At Least

Adam Shatz in The New Yorker:

Twice a month, when my daughter, Ella, spends the weekend with me, my apartment turns into a cooking school. Ella is thirteen and started to make cookies and scones a few years ago. She moved on to tarts, fresh tagliatelle, and, lately, croissants. Early on Saturdays, before heading to our local green market, we have impassioned conversations about her dinner plans. Pork adobo with citrus and coriander, she asks me, or red lentils simmered Ethiopian-style, with fresh tomatoes and berbere? And then she’s sure to ask if she can bake. I’m already thinking of the scabs of flour I’ll be scraping off my counter on Monday morning, and of how much pâtisserie I’ll have consumed, but I give in. I love watching the skill and authority of her fingers in a bowl of flour, eggs, butter, and chocolate; her intensity as she pipes ganache from a pastry bag or dusts éclairs with finely ground pistachios.

When she’s not cooking, she often watches shows like “Chef’s Table,” the sumptuously produced Netflix series featuring sombre, admiring portraits of culinary stars. With painterly cinematography and introspective voice-overs, “Chef’s Table” pays professional cooks the kind of homage once reserved for artists. Most of the dishes are impossible to replicate in a home kitchen—who has the time to make Enrique Olvera’s thousand-day mole, or even find all the ingredients?—but Ella doesn’t watch the show for recipes. She watches it for the spectacle of mastery, much as other teens hang out on YouTube watching Lionel Messi’s greatest goals or Yuja Wang playing “Flight of the Bumblebee.”

The show’s self-serious musings on the mysteries of food make me cringe a bit, but I was once fluent in that idiom. From the time I was nine until well into my teens, I was determined to be a chef. I ran a catering business out of my parents’ house, in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, and did apprenticeships with notable chefs.

More here.

Aaron Timms in The New Republic:

Did he change, or did we? For weeks now, Nate Silver has been morphing before our eyes into exactly the kind of bloviator he made his name mocking. Tired perhaps of the slow and predictable business of prognostication—the elections so far apart from each other, the long months of waiting and lousy web traffic in between—the founder of data journalism outlet FiveThirtyEight has transformed his Twitter account into a font of provocatively bad opinions. Some of Nate’s Takes have touched on his speciality in data-based political forecasting: He has told us, for instance, not to get too excited about Democratic candidates’ (read: Bernie’s) fundraising numbers because polls, rather than cash, are the best predictor of electoral success, whereas a year ago he was saying just the opposite. But he has also wandered into more exotic territory, offering up a mix of bad policy ideas (elite colleges should admit as many legacy students and children of rich donors as they want) and sanctimonious tone policing (liberals should feel ashamed of themselves for not allowing the president to revel in the murder of ISIS’s chief lieutenant) with the unyielding, over-the-spectacles glare of an imaginary Concerned of Brooklyn Heights.

Terry Eagleton at The Guardian:

Other intriguing details abound. When Notre Dame was being built in medieval Paris, a collective of prostitutes offered to pay for one of its windows and dedicate it to the Virgin Mary. Followers of Satan around the same time were obliged to suck on the tongue of a giant toad and lick the anus of a black cat. Galileo had a craving for celebrity and was an inveterate social climber. Yet, though the book is full of such titbits, there is a seriousness at its heart. Holland argues that all “western” moral and social norms are the product of the Christian revolution. He is haunted by St Paul’s claim that God chose the weak and foolish things of the world to shame the strong, and to drive the point home he might have looked at the beginning of Luke’s gospel. We encounter there an obscure young Jewish woman called Mary who is pregnant with Jesus, and Luke puts into her mouth a cry of praise that some scholars believe is a Zealot chant. It speaks of how you will know who God is when you see the poor coming to power and the rich sent empty away. It is this which must be weighed in the balance against the killing fields of Christendom.

more here.

Andrew Marzoni at The Baffler:

Adorno was known for his skill at anticipating apparent contradictions, gymnastically reframing objections to his theses as their necessary conclusions, and he would not have been shocked by the cultural capital afforded his byline any more than the ongoing devaluation of the art he held above all else. An insufferable elitist who championed art for refusing to conform to the standards of public consumption, his bad takes on jazz—attributing its popularity to sadomasochism, comparing the jitterbug to St. Vitus’s dance—are lamented, and sometimes excused for their ignorance: the only jazz Adorno knew, which he pronounced more like “yatz,” was the kind played by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra and increasingly derivative (mostly Caucasian) dance bands that entertained the Weimar bourgeoisie. As Stuart Jeffries notes in Verso’s Grand Hotel Abyss, Adorno spent the 1940s only a few miles from the clubs on Central Avenue where Dexter Gordon, Eric Dolphy, and Charles Mingus inaugurated a bop renaissance on the West Coast, but there’s no record of the critic going anywhere near them. According to New Yorker critic Alex Ross, Adorno “shows no sympathy for the African-American experience, which was finding a new platform through jazz and popular song. The writing is polemical, and not remotely dialectical.”

more here.

Richard Brody at The New Yorker:

Agnès Varda’s film “Varda by Agnès,” which is being released posthumously, on Friday (she died in March, at the age of ninety), is her retrospective of her own career, punctuated by deep dives into her personal life and newly filmed sidebars of interviews and self-displaying theatrics. Yet it’s more than just Varda’s last movie; it’s the last scene of her last act, the capper to a twenty-year span of work that includes some of her most original and significant films. At the same time, this period in her career and her life coincides with a shift in the history of cinema that she helped to define and that she responded to with a practical inspiration that is a mark of her historic art. That very story is one that she tells in “Varda by Agnès.”

Varda relies on a pair of public discussions to structure the overview of her career. The first hour leaps around, juxtaposing her films from different decades and circumstances by way of her insightful thematic connections, and ends at a crucial waypoint in her life: her last dramatic feature, which she made in the mid-nineteen-nineties.

more here.

Hannah Giorgis in The Atlantic:

Hala, the new film from the writer-director Minhal Baig, is a study in contrasts. The coming-of-age story follows its titular protagonist, a Pakistani American teenager played by Geraldine Viswanathan, as she navigates the confusion of adolescence in the United States. The divides she encounters are apparent almost immediately: parents versus classmates; Pakistan versus America; Islamic tenets versus romantic freedom. Hala skateboards to school and writes poetry. She also clashes with her strict mother and father, who chide her relentlessly for any number of activities her white friends speak about with casual disregard.

Movies about teens fighting with their parents are nothing new. But in examining the binaries that 17-year-old Hala confronts, Baig’s film joins a growing group of films and TV shows centered on young Muslim characters in America. Like some prior productions, including Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series Master of None and Kumail Nanjiani’s romantic comedy The Big Sick, Hala has received criticism for featuring yet another protagonist who has a fraught relationship with Islam and who sees her white love interest as one key to self-actualization. Capturing an entire community’s relationship to their religion is a staggering mandate, one that’s impossible for any one production (or two or three) to achieve. As a result, Hala is sharpest when viewed on its own terms—that is, in the way many coming-of-age films about white teens are. The film stands out most for its deft character work with Hala and her parents, especially when it doesn’t treat the trio as case studies for sweeping ideas about Muslim identity.

More here.

Aaron Kheriaty in The Scientist:

On June 9, 2016, a law permitting physician-assisted suicide went into effect in California. The same day, Dr. Lonny Shavelson, an emergency medicine physician, opened the Bay Area End of Life Options clinic to provide the newly legal service. A longtime activist for the cause, Shavelson’s interest began in adolescence. In an interview last year, he describes how, when he was fourteen, his severely depressed mother “enrolled me in pacts for her death.” Despite acknowledging that her request was “pathological,” he eventually chose to become a doctor “not only to help her in her illness but also to help her die.” In his 1995 book A Chosen Death, Shavelson recounted underground assisted suicides he witnessed. In one case, “Sarah,” the leader of a local advocacy group, took an especially active role when “Gene,” an elderly, partially paralyzed alcoholic man, asked for help with ending his life. But things did not go as planned, when Gene jolted awake in the middle of the process:

“It’s cold,” he screamed, and his good hand flew up to tear off the plastic bag. Sarah’s hand caught Gene’s at the wrist and held it. His body thrust upwards. She pulled his arm away and lay across Gene’s shoulders. Sarah rocked back and forth, pinning him down, her fingers twisting the bag to seal it tight at his neck as she repeated, “The light, Gene, go toward the light.” Gene’s body pushed against Sarah’s. Then he stopped moving.

Shavelson watched, frozen with ambivalence at whether to intervene. He did not.

Shavelson seems to have taken away from this event a sense of the dire need for reliable methods for ending life. Ignorance of these methods, he argued in last year’s interview, was much of what motivated doctors to oppose assisted suicide:

Everybody I talked to said we don’t know how to do this. So we don’t agree with it. And over time, what’s wonderful to watch is how patients have been the leading force…. As [hospices] started getting patient requests, they couldn’t just keep saying no. Hospices are fundamentally a loving and caring and responsive organization.

He and his colleagues have thus made themselves “ambassadors,” training physicians around the state on proper suicide methods to meet patient demand. As of last November, Dr. Shavelson and his staff had been at the bedside of 114 people whose suicides they assisted.

More here.

Kunitzieform

Did you know T. S. Eliot wore eye shadow
sometimes, I asked Stanley, and he chuckled—one
gurgle in the bubble chamber
of the spirit level—and his eyes had that sensual
brightness, and his big, fleshless, elegant
hand lifted, and soared over, and dropped,
a couple of times, on the back of my hand, like
being patted by matter. I didn’t
know that, he musicalled up.
Someone said he’d dust his lids
with green, so someone would say, “Are you
okay, Tom,” and Stanley said,
It’s a hard way to go about doing that,
and I rubbed the heel of my hand over the rough
nest-material of Stanley’s tweed
sleeve, and said, You have a generous heart, I
sometimes laugh at Eliot for that, like some
kind of revenge on his politics—
what about you, Stanley, what were your
feelings about him? And Stanley
drew on time, and space, he drew on
his powers, and their sleep, and their dreams, he worked,
like God not resting on the sixth day,
and then, when his thought was done, he turned his
long, loping engine toward the task
of telling it, word by word. He said, I was,
and paused—I love to pause with him, on the
long boat, our hands trailing in the
water of a hundred years—I was,
pause, pause, we breathe in,
Read more »

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

I have recently been informed that I am “outside of the sociology” of academic philosophy. (The person who said this of me is someone I like and admire, and whose presence on the scene I value, very much.) I think this means, for one thing, that I do not display a number of the shibboleths that are commonly used by members of the clan to identify other members, like Vikings with their brooches. Sometimes this is because I refuse to display them, and sometimes this is because I am unaware that they exist.

One of the most common shibboleths, of which I have been aware since grad school, is that one must ostentatiously grumble about all those times when strangers, for example seat neighbors on airplanes, innocently ask “what [your] philosophy is”. One is supposed to complain to fellow clan members that hoi polloi do not even know that a true philosopher does not “have a philosophy”, all while delicately avoiding use of a term like “hoi polloi” that might make explicit the class-based nature of this disdain.

Here’s the thing though: I do have a philosophy, and I like being asked what it is. So this is two strikes against me in my already contested petition for residence within the sociology of philosophy (a residence I had too casually assumed permanent when I got my Ph.D. and went out into the world and just kept doing philosophy). But when I explain what my philosophy is, rather than simply acknowledging that I have one, that’s when I really risk being taken for an outsider. Here we are not talking about a mere shibboleth or vocational tic, but about which of the historical legacies of philosophy we wish to see carried over into the future.

More here.

Helen Thomson in New Scientist:

The technique, officially called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), is being carried out on people who arrive at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore with an acute trauma – such as a gunshot or stab wound – and have had a cardiac arrest. Their heart will have stopped beating and they will have lost more than half their blood. There are only minutes to operate, with a less than 5 per cent chance that they would normally survive.

EPR involves rapidly cooling a person to around 10 to 15°C by replacing all of their blood with ice-cold saline. The patient’s brain activity almost completely stops. They are then disconnected from the cooling system and their body – which would otherwise be classified as dead – is moved to the operating theatre.

A surgical team then has 2 hours to fix the person’s injuries before they are warmed up and their heart restarted.

More here.

Arundhati Roy in The Nation:

In India today, a shadow world is creeping up on us in broad daylight. It is becoming more and more difficult to communicate the scale of the crisis even to ourselves. An accurate description runs the risk of sounding like hyperbole. And so, for the sake of credibility and good manners, we groom the creature that has sunk its teeth into us—we comb out its hair and wipe its dripping jaw to make it more personable in polite company. India isn’t by any means the worst, or most dangerous, place in the world—at least not yet—but perhaps the divergence between what it could have been and what it has become makes it the most tragic.

Right now, 7 million people in the valley of Kashmir, overwhelming numbers of whom do not wish to be citizens of India and have fought for decades for their right to self-determination, are locked down under a digital siege and the densest military occupation in the world. Simultaneously, in the eastern state of Assam, almost two million people who long to belong to India have found their names missing from the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and risk being declared stateless.

More here.

Martin Bell at Literary Review:

Hiroshima ran to 31,000 words. The original article filled the entire edition of the New Yorker on 31 August 1946, the first time in the magazine’s history that this had ever happened. It was serialised in full in eighty other publications around the world and eventually even in Japan. Subsequently republished in book form, it has been in print ever since and has sold more than three million copies. And yet, unusually for a work of journalism, it appeared more than a year after the events it described. There were reasons for the delay. One was the difficulty of accessing Hiroshima and the severity of postwar censorship. Another was the effect of the demonisation of the Japanese people in the American media after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It took an original mind and an eloquent pen to portray them as victims as well as aggressors. Hersey possessed both. Among his peers, in my view, he was rivalled only by the late and great James Cameron of the equally late and great News Chronicle.

more here.

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

Few composers—in his time and in the centuries since—have been as deft as Purcell at marrying text and sound. His opera Dido and Aeneas is a seminal work, the most important of his compositions for the stage, and his songs, of which he wrote more than 100, are exemplary (such 20th-century English composers as Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett would pay brilliant homage to them in their own ways). Between 1692 and 1695, Purcell composed three settings of Colonel Heveningham’s poem, all of them beautiful. The first two are more or less similar, but the third is a different work altogether, more florid, more darkly evocative.

It opens with a brief, enigmatic figure in the bass line, after which the soloist sings in the style of a recitative. As if to highlight the departure from Shakespeare (the exhortation in the text here is to Sing on, not play on), Purcell repeats that particular phrase, Sing on, each repetition becoming more and more embellished. The entire song is characterized by its melismatic style—that is, its use of melisma: the assigning of many notes, often in the form of an ornate run, to the singing of a single syllable.

more here.

Erica Wagner at The New Statesman:

Revising One Sentence” is the title of one of the essays in Lydia Davis’s masterful, lucid collection. No single piece could capture the essence of this extraordinary writer, but a new reader might wish to start here. This is the sentence in question, in its final version: “She walks around the house balancing on the balls of her feet, sometimes whistling and singing, sometimes talking to herself, sometimes stopping dead in a fencing position.” Nothing to see here, you might think. But think again.

The essay, a compact eight pages, distils Davis’s practice as she considers the choices she makes. We learn of the notebook she keeps beside her “official” work, a place for her thoughts about herself and the world to be set down freely. Everything she writes begins in this notebook, a habit that makes her “not afraid”, because there is no pressure, at the outset, to turn her work into a story. (How honest is that “not afraid”! So much truer than “bold” or “brave”.)

more here.

In Vienna [August 24]

If you have cigarettes prepare
to smoke them now
in the sunlight of this café in Vienna
where the woman at the table across from me
lets an ankle slip out of her glossy black pumps
and amid the general gasp I get a glimpse
of her pepper-and-salt pants and plain tan blouse
the liquefaction of her clothes
the distribution of her flesh
she knows I notice and she likes it
though no pass will be made it’s like being
a couple of extras in The Third Man
and the smile in her eyes when she pays
and leaves, looking back

David Lehman
from Plume Poetry

John Sutherland in Delanceyplace:

In 1940, Ernest Hemingway wrote of the Spanish Civil War and the Guadarrama Mountains of Spain: “The Guadarrama Mountains of Spain run from northeast to southwest across the central plains of Castille. They are ancient mountains, formed of pale granite and gneiss, their slopes densely wooded with pines of several species: black pines, maritime pines, sentry pines, Scots pines. To visit them is to be able to recall the scents of those days and nights, even years on: ‘the piney smell of … crushed needles’, as Ernest Hemingway puts it in for Whom the Bell Tolls, ‘and the sharper odour of … resinous sap’.

“Hemingway’s novel is set in the Guadarrama during the last May of the Spanish Civil War. Its hero is Robert Jordan, a young American fighting for the International Brigade. Jordan, an explosives expert with a profound dis­interest in his own fate, is tasked by his Soviet commander with destroying a bridge in the Fascist-held mountains. He joins forces with Republican par­tisans who have gone guerrilla. Their base for the operation is a cave in the ‘rim-rock’ at the ‘cup-shaped upper end’ of a ‘little valley’.

“In the book’s second paragraph, Jordan unfolds a photostatted map on the ‘pine-needle floor’ of the forest. That contrast between military percep­tion and natural presence preoccupies Hemingway throughout the novel. The landscapes of the Guadarrama are interpreted chiefly in terms of tactics: open ground is read for its lines of fire, ‘timber’ for its cover. Those with close knowledge of the range — like Jordan’s trusted guide Anselmo — are valuable because they can move discreetly through this hostile territory. Yet these tough men remain alert to the beauty of the mountains. When a two-day blizzard blows in, Jordan relishes its wildness, though he knows it will betray their position. Pilar, a fellow partisan, agrees: ‘What rotten stuff is the snow and how beautiful it looks.’ The hurry-up-and-wait aspects of war mean there is time to appreciate the ‘afternoon clouds … moving slowly in the high Spanish sky’. Maria, Jordan’s lover, speaks of her passion for the pine forest: ‘the feel of the needles under foot … the wind in the high trees and the creaking they make against each other: Even their target is assessed both aesthetically and militarily — it is a ‘steel bridge of a single span’, possessing a ‘solid-flung metal grace’,’ standing ‘dark against the steep emptiness of the gorge’.

More here.