Francine Prose at Lapham’s Quarterly:

If, as one sometimes hears, people can be divided into two groups—those who run away from violence and danger and those who run toward it—something similar could be said about ones who, like Brassaï and Caravaggio, see themselves as nocturnal beings, as opposed to those who see themselves as creatures of daylight, or even identify with that loaded appellation morning person. Some, like Sancho Panza, wish only to go to bed at twilight and to sleep undisturbed—escaping the real and imagined terrors that they perhaps sense lurk in the dark. Others, like Don Quixote, feel the compulsion to stay awake for at least part of the night, to maintain a vigil.

Still others feel that, like the vampires and werewolves a daylight lover may fear, they only really come alive when the lights go out. The thieves and murderers who ply their trade through the pages of this issue can do so only under cover of darkness, and so, as Juvenal and Italo Calvinoremind us, more crimes are committed during those blackened hours. Night is said to be Satan’s favorite time; one only has to read John C. Norris’ 1871 account of the nocturnal terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan to be mostly convinced of this.

more here.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce at The New Statesman:

You don’t turn to Thorn’s memoirs (this is her second; she is also a New Statesman columnist) for rock ’n’ roll name-dropping, but for someone who can – to quote her quoting Updike – “give the mundane its beautiful due”. My brother-in-law says of being a fan of the band: “The only difference between them and us was that we were listening to Everything but the Girl, while they were in Everything but the Girl.” The past is another planet and the diary twinkles with the arcane poetry of lost brand names – Aqua Manda, Green Shield Stamps.

Though it does turn out that Thorn was a bit more rock ’n’ roll than you might have thought. There’s a lot of underage drinking (“Southern Comfort, gin and orange. LOVELY!”) and sexual danger: “Creep asked me to dance again but I said no – found out he is a policeman. Yikes!” She was 13 when she wrote that, but the boys, she says, were “always older”.

more here.

Immanuel Kant

The philosophy of white blood cells:
this is self,
this is non-self.
The starry sky of non-self,
perfectly mirrored
deep inside.
Immanuel Kant,
perfectly mirrored
deep inside.

And he knows nothing about it,
he is only afraid of drafts.
And he knows nothing about it,
though this is the critique
of pure reason.

Deep inside.

by Miroslav Holub
from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry
Vintage Books, 1996
Translation from Czech by Dana Habova and David Young

Sara Miller Llana in The Christian Science Monitor:

Last fall it was voted America’s best-loved book. This winter it made it to Broadway, grossing more at the box office in its first full week than any other play in history. Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” became a classic the moment it was published in 1960 – a tale of racial injustice set in Depression-era Alabama told through the eyes of 6-year-old Scout. It garnered the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, and its movie adaptation won three Oscars in 1963. That it has smashed theater records and risen to the top of a PBS nationwide popularity poll of American literature nearly 60 years later speaks to the lasting power of the narrative of a little girl making sense of racism and hypocrisy around her, as her father Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman.

But its endurance is not just its clear-eyed depiction of a moment in time in the American South. It is the book’s evolution itself, from a groundbreaking text in its time to one today that raises complex questions about how the story is told – who tells it and, notably for some, who doesn’t. As “To Kill a Mockingbird” gets adapted for the stage, giving more voice to the black characters that were secondary or silent in the original novel, and gets re-examined in classrooms across North America, some are asking if a time comes when a book should be retired despite the impression it made on generations of students and the nostalgia many still feel about the work. That discussion gives it even more staying power.

More here.

Emily Lordi in The New Yorker:

“I don’t want to make somebody else,” Toni Morrison’s character Sula declares, when urged to get married and have kids, “I want to make myself.” Morrison herself might have understood this to be a false dichotomy—she was a single mother of two by the time she published “Sula,” her second novel, in 1973—but, in her fiction, she split the individualist impulse to make an artful life and the domestic drive to make a home between two characters: Sula and her best friend, Nel. The tensions between these two desires animate the body of fiction and nonfiction about the private lives of women and mothers. It’s a canon that has been dominated by the accounts of white, straight writers, but it now includes Michelle Obama’s blockbuster memoir, “Becoming.”

What Obama brings to this genre is, first, a powerful sense of self, which precedes and exceeds her domestic relationships—the book’s three sections are titled “Becoming Me,” “Becoming Us,” “Becoming More”—and, second, a conviction that the roles of wife and mother are themselves undefined. She makes and remakes her relationship to both throughout her adult life. In this, she draws on the literature of black women’s self-making that “Sula” represents. The modern matron saint of that tradition is Zora Neale Hurston, who, in a 1928 essay, describes “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”: a prismatic, mutable experience of being a loner, a spectacle, an ordinary woman, a goddess (“the eternal feminine with its string of beads”). Lucille Clifton shares Hurston’s sense of the need to invent oneself in a world without reliable mirrors or maps; as she writes in a poem, from 1992, “i had no model. / born in babylon / both nonwhite and woman / what did I see to be except myself? / i made it up…” Like these writers, Obama exposes the particular pressures and thrills of black women’s self-creation. But she also details the rather more modest creation of a stable domestic life. By bringing motherhood, marriage, and self-making together in “Becoming,” she combines the possibilities that Sula and Nel represent.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, we will publish at least one post dedicated to Black History Month)

Claire Mullen in Literary Hub:

In Diego Rivera’s La creación, Nahui Olin sits among a gathering of figures that represent “the fable,” draped in gold and blue. She appears as the figure of Erotic Poetry, fitting for what she was known for at the time: her erotic writing and sexual freedom.

Olin—a painter, poet, and artists’ model—was known throughout the 1920s and 30s for her intense beauty; huge green eyes, golden hair, and an all-engulfing stare. But her image has been practically erased from the lore of that post-revolutionary time. Her piercing eyes aren’t recognizable unless one is familiar with her face, and the myth that surrounds it: of a woman who reveled in her own beauty, who painted portraits of herself with her many lovers, and who was eventually shunned by society and died, decades later, in the house that she grew up in, alone. Now, a new generation is revalorizing her story.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

A young evolutionary biologist, Barrett had come to Nebraska’s Sand Hills with a grand plan. He would build large outdoor enclosures in areas with light or dark soil, and fill them with captured mice. Over time, he would see how these rodents adapted to the different landscapes—a deliberate, real-world test of natural selection, on a scale that biologists rarely attempt.

But first, he had to find the right spots: flat terrain with the right color soil, an abundance of mice, and a willing owner. The last of these was proving especially elusive, Barrett bemoaned. Local farmers weren’t keen on giving up valuable agricultural land to some random out-of-towner. After knocking on door after door, he had come up empty.

More here.

Michelle Nicholasen in The Harvard Gazette:

When Erica Chenoweth started her predoctoral fellowship at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in 2006, she believed in the strategic logic of armed resistance. She had studied terrorism, civil war, and major revolutions — Russian, French, Algerian, and American — and suspected that only violent force had achieved major social and political change. But then a workshop led her to consider proving that violent resistance was more successful than the nonviolent kind. Since the question had never been addressed systematically, she and colleague Maria J. Stephan began a research project.

For the next two years, Chenoweth and Stephan collected data on all violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006 that resulted in the overthrow of a government or in territorial liberation. They created a data set of 323 mass actions. Chenoweth analyzed nearly 160 variables related to success criteria, participant categories, state capacity, and more. The results turned her earlier paradigm on its head — in the aggregate, nonviolent civil resistance was far more effective in producing change.

More here.

Please watch videos in order. A good understanding of high school math and physics is required.

[Thanks to Jessica Collins for showing me this.]

Vauhini Vara at The Believer:

And yet the most surprising aspect of the tiny-house phenomenon might be that, while the lifestyle has never been more visible, real-life tiny-house dwellers are hard to find. Fewer than ten thousand of the homes are estimated to exist nationwide. The impracticalities of tiny living—shoebox-sized sinks, closetless rooms—can be daunting, but it’s not only that. There are also legal obstacles. In most states, houses built on a foundation must be at least 400 square feet. To get around that, builders have taken to putting tiny houses on wheels and building them to the less restrictive codes that apply to RVs. But many states and cities bar RVs from being parked in one place year-round. Also, when you buy a tiny house, the house is all you get; you have to either buy the land to put it on, use someone else’s for free, or find a landlord willing to lease land to you.

Around the time of LaBarre and Fredell’s entrepreneurial gambit, the discrepancy between the realities of tiny living and its on-screen representations had generated a great deal of confusion. Inspired by HGTV and Pinterest, people would set out to buy tiny houses, only to learn that tiny living, in the real world, is supremely hard.

more here.

Thomas Bunstead at The Paris Review:

In June 2007, in Seville, Spain, a conference was held under the banner “New Fictioneers: The Spanish Literary Atlas.” Around forty writers and critics came together at the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art to discuss the conservatism they felt to be suffocating their national literature. United in their belief that the Spanish novel in particular was in a bad state, they pointed to a disregard for the increasing centrality of digital media in people’s lives and a knee-jerk resistance to anything that smacked of formal experimentation. They were mostly of a similar age, born in the twilight of the Franco regime, committed to the DIY punk ethos of the fledgling blogosphere, and more likely to claim lineage to J. G. Ballard or Jean Baudrillard than any garlanded compatriots of their own. Nonetheless, the only true point of agreement on the day was that they were not part of a unified movement. The conference’s inaugural address itself rejected any suggestion of a coherent generation—a commonplace criticism familiar in Spain ever since the clumping together, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the Generation of ’98. Within a few weeks, however, an article appeared dubbing these writers “The Nocilla Generation”: the most significant literary phenomenon of Spain’s democratic era now had a label, and it stuck.

more here.

Charles Nicholl at the LRB:

Complexities of interpretation are food and drink to Petrarchan scholars, and Christopher Celenza tucks into them with quiet determination in his short life-and-works overview, Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer. The subtitle is taken from one of Petrarch’s verse letters, where he describes himself as ‘peregrinus ubique’ (more precisely translated as ‘everywhere a pilgrim’). He was indeed a restless traveller. We find him in Avignon, Montpellier, Lombez, Paris, Ghent, Liège, Basel and Prague, as well as all over Italy. A learned marginalium suddenly becomes a snapshot when he apologises for his handwriting – he’s writing while on a boat. But the peregrination he describes is more a metaphysical restlessness, as he moves among different interests, disciplines, languages and political allegiances; between different versions of himself – a man of no fixed abode, ‘without earth or sky to call his own’. This also has a bearing on exile. His father was of the conservative or ‘white’ wing of the Guelph party, whose members opposed papal influence, and (like Dante, whom he knew) had been banished from Florence in 1302; Petrarch was born two years later in Arezzo and spent his boyhood and youth in Provence. ‘A sense of exile,’ Celenza says, ‘permeated Petrarch’s psychology’ and ‘inflected his writing’. It also, paradoxically, fostered in him an early sense of ‘Italianness’, in place of the regional identity denied him by exile.

more here.

Myth of Trailer Bride Cicada

Lie flat on your back for ten days, kudzu
starts at your feet, devours you.

We have our own mythology. Gods in the South small enough
to fit into a soda bottle. Smaller than the atom.

Smaller than the freckles in your eye.
Smaller than the nubs of your teeth.

Small enough to shed your skin for skin of damned dogs.
Of snakes. To be lifted off a ladder in a backyard wrestling pit,

crashing to the earth, wings fused into your body. The mythology
of a broken body means no shit work for a while.

Means a check for every month,
cash straight into your body like

oxygen sucked from broken marrow.
Tell us again the story of the trailer bride, who turned into a cicada.

Screamed her tiny wings together as her husband removed
antlers from a buck. Played dirges on his saw, each note bent,

breaking timbres against the animal’s warm body.
Tell us the story of the young hicks who were copping,

and found their way into the backwoods.
And the mountains begged to be put back together.

And the shit jobs never returned, and the hicks never got straight.
The bride with her breast placed to her child’s lips, tell me how a howl

becomes a dumbing, endless hum, how a child can grow a silver crown,
head shaved the next morning,

flakes of silver petals thick enough for feet to disappear,
thick enough for sprouted wings to fan patterns on a pleated linoleum floor.

A bruise on the face slowly heals. A split lip has time to be sewn shut. Your
wings itch like phantom
limbs from a phantom body.

by Liam Hysjulien’s
from Bodega Magazine, August 21014

From BlackPast:

I promised God and some other responsible characters, including a bench of bishops, that I was not going to part my lips concerning the U.S. Supreme Court decision on ending segregation in the public schools of the South. But since a lot of time has passed and no one seems to touch on what to me appears to be the most important point in the hassle, I break my silence just this once. Consider me as just thinking out loud.

The whole matter revolves around the self-respect of my people. How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them? The American Indian has never been spoken of as a minority and chiefly because there is no whine in the Indian. Certainly he fought, and valiantly for his lands, and rightfully so, but it is inconceivable of an Indian to seek forcible association with anyone. His well known pride and self-respect would save him from that. I take the Indian position.

Now a great clamor will arise in certain quarters that I seek to deny the Negro children of the South their rights, and therefore I am one of those “handkerchief-head niggers” who bow low before the white man and sell out my own people out of cowardice. However an analytical glance will show that that is not the case. If there are not adequate Negro schools in Florida, and there is some residual, some inherent and unchangeable quality in white schools, impossible to duplicate anywhere else, then I am the first to insist that Negro children of Florida be allowed to share this boon. But if there are adequate Negro schools and prepared instructors and instructions, then there is nothing different except the presence of white people.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, we will publish at least one post dedicated to Black History Month)