English today, Cerquiglini argues, is mostly speaking French.

more here.

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Stan Carey at Sentence First:

That the OED is for Herzog ‘the book of books’ does not surprise me, given his love of learning and literature and his admiration for diligence and excellence. But he brings it up unexpectedly, in a medley passage in which he muses on his habits and nature:

I avoid contact with fans. Occasionally, I watch trash TV because I think the poet shouldn’t avert his eyes. I want to know what others aspire to. I’m a good but limited cook. My steaks are excellent, but they’ll never touch what you can get on any street corner in Argentina. Tree huggers are suspicious to me. Yoga classes for five-year-olds—which in California are a thing—are suspicious to me. I don’t use social media. If you see my profile anywhere there, you can be sure it’s a fake. I don’t use a smartphone. I never quite trust the media, so I get a truer picture of the political situation by going to multiple sources—the Western media, Al Jazeera, Russian TV, and occasionally by downloading the whole of a politician’s speech. I trust the Oxford English Dictionary, which is one of mankind’s greatest cultural achievements. I mean the one in twenty massive volumes with six hundred thousand entries and more than three million quotations culled from all over the English-speaking world and over a thousand years. I reckon thousands of researchers and amateur helpers spent 150 years combing through everything recorded. For me, it is the book of books, the one I would take to a desert island. It is inexhaustible, a miracle. The first time I visited Oliver Sacks on Wards Island north of Manhattan, I had mislaid the house number but knew the name of the little street. It was evening, winter-time; the slightly sloping street was icy. I parked and tiptoed along the icy pavement looking into every lit-up home. None of the windows had curtains. Through one window I saw a man sprawled on a sofa with one of the hefty volumes of the OED propped on his chest. I knew that had to be him, and so it was. Our first subject was the dictionary; for him as well, it was the book of books.

(The translation from the German is by Michael Hofmann.)

I am utterly won over by the image of Herzog tiptoeing along an icy street in search of Oliver Sacks, peering into windows until he recognises him thanks to the dictionary they both adored.

More here.

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Eric Reinhart & Craig Spencer at the Boston Review:

On Saturday Francis Collins resigned from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) after directing it for over a decade. His departure, coming on the heels of the expected confirmation of Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya as his replacement, represents more than the loss of an influential physician-scientist who once led the Human Genome Project and played a central role in the United States’ COVID-19 response. It marks the culmination of a decades-long missed opportunity: despite being the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, the NIH has not built a broad public constituency to protect it from partisan destruction.

In his resignation letter, Collins notes that the institute “is the main piston of a biomedical discovery engine that is the envy of the globe. Yet it is not a household name. It should be.” He singles out two notable discoveries. “When you hear about patients surviving stage 4 cancer because of immunotherapy,” he writes, “that was based on NIH research over many decades.” And “when you hear about sickle-cell disease being cured because of CRISPR gene editing, that was built on many years of research supported by NIH.”

Collins is right, but he fails to mention the fundamental reason many Americans don’t credit the government for these achievements: they only ever learn of NIH’s work from intermediaries—deeply unpopular pharmaceutical or medical device companies—that take credit for NIH science while leveraging it to extract as much money as possible from desperate patients and families.

More here.

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Lamorna Ash at Amulet:

Whenever I read The Letters of Abelard and Héloïse I have in mind another, more contemporary couple, whose collaborative work I have come to think of as sacred, too. As soon as the performance artists Marina Abramović and Ulay met in the 1970s, they fell hard in love and began making performance art together. They called this work a “third energy,” their souls combined, a kind of artistic procreation (we don’t know what happened to Héloïse and Abelard’s child—only that she called him Astrolabe, after the astronomical instrument for reckoning with time and observing the stars. Astrolabe as the one instrument that could point up to the star-crossed lovers who made him and prove that their love had been real). The idea for “The Lovers” came to Abramović as a vision in a dream. They would walk from either end of the Great Wall of China to finally meet in the middle where they would marry, documenting the whole expedition on film—the kind of exaggeratedly cinematic, romantic scheme that is destined to go wrong. In the time it took to secure their visas—several years—the relationship had already begun to fall apart. Five years later, they set out at last to make “The Lovers.” After almost 90 days of walking, each covering over two thousand kilometres alone, they reunited on the wall, not to marry, but to break up. Watching the footage of “The Lovers,” I imagine they are actually Héloïse and Abelard, setting out on their private pilgrimages through life in the wake of their painful estrangement, then meeting in the middle again through the form of letters.

more here.

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Stephen E. Hanson & Jeffrey S. Kopstein at Persuasion:

To understand Trump’s political order, then, we need to familiarize ourselves with the standard operating procedures of patrimonialism. While this regime type may be novel for the United States, it is quite common in human history. In the 21^st century, patrimonial regimes have been consolidated in countries as diverse as Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Narendra Modi’s India, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. Drawing lessons from regimes of this type, we can help get our bearings in what, for most Americans, is an unfamiliar new political environment.

First, in patrimonial regimes there is simply no way to distinguish between the parts of the leader’s speeches that matter politically from empty rhetoric not meant to be taken seriously. The cumulative effect of the daily storm of Trump’s announcements, social media posts, news conferences, and executive orders can be exhausting…

More here.  And more by Francis Fukuyama on the same subject here.

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A Rapture on Spring

Night rain
but morning wakes him
with a rush of bird sound.
The world
is made for love they cheep.
They croon
the world is made for me.

In the coniferous branches
outside his window a hummingbird
lights for a moment,
then off again
going to work
to feed its body
which burns up
calories so fast, so fast –
no time to lie in a nest in the comfort
of hummingbird thought.
Where is food?
Next where are the babes?

But the man in bed wonders
what is his own whistling all about?
Is it for himself?  he imagines
that girl back in college somehow reading it
and sending him a smile – maybe a letter even.

But spring songs,
though pretending
to be about bright eyes
or the swirl of a shapely hip,
sing of that great love affair –
you and the world.

Maybe
that’s all there is,
you and the world.
Nothing else to sing about,
in the fine light of spring?

by Nils Peterson

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Dean Kissick in Harper’s Magazine:

My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery. It was her day off, and she was going there to see an exhibition called Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. She had just arrived in London on a coach from Oxford and was run over by a bus outside Victoria Station. This was on a Friday morning in early May. The next day, in my apartment in Manhattan, I received an unexpected call—my mother never calls me—from a trauma ward in West London. “I’m in a lot of pain,” she said in a loud, anguished, slurring voice I hardly recognized, “but I’m in very good hands.” A few hours later, I was on a flight home.

When I visited her in the hospital, Mom asked me whether the show was worth losing her legs for. “No,” I told her, though at that point, I hadn’t seen it. When I did, two weeks later, my answer proved correct. Unravel featured tapestries, quilts, needlework, sculptures, and installations by modern artists, the majority of whom were of historically marginalized identities. The curators proposed that textiles themselves had also been marginalized, having been gendered as feminine and regarded as “craft” rather than “fine art.” As a result, the exhibition’s introductory text argued, the more politically radical aspects of textile making had been obscured. “What does it mean to imagine a needle, a loom or a garment as a tool of resistance?” the text asked.

More here.

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Jamie Ducharme in Time Magazine:

Dr. Frank Frizelle has operated on countless patients in his career as a colorectal surgeon. But there’s one case that stayed with him. In 2014, he was treating a woman in her late 20s suffering from bowel cancer—already a rare situation, given her age. But it became even more unusual when her best friend visited her in the hospital and told Frizelle that she had many of the same symptoms as his patient. Subsequent testing revealed that his patient’s friend had a lesion that, had it not been caught early, likely would have become cancerous. “That really brought it home to me—how it’s much more common than you think,” says Frizelle, a professor of surgery at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

More here.

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Isle McElroy at The Believer:

Building a film around a temperamental genius is never as simple as placing a star at its center. Murphy and Chalamet both do their parts: they create, they scowl, they have affairs. They are misunderstood. But their perceived genius is less about their particular actions than it is about the reactions of secondary characters. This is apparent throughout A Complete Unknown. In her review of the film, Vulture’s Alison Willmore highlights the cast around Chalamet: “Its best sequences aren’t about Dylan so much as they are about what it was like to be in his orbit when it felt like he could remake the universe.” The film succeeds because it captures how Dylan’s peers saw him—what made them want to be near him, what made them want to support his career.

This is recognizable in Edward Norton’s portrayal of the avuncular folk hero Pete Seeger. The two first interact in Woody Guthrie’s hospital room, when Dylan arrives late one evening to play a song he wrote for his ailing idol. As Dylan performs, the camera lingers on Seeger, his face quickly escalating past intrigue into admiration.

more here.

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Marek Makowski at The Millions:

In Kinsky’s latest novel, Seeing Further, the landscapes are still alive—but as the backdrop to the book’s main focus, the lost beauty and magic of cinema. Seeing Further is an elegy to the film-reel cinemas of the past, those places “that fomented stories by robbing you of words before the screen,” “these dormant motion-picture castles, with their worm-eaten, rusty, blockaded doors.” The question opening Seeing Further continues the preoccupations of Kinsky’s earlier fiction: “How to direct the gaze?” And Kinsky decides to turn her gaze to the abandoned ritual of cinema because, as her autobiographical narrator argues, “in the past century no location was as important for the how of seeing.” The narrator continues: “The collective experience facilitated by this space is disappearing along with it,” and so “this loss, whether mourned or not, deserves to be described and merits consideration.” Films and landscapes both point us to questions about the collective, to “the boundary between images seen and things experienced,” and Kinsky brings them into dialogue in strange and unexpected ways.

more here.

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Alissa Bennett in the New York Times:

I can’t recall the first time I saw “The Misfits,” John Huston’s 1961 cinematic masterpiece about a quartet of mutually disenfranchised wanderers, but I’m certain it was after I’d become a divorcée. I know it wouldn’t have stuck with me so permanently otherwise. Set in Reno, Nev., a city once as famous for its hassle-free divorces as its casinos, the film is a timeless meditation on what it means to lose.

I was not yet 30 when my first marriage dissolved, by which point I’d seen several friends’ relationships likewise buckle beneath the looming specter of forever. It seemed that every few years there was a wave of these breakups, and I began to predict them like weather patterns. “It’s divorce season,” I’d say, and if time has mitigated the phenomenon in my own life, I wasn’t surprised to find confirmation that it still wreaks its havoc elsewhere.

In two new nonfiction books, the authors Scaachi Koul and Haley Mlotek find their inspiration in the emotional maelstrom that follows divorce. Reading them in parallel, I was reminded not only of how hard it is to stay together, but of how painful it is to try to recalibrate who you are when “we” suddenly becomes “I.”

More here.

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