Why is it that we cannot read any discussion of a political sex scandal, or a sex scandal involving a politician, without pseudo-sophisticated comments about the supposedly different morals of Americans and Europeans? And why is it that this goes double if the politician is French, or if the reactions being quoted are from Gallic sources? And when did this annoying journalistic habit become so prevalent? It must have sprung up quite recently, or at least since the time when Charles de Gaulle and John F. Kennedy were presidents of their respective countries. The first man was a strict and fastidious Puritan who never gave his wife Yvonne a moment’s cause for complaint, while the second was a sensational debauchee who went as far as importing a Mafia gun-moll into the White House sleeping quarters. Yet the American culture, which regards Kennedy as a virtual Galahad, is the supposedly shockable one, while in France—ah, la France—a much more broad-minded and adult attitude prevails. Surely France and its partisans are not saying that the attempted rape of a chambermaid would not rearrange so much as an eyebrow in the supposedly refined salons of Paris? (After all, the endlessly cited François Mitterrand may have had a daughter out of wedlock, but he took good care to keep it a secret for as long as he could.) The problem arises from mentioning the two types of sexual behavior in the same breath. A related problem derives from the belief that Americans will not tolerate marital infidelity from their politicians.

more from Christopher Hitchens at Slate here.

Why May 21, 2011? Because, according to Family Radio’s president Harold Camping, it’s exactly 7,000 years to the day after God originally showed his infinite love—my words, not his—by drowning almost every woman, man, and child on earth in a worldwide flood. I’d explain the math behind Camping’s calculations, but, honestly, I don’t understand it. I tried. The timeline in the back of his book, Time Has an End, which I ordered from Amazon a few weeks ago, didn’t make the reasoning any clearer. I got hung up on passages like this: “The year 391 B.C. is the year when the Old Testament was finished, and 2,011 + 391 – 1 = 2,401, or 7 × 7 × 7 × 7. In the perfectly complete end of time, Christ will finish speaking to this present world.” How seriously do believers take this message? One guy I met in the Family Radio lobby had just returned from an RV proselyting trip that went as far as Colorado. Another told me he drove up from Los Angeles that morning just to correct a translation error in one of the ministry’s tracts. Some listeners in China have sold their homes and are donating the money to Family Radio’s campaign. NPR reports that in the U.S., one couple—with one kid and another on the way—cashed out their savings accounts and budgeted to run out of money on the big day.

more from Ted Cox at Killing The Buddha here.

From Smithsonian:

Late on a rainy evening in March, the black-sweatered crowd filled the hallways of New York City’s Institute of Culinary Education. It was late because that’s when many of the guests, who toil in restaurant kitchens, got off work. They wore black because it’s the costume of the cultural avant-garde, a movement whose leadership has improbably devolved from artists, composers and writers to the people who cut up chickens. Professional chefs, long counted among the most reliable acolytes of the bourgeoisie—why else would they be so drawn to Las Vegas?—have seized the vanguard of Revolution and are carrying it out, one hors d’oeuvre at a time. At this very moment, in fact, a half dozen of them are hunched conspiratorially over bowls of mysterious white flakes, arranging them in heaps onto spoons to be passed around by waiters.

“Any hints on how to eat this?” I asked a young woman, a food stylist for a cooking magazine. “Don’t breathe out,” she advised. I coughed, sending a powdery white spray cascading onto my shirt front. For the rest of the evening I wore a dusting of elote, a Mexican street-food snack of corn on the cob. Except this was elote deconstructed, reimagined and assembled into an abstraction of flavors, a Cubist composition of brown butter powder, freeze-dried corn kernels and powdered lime oil. The flavors of corn and butter burst onto my tongue in an instant, and were gone just as quickly.

“It’s delicious, isn’t it?” the woman said.

“Yes, and very, uh…”

“Light?”

“Actually I was thinking it would stay on the spoon better if it was heavier.”

This party marks the moment the Revolution has been waiting for: the publication of Modernist Cuisine, the movement’s manifesto, encyclopedia and summa gastronomica, 2,438 pages of cooking history, theory, chemistry and microbiology in five oversize, lavishly illustrated volumes, plus a spiralbound book of recipes on waterproof paper, weighing 43 pounds.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have found an apparent correlation between religious practices and changes in the brains of older adults.

“One interpretation of our finding — that members of majority religious groups seem to have less atrophy compared with minority religious groups — is that when you feel your beliefs and values are somewhat at odds with those of society as a whole, it may contribute to long-term stress that could have implications for the brain,” said Owen, who was lead author of the study. “Other studies have led us to think that whether a new experience you consider spiritual is interpreted as comforting or stressful may depend on whether or not it fits in with your existing religious beliefs and those of the people around you,” Hayward said. “Especially for older adults, these unexpected new experiences may lead to doubts about long-held religious beliefs, or to disagreements with friends and family. “Several studies have found that, for many people, belonging to a religious group seems to be related to better health in later life, but not all religious people experience the same benefits. This study may help us to understand some of the reasons for those differences,” Hayward said. While this stress may be a plausible interpretation of the findings of this study, the authors caution that not enough detail is known about the mechanics of how stress affects brain atrophy.

More here.

I don’t know of anything more disheartening than the sight of a shut down library. No matter how modest its building or its holdings, in many parts of this country a municipal library is often the only place where books in large number on every imaginable subject can be found, where both grownups and children are welcome to sit and read in peace, free of whatever distractions and aggravations await them outside. Like many other Americans of my generation, I owe much of my knowledge to thousands of books I withdrew from public libraries over a lifetime. I remember the sense of awe I felt as a teenager when I realized I could roam among the shelves, take down any book I wanted, examine it at my leisure at one of the library tables, and if it struck my fancy, bring it home. Not just some thriller or serious novel, but also big art books and recordings of everything from jazz to operas and symphonies. In Oak Park, Illinois, when I was in high school, I went to the library two or three times a week, though in my classes I was a middling student. Even in wintertime, I’d walk the dozen blocks to the library, often in rain or snow, carrying a load of books and records to return, trembling with excitement and anticipation at all the tantalizing books that awaited me there. The kindness of the librarians, who, of course, all knew me well, was also an inducement. They were happy to see me read so many books, though I’m sure they must have wondered in private about my vast and mystifying range of interests.

more from Charles Simic at the NYRB here.

Philip Ball in Nature News:

Why are we so complicated? You might imagine that we've evolved that way because it conveys adaptive benefits. But a study published by Nature today suggests that the complexity in the molecular 'wiring' of our genome — the way our proteins talk to each other — may simply be a side effect of a desperate attempt to stave off problematic random mutations in proteins' structures.

Ariel Fernández, previously at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and now at the Mathematics Institute of Argentina in Buenos Aires, and Michael Lynch of Indiana University in Bloomington argue that complexity in the network of our protein interactions arises because our relatively small population size — compared with that of single-celled organisms — makes us especially vulnerable to 'genetic drift': changes in the gene pool due to the reproductive success of certain individuals by chance rather than by superior fitness.

Whereas natural selection tends to weed out harmful mutations in genes and their related proteins, genetic drift does not. Fernández and Lynch argue that the large number of physical interactions between our proteins — a crucial component of how information is transmitted in our cells — compensates for the reduction in protein stability wrought by drift.

It was the 26th of January in Delhi, a crisp, clear, spicy-radish-and-tomatoes-in-the-sun winter morning that makes you glad to be alive. On this date, some fifty years ago, India had become a republic. Mona had chosen the anniversary to celebrate the birthday of her adopted daughter Ayesha; it pleased her that Ayesha had come into her arms precisely on the 26th of January. She would be free, like India. The route to the graveyard, the walls of its compound, the pillars at its gate, were plastered with posters inviting all and sundry to the party; it was certainly the most unusual invitation I’d ever seen. Beside a somewhat makeshift, unfinished structure stood a wall about five feet high, and behind it men and women cooked food in large vats. Pakodas were being fried, their delicious aroma wafting out along the clear morning air, vying with the mouth-watering smell of meat curry and hot, oven-baked rotis. At one end of the compound, next to a cluster of graves, two people were busy chopping bananas, guavas and oranges into a spicy fruit chaat. Mona, large and imposing, hennaed and cropped hair spiking every which way, teeth stained with paan, her dark skin catching the winter sun, walked among her guests, offering food to one, a cold drink to another. But something was amiss. She didn’t seem dressed for a party; her clothes were rumpled and somewhat grimy, her hair dishevelled. She looked distracted and unhappy – and there was no sign of her child.

more from Urvashi Butalia at Granta here.

Alexander Kosenina reviews Gerhard Schulz's Kleist: Eine Biographie and Jens Bisky's Kleist: Eine Biographie in The Modern Language Review:

Heinrich von Kleist, the most modern of all classic authors, has had hardly any attention from biographers in recent decades. The opposite might have been expected given his uninterrupted popularity among theatregoers and readers. To a far greater extent than Lessing, Goethe, or Schiller, Kleist was on an existential quest. He did not write to live, but lived to write, 'weil ich es nicht lassen kann'. Not until Kafka would any other author sound so possessed again. Puzzles about the inexpressible 'I' and the innermost core of being are his bread and butter. His works do not permit clear answers or distance from the text. His complex, difficult life, a marked contrast with his disciplined oeuvre, reads like a modern novel. A Kleistbiography is a considerable challenge; Jens Bisky and Gerhard Schulz have now taken it up at the same time.

Both books are beautifully written, and they have more in common than their identical titles. The wealth of information they present and their attention to lesser-known details are further similarities. Both authors have resisted the temptation, prevalent in research on Kleist, to dress conjecture as fact for want of sources. Life is harder here with Kleist than with other German Klassiker. The body of source material is comparatively sparse and patchy: his correspondence, for example, spans nineteen years (1793-1811) with only two hundred and forty letters and twenty replies, and by and large it is addressed only to family members and a handful of friends. There are no extent diaries or Ideenmagazine. Cryptic allusions and quotations turn the biographer into a literary detective. Kleist's letters, a fascinating read in themselves, are also the key to his life and works. They reveal intimate facts, their language is intoxicating, and they are an education in visual observation. They contain almost all the basic motifs of the literary works. Schulz, indeed, asks whether these letters are a work of fiction with Kleist as its sole hero–a question as pertinent as it is shrewd.

James Croft reviews Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell's new book, in The Humanist:

American religion is a conundrum. Americans manage to combine deep religious devotion with wide religious diversity, all the while remaining remarkably tolerant of each other. What factors have shaped the current religious landscape in the United States? What characteristics do people of faith have, in comparison to those of other faiths and those with none? And what explains America’s unique combination of diversity, devotion, and tolerance?

These are the questions that Robert Putnam, Harvard professor of public policy and the sociologist who shone a spotlight on American community in Bowling Alone, and David Campbell, professor of political science at Notre Dame, set out to answer in their book American Grace. In short, the authors seek to provide a definitive snapshot and analysis of the state of contemporary religiosity in America. They ask about the relationship between religion and politics, between religion and civic values, whether religion plays a divisive role or brings people together and, in the opening chapters, how America got to where it is today, religiously speaking. The breadth of the book’s ambition, along with its hefty dimensions (the main text runs to 550 pages) and steepled hands on the cover, convey the intention clearly: this is to be the new bible for sociologists of religion.

The majority of the book is based on two large surveys (3,108 participants in the first, and 1,909 in the second) conducted in 2006 and 2007. The sample drawn for the first was representative of the population of the United States and was randomly selected. The second followed up with as many of the individuals surveyed in the first as possible, and asked most of the same questions. Therefore, the authors argue, it is possible to see how some measures change (like church attendance) between one year and the next. This second survey is important because it enables the authors to “test” whether one variable alters with another: if making a friend of another religion coincides with a warmer view of that religion, for example, then one might plausibly hypothesize that making friends with people of another faith leads to warmer feelings for others of that same faith. This is not enough to establish causality, but it does give useful hints that would not emerge without the second survey.

Keith Gessen in The New Yorker:

In the fall of 1963, in Leningrad, in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the young poet Dmitry Bobyshev stole the young poet Joseph Brodsky’s girlfriend. This was not cool. Bobyshev and Brodsky were close friends. They often appeared, in alphabetical order, at public readings around Leningrad. Bobyshev was twenty-seven and recently separated from his wife; Brodsky was twenty-three and intermittently employed. Along with two other promising young poets, they’d been dubbed “the magical chorus” by their friend and mentor Anna Akhmatova, who believed that they represented a rejuvenation of the Russian poetic tradition after the years of darkness under Stalin. When Akhmatova was asked which of the young poets she most admired, she named just two: Bobyshev and Brodsky.

The young Soviets felt the sixties even more deeply than their American and French counterparts, for, while the Depression and the Occupation were bad, Stalinism was worse. After Stalin died, the Soviet Union began inching toward the world again. The ban on jazz was lifted. Ernest Hemingway was published; the Pushkin Museum in Moscow hosted an exhibit of the works of Picasso. In 1959, Moscow gave space to an exhibition of American consumer goods, and my father, also a member of this generation, tasted Pepsi for the first time.

The libido had been liberated, but where was it supposed to go? People lived with their parents. Their parents, in turn, lived with other parents, in what were known as communal apartments. “We never had a room of our own to lure our girls into, nor did our girls have rooms,” Brodsky later wrote from his American exile. He had half a room, separated from his parents’ room by bookshelves and some curtains. “Our love affairs were mostly walking and talking affairs; it would make an astronomical sum if we were charged for mileage.” The woman with whom Brodsky had been walking and talking for two years, the woman who broke up the magical chorus, was Marina Basmanova, a young painter. Contemporaries describe her as enchantingly silent and beautiful. Brodsky dedicated some of the Russian language’s most powerful love poetry to her. “I was only that which / you touched with your palm,” he wrote, “over which, in the deaf, raven-black / night, you bent your head. . . . / I was practically blind. / You, appearing, then hiding, / taught me to see.”

Almost unanimously, people in their circle condemned Bobyshev. Not because of the affair—who didn’t have affairs?—but because, as soon as Bobyshev began to pursue Basmanova, Brodsky began to be pursued by the authorities.

Yasmine El Rashidi in the NYRB blog:

On a recent afternoon this month, in a busy downtown Cairo street, armed men exchanged gunfire, threw rocks and Molotov cocktails, and freely wielded knives in broad daylight. The two-hour fight, which began as an attempt by some shop-owners to extort the customers of others, left eighty-nine wounded and many stores destroyed. In the new Egypt, incidents like this are becoming commonplace. On many nights I go to bed to the sound of gunfire, and each morning I leaf through newspapers anticipating more stories of crime. Stopped at gun-point; car stolen; head severed; kidnapped from school, held at ransom; armed men storm police station opening fire and killing four; prison cells unlocked—91 criminals on the loose. Many people I know have already bought guns; on street corners metal bludgeons are being sold for $3; and every week I receive an email, or SMS, or Facebook message about a self-defense course, or purse-size electrocution tool, or new shipments of Mace. “These are dangerous times,” my mother told me recently as she handed me a Chinese-made YT-704 “super high voltage pulse generator.” “You have to take precautions, keep it in your bag.”

Even more worrying, it seems increasingly clear that a variety of groups have been encouraging the violence, in part by rekindling sectarian tensions that had disappeared during the Tahrir Square uprising, when Muslim and Coptic protesters protected one another against Mubarak’s thugs. Since then, there have been a series of attacks on Copts, and the perpetrators seem to include hardline Islamists (often referred to as Salafis), remnants of the former regime, and even, indirectly, some elements of the military now in charge, who have allowed these attacks to play out—all groups that in some way have an interest in disrupting a smooth transition to a freely elected civil government and democratic state.

Angels of Choice

We lie trapped beneath
The Masonic geometry of Washington,
our bodies racked by long vistas,
our hearts bearing the tall spike’s pain.
Black-windowed limos rake my chest
with the loose gravel of power.

One of my hands reaches into a pocket
and small coins become bombs.
The other marks an X beside the black man’s name,
and soon he begins to lie.
Along the lines of my flesh I hear
the dark weeping of the disappeared.

There is no escape from the weight of this geometry.
My shackled movements shake small dirt
from boots that are always marching.
Ignorance is pressed into us as
we accept the banked protocol that
drives there along the avenues of shame.

Year after year, I unwrap the paper skin
of a garlic bulb, separate the cloves,
press each piece of the pinwheel
into cool October soil, while in my mind
green spears arise from the dirt
as April’s earth turns light.

Here I could dwell, here I could
let words fall out of the sky onto a white page,
here I could cradle the head of a neighbor
old now and fallen from his heights.
Here geometry is written on paper as thin
as a summer cloud disappearing.

by Susie Patlove

From Guernica:

Lila Azam Zanganeh interviews Amitav Ghosh:

Many novelists start out dreaming in their bed at night. As Sartre describes in The Words, they dream of how they’ll write these wild romantic novels. But Amitav Ghosh seems to come from quite a different place. As a young man he worked as a journalist; his first job was at the Indian Express newspaper, based in New Delhi. He next earned a PhD at Oxford in social anthropology, followed by a stint in Egypt. As he tells Lila Azam Zanganeh, our “Nabokovian“ interviewer, his background in anthropology—as opposed to, say, an MFA—might have been the best training imaginable for his fiction and essays: “What does an anthropologist do?” he asks. “You just go and talk to people, then at the end of the day you write down what you see.… It trains you to observe, and it trains you to listen to the ways in which people speak.”

Ghosh published the first of his six novels, The Circle of Reason, in 1986, and his career was given a boost when France awarded the book a prestigious Prix Médicis Etranger. While he lives in Brooklyn, writes in English and feels at home in the New York publishing scene, his sensibility is clearly that of an internationalist. Enabled in his career by writers such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul, he cares almost nothing about identity in its narrowest sense. Why? Because of India. “One of the reasons why is because anybody who's lived in India knows that India is incredibly, incredibly diverse.… That’s one of the wonderfully liberating things about India; it lets you be exactly who you want to be.”

More here.

From Nature:

A long-term study of children from Romanian orphanages suggests that the effects of childhood stress could be visible in their DNA as they grow up. Children who spent their early years in state-run Romanian orphanages have shorter telomeres than children who grew up in foster care, according to a study published today in Molecular Psychiatry¹. Telomeres are buffer regions of non-coding DNA at the ends of chromosomes that prevent the loss of protein-coding DNA when cells divide. Telomeres get slightly shorter each time a chromosome replicates during cell division, but stress can also cause them to shorten. Shorter telomeres are associated with a raft of diseases in adults from diabetes to dementia. The study is part of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a programme started in 2000 by US researchers who aimed to compare the health and development of Romanian children brought up in the stressful environment of an orphanage with those in foster families, where they receive more individual attention and a better quality of care.

When the study began, state orphanages were still common in Romania, and a foster care system was established specifically for this project. The study focused on 136 orphanage children aged between 6 and 30 months, half of whom were randomly assigned to foster families. The other half remained in orphanages. The researchers obtained DNA samples from the children when they were between 6 and 10 years old, and measured the length of their telomeres. They found that the longer the children had spent in the orphanage in early childhood – before the age of four and half – the shorter their telomeres. “It shows that being in institutional care affects children right down to the molecular level,” says clinical psychiatrist Stacy Drury of Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, one of the lead authors on the study.

More here.

Rochelle Gurstein in The New Republic:

As we headed toward the Cherry Esplanade at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden so that we could take in one of the great joys of spring in New York—cherry trees in full, glorious bloom—we entered a path between a double row of youngish oak trees that were now beginning to attain the height and fullness that will eventually give them the stately architectural elegance of an allée. I was asking my husband if he remembered how forlorn they had looked as saplings when we noticed a bronze plaque at the foot of a tree just filling in with deep green leaves. It read: “In Memory of the Heroes of Engine Company 280 and Ladder Company 132 Who Made the Supreme Sacrifice On September 11, 2001 In Defense of Their Country,” followed by the names of seven men who were killed. And with that, our delight in the beauty of what was a perfect spring day was interrupted by the presence of September 11.

We were taken off guard, but then we remembered that a number of years ago these oaks had been planted to replace the magnificent allée of old, soaring Norway maples that had been planted by the first generation of Brooklyn Botanic gardeners in 1918 to honor the Armistice and that had sadly come to the end of their natural life spans over 80 years later.

More here.

Avner Shapira in Ha'aretz:

Ludwig Wittgenstein may have declared at the beginning of his book “Philosophical Investigations” that “explanations come to an end somewhere,” but as far as his philosophy is concerned, the finish line is still nowhere in sight. Since his death 60 years ago, on April 29, 1951, numerous explanations and interpretations of his philosophy, or to be more precise, his philosophies, have been proposed. His influence has seeped into other spheres of knowledge and his unique personality has also been the subject of many analyses and portrayals.

The exhibition “Ludwig Wittgenstein: Contextualizations of a Genius,” at the Schwules Museum in Berlin offers new keys to understanding one of the 20th century's greatest intellects, who helped lay the foundations for the linguistic revolution that occurred in the world of philosophy. It underscores the connections between his philosophy and his life and sheds light on two key yet murky aspects of his biography: his ambivalent attitude toward his family's Jewish origins and his sexual identity.

At the entrance to the exhibition, a series of self-portraits of Wittgenstein, taken in 1922, are screened in a continuous loop. His changing expressions allude to the exhibition's aim – exposing the many facets of his personality. “On the 60th anniversary of his death, we wished to sketch character by means of observation not only of his pioneering theories, but also of his family, the culture from whence he came, the historical and intellectual sources that influenced him, his social connections and the many places that he lived,” says Kristina Jaspers, the exhibition's co-curator and the co-editor of the book of the same title (with Jan Drehmel ).

Jaspers says that making a connection between the philosophy and the biography of the philosopher is apt in Wittgenstein's case because he himself discerned such an affiliation. “He believed that in order to do philosophy properly, you had to live properly – in other words, that life and philosophy go hand in hand. The changes that occurred in his philosophical views could become clear in light of his biography: On the one hand, there is the indecision, the doubts and fear of mistakes that constantly haunted him, in life as well as in his theoretical pursuits; and on the other hand, whenever he felt that he needed to change his life or when he became convinced that he had erred in his philosophical conclusions, he made firm decisions and resolutely stuck to them.”

Jeffrey Bartholet in Scientific American:

It is not unusual for visionaries to be impassioned, if not fanatical­, and Willem van Eelen is no exception. At 87, van Eelen can look back on an extraordinary life. He was born in Indonesia when it was under Dutch control, the son of a doctor who ran a leper colony. As a teenager, he fought the Japanese in World War II and spent several years in prisoner-of-war camps. The Japanese guards used prisoners as slave labor and starved them. “If one of the stray dogs was stupid enough to go over the wire, the prisoners would jump on it, tear it apart and eat it raw,” van Eelen recalls. “If you looked at my stomach then, you saw my spine. I was already dead.” The experience triggered a lifelong obsession with food, nutrition and the science of survival.

One obsession led to another. After the Allies liberated Indonesia, van Eelen studied medicine at the University of Amsterdam. A professor showed the students how he had been able to get a piece of muscle tissue to grow in the laboratory. This demonstration inspired van Eelen to consider the possibility of growing edible meat without having to raise or slaughter animals. Imagine, he thought, protein-rich food that could be grown like crops, no matter what the climate or other environmental conditions, without killing any living creatures.

If anything, the idea is more potent now. The world population was just more than two billion in 1940, and global warming was not a concern. Today the planet is home to three times as many people. According to a 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the livestock business accounts for about 18 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions—an even larger contribution than the global transportation sector. The organization expects worldwide meat consumption to nearly double between 2002 and 2050.

Michael Bérubé over at Crooked Timber:

Somewhere between the end of my spring semester at Penn State on April 29 and the beginning of my month-long guest-teaching gig at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa (founded over a decade before that Johnny-come-lately Cornell in upstate New York) on May 2, I found some time to speak at this totally awesome conference on the work of Ellen Willis. Just glad to be on the bill, you know. Anyway, here’s a slightly expanded version of what I said that morning. Why slightly expanded? Because I’m including 15 percent more of Ellen Willis’s prose, which makes my remarks 15 percent better. That is why.

Ellen Willis took freedom seriously: “I believe that the struggle for freedom, pleasure, transcendence, is not just an individual matter. The social system that organizes our lives, and as far as possible channels our desire, is antagonistic to that struggle; to change this requires collective effort” (No More Nice Girls 266). And she was deadly serious about pleasure, too: “does it sound like a dirty word to you? No wonder, given how relentlessly it’s been attacked not only by puritanical conservatives but by liberals who uncritically accept the Reaganite equation of pleasure with greed and callousness…. Yet life without pleasure—without spontaneity and playfulness, sexuality and sensuality, esthetic experience, surprise, excitement, ecstasy—is a kind of death” (NMNG 272). It’s probably too much (or too cliché?) to say that her life was saved by rock and roll, but I do think she found in the music the rhythm of a social revolution she could dance to—and I think her willingness to think about freedom and pleasure rigorously served her well throughout her intellectual career.

That’s easy enough to see when you look at her writings on the drug wars of the 1980s, which Willis was right to see not just as an extension of state power and the carceral society in which we are all required to piss on demand, not only as a war on some classes of people who use drugs, but also as a frontal assault on the very idea that an illegal drug could have a beneficial effect on one’s being in the world. (By the mid-80s it was damn near impossible to say such a thing in public, so, of course, she went ahead and said it, more than once.) And it’s easy to see in Willis’s scathing critiques of antiporn feminism and so-called pro-life leftism, as well. But I see it suffusing every aspect of her work at every stage of her career, even in her writings on race, on The Satanic Verses, on “class first” leftism, and on the world after 9/11. It wasn’t just that she had one of the most accurate bullshit detectors known to modern science…

The Explosion

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead:
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark's eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins
Fathers brothers nicknames laughter
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun
Scarfed as in a heat-haze dimmed.

The dead go on before us they
Are sitting in God's house in comfort
We shall see them face to face–

plian as lettering in the chapels
It was said and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed–
Gold as on a coin or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them

One showing the eggs unbroken.

by Philip Larkin
from High Windows,1974