Lisa Allardice in The Guardian:

In June 2018, Colm Tóibín was four chapters into writing his most recent novel The Magician, an epic fictional biography of Thomas Mann that he had put off for decades, when he was diagnosed with cancer. “It all started with my balls,” he begins a blisteringly witty essay about his months in hospital; cancer of the testicles had spread to his lungs and liver. In bed he amuses himself by identifying the difference between blood clots (a new emergency) and cancer: “Boris Johnson would be a blood clot … Angela Merkel the cancer.”

He has seen off both Johnson and Merkel. In the month when he hopes he will have a final scan, he has just been awarded the David Cohen prize (dubbed “the UK Nobel”) for a lifetime achievement in literature. The author of 10 novels, two short story collections, three plays, several nonfiction books and countless essays, Tóibín has been shortlisted for the Booker prize three times and won the Costa novel award in 2009 for Brooklyn, about a young Irish woman who emigrates to New York in the 1950s, made into an award-winning film in 2015. He is surely Ireland’s most prolific and prestigious living writer.

Broodingly striking in appearance – in a movie he would be the gangster with a kind heart – he is animated, gracious and gossipy in conversation: we are on a video call from Los Angeles, where he spends part of the year with his boyfriend, editor Hedi El Kholti. He is very much alive (he played tennis yesterday). Meeting Tóibín in person (in more normal times) is to be struck by the disconnect between this ebullient, expansive raconteur and the spare, mournful fictional worlds for which he is famous. His short stories, in particular, are as steeped in gentle misery as his native Wexford is in rain.

More here.

Michael Patrick Hearn in The New York Times:

In 1959, long before his books “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and “Roots” made him famous, an aspiring writer named Alex Haley, fresh out of the Coast Guard, wrote to six prominent Black writers in Greenwich Village for pointers on how to break into publishing. Only James Baldwin replied, showing up at Haley’s place unannounced one afternoon and chatting with him. Haley was eternally grateful for such generous encouragement from the distinguished author.

Alex Haley, whose centenary we mark this year, was my James Baldwin. When I entered Hamilton College in the fall of 1968, I was determined to be a writer, so I signed up for Haley’s writing course, not knowing what to expect. I was already familiar with “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” his collaboration with the Black leader, which had become an instant best seller when it was published three years earlier; my sister had read it at Skidmore College and wrote to me about how powerful it was. (She signed her letter “Cindy X.”) The book blew me away, just as Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice” did later. Attending Haley’s class allowed me to observe him in action for nearly a year while he was working on his magnum opus, “Roots.”

The class was rather free-form — not exactly what Hamilton students were used to. Haley seemed to be making it up as we went along. Stylistically, he was old school, precise and a bit formal. He was always “Mr. Haley” to us; he called me “Hearn.” He enjoyed the conviviality of college life and had enormous faith in young people, but his class was not the place for moody poets or budding novelists. It was a no-nonsense course about the nuts and bolts of being a professional journalist — as Haley was at the time — and he often peppered his lectures with vivid anecdotes from his early days as a writer.

He proudly described how he started out in the Coast Guard during World War II, as the Black Cyrano de Bergerac of the South Pacific, writing letters for his lovesick shipmates to send to their sweethearts. He had dropped out of college to sign up as a mess boy and, after an article he wrote about his experiences aboard ship caught an admiral’s eye, was eventually promoted to the position — created just for him — of chief journalist for the service. He confessed that he was most productive writing at night at sea and often booked passage on freighters to meet deadlines. There were no distractions on a ship, in particular no telephones.

More here.

Diana

‘I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important
beyond all this fiddle,’ Marianne Moore said about
poetry. In any case, she was able
to see mitochondria and all the other
tiny lives – eye fixed
on the minute blotch of watercolor
compressed between two glass slides
the pupil round with wonder
just before mystery: to know what it was.

Is it more important to observe or to designate?
I fear sometimes I look askew
forget the tree where I left my keys
and my notebook, then I don’t know what to call
what, kind or relation, though I find
tranquility in the arcane language of the plane trees
behind the plaques in the botanical garden.
So I serve badly, I’m other, the odd one
out, a tourist here in so much

that pleases me and is work.
But it’s still not said (or is) if I insist
on my small scale in this myself
it’s because I don’t disconnect and touch and fail
at what’s in plain sight, raw
language clear in brute sky

by Margarida Vale de Gato
from: Lançamento
publisher: Douda Correria, Lisboa, 2016
translation (original here): Martin Earl, 2017

Raphaële Chappe in Late Light:

In 1976, Michael Jensen and William Meckling published “Theory of the Firm,” an article that became one of the most-cited economic articles ever written. In the article, Jensen and Meckling presented a theory of the firm that revolved around the goal of reducing agency costs by aligning the interests of executives with those of shareholders through incentive compensation structures such as stock options. Rooted in principal–agent considerations, this framework launched a new regime of corporate governance—the set of processes, institutions, and legal frameworks that determine how a corporation is run—that came to be known as “shareholder value maximization.” The Business Roundtable, a nonprofit association whose members are chief executive officers of major US companies, has recently issued a statement on the purpose of the corporation, professing a commitment to all stakeholders, and not just shareholders. If we take this statement at face value, the shareholder value maximization paradigm is being challenged.

As the research of William Lazonick has shown, the maximization of shareholder value was used—in the United States alone—to justify the extraction of some $3.4 trillion between 2004 and 2013 via dividends and share buy-backs, dollars that could have been spent on capital expenditures or to fund research and development activities. It should come as no surprise, then, that over the past decades increased corporate profitability has resulted neither in increased investment in labor nor in capital—a real “investment paradox” for both!

More here.

Herman Mark Schwartz in American Affairs Journal:

What exactly is financialization? How does it relate to what’s happening in the rest of the economy? Does it hinder growth, and if so, how? At the end of the nineteenth century, many on both the left and right regarded finance as a vampire sucking the lifeblood out of “real” businesses, workers, and, in Britain’s settler colonies, local econo­mies. Indeed, Stanford literature professor Franco Moretti has argued that the classic 1897 Bram Stoker novel Dracula, which birthed the modern vampire mythos, reflected British manufacturers’ fears of com­petition from new American and central European firms (primarily German) backed by powerful banks. Contemporaneous and more prosaic American and German economists also observed how finance encompassed and encumbered nonfinancial firms. The final third of Thorstein Veblen’s still relevant Theory of the Business Enterprise (1904) dissects how U.S. financial elites used the stock market to consolidate and control industry. Shortly after, in 1910, the Marxist and later Wei­mar-era finance minister Rudolf Hilferding comprehensively analyzed banks’ preeminent power in the German economy.

One century later, the same debate and language has resurfaced. Matt Taibbi famously called Goldman Sachs “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” But with Hollywood totally dependent on financial firms to capitalize its increasingly expensive and risky gambles, the focus in popular culture has shifted from vampires to the zombie firms they leave behind—bloodless, battered, neither bank­rupt nor bountiful, shuffling around aimlessly in search of better corpo­rate governance that might restore them to their prior profitable state.

More here.

Ian Hesketh in Aeon:

Big History burst on to the scene 30 years ago, promising to reinvigorate a stale and overspecialised academic discipline by situating the human past within a holistic account at a cosmic scale. The goal was to produce a story of life that could be discerned by synthesising cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology, archaeology and anthropology. This universal story, in turn, would provide students with a basic framework for their subsequent studies – and for life itself. Big History also promised to fill the existential void left by the ostensible erosion of religious beliefs. Three decades later, it’s time to take a look at how Big History has fared.

David Christian first made the case for what he called ‘Big History’ in an article in the Journal of World History in 1991. He based it on an interdisciplinary course that he had been teaching at Macquarie University in Sydney that brought together faculty members from the sciences and the humanities. The idea for the course was to situate human history within a grand historical narrative that stretched backwards in time to the origins of the cosmos in the Big Bang and forwards to include the present and future development of the human species. The course promised to transform the way students were taught history by focusing on the big picture and what united all humans rather than what divided them.

At the time, Christian was reacting to a trend in academic life towards increasing specialisation. This trend played a role in further dividing the ‘two cultures’ of knowledge represented by the arts and sciences, but also led to divisions within those two cultures as well. Christian’s discipline of history, for instance, had grown fragmented into geographic and temporal specialisations, while narrow studies of archival sources were preferred to large-scale narratives that were more common earlier in the century. At a time when, in Jean-François Lyotard’s memorable phrase from 1979, an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ represented the era’s postmodern condition, Christian headed in the opposite direction.

More here.

Thomas Belsham in Bank Underground:

The price of Bitcoin is currently around $57,000 (see Chart 1). But what is the price of Bitcoin based on? It’s just a bunch of code that exists only in cyberspace. It’s not backed by the state. There’s no recourse to a central authority. There’s no underlying asset, no stream of income. There’s just the thing itself. But does that mean it has no inherent worth? The code on which Bitcoin is based does give it scarcity value. Only 21 million Bitcoin will ever be created. And that might be worth something. That scarcity is why some people refer to Bitcoin as ‘digital gold’. But the very scarcity on which Bitcoin is based might also be its undoing. Its scarcity may even, ultimately, render Bitcoin worthless.

Chart 1: Bitcoin price in US dollars

Source: Blockchain.com

Satoshi Nakamoto said in his/her/their (the creator or creators remain anonymous) canonical paper, ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’, that ‘a peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution’. This was the driving force behind Bitcoin: create a payments system outside of the existing official financial architecture – a form of digital money, with no official entity standing behind it, just the strength of the underlying computer code.

Now, so far, Bitcoin has not performed well as money. Quick recap: money issued by central banks, fiat money, acts as a ‘store of value’ – it preserves the spending power of income and wealth, so that you can be confident that a pound, say, will buy about as much in a year’s time as it would today. It’s also a medium of exchange – you can use it as payment. And, largely by dint of satisfying those two criteria, the denomination of money – be it in the form of dollars, pounds, seashells, whatever – tends also to be used as a unit of account (a means of pricing other things in general).

More here.

Marco Roth in Tablet:

More here.

Steven Malanga in City Journal:

Throughout much of human history, famine, pestilence, and war have sent people seeking the comforts of religion. From the religious processions of Europe during the fourteenth-century Black Plague to the sharp uptick in churchgoing in America during World War II, it’s often been the case that the more terrifying times are, the more prayerful communities become.

Covid-19 has turned that historical precedent on its head. The percentage of Americans joining the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated has increased during the pandemic, according to a new survey by Pew, thanks largely to a drop in those identifying as Christian. Nearly three in ten Americans now report no religious affiliation, up from 26 percent in 2019 and nearly double the number in a Pew survey in 2007. The share of Americans who say religion is very important in their lives has declined to 41 percent today, from 56 percent in 2007.

Absent Covid, those numbers might fit into the long-term pattern of secularization in Western societies. In countries like Canada, Germany, France, and even Israel, surveys show that religious belief continues to decline and plays even less of a role today than it does in the U.S. But even in the modern age, tragedy and crisis have been the exceptions to secularization. Recent studies show that people still turn back to religion amid catastrophe—even if only temporarily. After 9/11, Gallup surveys reported a sharp uptick in the number of Americans saying that religion was an important influence—71 percent in months after the terrorist attacks, up from less than 40 percent before 9/11. Today, that number stands at a mere 16 percent. While a core of ardent religious believers, amounting to about 28 percent of Americans, said in a survey earlier this year that the pandemic had boosted their faith, some 14 percent said that it had done the opposite.

More here.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker:

What is the matter with the Democrats? On one level, the answer is simple. Voters with college degrees are increasingly siding with the Party, while those without are moving toward the Republicans, and there are more people in the second category than the first: about two in five voters in the 2020 Presidential election were college graduates. The Party’s prospects in the midterms do not look bright, and everyone involved in Democratic politics is exhorting the Party’s elected officials to do something about it. This has created a slightly comic situation, in which a group of highly credentialled people urgently instruct one another in how to appeal to those who are not.

On Twitter, the self-proclaimed popularists—a cadre of political consultants and opinion journalists alarmed about these trends—argue that policy might be the problem: the Democrats need to shake the influence of their activist élites and stop talking about issues likely to spook working-class voters, such as liberalizing immigation policy and defunding the police. To many, the Party’s fate hinges on the earthy personas of a few red-state survivors—Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Jon Tester in Montana—as if the only thing keeping the center left from a total wipeout is, as one Montana Democratic operative put it to me last week, in describing Tester, “a flat-topped, three-fingered dirt farmer.” Pick different candidates, Democrats tell their leaders, and say different things. Republicans shout for their candidates, full-throatedly, as if they were the Ohio State Buckeyes. Democrats shout at theirs.

But there is another way of thinking, in which the Democrats’ problem runs deeper than political positioning, to the question of who gets ahead and why. The chief proponent of this perspective is Michael Sandel, a political philosopher and professor at Harvard. Sandel, who is in his late sixties, first made his mark as a critic of John Rawls, but has also long been engaged with non-professional audiences, in part by teaching a storied Harvard course called Justice that in 2016 was adapted as a series by BBC Radio 4. As globalization lost its early gloss and produced some discontents, Sandel argued, in “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” that markets had usurped civic decision-making, and that the decisions that ought to be left to a democratic citizenry had wrongly been handed over to economic experts. This line of thinking made him a figure of mass interest—when he spoke in Seoul in 2012, it was to an audience of fifteen thousand.

More here.

Jim Ruland at the LA Times:

This kind of career serenity prayer led to Bissell’s biggest breakthrough: “The Disaster Artist,” which he co-wrote with the actor Greg Sestero about Sestero’s experiences making the cult film “The Room,” which many regard as the worst film ever made. The book became a bestseller and was adapted into an award-winning film in which Franco plays the mercurial director Tommy Wiseau. It almost didn’t happen.

Bissell had never written a book with another writer before. Again, he wondered if it was the right move, but he was so captivated by the material he threw caution to the wind. “The careerist would have said, ‘Tom, don’t collaborate with a male model actor on his life story about making a bad movie.’”

more here.

Alexandra Jacobs at the New York Times:

If a picture were still worth a thousand words, we’d know more than enough by now about Vivian Maier, the so-called photographer nanny whose vast trove of images was discovered piecemeal and not fully processed, in all senses of the word, after her death at 83 in 2009, just as the iPhone was going wide.

Long before we were all carrying around those little wafers of pleasure and misery, Maier made constant companions of her Brownies, Leicas and Rolleiflexes. The ensuing record of her movement throughout the world — at least 140,000 negatives of landscapes, common folk, celebrities, children, animals and garbage — has more range and rigor than any influencer’s. Despite recurring selfies, some in noirish shadow, Maier was in fact the anti-influencer: Her startling compositions were not only largely unshared and unsponsored during her lifetime — she made abortive attempts to start a postcard business — but almost entirely unseen.

more here.

Chinese Magic

Before my morning exercise
I took to stealing a glance
at the wise man sitting cross-legged
(in his painting done in Chinese ink)
near the door of the room.

When I return, exhausted, an hour later
I take three or four cookies out of the package
and prepare a cup of tea with milk,
which I drink in peace
with the first—and last—
cigarette of the morning.

The wise man of the painting,
which bears one of the Chinese Emperor’s red seals,
is not content with stealing glances,
and stares right at me through the smoke
with his two piercing eyes.
I’m so embarrassed that I don’t see his hand
as it reaches, stealthily, from the painting
to open the shutters:
a small bird from the neighbor’s garden
lands on the table
and steals some crumbs
as soon as I leave to water my plants.

The neighbors’ bird and I are thieves no longer.
We’re friends now, so steeped
in this wisdom
that one of us, this morning,
is writing a poem
while the other flaps its wings
in front of the painting on the wall—
in twin gratitude to our master,
the wise man of the painting.

by Mohamed Al-Harthy
from: Back to Writing with a Pencil
publisher: Dar al-Inteishar al-Arabi, Beirut, 2013
translation (original here): 2014, Kareem James Abu-Zeid

Clayton J. Crocket at Marginalia Review:

In this book, she explores the history of intellectual discussions of pantheism, and raises questions about why so many Western philosophers and theologians have resisted this concept. Pantheism is combined of two Greek words, pan—which means ‘all’—and theism, which consists of belief in God. Here All is God, or God is All. In most of Western thought, pantheism functions as a limit concept. That is, if we want to think about or have faith in a divinity, it needs to be related to the world, the all or everything, but pantheism names the collapse of this God into everything else to the extent that there is nothing that is not God.

One way to characterize Western religious thought is the resistance to pantheism. Rubenstein mines this resistance, and offers new ways to think about pantheism and even pantheology.

more here.

Rebecca Panovka at Bookforum:

IN THE FALL OF 1866, FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY FOUND HIMSELF barreling toward every writer’s worst nightmare: a deadline he couldn’t ignore. Having signed an ill-advised contract to avoid a trip to debtor’s prison, he now owed the publisher Fyodor Stellovsky a new novel of at least 160 pages by November 1. If he failed to deliver, Stellovsky would be entitled to publish whatever Dostoyevsky wrote over the next nine years free of charge. A more practical man might have spent his summer on the project for Stellovsky, but Dostoyevsky was simultaneously preparing segments of Crime and Punishment for serialization, and his plan to write one novel in the morning and another at night hadn’t panned out. By the beginning of October, he had not produced a single page of the promised novel. Staring down the literary equivalent of indentured servitude, he decided to try a new method to pick up the pace: hiring a stenographer and writing by dictation.

more here.