Who killed reality?

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon:

ImagesWith the coming of the Enlightenment, the cobwebs of superstition and pseudo-reality were supposed to be swept out of human society by the real reality of Science and Reason and Democracy and other grand abstractions. Why did that happen only incompletely, or temporarily? That might be the central question of modern history — and perhaps of philosophy, psychology, political science and a whole bunch of literature as well. But even without a graduate degree, we can conclude that there was considerable hubris at work, and that the balance between competing narratives of meaning was more complicated than it looked in Rousseau or Jefferson’s time. One answer might be that human beings thrive on stories. We need myth. If you’re anything like me, when you get home from work you’ll flip on Hulu or Netflix to soak up some middlebrow moral parable aimed predominantly at people of your class and background. Another answer lies in Nietzsche’s central insight, which was more or less that all systems of thought are always power relations in disguise. That doesn’t mean that no such systems are better than others, or that there’s no such thing as objective reality. There are facts out there about how Kennedy was killed in 1963, and about how Trump was elected in 2016 — but we are never likely to know them for sure, or to agree about them.

Repeatedly hitting people over the head with a rolled-up newspaper, as if they were disobedient doggies, while telling them that Donald Trump is a liar and a fraud is pretty much the apex state of liberal self-parody. They know that. That’s why they like him. Trump is a prominent symbol of the degradation or destruction of reality, but he didn’t cause it. He would not conceivably be president today — an eventuality that will keep on seeming fictional, as long as it lasts — if all of us, not just Republicans or the proverbial white working class, hadn’t traveled pretty far down the road into the realm of the not-real. Reality just wasn’t working out that well. God is dead, or at least he moved really far away with no phone and no internet, and a lot of reassuring old-time notions of reality loaded in his van. The alternative for many Americans is dead-end service jobs, prescription painkillers and blatantly false promises that someday soon technology and entrepreneurship will make everything better.

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How to Reverse the ‘Spiritual Blackout’

Adam Szetela in AlterNet:

Screen_shot_2017-10-27_at_12.51.26_pmNot many people can say they have done yoga with Amy Goodman. But then again, not many people have been to the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. Founded in 1977, the institute has been a spiritual haven and progressive force in a world cut through with hate, anger and ignorance. Last week, the institute held a multi-day retreat focused on the union of contemplative wisdom and political activism. In between yoga poses, performative art, meditation sessions, and communal dining, leaders of the progressive left gave talks on how to proceed in difficult times. Here is what they had to say. “America was a business before it was a country.” Clad in his trademark black suit, white shirt and silk tie, Cornel West helped to kick off Friday evening with a fiery sermon that condemned neoliberalism and the rising tide of neofascism in America. His words were soaked in metaphors, alliteration and the hip-hop style that Harvard president Larry Summers once called "an embarrassment." In between his rebuke of Wall Street and its political puppets, West made the important point that what America is experiencing is not just economic and political tyranny, but an “eclipse of integrity, honesty, decency, and generosity. It is the escalation of gangster-like sensibilities.”For West and the other speakers who joined him at Omega, America is in the long, dark night of a spiritual blackout. If people are to light a candle in these dark times, the first step is to be self-critical.

Self-criticism is something that CNN’s Van Jones knows well. On election night 2016, Jones was catapulted into the national spotlight after he stated on live television that Donald Trump’s victory was in part a result of "whitelash." Since then, Jones has traveled the country to connect with Trump voters. In his talk at Omega, he admitted that these experiences have made him rethink his initial post-election remarks and the way he fights for a progressive agenda. As he explained, “I met straight, white, cisgendered, heterosexual Trump voters who are some of the best people in this country. I’ve done that, I’ve seen it, and I can’t unsee it.” The message Jones sent to those listening is that they need to stop the bashing and the name-calling, and instead, step outside their assumptions about other people. If we are to effectively connect with the people we disagree with, then empathy and the ability to listen deeply will be our greatest allies. This approach to political struggle, as West prophetically stated, requires us to practice self-awareness and self-critique, and to see how much of our politics is governed by anger and self-righteousness, rather than compassion and the will to understand other people’s perspectives.

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“A Strange Sort of Periscope”: John Freeman on Poetry and Politics

Angela Stubbs interviews John Freeman in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

PhpThumb_generated_thumbnailJOHN FREEMAN IS a word slayer, known for his keen editorial eye. But he is just as keen to illuminate the stories of people in all lands. In the past several weeks, Freeman has released his debut book of poems, Maps, an anthology of essays titled Tales Of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, and the fourth issue of Freeman’s, his literary journal. All his literary endeavors are meditations on memory and love, which feel like guideposts on a search for authentic self-knowledge. In his poems, Freeman manages to offer an antidote to suffering, chaos, and pain by illuminating the loneliest, darkest places in each of us. His work is its own form of cognitive behavioral therapy for the reader. Instead of probing at the root cause of pain, his poems ask us to acknowledge and appreciate the journey, rethinking our attitude toward it. I emailed with John over the past month to discuss politics, poetry, and why imagination is at the heart of all our experiences.

ANGELA STUBBS: How did the writing of Maps help you unravel the internal maps you’d made over the years? How difficult was it to revisit some of these memories in order to write these poems?

JOHN FREEMAN: Writing poetry has always been a largely instinctual thing for me, something I do only when I feel like it, often very quickly at night or in transit. Scribble, scribble. My internal editor needs a lot of distraction to shut off. For the last 20 years, as a journalist and editor, I have been a human deadline, bouncing from one assignment or production date to the next. Poetry was a way to unplug and return to a deeper mode of thinking, and not direct my mind at a task but into a space. I’ve always felt the unconscious mind maps things far more interestingly than our rational, waking mind, so making this book was for me an attempt to try to be guided by that principle, to see what lived in there — for me — in the possibility of a poem. I’m so glad it wasn’t just filled up by muscle cars and Tom Petty tunes.

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Math’s Beautiful Monsters: How a destructive idea paved the way for modern math

Adam Kucharski in Nautilus:

ScreenHunter_2870 Oct. 28 20.36Much like its creator, Karl Weierstrass’ monster came from nowhere. After four years at university spent drinking and fencing, Weierstrass had left empty handed. He eventually took a teaching course and spent most of the 1850s as a schoolteacher in Braunsberg. He hated life in the small Prussian town, finding it a lonely existence. His only respites were the mathematical problems he worked on between classes. But he had nobody to talk to about mathematics, and no technical library to study in. Even his results failed to escape the confines of Braunsberg. Instead of publishing them in academic journals as a university researcher would, Weierstrass added them to articles in the school prospectus, baffling potential students with arcane equations.

Eventually Weierstrass submitted one of his papers to the respected Crelle’s Journal. While his previous articles had made barely a ripple, this one created a flood of interest. Weierstrass had found a new way to deal with a fiendish class of equations known as Abelian functions. The paper only contained an outline of his methods, but it was enough to convince mathematicians they were dealing with a unique talent. Within a year, the University of Königsberg had given Weierstrass an honorary doctorate, and soon afterward the University of Berlin offered him a professorship. Despite having gone through the intellectual equivalent of a rags to riches story, many of his old habits remained. He would rarely publish papers, preferring instead to share his work among students. It was not just the publication process he had little regard for: He was also not afraid to target mathematics’ sacred cows.

Weierstrass soon took aim at the research of Augustin-Louis Cauchy, one the century’s most eminent mathematicians.

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HOW DID NEW ATHEISM FAIL SO MISERABLY?

Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex:

Four_HorsemenThe Baffler publishes a long article against “idiot” New Atheists. It’s interesting only in the context of so many similar articles, and an inability to imagine the opposite opinion showing up in an equally fashionable publication. New Atheism has lost its battle for the cultural high ground. r/atheism will shamble on as some sort of undead abomination, chanting “BRAAAAAAIIINSSSS…are what fundies don’t have” as the living run away shrieking. But everyone else has long since passed them by.

The New Atheists accomplished the seemingly impossible task of alienating a society that agreed with them about everything. The Baffler-journalists of the world don’t believe in God. They don’t disagree that religion contributes to homophobia, transphobia, and the election of some awful politicians – and these issues have only grown more visible in the decade or so since New Atheism’s apogee. And yet in the bubble where nobody believes in God and everyone worries full-time about sexual minorities and Trump, you get less grief for being a Catholic than a Dawkins fan. When Trump wins an election on the back of evangelicals, and the alt-right is shouting “DEUS VULT” and demanding “throne and altar conservativism”, the real scandal is rumors that some New Atheist might be reading /pol/. How did the New Atheists become so loathed so quickly?

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“HOW IT CAME TO ME TO SAY” GORDON LISH

Gordon-lishDaniel Green at The Quarterly Conversation:

If, as Jonathan Sturgeon has suggested, we have entered an era dominated by “autofiction,” in which “the life of the author is now the novel’s organizing principle” (“2014: The Death of the Postmodern Novel and the Rise of Autofiction”), then in the search for progenitors of this literary phenomenon we might consider the fiction of Gordon Lish. Indeed, a common reaction to Lish’s books, at least since Peru (which may be his last work of fiction to predominantly feature a main character who can, to some degree at least, be separated from “Gordon Lish”) is to question whether Lish is writing fiction at all rather than some sort of free-form (some would say self-indulgent) autobiography. However, the wary reader would be just as mistaken to trust Lish’s writing to provide reliable accounts of the author’s actual experiences as to expect his “stories” to bear much resemblance to the traditional well-made short story.

That Lish’s fiction is not at all the sort of thing we would expect to emerge from most creative writing workshops, or most conventional short fiction anthologies, is perhaps surprising to readers, given Lish’s prominence as a creative writing teacher and as an editor of writers known for their short stories (most prominently, of course, Raymond Carver). It may in fact be the case that this gap between pre-established expectation and Lish’s own actual practice is wide enough to partly explain his relatively small audience, small even for avant-garde writers.

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Notes on the Art of Rhetoric

0520015460.01.MZZZZZZZKyle Winkler at The Millions:

For most of us, rhetoric boils down to what you learned in high school when the teacher drew a triangle on the chalkboard and wrote logos, ethos, pathos. “These are the three appeals to the audience,” the teacher said. Reason, character, emotion. “A composition will try to include all three of these for best effect,” you may’ve heard. But these three alone aren’t rhetoric. Instead, consider adding Kenneth Burke’s idea of “identification” from A Rhetoric of Motives, that states “[y]ou persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.”

Prince Hamlet is a prime rhetorician in the Burkean sense. (Actually, William Shakespeare was the rhetorician, but I’m being generous.) After speaking to his father’s ghost, Hamlet confides to Horatio: “I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on;” antic, as in, grotesque; meaning, Hamlet’s fixing his words and actions to fit the ass-backwards scene in his home. Because “time is out of joint” in Elsinore. And Hamlet, too, will be out of joint if he doesn’t persuade those around him he’s mad. Oddly, Hamlet will persuade everyone he’s nuts, but it will be against their common sense, against his prior character, and against what passes for royal emotion among his kin. That is a type of persuasion.

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old school criticism

P.549Michael Dirda at the Washington Post:

Both these excellent books — Christopher de Hamel’s “Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts” and Jorge Carrión’s “Bookshops” — reinvigorate an old-fashioned form of criticism, sometimes summed up by the phrase “the adventures of a soul among masterpieces.”

During the middle part of the 20th century, humanist scholarship in many disciplines modeled itself on the sciences, rejecting anything that smacked of the personal, subjective and essayistic. To art scholars, traditional connoisseurship was deemed overly impressionistic; in literary study, New Critics — under the banner of “the poem itself” — banished the biographical in favor of intensive verbal analysis; among historians, the Annales school shied away from narrative and fine writing, as practiced by a Gibbon or Michelet, to emphasize data, data, data.

No one would deny the crucial value of technical, “just the facts, ma’am” approaches, but they can seem more than a little arid to anyone not already passionate about a subject. Certainly, casual readers gravitate to scholarly books that combine knowledge and authority with a winning style and a vivid sense of the author’s personality. De Hamel and Carrión each show how this can be done supremely well.

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The Rules of the Doctor’s Heart

Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New York Times:

SidEvery medical case, to paraphrase the writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, is lived twice: once in the wards and once in memory. Some of what follows is still intensely vivid, as if it were shot in high-def video. Other parts are blurry — in part because I must have subconsciously deleted or altered the memories. I was 33 then and a senior resident at a hospital in Boston. I had been assigned to the Cardiac Care Unit, a quasi I.C.U. where some of the most acutely ill patients were hospitalized. In mid-September — it had been a moody, rain-drenched month, as I recall — I admitted a 52-year-old man to the unit. I’ll call him by the first letter of his given name, M. As medical interns, we were forewarned by the senior residents not to identify too closely with patients. “A weeping doctor is a useless doctor,” a senior once told me. Or: “You cannot do an eye exam if your own eyes are clouded.” But M.’s case made it particularly hard. He was a doctor and a scientist — an M.D., a Ph.D., like me. He must have been about 15 years ahead of me in his schooling; I could imagine him returning to my class in med school to teach us “Patient-Doctor,” in which students are taught how to deal with real-life patients. He’d trained as a medical resident and then as a fellow in cardiology at another hospital across town. He was now an assistant professor — it seemed like such a victory to have that title — and ran a small laboratory. I knew a student who once worked with him. Six degrees of separation? There was barely one.

Earlier that year, in March or April, M. became short of breath in the middle of his run. (Was his running route the same as mine? Across the Longfellow Bridge at Mass General, looping around the river and then back again by Storrow Drive?) His legs turned cold and blue. He had dizzy spells and lost words in midsentence. He saw a cardiologist — presumably one of his own colleagues — who diagnosed heart failure. A series of scans must have revealed a sluggish heart. In place of the regular, intentional motion — jellyfish pulsing in a tank — there was an eerie wobbliness, just jelly. A biopsy was performed, and the diagnosis was amyloidosis, a mysterious condition in which misfolded proteins begin to be deposited in the organs of the body. Sometimes the proteins come from cancer cells; sometimes from poorly understood sources. The deposits choke the organs: heart, liver, blood vessels, kidneys. “And then, bit by bit by bit, I was all pro-te-in,” he said dryly, paraphrasing the Tin Man in Oz. We laughed. M. needed a new heart. I’m writing this casually, as if you go to the used-heart salesman on Long Island and pick one up on a three-year lease. Hearts are notoriously hard to find; someone has to die for you to get one. About 3,000 hearts are available in the United States every year. Many come from youngish men and women who’ve had accidents or drowned, leaving them in a peculiar limbo — brain-dead but heart-alive. But there are never enough: At any given moment, about 4,000 patients are waiting for a heart. Many of them will never find one.

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My Quantified Monster and Me

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Jacob Brogab in Slate:

When I think back to the demons of my childhood, I almost always linger longest on the rust monster. Though it resembled a crudely drawn armadillo, it was the size of a mountain lion. Other, more dangerous, beasts lived in the caves where I found it; there were neither claws on its three-toed feet nor fangs in its mouth. Still, it was a frightening creature: Tentacular whiskers, each longer than a human arm, emerged from its smirking maw. Those unearthly appendages probed the empty space between us, tasting the air. Whenever they touched a metal object—my shield, my armor, my sword, my dagger—it would immediately oxidize, crumbling into a useless pile of reddish flakes. And then the rust monster would feed.

I met this creature in a solo adventure that accompanied the 1983 Dungeons & Dragons basic rule set my mother brought home from the library. Before our fateful encounter, I would ably fight off less-challenging antagonists like giant rats and angry goblins, but the rust monster, which presided over a cache of precious gems, undid me. It wasn’t the beast’s own stats—its formidable hit points or the difficulty of piercing its armored hide—that frightened me, but its ability to literally eat away at my own protective gear. Our struggle would leave me defenseless. I’d flee the cavern with only my fists to fight back against the other horrors that lurked in the dark and only my thin skin to protect me against their jagged blades.

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German Question(s)(3): Applying the Debt Brake

Adam Tooze over at his website:

The “reform narrative” that is crucial to understanding the self-conception of Germany’s political class today has several strands. It addressed the labour market by way of welfare rights (Hartz IV, coming to a blog near you soon). It addressed the labour market by way of a new politics of childcare (see the blogpost last week). It also addressed the key issue of public finance. A wide ranging debate within Germany going back to the late 1990s swirled around the issue of public debt. Reunification had led to heavy borrowing. But as Germans acknowledged, the tendency to run deficits clearly went far beyond that.

The short version of the story is that in response to a growing sense of alarm, German politicians rallied. Faced with the miserable track record of the last decades and the shock of the 2008 crisis, in 2009 they “did the right thing”. They applied the debt brake – a constitutional amendment requiring them to balance the books both at the national and local level. As a result Germany’s fiscal fortunes have since diverged radically from those of the rest of the industrialized world and the rest of the EU. The essential starting point of the Federal Republic’s agenda in the Eurozone crisis was to extend this new model of fiscal policy to the rest of Europe.

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The Shape of Randomness

Kendra Redmond over at The Physics Buzz blog:

We often rely on shapes and patterns when navigating the world. Poison ivy or an innocent plant? A nasty rash or the imprint of the textured wall you were leaning against? Similarly, scientists often use shapes and patterns to interpret datasets. Do the points follow a straight line? Appear in clusters? On the street and in the lab, shapes help us organize information, interpret data, and even make predictions.

While some sets of data are relatively straightforward to interpret, others get messy quickly. It can be difficult to extract useful information from maps of complicated situations like the relationship between diseases and their associated genes. This is because the structures that emerge often depend on parameters chosen by researchers through a somewhat arbitrary process, making it difficult to tell when a structure is really significant. In new research recently published in the American Physical Society’s journal Physical Review E, a team of scientists from Université Laval in Canada, the Politecnico di Torino and the ISI Foundation in Italy introduce a valuable tool for determining whether the shape of a complex dataset is actually significant.

This map represents the complex relationship between crimes and individuals in St. Louis. The blue shapes correspond to criminal cases; the orange dots represent involved individuals (criminals, victims, and witnesses). The system is highly organized, according to the simplicial configuration model.
Image Credit: Alice Patania, Giovanni Petri, Francesco Vaccarino, and Jean-Gabriel Young.

Diseases and their associated genes are just one example of what scientists classify as a complex system. Many other systems fall into this category too—the Earth’s climate, living cells, the human brain, social structures—really any system that is difficult to describe because it contains so many moving, interacting pieces. Of course, understanding these same systems can have a profound effect on our quality of life, enabling early warning systems, targeted treatments, and effective interventions.

A common way of studying these systems is with complex networks, a way of visually representing components and their interactions and looking at the structures that emerge. For example, the traditional network approach considers each component to be a node and each interaction between two components as a line linking them together. Research shows that the network approach is effective in helping us understand many systems. However, you can lose important information by applying it to a complex system that can’t be broken down into a set of clean interactions between two components.

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The End of Empire

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Chris Hedges in truthdig:

The global vacuum we leave behind will be filled by China, already establishing itself as an economic and military juggernaut, or perhaps there will be a multipolar world carved up among Russia, China, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and a few other states. Or maybe the void will be filled, as the historian Alfred W. McCoywrites in his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power,” by “a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral military forces like NATO, and an international financial leadership self-selected at Davos and Bilderberg” that will “forge a supranational nexus to supersede any nation or empire.”

Under every measurement, from financial growth and infrastructure investment to advanced technology, including supercomputers, space weaponry and cyberwarfare, we are being rapidly overtaken by the Chinese. “In April 2015 the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggested that the American economy would grow by nearly 50 percent over the next 15 years, while China’s would triple and come close to surpassing America’s in 2030,” McCoy noted. China became the world’s second largest economy in 2010, the same year it became the world’s leading manufacturing nation, pushing aside a United States that had dominated the world’s manufacturing for a century. The Department of Defense issued a sober report titled “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World.” It found that the U.S. military “no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors,” and “it no longer can … automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range.” McCoy predicts the collapse will come by 2030.

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worldwide DFW

1444946a-b8ca-11e7-b7b5-90f864fcf1124Elsa Court at the TLS:

Interpreting Wallace’s work is not an easy task. His novels and short stories use many voices; they insert dense analytical jargon into passages of lyrical prose; and they invite readers to go back and forth between the small print of the main text and the smaller print of footnotes: yet Wallace also warned young writers that “The reader cannot read your mind”. What are we to make of the formal obstacles his own writing poses, bearing in mind his claim that good writing always actively attempts communication – and his broader injunction to open up and communicate sincerely?

In The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace, Clare Hayes-Brady suggests that Wallace dramatizes the inward entrapment of consciousness, and invites the reader to struggle against it. Hayes-Brady’s title is playfully deceptive: she suggests that Wallace’s “failures” are also at the crux of his greatest achievement – namely, his re-enactment of our failure to communicate.

For Hayes-Brady, “commitment to the process of communication (rather than its outcome) is the driving force of [Wallace’s] writing”. The difficulties he seems to pose derive from his deeper sense of communication as a continuing dialogical process. The “failure” of communication, in this context, is to be understood as “generative”: not so much a defeat as an invitation, after Beckett, to use the certainty of failure as a reason to keep trying.

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How ISIS is hastening the end of the Yezidis’ ancient oral tradition

83245Alex Cuadros at Lapham's Quarterly:

There is a Yezidi hymn about a man whose tongue was cut off by the sultan of Mosul. For three days and three nights, he could not even lament. So he went to the valley of Lalish, to the holy community led by Sheikh Adi—the only perfect being other than God. “Sheikh Adi blew on his mouth / four times,” and the man’s tongue grew back better than before.

Some nine hundred years ago, before Sheikh Adi settled in Lalish, he is said to have stopped at a spring in the Sinjar Mountains, eighty miles west, near what is now the border with Syria. I could hear the spring’s trickle when my pickup’s engine shut off. It was at the end of a rutted track off a narrow asphalt road, past hundreds of white poly-cotton tents branded UNHCR and UNICEF. A shrine was built there, a conical spire rising from a slash of green in the dry scree. My interpreter called out for the caretaker, and from an adjoining compound a man emerged whose beard reached almost to his eyes. He was a feqir, literally “poor man”—a Yezidi ascetic. Introducing himself as Khalid Barakat, he led us to a patio and pulled out mats for us to sit on. One of his sons served fresh goat yogurt and sugar-rich tea.

Khalid agreed to talk about August 2014, when the black flags came. Suddenly the valley filled with Yezidis fleeing their villages in the surrounding plains. ISIS had rounded up and murdered a thousand Yezidis in the space of a few days. Thousands of women and children had been abducted. Khalid sheltered as many people as he could, American planes dropped water and food, but it was not enough.

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Theodore Dreiser’s New York

Mike Wallace in The Paris Review:

Theodore_dreiser_1-1-copyIn late November 1894, in the depths of the 1890s depression, Theodore Dreiser arrived in New York. He soon headed for City Hall Park, where he bulled his way into the World building, successfully evading the hired muscle who barred the doors of most Park Row newspapers, keeping desperate job seekers at bay. Once inside, he managed to land an unsalaried position as a space-rate reporter, paid by the column inch, on the strength of having served a lengthy journalistic apprenticeship in various midwestern cities. Dreiser liked newsmen. He appreciated their cynical dissent from prevailing pieties. “One can always talk to a newspaper man,” Dreiser would write, “with the full confidence that one is talking to a man who is at least free of moralistic mush.” His own life had rubbed him free of Victorian illusions. His family was grit-poor, his father a beaten man. The Dreisers were always on the move—being evicted or chasing cheaper rents—and ostracized as trash by “respectable” people. The slums of Terre Haute and Chicago taught him that life was hard, amoral, and indifferent to the individual—ideas reinforced by his readings of Spencer, Huxley, and Darwin.

Nevertheless, New York shocked him. “Nowhere before had I seen such a lavish show of wealth, or, such bitter poverty.” On his “reporting rounds,” Dreiser recalled, he was stunned by the numbers of “down-and-out men—in the parks, along the Bowery and in the lodginghouses that lined that pathetic street. They slept over gratings anywhere from which came a little warm air, or in doorways or cellar-ways,” exhibiting a “dogged resignation to deprivation and misery.” He was astonished and “over-awed” by the “hugeness and force and heartlessness of the great city, its startling contrasts of wealth and poverty, the air of ruthlessness and indifference and disillusion that everywhere prevailed.” Dreiser grew convinced that New York epitomized the Darwinian struggle for existence. In the “gross and cruel city” impersonal forces lifted up the arrogant rich; fire, disease, and winter storms carried off the shivering poor. He wondered why more New Yorkers didn’t protest what Howells had called “the perpetual encounter of famine and of surfeit.” World work did not go well. He was given bottom-drawer assignments—covering suicides, Bellevue, the morgue—and not many of those, not enough to live on.

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