The 6th of Sarah Bakewell's 7 part series on Montaigne, in The Guardian:

In 1580, just after publishing the first edition of his Essays, Montaigne had an audience with Henri III in Paris. Henri said he liked the book very much, to which Montaigne reportedly replied, “Sir, then your majesty must like me”. For, as he always maintained, he and his essays were one. “I have no more made my book than my book has made me”, he wrote, “it is a book consubstantial with its author”.

And this was just the beginning. By the time of its publication, he and his text had been growing together for eight years; now he would add material for 12 more, probably until the year of his death, 1592. More editions came out, and he left annotated copies for a vast posthumous one. He seems to have amazed even himself: “Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world?”

All this writing and tinkering rarely took the form of changing anything, or crossing out old versions. When Montaigne thought of some new angle on a question, he usually inserted it without further adjustment, even if this produced contradictions. He preferred not to repent of choices he had made either in literature or in life. His past selves each had their own voice, even if the new Montaigne no longer understood them. Thus, within a paragraph or two of the Essays, we may meet Montaigne as a young man, then as an old man with one foot in the grave, and then again as a middle-aged mayor bowed down by responsibilities. We may listen to him complaining of impotence; a moment later we see him young and lusty and bent on seduction. “I do not portray being”, he wrote; “I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another … but from day to day, from minute to minute.” His let his thoughts lie where they fell.

Why did he do it? What, really, was he trying to achieve by “essaying” his life for so long? His love of communication had something to do with it. But writing also helped him to live a better life: to become more truly, and more thoughtfully, himself.

John Fitzgerald over at Chris Marker:

Walking over to Peter Blum Gallery in Chelsea to see the new Chris Marker exhibition, I happened to pass by a section of the newly completed High Line, a pedestrian greenspace retrofitted onto an old elevated train track on the West Side. I stopped to look at a curious feature of the renovation: a glass panel cut into the side of the wall overlooking Tenth Avenue. Behind the glass was tiered seating where people sat and watched the traffic beneath them and the pedestrians walking by. The whole image reminded me of a movie theater—tiered seating all facing a rectangular screen—except instead of a screen, there was glass, and instead of a film, there was The Street. Turning onto 29th Street to go to the gallery, I couldn’t think of a better prelude to Marker’s exhibition about watching people on the trains in Paris.

“Chris Marker: ‘Quelle heure est-elle?’” is a meditation on spectacle. Comprised of pieces selected from the early and latter periods of his career as an artist, filmmaker, and photographer, all are united by Marker’s fierce attention to the world around him, be they images of war or faces in the Métro, pictures in magazines or movie posters of imaginary films. The images that make up the exhibition’s title consist of a series of thirty-six black and white photographs of people riding the Métro in Paris between 2004 – 2008. In order to capture his subjects “truer to their inner selves,” he explains, he used a digital wristwatch camera—thereby coming a long way from the 16mm silent film camera that he boldly employed in the crowded trains of Tokyo for Sans Soleil in 1983. “Here I caught them innocent like animals, in the beauty of the jungle,” he notes.1 And while the people he captures—predominantly women—are certainly less aware of his gaze than in much of his previous work, some of the images, while very beautiful, still seem to fall short of being entirely natural. Perhaps the innocence that Marker has sought in images throughout his career is not necessarily more attainable merely with a new technology. As he acknowledges, in this age of the cellphone camera, we are more cognizant of being watched than ever before, and the subway, with its absence of anything interesting in the windows except mirror-like reflections, only heightens this sense. But Marker, for me, is a writer more than he is anything else, and while these photographs are ponderous to look at, I miss the breathless, evocative commentary that accompanies such images in his films. Commentary, in this instance, may be unnecessary though. Why articulate in prose something already so perfectly expressed by Ezra Pound in his poem, “In a Station of the Metro”: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd / Petals on a wet black bough”? This was to be Marker’s epigraph in his previous exhibition, “Staring Back,” in 2007. He dropped it at the time, but was struck by how a reviewer, seeing the photographs, began his review by quoting this poem. “So it was true, after all,” Marker writes, “there existed such a thing as poetry, whose ways are by nature different from the ways of the world, that makes one see what was kept hidden, and hear what was kept silent.”

[H/t: J. M. Tyree]

Natan Dvir in Guernica:

Although I grew up and spent most of my photographic career in Israel, I felt I did not truly know or understand its Arab society—over a fifth of the population consisting of hundreds of thousands of families who stayed within Israel’s borders after it was established in 1948. This large minority, which is currently experiencing a challenging identity crisis, has been somewhat forgotten amidst the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a highly political environment I became interested in the stories of these people living as a minority in a country defined by its majority’s religion. I aim to confront and dispute the widespread misconceptions and stereotypes of the people within my own country who I was brought up to consider more as foes rather than as allies. I decided to focus on Arab men and women at the age of eighteen, a crucial turning point in their lives, when they complete school, become legal adults, and earn the right to vote. Yet unlike their Jewish peers, most do not join the military. By photographing and portraying my so-called “enemy,” I hope to highlight the impact that cultural and internal conflict have had on these young people, personally and collectively.

I chose to photograph my subjects in their close surroundings wishing to present the pictures with a sense of place and attempting to reveal the social context within which they live. The essence of the intimate environmental portraits does not lie in their aesthetics, but rather in their complex dynamics—unwelcoming expressions and body language testifying to the tense nature of our engagement. The portraits are combined with personal testimonies and candid images describing the transformation of my interaction with my subjects and illuminating their lives. Eighteen is an artistic point of contact serving as an invitation to get closer. A project aimed at reconciliation through understanding and respect. An inside view by one who is typically regarded as an outsider. If I, a Jewish Israeli man, have been accepted and was allowed into my subjects’ personal lives, so can others.

More here.

From Nature:

Early hominins were using stone tools to butcher meat as long ago as 3.4 million years, about 800,000 years earlier than previous evidence dates to, scientists report in this week's issue of Nature.¹ The finding comes from an examination of animal bones found last year in the Lower Awash Valley of Ethiopia. This site is not far from the spot where the same research team, led by palaeoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged of the California Academy of Science, San Francisco, had previously discovered a 3.3-million-year-old juvenile Australopithecus afarensis fossil dubbed 'Lucy's Baby'. That find is one of the most complete skeletons of an ancient human ancestor to be discovered so far². The animal bones — one from an impala-sized creature, the other from one closer in size to a buffalo — bear cut marks that indicate butchering, says their finder, Shannon McPherron, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a member of Alemseged's team.

This, he says, means that early hominins — presumably Australopithecus afarensis — were not only using tools, but also venturing out of the safety of the forests and onto the plains in search of meat. However, they probably weren't hunting, McPherron says; it is more likely that they were scavenging predator kills. Still, the search for large-animal meat is an important step in human development. “We've put this important, fundamental behaviour back into Lucy's time,” says McPherron, who is lead author of the new study. The same is true for tool usage. Previously, the earliest known date for tool usage was about 2.5 million years ago — right about the time that humanity's own genus, Homo, was first emerging. Now, it seems that tool usage pre-dates our genus. “We're pushing much deeper into our evolutionary past,” McPherron says.

More here.

Johnny Misheff in the New York Times:

She may not be a household name, but the filmmaker Alia Raza is a name to watch and to drop. Raza, 32, is the creative force behind obscure film and video projects with fittingly abstruse titles like “The Fragile White Blossoms Emit a Hypnotic Cascade of Tropical Perfume Whose Sweet Heady Odor Leaves Its Victim Intoxicated.” Her dazzling cast of subjects is equally enigmatic: the teen blogger Tavi Gevinson, whom Raza recently filmed constructing a dress out of black silk and bubble gum; the artist Terence Koh, whom she had perform surgery on a white cake; and the celebutante-around-town Julia Restoin Roitfeld, who appears in Raza’s coming video project for Six Scents, a feminist take on the mythological Medusa figure. “Their notoriety is an element in the work,” Raza says of the socially prominent actors she picks. “Someone said what I do is like ‘Francesco Vezzoli going downtown,’ which is funny because I live on the Upper East Side.”

More here. [And, yes, that's my niece.]

Heart Valve

so when I felt it,
sitting at my beat-up farm desk

that looks out glass doors

onto the browning garden—plain sparrows
bathing in the cube-shaped fountain

so violently they drain it,

the white-throats with their
wobbly two-note song

on the long way south still,

and our dogs
out like lights and almost

falling off their chairs

freed of the real-time for awhile
as time began for me

to swell, slow down, carry me out

of all this almost
to a where

about as strong a lure as love.

by Elizabeth Arnold

You’d expect the Juttersmuseum on the little Dutch island of Texel to have an air of melancholy or something like that. Its raison d’être is loss. But the Juttersmuseum is the site of what-once-was-lost-now-is-found, no regrets, no apologies. It is a place of redemption, reclamation, more like a church than an orphanage. There’s a type of beachcombing that is the hobby of the virtuous, who try to comb all evidence of humans from the beach. They are enemies of pollution, stewards of nature. The beachcleaner wants the beach to be clean, for the greater good of people and nature alike, and cleaning the beach is an act of generosity on the part of the cleaner. Still, there is a hint of contempt in the beachcleaner. The beachcleaner finds manmade debris exasperating, infuriating, knows secretly that because beachcleaning is a Sissyphisian task, it is the work of martyrs, and beaches are the cause of perpetual heartache. The beachcleaner wishes, ultimately, to cleanse the beach free of us for us.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

People are quiet in Moscow these days. First, because the one thing on everyone’s mind—this summer’s unremitting heat wave—has generally been deemed an impolite topic of conversation. If one does broach the topic, one must first make excuses: “I am sorry, but this is going to be about the weather.” Second, because it is plain boring: Even the newspapers and radio stations have stopped reporting the all-time heat records, to which the city’s thermometers attest daily. In a city where 90-degree days used to be rare—not even annual—occurrences, 100 degrees has become the new normal. Third, it is plainly difficult to talk: The air is thick with smoke from wildfires and peat fires burning in and just outside the city, and breathing this air tends to make one’s throat dry and scratchy. There is no relief in sight. Few Muscovites’ apartments are equipped with air conditioning, and the stores ran out of electrical fans in the middle of last month. Most pedestrians still in the streets have donned surgical masks, even though doctors warn that they do nothing to keep out the tiny particles that fill the air; nor, for that matter, do air conditioners. For weeks, the weather forecasters have promised that the heat will let up in about 10 days’ time—but as the days march on, the amount of time separating us from that illusory cold front refuses to shrink.

more from Masha Gessen at Slate here.

Europe’s cathedrals, churches, monasteries, and baptisteries cover the countryside like Veronica’s veil. They comprise the continent’s landmarks and focal attractions and, for centuries, have been integral to its culture. It is curious, then, that, in the history of art, architecture has been a relatively infrequent subject—in Western painting before 1900, only scattered examples come to mind, such as the Dutch seventeenth-century church interiors by Emanuel de Witte (pictured here) or the panoramas of Venice by Canaletto. The words art historians most frequently summon to describe the role of architecture in painting echo most people’s daily experience with architecture: Again and again, one reads dismissals of architecture as merely a “framing device.” If architecture seems a minor player in the Western tradition, it appears even less significant in Byzantine art, an amorphously defined aggregation of objects dating from the third century to as late as the early nineteenth. The pieces are united by religious subject (Christianity), geographic origin (parts of eastern Europe, western Asia, and the Middle East), and a flat, non-realistic, and boldly delineated style. And painting after painting (after painting) suggests that, to Byzantine artists, architecture meant little.

more from Sarah Williams Goldhagen at TNR here.

The late Kurt Vonnegut in Lapham's Quarterly:

I want to share with you something I’ve learned. I’ll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune. Death and terrible poverty, sickness down here—great prosperity, wonderful health up there. Your average state of affairs here in the middle [points to bottom, top, and middle of line respectively].

This is the B-E axis. B for beginning, E for entropy. Okay. Not every story has that very simple, very pretty shape that even a computer can understand [draws horizontal line extending from middle of G-I axis].

Now, I don’t mean to intimidate you, but after being a chemist as an undergraduate at Cornell, after the war I went to the University of Chicago and studied anthropology, and eventually I took a masters degree in that field. Saul Bellow was in that same department, and neither one of us ever made a field trip. Although we certainly imagined some. I started going to the library in search of reports about ethnographers, preachers, and explorers—those imperialists—to find out what sorts of stories they’d collected from primitive people. It was a big mistake for me to take a degree in anthropology anyway, because I can’t stand primitive people—they’re so stupid. But anyway, I read these stories, one after another, collected from primitive people all over the world, and they were dead level, like the B-E axis here. So all right. Primitive people deserve to lose with their lousy stories. They really are backward. Look at the wonderful rise and fall of our stories.

More here.

I mean, what has it done for the Flemish or the Walloons lately?

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

A war has been brewing in Europe and no one seems to care. Admittedly, the hostilities have been mild so far: hurt feelings, insults, diplomatic wrangling. Yves Leterme (a Flemish politician) questioned whether people in the French-speaking part of Belgium have the “intellectual capacity” to learn Dutch. Belgium, Leterme suspects, holds together as a nation only because of three things: “king, national football team and certain beers.” Not even all the beers.

Belgium is not the most obvious candidate for a unified state. It is, and arguably always has been, deeply and fundamentally divided between the French-speaking southern half of the country (Wallonia) and the Dutch-speaking northern half of the country (Flanders). The separation runs back to the Frankish invasions of the area back around the fifth century, which is a pretty longstanding divide even by European standards. Speaking of that era, Belgian historian Emile Cammearts wrote:

The Franks settled in the north, the Romanized Celts or “Walas” occupied the south. The first are the ancestors of the Flemings of today, the second of the Walloons, and the limit of languages between the two sections of the population has remained the same. It runs today where it ran 14 centuries ago, from the south of Ypres to Brussels and Maestricht, dividing Belgium almost evenly into two populations belonging to two separate races and speaking two different languages.

I can personally attest to the lack of Belgian national sympathies among many Belgians. The Belgian National Holiday on July 21 just passed by with little fanfare in Antwerp, where I have been living. It seemed largely an excuse to take a day off. This is in contrast to the holiday of Flemish pride on July 11, which was greeted with rock-and-roll performances in the city’s main square and general merriment in the streets. The holiday celebrates a 1302 battle, the Battle of the Golden Spurs, in which a bunch of proto-Belgian Flemish militiamen lured a group of French knights into a swamp and cut them to pieces. They kept the golden spurs of the French as trophies. The French knights were there in the first place because the citizens of Bruges had summarily executed everyone in the city who spoke French.

More here.

Michael Haederle in Miller-McCune:

The neuroeconomist Paul Zak is driving west along Interstate 10 on a gorgeous Southern California morning. As we pass emerald hillsides, glowing from recent rains, and the snow-blanketed ridges of the San Gabriel Mountains, Zak talks about how standard economics neglects the biological mechanisms of trust that underlie myriad human interactions. “Why people cooperate — why people are altruistic — is a huge question,” he says. “When you think about how much of the world works on a handshake or on holding a door open for somebody in an airport, all that kind of falls through the cracks in economics.”

Zak and his collaborators at Claremont Graduate University have found that oxytocin, a hormone produced in the brain that promotes human bonding, plays a powerful role in shaping how generous people are. He calls it “the moral molecule.” “It’s a whole different model,” Zak says. “It tells us why global commerce works — because there is a motivation to reciprocate.”

People release oxytocin (pronounced ok-si-toh-sun) in settings that promote feelings of trust and safety, Zak has found, and their behavior becomes more trusting and generous in return. He envisions workplaces structured to reinforce this cycle.

More here.

Our own Justin E. H. Smith in his eponymous blog:

Prior to moving to Canada in 2003, I never really thought about the existence of Native Americans. Of course I'd heard the standard histories, seen the caricatures in old movies, was able to make some basic distinctions as to the names and locations of the different tribes. But the appropriation of the continent and the setting up there of a new and successful nation state seemed to me, from my American perspective, to be such a thorough fait accompli that any suggestion of the enduring moral obligation to reflect on and perhaps respond to past wrongs would have seemed to me as foreign as a proposal to reconstitute Gondwanaland. This very much in contrast with the legacy of slavery, which never escaped my notice as the gaping wound that defines my country's history and character.

I don't know quite what changed; perhaps it was simply the little, symbolic things that the well-meaning Canadian government does to recognize the First Nations (including, by the way, calling them 'First Nations'), such as providing links on many government websites in Mohawk, Inuktitut, and so on. Perhaps it was the very absence of a legacy of slavery (which, I insist, has only to do with the different exigencies of a different sort of colonial economy: one without large-scale plantation farming), which leaves Canada with only one original sin, rather than two.

Whatever it was, over the past several years I have acquired what I take to be a distinctly Canadian sensibility about the First Nations issue, namely, one that supposes that it is not too late to do something about the wrongs that were done a long time ago; or, rather, that the colonial powers are not absolved of the need to do something simply because the wrongs were done a long time ago. It is still a live issue.

More here.

Old Woman With Protea Flowers, Kahalui Airport

She wears the run-down slippers of a local
and in her arms, five rare protea
wrapped in newsprint, big as digger pine cones.
Our hands can't help it and she lets us touch.
Her brother grows them for her, upcountry.
She's spending the day on Oahu
with her flowers and her dogs. Protea
for four dogs' graves, two for her favorite.
She'll sit with him into the afternoon
and watch the ocean from Koolau.
An old woman's paradise, she tells us,
and pets the flowers' soft, pink ears.

by Kathleen Flenniken

From The Washington Post:

From now on, anyone who dreams of becoming a novelist will need to read Tom Grimes's brutally honest and wonderful “Mentor.” While there have been plenty of books on how to write, or how to get published, or how to promote your work, as well as a number of triumphalist accounts of “making it,” this is a story of what it's like to just miss succeeding. It's also a superb reminiscence of the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the late 1980s and of its celebrated director, Frank Conroy, author of the classic memoir “Stop-Time” (1967). At the age of 32, Tom Grimes was working as a waiter at Louie's Backyard in Key West. He'd already been writing fiction for years and seemingly getting nowhere fast. His childhood in Queens, N.Y., had been psychologically debilitating because of a cold, unloving father; a streak of depression ran in his blood; and he'd recently been divorced. Now, he was happily remarried and wondering what to do with himself. Time was passing. Should he go to law school? Instead, at the advice of his wife, Grimes applied to four creative writing programs. Three turned him down.

One day, though, just as he was about to ride his bicycle to work, the phone rang. ” 'This is Frank Conroy from the Iowa Writers' Workshop,' the voice said.” Conroy had loved the excerpt from Grimes's novel and announced that he was giving him the program's top scholarship. “See you in August.” That fall in Iowa, Conroy continued to sing the praises of Grimes's unfinished novel about baseball and the American dream. “I'll tell you. Your manuscript. Jesus Christ. . . . If you want, you can have the best agent in America tomorrow. I'll call her in the morning, if you want me to.” (At the time, this was Candida Donadio.) Later, Grimes learned that another student was referring to him as “Golden Boy,” and people were comparing his writing to that of Don DeLillo and the young Richard Ford. Surprisingly, Grimes turned down the scholarship and asked to teach courses instead, calculating that he might need such experience on his résumé. He knew himself to be a bundle of neuroses, prey to anxiety and depression, and deeply uncertain whether he could complete his book to his own satisfaction and that of his new mentor and friend. Indeed, Conroy quickly seems to have looked on Grimes as a foster son, even an heir. It's clear that their similar backgrounds — hardscrabble New York childhood, crummy jobs, drink, divorce and much else — might generate a spiritual kinship.

More here.

From Science:

Great Danes stretch more than a meter from paw to shoulder and can easily weigh more than 90 kilograms. A Chihuahua fits snugly inside a purse. Domestic dog breeds are more varied in body size and shape—not to mention coat color and fur length—than any other land-based mammal. Yet, according to a new study, a mere two to six regions in doggy DNA account for most of this diversity. Over the past few years, researchers have linked a number of canine traits—from size to coiffure—to specific mutations in dog DNA. This new line of research was made possible by the completion of the Dog Genome Project in 2005 by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in Bethesda, Maryland. But researchers lacked a large-scale analysis of these traits across a wide variety of breeds. As a result, they didn't know whether traits were governed by a large number of genetic regions, each contributing a small effect, or by a few regions with large effects.

So a team led by Carlos Bustamante, a comparative geneticist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and Elaine Ostrander, a comparative geneticist with NHGRI, analyzed genetic information from 915 domestic dogs representing 80 different breeds. The researchers compared the dogs' DNA, looking for sequences that differed by a single base, known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms. Once they found out where the DNA differed, they compared those differences between dogs with, for example, short versus long legs or perky versus droopy ears. All told, the researchers identified 51 regions in the genome that contributed to physical variation among the breeds. These regions can be clumped into larger areas of the genome called quantitative trait loci, which are known to contain genes that produce a specific physical effect, such as shaggy hair. Depending on which traits are compared, genetic differences in two to six of these regions—which include genes, many of which haven't yet been mapped to specific traits—can account for about 80% of the variation in physical characteristics among dogs, says Bustamante. That differs significantly from humans, he says, whose physical variation is scattered far more widely across their genome, often comprising hundreds or thousands of regions.

More here.

Plagiarism is like that; it’s an insider’s obsession. If you’re a professional journalist, or an academic historian, or a philosopher, or a social scientist or a scientist, the game you play for a living is underwritten by the assumed value of originality and failure properly to credit the work of others is a big and obvious no-no. But if you’re a musician or a novelist, the boundary lines are less clear (although there certainly are some) and if you’re a politician it may not occur to you, as it did not at one time to Joe Biden, that you’re doing anything wrong when you appropriate the speech of a revered statesman. And if you’re a student, plagiarism will seem to be an annoying guild imposition without a persuasive rationale (who cares?); for students, learning the rules of plagiarism is worse than learning the irregular conjugations of a foreign language. It takes years, and while a knowledge of irregular verbs might conceivably come in handy if you travel, knowledge of what is and is not plagiarism in this or that professional practice is not something that will be of very much use to you unless you end up becoming a member of the profession yourself. It follows that students who never quite get the concept right are by and large not committing a crime; they are just failing to become acclimated to the conventions of the little insular world they have, often through no choice of their own, wandered into. It’s no big moral deal; which doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that plagiarism shouldn’t be punished — if you’re in our house, you’ve got to play by our rules — just that what you’re punishing is a breach of disciplinary decorum, not a breach of the moral universe.

more from Stanley Fish at The Opinionater here.

According to Pascal Bruckner, we in the west suffer from neurotic guilt, a condition imposed upon us by the high priests of the left. This secular clerisy are heirs to the Christian tradition of original sin, which universalised guilt by claiming that humans are fallen and must redeem themselves. Nietzsche denounced Christian guilt as a psychic evil which forces man’s will to power in on himself. Pascal Bruckner is a latter-day Nietzschean who gives no quarter when it comes to excoriating our new moral elite. Bruckner represents a distinct species of French intellectual. Born in 1948 and coming of age in the upheavals of 1968, he initially indulged the revolutionary fervour sweeping Paris but soon became affiliated with the nouveaux philosophes, a group of anti-Marxist intellectuals. Consisting of figures like Andre Glucksmann, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard-Henri Levy and Jean-Marie Benoist, this cenacle may be considered France’s second generation of anti-communist thinkers. Bruckner’s day job is that of novelist—one item in his bulging portfolio, Bitter Moon, even received film treatment at the hands of Roman Polanski. As a result of his literary background and immersion in the fiery French essayist tradition, he writes in a sparkling prose, captured well here by his translator, Steven Rendall. The resulting tone is redolent for Anglo-Saxon readers of an earlier era, when social critics like Marx or Nietzsche conveyed their ideas with combative gravitas.

more from Eric Kaufmann at Prospect Magazine here.

Are the writers receiving the major awards and official recognition really the best writers today? Or are they overrated mediocrities with little claim to recognition by posterity? The question is harder than ever to answer today, yet it is a worthwhile exercise to attempt (along with identifying underrated writers not favored by bureaucracy). It’s difficult to know today because we no longer have major critics with wide reach who take vocal stands. There are no Malcolm Cowleys, Edmund Wilsons, and Alfred Kazins to separate the gold from the sand. Since the onset of poststructuralist theory, humanist critics have been put to pasture. The academy is ruled by “theorists” who consider their work superior to the literature they deconstruct, and moreover they have no interest in contemporary literature. As for the reviewing establishment, it is no more than the blurbing arm for conglomerate publishing, offering unanalytical “reviews” announcing that the emperor is wearing clothes (hence my inclusion of Michiko Kakutani). The ascent of creative writing programs means that few with critical ability have any incentive to rock the boat–awards and jobs may be held back in retaliation. The writing programs embody a philosophy of neutered multiculturalism/political correctness; as long as writers play by the rules (no threatening history or politics), there’s no incentive to call them out. (A politically fecund multiculturalism–very desirable in this time of xenophobia–is the farthest thing from the minds of the official arbiters: such writing would be deemed “dangerous,” and never have a chance against the mediocrities.)

more from Anis Shivani at The Huffington Post here.

Over at NPR, you can listen to the 52 minute concert:

More than a half-century after big bands were popular, Argue reverse-engineers the popular music of today through his big band. His Secret Society ensemble takes a refreshingly original slant on the jazz tradition, full of driving energy. The band travels up from its New York home base to perform at the CareFusion Newport Folk Festival in Newport, R.I.