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Colin Dickey at Lit Hub:

On its surface, the book is deceptively simple. At first hating Svalbard and seeing only bleak desolation, she undergoes a change, learning a great deal about herself, humanity, and the wild in the process. This is a cliched appraisal of the book, but part of its charm is how clearly these beats are telegraphed, and how skillfully she delivers on what you already suspect is coming.

New wonders gradually begin to find her. A curious fox begins to hang around Ritter’s cabin—inquisitive, eager to form an attachment to these humans it’s found, it’s a hüsrev, or house fox, which Karl calls “Mikkl” (“the Norwegians call all polar foxes Mikkl,” she notes dryly). Scrawny and with an unappealing coat, the fox is unpromising to the hunters, so Ritter bargains with them to leave him be. Soon, he is a regular feature of the landscape: “On all our walks Mikkl now accompanies us like a faithful dog. Wherever we go, he suddenly turns up but acts as if he were not accompanying us, but going his own extremely individual way.”

more here.

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Seth Whidden at the TLS:

The same week this new two-volume edition of Charles Baudelaire’s Œuvres complètes arrived in bookshops, Spotify unveiled a new advert in the Paris Métro. It read: “You knew Le Spleen de Paris, here’s the Spleen of La Courneuve”. In the heart of the Seine-Saint-Denis banlieue, La Courneuve is a few miles north of the centre of Paris, where Baudelaire was born and mostly raised. On the other side of the périphérique ring road, it is where Jules Jomby’s family moved from Cameroon when he was six. Jules grew up in the blocks of council flats called the Cité des 4000, famously profiled in Jean-Luc Godard’s Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967). Later, Jules was to adopt the stage name Dinos as he launched a successful rap career; later still, he was to draw inspiration from Baudelaire on his track “Spleen”, from his first studio album, Imany (2018).

How did France’s first great Parisian poet end up in La Courneuve? How did his modern French idiom work its way onto a rap album with a title whose Arabic and Swahili origins mean “belief” or “faith”? Can this be the same Baudelaire whom Walter Benjamin credited as an allegorical genius, the first to make Paris the subject of lyric poetry?

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Danny Kelly at Literary Review:

From its inception, pop (and rock) music was about youth. It offered a sound and a culture that stood in direct contrast, if not opposition, to the smugness of America’s Greatest Generation and to the choking conformity of postwar austerity Britain. It was made by the young, for the young. It was supposed to be ephemeral, disposable, temporary. The consumers would grow tired of the dance and move on to more adult, societally useful pursuits; the performers would have their moment in the spotlight, then develop jowls and get proper jobs. 

For three decades (from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s) this pattern was largely followed. Pop stars came and went. Many of the greats – Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Bob Marley, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Marc Bolan, Otis Redding (the sad pantheon is familiar) – died young, thus avoiding questions of post-fame irrelevance or how to navigate middle, never mind old, age. The rest were expected to retreat (depending on the deals they’d signed as starry-eyed hopefuls) to their stockbroker mansions or bedsit obscurity.

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Niki Smith in New Humanist:

Ken Loach is a film director who has spent his career of more than half a century chronicling the lives of working people in Britain and beyond.

We’re talking the day after the general election. How do you feel about Labour winning power?

When Corbyn stood down, and to ensure he won the Labour leadership, Starmer promised to continue the party’s radical agenda, but he has now broken most of the commitments that he made then. For example, private health companies are set to make even more profit from the NHS. He demonstrated to those with wealth and power that he was no threat to them. And now he’s there [as prime minister]. It emphasises, yet again, the vacuum on the left.

But following the example in France [with the emergency formation of the left-wing New Popular Front alliance, which won the most seats in July’s snap election] there may be a left here in Britain again. We may finally get our act together and at least have a movement, if not a party – a left movement united on a few basic principles.

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Mark Greif in Harper’s Magazine:

It is characteristic of literature departments to see waves come and go. Fredric Jameson represents something like the lapping at the shoreline, which doesn’t go away and never ceases to turn up interesting things: shells, coins, and specimens of marine life heretofore unseen. Not only has Jameson been ceaselessly productive—he has often come bearing news, for more than fifty years.

His topics might at first have seemed esoteric. They became increasingly less so. Jameson initially achieved renown in the early Seventies for examinations of European theories of literature. He explained to Americans a German-language tradition of Western Marxist thinkers. These critics, after the October Revolution, adapted Marx’s thought to the study of the art and culture of the nations outside the Soviet bloc. Many of the books he drew on were still inaccessible in English. Next Jameson essayed Russian and Central European formalists and linguists and their French descendants, the structuralists. (Canonical French literature, from Balzac to Sartre, had been his university specialization.) But it became clear that he was not looking to improve our understanding of individual writers or nations. Jameson was stocking his own armory, from the leavings and detritus of overlooked predecessors on all sides, and reconstituting a tradition he intended to join and master.

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Ellen Ioanes in Vox:

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Behind the Curtain of Madness

I wish I could do whatever I liked
behind the curtain of “madness.”
Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long,
I’d paint; pain, love and tenderness,
I would laugh as much as I feel like
at the stupidity of others, and they would all say:
“Poor thing, she’s crazy!” (Above all I would
laugh at my own stupidity.)

I would build my world which, while I lived,
would be in agreement with all the worlds.
The day, or the hour, or the minute that I lived
would be mine and everyone else’s – my madness
would not be an escape from “reality.”

by Frida Kahlo
from Poetic Outlaws

Meeri Kim in The Washington Post:

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Ken Makin in The Christian Science Monitor:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 turns 60 on Tuesday. Its birthday is important because it is a living piece of legislation and a predecessor for laws impacting women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. I can’t help but think about this momentous act and its unifying power and be reminded of the time it brought together two of the greatest men of their generation – Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Their presence encapsulated the urgency of the moment, and the youthfulness that constitutes dreams. And yet, it is hard to see a piece of paper turn 60 while these two men were assassinated just before their 40th birthdays. Their blood, like President John F. Kennedy’s, is proverbially mingled in with the ink that codified antidiscrimination rulings and secured voting protections for Black people. When Dr. King met Mr. Kennedy in March of 1962, they spoke of a “second Emancipation Proclamation.” That promise, in some ways, was fulfilled two years later, though Dr. King’s heartbreaking words from 1968 still endure: “I might not get there with you.”

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Ed Park at Bookforum:

THIS IS A GOTHIC TALE. In the summer of 2002, a professional illustrator and single mom in Chicago went to her fortieth-birthday bash, a gypsy-themed affair that her young daughter told her not to attend. A premonition? At the party, a mosquito bit her. Perhaps she slapped it dead; maybe it stayed attached, vampirically feasting. The result was no mere itch, but a health spiral. She had contracted West Nile disease, in a city very far from either side of that river, plus meningitis and encephalitis, paralyzing her lower body. Her drawing hand no longer worked: her livelihood was at stake. She moved in with her mother, whose dining room could accommodate her hospital bed and wheelchair, and enrolled in the fiction writing program at the Art Institute of Chicago. There were stories she wanted to tell. Maybe she’d revisit an abandoned screenplay from the ’90s, about “a werewolf lesbian girl being enfolded in the protective arms of a Frankenstein trans kid.”

She also took a comics class, falling hard for Art Spiegelman’s Maus. (She used to love cartoons, and would copy strips from the paper with alarming facility; why had her interest waned?) At her daughter’s urging, she forced her muscles to relearn how to draw, duct-taping a quill pen to her afflicted hand. In time her powers came back. She started a graphic novel, turning her little lycanthrope into a freakishly charismatic narrator-illustrator: ten-year-old Karen Reyes, uptown Chicagoan and magical thinker.

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Jamie Hood in Bookforum:

MARRIAGE IS A GRIM BUSINESS—worse still if you’re a woman in a Rachel Cusk book. The blame lies with Christian iconography, she writes in her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, and pictures of the “holy family, that pious unit that sucked the world’s attention dry.” There, we found Mary and the manger, the Christ child, cuckolded Joseph: images gathered in a “cult of sentimentality and surfaces” to obscure the innate beastliness of human existence and so tidy death. They were fraudulent images, coercively “bent on veiling reality.” And who within the family is conscripted to perpetuate, if not precisely to manufacture, such images? Women. In becoming wives, we’re made stewards of our husbands, sainted sucklers of children, menders of life’s ripped seams. After the dissolution of a decade-long marriage, Cusk turned from Christianity to the myths of antiquity and the unconscious, that “tempestuous Greek world of feeling.” We are beings born of chaos, after all, disciplined by institutions but governed by affects and actions that stretch past the limits of our knowing and detonate the illusion of social order.

Cusk’s “fictions,” in turn, have a fabular quality, muddling fate and circumstance, conditioning and immanence. She’s not particularly interested in identity-qua-identity or the psychological and novelistic conventions of character. Instead, she’s after human “experience in a more lateral sense,” an “oceanic” and provisional representation of subjectivity.

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Sophia Chen in Nature:

The fastest supercomputer in the world is a machine known as Frontier, but even this speedster with nearly 50,000 processors has its limits. On a sunny Monday in April, its power consumption is spiking as it tries to keep up with the amount of work requested by scientific groups around the world. The electricity demand peaks at around 27 megawatts, enough to power roughly 10,000 houses, says Bronson Messer, director of science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where Frontier is located. With a note of pride in his voice, Messer uses a local term to describe the supercomputer’s work rate: “They are running the machine like a scalded dog.”

Frontier churns through data at record speed, outpacing 100,000 laptops working simultaneously. When it debuted in 2022, it was the first to break through supercomputing’s exascale speed barrier — the capability of executing an exaflop, or 10¹⁸ floating point operations per second. The Oak Ridge behemoth is the latest chart-topper in a decades-long global trend of pushing towards larger supercomputers (although it is possible that faster computers exist in military labs or otherwise secret facilities).

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Deep Shukla in Medical News:

After a lull of nearly 2 decades, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved some novel drugs for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease since 2021. Most of these drugs are antibody therapies targeting toxic protein aggregates in the brain. Their approval has sparked enthusiasm and controversy in equal measure. The core question remains: Are these drugs making a real difference? In this Special Feature, we investigate. Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease that involves a gradual and irreversible decline in memory, thinking, and, eventually, the ability to perform daily activities. Aging is the leading risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, and a rapidly aging population has made it a public health crisis.

In 2019, 57 millionTrusted Source individuals around the globe had Alzheimer’s disease, and this number is expected to reach 153 million by 2050. This underscores the need for disease-modifying treatments that produce a lasting change in the trajectory of this disease, slowing its progression. However, until recently, efforts to develop disease-modifying therapies for Alzheimer’s disease have not been successful. Most of the clinical research to develop disease-modifying therapies for Alzheimer’s has focused on targeting the beta-amyloid protein, whose abnormal accumulation is generally considered to lead to the development of this neurodegenerative disorder.

More here.

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Hunter Dukes at Cabinet Magazine:

At some point in the early morning, having forfeited my grip on the laminate, I was squeezed onto a balcony between Klaus and a very tall Polish American man, who was telling us about an upcoming trip to Kerala, where he would seek ayurvedic realignment after a season of encounters with unmitigated evil in Berlin. A third figure in a stiff leather jacket produced a red packet of cigarettes and distributed them with gravity, as if they were full-bodied charms. Klaus asked a question. Did you know that American Spirit was founded by one of Kojève’s graduate students, who named the tobacco company after Hegelian Spirit or Geist? I did not. This is the same Alexandre Kojève who had been born into Russian aristocracy, fled to Berlin after the October Revolution (and after an arrest for black-marketing soap), financed his early life by selling off the family jewels, enshrined himself as a chief architect of the European Economic Community, spied for the Kremlin for decades (or so it has been posthumously conjectured, without thorough proof), and did more than any other philosopher to shape the reception of Hegel’s thought in twentieth-century Europe. He was also, it seems, fond of anecdote, and liked to recycle one in particular. It went something like… when Hegel was asked, during a lecture on the philosophy of history, about the spirit of America, he thought for a moment and then replied: tobacco!

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Light

It’s beyond me, the pinhole in Hubble’s eye tomorrow as predicted,
(and lingo beyond me—some chicken scratching,
a few noises standing up for red giants, string theory)

and Sol his own self making stuff take place, beyond me
the melting ice fern on the window,
these four lesions on my face, and yes a radish and maple syrup.

It’s beyond me, the streetlamp out front of 3236 Rex Avenue
holding its sulphurous light over the street
and the cripple Debbie inside the post-war cape
with her clenched hand.

Beyond me are light’s eleven tongues,
the streetlamp talking her father’s parked dump truck
safely through the night, and Debbie’s squealing laughs
getting hit playing dodgeball.

Roger still tries to pry his sister’s locked fingers
to show us the imperfection in Debbie’s palm,
the reason for her crippled body, the meaning of life,
to which the streetlamp as good as says,
What is lit goes dark, what goes dark gets relit.

Debbie’s fist will not open, especially now
after she’s squealing lo these several decades,
even now after all this incandescence and fluorescence,
but in her palm I believe a dot lives,
like the still central point of a pinwheel nebula,
of a radish, of a rubber ball, a dot beyond me, yes,
beyond light. All it ever says is Open.

by Dennis Finnell
from Ruins Assembling
Shape and Nature Press, 2014

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