I’d like to have a word
with you. Could we be alone
for a minute? I have been lying
until now. Do you believe
I believe myself? Do you believe
yourself when you believe me? Lying
is natural. Forgive me. Could we be alone
forever? Forgive us all. The word
is my enemy. I have never been alone;
bribes, betrayals. I am lying
even now. Can you believe
That? I give you my word.
by James Tate
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVJysNJ7jts
Cora Currier in The Nation:
I can see, but not clearly describe, the patch of concrete, the base of the tree, the few brief seconds that the man and I struggled before my head hit the pavement. I spent the next week in bed with a concussion, staring at the ceiling of my hot bedroom, forbidden the use of words: no screens, no books, no stimuli. The nonverbal blur that followed was a time that passed as a smear across my brain. It soon came to feel like a muted extension of the attack.
When Sarah Everard was murdered in England in March, I thought about my experience again. It seemed to be the very kind of random violence against women that many saw in Everard’s murder: A woman walks home alone at night; a man she doesn’t know attacks her. Countless women took to social media to talk about their fear of such attacks, the admittedly useless strategies they employed to prevent them, and their sense that, at any moment, they could be next. And yet, as Charlotte Shane wrote in Dissent, something about this outpouring felt off. “Specific harm should be the issue,” Shane wrote, but “potential harm and ambient anxiety become the focus.”
More here.
In the L.A. Review of Books:
Anna Akhmatova was born in Odessa in 1889, but lived most of her life in Saint Petersburg, the city with which so much of her poetry is intimately connected. She frequented The Tower, the famous literary salon of the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, and in 1910 she married fellow poet Nikolay Gumilyov. The couple were divorced in 1918, three years before Gumilyov was executed by the Bolsheviks.
Akhmatova achieved fame with her first collection of poems, Evening, published in 1912, and her subsequent collections Rosary and While Flock consolidated her reputation as one of Russia’s leading poets during the period preceding the October Revolution. After 1917 she took the conscious decision to remain in Russia, rather than join those of her fellow writers who were opting to go into exile in the West. Following the publication of the second edition of Anno Domini MCMXXII in 1923 she found herself increasingly subject to censorship, and in 1946 she was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union in the wake a notorious speech by the Communist Party cultural boss Andrey Zhdanov, in which he described her as “a cross between a nun and a whore”; but although she faced much personal hardship and a protracted poetic silence as a consequence of her decision to remain in Russia, she was also able to create Requiem, her great affirmation of solidarity with the victims of the Stalinist purges. After Stalin’s death in 1953 the restrictions on Akhmatova’s work were gradually relaxed and a selection of her poems, entitled The Course of Time, was published in 1958. She died in Moscow in 1966.
More here.
Henry Farrell and Glen Weyl in Boston Review:
Two new books about technology and the fate of democracy begin by describing the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. They are right to see that fateful day as a turning point and a benchmark for debates about the course of U.S. society, and hint at important questions: Can democracy survive in its current form? What role did information technology play in encouraging a violent mob to tear through Congress? And what do we do now?
Both books see January 6 as the product of systematic misinformation and fraud, and argue that the solution is more participatory democracy. Though we agree for the most part, neither book offers a comprehensive theory of change or a particularly persuasive vision of an aspirational digital democracy. Solving Public Problems, by Beth Simone Noveck—director of Northeastern University’s Governance Lab and New Jersey’s inaugural Chief Innovation Officer—suggests that better government will produce a better public. System Error—by political theorist Rob Reich, computer scientist Mehran Sahami, and political scientist Jeremy M. Weinstein —explains how government might come to understand and perhaps constrain big tech more effectively. Each makes important contributions. System Error breaks new ground in explaining why Silicon Valley (SV) is wreaking havoc on U.S. politics and offers uniformly thoughtful reforms. Solving Public Problems, on the other hand, offers possibly the most detailed and serious treatment of how digital tools help enhance democratic governance around the world. Neither, however, answers the question implicitly posed by opening their books with a description of U.S. democracy’s failure: What happens now, after January 6?
More here.
Ian McEwan in New Statesman:
I’ll start with a place, a Paris apartment in Montparnasse, and a date, 23 December 1936, and a gift from one writer to another of his corduroy jacket which, from the point of view of the recipient, may have had a few traces of whale blubber attached to its lapels. The generous donor was the American writer Henry Miller. He thought his visitor, George Orwell, on his way to Spain to fight in the civil war, would benefit from its warmth through the Spanish winter, though he pointed out that it was not bulletproof. The present, Miller said, was his contribution to the loyalist anti-fascist cause.
The encounter between the two men (the American was almost 45, the Englishman 33) had been well smoothed in advance by Orwell’s positive review of Miller’s novel, Tropic of Cancer, which was followed by a collegiate exchange of letters. The meeting presents us with a tableau vivant and source for the heart of Orwell’s celebrated essay “Inside the Whale”, published in book form just over three years later in 1940 by Gollancz. Despite a fair degree of mutual admiration, these two writers had much to disagree about. Henry Miller, self-exiled, strenuously bohemian, a cultural pessimist, hedonist, tirelessly sexually active – or tiresomely, as second wave feminists would point out through the Seventies. He had a profound disregard for politics and political activism of any kind. As a writer, he was, by Orwell’s definition, “inside the whale”. Such political views as Miller had were naive and self-regarding and light-hearted. In a letter to Lawrence Durrell he wrote that he knew he could head off the rise of Nazism and the threat of war if he could just get five minutes alone with Adolf Hitler and make him laugh.
More here.
Jessica Ferri at the LA Times:
When Hustvedt returns to the idea of what’s missing, her writing takes off. In “Both-And,” an essay on Bourgeois, she offers the concept of intercorporeality from French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “that human relations take place between and among bodies, that we perceive and understand others in embodied ways that are not conscious.” What could be more loaded than the mother’s body, a body that is not one, but two? A body that is no longer hers alone? “The artist sees the object unfold, a thing that rises out of you, is related to you, but is not you either,” Hustvedt writes about Bourgeois’ work. But this easily applies to birth and mothering.
For all these sensitivities, Hustvedt’s most personal piece, “A Walk With My Mother,” dwarfs the others in this collection. In concert with the scientific essays, it is intensely focused on the physical.
more here.
“Questioned about why she had beaten her spastic child to death, the mother
told police, “I hit him because he kept falling off his crutches.’ “ —News Item
.
Because one’s husband is different from one’s self,
the pilot’s last words were. “Help, my God, I’m shot!”
Because the tip growth on a pine looks like Christmas tree
….. candles,
cracks appear in the plaster of old houses.
And because the man next door likes to play golf,
a war started up in some country where it is hot,
and whenever a maid waits at the bus stop with her
….. bundles,
the fear of death comes over us in vacant places.
It is all foreseen in the glassy eye on the shelf,
woven in the web of notes that sprays from a trumpet,
announced by a salvo a crackles when the fire kindles,
printed on the nature of things when a skin bruises.
And there’s never enough surprise at the killer in the self,
nor enough difference between the shooter and the shot,
nor enough melting down of stubs to make new candles
as the earth rolls over, inverting billions of houses.
by Mona Van Duyn
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986
Daphne Merkin at Bookforum:
One Friday begins on a Friday in April 2006, when the forty-seven-year-old Antrim, having just had a spat with his girlfriend, is clinging to the fire escape of his four-story apartment building in Brooklyn, considering jumping to his death. (Although one wonders if falling from this height might have resulted in serious injury rather than death.) “I didn’t know why I had to fall from the roof,” he writes, “why that was mine to do.” He goes on to tell us that depression is a “misleading term,” that he prefers to call his depression “suicide” because he sees it “as a long illness, an illness with origins in trauma and isolation” rather than “the death, the fall from a height or the trigger pulled.” Although Antrim offers this explanation as an original take on an enigmatic condition, I found it befuddling rather than clarifying: suicide is sudden and immediate while depression is a long and often recurrent illness. There is no getting around it: the former is a decision, however impulsive and catastrophic; the latter is a passively endured condition, the result of our chemistry and psychological vulnerabilities.
more here.
Emily Tamkin in New Statesman:
WASHINGTON, DC – Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.
Donald Trump, however, will not say this. He has spent the year since he lost insisting that he won. His supporters believe the same. According to an NBC News poll from November, 38 per cent of respondents did not believe that President Joe Biden was legitimately elected, and half of Republicans did not believe their ballots would be counted accurately the next time they went to vote. “There are always some sour grapes from the losing party after the election,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But this has gone to a new level of disbelief.” Just as troubling are the other steps that Trump and his supporters have taken in the past year to undermine American democracy, both for his own benefit and that of the Republicans aligned to him. They are not only refusing to accept reality but are trying to change the reality of how people vote in the future. “There really has not been anything like this in modern American history,” Burden said.
Official intimidation
Over the past year, election officials in various places across the country have been threatened. A study conducted by Benenson Strategy Group found that a third of election officials expressed concern about facing harassment in the course of doing their job, and 17 per cent had already been threatened. The For the People Act, a voting rights bill passed by the House of Representatives, does contain some protections for election officials – but the bill is stalled in the Senate. Unless moderate Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin agree to abolish the filibuster, it will not pass, since Republicans will not support it.
More here.
From Nature:
It seemed like a very promising cancer immunotherapy lead. CHO Pharma, in Taiwan, had discovered that it was possible to target solid tumours with an antibody against a cell-surface glycolipid called SSEA-4.1 This antigen is present during embryonic development, but not seen on human cells again — until they turn into cancer cells.2 The company turned to Lan Bo Chen, a recently retired Harvard pathologist, to help develop this work into an anti-cancer therapy for solid tumours. “It is highly reasonable to imagine that we can use SSEA-4, overexpressed on cancer cells, as a target for CAR-T,” says Chen, now in his role as senior technology advisor for CHO Pharma.
CAR-T therapy works by genetically engineering a person’s own T cells in such a way that they recognize and attack cancer cells. This involves creating a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) from an antibody against a target on the cell. But CAR-T therapy was designed for blood cancers so it needs several adaptations to make it suitable for the treatment of solid tumours.3 The cells need to be directed to the site of the tumour, survive in the tumour’s local microenvironment, and act only on tumour cells, not on healthy cells nearby.
But, when Chen tried to create CAR-T cells against SSEA-4, he hit a few obstacles. First it took him a long time to get his hands on a humanized SSEA-4 antibody suitable for adaptation. When he finally had one, he still had to find a way to turn that antibody into a CAR. And then to insert the CAR into a human T cell using lentiviral transduction.
More here.
Jonathan Gottschall in Literary Hub:
According to the English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), enjoyment of fiction requires a “willing suspension of disbelief”—a conscious decision. We say to ourselves, “Well, I know this story about Beowulf battling Grendel is hooey, but I’m going to switch off my skepticism for a while so I can enjoy the ride.”
But that’s not how it works. We don’t will our suspension of disbelief. If the story is strong, if the teller has style and craft, our suspension of disbelief just happens to us. Think of the metaphors we commonly use to describe what stories feel like. Narrative transportation is always something don’t to us, not by us. It’s a force we’re subject to, not something we control.
We think of storytellers as metaphorical bruisers who overpower us and hold us down—they hook, grip, rivet, and transfix.
More here.
Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica:
The detonation of the first nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 is seared into our collective memory, and the world has been haunted by the prospect of a devastating nuclear apocalypse ever since. Less well-known but equally significant from a nuclear arms race standpoint was the Soviet Union’s successful detonation of a hydrogen “superbomb” in the wee hours of October 30, 1961.
Dubbed “Tsar Bomba” (loosely translated, “Emperor of Bombs”), it was the size of a small school bus—it wouldn’t even fit inside a bomber and had to be slung below the belly of the plane. The 60,000-pound (27 metric tons) test bomb’s explosive yield was 50 million tons (50 megatons) of TNT, although the design had a maximum explosive yield of 100 million tons (100 megatons).
More here.
Tolu Olasoji in Reasons to be Cheerful:
Jean Luc remembers how, when he was very young, his parents would leave their house in Kimihurura, a neighborhood of Kigali, once a month in a good mood. He didn’t know what they were smiling about.
“I would always eavesdrop on my parents whenever they came [back] from it,” he says. “It always seemed like something that brightened their Saturdays.”
Now 21 years old, it brightens Luc’s Saturdays, too.
Luc, along with just about every able-bodied Rwandan aged 18 to 65, participates in the monthly activity known as “Umuganda,” a Kinyarwanda word that means “coming together in common purpose.” On the last Saturday of every month, from 8 to 11 a.m., Rwandans across the country gather together to partake in community improvement projects. In Luc’s neighborhood, this has meant trimming back bushes that attract malaria-spreading mosquitoes, and making sure roads are clear of trash and debris. “It not only ensured that we have a clean environment,” he says, “but also had a long-run positive effect on our health and physical wellbeing. And you know what they say, a healthy nation leads to a wealthy nation.”
More here.
Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:
Purgatory seems to be on people’s minds this year – we have several new translations of Dante’s canticle to consider in time for Christmas. Fortunately, we have Dantista Robert Pogue Harrison to do the considering for us in the current holiday issue of the New York Review of Books.
Your choices: a Graywolf Purgatorio translated by poet Mary Jo Bang, another translation by Scottish poet and psychoanalyst D.M. Black (with a preface by Harrison himself – read about it here) from New York Review Books, and finally After Dante: Poets in Purgatory: Translations by Contemporary Poets edited by Nick Havely with Bernard O’Donoghue and published by Arc in Yorkshire. Harrison gives especial attention to a different kind of translation, from words into art: Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno by the late Rachel Owen, edited by David Bowe and published by Oxford’s Bodleian Library.
more here.
Walker Caplan at Lit Hub:
Today in 1982, Gabriel García Márquez received the Nobel Prize for “his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.” Twenty-eight years later, Mario Vargas Llosa would win for “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” This double win could have been a source of joy for both of them; the two were longtime friends, and Vargas Llosa wrote his doctoral thesis on One Hundred Years of Solitude. Alas, in both 1982 and 2010, the two weren’t on speaking terms—because in 1976, a romantic scandal led Vargas Llosa to sucker punch Márquez in the face at a movie screening, ending their relationship.
more here.