Skye C. Cleary in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Writers always have to make difficult choices about what to leave in and what to cut from their work. The choices become especially acute when a writer is telling her own story. “What an odd thing a diary is,” a character in Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Woman Destroyed (La Femme rompue, 1967) says, “the things you omit are more important than those you put in.”

The statement seems to be more personal confession than fiction. Exploring the mysteries and misconceptions about Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) — one of the most underappreciated of philosophers — is the project of the new biography Becoming Beauvoir: A Life by Kate Kirkpatrick. Certainly, Beauvoir’s life story is not entirely new. Not only did she publish memoirs, travelogues, diaries, and letters, but Deirdre Bair published a 700-page biography in 1990 (Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography), drawing on five years’ worth of discussions with Beauvoir, often starting at 4 p.m. sharp, with an ounce of scotch served in Mexican glass tumblers. There have been other biographies, too, such as Hazel Rowley’s Tête-à-Tête: The Tumultuous Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2005), and Lisa Appignanesi’s brief portrait (titled Simone de Beauvoir), published in 1988.

However, since these biographies came out, new material has been released, notably Beauvoir’s student diaries (Cahiers de jeunesse: 1926–1930, published in 2008) and her love letters to Claude Lanzmann (published in 2018), which throws previous accounts of her life and thinking into question.

More here.

More here.

James Parker at The Atlantic:

In a bone-picking mood, I will sometimes imagine that I have a problem with the English writer Philip Pullman, best known for the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. I don’t like the flavor of his frequently expressed atheism, for example; I find it peremptory, literalistic. (The idea conveyed by the great mystic Simone Weil, that “absence is the form in which God is present,” Pullman has characterized as “cheek on a colossal scale.”) And I don’t like his polemical sideswipes at J. R. R. Tolkien: “There isn’t a character in the whole of Lord of the Rings who has a tenth of the complexity … of even a fairly minor character from Middlemarch.” In fact, now that I think about it, these are two sides of the same coin. Just as it seems like bad manners not to send the odd beam of gratitude, however agnostic, back into the heart of light and the source of your own being, so does it feel ungracious when Pullman bashes one of the prime creators of the imaginative space in which he himself—as a best-selling fantasy author—is operating.

more here.

Ross Perlin at Artforum:

Reawakening dormant languages requires extraordinary acts of coordination—administrative, social, and emotional—but it is possible. Take jessie “little doe” baird, a Wôpanâak woman who, when pregnant with her fifth child, Mae Alice, had a vision of reviving her ancestral language—the first tongue the Pilgrims encountered in coastal Massachusetts, which had been without speakers for more than a century. baird studied linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then spent the next twenty-six years leading a revival of Wôpanâak; Mae Alice is the first Wôpanâak-speaking child in generations. In Ohio, activist Daryl Baldwin has spearheaded the revival of Myaamia, dormant since the 1960s, first teaching it to himself, his wife, and their four children. Common to both community-led efforts was meticulous linguistic research that fed into the creation of immersion programs focused on fostering fluent new speakers.

more here.

Sara Wheeler at Literary Review:

What does Theroux do on his trip? In Nogales he has his teeth whitened, in San Diego de la Unión he attends a first communion, in San Miguel de Allende he drops in on a wedding and in Monte Albán he inspects pyramids built at a time when ‘Britain was a land of quarrelsome Iron Age tribes painting their bellies blue and huddled in hill forts’. Sometimes he abandons his car, which has Massachusetts plates, in a secure car park and goes on bus journeys. Mexican highways are well maintained, he notes, but the off-ramp ‘always leads to the dusty antique past – to the man plowing a stony field with a burro, to the woman with a bundle on her head, to the boy herding goats, to the ranchitos, the carne asada stands, the five-hundred-year-old churches, and a tienda, selling beer and snacks, with a skinny cat asleep on the tamales’.

Theroux quotes widely from published sources in both Spanish and English, interviews officials and, as always, talks to ‘ordinary’ people, including some who barely speak Spanish (the Mexican government recognises 68 languages and 350 dialects).

more here.

Dinitia Smith in The New York Times:

Harold Bloom, the prodigious literary critic who championed and defended the Western canon in an outpouring of influential books that appeared not only on college syllabuses but also — unusual for an academic — on best-seller lists, died on Monday at a hospital in New Haven. He was 89. His death was confirmed by his wife, Jeanne Bloom, who said he taught his last class at Yale University on Thursday. Professor Bloom was frequently called the most notorious literary critic in America. From a vaunted perch at Yale, he flew in the face of almost every trend in the literary criticism of his day. Chiefly he argued for the literary superiority of the Western giants like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Kafka — all of them white and male, his own critics pointed out — over writers favored by what he called “the School of Resentment,” by which he meant multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, neoconservatives and others whom he saw as betraying literature’s essential purpose. “He is, by any reckoning, one of the most stimulating literary presences of the last half-century — and the most protean,” Sam Tanenhaus wrote in 2011 in The New York Times Book Review, of which he was the editor at the time, “a singular breed of scholar-teacher-critic-prose-poet-pamphleteer.”

At the heart of Professor Bloom’s writing was a passionate love of literature and a relish for its heroic figures. “Shakespeare is God,” he declared, and Shakespeare’s characters, he said, are as real as people and have shaped Western perceptions of what it is to be human — a view he propounded in the acclaimed “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human” (1998).

More here.

Elizabeth Pannisi in Science:

The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) latest foray into turning emerging technologies into useful data sets is focusing on how the body’s trillions of cells interconnect and interact. The Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) aims to describe the biochemical milieu and the locations of individual cells in the body’s major organs, researchers write this week in Nature. It uses technology heralded by Science as the 2018 Breakthrough of the Year. The goal is to “establish a baseline of what constitutes a healthy system,” says HuBMAP grantee Julia Laskin, an analytical chemist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. That way, she says, researchers will be able to see what goes awry in disease. Until recently, biomedical scientists had just a broad-brush view of how organs functioned. In particular, they had succeeded in getting only a sense of gene activity—when genes turn on and off—in specific tissues. Gene activity defines what a cell does. But organs consist of many kinds of cells, each with their own molecular profiles.

In 2016, drawing on technologies that enable researchers to routinely study individual cells, a group of 90 scientists from the around the world launched the Human Cell Atlas (HCA), which aims to catalog how cells operate in different tissues. The effort now involves 1500 scientists from 65 countries, and draws support from many sources, including the Wellcome Trust and the European Union’s Horizons 2020 program, says Aviv Regev, one of the HCA’s founding members and a computational systems biologist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

HuBMAP represents the U.S. government’s commitment to this international grassroots effort, says the corresponding author on the 9 October Nature paper, genomicist Michael Snyder from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “Hopefully [HuBMAP] will have a major role in leadership and building the framework” that will help meld the HCA with about a dozen other projects focused on single cell analyses of specific organs, such as the brain, lungs, kidney, and pretumor and cancerous tissue, he explains. Such melding would involve establishing common standards, protocols, and ways of presenting the data. “As much as possible, we want to be able to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges,” Snyder says.

More here.

Trampoline

My mother bounced up and down
the night before I was born. Freckled
arms pumping, she prayed with each fall

that the confetti of us would rain down,
fly up, float for a moment, as I would—
a nest, awaited nine months and gone in a blink.

It would dissipate to settle around us
on the playful canvas still rippling,
straining under the weight of us.

We cry at the sight of one another, a part
of one another newly apart from one another.

All the while, woven strands strain.
The small spaces between are windows
we ignore until the woven strands fray,
give way, and all the small windows
become one, through which we fall.

We land years later on a lawn,
its green faded golden
and breath thick with morning
mosquitos and memories.
I, 24. She, 48.

Both of us dig through the roots
to those dry golden stalks, flimsy
and elusive. She looks for her lineage
before her, whose worried jawlines
look like hers, and I for the other half of
mine behind me, taut with absence.
My lineage stolen by ships, then
misunderstandings, miscommunications.
My fingers pierce precious places,

but my mother is milky
comfort, always confusing,
always forgiving,
my search for a blackness
to hide how different
she made me.

When, in all that mulched earth,
our frenzied fingers brush,
we lace them to butterfly and wiggle
their prints together into topsoil
growing sticky with effort and joy.

by Kendal Thomas
from Brooklyn Poets,
10/14/19

Zara Houshmand writes, in the introduction of the book, at her own website:

These rubaiyat, or quatrains, were composed by Jalal al-Din Mohammad Balkhi, known as Rumi, a thirteenth century Muslim theologian and Sufi mystic, and one of the greatest poets of the Persian language. They are a selection from almost two thousand such quatrains that, along with many longer ghazals, comprise the Divan-e Shams. These poems poured out during a period of Rumi’s life when he was intensely affected by his relationship with his spiritual mentor and soulmate, Shams al-Din Tabrizi.

Legend describes Shams—whose name means “sun”—as a wandering dervish, unschooled, an ugly man but charismatic. His own words, only recently made accessible in English, present a much subtler picture. He was an accomplished scholar who hid his learning, an iconoclast, and a fearsome enemy of all hypocrisy. He traveled widely in search of the great spiritual teachers of his time, but kept his distance from the dervish schools that would normally have accommodated such a traveler. He refused to beg, and instead earned a meager living at temporary jobs as he traveled.

His relationship with Rumi also defied categories, blurring the traditional roles of master and disciple. Rumi held the belief that at any one time, a single saint living in the world serves as an axis mundi, a center around which all spiritual energy revolves. He believed that in Shams he had found this saint. It is clear from Shams’s own teachings that he likewise saw Rumi as a saint, though one who had something to learn from him.

More here.  And you can pre-order the book here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

Vladimir Nabokov was not only being contrarian when he came out against the theory of evolution. He really meant it. “Natural selection in the Darwinian sense,” he wrote, “could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of ‘the struggle for life’ when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation.”[1]

Of course, few would mistake the stubborn Russian-American author for a typical representative of the creationist position, though the difference has to do mostly with emphasis. The creationist wants to say that nothing is nature, but all is art, or, more precisely, the artifice of a certain highly esteemed Artificer. Nabokov by contrast wants to say that art is natural, that our mimetic activity is not an exception to what nature is doing all the time, but rather an instance of it.

I will not help to lend legitimacy to creationism by agreeing with Nabokov here. Or at least I will not affirm his claim as a scientific claim. But as an opening to a general theory of art, he is surely onto something.

More here.

Helen Briggs in BBC:

Daniella Hodgson is digging a hole in the sand on a windswept beach as seabirds wheel overhead. “Found one,” she cries, flinging down her spade. She opens her hand to reveal a wriggling lugworm. Plucked from its underground burrow, this humble creature is not unlike the proverbial canary in a coal mine. A sentinel for plastic, the worm will ingest any particles of plastic it comes across while swallowing sand, which can then pass up the food chain to birds and fish. “We want to see how much plastic the island is potentially getting on its shores – so what is in the sediments there – and what the animals are eating,” says Ms Hodgson, a postgraduate researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London. “If you’re exposed to more plastics are you going to be eating more plastics? What types of plastics, what shapes, colours, sizes? And then we can use that kind of information to inform experiments to look at the impacts of ingesting those plastics on different animals.”

Microplastics are generally referred to as plastic smaller than 5mm, or about the size of a sesame seed. There are many unanswered questions about the impact of these tiny bits of plastic, which come from larger plastic debris, cosmetics and clothes. What’s not in dispute is just how far microplastics have travelled around the planet in a matter of decades. “They’re absolutely everywhere,” says Hodgson, who is investigating how plastic is making its way into marine ecosystems. “Microplastics can be found in the sea, in freshwater environments in rivers and lakes, in the atmosphere, in food.”

More here.

Peter Maass in The Intercept:

I honestly don’t know where to begin with this whole thing. But let me start by making clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that we should not read Handke’s literary work. My objection is not a version of the age-old question of whether we should listen to Richard Wagner. Go ahead and listen to Wagner. Go ahead and read Handke. My point is this: It is one thing to read him — it is quite another to bestow upon him a prize that delivers a great amount of legitimacy to his entire body of work, not just the novels and plays that are most impeccable and nonpolitical.

Handke’s most famous political offense was attending the funeral of Serbian strongman Slobodan Miloševic, who died in prison awaiting a trial for genocide and war crimes. Handke had visited Miloševic during his detention in The Hague and made a short eulogy during his funeral in Požarevac, Serbia, in 2006. This followed many years of Handke writing about how the Serbs were misunderstood and were unfairly given the lion’s share of blame for the bloodshed that occurred during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

More here.

James Mickens at Harvard’s website:

I’ve received tenure at Harvard! I want to thank all of the enemies that I had to destroy to achieve this great honor. Roger Davis at Princeton’s department of nutrition—you questioned my research on the efficacy of an all-Pop-Tart diet, but I am living proof that the diet works. Yes, I have nose bleeds every day and my pancreas has the dysfunction of a failing Soviet client state, but I believe that having constant double vision makes me twice as optimistic about life. Lawrence Adler at Yale—you claimed that Yale, not Harvard, has the best paintings of dead white men doing questionable things in recent antiquity. Your foolishness was revealed when I personally oversaw the restoration of Harvard’s painting “Archibald Montgomery, Law School Dean, Gazes Upon His Eighth-favorite Mistress Whose Name He No Longer Remembers As He Wears A Pith Helmet And Asks A Colored Man Why He Isn’t Ten Feet Tall And Swaying To Savage Jungle Rhythms.” You are my eighth-favorite enemy, Lawrence of Yale; DON’T EVER CHALLENGE A HARVARD MAN. My seventh-favorite enemy is obviously Alan Fontaine of Iowa State University.

More here.

Franklin Foer in The Atlantic:

Where in the pantheon of American commercial titans does Jeffrey Bezos belong? Andrew Carnegie’s hearths forged the steel that became the skeleton of the railroad and the city. John D. Rockefeller refined 90 percent of American oil, which supplied the pre-electric nation with light. Bill Gates created a program that was considered a prerequisite for turning on a computer. At 55, Bezos has never dominated a major market as thoroughly as any of these forebears, and while he is presently the richest man on the planet, he has less wealth than Gates did at his zenith. Yet Rockefeller largely contented himself with oil wells, pump stations, and railcars; Gates’s fortune depended on an operating system. The scope of the empire the founder and CEO of Amazon has built is wider. Indeed, it is without precedent in the long history of American capitalism.

Today, Bezos controls nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States. More product searches are conducted on Amazon than on Google, which has allowed Bezos to build an advertising business as valuable as the entirety of IBM. One estimate has Amazon Web Services controlling almost half of the cloud-computing industry—institutions as varied as General Electric, Unilever, and even the CIA rely on its servers. Forty-two percent of paper book sales and a third of the market for streaming video are controlled by the company; Twitch, its video platform popular among gamers, attracts 15 million users a day. Add The Washington Post to this portfolio and Bezos is, at a minimum, a rival to the likes of Disney’s Bob Iger or the suits at AT&T, and arguably the most powerful man in American culture.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4spsf3G33eg

Ode to Left-Handedness

I sat at my kindergarten desk,
Surrounded by others,
Either cheerful
Or bored, who were
Cutting
The requisite circles
With ease,
Or slicing down
Straight, penciled lines
As the teacher directed.
.
I did my dutiful best,
But the scissors
Hurt my fingers
In a minor,
Distracting way,
And I was too young
To realize the handle
Was biased
For a right-hand child,
So all I could do
Was cut in clumsy zigzags
And feel like a fool.
.
Staring hard at the blades,
I tried to will them
To obey,
Who couldn’t conceive
I was being freed
That day
By those little silver wings
Of a bird
Intent on the erratic,
Authentic pattern
Of its own flight
Through a sky of colored paper.
.
by Gregory Orr
from Narrative Magazine

Ben Juers at Sydney Review of Books:

Terry Eagleton’s Humour and Peter Timms’ Silliness: A Serious History are two recent additions to the patchy field of humour studies. Both authors are hemmed into the Anglocentric comedy canon that sees absurdist comedy peaking with The Goon Show, Pete and Dud, and Monty Python, and going downhill ever since. They’re also both in their seventies. This puts you in the weird position of feeling unreasonable for expecting them to be up-to-date on their subject. But neither would you want their lukewarm take on, say, ‘meme commentator’ @gayvapeshark or the HBO series Los Espookys.

To be fair, cutting-edge relevancy isn’t Eagleton or Timms’ priority. Humour is a critical survey not of humour but its theory – like a literature review for a PhD, albeit more reader-friendly. Its most interesting aspect is its Marxist subtext (Eagleton’s famously a comrade), which occasionally breaks ground but never erupts into a full-blown theory of how humour can serve Leftist aims.

more here.

Alex Preston at The Guardian:

First, a warning: this is a life-changing book and will alter your relationship to food for ever. I can’t imagine anyone reading Safran Foer’s lucid, heartfelt, deeply compassionate prose and then reaching blithely for a cheeseburger. There’s some dispute as to precisely what proportion of global heating is directly related to the rearing of animals for food, but even the lowest estimates put it on a par with the entire global transportation industry. A well-evidenced 2009 report by the Worldwatch Institute claimed that livestock-related emissions accounted for 51% of all greenhouse gases, “more than all cars, planes, buildings, industry and power plants combined”. Whichever the case, Safran Foer’s thesis is clear and compelling: by making “a collective act to eat differently” (he suggests “no animal products before dinner”) we can turn the tide of the climate crisis.

more here.