Bruce Robbins at The Nation:

By the middle of the ’70s, Berger was publicly triumphant. Yet it was at this very moment that he chose to retreat from public life and move to a mountain village above Geneva. Sperling does not say—perhaps no one knows—how much that move owed to the breakup of his marriage to Bostock and his new relationship with Bancroft. (Sperling is frustratingly tight-lipped about Berger’s romantic life.) But we do learn a lot about his new existence. “Many of his older neighbors continued to live by agrarian methods more or less unbroken for centuries,” Sperling tells us, and “Berger started to work alongside them. They became his teachers.” Recalling these years, Berger observed, “It was like my university. I learnt to tap a scythe, and I learnt a whole constellation of sense and value about life.” Sperling lists the activities Berger participated in—ones involving hay, cows, trees, weeds, apples, and plenty of manure—and notes that “Berger found in the working life of Quincy not only a home but an anchor: a community.”

more here.

Anna Aslanyan at the TLS:

Should humanity lie back and be satisfied to watch new thoughts make ancient verses?” What compelled François Le Lionnais to ask this question was a conversation he had with Raymond Queneau in 1960. A writer interested in mathematics, Queneau told his friend, a chemist interested in art, about a book he was working on, a sequence of ten sonnets such that any line in any of them could replace the corresponding line in any other. To experiment with this and other literary forms, the pair founded “a sort of secret society”, initially a group of eight, which began meeting monthly in Paris. “That which certain writers have introduced with talent (even with genius) in their work … the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo) intends to do systematically and scientifically, if need be through recourse to machines that process information”, Le Lionnais wrote in what was to form the group’s first manifesto. Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes – amounting to a hundred thousand billion rhymed, grammatically correct combinations – was published in 1961, the first book to be billed as Oulipian.

more here.

John Horgan in Scientific American:

First, some basic facts to convey the scale of the problem. Cancer is the second most lethal disease in the U.S., behind only heart disease. More than 1.7 million Americans were diagnosed with cancer in 2018, and more than 600,000 died. Over 15 million Americans cancer survivors are alive today. Almost four out of ten people will be diagnosed in their lifetime, according to the National Cancer Institute. Cancer has spawned a huge industrial complex involving government agencies, pharmaceutical and biomedical firms, hospitals and clinics, universities, professional societies, nonprofit foundations and media. The costs of cancer care have surged 40 percent in the last decade, from $125 billion in 2010 to $175 billion in 2020 (projected). Cancer-industry boosters claim that investments in research, testing and treatment have led to “incredible progress” and millions of “cancer deaths averted,” as the homepage of the American Cancer Society, a nonprofit that receives money from biomedical firms, puts it. A 2016 study found that cancer experts and the media often describe new treatments with terms such as “breakthrough,” “game changer,” “miracle,” “cure,” “home run,” “revolutionary,” “transformative,” “life saver,” “groundbreaking” and “marvel.”

…What’s the reality behind the hype? “No one is winning the war on cancer,” Azra Raza, an oncologist at Columbia, asserts in her 2019 book The First Cell: And the Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last. Claims of progress are “mostly hype, the same rhetoric from the same self-important voices for the past half century.” Trials have yielded improved treatments for childhood cancers and specific cancers of the blood, bone-marrow and lymph systems, Raza notes. But these successes, which involve uncommon cancers, are exceptions among a “litany of failures.”

More here.

David Thurston in Nucomintern:

Wright was born near Natchez, Mississipi a century ago in 1908.  Early in life, while living in Memphis, Wright’s father abandoned the family.  Soon afterward, his mother suffered a severe stroke, leaving her disabled, and leaving Richard Wright and his brother Leon to live at the mercy of a their extended family.  Wright’s early life is powerfully recounted in many biographies, but the most vivid source is Black Boy, his own autobiography, published in 1946.

In Black Boy, hunger serves as a powerful running metaphor, a literal description of Wright’s condition for much of his childhood, but also a way of describing his own desire to live beyond the boundaries proscribed by Jim Crow segregation in the South.

He writes:

Hunger stole upon me so slowly that at first I was not aware of what hunger really meant.  Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly… Whenever I begged for food now my mother would pour me a cup of tea which would still the clamor in my stomach for a moment or two; but a little later I would feel hunger nudging my ribs, twisting my empty guts until they ached. (BB: 14-15)

As Wright grew older, he came to love reading and desperately sought whatever literary material he could find.  This was quite controversial in the household of his grandmother, who viewed any secular reading as the work of the devil.  Wright links his physical hunger to the hunger for knowledge in this moving passage:

School opened and I began the seventh grade.  My old hunger was still with me and I lived on what I did not eat.  Perhaps the sunshine, the fresh air, and the pot liquor from the greens kept me going.  Of an evening I would sit in my room reading, and suddenly I would become aware of the smelling meat frying in a neighbor’s kitchen and I would wonder what it was like to eat as much meat as one wanted.  My mind would drift into a fantasy and I would imagine myself a son in a family that had meat on the table at each meal; then I would become disgruntled with my futile daydreams and would rise and shut the window to bar the torturing scent of meat. (BB: 137)

Throughout Wright’s years in the South, the threat of brutal racist violence cast a pall across his life.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will honor The Black History Month. This year’s theme is “African Americans and the Vote.” Readers are encouraged to send in their suggestions)

FranÇOise And The Fruit Farmer

In town to sell his fruit, he saw her—
Françoise in her summer slacks—
turning to him, coming back
to feel the swelling plums,
one held in each soft hand, breast-high,
above them her eyes enclosing him
in quietness brushed up to colors,
urgings green, thrustings yellow.

A vine-like touch, her promise seemed all profit,
surplus to lay aside and store,
quick harvest if he collapsed his stand,
pulled down his crates, rolled away his canvas:
full bounty if he washed his hands and followed,
trailing her fragrances
of melons in their prime, of berries bursting.

She turned to go, her scent adrift
as if from glistenings in soil turned off a spade.
His yearning had no time
to plant and cultivate
and wait for rain,
yet he was quick to catch a peach about to fall—
that brightness of his wrist
costing the moment that concealed her in the crowd;
and yet a perfect peach lay in his hand,
his only means to feel the way good seasons end.

A lucky day, he thought,
begins with plums.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

‘What insults my soul’, Zadie Smith has written, ‘is the idea… that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally.’

Both as novelist and essayist, Smith is one of the most subtle guides to the fraught terrain of culture and identity. The problem of ‘cultural appropriation’ – writers and artists being called out for having stepped beyond their permitted cultural boundaries to explore themes about people who are not ‘fundamentally ‘like’ us’ – is an issue that particularly troubles her. Too often these days, on opening a book or on viewing a painting, we are as likely to ask: ‘Did the author or painter have the cultural right to engage with that subject?’ or: ‘Does he or she possess the right identity?’ as: ‘Is it any good?’

So it is with the latest cultural firestorm over Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt, which tells the story of a mother and son, Lydia and Luca, forced to flee their home in Acapulco and join the migrant trail to America after their family is slaughtered by a drugs cartel. Cummins wants Americans to stop seeing migrants as a ‘faceless brown mass’ and to bear witness to the ‘tragedy of our making on our southern border’.

The novel’s supporters have hailed it as a Great American Novel, even the new The Grapes of Wrath. Its detractors point to the fact that Cummins is non-Mexican and that this wasn’t a story that was hers to tell, which is why she gets it all wrong.

More here.

Jillian Foley in Undark:

IT’S AN APPROXIMATELY 600-year-old mystery that continues to stump scholars, cryptographers, physicists, and computer scientists: a roughly 240-page medieval codex written in an indecipherable language, brimming with bizarre drawings of esoteric plants, naked women, and astrological symbols. Known as the Voynich manuscript, it defies classification, much less comprehension.

And yet, over the years a steady stream of researchers have stepped up with new claims to have cracked its secrets. Just last summer, an anthropologist at Foothill College in California declared that the text was a “vulgar Latin dialect” written in an obscure Roman shorthand. And earlier in the year, Gerard Cheshire, an academic at the University of Bristol, published a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Romance Studies arguing the script is a mix of languages he called “proto-Romance.”

Thus far, however, every claim of a Voynich solution — including both of last year’s — has been either ignored or debunked by other experts, media outlets, and Voynich obsessives. In Cheshire’s case, the University of Bristol retracted a press release highlighting his paper after other experts roundly challenged his research.

More here.

Todd Miller in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

One way to lose a popularity contest in the United States is to mention in polite company — who may be chatting about, say, the impeachment or the Mueller investigation — the numerous ways the United States has meddled in the affairs of other countries throughout many years.

Rigging elections might be the most benign offense on a list that includes engineering military coups, forcing economic policies beneficial to corporations, or blasting another country to bits. And if you mention any of these truths, and the wrong person is in the crowd, there is a chance that the rebuttal will be the following old insult: if you don’t like the country, why don’t you just leave?

Belén Fernández did just that. And it was no whim. As she explains in her book Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World, she left because the United States is, as she writes, a “large-scale lab experiment on how to best crush the human soul.”

More here.

From The Brooklyn Rail:

Andrea Scrima (Brooklyn Rail): Lance, you’ve written a novel that, in a nod to Ulysses (1922) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925) (but perhaps also to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)), takes place in a single 24-hour period—in this case, June 10, 1927. My Red Heaven—which borrows its title from a painting by the exiled German artist Otto Freundlich—is a paean to the Weimar era and a chilling anticipation of the ruinous events that would soon befall Germany and the rest of Europe and the world. What made you choose this particular summer day?

Lance Olsen: I think I was thinking less of Phillip K. Dick (whom I adore) when the idea for the novel surfaced than James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who I feel are everywhere in My Red Heaven. In 2015, I stumbled on Freundlich’s abstract Cubist painting at the Pompidou. It was completed in 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor. For some reason, that painting all at once became connotative to me of the cultural energy of the Weimar era. It also gestures toward a collage aesthetic in its collection of apparently disparate forms on a surface that simultaneously unifies them and underscores their multiplicity. I found myself wanting to see what happens when that aesthetic is translated into a narrative architectonics.

More here.

Ruth Franklin in The Atlantic:

Writing in The New York Times in June 2003, less than two years after the events of September 11 shattered the complacency with which many Americans conducted their lives, the British critic Michael Pye lamented an unlikely casualty of the new era: the ability to occupy ourselves with a superficial novel while sitting in an airport lounge or drifting at 30,000 feet. With tanks now standing guard at London’s Heathrow Airport, what was once an ordinary plane trip had acquired “an element of thoroughly unwanted suspense.” The usual reading material, Pye argued, would no longer do. “We stand in need of something stronger now: the travel book you can read while making your way through this new, alarming world.”

The Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel used these lines as an epigraph to her second novel, The Singer’s Gun (2010), a book haunted by 9/11. But her entire body of work—her new novel, The Glass Hotel, is her fifth—can be read as a response to Pye’s demand. Mandel’s deeply imagined, philosophically profound reckonings with life in an age of disaster would indeed be appropriate companions alongside a plastic cup of wine and a tray of reheated food (if we’re lucky). But they are equally welcome at home during anxious days of following the news cycle or insomniac nights of worrying about the future. “You can make an argument that the world’s become more bleak, but I feel like we always think we’re living at the end of the world,” Mandel said in a recent interview at the University of Central Florida. “When have we ever felt like it wasn’t going to be catastrophic?”

More here.

Hermione Hoby in The Guardian:

Of all the mantles that have been foisted on Toni Morrison’s shoulders, the heaviest has to be “the conscience of America”. It’s both absurd-sounding and true. For almost half a century her subject has been racial prejudice in the United States, a story that she has told and retold with a steadiness of rage and compassion. Her latest novel, God Help the Child, is her 11th and when I arrive at her apartment in Tribeca, Lower Manhattan, America’s Conscience is having her eyebrows drawn on. “For the photographer,” she explains with a chuckle.

Later, she’ll tell the photographer: “We did makeup for you. I have eyebrows and everything,” then add: “You lose all that stuff … ” The implied second half of that sentence is “when you reach my age”: Morrison turned 84 in February. Her many literary laurels include a Pulitzer in 1988 for Beloved, a Nobel in 1993, and, in 2012, the presidential medal of freedom, from her friend Barack Obama. Being America’s most venerated living writer does not, however, stop a person wanting to look good in pictures. And, it is natural that beauty and the notion of self-image are on her mind as at the centre of her new book is a striking, dark-skinned woman called Bride who tries to shield herself from her own past with surface beautification. A love story unfolds, precariously, between her and Booker, a scholarly young black man adrift in grief for a dead brother. He tells her: “scientifically there’s no such thing as race, Bride, so racism without race is a choice. Taught, of course, by those who need it, but still a choice. Folks who practice it would be nothing without it.”

Bride’s blackness is both the source of her childhood misery – her lighter-skinned mother is so horrified by it that she considers killing her baby – and of her adult success. She works in the fashion and beauty industry where, heeding one stylist’s dictum to dress only in white, she makes herself, “a panther in snow”, an exoticised “other”. The novel intimates that fetishising blackness, both for the observer and the observed, might be just as insidious as outright prejudice. There’s the ex-boyfriend, for example, who seems to claim her as some kind of racial trophy. When this young white man takes her home to his parents it’s clear “that I was there to terrorise his family, a means of threat to this nice old white couple. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ he kept repeating … His eyes were gleaming with malice.”

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will honor The Black History Month. This year’s theme is “African Americans and the Vote.” Readers are encouraged to send in their suggestions)

The shortest prayer I was ever taught was

no: what other name could a god have:

I named my son after my dead
grandfathers: blood and not blood

gather around the bent-corner Kodak
altar: I learned to cook by fetching ingredients

one by one: carrying them between
the kitchen and her swollen hands: I can

play cards and hold my liquor because I have
his blood: inheritance is what we can hold onto

not what we are given: my grandmother’s ring
was meant for me: my mother gave it away:

I kept his name: gave what I could
to my son: if I had a god who said yes: I’d ask

harder questions: where were you:
when Sandy walked through

my neighborhood: upended trees and sudden
opened roofs: my neighbor’s house and the world

could see where her baby slept: I like the new vinyl siding
and newer owners: if bad luck knew where I lived

I’d move: I broke a child once
twice: I was broken once

twice: I did what I had to do:

my mother can make ground beef
and ketchup and vinegar into my brother’s favorite food:

my favorite bible story is the one where our unlikely hero
feeds thousands with just a few fish and sleight

of hands: I have said god’s name and been ignored
so long: the night filled with prayer

by Nicole Homer
from Split This Rock

Nicole Homer is a New Jersey based writer and educator. Her work can be found in the American Academy of Poets Poem-a-Day, Muzzle, The Offing, Winter Tangerine, Rattle, The Collagist, and elsewhere. A fellow of both The Watering Hole and Callaloo, Nicole serves as an Editor and regular contributor at BlackNerdProblems, writing critique of media and pop culture, and as faculty at the Pink Door Writing Retreat for Women and Gender Non-conforming Writers of Color.

Ben Ehrenreich at The Guardian:

It is to Townsend’s credit that she does not attempt to be comprehensive. The cosmology of the Aztecs, their calendar, gods and myths, get only glancing treatment here. This is a brief history, and one told subtly and well, primarily through the lives of individuals. First among them is the woman baptised by the Spanish as Marina and known in Nahuatl as Malintzin, re-hispanicised as Malinche – a name that would become a synonym for traitor. Born to a noble lineage of a people unhappily subject to Aztec rule, she was offered as a tribute payment to the Mexica and then sold to the Chontal Maya on the Yucatán coast, one of the first communities to encounter Cortés’s ships. Given away again to the Spaniards, she survived by making herself indispensable, serving as Cortés’s concubine and interpreter as he tortured and slaughtered his way around the continent. Townsend has elsewhere devoted an entire book, Matlintzin’s Choices, to her resurrection. She emerges here as a complex and sympathetic figure, able – as indigenous Mexicans would be for generations to come – to hold many worlds within herself at once.

more here.

Janet Maslin at the NYT:

The film “Chinatown” was meticulously designed to capture a precise moment in Los Angeles’s history. Everything about its look and feel says 1937, not 1936 or 1938. In the same way, “The Big Goodbye,” Sam Wasson’s deep dig into the making of the film, is a work of exquisite precision. It’s about much more than a movie. It’s about the glorious lost Hollywood in which that 1974 movie was born.

In a scrupulously researched and reported book with a stellar cast of players, not to mention some astonishing sources, Wasson sees Roman Polanski as the genius who elevated “Chinatown” from good to great. Anyone offended by that should stay away.

more here.

Cintra Wilson at the NYRB:

In 2007 the national mood was one of ecstatic bloodlust, war drums, and camo-prints, and Dolce & Gabbana ads featured nearly naked models in apocalyptic deserts being pawed into orgasmic submission by cheetahs. The subliminal code being promoted: we are at war, war is like sex but bloodier and bigger, we’ll have our dirty way with the world, the world will love it and we don’t care who watches.

Fashion has ostensibly changed very little in the last few decades; once “everything goes,” as fashion editors announced in the 2000s, there are few drastic shifts in silhouette, either season to season or decade to decade. Changes are mainly visible through sexual temperature, e.g., after a rash of Sexy Back, there is often a whipsaw volte-face back to haute prude, as if all the models suddenly sobered up after a summer of rampant polyamory. The October 2019 cover of Harper’s Bazaar featured Demi Moore dressed in Victorian schoolmarm wear, replete with knotted collar and wire-rimmed glasses.

more here.

Christian List in the Boston Review:

According to the skeptics, human actions aren’t the result of conscious choices but are caused by physical processes in the brain and body over which people have no control. Human beings are just complex physical machines, determined by the laws of nature and prior physical conditions as much as steam engines and the solar system are so determined. The idea of free will, the skeptics say, is a holdover from a naïve worldview that has been refuted by science, just as ghosts and spirits have been refuted. You have as little control over whether to continue to read this article as you have over the date of the next total solar eclipse visible from New York. (It is due to take place on May 1, 2079.)

Such free-will skepticism may not yet be embraced by the general public. Nor is it new; the philosophical debate about whether free will is compatible with determinism stretches back centuries, and the modern scientific debate has been roiling at least since the famous neuroscience experiments on the alleged neural causes of voluntary actions conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s. Still, this skepticism makes trouble for some deeply held views about ourselves. The idea of free will is central to the way we understand ourselves as autonomous agents and to our practices of holding one another responsible.

More here.

Daniel C Dennett and Gregg D Caruso debate free will in Aeon:

[Dennett] You weren’t responsible for becoming an autonomous agent, but since you are one, it is entirely appropriate for the rest of us to hold you responsible for your deeds under all but the most dire circumstances. As [the American country singer] Ricky Skaggs once put it: ‘I can’t control the wind, but I can adjust the sails.’ To suppose that some further condition should be met in order for you or anyone else to be ‘truly deserving’ is to ignore or deny the manifest difference in abilities for self-control that we can observe and measure readily. In other words, the rationale or justification for excusing someone, holding them not deserving of criticism or punishment, is their deficit in this competence. We don’t try to reason with bears or babies or lunatics because they aren’t able to respond appropriately. Why do we reason with people? Why do we try to convince them of conclusions about free will or science or causation or anything else? Because we think – for good reason – that in general people are reasonable, are moved by reasons, can adjust their behaviour and goals in the light of reasons presented to them. There is something indirectly self-refuting in arguing that people are not moved by reasons! And that is the key to the kind of self-control which we are justified in treating as our threshold for true desert.

Caruso: I don’t disagree with you that there are important differences between agents who have the kind of rational control you highlight and those who lack it. Such a distinction is undeniable. A normal adult who is responsive to reasons differs in significant ways from one who is suffering from psychopathy, Alzheimer’s or severe mental illness. I have no issue, then, with acknowledging various degrees of ‘control’ or ‘autonomy’ – in fact, I think you and other compatibilists have done a great job highlighting these differences. My disagreement has more to do with the conditions required for what I call ‘basic desert’ moral responsibility.

More here.