Emma Garman at The Paris Review:

The life and career of the gifted Glaswegian writer Catherine Carswell was marked by such alarming and recurrent notoriety that her present obscurity is baffling. In 1908, still in her twenties and working as a newspaper critic, Carswell made headlines when a judge ruled that her husband, who suffered from murderous paranoid delusions, was of unsound mind at the time of their wedding. Although the couple had a daughter, Carswell got the marriage annulment she’d fought for and an enduring legal precedent was set. In 1930, she became a pariah in Scotland thanks to her sexually frank biography of national poet-hero Robert Burns, which offended zealous keepers of the Burns myth. One reader saw fit to send the author a letter containing a bullet, with the suggestion that she “leave the world a better, brighter, cleaner place.” Then, in 1932, Carswell’s biography of her friend D.H. Lawrence, The Savage Pilgrimage, was sensationally withdrawn from stores amid accusations of libel—not from the subject, who died in 1930, but from John Middleton Murry, the writer and critic. Murry, Lawrence’s posthumous biographer and the widower of Katherine Mansfield, had a tangled and volatile history with the late novelist and his wife, Frieda. An angry Lawrence once told Murry he was “an obscene bug sucking my life away.”

more here.

Sarah Beckwith at nonsite:

“To read a text isn’t to discover new facts about it,” says Moi, “it is to figure out what it has to say to us.”6 Understanding, meaning as use, responsiveness, responsibility, acknowledgement, the precision and inheritance of language: these are Toril Moi’s concerns in her refreshing, vitally important, generative book, a book that has the capacity to liberate us from language as a prison-house, and challenges and invites us into our own responsibility in words, as writers, readers, theorists, and critics. Moi wants us to wake up to the complexities of our inheritance of and use of language as if to invite us to exercise some stiffened and inflexible muscles to find greater, more various strengths and capacities. This is what makes this book such an exhilarating challenge and invitation at a time when literary studies seems to veer between the false allure of scientism (neurohumanities, “digital” humanities) and a fierce, entrenched moralism (which I take to be a stance which by-passes one’s own responses) and the professionalized credentializing, which sometimes appears to measure rather than judge academic work, all of which might break a graduate student’s spirit before she gets the chance to find her intellectual companions, and stand in the way of why she might ever have loved reading, thinking, and writing in the first place.

more here.

James Meek at the LRB:

The truth, as strongly suggested in Eugene Onegin, is that Pushkin’s attitudes towards the country were as conflicted as the twin self the novel in verse projects. When he stayed at Mikhailovskoye after graduating from his elite Petersburg lycée he was both delighted and impatient. ‘I remember how happy I was with village life, Russian baths, strawberries and so on,’ he wrote. ‘But all this did not please me for long.’ In the country he was constantly riding out to find companionship, love and sex among his gentry neighbours – failing that, to have sex with one of the family serfs – but still had time enough for composition. In one three-month autumn stay in Boldino, where he was less desperate for company – just engaged, but without his future wife, Natalya Goncharova – he wrote thirty poems, all five Tales of Belkin and the satirical History of the Village of Goryukhino. He also wrote the ending of Eugene Onegin and four short plays, including Mozart and Salieri, the work by which he is – invisibly – best known to modern popular culture outside Russia, via the Peter Shaffer play it inspired, Amadeus, rendered onto the big screen by Miloš Forman.

more here.

The night poetry danced with us

Orlando 49
emblazoned on the back of a t-shirt
worn by a white queer
who looked through and past
our table of Latinx, Indigenous, Black, Muslim queers
right in front of her
as if we never existed
as if we were not sitting there
laughing and thriving
radiating life
insistent in our brown, black, mixed skinned existence
as if we were not the brilliance of the sun streaking fire
when it decides to go down on the horizon
as if you were not our queer siblings
familia yaars dildars
our amours our pyars
our everything
shaking beautiful bronzed hips
the night poetry danced with us
before being shot
the night poetry danced with us
before being assumed to be a shooter
the night poetry danced with us
before it became second nature
to check for exits
the night poetry danced with us
before bullets replaced stanzas
before the breath of our beloveds
became a line break
with too much finality
the night poetry danced with us
before we understood
some only value our lives
after we are gone
the night poetry danced with us
until we realized
we were the poem

by Amal Rana
from Split This Rock Poetry

George Packer in The Atlantic:

No novel of the past century has had more influence than George Orwell’s 1984. The title, the adjectival form of the author’s last name, the vocabulary of the all-powerful Party that rules the superstate Oceania with the ideology of Ingsoc—doublethink, memory hole, unperson, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Thought Police, Room 101, Big Brother—they’ve all entered the English language as instantly recognizable signs of a nightmare future. It’s almost impossible to talk about propaganda, surveillance, authoritarian politics, or perversions of truth without dropping a reference to 1984.Throughout the Cold War, the novel found avid underground readers behind the Iron Curtain who wondered, How did he know?

It was also assigned reading for several generations of American high-school students. I first encountered 1984 in 10th-grade English class. Orwell’s novel was paired with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, whose hedonistic and pharmaceutical dystopia seemed more relevant to a California teenager in the 1970s than did the bleak sadism of Oceania. I was too young and historically ignorant to understand where 1984 came from and exactly what it was warning against. Neither the book nor its author stuck with me. In my 20s, I discovered Orwell’s essays and nonfiction books and reread them so many times that my copies started to disintegrate, but I didn’t go back to 1984. Since high school, I’d lived through another decade of the 20th century, including the calendar year of the title, and I assumed I already “knew” the book. It was too familiar to revisit.

More here.

Damian Carrington in The Guardian:

The average person eats at least 50,000 particles of microplastic a year and breathes in a similar quantity, according to the first study to estimate human ingestion of plastic pollution. The true number is likely to be many times higher, as only a small number of foods and drinks have been analysed for plastic contamination. The scientists reported that drinking a lot of bottled water drastically increased the particles consumed. The health impacts of ingesting microplastic are unknown, but they could release toxic substances. Some pieces are small enough to penetrate human tissues, where they could trigger immune reactions.

Microplastic pollution is mostly created by the disintegration of plastic litter and appears to be ubiquitous across the planet. Researchers find microplastics everywhere they look; in the air, soil, rivers and the deepest oceans around the world. They have been detected in tap and bottled water, seafood and beer. They were also found in human stool samples for the first time in October, confirming that people ingest the particles. The new research, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, took the data from 26 previous studies that measure the amounts of microplastic particles in fish, shellfish, sugar, salt, beer and water, as well as in the air in cities. The scientists then used US government dietary guidelines to calculate how many particles people would eat in a year. Adults eat about 50,000 microplastic particles a year and children about 40,000, they estimated.

More here.

Andy Clark at Edge:

The big question that I keep asking myself at the moment is whether it’s possible that predictive processing, the vision of the predictive mind I’ve been working on lately, is as good as it seems to be. It keeps me awake a little bit at night wondering whether anything could touch so many bases as this story seems to. It looks to me as if it provides a way of moving towards a third generation of artificial intelligence. I’ll come back to that in a minute. It also looks to me as if it shows how the stuff that I’ve been interested in for so long, in terms of the extended mind and embodied cognition, can be both true and scientifically tractable, and how we can get something like a quantifiable grip on how neural processing weaves together with bodily processing weaves together with actions out there in the world. It also looks as if this might give us a grip on the nature of conscious experience. And if any theory were able to do all of those things, it would certainly be worth taking seriously. I lie awake wondering whether any theory could be so good as to be doing all these things at once, but that’s what we’ll be talking about.

A place to start that was fun to read and watch was the debate between Dan Dennett and Dave Chalmers about “Possible Minds” (“Is Superintelligence Impossible?“ Edge, 4.10.19). That debate was structured around questions about superintelligence, the future of artificial intelligence, whether or not some of our devices or machines are going to outrun human intelligence and perhaps in either good or bad ways become alien intelligences that cohabit the earth with us. That debate hit on all kinds of important aspects of that space, but it seemed to leave out what looks to be the thing that predictive processing is most able to shed light on, which is the role of action in all of these unfoldings.

More here.