Nathan Heller at The New Yorker:

Didion, now eighty-six, has been an object of fascination ever since, boosted by the black-lace renaissance she experienced after publishing “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), her raw and ruminative account of the months following Dunne’s sudden death. Generally, writers who hold readers’ imaginations across decades do so because there’s something unsolved in their project, something that doesn’t square and thus seems subject to the realm of magic. In Didion’s case, a disconnect appears between the jobber-like shape of her writing life—a shape she often emphasizes in descriptions of her working habits—and the forms that emerged as the work accrued. For all her success, Didion was seventy before she finished a nonfiction book that was not drawn from newsstand-magazine assignments. She and Dunne started doing that work with an eye to covering the bills, and then a little more. (Their Post rates allowed them to rent a tumbledown Hollywood mansion, buy a banana-colored Corvette Stingray, raise a child, and dine well.) And yet the mosaic-like nonfiction books that Didion produced are the opposite of jobber books, or market-pitched books, or even useful, fibrous, admirably executed books. These are strange books, unusually shaped. They changed the way that journalistic storytelling and analysis were done.

more here.

Sangram Majumdar interviews Catherine Haggerty at BOMB Magazine:

SM These thoughts seem to parallel how so many aspects of your paintings live at the edge of becoming or dissolving. There’s a porousness to your world. Does this relate to the title of your show, An Echo’s Glyph, in any way?

CH I teach a Non-European Art Histories class at the School of Visual Arts, and we spend four weeks on Indigenous art and ledger drawing. I have been studying glyphs as a structure to hold meaning and identity. I love the way they float above the protagonist’s head in ledger drawings. I’ve begun to wonder how I can make my own and reference this beautiful and intelligent history in my work. An echo in itself is ephemeral, and it is fleeting. So for an echo to have a glyph, an identity marker actually seems impossible, which interested me for the title of the show. For me, glyphs get created through movement, through work, and through time, whereas Indigenous glyphs are specific and used for identification in pictographs. Ledger glyphs have to be specific, but mine are open and ambiguous which speaks to your comment about the work being porous. Each form has its own life, its own energy; they hover in space and are autonomous, not always connected to a character.

more here.

Ciara Nugent in Time:

In April 2020, during the first wave of COVID-19, Amsterdam’s city government announced it would recover from the crisis, and avoid future ones, by embracing the theory of “doughnut economics.” Laid out by British economist Kate Raworth in a 2017 book, the theory argues that 20th century economic thinking is not equipped to deal with the 21st century reality of a planet teetering on the edge of climate breakdown. Instead of equating a growing GDP with a successful society, our goal should be to fit all of human life into what Raworth calls the “sweet spot” between the “social foundation,” where everyone has what they need to live a good life, and the “environmental ceiling.” By and large, people in rich countries are living above the environmental ceiling. Those in poorer countries often fall below the social foundation. The space in between: that’s the doughnut.

Amsterdam’s ambition is to bring all 872,000 residents inside the doughnut, ensuring everyone has access to a good quality of life, but without putting more pressure on the planet than is sustainable.

More here.

David Kinney in Psyche:

Kenny Chow was born in Myanmar, and moved to New York City in 1987. He worked for years as a diamond setter for a jeweller, earning enough to buy a house for his family before he was laid off in 2011. At that point, Chow decided to become a taxi driver like his brother, scraping together financing to buy a taxi medallion for $750,000. This allowed him to operate as a sole proprietor, with the medallion as an asset.

For a while, everything went according to plan, with taxi medallions rising in value to more than $1 million. Then the bubble burst, and along came ridesharing apps such as Lyft and Uber. The value of Chow’s medallion plummeted, and it became harder to keep up the payments on his loan. In 2018, he took his own life.

We’d all recognise that Chow’s situation is unfortunate. But, arguably, he took a calculated gamble when he purchased a risky asset, and so some of us might be tempted to blame him for his own misfortune. According to one school of thought, when these sorts of bets don’t pan out, only the gambler is to blame. That might sound callous, but it’s indeed the attitude that many of us seem to hold, at least in the United States: a 2014 Pew Research report found that 39 per cent of Americans believed that poverty was due to a lack of effort on poor people’s part. When ‘effort’ includes an inability to properly weigh up the risks inherent in a decision, this suggests that, in the end, many of us think that people are responsible for their own bad luck.

I disagree with this view.

More here.

Tom Roston in OneZero:

Wikipedia was launched as the ugly stepsibling of a whole other online encyclopedia, Nupedia. That site, launched in 1999, included a rigorous seven-step process for publishing articles written by volunteers. Experts would check the information before it was published online — a kind of peer-review process — which would theoretically mean every post was credible. And painstaking. And slow to publish.

“It was too hard and too intimidating,” says Jimmy Wales, Nupedia’s founder who is now, of course, better known as the founder of Wikipedia. “We realized… we need to make it easier for people.”

Now 20 years later — Wikipedia’s birthday is this Friday — nearly 300,000 editors (or “Wikipedians”) now volunteer their time to write, edit, block, squabble over, and scrub every corner of the sprawling encyclopedia. They call it “the project,” and they are dedicated to what they call its five pillars: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia; Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view; Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute; Wikipedia’s editors should treat each other with respect and civility; and Wikipedia has no firm rules.

More here.

The Kitchen Gods

Carnage in the lot: blood freckled the chopping block —
The hen’s death is timeless, frantic.
Its numbskull lopped, one wing still drags
The pointless circle of a broken clock,
But the vein fades in my grandmother’s arm on the ax.
The old ways fade and do not come back.
The sealed aspirin does not remember the willow.
The supermarket does not remember the barnyard.
The hounds of memory come leaping and yapping.
One morning is too large to fit inside the mouth.
My grandmother’s life was a long time
Toiling between Blake’s root and lightning
Yahweh and the girlish Renaissance Christ
That plugged the flue in her kitchen wall.
Early her match flamed across the carcass.
Her hand, fresh from the piano, plunged
The void bowel and set the breadcrumb heart.
The stoves eye reddened. The day’s great spirit rose
From pies and casseroles. That was the house —
Reroofed, retiled, modernized, and rented out,
It will not glide up and lock among the stars.
The tenants will not find the pantry fully stocked
Or the brass boat where she kept the matches dry.
I find her stone and rue our last useless
Divisive arguments over the divinity of Christ.
Only where the religion goes on without a God
And the sandwich is wolfed down without blessing,
I think of us bowing at the table there:
The grand patriarch of the family holding forth
In staunch prayer, and the potato pie I worshipped.
The sweeter the pie. The shorter the prayer.

by Rodney Jones
from Transparent Gestures
Houghton Mifflin 1989

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSOj6tT2biE&ab_channel=erstaunliches

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctg5FCS1wCM&ab_channel=MiguelRodrigues

Ceri Radford in Independent:

Rahila Gupta in New Humanist:

On World Hijab Day, 1 February, the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB) will premiere Women Leaving Islam online, a documentary which explores the violence and repression that Islam’s modesty culture visits upon its women. Six women from the most diverse backgrounds, from different countries in the world and different wings of Islam but now settled in Europe and Australia, talk movingly of their journey from the hijab to freedom. I defy you not to cry along with them. None of them could have openly come out as atheists in their countries of origin without being declared an apostate or blasphemer either by the state or the wider community.

Apostasy and blasphemy are criminal offences punishable by death in 13 Muslim-majority countries. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are on that list and the home countries of two of the women: Fauzia Ilyas and Rana Ahmad. When Fauzia wanted to divorce her excessively religious and controlling husband, the court granted a divorce but gave the custody of her little daughter to her husband because he told the courts that she had renounced Islam and was a blasphemer. When her home was attacked by a mob, she fled and sought refuge in the Netherlands. Being a woman and an ex-Muslim in Pakistan is “a dangerous combination” she says. Ironically, as an asylum seeker in Amsterdam, she found that the centres were full of religious Muslims who were not welcoming of her.

Rana Ahmad was forced into going to Mecca by her mother who suspected that her religious faith was a bit shaky. Her act of rebellion, of coming out loud and proud while remaining safe, was to find a camera in a quiet part of the Kaaba, writing the words “Atheist Republic” on a piece of paper and flashing it in front of the CCTV. Eventually she fled Saudi Arabia and later described the experience: “At the moment when I was in the middle of the sea between Turkey and Greece, I get the feeling that if I die at this moment, I am happy because I tried to be free… But I ask why it has to be so expensive. It’s broken me from inside.”

More here.

Rachel Cooke at The Guardian:

A year before his death in 1992, Francis Bacon quietly slipped into the Prado in Madrid, discreetly followed by its deputy director, Manuela Mena. There, he spent 90 minutes alone with its collection of Velázquez (it was a Monday, and the museum was closed). What did Mena make of Bacon, who was then 81, and in the habit of using shoe polish to colour his hair? “I’ve never seen somebody so gentle,” she said. “He looked you straight in the eye. He wanted to see who you are. He had… this security in himself.” Bacon lingered longest, she recalled, in front of Mars Resting (1640), in which Velázquez depicts the Roman god of war with his face in shadow – a decision that whispers a loss of masculine power, even as the muscles on his torso seem to ripple like damask in a breeze – and we can assume that he was grateful for the chance to have done so: afterwards, he sent Mena the most beautiful flowers she had ever received.

more here.

Steffie Nelson at the LA Times:

In the essay, Didion describes a particular “shimmer” that would form around images in her mind, creating a frame of sorts that pulled her in, impelled her to set down words as a means of telling the scene into being. She compares this shimmer to the way a schizophrenic or someone under the influence of psychedelic drugs is purported to perceive his surroundings — ”molecular structure breaking down,” foreground and background “interacting, exchanging ions.”

“I’m not a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinogens,” she continues, “but certain images do shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you can’t miss [it].” Didion goes on to illustrate several tableaux that emitted the shimmer: the minor actress with long hair and a short halter dress, walking alone through a Las Vegas casino at 1 a.m., who inspired the dissolute ennui of her 1970 Hollywood novel, “Play It As It Lays”; and an early morning at the Panama airport, heat rising off the tarmac, into which the author inserted Charlotte Douglas, one of the main characters in “A Book of Common Prayer,” with her square-cut emerald ring and a demand for tea made from water boiled for 20 minutes (no doubt drawing on Didion’s own bout with dysentery after visiting said airport).

more here.

The Celestial Set-Up

imagine staring up into an open umbrella
_______________ you’re holding as it pivots

after the defeat after the ruin
_______________ and the flawed reconstruction
________ what’s left but drawing the body into
its own circle spinning around an axis

not like a small country flailing spikes
________ from its malignant crown
but in star clusters
islands breaking into archipelagos

by this I mean a network of events
_______________ or love moving on the epidermis
a crackle on a hand
________ in the small distance unravelling in tenses
between your past and my future

_______________ performing a horizontal music
in relation to the touch of breath
________ or the edge of this poem falling into space
where every revolution is still happening in your skin

when does holding out your hand
_______________ become a question
which way to the centre
________ and how will I know when I get there
when the city is both a practice of scars and
________ a pattern of what’s in the air
in other words in song
an accumulation of detail invisible until you’re dead

for now we wander slowly about the star sphere
________ in a discontinuity that exists as aperture
to defer the sound of an ending not to
________ stop there just look
__         don’t look at the sun

by Zoe Skoulding
from The Celestial Set-Up
publisher: Oystercatcher, 2020

Yelena Furman in The Baffler:

AS A PROFESSOR OF MINE in graduate school used to say, there is more to Russian literature than Tolstoevsky, a witticism borne out of frustration with American readers’ familiarity with just two writers at the expense of a vast and varied body of works. You can add Chekhov, Turgenev, Pushkin, and several twentieth-century names to the list of Russian writers read by English speakers. To a large degree, this paucity is not surprising: the availability of English translations depends on a combination of financial factors and publishers’ preferences, which tend toward known entities. The field of English-language translation constitutes a kind of canon of its own.

In the twenty-first century, when notions of canon formation have undergone significant expansion, the translation of Russian works in the United States has begun to reflect this shift. As the Russian Library at Columbia University Press states on its website, it publishes “works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations.” Archipelago Books, Deep Vellum, and Ugly Duckling Presse have brought out translations of several notable contemporary Russian writers. Now, NYRB Classics has published Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov (translated primarily by Donald Rayfield, along with pieces by Robert Chandler and William Edgerton), bringing together previously and newly translated works by a writer whose “absence from classic Russian literature lists must end now!” as the blurb by Gary Shteyngart exhorts. (Presumably he means in the United States, since Leskov is known in Russia, although secondarily to the nineteenth-century giants.) Rayfield recently spoke about his work on the volume for Read Russia’s Russian Literature Week.

Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895) had a tumultuous personal life and, in a related development, was a bilious human being. As Rayfield notes in his introduction, his father died when Leskov was a teenager, after which he was pawned off on relatives who did not want him. During his marriage, his wife “suffered from psychotic episodes” which Leskov “probably exacerbated,” and she lived out her days in a mental institution. Due to subsequent relationships that went awry, including one with his servant, he at a certain point “became the sole charge of four children by three different women.”

More here.

Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

It’s tempting to presume a clear line between intention and accomplishment, but Janice P. Nimura, in her enthralling new book, “The Doctors Blackwell,” tells the story of two sisters who became feminist figures almost in spite of themselves. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, in 1849, and she later enlisted her younger sister Emily to join her. Together they ran the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children and founded a women’s medical college — even though, as Nimura puts it, opening a separate school for women was just about the last thing they had planned to do.

The Blackwell sisters had initially cast themselves as exceptions, seemingly content to be the only women allowed into the room. Their temperaments were decidedly different: Elizabeth was self-assured and occasionally grandiose; Emily was quieter and more methodical, though her apparent equipoise concealed an inner turmoil. They treated the women in their care with sympathy, but empathy — the sense that they inhabited the same ordinary plane as their patients, or even other women — seemed mostly to elude them. Elizabeth, especially, would rhapsodize about humanity in the abstract, even as actual experiences of clinical intimacy could unnerve her. “I feel neither love nor pity for men, for individuals,” she declared as a young doctor, in a letter to one of her brothers. “But I have boundless love & faith in Man, and will work for the race day and night.”

The broad outlines of their lives could have made for a salutary tale about the formidable achievements of pioneering women; instead, Nimura — a gifted storyteller whose previous book, “Daughters of the Samurai,” recounted another narrative of women’s education and emancipation — offers something stranger and more absorbing. She begins with her subjects’ early lives in Bristol, where their father, a sugar refiner, introduced his young children to antislavery politics. Samuel Blackwell’s eight British-born offspring — a ninth would be born after they immigrated to the United States — “grew strong on a diet of nature, literature and political consciousness,” Nimura writes.

More here.

Morgan Meis in Slant Books:

I want to write about a certain kind of prose. It is the kind of prose that gets lost in itself. The kind of writing that tumbles head over heels and threatens to drown in its own wake. But not quite. The kind of prose that drowns completely is not so interesting. And the prose that never gets lost is not so interesting either. In my opinion. You’ve got to teeter around and stumble just at the edge there. In my opinion.

I’m thinking right now of Ingeborg Bachmann. She was a poet but she gave up poetry. She was a philosopher but she gave up philosophy. She was a person but she gave up being a person. Or tried to. I don’t know. She died in Rome in 1972 from the results of smoking a cigarette in bed. She was hooked, at that point, on pills and drink. So it was a kind of lazy, slow moving suicide. She couldn’t teeter on the edge anymore and so she just went over. Maybe.

She wrote a novel before she died. I guess you can call it a novel. Better, let’s say she wrote a piece of prose just a couple of years before that cigarette and the pills got her. It is called Malina. It is impossible to say what Malina is about and so I will not try. It isn’t about anything. It is about everything. It is the story of a love affair, but not really.

More here.

Kyle A. Thomas, Peter DeScioli, and Steven Pinker:

Imagine spilling a plate of food into your lap in front of a crowd. Afterwards, you might fix your gaze on your cell phone to avoid  acknowledging the bumble to onlookers. Similarly, after disappointing your family or colleagues, it can be hard to look them in the eye. Why do people avoid acknowledging faux pas or transgressions that they know an audience already knows about?

Following a transgression, people feel the negative self-conscious emotions of shame, embarrassment, or guilt, and these emotions help them regulate their relationships. A transgressor has displayed ineptitude, which can damage his reputation as a valuable cooperator, or a disregard for someone’s welfare, which can damage his reputation as a trustworthy cooperator. The discomfort caused by the resulting emotions, even when privately felt, motivates a person to manage these threats by drawing his attention to the transgression and motivating him to make amends and avoid similar acts in the future.

The idea that self-conscious emotions regulate relationships also explains why the presence of an audience intensifies feelings of embarrassment, shame, and guilt.

More here.