Anna Gát: What to Read This Weekend #16
Tragedy/comedy, winning/losing, reality/illusion, good sex/virtue, math/humanities. And Rachmaninoff, Orwell, Vermeer. Copyright, atheism, late bloomers. James Clear, Umberto Eco, Joni Mitchell...
Hello from Boston!
A beautiful time of year to be here, the trees are green, the flowers blooming, the oysters chilled, the students… gone. I’ve just been to a very interesting conference, 2 full days nonstop, I’m now heading to a fancy-schmancy literary dinner (need to do some pre-reading!), then tomorrow attending an Interintellect offline with the great Sasha Sagan and Thomas Arnold.
Never not loving my time in the US, the big spaces, the big ideas, the big hospitality, the big speed, the abundance. Thanks for having me!
Once again, some excellent readings for your weekend below. With special nods to Bostonians.
Is My Writing a Hobby Or a Career?
If writing was happening in what some might call margins of my life, did that inherently make it a hobby—or was it actually what knit my life together?
Rainesford Stauffer; Esquire
What Happens if Everyone Decides to Major in Math?
A growing number of academics see the future not as an either-or question of math versus the humanities but as a combination of the two, which, after all, was the blueprint of the liberal arts education as dreamed up by the ancient Greeks. The notion was to create a wholly educated individual who was as learned in astronomy as in Plato.
Nicole Laporte; Town and Country
Do Liberals Have a God Problem? - How therapy has replaced religion on dating apps—and everywhere else
I’m trying to ask myself questions. Why am I here? What is my purpose? What is my path? I know I’m a “believer.” But a believer in what, exactly?
Rachel Rizzo; Wisdom of Crowds
Notes on Losing
When I’m losing, I try to meditate, channel my rage, and take it one point at a time. I talk to my right arm, coaxing it through the proper forehand motions: palm down on the backswing, hips rotate, full extension, explode through the ball on the front foot. Nothing works.
Jay Caspian Kang; The New Yorker
Pleasure and Justice (2021)
There are vanishingly few contemporary contexts in which women are taught or encouraged to demand electrification, or indeed, to want actively at all. In the public imagination, they figure at best as passive consenters, accepters or rejectors of male propositions, at worst as the hapless prey of nefarious lechers. In this picture, sexual agency is mostly reserved for male philanderers and predators. It is telling that #MeToo has focused not on women asserting but on women assenting (or failing to assent). No doubt for partially strategic reasons, the movement’s proponents have rarely asked what good sex—by which I mean not virtuous but delicious sex—would look like for women, and under which conditions it might be realized.
Becca Rothfeld; Boston Review
A Conversation with James Clear
I suffered a really serious injury in high school—I was hit in the face with a baseball bat. I discuss the whole story in the introduction to Atomic Habits. Basically, afterward, I was trying to regain some control over my life. A lot of times when something challenging happens to you, it feels like it happened to you and not because you wanted it. You’re looking for some way to regain control, so little habits like making my bed every morning or making sure that I studied consistently, or I had this rule that I wouldn’t do any homework after midnight. If I hadn’t learned it by midnight, I was just going to go to bed—effectively that’s a sleep habit. Strength-training habits were big for me then, too.
Abbe Wright; Penguin Random House
Why Songwriters Can’t Have Their Own Writers Strike—Yet
In today’s music industry, the distinctions between songwriter and musician are even blurrier than they were in the 1980s. Independent contractors are excluded from the protections offered by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935. Labor lawyer Leo Gertner explains that the independent contractor classification was carved out in the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the NLRA, which also banned solidarity and wildcat strikes and passed right-to-work laws. “A lot of this stuff is just anachronistic,” says Gertner.
Luke Ottenhof; Pitchfork
Arthur Miller, The Art of Theater No. 2.(1966)
INTERVIEWER
You were particularly drawn to tragedy, then?
MILLER
It seemed to me the only form there was. The rest of it was all either attempts at it, or escapes from it. But tragedy was the basic pillar.
Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron; Paris Review
Joni Mitchell Defends Herself (1979)
They insist on painting me as this tragic . . . well not even a tragic, because in this town people don’t understand tragedy. All they understand is drama. You have to be *moral* to understand tragedy [laughs].
Cameron Crowe; Rolling Stone
Read Your Way Through Boston
Boston does not, like Dublin, have a Ulysses — few cities do. The nearest novel to being essentially Bostonian might be Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah…
Paul Theroux; The New York Times
On Spinsters (2015)
Chronically unmarried women have long endured the injustice of being set aside, ignored, dismissed, made invisible. This experience of social erasure is at the heart of the drama of many spinster stories. And the irony of Spinster is that, despite its title, it is often curiously committed to ignoring actual spinsters. I was floored when [author Kate Bolick] mentioned the boy-crazy, glamorous, and/or eligible Henry James heroines Isabel Archer (married) and Daisy Miller (a teenager) as “New Woman” precursors for what she’s calling a spinster, but name-checked The Bostonians only as a way to signify the “WASP decorum” of The Atlantic office where she worked. Has Bolick even read The Bostonians? Henry James is practically the poet laureate of Spinsterland…
Briallen Hopper; LA Review of Books
Please Make a Better Kindle
The Kindle could be 10x better than it is.
But, as far as I can tell, Amazon doesn’t seem to be moving very fast to improve it. This is not a good state of affairs. Reading books, in my opinion, is one of the most pleasurable, enriching, and interesting activities humans engage in. It sucks that in the age of AI, books seem to be getting left behind.
So this week I decided to set myself a little challenge: What would happen if we set fire to the Kindle?
Dan Shipper; Every
Look Back in Anger - The lights are going off in South Africa
Could the decline of South Africa have been avoided? Escaping worst-case scenarios is the country’s special gift. Pessimists predicted in 1994 that the country would collapse into civil war. Thanks to Mandela’s leadership and healing gestures like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this outcome was avoided. Perhaps wiser preparation could have forestalled the country’s other problems.
Helen Andrews; Claremont Review of Books
Rachmaninoff’s enduring melodies
The image of Rachmaninoff the austere, exiled Russian was boosted by his formidable stage persona as a pianist. He was a tall man with close-cropped hair, always impeccably dressed, and there was no flamboyancy about his performances. He had a reputation as a perfectionist, and played with such seriousness that Stravinsky memorably described him as resembling a “six-and-a-half-foot scowl”. Such was his popularity as a pianist that audiences often verged on hero-worship.
Leah Broad; New Statesman
Blue movie - Michel Houellebecq’s latest provocation falls flat
Houellebecq maintains an impressive inability or unwillingness to read the room in a moment attuned to sexual politics. On arriving in Amsterdam he is met by an unfriendly cameraman who refuses to shake his hand, and “for the first time in my life I felt treated, absolutely, like the subject of an animal documentary”. (I’ve written “get over it” in the margins of my copy.)
Russell Williams; Times Literary Supplement
Orwell by DJ Taylor review – a very English socialist
Orwell endured in completing Nineteen Eighty-Four. Work was always his refuge in times of crisis: in the first 20 months of the second world war he produced around 200 book, theatre and film reviews, quite aside from longer essays; and in the year after Eileen’s sudden death (during an operation) he filed 130 pieces. The novel took him longer, but his insistence on typing the final version himself, while seriously ill in bed on Jura, hastened his final collapse. “It isn’t a book I would gamble on for a big sale,” he told his publisher, with his usual self-disparagement. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Blake Morrison; The Guardian
Umberto Eco - By Chris Wallace (2015)
"Listen, I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul. Which is what strikes me about today—this general, planetary phenomenon, the loss of memory, especially the young generations.
Interview Magazine
The Supreme Court’s Warhol Decision Just Changed the Future of Art
What’s sometimes lost is in this discussion is that copyright law’s purpose (perhaps surprisingly) is to benefit the public—benefit to an individual artist is only incidental. The theory behind the law is that if we want a rich and vibrant culture, we must give artists copyright in their work to ensure they have economic incentives to create. But by the same logic, fair use recognizes that a vital culture also requires giving room to other artists to copy and transform copyrighted works, even if the original creator of those works objects. Otherwise, in the Supreme Court’s words, copyright law “would stifle the very creativity” it is meant to foster.
Amy Adler; ARTnews
Seeing Beyond the Beauty of a Vermeer
But what was really beginning to grate on me was the breathless critical acclaim. The name Vermeer is, by now, a shorthand for artistic excellence and so much of the praise for the exhibition sounded like emotional shorthand too. Greatness, perfection, sublimity: the appropriate vocabulary for a certain kind of cultural experience. Those who had seen the show were envied by those who hadn’t.
Teju Cole; The New York Times
The case for opsimaths - Maybe late bloomers aren't so late (2021)
We are not very good at knowing how to assess people who have not yet succeeded but who might become impressive later on. Why do some people show no sign of their later promise, and how can we think about the lives of those late bloomers who had precarious journeys to their eventual flourishing?
(phew!!) Henry Oliver
Wisdom That Is Woe - On finding a place for philosophy (2020)
Before I left Opus Dei and the Church, I thought it was a great gain rather than a great loss. I thought I had discovered the truth about the universe, and that by leaving I would be placing myself in the ranks of a great army of liberation going all the way back to the first modern philosophers and especially the philosophes of the Enlightenment. I felt tremendously lucky and proud to be a drop in that great wave of progress and truth. And then, when I actually did it, walked out the door, I discovered that religion had been a kind of drug for me, or a safety net or scaffolding. And the reaction I felt was one of agitation and anxiety. Now I was to be on my own for a time—and possibly eternity, just in case I happened to be wrong. I was terribly frightened.
Joseph M Keegin; The Point
Historic gains: Low-income workers scored in the Covid economy
The gains were the product of a series of dramatic changes in the structure of the labor market and government policies to aid the economy during the pandemic. Fueled by the resulting worker shortage, for example, one of the lowest tiers of earners — people making an average of $12.50 per hour nationally — saw their pay grow nearly 6 percent from 2020 to 2022, even after factoring in inflation.
Victoria Guida; Politico
Is It Real or Imagined? How Your Brain Tells the Difference
Perky asked participants to picture fruits while staring at a blank wall. As they did so, she secretly projected extremely faint images of those fruits — so faint as to be barely visible — on the wall and asked the participants if they saw anything. None of them thought they saw anything real, although they commented on how vivid their imagined image seemed. “If I hadn’t known I was imagining, I would have thought it real,” one participant said.
Yasemin Saplakoglu; Quanta