Elaine Blair in The New York Times:

Nearly all of Ferrante’s interviewers ask some version of the obvious question: Why write under a pseudonym? At first, Ferrante says, it was a matter of “timidity” — “I was frightened of the possibility of having to come out of my shell.” She has been writing for her entire adult life, Ferrante explains, but only with “Troubling Love” did she feel she had finally written a book worth publishing. Using a pseudonym seemed a natural extension of having written in obscurity for years. In a way, she was protecting her future work by not becoming emotionally caught up in the promotion of her present work. Later, she came to resent the superficial media coverage of authors and books. It’s not only that she wants to defend her novels from reductive comparisons to her own life. She’s afraid that she herself, under the pressure of a confrontation with a journalist, will oversimplify or otherwise betray her own work. “In the games with newspapers one always ends up lying, and at the root of the lie is the need to offer oneself to the public in the best form, with thoughts suitable to the role,” she writes to her editor after the publication of her second novel. “I care deeply about the truth of ‘The Days of Abandonment,’ I wouldn’t want to talk about it meekly, complying with the expectations implicit in the interviewer’s questions.” (Her fear of “complying” — of polite social accommodations — comes up several times, and indeed it may have been just such an act of friendly compliance with her editors that led to the publication of “Frantumaglia.”)

Ferrante often points out that readers don’t need authors to explain the work. But by participating in all of these interviews, Ferrante notably retained the ability to comment on her work and regularly did. (Her discussion of her books and her artistic influences makes for some of the most absorbing parts of “Frantumaglia.” Her exchanges with Martone about his screenplay for “Troubling Love,” in which she offers deep interpretations of the book’s narrator, Delia, are particularly interesting, as is a letter to the Italian magazine Indice in which she quotes excised passages from her first two books and explains why she ended up cutting them.) What she denied the media was any outside observation of her person, or her personality. No journalist could describe her clothes or the way she walks or what she orders in a restaurant. No childhood friend could gossip with a reporter about the young Ferrante. For 25 years, Ferrante retained sole authorship of the character “Elena Ferrante.” She found a way to speak to readers through the press entirely on her own terms — literally and exclusively in her own words. This is a rare, maybe unique, achievement. It’s not surprising that a member of the press would eventually be provoked to turn the tables. In order to do it, Ferrante was willing to forgo personal credit for the novels: She has long made the case to incredulous interviewers that some experiences are even more gratifying than being a celebrity. “I don’t want to accept an idea of life where the success of the self is measured by the success of the written page,” she explained in a letter to a magazine editor in 1995. “It’s not a small thing,” she told an interviewer from La Repubblica in 2014, “to write knowing that you can orchestrate for readers not only a story, characters, feelings, landscapes but the very figure of the author, the most genuine figure, because it’s created from writing alone.”

More here.

The Mirror

Is it in hopes
to find or lose myself
that I
fill up my table now
with Michelet and Motley?
to ‘know how it was’
or to forget how it is—
what else?
Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew,
Yankee nor Rebel, born
in the face of two ancient cults,
I’m a good reader of histories,
And you,
Morris Cohen, dear to me as a brother,
when you sit at night
tracing your way through your volumes
of Josephus, or any
of the cold Judaic chronicles,
do you find yourself there, a simpler
more eloquent Jew?
or do you read
to shut out the tick-tock of self,
the questions and their routine answers?
.

by Adrienne Rich
from Contemporary American Poetry
Penguin Books, 1966
.

Poem in Three Parts

Oh, on an early morning I think I shall live forever!
I am wrapped in my joyful flesh,
As the grass is wrapped in its clouds of green.

Rising from bed where I dreamt
of long rides past castles and hot coals,
The sun lies happily on my knees;
I have suffered and survived the night,
Bathed in dark water, like any blade of grass.

The strong leaves of the box-elder tree,
Plunging in the wind, call us to disappear
Into the wilds of the universe,
Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant,
And live forever, like the dust.
.

by Robert Bly
from Contemporary American Poetry
Penguin Books, 1966
.

Cynthia Haven in the Times Literary Supplement:

Until a few days before his death last year at the age of ninety-eight, Robert Conquest was busy finishing his memoir, completing a poem or two, and sending off a steady stream of letters to a wide international circle of friends. As always, his serenely successful life was divided between poetry and prose. Most of the obituaries concentrated on his groundbreaking work as a historian: The Great Terror (1968), Harvest of Sorrow (1986) and other books had exposed the genocidal horrors of Stalin’s regime and earned Conquest the disapprobation of left-wing intellectuals and the admiration of, among others, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But he was also a poet of note; not just for the light verse and bawdy limericks with which he entertained fellow guests at social gatherings (a selection of these, A Garden of Erses, was published in 2010 as the work of “Jeff Chaucer”), but for serious verse that is lyrical, sensual and exactingly observed.

The poets of the “Movement”, which Conquest could almost be said to have invented, are studied in British schools, and Conquest’s poetry has readers in the United Kingdom. In the United States, however, where he had made his home for decades, his poetry is little known – along with that of the poets he fostered with his anthology, New Lines (1956). Yet two events were held in the US earlier this year that might alter the picture. One unlikely champion for Conquest’s poetry had a major role in both: the poet R. S. Gwynn of Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, a genial bear of a man with a pronounced Southern drawl.

More here.

David Farrier in The Atlantic:

Late one summer night in 1949, the British archeologist Jacquetta Hawkes went out into her small back garden in north London, and lay down. She sensed the bedrock covered by its thin layer of soil, and felt the hard ground pressing her flesh against her bones. Shimmering through the leaves and out beyond the black lines of her neighbors’ chimney pots were the stars, beacons “whose light left them long before there were eyes on this planet to receive it,” as she put it in A Land (1951), her classic book of imaginative nature writing.

We are accustomed to the idea of geology and astronomy speaking the secrets of ‘deep time,’ the immense arc of non-human history that shaped the world as we perceive it. Hawkes’s lyrical meditation mingles the intimate and the eternal, the biological and the inanimate, the domestic with a sense of deep time that is very much of its time. The state of the topsoil was a matter of genuine concern in a country wearied by wartime rationing, while land itself rises into focus just as Britain is rethinking its place in the world. But in lying down in her garden, Hawkes also lies on the far side of a fundamental boundary. A Land was written at the cusp of the Holocene; we, on the other hand, read it in the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene, or era of the human, denotes how industrial civilization has changed the Earth in ways that are comparable with deep-time processes. The planet’s carbon and nitrogen cycles, ocean chemistry and biodiversity—each one the product of millions of years of slow evolution—have been radically and permanently disrupted by human activity.

More here.

Eric Bates in The New Republic:

Years ago, there was an old guy in my neighborhood named Pete. His hair was white and disheveled, and he liked to wheel his small shopping cart up and down the street and hand out political flyers to everyone he met. Some days the flyers were about the dangers of nuclear power. Some days they were about the perils of free-trade agreements. But they were always handwritten, they always took up both sides of the page, and there was never a margin in sight. For Pete, margins were a missed opportunity, a plot by the establishment, an artificial convention created by a world that mistook the urgency of the situation. The truth has no use for margins.

Bernie Sanders is a little like Pete. He doesn’t have a shopping cart, and his political positions are significantly more coherent. But like Pete, he has no patience for anything that threatens to distract him or others from the pressing matters at hand. When I arrive at his Senate office for an interview, he does not want to chat about the last time we met, at a tribute in Vermont to the late journalist Michael Hastings. He does not want to look back at his historic campaign for the presidency and consider what he might have done differently. He does not want to talk about Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings or the incivility of some of his supporters. He does not mention that tomorrow is his seventy-fifth birthday. He wants to talk about policy, and the nuts and bolts of organizing, and whatever else is needed to bring a greater measure of justice and equality to human affairs. He lives by the Marxist-Calvinist tradition of everything for the cause. He doesn’t have time for roses. Too many people need bread.

More here.

Kate Adie at Literary Review:

The wistful nephew of a former secret agent in the Second World War once told me of his utter frustration: his aunt, well into her nineties, refused to talk of her adventures. Patrick Garrett had already read his great-aunt Clare Hollingworth’s autobiography, but it was short on personal detail. He’d also spent many hours talking to her in her apartment in Hong Kong, though she added little to personalise the details of her career in journalism that were already in the public domain. Then, in his parents’ attic back in England, he discovered a ‘battered trunk, plastered with shipping labels’. In it were letters, campaign medals, documents, torn photographs of former lovers… His great-aunt’s past sprang to life.

And what a life. Wars, travel, exotic locations, encounters with spies, fact-finding and gossip with diplomats and soldiers, double agents and politicians. It was both glamorous and gritty, from the fashionable watering holes of Cairo, Paris and Bucharest to the rigours of survival in a warzone. It featured two husbands, many other charming men and, essential to a globetrotting correspondent, a phenomenal contacts book.

more here.

Mayanthi Fernando in Dissent:

The ideas articulated in Islamic Feminisms have also been circulating informally in Muslim French women’s reading circles for over a decade. Born and raised in France, and committed to basic liberal feminist notions of liberty and equality, these young Muslims sought to distinguish between the patriarchal cultural traditions of the Maghreb—like demanding modesty and virginity from young women but not young men—and what they view as “authentic” Islam. In groups like Al Houda, young women gathered to criticize the sexism of conventional Islamic exegesis and jurisprudence—which largely treats women as wives, daughters, and mothers—and to explore new ways to conceptualize Islam. They were just as critical, however, of mainstream feminism’s claim that women’s emancipation entails the rejection of religion and religious norms. As Islamic feminists, they argued, they could be both devout Muslims and committed to gender equality. Islamic feminism, spearheaded by scholars and activists, began to emerge globally in the late 1980s. Unlike secular feminists, Islamic feminists begin with the premise that the Quran constitutes Divine Speech. From that basis, they argue that equality is the founding principle of Islam, and that the Quran endorses equality between the sexes. Thus Amina Wadud’s Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (1992)—a key text in this movement—reinterprets passages used to justify sexist and misogynist practices (such as the beating of recalcitrant wives and the unequal distribution of inheritance, for example) and argues for very different meanings.

In a similar vein, Asma Barlas, a Pakistani academic who teaches in the United States, claims in her influential “Believing Women” in Islam (2002) that the Quran is explicitly “egalitarian and antipatriarchal.” Contrary to popular belief in much of the Muslim world, Barlas contends, the Quran expects both sexes to live by the same moral standards, and this moral equality between men and women means that chastity and modesty are as incumbent upon men as they are on women—a point reiterated again and again by young Muslim feminists in France. Islamic feminists also argue that the Prophet Mohammed defended the rights of women in a tribal society known for its misogyny, and they point to the active presence of women in political life and on the battlefield in the early days of Islam. Wadud, Barlas, and others argue that Islamic teachings used to justify the gender inequality endemic to so many Muslim societies today derive not from the Quran itself but from Quranic exegesis (tafsir), undertaken for centuries by men whose own misogyny has come to eclipse the revolutionary message of Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. Hence the need to re-read the Quran against the grain of centuries of interpretation in order to recover Islam’s true principles.

More here.

Adam Kirsch at The Nation:

This liberal faith has not entirely vanished in Smith’s new book, Swing Time, but the novel does have a quality that is even more monitory than the willed strenuousness ofNW. Smith is always being called exuberant—or Dickensian, or even “hysterical realist,” which amount to the same thing—and the title of the new book, with its Astaire-and-Rogers gaiety, seems to promise more of the same. But in fact Swing Time is a sober book, even—at times—a depressive one. It feels like the kind of book novelists write when they have come to the end of their own favorite themes and techniques. There is less of the excitement of discovery, of getting things down on paper that have not been observed before, and more of the resigned pleasure of understanding. There is less seeing, and more seeing through.

The immediate source of this change in her work has to do with the novel’s narration. An omniscient narrator, which Smith has employed in her previous books, can understand all and forgive all. But a first-person narrator, which she uses in Swing Time, is limited by circumstance and trapped by temperament. We never learn the name of the woman who is telling us the story in Swing Time, and she remains adjacent to the action, lost in the shadow cast by other, more radiant personalities.

more here.

Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

When the Soviet Union expelled the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in 1972, he already had a few friends waiting for him in the West. One of them,Diana Myers, would remain a confidante until the Nobel laureate’s death in 1996. The London home she shared with her husband, the translator Alan Myers, became his English pied-à-terre.

The Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford has recently acquired Diana Myers’ collection of Brodsky’s papers, including letters, photos, drafts, manuscripts, artwork and published and unpublished poems.

“We were keenly interested in adding the Joseph Brodsky papers collected by his friend Diana Myers to our vast archives on Russia and making them accessible right away,” said Eric Wakin, the Robert H. Malott Director of the Hoover Library & Archives.

“With Hoover’s significant holdings on the poet in its Irwin T. and Shirley Holtzman Collection, and the recently acquired Joseph Brodsky papers from the Katilius Family Archive at the Green Library, we’re honored that Stanford has become a notable center for Brodsky studies in the United States.”

The new acquisition documents Brodsky’s enormous capacity for friendship and his long love affair with the English language.

more here.

Jessa Gamble in The Atlantic:

In a time when college graduates return to live under their parents’ roofs and top careers require years of internships and graduate degrees, the age of adulthood is receding, practically into the 30s. Adolescence, loosely defined as the period between puberty and financial independence, now lasts about 15 years, twice as long as it did in the 1950s. Part of this is due to the declining age of puberty in both males and females, but most of that extension appears in the 20s, when an increasing number of young people are still dependent on their parents. There is some concern that all of this dependence could lead to a lasting immaturity and failure to take on responsibility.

But according to developmental researchers, there is one lasting gift that extended adolescence can bestow, and it resides in the brain. “Neurobiological capital” is built through a protracted period of learning capacity in the brain, and it is a privilege that comes to those lucky enough to enjoy intellectually stimulating environments in late adolescence. Far from a contributor to emotional immaturity, the trend toward an adolescence that extends into the mid-20s is an opportunity to create a lifelong brain-based advantage. Choirmasters’ records show that whereas choristers’ voices broke around age 18 in the mid-1700s, that age declined to 13 in 1960, and voices now break on average at age 10-and-a-half. Meanwhile, the age of first menstruation in girls has been declining by more than three months per decade. Much of that change comes down to improved nutrition, but in recent years the age drop has become a health concern. Marriage and financial security, on the other side of adolescence, now arrive close to age 30, in contrast to the early-20s marriages of the 1950s. In combination, those changes make for a more dominant life stage between childhood and adulthood. Biologically, adolescence serves to prepare the brain for independence, and it represents the last surge of plasticity, when the brain is far more open to change than it was in middle childhood.

More here.

Peter Constantine in Literary Hub:

I have been translating Anton Chekhov for over 20 years, bringing into English more than a hundred stories that are lesser-known, unknown, or untranslated. I have been asking myself throughout these two decades: What is Chekhovian? We hear of Chekhovian situations, Chekhovian despair, Chekhovian resolutions. There is Nabokov’s famous take on “Chekhovian” in his novel Pnin:

Ten years before, she had had a handsome heel for a lover who had jilted her for a little tramp, and later she had had a dragging, hopelessly complicated—Chekhovian rather than Dostoevskian—affair with a cripple, who was now married to his nurse, a cheap cutie.

But is Chekhovian really something “dragging and hopelessly complicated?” There is the deep and elusive quality of his plays, which so many directors throughout the world try to fathom every year, and there is also the complexity of the stories he wrote in the last years of his brief life—he died at the age of 44, in 1904—but there is much more to Chekhov’s work than that.

More here.

Ashutosh Jogalekar in The Curious Wavefunction:

What makes a successful scientist? The question is hard to answer, not because there is no general consensus but because the precise contribution of specific factors in individual cases cannot always be teased out. Intelligence is certainly an important feature but it can manifest itself in myriad ways. Apart from this, having a good nose for important problems is key. Perhaps most important is the ability to persevere in the face of constant frustration and discouragement. And then there is luck, that haphazard driving force whose blessings are unpredictable but can be discerned by Alexander Fleming's famous “prepared minds”.

But aside from these determinants, one factor stands out which may not always be obvious because of it's negative connotation; and that is the good sense to realize one's weaknesses and the willingness to give up and marshal one's resources into a more productive endeavor. Admitting one's weaknesses is understandably an unpleasant task; nobody wants to admit what they are not good at, especially if they have worked at it for years. That kind of attitude does not get you job offers or impress interviewers. Yet being able to admit what qualities you lack can make your life take a radically successful direction. And lest we think that only mere mortals have to go through this painful process of periodic self-evaluation and subsequent betterment, we can be rest assured. It was none other than Linus Pauling who went through this soul-searching. And we are all the wiser for his decision.

More here.

Moni Mohsin in The Guardian:

When I was a child in Lahore in Pakistan, my parents employed a driver called Sultan. Sultan, a retired soldier, was from a village near Jhelum. He was a cheerful man in his 60s who readily joined in our games of badminton. But to me the most interesting fact about Sultan was that he could speak Italian. A fragmentary, broken Italian, but Italian nonetheless, picked up as a prisoner of war in Italy. He called me signorina and taught me three Italian words: si, grazie and buongiorno. Decades later, when I told my children about Sultan, they were gobsmacked. What was a Pakistani villager doing fighting in Italy? He wasn’t Pakistani then, I explained, he was Indian. Sultan was one of more than two million Indian soldiers who fought for the allies in the second world war. “No! Really?” they breathed.

My children (daughter 17, son 15) were born and raised in London and have had the good fortune to attend fantastic schools where they have been offered, alongside the usual array of subjects, a rich diet of music, drama, art, sport and languages. Their extracurricular clubs include Arabic, feminism, astronomy, mindfulness and carpentry. In my convent school in Lahore, I had to listen in respectful silence. In London, they are encouraged to question and argue.

Yet, for all the range and candour of their education, they haven’t once encountered Britain’s colonial past in school.

More here.

Mark Hutchinson at the Times Literary Supplement:

It was at this point that Bunting approached Eliot for the third, and possibly fourth, time (dates in Bunting’s life tend to be a bit slippery, and accounts differ as to whether he went to him once or twice). First, in late 1950, with a copy of Poems: 1950, a book compiled and published by one of Pound’s crankier American disciples that is basically a revised and updated version of the Redimiculum Matellarum typescript, with a few early poems stripped out and replaced by odes from the late 1930s and 40s (“Let them remember Samangan”, “The Orotava Road”), and one of the first and most beautiful of Bunting’s translations from the Persian, “When the sword of sixty” (which Eliot did, incidentally, publish, in the Criterion, in 1936); plus “The Well of Lycopolis”, a long and “very bitter” poem, as Bunting was later to describe it, written in the Canaries in 1935 and featuring Venus as a garrulous old whore. Then (if Richard Burton, the author of the biography A Strong Song Tows Us – reviewed in the TLS, June 20, 2014 – is correct), a second time, in 1952, with the same book plus “The Spoils”, a recent poem based on his experience in the Middle East that had been published in Poetry in November 1951. Yet again Eliot turned him down, and, judging by the account Bunting gave to Zukofsky (in reported speech, note), in no uncertain terms: “The poetry is good, some of it very good indeed, and the writing is clean and workmanlike, with no fluff, but . . . they are still too much under the influence of Pound for the stage which you have reached”.

For Bunting, who was now well into ­middle age and once more casting about for employment, it must have been like being slapped down by the head prefect. The next twelve years were his traversée du désert, as he toiled to support his family in a succession of poorly paid jobs – proofreading suburban train timetables and seedsmen’s catalogues, then working nights as a sub-editor on the Newcastle Daily Journal before switching to a day shift on the financial pages of the Evening Chronicle – but otherwise appears to have withdrawn into a shell.

more here.

Peter von Ziegesar at Lapham's Quarterly:

How was intercourse accomplished using Noyes’ innovation? In the 1920s, long after the Oneida Community had ceased to be, a sex research pioneer named Robert Latou Dickinson came to the Mansion House to discover exactly that. Dickinson was fascinated with the variety of ways people could make love. Decades before Alfred Kinsey made a habit of taking notes on the erotic lives of everyone he met, Dickinson jotted down thousands of sexual histories. He found an aging grandniece of the founder, a physician named Hilda Herrick Noyes, who was happy to offer details. A bout of amative intercourse would last for an hour or more, she remembered, and the women were particularly happy at the “long play.” Typically, during a “love interview” a woman would lie on her side with one leg cocked while the man entered her from behind. Holding her very much as he might hold a cello, he’d reach his hand around to the front and manipulate her to a climax. At the same time, he refrained from having an orgasm himself. Thus, amative intercourse involved coitus, but the primary stimulation was by hand. The male’s assigned role was as a skilled musician who received his pleasure through the mastery of his instrument and through the vicarious enjoyment of the pleasures he was instilling. Noyes thought the connection profound and spiritual. A follower of Franz Mesmer, the doctor who sometimes caused followers to go into mass orgasms by hooking them up to enormous batteries, Noyes believed sexual intercourse was nothing less than “the interchange of magnetic influences, or conversation of spirits, through the medium of that conjunction.”

To hold a woman closely, flesh to flesh, to feel her pulse and breathing rise, to hear her exhalations and know that she has surrendered to your will, to set off the final detonation with the touch of your finger—these are primarily masculine concerns. But consider this: the women in the Oneida Community were liberated as few Victorian women were.

more here.

Andrew Katzenstein at The New York Review of Books:

In Thomas Bernhard: Three Days, a documentary filmed in Hamburg in 1970, the Austrian novelist and playwright says, “As far as I am concerned, I am no writer, I am somebody who writes.” For Bernhard—known for his rant-like novels, at once devastating and entertaining, that criticize seemingly everything in a torrent of piercing observations and mordant epigrams—this distinction was crucial. Many of his clever, caustic narrators are artists or writers, such as the failed concert pianist in The Loser, the misanthropic Austrian musicologist in Concrete, and the writer in Woodcutters who recalls his hatred of old artistic acquaintances in Vienna. These cantankerous, lonely men see vanity, hypocrisy, and idiocy everywhere, and believe that they can only escape condemnation by showing the world its own folly. Perhaps because of the almost redemptive value they place on art, their strongest rebukes are aimed at hacks—artists who seem more interested in fame and accolades than in the creation of meaningful work.

It’s surprising, then, that Bernhard would agree to star in a documentary about his own life and work. (A new book featuring a translated transcript as well as a number of stills has just been released.) Although films about writers may satisfy the curiosity of readers—who might wonder what their favorite authors look like, what they sound like, or whether their work is somehow apparent in their personality—the actual process of writing and revision can make for tedious viewing. By participating in Three Days, Bernhard risked turning himself into writer, not someone who writes.

more here.

Eric D. Knowles and Linda R. Tropp in The Conversation:

As whites increasingly sense that their status in society is falling, white racial identity is becoming politicized. Trump’s promise to “make America great again” speaks to these anxieties by recalling a past in which white people dominated every aspect of politics and society. That’s why media outlets from New York Magazine to The National Review have dubbed Trump an “ethnonationalist” candidate.

Hillary Clinton counters Trump’s exclusionary rhetoric with her message that all Americans are “Stronger Together.”

To test our ideas about Trump and white identity politics, we surveyed a nationally representative sample of about 1,700 white Americans. The survey covered racial identities, attitudes and political preferences. In examining the relationship between white identity and ethnic diversity, we chose to focus on an ethnic minority of particular salience in contemporary politics: Hispanics. More than any other group, Hispanics have been in the Trump campaign’s crosshairs.

Do whites from heavily Hispanic neighborhoods show stronger white racial identity? To measure identity, we used a widely used questionnaire. On a five-point scale, participants rated their agreement with items such as “Being a white person is an important part of how I see myself” and “I feel solidarity with other white people.” As shown in the graph below, there is a positive relationship between exposure to Hispanics and white respondents’ sense of racial identity.

And does white identity lead to support for Donald Trump? We examined the relationship between white identity and respondents’ likelihood of supporting Trump for the presidency versus Hillary Clinton or several Republican primary challengers. Consistent with others’ analyses, white identity strongly predicts a preference for Trump.

More here.