Sarah Blackwood in The Paris Review:

“Undine Spragg—how can you?” her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid “bell-boy” had just brought in.

It strikes me as odd that the opening of Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel, The Custom of the Country, rarely appears on those “best first lines in literature” lists that go around every so often. The sentence has everything that makes the novel, and Wharton’s work in general, so great: vigor, voice, irony, detail. Through it, Wharton sketches a tense and dissonant world in which the colloquial and the bejeweled come into uncomfortable relation with each other. Dramatic and dynamic, this world nevertheless feels intensely claustrophobic. From the first five words of the novel, the reader is tied to a repetitive present tense that feels inescapable—no future, no past, just a boxed-in present (“how can you?” rather than the usual “how could you?”).

Each time we read the novel, it seems, the continuous present of the deliciously named Undine Spragg happens to us all over again. The Custom of the Country, many recent commentators have noted, feels uncannily up to the minute. Its heroine, the beautiful, social-climbing, rapacious, and empty-souled Undine Spragg, reminds us of a tabloid fixture or a reality television star; her currency as a figure who exemplifies the ideas about white womanhood in every era has remained constant. If the morality of divorce—the main “problem” in this 1913 “problem novel”—is perhaps no longer the most pressing social phenomenon to imaginatively explore, Undine’s grasping, financially speculative approach to personal identity and relationships still is.

More here.

The Fiddler

In a little Hungarian cafe
Men and women are drinking
Yellow wine in tall goblets.

Through the milky haze of the smoke,
The fiddler, under-sized, blond,
Leans to his violin
As to the breast of a woman.
Red hair kindles to fire
On the black of his coat-sleeve,
Where his white thin hand
Trembles and dives,
Like a sliver of moonlight,
When wind has broken the water.

by Lola Ridge
from Poetry.com

The Death of the Wounded Child

… In the night once more . . . It is the fever-
hammer in the bandaged temples
of the boy. “Mother! The yellow bird!
The butterflies are black and purple!”

… “Sleep, my son.” The mother by the bed
squeezes the tiny hand. “My burning flower,
my bloodflower, who freezes you? Tell me!”
There is an odor of lavender in the stark bedroom;

… outside the swollen moon is turning white
the cupola and the steeple of the darkened city.
An invisible aeroplane hums.

… “Are you asleep, sweet flower of my blood?”
The pane on the balcony window shivers.
“Oh cold, cold, cold, cold, cold.”

by Antonio Machado
from Times Alone
Wesleyan University Press, 1983

Original Spanish at: Read More

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Patrick Barkham at The Guardian:

The greatest living writer on the English countryside will celebrate his 100th birthday this week at his Suffolk farmhouse, surrounded by the friends he calls his “dear ones”. Ronald Blythe is best known for Akenfield, his moving and intimate portrait of a Suffolk village through the lives of its residents, which became an instant classic when published in 1969. But Blythe, who has spent all his 10 decades living within 50 miles of where he was born, has also devoted millions more words – in history, fiction, and luminous essays and columns – to describe with poetry and precision not simply rural folk but the very essence of existence.

His writing is honoured in a new volume, Next to Nature, a highlights package of nearly a quarter-century of weekly columns for the Church Times, written between 1993 and 2017. Fellow writers agree that Blythe’s work has improved with age.

more here.

Dwight Garner at the New York Times:

Opera is all about saying goodbye, Virgil Thomson is reputed to have said, and ballet is all about saying hello.

In “Mr. B,” a sensitive, stately and often thrilling new biography of the Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine, Jennifer Homans finds a bittersweet tone to capture Balanchine’s many leave-takings — the way he was chased, as if he were Chaplin’s Tramp, across the first half of the 20th century.

When World War I arrived, Balanchine was a young dance student in czarist Russia. Three years later, at 13, he was forced to scavenge for food when the revolution disrupted his life. He spent the interwar years shuffling between Weimar Berlin, before Hitler put an end to that decadent and creative intellectual milieu, and Paris, Monte Carlo and London.

more here.

Shawna Williams in The Scientist:

For years, some researchers have looked to psychedelic drugs, including psilocybin (the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms), as a potential treatment for some psychiatric conditions. The largest trial to date of psilocybin for depression, published today (November 3) in the New England Journal of Medicine, finds that a dose of synthetic psilocybin combined with counseling did alleviate symptoms for some patients. But for some participants who did respond, the effects wore off within 12 weeks of the treatment.

“It’s a big step forward for the field of psychedelic research and depression treatment,” Jimmy Potash, who oversees psychedelics research at Johns Hopkins but was not involved in the study, tells STAT. The durability of the response is “not as good as you’d like, but it’s still quite good,” he adds. The Phase 2 clinical trial, funded in part by the mental health care startup Compass Pathways, which makes the synthetic psilocybin used in the study, included 233 patients for whom at least two depression medications had not worked. The participants were randomly assigned to receive psilocybin at one of three dosing levels: 25 mg, 10 mg, or 1 mg (used as a control). Volunteers in all three groups received counseling before and after the psilocybin use and were monitored during their experience with the drug.

Three weeks after treatment, all three groups saw a fall in their average score on a standard rating scale of depression indicators (indicating less severe cases) relative to their scores prior to treatment, according to the paper, with the largest improvement in the highest-dose group. STAT notes that 29 percent of those high-dose participants were in remission at the three-week mark, a number that dropped to 20 percent at 12 weeks, while 37 percent had their depression score halved by the three-week mark.

More here.

Aatish Taseer in The New York Times:

ON A MORNING of haunting heat in Seville, I sought out the tomb of Ferdinand III. There, in the Gothic cool, older Spaniards came and went, dropping to one knee and crossing themselves before the sepulcher of the Castilian monarch. There were men in staid tucked-in shirts, gray checked with yellow, and women with short-cropped hair and knee-length dresses, slim belts around their waists. They sat in pews under a coffered ceiling, dourly communing with El Santo, the patron saint of what would come to be called La Reconquista — the man under whom five and a half centuries of Muslim rule had in 1248 come to an end in this town: Seville, or Ishbiliya, as it was known then.

On a banner above the altar, silver letters against a crimson ground read, “Per Me Reges Regnant” (“By Me, Kings Reign”). The Virgin of Kings, dressed in orchid pink, gazed down at this scene of historical piety. Black-haired putti, prying and vaguely deviant, swarmed around her. The organ played. Latin chants filled the ribbed recesses of the largest Gothic church in Christendom, which retained as its belfry the fabled minaret (La Giralda, or “weather vane”) of the 12th-century mosque on whose bones it had been built.

More here.

Haruki Murakami in Interview:

You often write your novels abroad. What has been your favorite foreign locale for writing? 

MURAKAMI: When I was writing a novel on an island in Greece, I could see a flock of sheep right outside the window and I wrote the novel every day looking at them. It’s not like the sheep helped in any special way, but they might have encouraged me. The novel I was writing then was Norwegian Wood. Not a single sheep in the story.

How important is the classification of “Japanese writer” to you? 

MURAKAMI: I write novels in Japanese, so I guess that’s why I’m called a “Japanese writer.” It’s easiest for me to write in Japanese, but it doesn’t mean anything beyond that. I do, though, like being in Japan because of all the delicious soba buckwheat noodle shops.

More here.

Madeleine Cuff in New Scientist:

In the holiday resort of Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt, the stage is being set for COP27, the next round of UN climate talks, which kicks off on 6 November.

As delegates prepared to head to the summit, a flurry of sobering reports released last week reminded the world that greenhouse gas concentrations are rising and hopes of delivering on the promises of the 2015 Paris Agreement are fading fast.

First came the stark but unsurprising news from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that atmospheric concentrations of planet-warming carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane hit a record high in 2021 and have continued to rise throughout 2022.

Atmospheric CO₂ , responsible for about 66 per cent of global warming since 1750, hit 415.5 parts per million in 2021, the WMO said. Meanwhile, methane registered the largest single-year increase since researchers started keeping records 40 years ago.

More here.

Nouriel Roubini in Project Syndicate:

Severe megathreats are imperiling our future – not just our jobs, incomes, wealth, and the global economy, but also the relative peace, prosperity, and progress achieved over the past 75 years. Many of these threats were not even on our radar during the prosperous post-World War II era. I grew up in the Middle East and Europe from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, and I never worried about climate change potentially destroying the planet. Most of us had barely even heard of the problem, and greenhouse-gas emissions were still relatively low, compared to where they would soon be.

Moreover, after the US-Soviet détente and US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in the early 1970s, I never really worried about another war among great powers, let alone a nuclear one. The term “pandemic” didn’t register in my consciousness, either, because the last major one had been in 1918. And I didn’t fathom that artificial intelligence might someday destroy most jobs and render Homo sapiens obsolete, because those were the years of the long “AI winter.

Similarly, terms like “deglobalization” and “trade war” had no purchase during this period.

More here.

Darren Hudson Hick at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

All too often, philosophers of art (myself included) deal with art at a remove, at their desks, surrounded by books, countless tabs open in their browser windows. Reading Sherri Irvin’s book feels like you’re being led through a gallery that Irvin herself has carefully curated—indeed, led through the hidden corridors behind the gallery walls. Despite the title of this volume, Irvin makes the art she discusses feel material in a way that other philosophers just don’t—maybe can’t. Irvin makes me appreciate the art she discusses; she makes me love it.

In this book, her first monograph, Irvin brings together, revises, and expands upon a view she has been developing for two decades. Irvin’s focus here is on contemporary art, an artworld term imprecisely describing a broad swath of visual art created since the late 1960s, art that tends to expand, defy, or at least challenge longstanding traditions of art (“yes, it’s a painting, but that’s not all it is”), but which has nevertheless been embraced by gallerists and museum curators. Contemporary art doesn’t tend to look like the art that has preceded it, and when it does, something is afoot.

more here.

Ed Simon at The Millions:

Maronite priest Antonio Fausto Naironi once claimed that the greatest of miracles happened in ninth-century Ethiopia. It was then and there, in the province of Oromia, that a young shepherd named Kaldi noticed that his goats were prone to running, leaping, and dancing after they had eaten blood-red berries from a mysterious bush. Kaldi chewed on a few beans himself, and suddenly he was awake. Gathering handfuls of them, he brought them to a local abbot. Disgusted with the very idea of such a shortcut to enlightenment, the monk threw the beans into a fire, but the other brothers smelled the delicious fragrance and gathered. Naironi is a bit scant on the details, but for some reason the grounds were filtered into water, and the first cup of coffee was brewed.

Such a perfect creation myth. Coffee, from the highlands of Ethiopia (still one of the largest producers), that ancient land which was home to the Queen of Sheba, the Ark of the Covenant, and where humanity first walked. The youthful innocence of Kaldi. And of course, the dancing goats, so perfectly Dionysian, so exquisitely demonic.

more here.

Beasts Bounding Through Time

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory
moving this little bit of light toward us
impossibly.

by Charles Bukowski
from Poetic Outlaws

Lydialyle Gibson in Harvard Magazine:

“SOMETIMES I THINK I know where I’m going, but once you draw a line, you know, it tends to have a mind of its own,” says painter Judith Seligson ’72. She’s standing in the living room of her Manhattan apartment, looking at an installation of her work that hangs above the sofa: a carefully arranged group of geometric abstractions in oil paint—her signature style—with suggestive titles like “Do Less,” “Danger,” “Super-Fluidity,” and “Missing in Action.” The works span some 20 years of artistic endeavor, their odd angles and straight lines playing off each other from their separate framed canvases, with deep purples and greens and oranges softening into pale pinks and blues. “To me, each shape is like an individual in a community,” Seligson says. “They cohere to themselves, but they also interact.” Eventually, “the painting finds a place where this shape or that color can kind of break off like a piece of cake.” That’s when she knows something is complete.

More here.