Charles Finch at The Point:

Last year the great American novelist Norman Rush published a new book, Subtle Bodies, his fourth. Unlike the first three—Whites, Mating and Mortals—it is not set in Botswana, where Rush and his wife Elsa were Peace Corps co-directors from 1978 to 1983, and perhaps that missing edge of novelty is one reason why there’s been a tone of civil disappointment in the critical response. Nevertheless all four books are of a piece, sharing a pair of central concerns: geopolitics, specifically with regard to issues of structural injustice, and the nature of a long and extremely intimate marriage.

On those first and third levels of the art of the novel, Rush is only an equivocal and intermittent master. Passages of his books, particularly Mortals, are beautifully plotted, but none of them could be called compulsive from first to last solely by virtue of their story. As for his vision of the world, fascinating though it is, it has limitations of perspective that the best and most dispassionate novelists (even seemingly inward ones, such as Kafka) have been able to transcend. To be specific: few of the humans who populate Rush’s books ever seem quite as real as the husband and wife who recur again and again as central characters, bandits traveling under different names each time, and who form the twinned consciousness of his art.

But the second, intermediate level of novelistic greatness has to do with neither technical nor visionary genius.

more here.

Justin Erik Halldór Smith at his blog:

1. As with, say, colour perception, reports on the direct experience of feelings are necessarily veridical. E.g., you cannot report (in good faith) that you are experiencing fear, while not in fact being afraid.

2. This experience reveals that fear is real. One needn't go looking for fear in the world, as one would go looking for bigfoot or quarks. This is just not what we have in mind when we attribute reality to certain things.

3. I experience love.

4. God is, by definition, love.

5. Therefore, God is real.

Issue will be taken, of course, with step 4, as having a stipulative character. I am taking it from 1 John 4:8, but others will look to other biblical passages and to other religious traditions to say that God is an anthropomorphized being of some sort, or a theriomorphized one, or a many-headed chimera: in any case, a conscious agent, not a feeling.

But here one might also note that any virtue or feeling at all can be, and often is, anthropomorphized: justice, beauty, purity, etc., have all been represented as human beings in the history of art, and a future historian or a Martian anthropologist would be forgiven for inferring, for example, that late-modern New Yorker-New Jerseyans follow a cult around the goddess of liberty.

more here.

Tara Isabella Burton in The Paris Review:

Poor Fanny Price. The unabashedly mousy, pathologically virtuous protagonist of Mansfield Park—which turns two hundred this year—is Jane Austen’s least popular heroine. She spends most of the novel creeping around the periphery of the titular park, taciturn and swallowing tears; she tires after the briefest of physical exertions; she looks down on her wealthier cousins for engaging in flirtatious amateur theatrics; and for most of the book’s five hundred pages, she refuses to voice her long-held love for her cousin Edmund. Austen’s own mother reportedly found Fanny “insipid”; the critic Reginald Farrer described her as “repulsive in her cast-iron self-righteousness and steely rigidity of prejudice.” Even C. S. Lewis—in the voice of his demon Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters—let loose a vitriolic rant about Austen’s most priggish heroine, calling her “not only a Christian, but such a Christian—a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic, mouselike, watery, insignificant, virginal, bread-and-butter miss … A two-faced little cheat (I know the sort) who looks as if she’d faint at the sight of blood, and then dies with a smile … Filthy, insipid little prude!” Even if we are to separate Lewis from Screwtape, it’s difficult to see Fanny as anything but, to quote Nietzsche’s famous description, “a moralistic little female à la [George] Eliot.”

And indeed, those who defend Fanny tend to see her as a Christian heroine in the mold of a Dorothea Brooke. As the Austen biographer Claire Tomalin puts it, “it is in rejecting obedience in favor of the higher dictate of remaining true to her own conscience that Fanny rises to her moment of heroism.” But to read Mansfield Park as a kind of Middlemarch is to miss the far more complicated story Austen has told. Fanny Price’s story is less about her individual virtue, or her richer relatives’ lack thereof, but about class, about privilege in its most insidious form—before the term ever cropped up in contemporary social justice discourse. Fanny isn’t moral or upright because she wants to be, but because the role—along with a whole host of so-called middle-class values—is forced upon her. For all we know, she may well wish to be as carefree, as filled with dynamic sprezzatura, as Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet, Austen’s more fortunate heroines, but the social dynamic, and the circumstances of her birth, deny her the security necessary for such frivolity. Fanny has too much at stake to be easygoing.

More here.

Bilal Qureshi in NPR:

Ayad Akhtar is a novelist, actor and screenwriter. And when his first play, Disgraced, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2013, he also became one of the most talked about new voices in American theater. Long before this buzz, though, Akhtar grew up in a Muslim family with roots in Pakistan. He mines this background to bring the inner lives and conflicts of Muslim Americans to the stage. His plays often feature cutting dialogue and confrontations steeped in the tension between Islamic tradition and personal evolution. Akhtar's latest play, The Who & the What, is set in Atlanta and tackles the role of women in Muslim families. As with his other work, Akhtar's own family helped inspire the drama. “One of the central questions of my childhood was the role of women in my culture,” Akhtar says. “I grew up around so many brilliant and strong women who really seemed to suffer and chafe under the familial and religious order.” At the heart of his new play is a young woman named Zarina, who wants to confront that order. She's secretly writing a scathing book about the Prophet Muhammad, hoping to expose what she considers the misogyny at the heart of Islamic history. When Zarina's observant father and sister discover her manuscript, the three of them descend into accusations of blasphemy and betrayal.

Playwright Donald Margulies served on the jury that recommended Akhtar's Disgraced for the Pulitzer Prize, and he says these kinds of clashes are at the heart of great theater. He says, “Theater is a place where arguments can be dramatized in a much more exciting way than if it were simply prose narrative.” He adds that what makes Akhtar's work especially exciting is that he is staging multiple perspectives within a community that is still working through its place in America. “The African-American experience, the Jewish American experience — these have been very prevalent in our drama for generations now, and the fact that here we were having a Muslim American experience that was being dramatized was a very momentous occasion,” he says.

More here.

The firstborn was handed back to them
in a small cask not much bigger than
a shoebox only wooden no more about it
they took it home by pony and trap
wasn’t the river in flood at the gate?
they had to climb down and wade through it
and she went alone with him
to the corner of a field below the house
a dry shaded place where he opened a grave
for it was April then and the pinkish
blossoms of whitethorn were emerging
and they lifted it low together
onto sods of damp earth
placed holy water with it
and everything she could to lay
a holy innocent to rest
as far as giving the boy a name
it was Martin the brother in Chicago
and when it came to saying good-bye
he had to draw her away she was so
lonely that shook him while
he covered it with clay for up to then
never a care but a demon for style
high heels you’ve never seen the like
though she gave birth again
she was often seen alone in that field
.

by Catherine Phil MacCarthy
from The Invisible Threshold
Publisher: Dedalus Press, Dublin

Jason Mitchell at Harvard:

When an experiment is expected to yield certain results, and yet it fails to do so, scientists typically work to locate the source of the failure. In principle, the cause of an experimental failure could lurk anywhere; philosophers have pointed out that a failed experiment might very well indicate a previously undetected flaw in our system of logic and mathematics[1]. In practice, however, most scientists work from a mental checklist of likely culprits. At the top of this list, typically, are “nuts-and-bolts” details about the way in which the experiment was carried out—was my apparatus working properly? did my task operationalize the variable I was aiming for? did I carry out the appropriate statistical analysis in the correct way? and so on. Very often, the source of the failure is located here, if only because the list of practical mistakes that can undermine an experiment is so vast.

Considerably lower down the list are various doubts for expecting particular results in the first place, such as uncertainty about the theory that predicted them or skepticism about reports of similar effects[2]. In other words, when an experiment fails, scientists typically first assume that they bungled the details of the experiment before concluding that something must be wrong with their initial reasons for having conducted it in the first place (or that logic and mathematics suffer some fatal flaw). This makes good sense: it would be inane to discard an entire theoretical edifice because of one researcher’s undetected copy-and-paste error or other such practical oversight.

More here. And see also this comment from Neuroskeptic.

Adam Kuper at the Times Literary Supplement:

In the early twentieth century, a handful of Cambridge men, young medical doctors mostly, established modern anthropology, neuroscience, psychology and psychotherapy in Britain. Ben Shephard sums up their quest as “a search for a science of the mind”, which was certainly a large part of it, but they were interested in a great many other things as well. They were close associates who influenced one another, but it would be a mistake to exaggerate the coherence of their projects or the extent to which they shared a common sense of what they were after. Because they were so eclectic and ranged so widely, they were not installed as ancestor figures in the disciplines into which the human sciences were beginning to fragment, even if they were influential in the committees that helped to shape the new professional institutions. Their names are therefore mostly unfamiliar today. Shephard rescues them from the oubliette of disciplinary histories and presents them as members of a cohort: a network of eccentric, wilful, brilliant men who were prepared to go anywhere, try anything, to advance the scientific understanding of human nature.

Central members of this cohort were brought together in the 1898 “Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits”, that narrow stretch of sea, with numerous islands, which separates Australia and New Guinea. The expedition was organized by a zoologist, Alfred Haddon.

more here.

Maggie Gram at n+1:

THIS JULY MARKS the fiftieth birthday of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It is one of the most important pieces of legislation that Congress has ever passed; it made racial discrimination illegal in many of the walks of public life where it had been legally permissible before. Ten years before the Civil Rights Act became law, the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Educationhad taken America by surprise, generating a set of iconic images1 that are still stamped in our national historical memory. But a decade afterBrown, only two percent of southern African American children were attending integrated schools.2 Brown’s imagery stuck in the mind’s eye, but it was the Civil Rights Act that remade the country.

Other laws, of course, have also helped shape the country. But the Civil Rights Act is different in one major way: for many Americans born since its passage, it is very difficult to imagine political and social life without it. Imagine the United States losing the Civil Rights Act’s bans on employment discrimination or on the segregation of public places. Imagine us giving up its tools for the integration of schools and other public facilities. For a lot of people, it’s nearly unthinkable.

more here.

Anne Hollander at The New Republic (from the archives):

They help to create a world, she wrote, where men are forever feeling betrayed, not supported, by the true character and the quality of women, because when fantasy is governing perception, the truth appears as a blasphemy. Neutral facts about women are perceived by men, and by women themselves, not as welcome illuminations but as bad news, festering blemishes on the lovely structure that both sexes agree is woman's proper moral and physical shape. Men need the structure and try to force its preservation; but they also feel entitled to hate the rituals of fakery that women perform to maintain it, especially when they tail. Women in such a world feel chronically in the wrong, most acutely wrong in moments when the truth of the self betrays the fantasy, but obscurely wrong in essence for consenting to the fantasy in the first place. Woman as Object may be spared the burden of responsibility carried by primary Subjects only by suffering the dishonor of constant two-way self-betrayal. Much heavier burdens and worse sufferings then follow, as women are given and often meekly accept every form of raw deal in punishment tot representing falsity and moral weakness.

The sophistication of Beauvoir's account gave her book a lasting resonance, but her brisk solutions of 1949 were too simple for the way that history was going.

more here.

Jon Western over at Duck of Minerva (image from wikimedia commons):

Officially, the Israeli government is still committed to the two-state solution, but for all practical purposes, Netanyahu and the right wing have largely abandoned it. With the continual expansion of settlements, it becomes harder and harder every day to imagine that any future Israeli government will be willing to drive anywhere from 100k to nearly a quarter of a million settlers out of the West Bank – even if the Palestinians accept territorial exchange for blocks of settlements. As of last week, the most immediate task for Netanyahu to preserve the status quo was to break the Palestinian unity government between the PA and Hamas that developed last month following the collapse of Kerry’s peace talks earlier this spring. The IDF response in Hebron and elsewhere in the search for the missing teens was designed to find the boys and to wedge the PA from Hamas.

More broadly, prior to the escalation of violence in the last six days, life for most Israelis has been pretty easy. The security situation has been relatively calm. And, even though the entire Middle East is in turmoil, there is some sense that this has actually been to some benefit to Israel. Hezbollah and Iran both have their hands full in Lebanon and Syria with the recent actions of ISIS and other Sunni extremists. The economy is doing well. Indeed, a common lament up until the last few days in Tel Aviv is that the hardest thing about life there is getting a reservation at any one of the dozens of new upscale restaurants.

We also met with Dani Dayan, a leading figure in the settler movement. A few weeks earlier, he had published a seemingly conciliatory op-ed in the New York Times in which he spoke about reconciliation with the Palestinians. But, when pressed deeper about the details – in particular, what exactly is the alternative if the two-state solution is dead, he said a one-state solution was untenable given the demographics in which Palestinians would soon constitute a majority. Instead, he argued that a “normalized” status quo was both acceptable and sustainable. He said the settlements should be allowed to continue with Israeli government support. He noted that Israeli politics had increasingly turned and has much stronger settler representation than ever. Even the IDF has changed and many of its officers come from the settler communities – they will never force Israelis off of their lands in Judea and Samaria. In short, he argued that it was time to recognize the real situation and “normalize” the occupation.

More here.

David Goldblatt in Al Jazeera America (Vanderlei Almeida / AFP / Getty Images):

After the 1998 World Cup final, when France swept aside Brazil and the catatonic Ronaldo, there was eventually sufficient political pressure to force the creation of congressional inquiries into the CBF (the Brazilian football federation) and its relationship with Nike, as well as the wider pathologies of the Brazilian game. Those reports, long moldering on the ministry of sports website revealed that Brazilian football is, despite very stiff global competition, amongst the most dysfunctional, badly organized and corrupt system around. More than that, both reports, published in 2001, recommended the criminal investigation and prosecution of a large swathe of Brazil’s football establishment. Brazil’s victory in the World Cup in 2002 ensured that not a single investigation or prosecution would be pursued.

I suspect that a victory in 2014 would have resulted in a similar absolution of the people and institutions that have run this World Cup. That the broken promises to the poor, the squandered opportunities for progressive urban redevelopment, the widespread and shameless stealing that has characterized the seven years since the tournament was awarded to Brazil, would all be, if not forgotten rendered utterly marginal. That is going to be a much harder act to pull off. But as Carlos Drummond de Andrade, the mid-century Brazilian poet and football chronicler, wrote in 1982 after the famous defeat to Italy – it’s time for Brazil to wipe its tears, roll up its sleeves and get back to the serious business of political reform.

But Germany’s victory has not only changed the long-term resonance of the tournament in Brazil but showed us something about football itself. We can be grateful that the world’s press has not chosen to describe the game in terms of blitzkrieg, but offered the lesser clichés of the clinical, efficient Teutonic machine. It is extraordinary how words can blind us to what is going in front of our eyes: Germany were not clinical or efficient, they were dazzling.

More here.

Jessica Pishko in The Morning News:

People talk about feeling in debt when someone donates an organ. Dr. Sally Satel, who had a kidney transplant and is a doctor, eloquently writes about her mixed feelings of relying on someone else for a vital organ. She thinks organ donation should be a purely financial transaction, more like buying a used car, without all of the feelings that come along with a personal exchange. “I wanted my donor to be completely anonymous so I could avoid the treacherous intimacy of accepting an organ from someone I knew,” she writes. She later quotes the work of two sociologists who discuss the “tyranny of the gift,” the idea that once someone does something altruistic, they are bound forever like debtor and debt holder, “in a mutually fettering way.” I see where she’s coming from. Permanent ties to people used to make me nervous. But then I had a child.

My uncle received a kidney from an old student of his. I’ve met the donor, and he seems like a nice guy. He gets a lot of hugs and congratulations. I don’t know if my uncle feels indebted, but I suppose he might. Maybe he is more comfortable being intimately entangled with other people. I’ve heard there are strangers who offer to donate kidneys. My father has received emails from around the world—war-ravaged African countries, China, the Middle East—from people offering their kidneys. They don’t name their price, but he usually assumes the debt would be too big to ever repay. It turns out Dr. Satel got a kidney from a friend who was just the right distance: not too intimate, not too far. I’m glad it worked out for her that way, but it must be a struggle to maintain relationships that aren’t too entangled, that aren’t too fettering. She was relieved to find out she wouldn’t have to talk to her friend about the kidney she gave her; all that gratitude would just go unsaid.

More here.

Katie Langin in National Geographic:

According to a study published Tuesday in the journal Biology Letters, common red ants (Myrmica rubra) that were prevented from removing their nestmates' corpses died more frequently than those allowed to bring out their dead. The tiny ants—each roughly the size of a medium-grain rice kernel—live under rocks and logs in densely packed colonies. More than a thousand worker ants can be found in a single nest. These insects reap many benefits from group living, as they work together to gather food, care for their queen, and defend their nest. But the situation also puts them at risk of being hit by disease epidemics: If one individual in the colony comes down with an illness, the blight can spread rapidly. This places a premium on good hygiene.

Dead Are Deadly

Many insects habitually remove dead nestmates from their colony. Scientists have long assumed that this behavior is based on a need to keep the rest of the colony healthy. But until now that idea hadn't been put to a formal test. The new study, conducted by researchers at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Université de Liège in Belgium, tested the health benefits of corpse removal in common red ant colonies kept in artificial nests. Some of the nests had wide exits. Others had narrow openings that made it difficult for the ants to transport and deposit corpses outside. In each colony, the scientists fatally froze ten worker ants, placed their corpses back in the nest, and monitored the survival of the remaining workers. The result: The ants in colonies that couldn't remove corpses didn't fare as well. By the end of the 50-day experiment, mortality had more than doubled in the corpse-littered colonies, from 6 percent to 13 percent. Why the higher death rate? The researchers can't say for sure, but they speculate that “corpses artificially staying longer in the nest may have increased the occurrence of microorganisms, requiring a greater investment in the immune system for live ants and possibly resulting in a reduced lifespan.”

More here.

Judith Butler reviews Jacques Derrida's The Death Penalty: Vol. I, in The LRB:

‘Whence comes this bizarre, bizarre idea,’ Jacques Derrida asks, reading Nietzsche on debt in On the Genealogy of Morals, ‘this ancient, archaic (uralte) idea, this so very deeply rooted, perhaps indestructible idea, of a possible equivalence between injury and pain (Schaden und Schmerz)? Whence comes this strange hypothesis or presumption of an equivalence between two such incommensurable things? What can a wrong and a suffering have in common?’ By way of an answer, he points out that ‘the origin of the legal subject, and notably of penal law, is commercial law; it is the law of commerce, debt, the market, the exchange between things, bodies and monetary signs, with their general equivalent and their surplus value, their interest.’

More here.

Thomas B. Edsall in the NYT

In “Obedience to Traditional Authority: A heritable factor underlying authoritarianism, conservatism and religiousness,” published by the journal Personality and Individual Differences in 2013, three psychologists write that “authoritarianism, religiousness and conservatism,” which they call the “traditional moral values triad,” are “substantially influenced by genetic factors.” According to the authors — Steven Ludeke of Colgate, Thomas J. Bouchard of the University of Minnesota, and Wendy Johnson of the University of Edinburgh — all three traits are reflections of “a single, underlying tendency,” previously described in one word by Bouchard in a 2006 paper as “traditionalism.” Traditionalists in this sense are defined as “having strict moral standards and child-rearing practices, valuing conventional propriety and reputation, opposing rebelliousness and selfish disregard of others, and valuing religious institutions and practices.”

Working along a parallel path, Amanda Friesen, a political scientist at Indiana University, and Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz, a graduate student in political science at Rice University, concluded from their study comparing identical and fraternal twins that “the correlation between religious importance and conservatism” is “driven primarily, but usually not exclusively, by genetic factors.” The substantial “genetic component in these relationships suggests that there may be a common underlying predisposition that leads individuals to adopt conservative bedrock social principles and political ideologies while simultaneously feeling the need for religious experiences.”

From this perspective, the Democratic Party — supportive of abortion rights, same-sex marriage and the primacy of self-expressive individualism over obligation to family — is irreconcilably alien to a segment of the electorate. And the same is true from the opposite viewpoint: a Republican Party committed to right-to-life policies, to a belief that marriage must be between a man and a woman, and to family obligation over self-actualization, is profoundly unacceptable to many on the left.

If these predispositions are, as Friesen and Ksiazkiewicz argue, to some degree genetically rooted, they may not lend themselves to rational debate and compromise.

More here.

Samanth Subramanian in Caravan (Gemunu Amarasinghe / AP Photo):

One evening in Colombo, my friend Sanjaya dropped by, intending to collect me on our way to someplace else. I offered him a drink—beer, I seem to remember now, but given how the next two hours slipped clean out of our hands, more likely it was arrack. Arrack did that to you: it greased the passage of time. We sat around my dining table, Sanjaya telling stories and I listening. He told yarns tall and magnificent, embellishing on the run and possessing such a fondness for the absurd that he giggled as if he were hearing the tale and not narrating it. When he laughed, his eyes narrowed into letterbox slits, he quivered noiselessly, and his shoulders heaved. His mirth was tectonic.

“You heard they pulled a Muslim shrine down?” Sanjaya asked.

It had happened in the previous week in Anuradhapura, the ancient capital of Sri Lanka, and the most holy of towns for the island’s Buddhists. A group of Buddhist protesters—a busload, or two busloads, according to conflicting media reports—had arrived with crowbars and hammers and taken apart a small, old dargah. In this enterprise, they had not been stopped by the police or local administrators. Anuradhapura now bristled with communal tension.

“We should go there,” I said.

“We should,” Sanjaya said thoughtfully. “I know a guy who caught the whole thing on video.”

During the final years of the civil war, Sri Lankan Buddhism had developed a muscular right wing. First, in 2004, there was the launch of the Jathika Hela Urumaya, a political party led by Buddhist monks, some of whom admitted quite freely to being racists and bayed for a destructive, damn-the-consequences annihilation of the guerrillas of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Nine of its monks entered parliament, and the party became a member—and an ideological heavyweight—in the coalition that ruled Sri Lanka. After some years, even the JHU was deemed by some to be too timid. In 2011 and 2012, two other sets of monks splintered from the JHU and started the Sinhala Ravaya (the Sinhalese Roar) and the Bodu Bala Sena (the Army of Buddhist Power), hijacking for themselves the shrill energy of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism. On the flag of the Sinhala Ravaya, a lion bounds forward, holding a sword thrust forward in attack. The Sinhalese roar is practically audible.

During those two years, the Buddhist right developed a taste for straight thuggery. The Tamils, cautious and defeated, living under a crushing military presence in the country’s north and east, posed no present threat to Sinhalese Buddhism. So, instead, the Bodu Bala Sena and the Sinhala Ravaya—as well as the JHU, their milquetoast cousin—retrained their energies upon Sri Lanka’s Muslims, who form roughly 10 percent of the population.

More here.

Joanna Walsh in Berfrois (image–Goppeldangers: Samuel Beckett by Nell Frizell):

The first time I read More Pricks Than Kicks I was assailed by terrible cramps that rippled up and down the front of my torso until I stopped reading. It seemed appropriate. Echo’s Bones is a long short story originally intended as the ‘recessional’ to More Pricks Than Kicks, Beckett’s 1934 collection of stories about Belacqua – Dubliner, eternal student, abject sufferer from his own body: goitre, hammer toe, sexual dysfunction and moral turpitude. Although Beckett had to be persuaded to write the story in order to flesh out the collection, Echo’s Bones gave Shatton & Windup [1] “the jim-jams” and it was rejected. Now here it is, resurrected and larger-than-life, bulked-out by an introduction and notes longer than the text itself.

The beautiful new Faber edition (taking notes, my pencil sunk into what must truly be the Andrex of paper stock) is annotated almost out of existence, making the task of reading nearly as great a labour as digging up your own coffin, as Belacqua (now deceased), finds.

There is much to annotate. In a letter to Thomas McGreevy, in 1933, Beckett says Echo’s Boneswas a “story into which I put all I knew and plenty that I was better still aware of.” Beckett started his career, under the influence of Joyce, by saying everything, and ended up by saying nothing: the less he wrote, the more he was capable of meaning. In a late interview with James Knowlson, Beckett said, “I realised that James Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding. ”Cut out the style.” as Lord Gall advises Belacqua, several times.

In an essay on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Beckett said of his mentor, “his writing is not about something; it is that something itself.” In Echo’s Bones, Beckett addresses, creatively, the anxiety of what relations words can have with what is. If More Pricks than Kicks is set in a Grosz world of the solidly physical, with its cast of scholars and whores (there are no other women: “Toutes êtes, serez ou futes, De fait ou de volonté putes,” Chas quotes, in A Wet Night) in Echo’s Bones, though set in the afterlife, flesh is still pervasive.

More here.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips at The Paris Review:

And yet before Sunday’s final, there’s Saturday’s game, which for me carries the same weight—not for its importance, but for the window it provides into the people who play. This will be the third-place game, in which the losers of the two semifinals meet to decide who finishes third and who finishes fourth. Finals are dreamscapes, heavy shimmering things. The spectacle and competition make a final less about its players and more about the game itself; the players fill a void that’s been waiting for them, as even now such voids are waiting in the Moscow of 2018 and the Qatar of 2022. But that third-place game …

While the semifinalists of the World Cup prepare for their games with the taste of victory still fresh, the third-place game is a consolation for losers. Whether you lost 4-0 or to a last-second goal, there you are. There are times when national pride and/or a collective feeling of fleeting opportunity coaxes one final good performance out of a team. There are other occasions in which the semifinal loss still stings too much, a nation having expected much more than third from its team.

In urban planning, cultural studies, and sociology, there’s a concept called third placeinvented by Ray Oldenburg. If home is the first place and work is the second, the third place is an intermediary area to create and foster community—the setting where you hang out and become a regular among regulars—the barbershop or hair salon, the record store, the pub, the bowling alley.

more here.

Javier Marías at Threepenny Review:

I can think of seven reasons not to write novels:

First: There are too many novels and too many people writing them. Not only do those already written continue to exist and demand to be eternally read, but thousands more entirely new novels keep appearing in publishers’ catalogs and in bookshops around the world; then there are the many thousands rejected by publishers that never reach the bookshops, but which nonetheless exist. It is, then, a commonplace activity, one that is, in theory, within the grasp of anyone who learned to write at school, and for which no higher education or special training is required.

Second: And precisely because anyone, whatever his or her profession, can write a novel, it is an activity that lacks merit and mystery. Poets, philosophers, and dramatists do it; so do sociologists, linguists, publishers, and journalists; politicians, singers, TV presenters, and football coaches; engineers, school teachers, civil servants, and movie actors; critics, aristocrats, priests, and housewives; psychiatrists, university professors, soldiers, and goatherds.

more here.