Reviews and News:
Growing to 25 feet, the Greenland shark “is the largest flesh-eating shark, longer even than a great white. It dwells in the deepest northern oceans. It eats seabirds, huge fish and seals, most of which it probably surprises and devours on the seabed. The youngest Greenland shark of reproductive age is 100 and the oldest may have been alive when the Mayflower set sail.” Its “teeth are like ‘over-sized steel traps’. The outer skin is structured so that if you rub your hand along its body in a tail-to-nose direction it cuts you like razor blades. The Germans once imported and used it as a form of sandpaper. The eyes of Greenland sharks are riddled with large burrowing worms that leave most of the creatures blind. Its flesh smells of urine and contains a nerve gas, trimethylamine oxide, which can have a powerful hallucinogenic effect.” Shark Drunk is a fascinating account of trying to catch one from “a rubber boat armed with a gaff, 1,000 feet of high-strength line and large chunks of rotten bull flesh as bait.” But what makes the book a “triumph,” according to Mark Cocker, is Strøksnes’s “free association on matters maritime as he sits there, day after day, in his rubber boat, waiting for the beast to bite. It is not a fishing drama, but a work of meditation and wonder with a horizon as wide and open as the far Nordic coastlines that he so beautifully evokes.”
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Making Thousand and One Nights respectable.
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Alan Jacobs on William Empson in Japan and his obsession with Buddha: “One of the finest works of literary criticism produced in the first half of the 20th century—and among the handful that can still be read with both pleasure and profit today—is William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). Anyone would be immensely proud of such an achievement, which makes it rather remarkable that Empson wrote the book when still an undergraduate, pursuing, at Cambridge, a second B.A. in English after he had already completed one in mathematics. He had thus laid the foundation for a notable academic career. However, in 1929, between his graduation and the publication of his book, he was discovered to be keeping a package of condoms in his college rooms, which led to the stripping of his fellowship and his dismissal from the University. (His biographers also record that he was banished from the city of Cambridge, though I do not believe that that was legally possible.) Empson’s academic career in England was over, at least for the time being, and the best job he could find—or the best job his mentor, I. A. Richards, could find for him—was a teaching position in the booming city of Tokyo. And it was while teaching there, in 1932, that he visited the old city of Nara, where, as Rupert Arrowsmith says in his introduction to The Face of the Buddha, ‘the beauty of a particular set of Buddhist sculptures struck Empson with a revelatory force.’ And thus began a curious detour in his career.”
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Eugene Peterson retracts his support of same-sex marriage.
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How honest was Mary McCarthy?
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Salvador Dali says yes.
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Truman Capote was a great story-teller, but it eventually got him into trouble: “Capote’s reputation as an off-the-cuff raconteur was, in reality, the result of careful rehearsal. According to Plimpton, he would work up a list of the stories he planned to tell before he visited admirers. ‘He really worked at entertaining them,’ Plimpton said. Whether the stories were true was another matter. ‘He was a famous but charming liar,’ Plimpton added. ‘He always felt that if it didn’t happen that way, it should happen that way.’”
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Essay of the Day:
In Spiked, Leigh Phillips, a writer on the left, examines the idea that the only way to save the environment is to kill capitalism. Household CO2 emissions are negligible, and most biofuels are less eco-friendly than fossil fuels. Maybe we should just stop buying stuff? Or so the argument goes:
“This new paradigm of rejecting growth and embracing limits is also by definition a rejection of progress. It is to say: this much and no more. Or, more precisely, that we can expand but only in non-material forms. Klein, for example, emphasises that her prescription is ‘selective degrowth’, which she clarifies in a 2014 interview with the New York-based Indypendent newspaper: ‘There are parts of our economy that we want to expand that have a minimal environmental impact, such as the care-giving professions, education, the arts. Expanding those sectors creates jobs, wellbeing and more equal societies.’ But the material side of the economy – the ‘extractivist’ side, in Klein’s words – has to shrink.
“All this voluntary-simplicity, simple-living rhetoric sounds lovely, warm and fuzzy. I’m certainly feeling the feels when I read plaintive yearnings in popular environmentalist magazines like Orion or Grist about building community, or overhear the kale-wranglers and turnip-whisperers at my local farmers’ market pining for a society where we are more neighbourly and devote more time to friends and family, art, poetry and music. But all this sort of ‘embracing other, less material ways of wellbeing’ ignores the fact that you can’t make music without instruments or write poetry without ink and paper, and instruments and paper can’t be made without raw materials that need to be chopped down or mined. A whistle is made of tin and a trumpet made of brass.
“This argument (or mood, really; it’s less an argument than a sentiment) also forgets that it is increased productivity through technological advance (combined with trade-union organising) that gives us more free time, which would allow us to be more neighbourly and community-oriented. So the immateriality of ‘other kinds of growth’, of ‘selective degrowth’, is a fantasy. While we can steadily dematerialise production via technological innovation, and though knowledge itself is certainly immaterial, knowledge will always be linked to the material, both in its origins and its products. New knowledge depends on old technologies, old stuff, and gives rise to new technologies, to new stuff.
“Think about it this way: if we have retreated to the optimum economic stasis-point of the Kleinian imaginary, where we are no longer supposed to be overshooting our carrying capacity, then each one of us has all the right amount of ‘stuff’ – no more and no less. But now, if through the expansion of our knowledge, we develop a new technology that does not replace – or only partly replaces – a previous technology, and yet we want to put it into production because of its manifest benefits to society, then we will have to give up production of some other technology to make room for it. But hold on – we’ve already decided that we have all the stuff that we need, no more and no less. That means that we cannot give up that old technology. Thus we either invent nothing new (or at least only those new technologies that perfectly replace old technologies without any overall expansion of production), or we have to grow.
“Therefore, the steady-state economy must by definition refuse most technological advance, and even most new knowledge as well. The steady-state economy is a steady-technology economy, a steady-science economy, a static society. It is the very definition of conservatism.”
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Photos: Audubon Photography Awards
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Poem: Tatiana Forero Puerta, “Christening”
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