Richard Seymour in Sidecar:

Was ever a country, in this humour, won? A majority without a mandate, and a landslide that isn’t a landslide. Labour won 64% of the seats with 34% of the vote, the smallest ever vote share for a party taking office. Turnout, estimated at 59%, was at its lowest since 2001 (and before that, 1885). When a soggy Sunak finally pulled the plug on his flagging, flag-bedraggled government at the end of May, every poll showed Labour with a double-digit lead, at over 40%. Sunak’s litany of unforced errors, as well as the massive funding gap between Labour and the Conservatives and the queue of businessmen and Murdoch newspapers endorsing Labour, ought to have helped keep it that way. Instead, Labour’s total number of votes fell to 9.7 million, down from 10.3 million in 2019.

The Conservatives plunged from 44% to 24%, feeding into a surge for the far-right Reform UK which, with 14% of the vote, took four seats. The combined Tory–Reform vote, at 38%, was bigger than Labour’s share. The latter would not have increased at all, as the pollster John Curtis pointed out, without the Labour gains in Scotland enabled by the SNP’s implosion. Meanwhile the country’s left, despite its tardiness and lack of strategic focus, did well. The Greens increased their vote share from less than 3% to 7% and took four seats. Sitting alongside them in the Commons will be five independent pro-Palestine candidates, including Jeremy Corbyn who defeated his Labour rival in Islington North with a margin of 7,000 votes. Intriguingly, George Galloway’s diagonalist Workers’ Party didn’t win a single seat – including Rochdale, which Galloway has represented since February.

Never has there been such a yawning gap between the fractal pluripotencies of the age and the suffocating politics at the top.

More here.

Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie in Polycrisis:

On June 25, crowning a dramatic, nationwide tax revolt, demonstrators in Nairobi stormed Kenya’s parliament buildings. President William Ruto’s new finance bill, introduced in Parliament in May, sought to increase levies on everything from bread and money transfers to sanitary items and cellular data. In response, the “Gen-Z” generation that has been criticized for not being politically active took it upon themselves to organize on TikTok and mobilize in the streets.

The public mood was souring even before the social explosion. Last year, Kenyans reported the second highest share of people struggling to eat globally, and the highest share of people fearing political unrest that would lead to violence. Public services have deteriorated rapidly with hospitals virtually empty, running out of essential medicines, and doctors striking for pay and better funded facilities. Since mid-2021, Kenya has spent twice as much on interest payments as on health. Joblessness is rising.

Kenya is not alone in its crisis. The majority of the world’s governments have undertaken austerity policies, under either direct IMF pressure or the indirect discipline of other creditors. Last spring, we warned that such moves would cause societies to boil. According to the World Bank, three in five low-income countries are now at risk of, or are already in, debt distress. No less than twenty-one sub-saharan African countries are in an IMF program. Eighteen countries defaulted between 2021 and 2023, but balance sheet calamities rarely get the attention of the international media—until social crises, dramatic protests, and violent repression break through.

More here.

Owen Myers at The Guardian:

She felt like a cellophane wrapper on a packet of cigarettes. Every Joni Mitchell fan has heard this description before; it’s how the mercurial artist summed up her naked emotional state while writing her 1971 album, Blue. “It’s virtually impossible to find an account of Blue from the last 50 years that doesn’t include that quote,” writes music critic and author Ann Powers, whose new study of Mitchell doesn’t have much interest in retreading well-beaten paths. “Resist the rush you get imagining Joni’s pain,” Powers instructs. “Where songs start is not that important.”

Travelling is a sweeping study of Mitchell’s life and work that swerves familiar touchstones to create a vibrant, multifaceted portrait of a music enigma. Powers didn’t interview Mitchell. “In this way, I remain a witness, not a friend,” she writes. Yet there are more than two dozen interviews with the artist’s associates including David Crosby, Judy Collins, recent collaborator Brandi Carlile and Mitchell’s ex-husband Larry Klein.

more here.

Louis Bayard at the NY Times:

In the opening sentence of her rage-swollen “Ask Not,” Maureen Callahan declares that her book “is not ideological or partisan.” It is, of course, both. Sometimes it is both in extremis. You need only cast an eye over its cover, which, like the book itself, is black and white and red all over. Bad men wronging good women: cheating on them, abandoning them, infecting them, turning them into alcoholics, leaving them for dead, raping and maiming and killing them.

That the men in this case are (mostly) Kennedys is meant to shock us, but the only shock by now is shock’s absence. Decades of reportage have left us with a grim roll call. Mary Jo Kopechne, slowly suffocating beneath three feet of Chappaquiddick black water. Pamela Kelley, thrown from a Jeep and paralyzed for life while the driver, a Kennedy, walked away with a $100 fine.

more here.

The Spirit of Triumph

do you remember learning to tie your shoes?
astonishing! the loops you had to make the delicate
adjustments the pulling-through tightening impossible!
the things we learn!
putting a bridle on a horse when he’s head-shy
getting your hands under a girl’s sweater
no wonder we are the crown of all that exists
we can do anything how we climb chimneys
how we put one foot on the gas one on the clutch
and make the car go nothing too difficult nothing!

crutches artificial arms have you seen that?
how they pick their cups up and use razors? amazing!
and the wives shine it for them at night
they’re sleeping the wives take it out of the room
and polish it with its own special rag
it’s late they hold it against their bellies
the leather laces dangle into their laps
the mechanisms slip noiselessly
lowering the hook softly on to their breasts
we men! aren’t we something? I mean
we are worth thinking about aren’t we?
we are the end we are the living end

C.K. Williams
from C.K. Williams Selected Poems
The Noonday Press, 1994

Shehryar Fazli in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Immediately after the attack, a photograph circulated of Rushdie being wheeled to an emergency helicopter; the volume of blood and the places he was bleeding from didn’t look promising. The longer the information gap stretched, the eerier our preparation for a post-Rushdie world became, one we’d feared even after Iran effectively lifted the fatwa in 1998.

Pull through! Pull through! I pleaded over and over, uselessly. To later receive that very affirmation, like a direct response from the macrocosm, was to see the approaching darkness yield a slice of light. Over the ensuing days and months, the news trickled in. He was off the ventilator. He was speaking. He was cracking jokes. He’d lost his right eye forever. He’d attended an event virtually. He was making public appearances and giving interviews. Now, with the release of his 2024 memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, comes a summation of that terrifying period but also, to some extent, of a long, groundbreaking career.

More here.

Steven Mithen at Literary Hub:

How children learn language has long been of interest to those concerned with its evolution. The idea that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ has been promoted, which means the stages of child development on their way to adulthood replicate those of our human ancestors on their way to becoming modern humans. This idea has been applied to language acquisition and its evolution, but I’ve never been persuaded. It is intellectually problematic because our human ancestors were never ‘on their way’ to anywhere other than being themselves. My interest in language acquisition is different and twofold.

First, is language acquired by specialized mental processes that are dedicated to this task or learned by general-purpose processes used for a variety of learning tasks? Second, can we project the processes of language acquisition/learning that we observe in the present into the prehistoric past to gain insights about the evolution of language?

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Carl Rollyson at Lit Hub:

So far as I can determine Ted Hughes never went shopping with Sylvia Plath. He thought her flair for fashion, and her materialistic desires, frivolous. “I need to curb my lust for buying dresses,” she wrote to herself on May 9, 1958 while the married couple were living in Northampton, Massachusetts. Four years later, on her own in London during her last days, she shopped like mad, threw away her country duds, reveled in a new hairdo, and enjoyed wolf whistles on the street. She had repressed a good deal of herself to please the man whose unkempt, often dirty appearance she had schooled herself to tolerate.

Indexing Plath’s life helped me to more deeply appreciate why this troubling man won her over. In a May 7, 1957 letter to her brother, she mentioned writing a novel (never completed) tentatively titled, Hill of Leopards, which explored the “positive acceptance of conflict, uncertainty, & pain as the soil for true knowledge and life.” She saw in the hulking Hughes, a towering figure among his adoring Cambridge chaps, exactly the kind of challenge to “positive acceptance” that would fulfill herself as woman and artist, and that no other man—as far as I was able to quantify in my indexing—had come close to satisfying.

more here.

Kåre Hedebrant and Agneta Herlitz in Psyche:

When it comes to gender equality, no society is perfect, but some are widely understood to have come further than others. These societies do a better job of offering equal opportunities, rights and responsibilities, and minimising structural power differences between men and women. One might expect that men and women in these societies would also become more similar to each other in terms of personality and other psychological qualities. Research has previously found differences in men’s and women’s average levels of characteristics such as self-esteem and sensation-seeking (both typically higher in men), emotional perceptiveness (higher in women), and some cognitive dimensions (though not overall cognitive ability). Do these differences become less pronounced when women and men are more equally empowered?

Surprisingly, researchers have sometimes found the opposite to be true: that improved living conditions, including greater gender equality, are associated with larger psychological differences between men and women. This phenomenon is often referred to as the ‘gender-equality paradox’.

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Rilke at The Paris Review:

My apartment has just now been completed. I don’t know which object did it; suddenly everything quietened down and it immediately became inhabited and familiar, as if no longer new—and yet … I would very much like to tell you how everything is, and where and why things are the way they are. Well, there is a small, unremarkable entryway, and a kitchen that will become interesting due only to my daily attempts at cooking (I have to prepare everything myself!); from the entryway you step through a small door and under a dark red curtain of heavy, woven linen (sold at Bernheimer’s in Munich as toile japonaise) into my very large study. There is a huge three-part window partially wedged into a bay as wide as the room itself. To the right of the bay, a glass door leads to a small balcony, while on the left the bay is joined by a blank wall to the wall of the study. Underneath the window there is a broad bench covered with a blue-and-red blanket from Abruzzo(!), and two steps in front of this bench, in the center of the room, is the main desk. There is a second, quite long desk set up as a working table for evening tasks—independent of the window, at an angle in front of the stove, and diagonally blocking the corner. To the left of the large window there hangs a narrow rug with a colorful border that keeps that corner dark, and in front of it stands the yellow samovar on a Russian base, surrounded by some Russian things, images, and holy icons. A very broad chair covered by a good, antique Turkish rug connects (to the left of the wall) to the cupboard for the samovar so that it’s easy to put down one’s glass of tea there. The Turkish blanket is stretched up the wall to the so-called ‘Rubens’—the Adoration of the Magi (oil painting—old, 2 meters long, 47 centimeters high)—and provides the backdrop for the best heirloom: a family crest in a precious silver frame. Then there is a small green table where I have to eat what I cook—and a small sideboard.

more here.

Donna Tartt in Harper’s Magazine:

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the painter James McNeill Whistler shouted out fiercely into posterity, over the heads of the art-world philistines of his day, and our own:

Listen! There never was an artistic period. There never was an Art-loving nation.

This hoarse cry from the Belle Époque is as bracing as it ever was, especially here in our own burned-out landscape where Art as Whistler defined it—Art with a capital A—is all too often viewed as an antiquated construction ensconced behind velvet ropes, not very relevant except as a standing resource to be boiled down to blunt cultural agendas, picked apart by theory, aped by predictive formulas, pillaged and parodied for commercials and computer software, if not ignored altogether in the glitz of technological stimulus.

Even in 1794, Schiller was asking: How is the artist to protect himself against the corruption of the age that besets him on all sides? Too much chasing after money and success, too much pandering to the popular taste, too much weight on ideology or politics or dogma of any stripe, and God, in the cogent phrase of Quincy Jones, walks out of the room. But in our own sped-up nightmare of screens and algorithms, accelerating more wildly every day, art—and artists—are battered with all the same old discouraging assaults along with new ones that Whistler never dreamed of.

More here.

Cade Metz in The New York Times:

Sitting near a window inside Boston’s Four Seasons Hotel, overlooking a duck pond in the city’s Public Garden, Ray Kurzweil held up a sheet of paper showing the steady growth in the amount of raw computer power that a dollar could buy over the last 85 years. A neon-green line rose steadily across the page, climbing like fireworks in the night sky. That diagonal line, he said, showed why humanity was just 20 years away from the Singularity, a long hypothesized moment when people will merge with artificial intelligence and augment themselves with millions of times more computational power than their biological brains now provide. “If you create something that is thousands of times — or millions of times — more powerful than the brain, we can’t anticipate what it is going to do,” he said, wearing multicolored suspenders and a Mickey Mouse watch he bought at Disney World in the early 1980s.

Mr. Kurzweil, a renowned inventor and futurist who built a career on predictions that defy conventional wisdom, made the same claim in his 2005 book, “The Singularity Is Near.” After the arrival of A.I. technologies like ChatGPT and recent efforts to implant computer chips inside people’s heads, he believes the time is right to restate his claim. Last week, he published a sequel: “The Singularity Is Nearer.”

More here.

The Lark. The Thrush, The Starling

               ( Poems from Issa)

That the world
is going
to end someday
does not concern
the wren:

it’s time to
build your nest,
you build
your nest.

~>~<~>~<~>~<~>~

Listen carefully.

I’m meditating.
The only thing in my mind
right now
is the wind.

No, wait . . . the autumn
wind, that’s right,
the autumn wind!

~>~<~>~<~>~<~>~

In the middle
of a bite of
grass,
the turtle stops
to listen for,
oh, an
hour, two
hours,
three hours . . .

from C.K. Williams Selected Poems
The Noonday Press, 1994

Elif Shafak at Literary Hub:

There is Orwell the human being. There is Orwell the novelist. There is Orwell the intellectual, the critic, the journalist, the essayist, the radical. But lately, George Orwell—who was born Eric Arthur Blair and who never fully abandoned his original name—has increasingly come to be regarded as a modern oracle, a gifted soothsayer who predicted with terrifying accuracy how fragile and fallible our political systems were, how close the shadow of authoritarianism. His body of work has become a compass to help us navigate our way in times of democratic recession and backsliding, as is the case worldwide. Among all his books, the one that has left the deepest impact on generations of readers across borders is, no doubt, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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Raghuveer Parthasarathy at The Eighteenth Elephant:

Insulin is an abomination. Sure, injecting it saves the lives of millions of diabetics, but that injected protein is unnatural and abhorrent, the product of a genetically modified organism! And it’s not even necessary: Rather than playing God to coax single-celled creatures never designed for insulin production to make the stuff, we could be harvesting it naturally, like we used to just a few decades ago. After all, one need only slaughter about 20,000 pigs or cows to provide a pound of insulin!

If this argument strikes you as absurd or even horrific, it should.

More here.