The Curfew

I’m alone as usual
but the city is unusually alone.
I watch over its wilderness out of my window.
Nothing but the night and the curfew.
The one tree of the long street
asks about two lovers that have never missed a date.
The broken lantern asks about a kiss
it has concealed in the dark time and again.
The bar is closed and the wine is drinking by itself
and a pot hole in the road is celebrating
footsteps that did not come.
Only the curfew is wandering alone
and all this night is a kingdom for the wind.
What will become of supplication
and deferred footsteps
and appointments that wait
for the curfew’s permission?
What’s all this change in the city?
Where are the weddings and the city lights?
Where are the door bells and the cats’ meows?
Where are the horns and brakes of crazy cars?
Where are the voices of children
who split the darkness with shouting and laughter?
Where’s the tapping of a dancer’s high heels on her way home
or of a woman heading to work?
Where’s me when I hate my loneliness?
The city that was plentiful around me
is now lonely like me
lying on the side of the night.
The curfew is cautious
just like my confused window
like me the solitary
like the city
this cautious stillness…moving stealthily toward the morning of life.

by Radhia Chehaibi
from Split This Rock
translated from the Arabic by Ali Znaidi

Henry Louis Gates Jr in The New York Times:

Ian Parker in The New Yorker:

In 2008, Yuval Noah Harari, a young historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began to write a book derived from an undergraduate world-history class that he was teaching. Twenty lectures became twenty chapters. Harari, who had previously written about aspects of medieval and early-modern warfare—but whose intellectual appetite, since childhood, had been for all-encompassing accounts of the world—wrote in plain, short sentences that displayed no anxiety about the academic decorum of a study spanning hundreds of thousands of years. It was a history of everyone, ever. The book, published in Hebrew as “A Brief History of Humankind,” became an Israeli best-seller; then, as “Sapiens,” it became an international one. Readers were offered the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human affairs—evolution, agriculture, economics—while watching their personal narratives, even their national narratives, shrink to a point of invisibility. President Barack Obama, speaking to CNN in 2016, compared the book to a visit he’d made to the pyramids of Giza.

“Sapiens” has sold more than twelve million copies. “Three important revolutions shaped the course of history,” the book proposes. “The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different.” Harari’s account, though broadly chronological, is built out of assured generalization and comparison rather than dense historical detail. “Sapiens” feels like a study-guide summary of an immense, unwritten text—or, less congenially, like a ride on a tour bus that never stops for a poke around the ruins. (“As in Rome, so also in ancient China: most generals and philosophers did not think it their duty to develop new weapons.”) Harari did not invent Big History, but he updated it with hints of self-help and futurology, as well as a high-altitude, almost nihilistic composure about human suffering. He attached the time frame of aeons to the time frame of punditry—of now, and soon. His narrative of flux, of revolution after revolution, ended urgently, and perhaps conveniently, with a cliffhanger. “Sapiens,” while acknowledging that “history teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialise,” suggests that our species is on the verge of a radical redesign. Thanks to advances in computing, cyborg engineering, and biological engineering, “we may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world—me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant.”

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith at his own site:

I strongly suspect that at least 95% of occurrences of the phrase ‘a murder of crows’ are found in sentences like, “Did you know that a group of crows is called a ‘murder of crows’?” With this in mind, it can’t really be correct to say that a group of crows is a murder; the preponderance of occurrences of the term in sentences of the sort I just gave means that, in the other 5%, the ones where English-speakers say things like, “Look at that murder of crows,” what is in fact happening is that the speaker is drawing attention to the fact that he or she has mastered this precious bit of vocabulary. The focus of the proposition, in other words, is the speaker, and not the crows.

The more attentive you are to questions of style in language, the more you become attuned to the fact that a great deal of it works in this way. As far as I can tell no one actually uses the word ‘temblor’; it is a hack synonym for journalists to throw in when they have already used the word ‘earthquake’ too many times, and need to show a capacity for variety. I’ve long suspected that people almost never use certain anatomical orthophemisms in a way that faithfully focuses the listener’s attention on the denotation of the term, but instead that whenever we hear ‘penis’ or ‘vagina’, what we’re actually hearing is a sort of performance of the speaker’s maturity. (As I’ve pointed out before, both of these, as well as ‘anus’, have their origins in Latin euphemisms: ‘tail’, ‘sheath’, and ‘ring’, respectively). I never use these words anyway, but always talk around them, aware that they pose an objective and irresolvable problem to anyone who cares about language, and understands that real mastery of language is not just about getting things right, but calibrating one’s expression of what is right so as to allow its performative aspect to be evident only as much as one wishes. A hack by contrast is someone who uses words like ‘temblor’ or ‘penis’, or phrases like ‘to tamp down’, and thinks they’re getting away with it.

More here.

Alex Lubben at Vice:

A record-breaking temperature reading taken at an Argentinian research station on the continent Thursday clocked in at 18.3 degrees Celsius — 65 degrees Fahrenheit — warmer than it is right now in Orlando, Florida, and the hottest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica.

The reading was from a station on Esperanza, the peninsula on the northern tip of Antarctica that’s been recording temperature data since 1961. As the planet heats, the poles are getting hotter way faster than the rest of the world. Hotter temperatures mean melting ice, which makes sea levels rise and threatens populations and economies around the world.

More here.

Masha Gessen in The New Yorker:

This month, Verso is publishing Butler’s latest book, “The Force of Nonviolence.” It is a slim volume that makes an outsized argument: that our times, or perhaps all times, call for imagining an entirely new way for humans to live together in the world—a world of what Butler calls “radical equality.” Butler sat down for a conversation with me during a recent visit to New York. The interview has been edited and condensed.

In this new book, you propose not just an argument for nonviolence as a tactic but as an entirely different way of thinking about who we are.

We are used to thinking strategically and instrumentally about questions of violence and nonviolence. I think there is a difference between acting as an individual or a group, deciding, “Nonviolence is the best way to achieve our goal,” and seeking to make a nonviolent world—or a less violent world, which is probably more practical.

I’m not a completely crazy idealist who would say, “There’s no situation in which I would commit an act of violence.” I’m trying to shift the question to “What kind of world is it that we seek to build together?”

More here.

Eric Homberger in The Guardian:

George Steiner, who has died aged 90, was a polymathic European intellectual of particular severity. In an academic career that took him from the University of Chicago to Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, Cambridge and Geneva, Steiner held forth on tragedy, reading, the decline of literacy, the possibilities of translation, science and chess. He crossed swords with Noam Chomsky on linguistics and wrote the Fontana Modern Masters volume on the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

For half a century, Steiner was a commanding reviewer and a subtle and enthralling lecturer. His books established fields, set agendas, and upheld the highest standards. There has been nobody quite like him in contemporary British intellectual life.

He was feted and laden with honours from learned societies, research institutes and distinguished universities. Few academics of his generation received so many professions of respect. Yet, Steiner was far from satisfied. He felt that Cambridge University had behaved abominably in not appointing him to a lectureship. Those who remained silent about his ideas, or wrote mocking reviews of his books, were, he thought, all too likely to appropriate his central themes without acknowledgment.

More here.

Josephine Seah at the LRB:

That evening, people flooded the supermarkets, packing their carts high with instant food, rice, toilet paper and condoms. A picture of a masked woman with a cartload of Maggi Mee instant noodles was soon turned into a meme. Another image showed a condom-clad finger pressing a lift button; there had been an earlier suggestion to use uncapped pens (with their ink cartridges removed) as button pushers in public lifts to limit the chances of infection. On a government-run WhatsApp channel, a message asked the public to ‘stay calm; don’t panic buy’, reassuring us that the country was not about to run out of food or household items. Ministers posted on their Facebook pages urging against hoarding.

more here.

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

In 1942, when Levant was back in New York City, he commissioned Schoenberg to write a piano piece for him. Expecting something short, perhaps the length of a Chopin Nocturne, Levant “wasn’t prepared,” as he later wrote, for the full-length concerto upon which the composer instead embarked. Accompanying a letter dated August 8, 1942, Schoenberg sent roughly a quarter of the manuscript to Levant. The work, Schoenberg wrote, would be in four parts and would include a scherzo, an adagio, and a rondo-like finale. But though Levant had already paid an installment of $200, a final fee for the commission had yet to be agreed upon. Schoenberg naturally wanted to finalize the details. What followed was a delicate back and forth, the two artists acting like a pair of uneasy dance partners.

more here.

Gavin Francis in The Guardian:

Part-way through this memoir of hospice medicine and living with loss, Rachel Clarke lists a few troubling ideas she prefers to avoid thinking about: global warming, far-right populism, email overload, menopause, declining numbers of bees and, of course, mortality. It’s become a truism that western societies have difficulties accepting death, but Clarke, whose daily work is to ease the suffering of the dying, has a different view. She sees sense in avoiding the contemplation of death, and often applauds her patients for it – right up until they no longer have any choice.

It’s a kindness to see death as belonging on the same list as brown envelopes from the government: “Maybe, more prosaically, dying is on a par with tax returns and pensions. We know we should address them all proactively, it is just that the admin involved is, frankly, tiresome.” Only 4% of the population have had the foresight to prepare an “advanced directive” detailing how they’d like to be treated or left in peace should they become critically ill; Clarke would like to see that number increase. Her book has an appendix of websites and organisations that can help. But Dear Life is not a manual for dying, or an orthodox medical memoir – it’s a very personal autobiography. It charts one woman’s trajectory from a happy childhood in rural Wiltshire as the daughter of a local GP, through university, then into a successful career making TV documentaries in London. There’s a Damascus moment in her late 20s when she decides to retrain as a doctor, first in acute and emergency medicine, then finally as a consultant in palliative care.

More here.

From American Radio Works:

Whenever the Negroes keep the Democrats in power they’re keeping the Dixiecrats in power. This is true! A vote for a Democrat is nothing but a vote for a Dixiecrat. I know you don’t like me saying that. I’m not the kind of person who come here to say what you like. I’m going to tell you the truth whether you like it or not. [applause] Up here in the North you have the same thing. The Democratic Party don’t – they don’t do it that way. They got a thing they call gerrymandering. They maneuver you out of power. Even though you can vote they fix it so you’re voting for nobody. They got you going and coming. In the South they’re outright political wolves, in the North they’re political foxes. A fox and a wolf are both canine, both belong to the dog family. [laughter, applause] Now, you take your choice. You going to choose a northern dog or a southern dog? Because either dog you choose, I guarantee you, you’ll still be in the doghouse.

This is why I say it’s the ballot or the bullet. It’s liberty or it’s death. It’s freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody. [applause] America today finds herself in a unique situation. Historically, revolutions are bloody, oh yes they are. They have never had a bloodless revolution. Or a non-violent revolution. That don’t happen even in Hollywood [laughter] You don’t have a revolution in which you love your enemy. And you don’t have a revolution in which you are begging the system of exploitation to integrate you into it. Revolutions overturn systems. Revolutions destroy systems.

A revolution is bloody, but America is in a unique position. She’s the only country in history, in the position actually to become involved in a bloodless revolution. The Russian Revolution was bloody, Chinese Revolution was bloody, French Revolution was bloody, Cuban Revolution was bloody. And there was nothing more bloody than the American Revolution. But today, this country can become involved in a revolution that won’t take bloodshed. All she’s got to do is give the black man in this country everything that’s due him, everything. [applause]

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)

“Many American men…do not have enough awakened or living warriors
inside to defend their soul houses.” —Robert Bly

Old Self

I chanced across my old self
today. He was sitting in the second
floor office where I used to work —
at the typewriter, young, thin guy,
in his late twenties, white shirt, narrow
dark tie, serious demeanor, writing
an essay against the Viet Nam war.

I came up the stairs and saw him —
a decent human being, diligent,
not remotely aware of the ambush
life had waiting — not knowing
he’d permit himself to be taken
prisoner and then, in confusion,
do desperate things, betray
what he loved — and that nothing
would enable him to survive
as he was.

I passed the open door
and wanted to cry out — warn him,
force the warriors to raise
their spears. But even hearing
my shout, he would have only
hesitated, then turned back to
his devoted, lonely and interminable
work.

by Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook
Signal Books, 1997

Chang Che in Quillette:

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville took a 10-month trip to the United States to study the American penal system. In the resulting book—Democracy in America—he singled out one noteworthy feature: “Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.” Although he ignored the fact of slavery, his reference to economic equality among white Americans was, at the time, accurate. According to economic historians Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, the share of national income going to the top one percent was less than 10 percent.

Today, the share of national income going to the top one percent has doubled, while median wages have remained largely stagnant. In the last 40 years, CEO wages have grown nearly 100 times the rate of wages for average workers. The popularity of left-wing candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders—both with significant redistributive policies at the core of their platform—reflects the moral concerns many have about high levels of income inequality.

But no moral case for economic equality will convince those on the Right. What is at stake is an idea of fairness. It is unfair, so the thought goes, for others to live off one’s labor without making an equally productive contribution to society. This appeal to fairness trumps any moral case for income redistribution. There is, however, another case for relative equality of conditions that appeals to the same idea of fairness that’s appealed to by the opponents of redistribution.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The Greek statesman Demosthenes is credited with saying “I am a citizen of the world,” and the idea that we should take a cosmopolitan view of our common humanity is a compelling one. Not everyone agrees, however; in the words of former British Prime Minister Theresa May, “If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” On the other side of the political spectrum, groups who share a feature of identity — race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and others — find it useful to band together to make political progress. Kwame Anthony Appiah is a leading philosopher and cultural theorist who has thought carefully about the tricky issues of cosmopolitanism and identity. We talk about how identities form, why they matter, and how to negotiate the difficult balance between being human and being your particular self.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Porch Magazine:

You should sit low, not on a chair or a stool or a couch. A small crate will do the job. Or anything that is lower than 9.5 inches from the ground. You can’t shave or cut your hair. You can’t have sex. You shouldn’t take a shower, though you may do some light swabbing of your especially funky bits, as well as dousing your feet and hands in cold water now and again. You can’t greet people in the normal way. You definitely cannot work. No freshly laundered clothes. The list of things you cannot do is long.

What you can do is mourn. You can weep and wail, and you are encouraged to talk about the loved one who has recently died. You aren’t to take care of yourself, but to allow everyone else– family, the community–take care of you. You are to throw yourself helplessly upon other people, and you are to confront the feelings of sorrow and loss, to bring them to the surface and let those intense feelings have their place.

This is sitting shiva. It’s how observant Jews have been dealing with grief since ancient times.

In Ari Aster’s recent film Midsommar, a terrible thing happens. A young woman named Dani (Florence Pugh) loses her sister and parents in a ghoulish suicide/homicide. Hellish stuff, the stuff of nightmares. If anyone has ever needed help grieving, it is Dani. If anyone has ever needed a community to fall back upon, it is Dani. Does she get it? Of course not. She is, like many people living in the contemporary, globalized, post-modern world, more or less without a community in any functional sense of the word.

More here.

Kinton Ford at n+1:

GEORGE STEINER IS A CHARMING but monstrous narcissist. In November 2001, I spent an amazing evening with him and the Celebrated Poet at the Professor of Poetry’s house. Things got started when another Professor, the Poet, and an Artist (the Poet’s spouse), complained laughingly about the xerox machine in the University English Department. This led to an interesting and moving story of Steiner’s about his Czech students copying out Middlemarch by hand since access to copying was extremely difficult in Prague: the Czech xerox machines were controlled by the state, lest any samizdat activities got going.

more here.

Sophie Duncan at Literary Review:

Men not reading women’s writing is widespread, and they begin not reading early. In the university applications that cross my desk, it’s common for male candidates not to mention a single female author, despite otherwise showing evidence of wide and ambitious reading. The opposite is rare.

As it turns out, though, without women, men wouldn’t have much to read at all. Women are responsible for fiction’s survival, as Helen Taylor details in Why Women Read Fiction. We buy, borrow, download and lend the majority of fiction books, from classic literature to romance, erotica and saga writing. Taylor has surveyed more than four hundred female readers, documenting their responses to fiction and their urgent, frequently furtive efforts to scrape out space for reading. Most movingly, a number of Taylor’s respondents stress the conflict between reading and domestic labour: a former library development manager confessed she can only read ‘when I’ve done everything else (washing, Hoovering etc)’, while others recall having faced accusations of ‘sneaking off’ or rudeness for choosing reading over angelic housewifery.

more here.

Francesca Wade at the Paris Review:

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,” wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929). In that essay, commenting on the fact that women’s lives are “all but absent from history,” she argues that this is not only a consequence of the ways women have been deprived of the material conditions under which their talents can prosper but also reveals the sort of events and lives historians have traditionally considered worth remembering—primarily, the public activities of “great men.” Perusing the index of G. M. Trevelyan’s History of England, Woolf looks up “position of women” and is dismayed to find only a smattering of references, mostly to customs of arranged marriage, wife-beating, and the fictional heroines of Shakespeare. Flicking through chapters on wars and kings, she wonders why so little room is left for women’s activities in the events that “constitute this historian’s view of the past.” It was clear to Woolf that new histories were needed, which would examine the reality of women’s lives, their relationships and activities, and the forces that thwarted their ambitions.

more here.