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Wednesday, September 9, 2020

For The Slow Work Of Critique In Critical Times, by Webb Keane, Public Books

Drawing together first- and third-person perspectives, critique provides languages to dissect, persuade, dispute, enlist, encourage, propose, invent, and imagine, so that others may do so as well. Through second-person address—such as that employed by the prisoner—critique may summon forth new solidarities and emergent communities. Working at its own pace, critique can reveal the ethical wellsprings of people’s political commitments, so they know better why they act and what they can hope for.

Aram Saroyan And The Art Of The One-Word Poem, by Paul Stephens, The MIT Press Reader

Writing in 1961, at the founding of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) movement, Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, two of France’s most significant postwar literary experimentalists, wondered to one another “how few words can make a poem?”

Physics And Information Theory Give A Glimpse Of Life’s Origins, by Natalie Elliot, Aeon

How did life originate? Scientists have been studying the question for decades, and they’ve developed ingenious methods to try to find out. They’ve even enlisted biology’s most powerful theory, Darwinian evolution, in the search. But they still don’t have a complete answer. What they have hit is the world’s most theoretically fertile dead end.

How Algorithms Are Changing What We Read Online, by Russell Smith, The Walrus

No, I don’t think readers weren’t interested. It’s that they were told not to be interested. The algorithms had already decided my subjects were not breaking news. Those algorithms then ensured that they would never be. When I took my final bow, the room was already empty.

In ‘Not A Novel,’ Jenny Erpenbeck Continues To Evolve, by John Domini, Washington Post

Despite their differences, these essays come together to assert the value of the writer’s vocation. Whatever her subject or tone, Erpenbeck keeps coming back to how her work enables us to know the unknowable, especially in our ever-changing heads and hearts. “It takes an entire lifetime,” she contends, “to unravel the mysteries of our own lives,” and in that task we have no better tool than fiction, poetry, drama — or even memoir.

An Award-Winning Debut Novel About Innocence Shattered Offers Terror And Solace, by Parul Sehgal, New York Times

However strong your readerly constitution, it might feel like a peculiar time to pick up a book so mournful and gory. And yet, I went to it every day without dread, with, in fact, a gratitude that surprised me. It was the gratitude of not being condescended to.

Just Like You Review – Nick Hornby Tackles Race, Romance… And Brexit, by Sam Leith, The Guardian

In this age of anxiety about cultural appropriation and suchlike, kudos to Nick Hornby’s bold move in Just Like You. He narrates one half of it from the point of view of a working-class black man in his early 20s and the other half from the point of view of a 42-year-old middle-class white mother. And, what’s more, he makes a social comedy of the two of them falling in love, one that gently dramatises their differences of class, race and generation.

Reading World Of Wonders: In Praise Of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, And Other Astonishments, by Sarah Appleton Pine, Ploughshares

Through her celebration of nature—and herself—Nezhukumatathil explores how it connects her to family and has played a role in building her own; in particular, nature becomes a lens through which to view motherhood. Nezhukumatathil reflects on the generosity and resilience of her own mother, a doctor who worked at a hospital for the criminally insane and faced racism from inmates and their families. “How did she manage to leave it all behind in that office, switching gears to listen to the ramblings of her fifth and sixth-grade girls and their playground dramas, slights, and victories?” Nezhukumatathil wonders.

Overnight Snow, by Ted Kooser, Literary Hub

Before walking to work, and in still-falling snow,
my father in hat, suit, topcoat, and galoshes