“Writers,” Joan Didion observed in 1968, “are always selling somebody out.” It’s one of those classic Didion statements, epigrammatic yet personal, a line that unpacks itself the more we consider what it implies. Didion may have been referring to journalism when she wrote that in the preface to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” but she was also, as directly as can be imagined, addressing herself. “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does,” she acknowledged earlier in the same paragraph, and it is this clarity, this edge of laser-sharp engagement, that sets her apart. For nearly 50 years now, her work has been defined by what she calls “triangulation,” which is a way of explaining how she asserts herself in a piece of writing — to tell a reader where she is. This question of presence, of triangulation, has come up on a Thursday afternoon in Didion’s comfortably cluttered Upper East Side living room because she is discussing her new book, “Blue Nights” (Alfred A. Knopf: 188 pp., $25), which, she is saying, she almost didn’t write. “There came a time,” she recalls, her voice a low murmur, “when I decided I would simply repay the money I had gotten from Knopf. I told Lynn Nesbit that this was my plan, that I was going to tell Sonny I couldn’t do it, and we would repay him. And Lynn said, ‘Why don’t you wait on that awhile?'”

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

In 2008, the critic Louis Menand wrote “Regrets Only,” an extended essay on Lionel Trilling, the pre-­eminent literary intellectual of the 1950s. Published in The New Yorker, it depicted Trilling as the symbol of mid­century America, a time when art was placed on a pedestal and the earnest critic stood on a pedestal almost as high. Trilling’s best-remembered book, “The Liberal Imagination,” Menand wrote, “belongs to the age of (it feels a little funny just typing the words today) heroic criticism.” This was an age before the ’60s, before the old heroes had been retired and new ones put in their place, before the nostalgic condescension of “Mad Men.” Menand drew a sharp distinction between 21st-­century Americans and the readers of Trilling’s day. Most people now “don’t use the language of approval and disapproval in their responses to art,” he wrote. “They use the language of entertainment. They enjoy some things and don’t enjoy other things.” The decline of elitist seriousness was inevitable, Menand implied, and this decline is nothing terrible. High-minded Trilling matters because of the way he once mattered and no longer does.

more from Michael Kimmage at the NY Times here.

Corydon Ireland in the Harvard Gazette:

Harvard literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt has proposed a sort of metaphor for how the world became modern. An ancient Roman poem, lost for 1,000 years, was recovered in 1417. Its presciently modern ideas — that the world is made of atoms, that there is no life after death, and that there is no purpose to creation beyond pleasure — dropped like an atomic bomb on the fixedly Christian culture of Western Europe.

But this poem’s radical and transformative ideas survived what could have been a full-blown campaign against it, said Greenblatt in an Oct. 26 lecture. One reason is that it was art. A tract would have drawn the critical attention of the authorities, who during the Renaissance still hewed to Augustine’s notion that Christian beliefs were “unshakeable, unchangeable, coherent.”

The ancient poem that contained such explosive ideas, and that packaged them so pleasingly, was “On the Nature of Things” (“De Rerum Natura”) by Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus, who died five decades before the start of the Christian era. Its intent was to counter the fear of death and the fear of the supernatural. Lucretius rendered into poetry the ideas of Epicurus, a Greek philosopher who had died some 200 years earlier. Both men embraced a core idea: that life was about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

More here. [For Morgan Meis, our in-house classical scholar.]

Janet Maslin in the New York Times:

Charles J. Shields got nowhere with Harper Lee when he tried to interview her for the 2006 biography “Mockingbird.” But he got lucky with Kurt Vonnegut. Mr. Shields found a lonely talkative octogenarian who had scores to settle and a reputation that badly needed restoring. Vonnegut had once told Martin Amis that the only way he could regain credit for his early work, those books from the 1950s and 1960s once so beloved by college kids, would be to die. He died on April 11, 2007, less than a year after Mr. Shields first approached him. And the two did not spend much time together. But Vonnegut gave the go-ahead that has allowed Mr. Shields to construct “And So It Goes,” an incisive, gossipy page-turner of a biography, even if it’s hard to tell just how authorized this book really is. Denied permission to quote from Vonnegut’s letters, Mr. Shields relies on paraphrases and patchwork to create a seamless-sounding account. Astonishingly, this book has nearly 1,900 notes to identify separate sources and quotations. But it doesn’t sound choppy at all.

More here.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who think the Doors are a hokey caricature of male rock stardom and those who think they’re, you know, shamans. The Doors, who took their name from a line in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”), combined jazz chord changes and Latin rhythms with flamenco, surf, raga, blues, and psychedelia, all in one ’60s rock band, often in one song: “Light My Fire,” “The End,” “Roadhouse Blues,” and “People Are Strange,” just to name a few. The power of the Doors’ music is that it is so unabashedly arty that it begs to be made fun of, especially by older people or those who went through Doors periods themselves and are now into Steely Dan or Animal Collective or some other less embarrassing musical endeavor. And why embarrassing? Because the Doors reflect a conflict many of us have with artists we think we have outgrown. For those with a youthful bent, sustained naïveté, or a poetical inclination, the combination of the Doors’ music and Jim Morrison’s lyrics can be transformative. In Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir depicting her early days in New York and friendship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, the singer neatly encapsulates how she, and many others, “felt both kinship and contempt for [Morrison]” while watching him perform for the first time. “I observed his every move in a state of cold hyperawareness. I remember this feeling much more clearly than the concert. I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that.”

more from Daniel Nester at Poetry here. (Dear person who reads 3QD regularly but has not given us a few bucks for our fundraiser. Only a few days left and still a few thousand bucks to go. We need you to take a minute. You know you would be sad if we went away. Don’t make us go away. I don’t want to go away. Please. Thanks.)

As a child I once bathed in the Danube. It was on a mild spring evening in 1967. I’d come to Budapest from a town where there was no water far and wide – neither still nor flowing. Not even a puddle. On top of that, in the middle of the Hungarian plain I’d never even seen a hill, let alone a mountain. No water, not a mountain. So when I jumped into the water in northern Budapest with a view of the not so distant mountains, I was almost beside myself with joy. Like someone who has opened the door onto a new and unimagined world. What seemed to me then as a huge novelty turned out to be anything but that. My experience might have been new, but as I swam around in the Danube I was overcome by almost atavistic sensations. Moreover, that northern part of Budapest where I experienced the Danube for the first time is called “Romans’ beach” – after the Romans who used to live here and who, through the ruins, are present to this day. They also built the first bridges over the Danube, for example at Aquincum in the north of Budapest, near to Romans’ beach, whose foundations, built with wooden stakes, were surveyed in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was as if I was submerged in a kind of common past. Unconsciously, I was experiencing the same thing as millions and millions of others before me. On that evening in May 1967 I still knew nothing about the Danube, had no idea about its history, about the blossoming cultures along its banks, didn’t know the fantasies, ideas, hopes entwined around it. But my senses refused to be tricked. They knew very well that I wasn’t bathing only in the Danube, but also in the myth of the Danube. That was also perhaps why I took such pleasure in the powerfully surging river. I was submerged in a myth. “Now and forever”: that could be the motto of all water. Especially of rivers, which are eternally changing, assuming new forms, whose drops find themselves in permanent exchange – although from its source to its estuary the river is a single, constant whole.

more from László Földenyi at Eurozine here.

In 1959, at a time of violent unrest among American youth, a publisher commissioned a study of juvenile delinquency from Paul Goodman. The resulting volume, Growing up Absurd, was an immediate if unlikely success. Goodman had already written more than twenty books, none of which had made any great impression. And fifty years on he is once again unknown. But to reread his book in the aftermath of this summer’s riots in Britain is to be visited by uneasy feelings. Prime Minister David Cameron’s initial response to the British riots, it will be recalled, was to blame them on something called “sheer criminality.” What that phrase meant became clear when sentences of four years were handed down for using Facebook to “incite disorder.” A month later Cameron acclaimed the “Spirit of London Awards”—according to their site, “a way of celebrating all that is good about the young, positive role models in London”—as a “powerful antidote.” One of its “London heroes,” a young table tennis player, visited 10 Downing Street to be paraded before the cameras as the acceptable face of youth. Cameron’s government has now appointed Louise Casey, “respect tsar” under former prime minister Tony Blair, to head the response to the riots. Labour leader Ed Miliband for his part has cried in the wilderness for “a new ethics.” Blair blamed bad parenting. Journalist Kenan Malik denounced the atomization and “moral poverty” of the society that had created the rioters.

more from Horatio Morpurgo at Dissent here.

Corey Robin in his blog:

From The New York Times:

Murakami has always considered himself an outsider in his own country. He was born into one of the strangest sociopolitical environments in history: Kyoto in 1949 — the former imperial capital of Japan in the middle of America’s postwar occupation. “It would be difficult to find another cross-cultural moment,” the historian John W. Dower has written of late-1940s Japan, “more intense, unpredictable, ambiguous, confusing, and electric than this one.” Substitute “fiction” for “moment” in that sentence and you have a perfect description of Murakami’s work. The basic structure of his stories — ordinary life lodged between incompatible worlds — is also the basic structure of his first life experience. Murakami grew up, mostly, in the suburbs surrounding Kobe, an international port defined by the din of many languages. As a teenager, he immersed himself in American culture, especially hard-boiled detective novels and jazz. He internalized their attitude of cool rebellion, and in his early 20s, instead of joining the ranks of a large corporation, Murakami grew out his hair and his beard, married against his parents’ wishes, took out a loan and opened a jazz club in Tokyo called Peter Cat. He spent nearly 10 years absorbed in the day-to-day operations of the club: sweeping up, listening to music, making sandwiches and mixing drinks deep into the night.

His career as a writer began in classic Murakami style: out of nowhere, in the most ordinary possible setting, a mystical truth suddenly descended upon him and changed his life forever. Murakami, age 29, was sitting in the outfield at his local baseball stadium, drinking a beer, when a batter — an American transplant named Dave Hilton — hit a double. It was a normal-­enough play, but as the ball flew through the air, an epiphany struck Murakami. He realized, suddenly, that he could write a novel. He had never felt a serious desire to do so before, but now it was overwhelming. And so he did: after the game, he went to a bookstore, bought a pen and some paper and over the next couple of months produced “Hear the Wind Sing,” a slim, elliptical tale of a nameless 21-year-old narrator, his friend called the Rat and a four-fingered woman. Nothing much happens, but the Murakami voice is there from the start: a strange broth of ennui and exoticism. In just 130 pages, the book manages to reference a thorough cross-section of Western culture: “Lassie,” “The Mickey Mouse Club,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “California Girls,” Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, the French director Roger Vadim, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Elvis Presley, the cartoon bird Woodstock, Sam Peckinpah and Peter, Paul and Mary. That’s just a partial list, and the book contains (at least in its English translation) not a single reference to a work of Japanese art in any medium. This tendency in Murakami’s work rankles some Japanese critics to this day.

More here.

(Un)occupy Oakland: An Open Source Love Poem

I.

They have come for the city I love

city of taco trucks, wetlands reclaimed
water fowl with attitude, gutted
neighborhoods, city of toxic
waste dumps and the oldest wildlife refuge
in North America.
City owned by spirits
of Ohlone, home
to the international treaty
council, inter-tribal friendship house

City
in which I love and work, make art,
dance, share food, cycle dark streets at 2am
wind in my face, ecstasy
pumping my pedals.

City where women make family
with women
men with men
picnic in parks with their children
walk strollers through streets.

City that birthed the Black Panthers
who took on the state
with the deadliest of arsenals:
free breakfast for children, free clinics,
grocery giveaways, shoemaking
senior transport, bussing to prisons
legal aid.

City where homicide rate for black men
rivals that of US soldiers in combat.

City where I have walked precincts
rung doorbells, learned that real
democracy
is street by street, house by house
get the money out and
get the people in.

City of struggling libraries
50-year old indie bookshops
temples to Oshun, Kali-Ma, Kwan Yin.

City where Marx, Boal,
Bhaktin, Freire are taught
next to tattoo shops
bike collectives rub shoulders
with sex shops, marijuana
dispensaries snuggle banks

City of pho, kimchee, platanos, nopales
of injera, tom kha gai, braised goat,
nabeyaki udon, houmous and chaat,
of dim sum and wheatgrass and chicken-n-waffles.

City of capoiera and belly-dance,
martial arts, punk rock, hip-hop,
salsa, bachata, tango
city of funk and blues and jazz.

City that shut down for 52 hours
in 1946, dragged jukeboxes
into the streets, jammed
to “Pistol-Packin’ Mama” for the rights
of 400 female store clerks
to fair wages and unions.

City of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union,
who refused for a record 10 days
in 1984 to unload a ship from South Africa
in the world’s 4th largest port
faced down million dollar fines.

City of nail parlours, hair brokers, tarot dens
nano-tech, biotech, startups
women-owned auto shops
gondolas on a lake fruity
with sewage, magical
with lights.

City of one-hundred-twenty-five
freaking languages
the most ethnically diverse
in the USA.

Here on the shores of a lake
where all the waters, fresh and salt
of history and revolution mingle
they have come for the city I love.

Read more »

From PhysOrg:

New research in the UK on rhesus macaque monkeys has found for the first time that if they live in larger groups they develop more gray matter in parts of the brain involved in processing information on social interactions. The researchers, led by Jerome Sallet of Oxford University, said the results of the new study bear some similarities to research by other groups working with humans, that related brain size to the extent of social interactions. These studies include recent work that suggested a link between the volume of some regions of the brain and the number of online friends people have in social networking sites such as Facebook.

The new study observed 23 macaques in a number of groups of different sizes. The monkeys were kept in their groups for an average of over a year, and a minimum of two months. One monkey was alone in its cage, but in all the other groups, which had from two to seven individuals, a heirarchy developed in which an individual's rank depended on the monkey's ability to form successful social interactions, such as friendships and partnerships. The study used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compare the brains of the monkeys, and the results showed that in the temporal areas of the brain associated with social interaction skills, around a five percent increase in the volume of gray matter was found for each additional group member. The regions of the brain that increased in volume included the temporal pole, temporal cortex, and the inferior and rostral temporal gyri.

More here.

One of the last of Samuel Beckett’s letters in Volume One of this indispensable edition was written to James Joyce, in January 1940. In it Beckett thanked Joyce for having brought his work to the attention of a potential sponsor. “It was kind of you to write him about Murphy. He offers very kindly to read the translation & to ‘introduce’ me to the French public.” Nearly fourteen years later, Beckett wrote to Mania Péron, the widow of his friend Alfred, “I am in the shit fontanelle deep: rehearsals every day, translations on all sides, people to see. I can’t keep up”. And a month or so after that he wrote to his American lover Pamela Mitchell, “I went to Godot last night for the first time in a long time. Well played, but how I dislike that play now. Full house every night, it’s a disease”. The “disease” called En Attendant Godot raged untreated in Paris from its first night at the beginning of 1953, and would soon spread around the world. (When Beckett met Mitchell she was in Paris with a view to securing US rights to the play for her employer.) The thirty-three-year-old expatriate Irish writer who responded gratefully to the offer of an introduction to a French public for whom he did not exist had become, at forty-seven, a succès de scandale in his adopted country.

more from Alan Jenkins at the TLS here. (PS we are at 82% here on our fundraising drive. Samuel Beckett himself just contributed … and he is dead. What is your excuse? Please, a couple of minutes and a couple of bucks and we can be done with this damn thing. Thanks.)

At a Pittsburgh gallery in 2006, artist Keny Marshall exhibited 3D Pipes, an elaborate, freestanding installation of aged metal plumbing. “Everybody’s got 3D Pipes on their computer,” said Marshall in an interview. “The only difference is this 3D Pipes took months to build and weighs three to four thousand pounds.” Oddly inconspicuous, mistakable for exposed utilities in the gallery’s warehouse-like space, this life-size, patina’d tribute to the PC’s workhorse screen saver of the 1990s and early 2000s spoke of our culture’s recent yearnings for industrially or intimately material work, Dirty Jobs adventurism or an Etsy sort of DIY. Yet perhaps more pervasively than any other 2D commonplace of its time, the virtual 3D Pipes—and the screen saver as a genre—had woven its own frenetic, filigreed dreamwork about work. On when we’re off, screen savers are both hallucinatory napscapes and work-site facades. Though customizable, like icons and wallpapers, and comparable to other cubicle brighteners (potted plants, fluorescent stickies), they possess a distinct poetics. As boxed, watchable decor, where a fireplace or window might once have sufficed, they tend to emulate the mesmeric morphing and gelatinous luminosity of fish tanks, lava lamps, self-tilting wave tanks.

more from Chinnie Ding at The Believer here.

The freak East Coast snowstorm answered one challenge question a few weeks early: What will happen to the encampments when the weather turns cold? Apparently they will stay. More ominously, protesters in many cities now face the prospect of sustained police crackdowns, from the hassles of permitting and noise ordinances to the violence that erupted last week in Oakland. There, police used tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets to attack protesters near city hall. One of those bullets fractured the skull of Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen, leaving him hospitalized in critical condition. Since then, Olsen has become the chief symbol of Occupy’s new reality: Going up against Wall Street, it turns out, is serious business. And the more serious the Occupy movement gets, the more official and near-lethal hostility it’s likely to encounter. Advertisement As they sort out what to do next, the Occupiers might take a page from the history of American labor, the only social movement that has ever made a real dent in the nation’s extremes of wealth and poverty. For more than half a century, between the 1870s and the 1930s, labor organizers and strikers regularly faced levels of violence all but unimaginable to modern-day activists.

more from Beverly Gage at Slate here.

Lawrence Osborne in Newsweek:

To call Manny Pacquiao a “boxer” is one of those descriptions that don’t quite fly, like calling Mahatma Gandhi a “Hindu lawyer.” The pound-for-pound greatest fighter on earth has begun to move beyond his bloody sport in increasingly unpredictable ways. In the Philippines, where he was born into abject poverty, the WBO welterweight champion is an almost religious figure, whose following is ecstatically cult-like. In America, he is “Pacman”—the idol of Las Vegas mega-fights, the Bruce Lee of Marquess of Queensberry boxing: tiny, furious, and lethal. “Manny Pacquiao,” Mike Tyson has said, “is a phenomenon.” No argument there: ESPN ranked him tied for first among the world’s highest-salaried athletes this year.

Pacquiao’s fights are not ordinary fights. His battles with Miguel Cotto, Oscar De La Hoya, and Shane Mosley, his seesaws with Erik Morales and Juan Manuel “Dinamita” Marquez—against whom he will fight, for the third time, on Nov. 12 in (where else) Vegas—showcased a mortal intensity without equal. Against De La Hoya, few expected an easy fight for the Filipino. Pacquiao, however, dominated the larger man with his precision and speed.

It was ironic, in a way: Pacquiao had burst onto the American scene in 2001 on a De La Hoya undercard. Then unknown, he was brought in as a late substitute for Enrique Sanchez in an IBF super-bantamweight title fight at 122 pounds against South African champion Lehlohonolo Ledwaba. Pacquiao was 32–2, but no one really knew who he was. (George Foreman, commentating, repeatedly mispronounced his name.) After a rampant Pacquiao overwhelmed Ledwaba, however, Larry Merchant stated that “Ledwaba came in here with a chance to be a star but it looks like Pacquiao may go out being the real star.” But it was not until November 2003 that Pacquiao became a true American superstar, with an 11th-round stoppage of the menacing Mexican Marco Antonio Barrera for the featherweight title.

More here.

The Way We Were Made

Brian Palmer in Slate:

Joel Whitney in Guernica:

Since its publication in 1980, Howard Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States has sold more copies every year and has had a tremendous effect on our understanding of who gets left out of traditional histories. Zinn grew up in the slums of New York, and worked as a young man in the New York shipyards. At seventeen, he attended his first public rallies to petition for better working conditions. He volunteered as an Air Force bombardier in World War II and, after the war had effectively ended, was ordered to drop napalm on French villagers and German soldiers who'd already surrendered.

After a doctorate from Columbia University, Zinn took a job at Spelman College, an all-black women’s college in Atlanta, where he worked with students as an early civil rights advocate. In 1968, during the United States war in Vietnam, he worked on the North Vietnamese prisoner exchange and at home as an anti-war activist. He ended up at Boston University and published A People’s History and many other books. A documentary released this summer, Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train traces his career and his influence on progressives, historians, and the anti-war movement.

Guernica: I just saw the documentary on your life and career, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. Could you explain the title of the film.

Howard Zinn: It comes from something I used to say in teaching when I was starting a new class. I would tell my students, “This is not going to be a neutral class.” I don’t believe in neutrality because the world is already moving in certain directions and wars are going on and children are going hungry. Terrible things are happening. And so to be neutral in a situation like this when things are already moving is to collaborate with whatever is going on. And I don’t want to collaborate with the world as it is. I want to intrude myself. I want to participate in changing the direction of things. So that’s the origin of the title, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

More here.