Peter Rainer in The Christian Science Monitor:

Of the films of the great Indian director Satyajit Ray, the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa once said that not having seen them “is like never having seen the sun or the moon.” I completely agree. For me, Ray is perhaps the finest of all film artists. The humanism of his vision, and the lyricism he brings to it, is overwhelming. No other director has so consistently expressed what it means to be alive. No other filmmaker, male or female, has explored with such profound grace and understanding the inner lives of women. I had the honor in the fall of 2008 to be invited to Kolkata, India, to lecture to local students and film societies about his work. As a white Westerner, I was wary of coming across like some sort of postcolonial know-it-all. I needn’t have worried. Our shared love for Ray dissolved any barriers. I was accompanied by a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who was instrumental in the ongoing restoration of Ray’s films, many of which were in a state of disrepair. (Ray was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1992, shortly before his death.)

…Trying to whittle down the director’s oeuvre to a couple of movies is like picking out a couple of plays by Shakespeare. I’ve seen most of Ray’s 29 feature films, and I’m not being sentimental or starry-eyed when I say that he has the highest batting average of any major film director. The vast majority of his output is extraordinary but I will highlight here his most famous contribution, The Apu Trilogy. I consider it the finest linked series of films ever made. (Ravi Shankar composed the beautiful music.) They stand on their own but for maximum effect must be seen in order. Never having directed a movie before, Ray began his career in 1955 with “Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road)” (unrated), derived from a classic novel about rural Bengali life and its impoverishments. The focus is on little Apu and his family, and it conveys like no other movie the sense of liberation one gets from breaking free, however momentarily, from the restraints of such a world. A sequence where Apu and his older sister Durga race across the fields to glimpse a distant train – a symbol of a faraway realm – takes you to the limits of feeling.

More here.

A Mayfly

A mayfly taking off from a spike of mullein
would blunder into Deichtine’s mouth to become Cú Chulainn,
Cú Chulainn who had it within him to steer clear
of a battlefield on the shaft of his own spear,
his own spear from which he managed to augur
the fate of that part-time cataloguer,
that cataloguer who might yet transcend the crush
as its own tumult transcends the thrush,
the thrush that’s known to have tipped off avalanches
from the larch’s lowest branches,
the lowest branches of the larch
that model themselves after a triumphal arch,
a triumphal arch made of the femora
of a woman who’s even now filed under Ephemera.

by Paul Muldoon
from Poetry International Web
______________________________

Editor’s Note: In Irish mythology, Deichtine or Deichtire was the sister of Conchobar mac Nessa and the mother of Cúchulainn, a hero of ancient Ulster and the Old Irish literary saga An Táin.  

Mark Hoipkemier in The Hedgehog Review:

In ordinary times, the common good is like liberalism’s cranky old uncle: You wouldn’t deny his existence outright, though you don’t usually mention him and his foibles in polite company. But on occasion the common good, like Uncle Orlo, has a role to play in our liberal societies, and the current coronavirus pandemic is such a time. It certainly forces citizens to consider dimensions of our common life that we normally prefer to ignore. While the common good is on center stage, we might profitably reflect on its ongoing relevance for less turbulent times as well.

To be sure, the concept of the common good is a slippery one, subject to contestation and interpretation from all points of the political spectrum. This is a feature, not a bug. That said, most of the contending views draw on a core meaning articulated most clearly by Aristotle and the tradition of thinkers follow him. On this view, the good that members of a community share consists of the flourishing of that community—whether it is a nation, a town, a school, a religious body, or even a family. Irreducibly social goods of this kind are necessary for the flourishing of the “political animal,” yet totally inaccessible apart from the communities with which those goods are bound up. You cannot enjoy the goods of quarterbacking without a football team, nor those of higher education apart from a university system. These communities flourish when their members justly share in the benefits and burdens of pursuing common ends together. When common ends such as knowledge or gridiron glory are achieved with justice, the irreducibly social excellence of the community is a common good in which the members share. The main point of the­­­ “common good” is to name this shared flourishing and use it as a way to evaluate the use of political authority.

At present, away from the crowded wards of busy hospitals and a few mostly urban global hotspots, what we are facing is not the COVID-19 virus itself but the vast social anticipation of its spread, coordinated with varying degrees of competence by the directives of political authorities at different levels of government. Broad compliance with their mandates, it is worth noting, is itself evidence that contemporary society has not become as atomized or individualistic as some critics of liberal democracy claim.

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Lulu Garcia-Navarro at NPR:

In the new book How to Feed a Dictator, journalist Witold Szablowski tracks down the chefs who served these five men, to paint intimate portraits of how they were at home and at the table.

“When I read about Pol Pot, when I was researching for the book, I read somewhere that he liked the heart of cobra,” Szablowski says. “So I felt like this is the very dictatorship-ish story. But then I went to the chef and she told me that it never happened. He didn’t like the snakes, like, he was eating chicken and fish.”

The chefs were complex characters, he adds. “Sometimes they are very easy to like, but sometimes they are very easy to hate. Like, they are not easy characters, because it wasn’t an easy job.”

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Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

Last week, in Oxford, the first volunteers in the first European human trial were injected with a potential coronavirus vaccine. At the same time, Pakistan’s National Institute of Health received an offer from the Chinese pharmaceutical firm Sinopharm International Corp to take part in a trial of another potential coronavirus vaccine.

The two events reveal twin aspects of the global process of drug trials and development. On the one hand, there is the ingenuity and drive that allow a potential vaccine to emerge in a fraction of the time it would normally take, as well as the courage and selflessness shown by the volunteers risking their health to test it. On the other, the increasing use of poorer nations as testing grounds for new medicines, in trials in which the subjects often have, because of poverty and lack of access to health provision, little choice about whether to take part.

The details of the proposed Chinese trial are still unclear, but it is part of what many call the ‘globalisation of clinical trials’. Until the end of the last century, virtually all clinical trials by Western pharmaceutical companies were conducted in Europe or America. The majority still are. Over the past 20 years, however, US, European and, increasingly, Chinese companies have taken to offshoring trials to low- and middle-income countries.

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Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung at Artforum:

THERE IS A CERTAIN PROFUNDITY—a profundity that can only be qualified and quantified as tautology—a deep profundity in Santu Mofokeng’s work, which thrusts the viewers, if they are willing to listen to the images carefully, into a space of timelessness. A timelessness that speaks of the elasticity of time beyond time, beyond geography. A deep time. Not in the geological, Huttonian sense of deep time, but as in time’s transience and transcendentality. A time beyond the temporality of the lived imagination. I have found myself in this time-space often when looking at and listening to Santu’s photographic series, particularly “Landscapes,” 1988–2010; “Poisoned Landscapes,” 2008; “Townships,” 1985–87; “Child-Headed Households,” 2007; “Train Church,” 1986; “Landscapes of Trauma,” 1997–2004; “Chasing Shadows,” 1996–2006; and “Ishmael,” 1984–2005.

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Mayukh Sen in The Atlantic:

In 1986, when the director Mira Nair was scouting for her film Salaam Bombay! at the National School of Drama in New Delhi, she fixed her gaze on a young man from Jaipur. “I noticed his focus, his intensity, his very remarkable look—his hooded eyes,” she later recalled of seeing Irrfan Khan. Though she cast him, she soon decided that he was too towering at more than six feet, that he seemed too well fed to convincingly play a malnourished child. To Khan’s dismay, Nair pared his role down to scraps. “I remember sobbing all night when Mira told me that my part was reduced to merely nothing,” the actor told the Indian magazine Open in 2015. “But it changed something within me. I was prepared for anything after that.”

The film would go on to be nominated for an Oscar, but Khan’s role in it as a professional letter writer was confined to just one scene. He made an impression anyway, vanishing into the character as though he really did spend his days composing letters on the streets of Mumbai. The setback didn’t blur Khan’s focus but instead revealed it. His dogged work ethic, combined with his striking command of his craft, would make him a star unlike any India had known before. Khan walked the tightrope between commercial and art-house Hindi cinema with ease, helping viewers imagine a future in which such a binary didn’t exist. Even more impressively, he accomplished this while making major inroads in English-language films, appearing in such big-ticket titles as Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Life of Pi (2012), and Jurassic World (2015). He toiled tirelessly throughout his career, thereby cementing himself in popular memory.

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Robert Pippin at The Point:

Although the nineteenth-century philosopher G.W.F. Hegel is known as a defender of bourgeois society and so of what came to be known after him as capitalism, I think the evidence suggests that his answer to these questions is far more negative than is widely recognized, and this in a distinctive sense that remains relevant today. I want to try to explain this counterintuitive claim. Hegel, of course, writing in Germany in the early nineteenth century, had no idea of the full scope of the industrial capitalism to come, but he certainly saw that a largely agricultural and artisanal/craft/predominantly homebound economy was changing into a wage-labor economy, and his worries about that alone are apposite. What makes him especially worth returning to in our present circumstances, however, is that while material inequalities and the resulting systematic unfairness were important to him, Hegel’s principal focus was on the experiences of ourselves and others inherent in the ordinary life required by such a productive system. These issues are often misleadingly marginalized as “psychological,” but as recent events have shown, they are crucial to the possibility of the social bonds without which no society can survive.

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Gil Redelman Sidi in Nature Reviews:

Windy Evening

This old world needs propping up
When it gets this cold and windy.
The cleverly painted sets,
Oh, they’re shaking badly!
They’re about to come down.

There’ll be nothing but infinite space.
The silence supreme. Almighty silence.
Egyptian sky. Stars like torches
Of grave robbers entering the crypts of kings.
Even the wind pausing, waiting to see.

Better grab hold of that tree, Lucille.
Its shape crazed, terror-stricken.
I’ll hold on to the barn.
The chickens in it are restless.
Smart chickens, rickety world.

by Charles Simic
from A Wedding in Hell
Harcourt, 1994

Simon Kuper in Wired:

Piketty’s 753-page book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2013, sold 2.5 million copies worldwide and helped put inequality on the global agenda. But his latest, the even thicker Capital and Ideology, may prove still more influential. The book is nothing less than a global history of inequality and the stories that societies tell to justify it, from premodern India to Donald Trump’s US. It arrives just as anger about inequality (some of it generated by Piketty’s work) approaches a boiling point, and was channeled by a contender for the White House, Bernie Sanders.

Capital and Ideology builds on Piketty’s long-standing argument that inequality has soared across the world since 1980. It proposes strong remedies. Piketty wants to slap wealth taxes of 90 percent on any assets over $1 billion, and he waxes nostalgic about the postwar decades when British and American top marginal income-tax rates were over 80 percent.

Much of Piketty’s information comes from the World Inequality Database (WID), which he created with colleagues. A free website, to which over 100 researchers have contributed, it claims to include “series on income inequality for more than 30 countries, spanning most of the 20th and early 21st centuries, with over 40 additional countries now under study.” The WID’s coverage keeps getting more international, as more material from Asia, Africa, and Latin America is added. The site is now trying to expand its focus from income to the even harder-to-chart terrain of wealth.

More here.

Anthony Gottlieb in The New Yorker:

The world will never know what has happened—what a light has gone out,” the belletrist Lytton Strachey, a member of London’s Bloomsbury literary set, wrote to a friend on January 19, 1930. Frank Ramsey, a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge University, had died that day at the age of twenty-six, probably from a liver infection that he may have picked up during a swim in the River Cam. “There was something of Newton about him,” Strachey continued. “The ease and majesty of the thought—the gentleness of the temperament.”

Dons at Cambridge had known for a while that there was a sort of marvel in their midst: Ramsey made his mark soon after his arrival as an undergraduate at Newton’s old college, Trinity, in 1920. He was picked at the age of eighteen to produce the English translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” the most talked-about philosophy book of the time; two years later, he published a critique of it in the leading philosophy journal in English, Mind. G. E. Moore, the journal’s editor, who had been lecturing at Cambridge for a decade before Ramsey turned up, confessed that he was “distinctly nervous” when this first-year student was in the audience, because he was “very much cleverer than I was.” John Maynard Keynes was one of several Cambridge economists who deferred to the undergraduate Ramsey’s judgment and intellectual prowess.

When Ramsey later published a paper about rates of saving, Keynes called it “one of the most remarkable contributions to mathematical economics ever made.”

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David Byrne in Reasons to be Cheerful:

Last week, oil prices went negative. There is nowhere to store the oil being pumped out of the ground because demand, due to the coronavirus, has collapsed. There is less flying, less driving and fewer factories operating. So oil producers and their financial backers have been paying folks to take their oil. There are jokes going around that if you had a big storage tank in your basement, you could get paid to take some oil and sell it at a huge profit when, and if, the price goes up again.

West Texas is oil country. But there is something else going on in West Texas: it is a world capital of wind energy. Last year, Texas got more of its energy from wind — 23.4 percent — than any other U.S. state. In fact, if Texas were a country (which some might argue it is) it would rank fifth in the world in wind power generation, just behind Germany and India.

Wind in oil country may seem like a contradiction, but to Texans it makes perfect sense.

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Nick Ripatrazone at Poetry Magazine:

In 2011, McSweeney coined the term necropastoral to describe a literary zone of “infectiousness, anxiety, and contagion occultly present in the hygienic borders of the classic pastoral.” She identified writers in this tradition as Georges Bataille, Aimé Césaire, Leslie Scalapino, Kim Hyesoon, Christian Hawkey, and Wilfred Owen, whose “bad writing” Yeats deplored. She might also have included herself. The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014), McSweeney’s collection of critical essays, is an illuminating companion to Toxicon and for her approach to Keats more broadly. The “definitive processes of the Necropastoral are decay, vagueness, interembodiment, fluidity, seepage, inflammation, supersaturation,” she writes.

The necropastoral is also an honest consideration of the natural life cycle: humans live, die, and are often interred in the ground to settle with the soil.

more here.

Susan Tallman at the NYRB:

Richter is contemporary art’s great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation. Now eighty-eight, he is frequently described as one of the world’s “most influential” living artists, but his impact is less concrete than the phrase suggests. There is no school of Richter. His output is too quixotic, too personal, to be transferrable as a style in the manner of de Kooning or Rauschenberg. Though his influence has indeed been profound, it has played out in eyes rather than hands, shifting the ways in which we look, and what we expect looking to do for us.

In Germany he is treated as a kind of painterly public intellectual—personally diffident and professionally serious, a thoughtful oracle especially as regards the prickly territory of German history. He was among the first postwar German artists to deal with pictorial records of Nazism, and his approach to the past might be summarized as poignant pragmatism, rejecting both despair and amnesia.

more here.

Scott Kaufman in Scientific American:

Toward the end of his life, the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow was developing new insights into self-actualization – and envisioning an even higher motivation, which he called transcendence. He referred to his theory as “Theory Z“. To Maslow, “transcenders” are regularly motivated by values and experiences that go beyond the satisfaction of basic needs and the fulfillment of one’s unique potential. These “metamotivations” include a devotion to a calling outside oneself, a seeking of “peak experiences”, and a commitment to the values of Being, or the “B-values”, including truth, goodness, beauty, justice, meaningfulness, playfulness, aliveness, excellence, simplicity, elegance, and wholeness— as ultimate goals in themselves. Maslow observed that when he asked transcenders why they do what they do and what makes their life worth living, they often cited those values. There was no further reason why they devoted so much time to their work; the values were not in service of anything else, nor were they instrumental in achieving any other goal. Maslow believed that satisfaction of the “metaneeds” are necessary “to avoid illness and to achieve fullest humanness or growth. . . . They are worth living for and dying for. Contemplating them, or fusing with them gives the greatest joy that a human being is capable of.”

The Theory Z worldview is strikingly similar to the modern psychological research on wisdom. Wisdom is often conceptualized in psychological literature as involving an integration among cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions. This includes the ability to accept multiple perspectives, to respond nondefensively when challenged, to express a wide array of emotions in order to derive meaning, to critically evaluate human truths, and to become aware of the uncertain and paradoxical nature of human problems.

As clinical psychologist Deirdre Kramer puts it, “Wise people have learned to view the positive and negative and synthesize them to create a more human, more integrated sense of self, in all its frailty and vulnerability. . . . They seem able to first embrace and then transcend self-concerns to integrate their capacity for introspection with a deep and abiding concern for human relationships and generative concern for others.”

More here.