Francesca Wade at The Nation:

In an anonymously published essay, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” George Eliot set out her objections to “mind-and-millinery” novels: those books featuring dazzling heroines—eloquent, accomplished, almost godly—who set off into the world solely in pursuit of an amiable husband. Castigating the genre for its “drivelling” narratives, clichéd characters, and hackneyed morals, Eliot argued that novels that posit marriage as a woman’s ultimate aim and achievement only “confirm the popular prejudice against the more solid education of women.” In her own writing, Eliot set out not just to rehash the “marriage plot” but to expose and dissect it: Her sweeping novels show her utterly human characters grappling with the harsh disparities between societal expectations of married life and their own, often painful experiences of it.

As Clare Carlisle shows in her fascinating new biography, The Marriage Question, Eliot chose to make her life, as well as her fiction, outside the conventions of the marriage plot.

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Warren Cornwall in Science:

THE CANARY ISLANDS—More than 1000 years ago, a young man stood on the northern shore of the island now known as El Hierro. Across the wave-swept Atlantic Ocean, he could see the silhouettes of other islands, a volcanic peak on one soaring toward the clouds only 90 kilometers away. Yet, for him, those islands were as unreachable as the Moon.

His body betrayed the rigors of life on his arid volcanic outcrop. His molars were worn almost to the gums from grinding fibrous wild fern roots. His ancestors here had farmed wheat, but he and his contemporaries grew only barley and raised livestock such as goats. His genes held evidence that his parents were closely related, like many of the roughly 1000 people on the island, who had not mingled with outsiders for centuries. Also like many of his fellow islanders, he bore signs of an old head injury, likely sustained in a fight.

“This population faced a lot of challenges,” says archaeologist Jonathan Santana of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC). “Survival on this island was a challenge every day.”

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Victoria Wiet at the LARB:

ALMOST IMMEDIATELY after melodrama had its heyday in the mid-19th century, it began to be mocked for being obsolete. In an 1890 burlesque of Victorien Sardou’s La Tosca, the play later adapted into a more famous opera, the police chief Scarpia proudly admits that, as a villain intent on “possess[ing]” the play’s titular heroine, he is a vestige of “that dark age / when curdling melodrama held the stage.” Belonging to a genre that has come to feel more campy than poignant, even villains like Scarpia can’t take themselves seriously. And yet, no matter how many generations have claimed to have evolved away from a genre besmirched for its expressive storytelling and moral polarities, melodrama has retained its power as a way for artists to represent the world and as a lens for critics to interpret what they see.

When it comes to the work of director Todd Haynes—whose latest feature, May December (2023), has been the subject of critical buzz and an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay—that turn to melodrama can feel automatic, even obligatory.

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Robert Pogue Harrison in the New York Review of Books:

In antiquity humans were referred to as “mortals,” which meant that they were destined not only to die but also to suffer loss, misfortune, and disaster. By comparison with the immortal gods, even the loftiest mortals are losers in the long run (as Achilles realizes in Hades). In his book In Praise of Failure, the philosopher and essayist Costica Bradatan reminds us that we flash into existence between “two instantiations of nothingness,” namely the nothingness before we were born and the one after we die. Each one of us, ontologically speaking, is next to nothing. And each one of us, despite our precarious condition, has something to lose. “Myths, religion, spirituality, philosophy, science, works of art and literature”—all, according to Bradatan, seek to make our next-to-nothingness “a little more bearable.”

To seek to make our condition more bearable is one thing. To anxiously take flight from its reality is another. In American society’s glorification of winning and worldly success, Bradatan sees a virulent and self-defeating psychology of evasion.

More here.

Sci-Fi

There will be no edges, but curves.
Clean lines pointing only forward.

History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance,

Just like the dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.

Women will still be women, but
The distinction will be empty. Sex,

Having outlived every threat, will gratify
Only the mind, which is where it will exist.

For kicks, we’ll dance for ourselves
Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs.

The oldest among us will recognize that glow—
But the word sun will have been re-assigned

To the Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device
Found in households and nursing homes.

And yes, we’ll live to be much older, thanks
To popular consensus. Weightless, unhinged,

Eons from even our own moon, we’ll drift
In the haze of space, which will be, once

And for all, scrutable and safe.

by Tracy Smith
from Life on Mars
Graywolf Press, 2011

Samuel Wheeler III at nonsite:

Decades ago, I argued that indeterminacy of interpretation, construed in the terminology of Husserl’s phenomenology and Saussure’s conception of language, was very close to Derrida’s “deconstruction.” I have come to see that the very structure of Davidson’s account of language commits him to a version of “dissemination,” the fluidity and “play” of ascriptions of meaning. The core of Davidson’s account of language and interpretation guarantees that natural languages will be disseminative.

Husserl construed meanings as entities that in principle could be common to different languages. Frege’s “senses,” the Analytic tradition’s version of Platonic forms, were similar metaphysical equipment. Languages were ways of expressing such meanings. Derrida and Davidson attacked trans-linguistic meanings. Derrida treated metaphysical trans-linguistic meanings historically, as an aspect of philosophy’s obsession with Presence, which had shaped the history of metaphysics.

more here.

Jeremy Harte at Literary Review:

Don’t impress me with peasant virtues, said Chekhov, I have peasant blood in my veins. Patrick Joyce has the blood too. His people won a living from the hard lands of Dúiche Seoighe, or Joyce Country, which stretch from Loughs Corrib and Mask to the Atlantic Ocean and straddle the border of County Mayo and County Galway. Although his father took the family to England in 1930, he brought his sons back every year and they would fall asleep night after night listening to kitchen talk in English and Irish. Joyce knows what he is talking about, and if his peasants are not always virtuous, they are at least vivid and real.

It is hard to hold on to that reality, for peasants will soon be as extinct as the aurochs and Irish elk. In western Europe, the proportion of the population employed in agriculture now stands at something between 1 and 5 per cent.

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Tom Crewe in The Guardian:

There is a well-known passage in EM Forster’s Maurice, written in 1913 but not published until 1971, after Forster’s death. Maurice, who has “failed to kill lust single-handed”, resolves to consult a doctor about his problem. “I am an unspeakable,” he confesses, “of the Oscar Wilde sort.” What is “unspeakable” is immediately revealed by the use of Wilde’s name: that Maurice is homosexual. To be an “Oscar Wilde sort” was to be gay – but was it to be anything like Oscar Wilde? This was the problem troubling men of Forster’s generation and after, at least until the legalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales in 1967 (Scotland did not follow until 1981, Northern Ireland until 1982, Ireland until 1993). Wilde’s scandalous exposure created a set of public assumptions and prejudices that persisted for well over half a century, often twisting how gay people saw themselves. Among these was the belief that gay men, like Wilde, imposed themselves on the world by their difference: that they dressed differently, talked differently, were “theatrical”. That their relationships – as Wilde’s were alleged to have been – were crudely sexual, exploitative, mired in inequalities of age and class. That their susceptibility to blackmail brought them into contact with criminality, made them suspect. That they might always be one misstep away from tragedy. Maurice was an attempt to argue with these ideas, but the fact that Forster felt unable to publish it in his lifetime is a testament to their grip.

More here.

Nadia Asparouhova in The New Atlantis:

A new tech ideology is ascendant online. “Introducing effective accelerationism,” the pseudonymous user Beff Jezos tweeted, rather grandly, in May 2022. “E/acc” — pronounced ee-ack — “is a direct product [of the] tech Twitter schizosphere,” he wrote. “We hope you join us in this new endeavour.”

The reaction from Jezos’s peers was a mix of positive, critical, and perplexed. “What the f*** is e/acc,” posted multiple users. “Accelerationism is unfortunately now just a buzzword,” sighed political scientist Samo Burja, referring to a related concept popularized around 2017. “I guess unavoidable for Twitter subcultures?” “These [people] are absolutely bonkers,” grumbled Timnit Gebru, an artificial intelligence researcher and activist who frequently criticizes the tech industry. “Their fanaticism + god complex is exhausting.”

Despite the criticism, e/acc persists, and is growing, in the tech hive mind. E/acc’s founders believe that the tech world has become captive to a monoculture. If it becomes paralyzed by a fear of the future, it will never produce meaningful benefits. Instead, e/acc encourages more ideas, more growth, more competition, more action.

More here.

Robert Bellafiore in The New Atlantis:

From John Maynard Keynes’s prediction of a fifteen-hour workweek to Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland to 2001: A Space Odyssey’s interplanetary waltzing, many futurists and crystal-ball seers of the twentieth century assured us that, thanks to the wonders of technology, things were looking up for the human race. And remarkably, they were often justified in their buoyancy: President Kennedy explained in 1962 why we chose to go to the Moon, and seven years later there we were. Surely the 2000s would be a whole century of roaring twenties.

Instead, we got … this. A damaged earth, a pandemic, a housing crisis, and a deep sense that we all got played. “There’s no U.S. economy running on clean nuclear fusion or superdeep geothermal energy,” James Pethokoukis bemoans, “no universal antivirus vaccine, no driverless flying electric taxis, no suborbital hypersonic flights from New York to Paris, no booming space economy.” What gives?

In The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, Pethokoukis, a policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, sets out to explain what happened, and how we can return to the future as it used to be.

More here.

The Cat

While you read
the sleepmoth begins
to circle your eyes
and then—
a hail of claws
lands the cat
in your lap.
The little motor
in his throat
is how a cat says
Me. He rasps the soft
file of his tongue
along the inside
of your wrist.
He licks himself.
He’s building
a pebble of fur
in his stomach.
And now he pulls
his body in a circle
around the fire of sleep.

by William Matthews
from Sleek For the Long Flight
White Pine Press, 1998

Summer Rylander in Nautilus:

Few animals are more synonymous with the African savannah than the lion. With its muscular stride and ferocious roar, it has long been a symbol of strength, courage, and nobility. As an apex predator, it sits at the top of the food chain—the only real predator it must fear is the human. But recently, one of the savannah’s tiniest inhabitants, one that is barely visible, has fundamentally reshaped the fortunes of the lion, as well as those of a number of other magnificent beasts: zebras, elephants, and buffalo.

This real-life fable begins with the iconic umbrella-shaped acacia tree, also known as the whistling thorn tree. Graceful and resilient, the acacia tree dominates the savannah landscape and often provides most of the tree cover for thousands of square miles. Hidden in the branches of this tree are great numbers of tiny acacia ants, which make their home there and act as protectors. With their painful stings and bites, the ants ward off large herbivores such as elephants and giraffes, and allow the trees to thrive.

More here.

Myles Burke in BBC:

Emmanuel Faye at Notre Dame Philosophical Review:

Wolin’s project can be summarized as follows: After the recent publication of Heidegger’s seminars, lectures, correspondence, and the Black Notebooks has revealed the Heideggerian edifice to be in ruins, Wolin wants to show that Heidegger’s writings can nonetheless provide philosophy with valuable material that can be re-used. Should we conclude that Wolin—like Trawny, Nancy, and di Cesare before him—seeks to salvage the seemingly valuable philosophical remains of Heideggerian thought following the publication of the Black Notebooks? And that this rescue operation is carried out in the face of opposition from mysterious and anonymous critical “commentators”? Or are these statements rhetorical, designed to safeguard the project against potential attacks by the most uncompromising of Heideggerians? It is in any case striking that Wolin places his project under the aegis of Nietzsche, given his previous unsparing criticism of this figure. He might argue that this is merely ironic. Yet the methodological fact remains that the Nietzsche citation fits with Wolin’s aim of re-evaluating the Heideggerian material.

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Meara Sharma at Artforum:

To encounter the work of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama is to see the world not through his eyes but through his whole being. His angles are dizzyingly extreme, as if shot from the perspective of his knees, his toes, the back of his head. His subjects are blurred and warped, conjuring a sense of frenetic movement through space. His images—mostly black-and-white—are intensely high contrast, evocative of the sun’s unforgiving glare or the heightened realm of dreams. Rather than proposing an artfully constructed vision of the world, his photographs (whether of television screens or thronging beaches or fishnet-sheathed legs or discarded dolls) attempt to embody the fragmented experience of existence: its chaos, its precariousness, its fundamental inscrutability.

Moriyama’s signature style—known as are, bure, boke, which translates as “grainy, blurry, out of focus”—stems from a lifelong suspicion of photography’s capacity to capture reality, evident in the eighty-five-year-old artist’s potent retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery.

more here.