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Reflections on the cultural and political complexities of translation in global contemporary artistic practices.The movement of global populations, and subse...

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Living as a Bird with Vinciane Despret and Garry Marvin

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I still wanted to make you aquinted of four sources concerning translation. I also put them on your Silex, also see attachment:

https://german.yale.edu/sites/default/files/benjamin_translators_task.pdf

"The Translator s Task, Walter Benjamin (Translation)"

The Translator's Task Walter Benjamin Translated by Steven Rendall When seeking knowledge of a work of art or an art form, it never proves useful to take the receiver into account.

german.yale.edu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZOf1gvq6R4

YouTube

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Living as a Bird with Vinciane Despret and Garry Marvin

FrenchInstituteUK

2,1K views · 2 years ago

Open

In the library:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537926/translation/

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The Bell Iris Murdoch: Quotes & Summary | Vaia

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The Bell Iris Murdoch: ✓ Novel ✓ Characters ✓ Summary ✓ Analysis ✓ Quotes ✓ Symbolism ✓ Book ✓ Vaia Original

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Dear Isabel,

Thanks for sharing the text. It reads like a flow and you touch upon interesting topics. The most important ones are maybe: the ego, privilege (cultural power), protection, change, love, sexual desire, and the body. How are they for you interconnected? I’m looking forward to how your writing will influence your work (that you do in cooperation with Magnus). And how the results of these experiments seep back into your writings.  I asked you to add also an appendix to your writing, an appendix of sources you’ve used, with short descriptions of why those particular sources intrigued you.  I would also like to ask you to go into some of these descriptions into the differences and similarities between the things that are described in a source (concerning issues like the ego, protection, change, love, sexual desire, and the body) and in your writings. For instance, the book of Neige Sinno touches upon issues you also discuss in your text, like the ego, protection, love, sexual desire, and the body. You could write how the text of Sinno about these issues shows the same or different insights on these issues. The Chinese and Japanese philosophy goes also into these issues, especially the topic of change, the philosophy is trying to make us aware that the ego is an illusion, the non-doing without meaning. A lot of the Chinese and Japanese writing is written in a metaphorical poetical language because they believe you can’t write clearly about something fleeting, something that constantly changes. See for instance Lao-Zi. See post.

Also, the characters in the book by Iris Murdoch show a weird mix of the ego, protection, privilege, change, love, sexual desire, and the body. `They are tragic characters doing their best, they rise and fall, the struggle of human beings she describes touchingly. Like the book The Bell. See post.

https://www.vaia.com/en-us/explanations/english-literature/novelists/the-bell-iris-murdoch/

https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/41829/9780472901388.pdf

Best regards,

Hille

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Dear Isabela,

We concluded to take for this essay a freer approach compared to your former essay. For this essay, you could let go your neat approach and take the collage approach more into account. We were talking about how you could use your writings for Alchemical writing as a source of inspiration; turning the essay into a collage where there is room for different subjects and styles of writing, later you could use the samurai to make it more into a whole. But on the other hand, a strong collage feel might also work. You could also use images if you want. For instance, how images and text react to each other,

At last, you were already doing interesting stuff for the manifesto, like this text about giving, which starts in the first paragraph positive but turns into the last paragraph into a labyrinth without an out-way. You had the idea to let other writers start with the same paragraph (maybe they must not see your last paragraph, maybe only when they finished their own one) but add their second paragraph. This form of manifesto could also turn into an essay. We have to see along the way what works or not. How the community can be a way to break out the neat perspective, a collection of perspectives while one perspective can also be strong.

Best regards,

Hille

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Women's anger has fueled every political movement in the United States, from suffrage to Civil Rights to #MeToo. Women's anger is a powerful, unshakeable force that sends people from marginalized communities into the streets, the courtrooms, the classrooms, and beyond to fight for the more just world that our ancestors fought for and our descendants will fight for long after we're gone.

"The Future is Furious" is a weeklong series about women's anger-and, more specifically, about how that anger is policed, dismissed, and overlooked because its potent, transformative social and political power terrifies people. We get to decide how we wield our anger, and this series is a mere entry point for a canon of work about women's rage. It is our hope that by the end of it, you're revved up and ready to rage in a time when it's more important than ever to put women's anger to work.
Editor's note: For the first time ever, we are sharing a full interview in audio form in hopes that our readers, and listeners, can have the best experience possible. Listen on the go after work, during your workout, or in the comfort of your living room. Whenever and wherever you listen, we hope you enjoy!
Even if you've never heard of Rebecca Solnit, you know who she is. It was Solnit's 2008 essay at the blog TomDigest that identified the concept we know today as mansplaining. ("Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.") But long before Solnit became a patron saint of the extremely online, she was an activist, a historian, a mapmaker, and a prolific author of books on a dizzying breadth of topics: the history of walking (2000's Wanderlust); the motion-photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge (2004's River of Shadows); the emerging evidence of climate change (2018's Drowned River); and ambient cultural misogyny (2015's essay collection Men Explain Things to Me).

Solnit's new book of essays, titled Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises (And Essays), connects the Trump administration, economic inequality, indigenous history, police brutality, and gentrification gracefully, tying them together with meditations on American exceptionalism and the importance of precise language that gets right down to the lived facts of politics. Call Them By Their True Names doesn't boil over with long-simmering ire on behalf of democracy and social justice, but rather deploys Solnit's trademark precision, dry wit, and enduring optimism toward an absorbing whole. All the more reason to get her on the phone to talk about the role, and the necessity, of anger in a world that tosses up fresh outrages at least once a day.
Rebecca Solnit, it's so great to have you here. Your new book is called Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises (And Essays). I really love how sort of tongue-in-cheek but accurate the idea of American crises, "and also essays" is.
Thank you.
It reminds me of [people] who have been talking for the last few years about how it's become hard to really trust people who don't experience what we're living through now as a crisis. And I was wondering if you could speak to that.
It's interesting because it feels like part of understanding that it's a crisis is having enough historical perspective, enough long-term frameworks to see big things like climate change that are terrifying; big things, like feminism, that are actually transforming things in really exciting ways; and how different things are than they were 10 years, let alone 50 years ago. And then the fact that, in terms of the federal government, we're in some kind of crazy, exciting clusterfuck of monstrosity that's utterly unprecedented.

So do you feel like people you know, people you talk to every day, are experiencing the world as a crisis? If so, how are they living their daily lives?
Well, I'm on the board of Oil Change International, a climate action group, and my wonderful team is trying to shut down all fossil-fuel corporations, which is a really nice way to respond to being anxious. And, you know, I'm around a lot of feminists who are doing their bit to destroy patriarchy and liberate all beings. Then I know a lot of people who don't have a specific bailiwick, some of whom are doing a lot, some of who aren't. And it often seems like it's the people who are doing the least who have the most anxiety.

People often think I do things out of sheer virtue, and I'll take a point or two for it. But I think it's also a really good way to deal with anxiety that not participating, not taking action, not finding out where your power lies, makes it worse in a way. I think that the levels of stress, anxiety, hypervigilance, etc.-particularly around this administration and some of the related things, the attacks on immigrants, the attacks on Black people by the police. You know, that there's constituents who have specific things, but I feel like everybody's kind of ratcheted up. But the people I know who are doing something about it, it's a good coping strategy.
Yeah, it takes your mind off of immediate things that are developing.
I don't think it's so much [that it] takes your mind off it as it gives you a meaningful way to respond so you don't feel thwarted and powerless and voiceless. And it also connects you to heroic communities, and that's very helpful.
I feel like-having been not necessarily in but adjacent to the activist world for more than 20 years-a big positive thing that's happened in recent years is that there's been a lot of demystifying of what activism looks like and who can participate. I think that's something that we're certainly seeing a lot of now. And I was wondering if you had thoughts on that.
I think one of the exciting things about Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement and some of the related stuff is a sense that, to quote a Climate Action slogan, "To change everything, we need everybody"-that we're all participants. You can participate on the side of the status quo by doing nothing. You can participate by addressing transgressions as you see them arise, by speaking up for vulnerable communities, by holding those truths, by being inclusive in your curriculum if you're a teacher. We're starting to recognize that activism isn't just marching on special occasions but about the nuances of everything we do, and that everything we do in some sense is political. I think that's been really valuable in helping people see that they're already participating, even if not [always] as they would hope to.
You've written so many books on a lot of different things, but I'm guessing a lot of people may know you best for introducing the world to the concept of mansplaining. Mansplaining itself has taken on a life of its own since you wrote the initial essay. I'm wondering what it's been like to witness that, and whether you feel any kind of-I'm not even sure it's ownership, but whether you feel invested in people using the phrase in the spirit in which it was intended.
I had a very funny moment on social media a few weeks ago where some people were arguing about whether or not something was mansplaining. And I got to just weigh in and say, "I am the world's leading expert on mansplaining, and I say this is mansplaining." So, you know, I get that perk. And I have seen it misused, but overall I just am incredibly thrilled and proud and astonished that I was able to make a significant contribution to the discourse.

David Roberts did a beautiful piece about #MeToo, a kind of dude-to-dude screed about why men need to get on board and stop whining. And he [wrote that], obviously, not everything is in the same point on the spectrum, but the point is that it is the same spectrum, that these little things come out of the same motives as the big things. And being able to talk about the way that women are silenced and shut down and discredited and treated as incompetent witnesses to their own lives is such an important part of the story.

Looking at the Les Moonves story, the CBS CEO who was just pushed out-there's two pieces to it. The conventional way to tell the story is [that] he sexually assaulted all these women. But the impunity with which he did it and the way in which they were rendered incapable of bearing witness to the atrocities committed against them is equally criminal in its own way. You can only do these things if people are voiceless. And what makes women voiceless is all these subtle, complex ways they're shut down [and] discredited. Mansplaining comes out of the assumption that he has authority on the subject at hand and she doesn't.

And I talked about it [in the essay] particularly as it relates to intellectual things: the very important book on [Eadweard] Muybridge that got explained to me, having not bothered to ascertain that I actually wrote it, you know, and other things. The guy who explained to me that Women Strike for Peace was not a significant organization, who didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but was very harsh and condescending and intimidating.

But that stuff matters. Rudeness in the academy and at the dinner table matters because it also happens when a woman says, "He's trying to kill me. He assaulted me. He stole my work." And the crucial sentence in that essay is [about] credibility as a basic survival skill. I feel like ["Men Explain Things to Me"] contributed to this conversation about the part of gender violence that needed addressing, which is the assault on credibility, on women's rights, and the capacity to bear witness [to what] we see around rape, domestic violence, workplace harassment, and all these other things.
You wrote a great essay for Harper's a few months back, and the line in it that really stuck with me is: "Young women are categorically inaudible." That's something I think about a lot in the context of [how] feminism has developed and been amplified online. Social media, in particular, has given young women a volume that didn't really exist before. It's making them audible. But it's very hard to translate that into real life. So you can be a young woman who's incredibly opinionated on the internet and doesn't hold back, but it's a completely different context if you're at your job and you really feel that you can't speak up.
I wonder whether the experience of having credibility in your online community and an audience of like-minded people might fortify your sense that you can speak up and have the right to do so. Because so much of it is not only the forces that come from men and institutions that shut women up, but their own self-doubt.

I just read Educated by Tara Westover in a kind of frenzied gallop the other day. I picked it up and then I just stayed up till 1:00 a.m. because I didn't want to stop. A crucial part of that book is tremendous family violence that, because it's a male person against female people, the patriarchal family insists [that violence] didn't happen. To be a member of the family, you have to deny that it happened. [There's] this incredible struggle between speaking your truth and defending yourself against something horrific that happened-and even being sane, which is trusting your own perception of reality. The price of membership in [Westover's] family was surrendering all that. It was amazing to read an extreme version of a struggle that I think most women have had some degree of, being told [things] didn't happen.

I feel like there's a kind of Greek chorus of millions of women reinforcing each other. One of the things I've mentioned, but feel I could give a lot more attention to, is the extraordinary generosity of spirit behind what's happened in the last several years, when people like Jian Ghomeshi, Bill Cosby, and various other things [that] happened even before #MeToo. As the stories broke, women came forward to support other women and to say, "She's being discredited, but he assaulted me too. I can vouch for her that he is a person who does these things." Also, you had these wonderful hashtag choruses of #YesAllWomen, for example, after the Isla Vista killings in 2014. And a number of hashtags: #IBelieveHer, #WhyIStayed, #WhyILeft that were millions of women finding a space to bear witness to their own brutalization but also to the truth of these stories. There's been a real generosity and solidarity.

One of the ways misogyny depicts women is as catty competitors for male favor. And of course that happens, but the antithesis of that is this incredible solidarity, and it's been a big part of this movement. And I think it has given women more strength, though what actually comes to mind is a wonderful story from my book A Paradise Built in Hell. A young woman who helped defuse bombs dropped on London by the Nazis said that there was a lot of leveling of hierarchies during The Blitz, as there often [are] in disasters and catastrophes. And she said, "I felt like if I could defuse a bomb, I could speak up to my boss." So she told off her boss she'd been intimidated by. And I think there's a practical assessment a lot of young women are able to make-that we are now in an era where I can say this happened and people will not automatically disbelieve, discredit, slut-shame me for being raped, assaulted, beaten, etc.

So, it's partly that the rules of the game have changed themselves. But I do think that these experiences of speaking up in other arenas can reinforce you in ways that count, and that so much of, as I mentioned-was it in that #MeToo essay? Maybe it was in another Harper's essay-these wonderful, endless conversations I had as a young woman-oh no, I talked about them in my essay on preaching to the choir-reinforce the legitimacy of our feelings. But more than that: the legitimacy of our rights as human beings to have feelings, to have interpretations, to have stories, to live and bring and think and do. I think that they're not necessarily unconnected.
We're facing a huge amount of women's anger, and we're also in a moment where women's anger is having a moment. Rebecca Traister's book that's just come out, Soraya Chemaly's book...
Yeah, and Brittney Cooper's Eloquent Rage, which came out a little bit earlier. I just reviewed the three of them, or wrote an essay related to the three of them, for The New Republic. So I have been thinking about anger.
Just the reactions to the fact that these books are coming out-not even the content of them-have been really, really outraged [about] women having venues to express anger and people taking their anger seriously. I was just looking at comments on Traister's recent New York Times piece, and I think the specter of women being angry, and being angry together, terrifies people. That's so much of how we got here-there's so much misogyny because there's so much fear.
You know, I might be a divergent thinker on anger. One way to address anger is to try and overcome the things that make us angry, frustrated, miserable, thwarted, resentful, which is the work that feminism has been doing all along. If there's less violence against women, we have less to be angry about.

A second thing is the struggle to legitimize not only the anger of women, but of nonwhite people and other constituencies whose anger is discredited. Because there's a way in which women's anger is treated as a subjective expression of inappropriate emotion, which is a way of not talking about what we're angry about. The caricature of angry feminists always had implicit in it [that] there's no reason why women should be angry about women's lot. And therefore women's anger is unreasonable, which, of course, ties back to our inability to have authority about and witness to our own lives, [and] not being granted the credibility to have a basis for what [we] say, do, think, and feel.

But then there's also this thing: How can we respect the right of people of color, women, non-straight people to be angry without idealizing anger as this good thing and confusing it with power? I've spent a lot of time around lifelong activists, and I don't think of them as particularly angry people. But I see now, often, an equation that anger is the force that changes the world. I think we should value our right to be angry without thinking that anger is a positive experience. Being angry is a really miserable experience.

And [we should] also recognize that the motivating force of great activism is really love. I'm indignant about what's happening to migrant children because at some level I love them, and I love rights and justice and equality and decency. I'm against gender violence because I love the rights of women and a world in which women are free and equal. I'm against fossil-fuel corporations because I love the earth and its ecosystems and the elegant orchestral coordination of working ecological systems as well as the climate-vulnerable [ones]. So I'm indignant when somebody attacks those things, but it's just also an interesting thing: Do we foreground that indignation?

And then one more point, as long as I'm being dissenting about anger: I think we call a lot of different things anger. There's a physiological reaction when you're under attack that animals have: If you kick a dog, it feels attacked. But if I say that the dog has the wrong religion or hair color, the dog doesn't feel attacked, but you might. And there are all kinds of things [that are] different from indignation, outrage, resentment, dissent, etc. that conflate physiological reactions to threat, short-term reactions to insult, and long-term commitments to changing things. I think by using the same word for all of them, we see them all as the same thing. I think they might be a number of different things.
I was going to say that the very idea that women expressing themselves-or people of color pushing back on racism, or other marginalized communities speaking up-is often interpreted as violence by the mainstream media. Serena Williams is the most recent example, but this happens constantly, where a woman expressing an opinion that may or may not have outrage behind it is interpreted as being angry simply because they're speaking and calling attention to an injustice.
It's really interesting to think about that as a kind of transference where, like, I say that three women a day are killed in domestic violence-related crimes and that offends somebody who doesn't want to hear that patriarchy isn't a picnic. They're angry, but since they don't even want to acknowledge that they're angry, they decide that I'm angry. Which is a way to say I'm illegitimate, since ladies shouldn't be angry. It's interesting how often calling somebody angry is a way of dismissing their facts. It certainly happened massively with Black Lives Matter: "Why are those people angry?" was a way of not [asking], "Why do the police keep shooting people of color?"

The Williams incident was really interesting for a number of things, and some of it's been called out-the unfairness of the standards, the unequal standards [imposed by] the referee or the judge. But the part of the story that was most interesting to me, as a person who has never watched a tennis match and knows very little about sports, is that although [Williams] was indignant-and I think it was partly out of love [for] her own dignity, but also a love of justice and fairness-she did this really beautiful thing when the crowd booed the young woman [Naomi] Osaka. She went and told them to stop booing and stood with [Osaka]. She might have been angry at the referee, but she wasn't angry at the other woman for playing beautifully.

It was such a model of this thing that I see a lot in women's action, which is [being] a competitor or a dissident without being an opponent or an enemy. There was also this generosity and solidarity that was a big part of what happened at the beginning and the end of the game. That was also very defining of who [Williams] is and really something I wanted to give her kudos for.

It tied very much to a wonderful review I just read in the London Review of Books of two new books about the British suffrage movement. About how the constitutionalists and the militants, who would conventionally be assumed to be in conflict with each other, with their different strategies for getting women the vote, declined to be opponents. I feel like I've seen a fair amount in these moments of women coming to voice and taking action.

How can we respect the right of people of color, women, non-straight people to be angry without idealizing anger as this good thing and confusing it with power?
Oh, definitely. And it's really notable, in the case of Williams, how little coverage that [solidarity] moment got. The fact that [Williams] tried to deflect what people interpreted as anger and [wanted to] make about two women catfighting. Because that takes the spotlight: Portraying women as [being] against one another has always been an effective strategy.
Yeah. But I think, also, if it were men playing tennis or boxing or anything, people expect that you're hostile to your opponent-that you're a competitor. The model of "We can compete with each other without being opponents" was really important and was about something that, in some ways, is antithetical to anger. It's about an inclusion of generosity and a precision in [Williams's] behavior that I've seen in other places and that I think models [a] better set of possibilities, [ones that] we don't get most of the time, whether it's in sports or political combat or anything.

We have had some nice moments of surprise losses in Democratic primaries, like the guy who lost to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, [who] was pretty gracious. [ Update: Apparently, this geniality did not last.] He played "Born to Run" and dedicated it to her, which was pretty good. It's that model-which I don't recall in the Democratic primary, but never mind-of how do you regard this other person as part of a larger whole [where] you're on the same side, even though you're competitors? And it's one of the nice things about these competitions within parties where it's like, "Well, you won. But we share a lot of goals, and I wish you well."
Right, and ideally that would be the case in politics because, in theory, the end goal of everyone should be that the world gets better or that improvements are made. But we're also living in a time where's there a sort of zero-sum idea that there has to be a winner and a loser. I just saw a headline about the Les Moonves thing that said Shari Redstone came out the winner in the whole debacle. If you're talking about an epidemic of sexual harassment as though there is a winner, you're really not focusing on the root problem.
There is a winner in a way, in that I feel like the termination of the careers and reputations of the most powerful patriarchs in our country is edifying for all of us. For women, that maybe your voice is going to count going forward. And for men, that, hey, the era where you could get away with this stuff isn't something you can count on anymore. So in a sense, I think that there's a win in a way, but to turn it into this kind of sports thing of, Oh, somebody's career got a bounce out of this.

There's a win for me in that 12 women were treated as valuable and credible belatedly. With all of these #MeToo stories, the fact that these distinguished, competent, professional women-and this goes for the janitors who marched on Sacramento, as well as [for] the actresses and TV producers and things-had no recourse for decades, and before that for centuries, and maybe for millennia. And that we're just coming out of an era that almost has no beginning of women's silencing is pretty staggering. But it feels like a victory to come out of it.
You're definitely changing my mind.
I am, but I have two main jobs. I'm the hope lady and I'm a feminist writer, and those two things kind of inflect each other in interesting ways. I look at lots of horrible gender violence, and I am also pretty hopeful. Partly because I'm 57 now, and the world I was born into has fallen away. Patriarchy is not over, but the condition of my mother's life, which was wretched in so many ways even though she was a middle-class white person, have mostly been transformed. Marriage is not such a deeply unequal relationship. Domestic violence is addressed. Workplace equality and other equality of access and things are still cultural problems, but have been [legally] redressed to some extent. I often hear people being despondent because this year isn't better than last year, but this year is a hell of a lot better than 1961 for women.
When we're talking about these sort of masters-of-the-universe types like Harvey Weinstein and Moonves and the otherwise faceless CEOs of hotel chains or other employers whose workers are routinely exploited-these are people who built entire structures to insulate themselves from being found out. So what comes next? Is there a process of restorative justice that goes beyond Les Moonves saying, "Oh, let me throw a big chunk of money to a bunch of charities that I've never heard of that my assistants will [research]?" What would that look like?
There's two pieces of it, one of which is [that] women increase in power, credibility, and audibility through the work we're doing. But I think that ultimately, the transformation I want to see is men losing the desire to harm and degrade women and losing the belief that they have the right to do that. Until that happens, I don't think that fear and punishment and counterforces are adequate to end misogyny.

[For] most of my life, feminism has been yet another thing that's women's work, but [it's] men [who] need to change whatever it is that makes them believe they have the right to harm and degrade women. You know, obviously not all men, and being a San Franciscan and spending my life among gay men has been very helpful in seeing that masculinity and patriarchy are socially constructed and can be socially deconstructed. But I think that's the transformation, ultimately, that we need to see, and it's not easy and immediate.

It's happening in some ways by how people raise sons as well as daughters, by teachers who don't give boys primacy in the classroom, by a lot of things. But I feel like we still have a long way to go, and a lot of problems built into the system, like misogynist porn and an online culture generally that feels like [it's] taking a lot of men backward as young women move forward. That, for me, is what needs to happen: a world in which it doesn't even occur to a man, any man, that they can do it, and they want to do it.

It's part of where you realize how different the production of human beings is. Because the idea of doing these things, to me, is just inconceivable as well as repulsive. I've never desired to have sex with somebody who's being traumatized and nauseated by my bodily presence, for example. How are boys and young men socialized? How do we deform human nature in these ways? How can we stop doing it? I was going to say, early on in this conversation I quoted a climate slogan: "To change everything, it takes everybody." I could end with it as equally useful as a feminist slogan.
You can also listen to this full interview in audio form. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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"A Clusterfuck of Monstrosity": Rebecca Solnit Talks Women, Activism, and Anger

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If there's less violence against women, we have less to be angry about.

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In 2008, Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay titled " Men Explain Things to Me," a biting critique of a condescending male behavior that drowns out and belittles women's voices, that went viral. The term it inspired - "mansplaining" - became not only a part of everyday conversation, but an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. Solnit captured the anger and frustration of millions of women and quickly became a major feminist voice - speaking out on #MeToo, climate change and the power of collective organizing.

Solnit's memoir " Recollections of My Nonexistence " promises a more intimate look at her life. Here she tells us how she found her way as a writer, about her life in 1980s San Francisco and her shift from chronicling the trajectories of men forgotten by the art world to analyzing the tensions over the environmental and gender issues that define our times.

'Hood Feminism' makes a convincing - and urgent - case about how race and class divide women

Solnit writes vividly of her influences, from the thick atmosphere of gendered violence and discrimination to the open landscapes of the American West, where she house-sits in New Mexico, researches and hikes alone. She captures her tiny "alabaster" studio so vividly that you can close your eyes and be there, running a hand along the haunch of the velvet sofa that "left droppings of ancient horsehair stuffing on the floor like an incontinent pet," peeling back the tacky vinyl kitchen siding to reveal layers of wallpaper like layers of the neighborhood's history or writing at her treasured desk. With Solnit as a guide, you can hear her neighbors tell tales of Texas and Oklahoma, walk past the varied shades of devotion in a community dotted by churches and sift through the archives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Readers are offered snippets of a life - often in rich tones - but do we come away with a better sense of who Rebecca Solnit, the person, is? Not really.

As its title suggests, "Recollections of My Nonexistence" toys with the confessional form, letting us in only so far. Solnit writes of trying to both "appear and disappear" - acts, she confesses, that are "often odds with each other." The book's cover echoes this theme: a snapshot of Solnit pressed up against a wall, bracing herself with elegantly gloved hands. She wears one of her favorite outfits, a 1940s pencil skirt and a men's waistcoat belted and worn backward. The clothes may speak to confidence and transformation, but her pose is all about concealment.

So it is in the book: There is a sense of reserve that feels deliberate even as it is unsatisfying. Solnit obeys the conventions of the memoir genre sparingly. For example, when she moves into her apartment on San Francisco's Lyon Street at 19, she is the only white person in her building. Rather than delving deeply into the implications of her presence, Solnit reflects beautifully on the intricacies of the neighborhood at large, writing one of the most vivid sections of the book. Yet when she moves years later, she leaves a gentrified, white middle-class area that bears little resemblance to the Lyon Street of 1981, she has little to say about it.

Solnit tells us how her voice developed - by listening to and reading stories in the news about violence against women, depicted in the arts and in personal stories told by friends. "I am a woman who during my youth thought it likely that I would be raped and maybe also murdered and all my life have lived in a world where women were raped and murdered by strangers for being women and by men they knew for asserting their rights or just being women and where those rapes and murders were lasciviously lingered on in art," Solnit writes. Reading this, it's difficult to fathom a way out of such darkness. What possible hope can remain within a society that passively allows violent female erasure?

Yet throughout "Recollections of My Nonexistence," Solnit emphasizes the need to find poetry in survival. Describing a delicate Victorian writing desk gifted by a friend, she imbues the object with a strong sense of her intellectual life and credibility as a writer. She meditates on the words she wrote sitting at this desktop - the emails to friends, the 20 books and countless essays - before revealing its darker history. "A year or so before she gave me the desk, my friend was stabbed 15 times by an ex-boyfriend to punish her for leaving him," Solnit writes. It's a somber turn, yet rather than lingering solely on despair, Solnit pivots toward hope: "Someone tried to silence her. Then she gave me a platform for my voice."

Rebecca Solnit on mansplaining and her new book, 'The Mother of All Questions'

Perhaps it's not surprising that the iconoclastic Solnit would, in her memoir, renounce the trappings of memoir itself. Solnit seems to see her own experience as part of a more sweeping experience of being a woman in the world. Writing about her own fear of rape, for example, she says, "I tell all of this not because I think my story is exceptional, but because it is ordinary; half the earth is paved over with women's fear and pain, or rather with the denial of them, and until the stories that lie underneath see sunlight, this will not change." Her book then, might be read less as memoir than as manifesto - a voice raised in hope against gender violence. It's a call we should listen to.

Lauren Sarazen  is a freelance writer based in Paris.

RECOLLECTIONS OF MY NONEXISTENCE: A Memoir

By Rebecca Solnit

Viking. 243 pp. $26

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Review | Rebecca Solnit, who inspired the term 'mansplaining,' explains herself (sort of)

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"Recollections of My Nonexistence," a memoir by the feminist icon, is both revealing and not.

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Ancient Therapy for Modern Problems: Stoic Philosophy Explained

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Social Constructs (or, 'What is A Woman, Really?')

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#JackKerouac #OldAngelMidnight

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Old Angel Midnight is a long narrative poem by American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac. It was culled from five notebooks spanning from 1956 to 1959, while Kerouac was fully absorbed by his studies of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy. Kerouac initially experimented with Old Angel Midnight (then called "Lucien Midnight") in 1953 in his diary titled "1953. Notes again." In entries dated from November 20 to December 3, 1953, he made notes on "Lucien Midnight" which was to be originally conceptualized in what he called "book movie" form, when he closed his eyes and projected onto paper a cinematic sense of what he heard. A bookmovie, he explained in Some of the Dharma, is a "prose concentration camera-eye visions of a definite movie of the mind with fade-ins, pans, close-ups, and fade-outs." Kerouac's notes on Lucien Midnight were written while staying in the Lower East Side where he initially heard sounds coming through a tenement window from the wash court below. He then heard voices coming from kitchens of the other occupants in nearby apartment buildings and a man named Paddy arriving home drunk, and even a junky stirring in his bed. Kerouac conceptualized an idea of developing a work based on James Joyce's experimental novel Finnegans Wake (not Ulysses as indicated by Ann Charters in her introduction to Old Angel Midnight for Grey Fox Press) where the "sounds of the universe" became the chief "plot" with all of its associated "neologisms, mental associations, puns and wordmixes" that stewed a plethora of languages and "nonlanguages." Kerouac determinedly "scribbled out in a strictly intuitional discipline at breakneck speed" the fledgling prose that would finally comprise the finished book for City Lights's Pocket Poet series eight years later. Kerouac's one dogma was to compose Lucien Midnight strictly in pencil by candlelight. Lucien Midnight differs from his sketching method of writing because it is based upon an aural experience, and not visual. The bookmovie approach was abandoned in 1953 in favor of a different approach he had stylistically achieved by 1956.

In other notes from the time, Kerouac described Lucien Midnight as a "monolog of the world."

On March 1, 1957, while staying with William S. Burroughs in Tangiers, Kerouac worked on Lucien Midnight. Kerouac said of the poem:

"Old Angel Midnight" is only the beginning of a lifelong work in multilingual sound, representing the haddalada-babra of babbling world tongues coming in thru my window at midnight no matter where I live or what I'm doing, in Mexico, Morocco, New York, India or Pakistan, in Spanish, French, Aztec, Gaelic, Keltic, Kurd or Dravidian, the sounds of people yakking and of myself yakking among, ending finally in great intuitions of the sounds of tongues throughout the entire universe in all directions in and out forever. And it is the only book I've ever written in which I allow myself the right to say anything I want, absolutely and positively anything, since that's what you hear coming in that window... God in his Infinity wouldn't have had a world otherwise - Amen."

Kerouac began the first notebook on April 1, 1956. By now his spontaneous prose method had become second nature to him. Kerouac was staying with Gary Snyder in his Mill Valley cabin. Writing John Clellon Holmes on May 21, 1956, Kerouac explained his intentions: "I don't know what to write anymore, I've been doodling with an endless automatic writing piece which raves on and on with no direction and no story and surely that wont do tho I'll finish it anyway while doing other things. Old Angel Midnight was first printed in Big Table 1, 1959. Big Table was a new magazine started by Paul Carrol and Irving Rosenthal published after the University of Chicago censored the student magazine, The Chicago Review. A "prose picnic" is what Judge Julius Hoffman called Kerouac's poem, in the ensuing trial of the Post Office vs. Big Table.

To Kerouac, Old Angel Midnight was the only "form in which I am allowed to say anything I want because not only I've got to approximate the speed and content of mindflow naked word-babble," but that it could give him to "swim" with absolute freedom, "dedicatedly crazed in the sea of that language." Within the scope of that work, Kerouac envisioned the voices he heard discussing the "long weekend from Friday afternoon as it moves into Sunday night." When he prepared drafts for eventual publication, Lucien Carr objected to the use of his first name, telling Kerouac that it was "pejorative." It should have been, Kerouac explained to Ginsberg in a letter on August 28, 1958, "majorative," referring to Lucien Midnight's intended all-encompassing universal sweep of humanity and its surrounding cosmos.

In December 1958, Kerouac stayed up through the night skimming through the pages of the Holy Bible and an English dictionary looking for a replacement title. When he heard Charles Van Doren, on a morning talk show (the son of Mark Van Doren and notoriously involved in a television quiz show scandal that decade) refer to a phrase from Mark Twain's journal, Kerouac had his answer. Twain writes, "I never felt so happy in my life, sir - never since I was born, sir. Loved that hoary, venerable old angel as if he was my father, sir." Lucien Midnight then became Old Angel Midnight.

Kerouac dedicated the poem to Lucien Carr, a friend of Kerouac who was a key member of the early Beat Generation, and whose manner of speech was the initial inspiration for Old Angel Midnight.

References [ edit]

1993. Old Angel Midnight, ISBN 0-912516-97-6

2010. "We Know Time: The Cosmos of Jack Kerouac" [unpublished work-in-progress], Paul Maher Jr.

2010.The Letters: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Penguin Books

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Toggle the table of contents From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Old Angel Midnight is a long narrative poem by American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac. It was culled from five notebooks spanning from 1956 to 1959, while Kerouac was fully absorbed by his studies of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy.

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Martha Nussbaum's far-reaching ideas illuminate the often ignored elements of human life-aging, inequality, and emotion.

Martha Nussbaum was preparing to give a lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, in April, 1992, when she learned that her mother was dying in a hospital in Philadelphia. She couldn't get a flight until the next day. That evening, Nussbaum, one of the foremost philosophers in America, gave her scheduled lecture, on the nature of emotions. "I thought, It's inhuman-I shouldn't be able to do this," she said later. Then she thought, Well, of course I should do this. I mean, here I am. Why should I not do it? The audience is there, and they want to have the lecture.

When she returned to her room, she opened her laptop and began writing her next lecture, which she would deliver in two weeks, at the law school of the University of Chicago. On the plane the next morning, her hands trembling, she continued to type. She wondered if there was something cruel about her capacity to be so productive. The lecture was about the nature of mercy. As she often does, she argued that certain moral truths are best expressed in the form of a story. We become merciful, she wrote, when we behave as the "concerned reader of a novel," understanding each person's life as a "complex narrative of human effort in a world full of obstacles."

In the lecture, she described how the Roman philosopher Seneca, at the end of each day, reflected on his misdeeds before saying to himself, "This time I pardon you." The sentence brought Nussbaum to tears. She worried that her ability to work was an act of subconscious aggression, a sign that she didn't love her mother enough. I shouldn't be away lecturing, she thought. I shouldn't have been a philosopher. Nussbaum sensed that her mother saw her work as cold and detached, a posture of invulnerability. "We aren't very loving creatures, apparently, when we philosophize," Nussbaum has written.

When her plane landed in Philadelphia, Nussbaum learned that her mother had just died. Her younger sister, Gail Craven Busch, a choir director at a church, had told their mother that Nussbaum was on the way. "She just couldn't hold on any longer," Busch said. When Nussbaum arrived at the hospital, she found her mother still in the bed, wearing lipstick. A breathing tube, now detached from an oxygen machine, was laced through her nostrils. The nurses brought Nussbaum cups of water as she wept. Then she gathered her mother's belongings, including a book called "A Glass of Blessings," which Nussbaum couldn't help noticing looked too precious, the kind of thing that she would never want to read. She left the hospital, went to the track at the University of Pennsylvania, and ran four miles.

She admired the Stoic philosophers, who believed that ungoverned emotions destroyed one's moral character, and she felt that, in the face of a loved one's death, their instruction would be "Everyone is mortal, and you will get over this pretty soon." But she disagreed with the way they trained themselves not to depend on anything beyond their control. For the next several days, she felt as if nails were being pounded into her stomach and her limbs were being torn off. "Do we imagine the thought causing a fluttering in my hands, or a trembling in my stomach?" she wrote, in "Upheavals of Thought," a book on the structure of emotions. "And if we do, do we really want to say that this fluttering or trembling is my grief about my mother's death?"

Nussbaum gave her lecture on mercy shortly after her mother's funeral. She felt that her mother would have preferred that she forgo work for a few weeks, but when Nussbaum isn't working she feels guilty and lazy, so she revised the lecture until she thought that it was one of the best she had ever written. She imagined her talk as a kind of reparation: the lecture was about the need to recognize how hard it is, even with the best intentions, to live a virtuous life. Like much of her work, the lecture represented what she calls a therapeutic philosophy, a "science of life," which addresses persistent human needs. She told me, "I like the idea that the very thing that my mother found cold and unloving could actually be a form of love. It's a form of human love to accept our complicated, messy humanity and not run away from it."

A few years later, Nussbaum returned to her relationship with her mother in a dramatic dialogue that she wrote for Oxford University's Philosophical Dialogues Competition, which she won. In the dialogue, a mother accuses her daughter, a renowned moral philosopher, of being ruthless. "You just don't know what emotions are," the mother says. Her father tells her, "Aren't you a philosopher because you want, really, to live inside your own mind most of all? And not to need, not to love, anyone?" Her mother asks, "Isn't it just because you don't want to admit that thinking doesn't control everything?"

The philosopher begs for forgiveness. "Why do you hate my thinking so much, Mommy?" she asks. "What can I say or write that will make you stop looking at me that way?"

Nussbaum is drawn to the idea that creative urgency-and the commitment to be good-derives from the awareness that we harbor aggression toward the people we love. A sixty-nine-year-old professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago (with appointments in classics, political science, Southern Asian studies, and the divinity school), Nussbaum has published twenty-four books and five hundred and nine papers and received fifty-seven honorary degrees. In 2014, she became the second woman to give the John Locke Lectures, at Oxford, the most eminent lecture series in philosophy. Last year, she received the Inamori Ethics Prize, an award for ethical leaders who improve the condition of mankind. A few weeks ago, she won five hundred thousand dollars as the recipient of the Kyoto Prize, the most prestigious award offered in fields not eligible for a Nobel, joining a small group of philosophers that includes Karl Popper and Jürgen Habermas. Honors and prizes remind her of potato chips; she enjoys them but is wary of becoming sated, like one of Aristotle's "dumb grazing animals." Her conception of a good life requires striving for a difficult goal, and, if she notices herself feeling too satisfied, she begins to feel discontent.

Nussbaum is monumentally confident, intellectually and physically. She is beautiful, in a taut, flinty way, and carries herself like a queen. Her voice is high-pitched and dramatic, and she often seems delighted by the performance of being herself. Her work, which draws on her training in classics but also on anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology, and a number of other fields, searches for the conditions for eudaimonia, a Greek word that describes a complete and flourishing life. At a time of insecurity for the humanities, Nussbaum's work champions-and embodies-the reach of the humanistic endeavor. Nancy Sherman, a moral philosopher at Georgetown, told me, "Martha changed the face of philosophy by using literary skills to describe the very minutiae of a lived experience."

Unlike many philosophers, Nussbaum is an elegant and lyrical writer, and she movingly describes the pain of recognizing one's vulnerability, a precondition, she believes, for an ethical life. "To be a good human being," she has said, "is to have a kind of openness to the world, the ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control that can lead you to be shattered." She searches for a "non-denying style of writing," a way to describe emotional experiences without wringing the feeling from them. She disapproves of the conventional style of philosophical prose, which she describes as "scientific, abstract, hygienically pallid," and disengaged with the problems of its time. Like Narcissus, she says, philosophy falls in love with its own image and drowns.

In several books and papers, Nussbaum quotes a sentence by the sociologist Erving Goffman, who wrote, "In an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports." This sentence more or less characterizes Nussbaum's father, whom she describes as an inspiration and a role model, and also as a racist. He was prejudiced in a "very gut-level way," Nussbaum told me. "It was about shrinking and disgust."

For the past thirty years, Nussbaum has been drawn to those who blush, writing about the kinds of populations that her father might have deemed subhuman. She argues that unblushing males, or "normals," repudiate their own animal nature by projecting their disgust onto vulnerable groups and creating a "buffer zone." Nussbaum thinks that disgust is an unreasonable emotion, which should be distrusted as a basis for law; it is at the root, she argues, of opposition to gay and transgender rights. Her work includes lovely descriptions of the physical realities of being a person, of having a body "soft and porous, receptive of fluid and sticky, womanlike in its oozy sliminess." She believes that dread of these phenomena creates a threat to civic life. "What I am calling for," she writes, is "a society of citizens who admit that they are needy and vulnerable."

Nussbaum once wrote, citing Nietzsche, that "when a philosopher harps very insistently on a theme, that shows us that there is a danger that something else is about to 'play the master' ": something personal is driving the preoccupation. In Nussbaum's case, I wondered if she approaches her theme of vulnerability with such success because she peers at it from afar, as if it were unfamiliar and exotic. She celebrates the ability to be fragile and exposed, but in her own life she seems to control every interaction. She divides her day into a series of productive, life-affirming activities, beginning with a ninety-minute run or workout, during which, for years, she "played" operas in her head, usually works by Mozart. She memorized the operas and ran to each one for three to four months, shifting the tempo to match her speed and her mood. For two decades, she has kept a chart that documents her daily exercises. After her workout, she stands beside her piano and sings for an hour; she told me that her voice has never been better. (When a conductor recently invited her to join a repertory group for older singers, she told him that the concept was "stigmatizing.") Her self-discipline inspired a story called "My Ex, the Moral Philosopher," by the late Richard Stern, a professor at the University of Chicago. The story describes the contradiction of the philosopher's "paean to spontaneity and her own nature, the least spontaneous, most doggedly, nervously, even fanatically unspontaneous I know."

Nussbaum is currently writing a book on aging, and when I first proposed the idea of a Profile I told her that I'd like to make her book the center of the piece. She responded skeptically, writing in an e-mail that she'd had a long, varied career, adding, "I'd really like to feel that you had considered various aspects of it and that we had a plan that had a focus." She typically responded within an hour of my sending an e-mail. "Do you feel that you have such a plan?" she asked me. "I'd like to hear the pros and cons in your view of different emphases." She wasn't sure how I could encompass her œuvre, since it covered so many subjects: animal rights, emotions in criminal law, Indian politics, disability, religious intolerance, political liberalism, the role of humanities in the academy, sexual harassment, transnational transfers of wealth. "The challenge for you would be to give readers a road map through the work that would be illuminating rather than confusing," she wrote, adding, "It will all fall to bits without a plan." She described three interviews that she'd done, and the ways in which they were flawed. Among other things, they hadn't captured her devotion to teaching and to her students. One of the interviews, she said, had made her "look like a person who has contempt for the contributions of others, which is one of the biggest insults that one could direct my way."

For our first meeting, she suggested that I watch her sing: "It's the actual singing that would give you insight into my personality and my emotional life, though of course I am very imperfect in my ability to express what I want to express." She wrote that music allowed her to access a part of her personality that is "less defended, more receptive." Last summer, we drove to the house of her singing teacher, Tambra Black, who lives in a gentrifying neighborhood with a view of the churches of the University of Chicago. It was ninety degrees and sunny, and although we were ten minutes early, Nussbaum pounded on the door until Black, her hair wet from the shower, let us inside.

Nussbaum wore nylon athletic shorts and a T-shirt, and carried her sheet music in a hippie-style embroidered sack. Her fingernails and toenails were polished turquoise, and her legs and arms were exquisitely toned and tan. She stood beside Black's piano with her feet in a ski-plow pose and did scales by letting her mouth go completely loose and blowing through closed lips.

The first aria she practiced was "Or sai chi l'onore," from "Don Giovanni," one of the few Mozart operas that she has never run to, because she finds the rape scene reprehensible. As she ascended in pitch, she tilted her chin upward, until Black told her to stop. She excelled at clarion high notes, but Black thought that a passage about the murder of the heroine's father should be more tender. "Can you make it a little more pleasant?" Black asked.

The next aria was from the final act of Verdi's "Don Carlos," which Nussbaum found more challenging. She had to embody the hopelessness of a woman who, knowing that she can never be with the man she loves, yearns for death.

"Put a little longing and sadness in there," Black said. "Don't give too much too early."

Nussbaum softened her tone for a few passages, but her voice quickly gathered force.

"You have too much power," Black told her. "Save a little for the end."

"I'll have to work on that," Nussbaum said, her eyes fixed on the sheet music in front of her. "It's difficult to get all the emotions in there."

Hours later, as we drove home from a concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Nussbaum said that she was struggling to capture the resignation required for the Verdi piece. She couldn't identify with the role. "I feel that this character is basically saying, 'Life is treating me badly, so I'm going to give up,' " she told me. "And I find that totally unintelligible."

When Nussbaum was three or four years old, she told her mother, "Well, I think I know just about everything." Her mother, Betty Craven, whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower, responded sternly, "No, Martha. You are just one person among many." Nussbaum was so frustrated by this response that she banged her head on the floor.

Her father, George Craven, a successful tax lawyer who worked all the time, applauded her youthful arrogance. He thought that it was excellent to be superior to others. He liked to joke that he had been wrong only once in his life and that was the time that he thought he was wrong. The Craven family lived in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in an atmosphere that Nussbaum describes as "chilly clear opulence." Betty was bored and unfulfilled, and she began drinking for much of the day, hiding bourbon in the kitchen. Nussbaum's younger sister, Gail, said that once, after her mother passed out on the floor, she called an ambulance, but her father sent it away. Nussbaum's half-brother, Robert (the child of George Craven's first marriage), said that their father didn't understand when people weren't rational. "It was an emotionally barren environment," he told me. "You were supposed to just soldier on."

Nussbaum spent her free time alone in the attic, reading books, including many by Dickens. Through literature, she said, she found an "escape from an amoral life into a universe where morality matters." At night, she went to her father's study in her long bathrobe, and they read together. Her father loved the poem "Invictus," by William Ernest Henley, and he often recited it to her: "I have not winced nor cried aloud. / Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed. . . . I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul."

Her father's ethos may have fostered Nussbaum's interest in Stoicism. Her relationship with him was so captivating that it felt romantic. "He really set me on a path of being happy and delighted with life," she said. "He symbolized beauty and wonder." Gail Busch found her father's temperament less congenial. "I believe he was probably a sociopath," she told me. "He was certainly very narcissistic. He was extremely domineering and very controlling. Our mother was petrified for most of their marriage." Busch said that when she was a young child her father insisted that she be in bed before he got home from work.

Nussbaum once wrote of Iris Murdoch that she "won the Oedipal struggle too easily." The same could be said of Nussbaum herself. Busch told me, "There were very few people that my father touched that he didn't hurt. But one of them was Martha, because they were just two peas in a pod. I know that he saw her as a reflection of him, and that was probably just perfect for him."

Nussbaum excelled at her private girls' school, while Busch floundered and became rebellious. In an interview with a Dutch television station, Nussbaum said that she worked so hard because she thought, This is what Daddy's doing-we take charge of our lives. Of her mother and sister, she said, "I just was furious at them, because I thought that they could take charge of their lives by will, and they weren't doing it."

Nussbaum attended Wellesley College, but she dropped out in her sophomore year, because she wanted to be an actress. Playing other people gave her access to emotions that she hadn't been able to express on her own, but, after half a year with a repertory company that performed Greek tragedies, she left that, too. "I hadn't lived enough," she said. She began studying classics at New York University, still focussing on Greek tragedies. She came to believe that reading about suffering functions as a kind of "transitional object," the term used by the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, one of her favorite thinkers, to describe toys that allow infants to move away from their mothers and to explore the world on their own. "When we have emotions of fear and pity toward the hero of a tragedy," she has written, "we explore aspects of our own vulnerability in a safe and pleasing setting."

Nussbaum felt increasingly uncomfortable with what she called the "smug bastion of hypocrisy and unearned privilege" in which she'd been raised. She had spent her childhood "coasting along with assured invulnerability," she said. In a class on Greek composition, she fell in love with Alan Nussbaum, another N.Y.U. student, who was Jewish, a religion she was attracted to for the same reason that she was drawn to theatre: "more emotional expressiveness," she said. She associated the religion with the social consciousness of I. F. Stone and The Nation. Her father, who thought that Jews were vulgar, disapproved of the marriage and refused to attend their wedding party. Robert Craven told me, "Martha was the apple of our father's eye, until she embraced Judaism and fell from grace."

Four years into the marriage, Nussbaum read "The Golden Bowl," by Henry James. She kept thinking about Maggie Verver's "wish to remain, intensely, the same passionate little daughter she had always been." She was so captivated by the novel that she later wrote three essays about the ways in which James articulates a kind of moral philosophy, revealing the childishness of aspiring to moral perfection, a life of "never doing a wrong, never breaking a rule, never hurting." Nussbaum told me, "What drew me to Maggie is the sense that she is a peculiarly American kind of person who really, really wants to be good. And of course that's impossible. She has a particularly demanding father, and, in order to be fully herself with her husband, she has to leave her father and hurt him, and she just had no way to deal with that. She was not prepared."

Nussbaum entered the graduate program in classics at Harvard, in 1969, and realized that for years she had been smiling all the time, for no particular reason. When her thesis adviser, G. E. L. Owen, invited her to his office, served sherry, spoke about life's sadness, recited Auden, and reached over to touch her breasts, she says, she gently pushed him away, careful not to embarrass him. "Just as I never accused my mother of being drunk, even though she was always drunk," she wrote, "so I managed to keep my control with Owen, and I never said a hostile word." She didn't experience the imbalance of power that makes sexual harassment so destructive, she said, because she felt "much healthier and more powerful than he was."

She soon drifted toward ancient philosophy, where she could follow Aristotle, who asked the basic question "How should a human live?" She realized that philosophy attracted a "logic-chopping type of person," nearly always male. She came to believe that she understood Nietzsche's thinking when he wrote that no great philosopher had ever been married. "I think what he was saying is that most philosophers have been in flight from human existence," she said. "They just haven't wanted to be entangled." She rejected the idea, dominant in contemporary philosophy, that emotions were "unthinking energies that simply push the person around." Instead, she resurrected a version of the Stoic theory that makes no division between thought and feeling. She gave emotions a central role in moral philosophy, arguing that they are cognitive in nature: they embody judgments about the world.

One of her mentors was John Rawls, the most influential political philosopher of the last century. He stuttered and was extremely shy. She said that one day, when they were eating hamburgers for lunch (this was before she stopped eating meat), he instructed her that if she had the capacity to be a public intellectual then it was her duty to become one.

Utilitarian and Kantian theories were dominant at the time, and Nussbaum felt that the field had become too insular and professionalized. She was frustrated that her colleagues were more interested in conceptual analyses than in attending to the details of people's lives. While writing an austere dissertation on a neglected treatise by Aristotle, she began a second book, about the urge to deny one's human needs. In "The Fragility of Goodness," one of the best-selling contemporary philosophy books, she rejected Plato's argument that a good life is one of total self-sufficiency. She argued that tragedy occurs because people are living well: they have formed passionate commitments that leave them exposed. She began the book by acknowledging:

I must constantly choose among competing and apparently incommensurable goods and that circumstances may force me to a position in which I cannot help being false to something or doing something wrong; that an event that simply happens to me may, without my consent, alter my life; that it is equally problematic to entrust one's good to friends, lovers, or country and to try to have a good life without them-all these I take to be not just the material of tragedy, but everyday facts of practical wisdom.

Nussbaum describes motherhood as her first profound experience of moral conflict. Her pregnancy, in 1972, was a mistake; her I.U.D. fell out. She had just become the first woman elected to Harvard's Society of Fellows, and she imagined that the other scholars must be thinking, We let in a woman, and what does she do? She goes off and has a baby. Nussbaum carried on for nine months as if she weren't pregnant. She ran several miles a day; she remained so thin that her adviser told her she must be carrying a "wind egg"; she had such a rapid delivery-with no anesthesia-that doctors interviewed her about how she had prepared for birth. She told them that "Lamaze was for wimps and running was the key." She brought Aristotle's Politics to the hospital. Her husband took a picture of her reading. She was at a Society of Fellows dinner the next week. "I wanted everyone to understand that I was still working," she said.

Alan Nussbaum taught linguistics at Yale, and during the week Martha took care of their daughter, Rachel, alone. "Among the good and decent men, some are unprepared for the surprises of life, and their good intentions run aground when confronted with issues like child care," she later wrote. They divorced when Rachel was a teen-ager. When Nussbaum joined a society for female philosophers, she proposed that women had a unique contribution to make, because "we had an experience of moral conflicts-we are torn between children on the one hand, and work on the other-that the male philosophers didn't have, or wouldn't face up to." She rejected the idea, suggested by Kant, that people who are morally good are immune to the kind of bad luck that would force them into ethically compromised positions. She told me, "A lot of the great philosophers have said there are no real moral dilemmas. Well, we were saying, 'No woman would make that stupid mistake!' "

Nussbaum left Harvard in 1983, after she was denied tenure, a decision she attributes, in part, to a "venomous dislike of me as a very outspoken woman" and the machinations of a colleague who could "show a good actor how the role of Iago ought to be played." Glen Bowersock, who was the head of the classics department when Nussbaum was a student, said, "I think she scared people. They couldn't wrap their minds around this formidably good, extraordinarily articulate woman who was very tall and attractive, openly feminine and stylish, and walked very erect and wore miniskirts-all in one package. They were just frightened."

This was the only time that Nussbaum had anything resembling a crisis in her career. I was eager to hear about her moment of doubt, since she always seemed so steely. Projecting a little, I asked if she ever felt guilty when she was successful, as if she didn't deserve it. "No-none of that," she said briskly. "I think women and philosophers are under-rewarded for what they do." After she was denied tenure, she thought about going to law school. "The doubt was very brief," she added. "I thought about law school for about a day, or something like that."

Instead, she began considering a more public role for philosophy. One of her mentors, the English philosopher Bernard Williams, accused moral philosophers of "refusing to write about anything of importance." Nussbaum began examining quality of life in the developing world. She was steered toward the issue by Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, who later won the Nobel Prize. In 1986, they became romantically involved and worked together at the World Institute of Development Economics Research, in Helsinki. At the institute, she told me, she came to the realization that "I knew nothing about the rest of the world." She taught herself about Indian politics and developed her own version of Sen's capabilities approach, a theoretical framework for measuring and comparing the well-being of nations. Her earlier work had celebrated vulnerability, but now she identified the sorts of vulnerabilities (poverty, hunger, sexual violence) that no human should have to endure. In an Aristotelian spirit, Nussbaum devised a list of ten essential capabilities that all societies should nourish, including the freedom to play, to engage in critical reflection, and to love. The capabilities theory is now a staple of human-rights advocacy, and Sen told me that Nussbaum has become more of a "purist" than he is. When it comes to judging the quality of human life, he said, "I am often defeated by that in a way that Martha is not."

Nussbaum went on to extend the work of John Rawls, who developed the most influential contemporary version of the social-contract theory: the idea that rational citizens agree to govern themselves, because they recognize that everyone's needs are met more effectively through coöperation. Nussbaum argued that Rawls gave an unsatisfactory account of justice for people dependent on others-the disabled, the elderly, and women subservient in their homes. For a society to remain stable and committed to democratic principles, she argued, it needs more than detached moral principles: it has to cultivate certain emotions and teach people to enter empathetically into others' lives. She believes that the humanities are not just important to a healthy democratic society but decisive, shaping its fate. She proposed an enhanced version of John Stuart Mill's "aesthetic education"-emotional refinement for all citizens through poetry and music and art. "Respect on its own is cold and inert, insufficient to overcome the bad tendencies that lead human beings to tyrannize over one another," she wrote. "Public culture cannot be tepid and passionless."

By the late nineties, India had become so integral to Nussbaum's thinking that she later warned a reporter from The Chronicle of Higher Education that her work there was at the "core of my heart and my sense of the meaning of life, so if you downplay that, you don't get me." She travelled to developing countries during school vacations-she never misses a class-and met with impoverished women. She said she felt as if she were "a lawyer who has been retained by poor people in developing nations."

In the sixties, Nussbaum had been too busy for feminist consciousness-raising-she said that she cultivated an image of "Doris Day respectability"-and she was suspicious of left-wing groupthink. Once she began studying the lives of women in non-Western countries, she identified as a feminist but of the unfashionable kind: a traditional liberal who believed in the power of reason at a time when postmodern scholars viewed it as an instrument or a disguise for oppression. She argued that the well-being of women around the world could be improved through universal norms-an international system of distributive justice. She was impatient with feminist theory that was so relativistic that it assumed that, in the name of respecting other cultures, women should stand by while other women were beaten or genitally mutilated. In "Sex and Social Justice," published in 1999, she wrote that the approach resembles the "sort of moral collapse depicted by Dante, when he describes the crowd of souls who mill around in the vestibule of hell, dragging their banner now one way now another, never willing to set it down and take a definite stand on any moral or political question. Such people, he implies, are the most despicable of all. They can't even get into hell because they have not been willing to stand for anything in life."

In 1999, in a now canonical essay for The New Republic, she wrote that academic feminism spoke only to the élite. It had become untethered from the practical struggle to achieve equality for women. She scolded Judith Butler and postmodern feminists for "turning away from the material side of life, towards a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest connections with the real situations of real women." These radical thinkers, she felt, were focussing more on problems of representation than on the immediate needs of women in other classes and cultures. The stance, she wrote, "looks very much like quietism," a word she often uses when she disapproves of projects and ideas.

In letters responding to the essay, the feminist critic Gayatri Spivak denounced Nussbaum's "civilizing mission." Joan Scott, a historian of gender, wrote that Nussbaum had "constructed a self-serving morality tale."

When Nussbaum is at her computer writing, she feels as if she had entered a "holding environment"-the phrase used by Donald Winnicott to describe conditions that allow a baby to feel secure and loved. Like the baby, she is "playing with an object," she said. "It's my manuscript, but I feel that something of both of my parents is with me. The sense of concern and being held is what I associate with my mother, and the sense of surging and delight is what I associate with my father."

She said that she looks to replicate the experience of "surging" in romantic partners as well. She has always been drawn to intellectually distinguished men. "I suppose it's because of the imprint of my father," she told me one afternoon, while eating a small bowl of yogurt, blueberries, raisins, and pine nuts, a variation on the lunch she has most days. Her spacious tenth-floor apartment, which has twelve windows overlooking Lake Michigan and an elevator that delivers visitors directly into her foyer, is decorated with dozens of porcelain, metal, and glass elephants-her favorite animal, because of its emotional intelligence. "I used to observe that my close female friends would choose-very reasonably-men whose aspirations were rather modest," she told me. "That works out nicely, because these men are really supportive of them. I've thought, Wouldn't it be nice to have romantic and sexual tastes like that? But I certainly don't."

After moving to the University of Chicago, in 1995 (following seven years at Brown), Nussbaum was in a long relationship with Cass Sunstein, the former administrator for President Obama's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and one of the few scholars as prolific as she is. Nussbaum said that she discovered her paradigm for romance as an adolescent, when she read about the relationship between two men in Plato's Phaedrus and the way in which they combined "intense mutual erotic passion with a shared pursuit of truth and justice." She and Sunstein (who is now married to Samantha Power, the Ambassador to the United Nations) lived in separate apartments, and each one's work informed the other's. In an influential essay, titled "Objectification," Nussbaum builds on a passage written by Sunstein, in which he suggests that some forms of sexual objectification can be both ineradicable and wonderful. Straying from the standard line of feminist thought, Nussbaum defends Sunstein's idea, arguing that there are circumstances in which being treated as a sex object, a "mysterious thinglike presence," can be humanizing, rather than morally harmful. It allows us to achieve a state that her writing often elevates: the "abnegation of self-containment and self-sufficiency."

Nussbaum is preoccupied by the ways that philosophical thinking can seem at odds with passion and love. She recognizes that writing can be "a way of distancing oneself from human life and maybe even a way of controlling human life," she said. In a semi-autobiographical essay in her book "Love's Knowledge," from 1990, she offers a portrait of a female philosopher who approaches her own heartbreak with a notepad and a pen; she sorts and classifies the experience, listing the properties of an ideal lover and comparing it to the men she has loved. "You now begin to see how this lady is," she wrote. "She goes on thinking at all times. She won't simply cry, she will ask what crying consists in. One tear, one argument."

Nussbaum isn't sure if her capacity for rational detachment is innate or learned. On three occasions, she alluded to a childhood experience in which she'd been so overwhelmed by anger at her mother, for drinking in the afternoon, that she slapped her. Betty warned her, "If you turn against me, I won't have any reason to live." Nussbaum prayed to be relieved of her anger, fearing that its potential was infinite. "I thought it would kill somebody," she said.

Anger is an emotion that she now rarely experiences. She invariably remains friends with former lovers, a fact that Sunstein, Sen, and Alan Nussbaum wholeheartedly affirmed. In her new book, "Anger and Forgiveness," which was published last month, Nussbaum argues against the idea, dear to therapists and some feminists, that "people (and women especially) owe it to their self-respect to own, nourish, and publicly proclaim their anger." It is a "magical fantasy," a bit of "metaphysical nonsense," she writes, to assume that anger will restore what was damaged. She believes that embedded in the emotion is the irrational wish that "things will be made right if I inflict suffering." She writes that even leaders of movements for revolutionary justice should avoid the emotion and move on to "saner thoughts of personal and social welfare." (She acknowledges, "It might be objected that my proposal sounds all too much like that of the upper-middle-class (ex)-Wasp academic that I certainly am. I simply deny the charge.")

For a long time, Nussbaum had seemed to be working on getting in touch with anger. In the nineties, when she composed the list of ten capabilities to which all humans should be entitled-a list that she's revised in the course of many papers-she and the feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon debated whether "justified anger" should make the list. Nussbaum was wary of the violence that accompanies anger's expression, but MacKinnon said she convinced Nussbaum that anger can be a "sign that self-respect has not been crushed, that humanity burns even where it is supposed to have been extinguished." Nussbaum decided to view anger in a more positive light. "I thought, I'm just getting duped by my own history," she said. In an interview a few years later, she said that being able to express anger to a friend, after years of training herself to suppress it, was "the most tremendous pleasure in life." In a 2003 essay, she describes herself as "angry more or less all the time."

When I asked her about the different self-conceptions, she wrote me three e-mails from a plane to Mexico (she was on her way to give lectures in Puebla) to explain that she had articulated these views before she had studied the emotion in depth. It was not full-fledged anger that she was experiencing but "transitional anger," an emotional state that embodies the thought: Something should be done about this, in response to social injustice. In another e-mail from the air, she clarified: "My experience of political anger has always been more King-like: protest, not acquiescence, but no desire for payback."

Last year, Nussbaum had a colonoscopy. She didn't want to miss a workday, so she refused sedation. She was thrilled by the sight of her appendix, so pink and tiny. "It's such a big part of you and you don't get to meet these parts," she told me. "I love that kind of familiarization: it's like coming to terms with yourself."

Her friends were repulsed when she told them that she had been awake the entire time. "They thought it was disgusting to go through the procedure without their consciousness obliterated," she said. She wasn't surprised that men wanted to be sedated, but she couldn't understand why women her age would avoid the sight of their organs. "Here are the same women who were inspired by 'Our Bodies, Ourselves,' " she told me. "We said, 'Oh, let's not shrink from looking at our vaginas. Let's not think, Our periods are disgusting, but let's celebrate it as part of who we are!' Now we get to our sixties, and we are disgusted by our bodies again, and we want to be knocked out."

Nussbaum believes that disgust "draws sharp edges around the self" and betrays a shame toward what is human. When she goes shopping with younger colleagues-among her favorite designers are Alexander McQueen, Azzedine Alaïa, and Seth Aaron Henderson, whom she befriended after he won "Project Runway"-she often emerges from the changing room in her underwear. Bodily functions do not embarrass her, either. When she goes on long runs, she has no problem urinating behind bushes. Once, when she was in Paris with her daughter, Rachel, who is now an animal-rights lawyer in Denver, she peed in the garden of the Tuileries Palace at night. (Rachel was curt when we met; Nussbaum told me that Rachel, who has co-written papers with her mother on the legal status of whales, was wary of being portrayed "as adjunct to me.")

Nussbaum acknowledges that, as she ages, it becomes harder to rejoice in all bodily developments. Recently, she was dismayed when she looked in the mirror and didn't recognize her nose. Sinking cartilage had created a new bump. She asked the doctor who gives her Botox in her forehead what to do. "He is a minimalist," she told me. "He's very artistic." He fixed the problem by putting filler above the tip of her nose. It wasn't that she was disgusted. "But I do feel conscious that at my age I have to be very careful of how I present myself, at risk of not being thought attractive," she told me. "There are women like Germaine Greer who say that it's a big relief to not worry about men and to forget how they look. I don't feel that way! I care how men look at me. I like men."

In a new book, tentatively titled "Aging Wisely," which will be published next year, Nussbaum and Saul Levmore, a colleague at the law school, investigate the moral, legal, and economic dilemmas of old age-"an unknown country," which they say has been ignored by philosophy. The book is structured as a dialogue between two aging scholars, analyzing the way that old age affects love, friendship, inequality, and the ability to cede control. They both reject the idea that getting old is a form of renunciation. Nussbaum critiques the tendency in literature to "assign a 'comeuppance' " to aging women who fail to display proper levels of resignation and shame. She calls for an "informal social movement akin to the feminist Our Bodies movement: a movement against self-disgust" for the aging. She promotes Walt Whitman's "anti-disgust" world view, his celebration of the "lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean. . . . The thin red jellies within you or within me. . . . O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul."

At a faculty workshop last summer, professors at the law school gathered to critique drafts of two chapters from the book. Nussbaum wore a fitted purple dress and high-heeled sandals, and her blond hair looked as if it had recently been permed. She appeared to be dressed for a different event from the one that the other professors were attending. As she often does, she looked delighted but not necessarily happy.

In one of the chapters, Levmore argued that it should be legal for employers to require that employees retire at an agreed-upon age, and Nussbaum wrote a rebuttal, called "No End in Sight." She said that it was painful to see colleagues in other countries forced to retire when philosophers such as Kant, Cato, and Gorgias didn't produce their best work until old age.

The libertarian scholar Richard Epstein raised his hand and said that, rather than having a national policy regarding retirement, each institution should make its own decision. "So Martha, full of vim and vigor, can get offers from four other places and go on and continue to work," he said.

"Sure, I could go and move someplace else," she said, interrupting him. "But I don't want to." If she were forced to retire, she said, "that would really affect me psychologically in a very deep way. And I have no idea what I'd do. I might go off and do some interesting thing like be a cantor. Or I might just get depressed."

"Martha, it's too autobiographical," Epstein said. His concern was not that "Martha stays on. It's that a bunch of dead wood stays on, as well, and it's a cost to the institution."

When another colleague suggested that no one knew the precise moment when aging scholars had peaked, Nussbaum cited Cato, who wrote that the process of aging could be resisted through vigorous physical and mental activity. Her celebration of this final, vulnerable stage of life was undercut by her confidence that she needn't be so vulnerable. She said that her grandmother lived until she was a hundred and four years old. "Why do I have my outlook?" she said. "It's a matter of the habits you form when you are very young-the habits of exercise, of being active. All of that stuff builds to the sense of a life that can go on."

Not long ago, Nussbaum bought a Dolce & Gabbana skirt dotted with crystal stars and daisies. "It had a happy look," she told me, holding the hanger to her chin. She planned to wear it to the college graduation of Nathaniel Levmore, whom she describes as her "quasi-child." Nathaniel, the son of Saul Levmore, has always been shy. Saul told me, "Of my two children, this is the one that's the underdog, and of course Martha loves him, and they talk for hours and hours. Martha has this total belief in the underdog. The more underdog, the more charming she finds them."

Nussbaum has taken Nathaniel on trips to Botswana and India, and, when she hosts dinner parties, he often serves the wine. When I joined them last summer for an outdoor screening of "Star Trek," they spent much of the hour-long drive debating whether it was anti-Semitic for Nathaniel's college to begin its semester on Rosh Hashanah. Their persistence was both touching and annoying. Just when I thought the conversation would die, the matter settled, Nathaniel would raise a new point, and Nussbaum would argue from a new angle that the scheduling was anti-Semitic.

Recently, when I had dinner at Nussbaum's apartment, she said she was sorry that Nathaniel wasn't there to enjoy it. We sat at her kitchen island, facing a Chicago White Sox poster, eating what remained of an elaborate and extraordinary Indian meal that she had cooked two days before, for the dean of the law school and eight students. She served me heaping portions of every dish and herself a modest plate of yogurt, rice, and spinach.

I mentioned that Saul Levmore had said she is so devoted to the underdog that she even has sympathy for a former student who had been stalking her; the student appeared to have had a psychotic break and bombarded her with threatening e-mails. "I feel great sympathy for any weak person or creature," she told me. She mentioned that a few days before she had been watching a Webcam of a nest of newborn bald eagles and had become distraught when she saw that the parent eagle was giving all the food to only one of her two babies. "The other one kept trying to eat something, and didn't get it!" she said. "I thought it was possible that one of the eagles was getting weaker and weaker, and I asked my bird-watcher friend, and he said that kind of sibling rivalry is actually pretty common in those species and the one may die. I was really upset by this."

"Isn't that the sort of dynamic you had with your sister?" I asked.

"Yeah, it probably is," Nussbaum said, running her finger along the rim of her plate. "It is, I guess." She said that her sister seemed to have become happier as she aged; her musical career at the church was blossoming. "Well, this is what we'll have to talk about in class tomorrow," she said. "Can guilt ever be creative?" She licked the sauce on her finger. " 'Guilt' might not even be quite the right word. It's a kind of sorrow that one had profited at the expense of someone else."

We began talking about a chapter that she intended to write for her book on aging, on the idea of looking back at one's life and turning it into a narrative. "Did you stand for something, or didn't you?" she said. She said that she had always admired the final words of John Stuart Mill, who reportedly said, "I have done my work." She has quoted these words in a number of interviews and papers, offering them as the mark of a life well lived. The image of Mill on his deathbed is not dissimilar to one she has of her father, who died as he was putting papers into his briefcase. Nussbaum often describes this as a good death-he was doing his work until the end-while Nussbaum's brother and sister see it as a sign of his isolation.

She said, "If I found that I was going to die in the next hour, I would not say that I had done my work. If you have a good life, you typically always feel that there's something that you want to do next." She wondered if Mill had surrendered too soon because he was prone to depression.

"It does sound a little bit final," she went on, "and one rarely dies when one is out of useful ideas-unless maybe you were really ill for a long time." She said that she had been in a hospital only twice, once to give birth and once when she had an operation to staple the top of her left ear to the back of her head, when she was eleven. It poked out, and her father worried that boys wouldn't be attracted to her. "I just enjoyed having this big bandage around my head," she said. "I was acting the part of Marley's ghost in 'A Christmas Carol,' and it made quite an effect."

She stood up to clear our plates. "You're making me feel I chose the wrong last words," she called out from the sink. She returned with two large cakes. "I think last words are silly," she said, cutting herself a sliver. "Probably the best thing to do with your last words is to say goodbye to the people you love and not to talk about yourself." ♦

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Rachel Aviv writes a Profile of the University of Chicago professor and the author of "Upheavals of Thought" and "The Fragility of Goodness."

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Being a #Stoic saved me from the curse of the British stiff upper lip | #JulesEvans

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Being a Stoic saved me from the curse of the British stiff upper lip | Jules Evans

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Jules Evans: Real Stoicism, as the ancients practised, is about understanding feelings, not repressing them – which can do real harm

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If something’s out of your control, should you still worry about it? Oliver Burkeman

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ecently - oh, no particular reason - I've found myself returning to the ancient philosophical idea known as "the dichotomy of control". "Some things are within our power, while others are not," wrote Epictetus, the Greek Stoic, in a line you'd be justified in dismissing as obvious, if it weren't for the fact that we ignore its ramifications every day, and suffer as a result. In every situation, there are things we can control and things we can't, and struggling to control the latter is a recipe for anxiety and stress. "Partial control", like the kind I have over my three-year-old's behaviour, can be broken down into the two: I usually have total control over what I say or do; and none, technically, over how he reacts.

It's an idea that's echoed widely elsewhere, for example in the Serenity Prayer, associated with Alcoholics Anonymous, and in an observation with Buddhist origins: if a problem can be fixed, there's no need to worry about it; and if it can't be fixed, well, why bother worrying?

Which is fine so far as it goes: it's surely true that if I could manage never to fret about things I can't affect, then life would proceed serenely. But it strikes me as a major weakness of Stoicism - at least in its rediscovered, newly fashionable form - to assume that seeing the truth in an insight like this can bring peace of mind by itself. Among the many things I can't control, it turns out, are my own emotions. What Sigmund Freud and his successors brought to psychology was the understanding that conscious thought might be only a tiny sliver of what's going on in the mind as a whole. So if a global pandemic triggers my particular anxieties around death, or illness, or job security - anxieties formed over decades, and embedded in my unconscious - it's radically insufficient to try to think myself into realising they're futile. If pointlessness caused things to vanish, PopSockets that people stick on the backs of their phones wouldn't exist. Yet they do.

That's why, in my experience, the dichotomy of control is best approached as a preliminary tool. You use it to distinguish what you can control from what you can't - but peace of mind arrives only when you begin taking action in the realm of the former. (As the saying goes, you can't think yourself into new ways of acting, but you can act yourself into new ways of thinking.)

It's often less a matter of realising how little control you have than how much. You can't stop the worldwide spread of a disease, but you can do plenty to stop it spreading through you. You can't choose physical fitness, but you can choose to eat well, and to move. You can't choose to make it through today's to-do list, but you can choose to spend the next three hours diligently attacking it. And so on.

There's a deep kind of freedom to be found here, even in the presence of severe external constraints. Your goals shift from external ones, about imposing certain changes on the world, to internal ones, about how you plan to act upon the world. These are objectives you can aim at wholeheartedly, fully expecting to accomplish - secure in the knowledge that they don't require the cooperation of forces whose assistance you're in no position to compel.

Read this

Massimo Pigliucci and Gregory Lopez offer ancient insights for thriving in a world you can't control in their book, Live Like a Stoic.

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If something's out of your control, should you still worry about it? | Oliver Burkeman

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There's a freedom that comes with realising you have more influence over your life than you thought

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#MassimoPigliucci #Stoic #Stoicism

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In a world fraught with difficult moral issues, Stoicism may be our best path forward for structuring our life, achieving tranquility of mind and maintaining our personal integrity - in other words, for shaping a life well lived.
Whether we are secular or religious, at some point we all find ourselves facing the question of how to live. How should we handle life's challenges and vicissitudes? How should we conduct ourselves in the world? How should we treat others? And the ultimate question: how do we best prepare for the final test of our character, when we die?

When he turned 50, the philosopher and biologist Massimo Pigliucci found himself, like others before him, facing his own mortality and reflecting on the big questions: who am I and what am I doing? A trained scientist, a self-professed moderate atheist and a native of Rome, Pigliucci embraced his cultural roots as well as his experimental nature - he became a Stoic.

In How to be a Stoic, Pigliucci combines his experiment in Stoic living with a brisk and illuminating guide to this timely philosophy. Developed by Zeno of Citium in the early third century BC, Stoicism counts Seneca and Marcus Aurelius among its best known practitioners, but is today associated more with grim endurance than with living a good life. As Pigliucci reveals, however, Stoicism is fundamentally a practical philosophy, with a core practice of meditation, mindfulness and focus on virtue. And although for centuries it was eclipsed by Christian thought in the mainstream, Stoic influences appear in unexpected places: the Serenity Prayer, the underlying principles of cognitive behavioural therapy. Pigliucci finds in Stoicism a rational, science-friendly philosophy that also allows room for a spiritual metaphysics: that is, a practical philosophy eminently open to revision - in stark contrast to so much of the dogma we face today.

In practising Stoicism, Pigliucci offers a reconsideration of this ancient philosophy for modern life and reveals why its popularity is now on the rise.

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In a world fraught with difficult moral issues, Stoicism may be our best path forward for structuring our life, achieving tranquility of mind and maintaining our personal integrity - in other words, for shaping a life well lived. Whether we are secular or religious, at some point we all find ourselves facing the question of how to live.

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#Stoicism #JulesEvans #MassimoPigliucci

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#TheFourAgreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom is a self-help book by the author #Don MiguelRuiz. The book outlines a code of conduct based on ancient #Toltec wisdom – advocating freedom from self-limiting beliefs which bring suffering and limitation to one's life.

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#Toka-Pa Turner #Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

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Read 216 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. 2017 Nautilus Award Gold Winner for Personal Growth The world has never been more connect...

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#Belonging:  #Toko-PaTurner

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#Braidotti #Nomad #Nomadism

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Over the last few years, we have seen attacks on citizens in some EU member states, deportations in others, and difficulties for citizens to access the rights they are entitled. Brexit has highlighted in many ways the difficulties EU citizens can face, but should not be seen in isolation, with citizens facing problems in realising their right to move, and to move with their families, in many countries, from Belgium to Sweden, Germany to Romania. Rosi Braidotti has spent a life in transit, moving between cultures and languages. She has explored the notion of "nomadism", which has become the key concept for the development of an extremely rich and original research, varying from poststructuralism, to the history of feminism, to ethics. In this conversation with Sara Saleri, PhD at the University of Bologna, they talked about ethical gestures, feminism and the possibilities of a nomadic political practice.

Sara Saleri: The idea of the nomadic subject was born as a philosophical concept, as an existential condition, as a (non structured) form of one's own identity. In recent years you have especially reflected on this concept in an ethical dimension, as what should be the basis of political action. We especially think about Transpositions , where you maintain that "a nomadic and not unitary vision of the subject, instead of impeding ethically relevant positions, constitutes a necessary precondition for the formulation of an ethics which measures up to the complexities of our time". Which are the concrete practices you think of, when you talk about politics of location, of multiple becoming, of the necessity of going through differences and belongings that can also be contradictory? Which could be the figures and everyday experiences of nomadism?

Rosi Braidotti: The project on nomadic subjects emerges from feminist philosophies, post-colonial philosophies and anti-racist philosophies, critical theory, social theory. And then it develops into an analytical tool to look at three classes of problems. First of all, the cultural mutations, which I call "the cultural cartography": what is happening to bodies, identities, belongings, in a world that is technologically mediated, ethnically mixed and changing very fast in all sort of ways. Secondly, there is a clearly political project: can we think other ways of being globalized, of becoming planetary, or are we stuck with this neoliberal model? Is there another way in which we can rethink at our interconnections? And then, finally, the ethical issue: what are the values of subjects who are not unitary but are split, complex, nomadic?

These three dimensions are reflected in my trilogy of books: Nomadic Subjects (1994, Columbia University Press) is the starting social statement, Metamorphoses (2002, Polity Press) deals with the cultural part, while Transpositions (2006, Polity Press) focuses on ethics.

Our European citizenship allows us to recombine nationality and ethnic origins in very unprecedented ways: in fact, we can delink citizenship from ethnicity and connect it to participation, belonging.

In terms of practical implications, there are two clear areas in which nomadic subjectivity can be seen. First, the actual practice of flexible citizenship, which I explored in my work on Europe: a temporary, interim citizenship based on delinking ethnic origin from nationality and citizenship and then recombining them in different ways. Our European citizenship allows us to recombine nationality and ethnic origins in very unprecedented ways: in fact, we can delink citizenship from ethnicity and connect it to participation, belonging. And I think that this model of nomadic citizenship, that would be pragmatic and grounded, instead of abstract and based on nationality, is what we have to focus on.

Second, connected to this, the idea of nomadic subject allows us to have a different take on immigration: we have to stop looking at immigration as a problem and see immigration as simply of globalization. We have to start from the fact that the world will never be culturally and ethnically homogenous again: that world is over. Then, we have to think about the multiple forms of belonging of subjects and map out different configurations of nomadism, different ways in which a subject can have multiple belongings, multiple ways in which ethnicity, nationality and citizenship can actually be combined, even within the same nation state.

A model of nomadic post-colonial theory would allow you to de-criminalize, depenalize, de-pathologize the problem, and also not to discuss post-colonial theory only in terms of other possible identities. The crucial thing about nomadic subject is that it is post-identitarian: nomadic is a verb, a process by which we map out multiple transformations and multiple ways of belonging, each depending on where our particular location is and how we grow. So we have to map out the alternative cartographies of the non-unitary subjects that we are, so that we can get rid of any idea that there are subjects that are completely unitary, belonging entirely to one location.

SS: This concept of "flexible citizenship" seems to recall the idea by Hannah Arendt of reversed human rights, which would guarantee the right to citizenship at an international level. A political citizenship in a political space, wider than the one possible within the nation state. Arendt saw a possibility of this kind of citizenship in the project of federal Europe: do you think this notion could be realised in the Europe we have, increasingly more constructed as a fortress, opposed to those who try to enter its borders? Instead, how can we imagine and how can we build a different Europe, really post-national, which would open to this kind of citizenship?

RB: We obviously have the Europe that we deserve. Europe is made through elections in which very few people vote. Clearly a political project that construct a post-national Europe is not there. And Daniel Cohen Bendit, the leader of my party, the European Greens, has been forever working within the institutions, to have the political Europe on the agenda. It's a political decision if we do it or not: the institutional and legal means are in place. If you look at the work done at the European Institute in Florence by armies of lawyers who have worked out the structure of a possible European citizenship, it is absolutely feasible and easy to delink citizenship from ethnic origins or even nationalities.

So the entire infrastructure is in place, there's no political will. And I think in the last ten years - I was talking with Luisa Passerini about this - the political project of Europe has regressed enormously, under the combined forces of the delirious nationalistic right and the equally delirious old fashioned left: I hold them both entirely responsible. A middle way that can allow us constructing a Europe where - as Spinelli, Schumann and Monnet were pointing out - the European framework would actually allow us to bypass nationalism, would be possible to postulate citizenship on participation, on belonging, on taxation, on being there... allowing people without countries, stateless people, to be citizens. To give everyone the right to have rights, using precisely the European legal framework as an unprecedented legal framework, that would allow us to transcend the nation state. This is the greatness of this project, but it is not highlighted in the public debate.

SS: A keyword in all your work is "responsibility". In "Transposition", you defined ethics as a whole of "intersected forms of situated responsibility", linked to a politics of location: we have to become "other", to take the responsibilities linked not only to the roles we act, but also to the roles we can keep in memory (a memory which is intergenerational and collective). How do you think this becoming-other, becoming-multiple can be translated in practice, beyond an increased awareness of oneself as a subject (or many subjects)? Is it a project which ends in the individuality of a subject, or do you think it also as a collective project?

The whole process of is a process of abandoning identity and entering in the construction of subjectivity, subjectivity being per definition transversal, collective.

RB: I think we have to start from eliminating identities. We will never arrive anywhere if we identity as a starting point. In fact the whole process of is a process of abandoning identity and entering in the construction of subjectivity, subjectivity being per definition transversal, collective. This is an enormous switch because even the political movements I have known in the 70s were identitarian movements: women's movements would fight for women, gay movements would fight for gays... There is sometimes a sort of one-on-one equivalence between the grief and the remedy, what you are complaining against and what you propose as an alternative. This one-on-one equivalence has to switch, transcending the merely identitarian claim and look at the broader issue.

This point was already made back in the 80s by poststructuralists, when there was a critique of Hegelian and Marxist identity politics. It went for a large part unheard, but if you read early Foucault, middle Deleuze, Derrida, it is clear that the only possible ethics for the global world is collectively shared, because the scale of the problems is planetary, gigantic.

An example for this is what people continue to call "the environmental problem" - as if it were a problem, when it is in fact the possibility of the future. It is like immigration: these issues are not problems, they are either a fact or a condition of possibility for survival. You can't address a problem today, whether it is water, or clean air, without having to take into account a common condition, planetary, almost global, and future generations. That is the clear example of the ethical shift that we need.

And of course our morality - Kantian or Judeo-Christian - is not only individualistic but it is like a contract between self and other, a negotiation: "I don't do to you what you don't do to me, etc.". A kind of capitalist driven negotiation of boundaries. No matter what neo-Kantians of today - such as Martha Nussbaum - say, that model is simply inadequate to the scale and dimension of problems we have.

We need to be able to think for future generations who cannot do anything for us. The future per definition cannot be reciprocal, so we should exit the Kantian morality "I do that for you, you do that for me"... No! You do that for the love of humanity, because if we don't do that, there is no going to be a humanity! So we have to give up the idea of reciprocity and we instead to know that we share a specificity of a certain condition. And we have to give up a certain notion which, by the year 2010, has lead to an assimilation of progress with further consumption: you will consume more than we did, we consume more than our parents did, our parents consumed more than their parents did... as a consequence of that, now we are at the verge of a catastrophe, financial, environmental, demographic.

The eco-philosophical problem highlights the size of the issues we look at. When we look at war and peace, development, problems in the third world, increasing poverty in the first world ... I think either we understand we are in this together, or it's not going to work. It's not a matter of choice but of necessity, to think of collective responsibility in a non-reciprocal manner, covering humans and nonhumans. We need an ethics for our times, and not the application of moral rules that are based in an 18th century world - I'm sorry, but I don't live in that world. I don't even think we have to see it as a choice.

** The Campus of European Alternatives took part in Florence from July 19-22 with trainings on freedom of movement and countering the rise of far right and xenophobia. Discover more about the Campus here

This conversation is an excerpt of an interview published in May 2010 in Transeuropa Magazine. The full interview is available online .

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On nomadism: A conversation with Rosi Braidotti

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Over the last few years, we have seen attacks on citizens in some EU member states, deportations in others, and difficulties for citizens to access the rights they are entitled.

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#Heidegger #Home #Groundless

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#ZygmuntBauman #LiguidSociety

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The #Burnout Society: #Byung-ChulHan in Seoul/Berlin #2015 #Documentary

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Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, The Burnout Society: Byung-Chul Han in Seoul/Berlin (2015) English Subtitles

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What are #commons?

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#Silvia Federici: The Struggle for the #Commons - Kontext TV

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Silvia Federici: The Struggle for the Commons - Kontext TV

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#SilviaFederici #Commons

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Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement - just fascinating conversations.

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Left-wing and right-wing principles are no longer an effective axis in our era. The Russian and Afghanistan conflicts are a good example of it. I think it is time to start a new beginning according to our values. Politicians have corrupted our cities, neighborhoods, villages, countries... thus, the...

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A brief survey of the short story: #DavidFosterWallace

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David Foster Wallace was a maximalist. His masterpiece, Infinite Jest, is a 1,000-page, polyphonic epic about addiction and obsession in millennial America. His journalism and essays, about television and tennis, sea cruises and grammar, always swelled far beyond their allotted word counts (cut for publication, he restored many of them to their full length when they were collected in book form). In a letter sent to a friend from a porn convention in Las Vegas, Wallace exclaimed that, "writing about real-life stuff is next to impossible, simply because there's so much!" It might seem surprising that a writer like this could or should want to function within the confines of the short story, yet besides Infinite Jest it is arguably his three story collections that represent the most important part of his work.

That said, many of Wallace's short stories aren't all that short, and often test the limits of traditional conceptions of story. As he told Larry McCaffery in 1993: "I have a problem sometimes with concision, communicating only what needs to be said in a brisk efficient way that doesn't call attention to itself." In fact, Wallace's later works would rewire this statement: in order to say what needed to be said, he found his writing had no option but to call attention to itself. To experience a Wallace story is often also to experience someone making an agonised attempt to write a story. This was nothing new, of course: the postmodernists of the 1960s were committed to metafiction, the literary technique of self-consciousness that puts the lie to realism, making the audience constantly aware that what they are reading is an artificial construct.

This approach appealed to the young Wallace, who once remarked that Donald Barthelme's short story The Balloon was the first work of fiction to "ring my cherries", and who subsequently found a deep affinity with the work of Thomas Pynchon. Yet by the time of his first collection, 1989's Girl With Curious Hair, and despite the significant debts individual stories owe to postmodern writers (John Billy is a tribute to Omensetter's Luck by William Gass, while the political epic-in-miniature Lyndon takes its lead from Robert Coover's A Public Burning), Wallace's relationship with postmodernism had grown more complicated. He believed that a movement that had taken shape to unmask the hypocrisies of mass culture had come to lend them an insidious power: once advertising became knowing and ironic, the postmodernist game was up. Wallace began attempting to move beyond irony towards a new sincerity, although he struggled with how to achieve this.

'Reflexive knots' ... Wallace photographed circa 1996. Photograph: Gary Hannabarger/Corbis

The novella that ends the collection, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, is a tortuously long assault on postmodernism that paradoxically satirises the strategies of metafiction by employing an encyclopaedic array of metafictional strategies - skilfully enough that it could easily be taken for a piece of metafiction itself. It is illustrative of the struggle Wallace had throughout his career with the shape and content of his fiction, that after several years of considering the story to be by far the most important thing he had written, he then disowned it: "In Westward I got trapped one time just trying to expose the illusions of metafiction the same way metafiction had tried to expose the illusions of the pseudo-unmediated realist fiction that came before it. It was a horror show. The stuff's a permanent migraine".

It is possible to see Wallace as an artist who grew less certain of what he was doing the longer he did it, but at the same time becoming increasingly certain that this uncertainty was where he should focus his energy. It is this decision, and the scrupulousness with which Wallace pursued it, that can make areas of his work so tricky to engage with. His second collection, for example, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (1999), is a brilliant book that is very difficult to enjoy. Reviewing it, the novelist Lawrence Norfolk noted the "brutal trades" one story makes "between the integrity of its rhetorical position and any pretension to aesthetic pleasure", which is a useful way of considering much of his work from this point on: it tends to have very specific reasons for existing in the forms it does, but those forms can be rebarbative. They include extremely long and knotty sentences, monologues by obsessive bores, and a perverse love of the extreme ugliness of certain types of specialised language - marketing terminology, programmer's English, therapy-speak, and so on. They are ouroboros-like stories that consume themselves at the same time as we consume them.

One of the best of this latter group is Octet, an exhilarating but enervating story that Norfolk found "maddening", although he remained insightful enough to note that the story's multiplying "reflexive knots ... are not ironic reflexive gestures meant to distance the writer from the imminent implosion of his own artefact. They are Wallace's own, sincere misgivings." The story, a series of what Wallace calls "short belletristic pieces" that present a situation then ask the reader a question about it, collapses into itself halfway through, then proceeds to analyse the reasons for that collapse in a section that begins, "You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer". By its author's own admission, the story becomes increasingly "dense and inbent" as successive arguments and positions are explored, expanded on, and digressed from. There is a moment in Infinite Jest when the weed addict Ken Erdedy dwells on "the paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch". In Octet, Wallace is working himself to just such a standstill.

But when Wallace's stories devour themselves, it is not a hip trick. The misgivings catalogued and explored in Octet are, as Norfolk noted, sincere. Zadie Smith has written that "how you feel about Octet will make or break you as a reader of Wallace, because what he's really asking is for you to have faith in something he cannot possibly ever finally determine in language ... his sincerity, his apparent desperation to 'connect' with his reader in a genuine way". This idea of human connection, and whether it is even possible, is present right through his work, from the early story Little Expressionless Animals onwards, but its most urgent interrogation comes in his final and darkest collection, Oblivion (2004).

In an interview he gave in 1996, referring to Infinite Jest, Wallace talked about addressing "a real American type of sadness". It is unsurprising to note that a writer who struggled with depression from his teens, who committed suicide at the age of 46, and whose stories nearly all contain at least a passing reference to depression and/or suicide, should have returned to sadness as a theme, but it is in Oblivion that it is captured most starkly. Critics tend to focus on the stories Good Old Neon (told from the viewpoint of a suicide) and The Suffering Channel (about a man who can defecate great works of art, and, indirectly, 9/11), and both count among Wallace's best fiction, but there is another story in the collection, The Soul Is Not a Smithy, that is at once typical of his themes and extraordinary in the way it addresses them.

The editor and critic Sven Birkets, writing about his experience of first reading this story, describes "a density that was, at every step, forbidding - those sentences, the micro-obsessiveness of the narrating voice, the slow unfolding of suggestive implication that Henry James, title-holder in this category, would have applauded". The story operates on several different levels: as an adult, the narrator reflects on the day in 1960 when he and three classmates were apparently held hostage by an unhinged supply teacher; in fact the narrator was unaware of being a hostage, because he was deeply involved in his habitual pastime of authoring a mental comic strip, the images of which appeared in the reticulate mesh of the classroom windows. Alongside this nested story - which we are told in great detail, and which is extremely funny, violent and sad - are interspersed memories of the narrator's childhood home, and glimpses of his life since, including a detailed, digressive investigation of a dream sequence from The Exorcist.

Then, following the description of a recurring nightmare about his father's office, the narrator presents an extraordinary portrait of this man, an insurance actuary who "for almost 30 years of 51 weeks a year ... sat all day at a metal desk in a silent, fluorescent room, reading forms and making calculations and filling out further forms on the results of those calculations, breaking only to answer his telephone or meet with other actuaries in other bright, quiet rooms". "I did not know," the narrator says "that in mild weather he took his lunch down in the elevator and ate it sitting on a backless stone bench that faced a small square of grass with two trees and an abstract public sculpture, and that on many mornings he steered by these 30 minutes outdoors the way mariners out of sight of land use stars". Then, devastatingly, he remarks that his father "died of a coronary when I was 16, and I can acknowledge, despite the obvious shock and loss, that his passing was less hard to bear than much of what I learned about his life when he was gone". He means the everyday sorrow of it, the smallness of its pleasures against the vastness of its mundanity, and the fear that this is his birthright. Earlier, describing his father's daily ritual on arriving home, he describes how "this routine ... cast shadows deep down in parts of me I could not access on my own". This account, in tandem with numerous other glancing references to disappointments and misfortunes scattered throughout the story, is the capstone to a profoundly sorrowful work of fiction.

Flipping the entropy of stories like Octet, or Adult World parts I and II - where the story begins coherently only to become more and more unconventional until it atomises - here, unexpectedly, it is mimesis that comes to dominate a narrative that for much of its length has been fragmented and surreal. For once, Wallace slips his bonds and writes through to the end without the story dissolving or blowing up in his face, and it feels as though he caught himself by surprise in doing so (which is perhaps why he described the story as "a very strange piece"). This story realises the ambition Wallace described to Larry McCaffery back in 1993, when he was willing himself to become the writer he most wanted to be: "Really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you really feel something. To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this. And the effort actually to do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don't seem to have yet."

Wallace's fiction contains enormous cruelty: rape, animal torture, child abuse, the severe and perhaps fatal burning of a baby. Relationships are fractured, parasitic, and often the cause for psychic pain and disturbance; sex is furtive or coercive. It can be difficult to take, even when the knots and involutions of it aren't making it difficult to read on a purely formal basis. But it is also a deeply moral body of work. Its difficulties, and many of its cruelties, exist for specific reasons. Whether Wallace's fraught projects are successes or failures is up to the individual, but these are judgments that all serious readers should want to make for themselves.

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A brief survey of the short story: David Foster Wallace

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For all its elaborate formal tricks, Wallace's work is marked by a deep desire for authentic connection, to his subjects and to his readers

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#DavidFosterWallace #NewSincerity

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

New Sincerity (closely related to and sometimes described as synonymous with post-postmodernism) is a trend in music, aesthetics, literary fiction, film criticism, poetry, literary criticism and philosophy that generally describes creative works that expand upon and break away from concepts of postmodernist irony and cynicism.

Its usage dates back to the mid-1980s; however, it was popularized in the 1990s by American author David Foster Wallace.[1][2][3]

"New Sincerity" was used as a collective name for a loose group of alternative rock bands, centered in Austin, Texas, in the years from about 1985 to 1990, who were perceived as reacting to the ironic and cynical outlook of then-prominent music movements like punk rock and new wave. The use of "New Sincerity" in connection with these bands began with an off-handed comment by Austin punk rocker/author Jesse Sublett to his friend, local music writer Margaret Moser. According to author Barry Shank, Sublett said: "All those new sincerity bands, they're crap."[4] Sublett (at his own website) states that he was misquoted, and actually told Moser, "It's all new sincerity to me ... It's not my cup of tea."[5] In any event, Moser began using the term in print, and it ended up becoming the catch phrase for these bands.[4][6][7]

Nationally, the most successful "New Sincerity" band was The Reivers (originally called Zeitgeist), who released four well-received albums between 1985 and 1991. True Believers, led by Alejandro Escovedo and Jon Dee Graham, also received extensive critical praise and local acclaim in Austin, but the band had difficulty capturing its live sound on recordings, among other problems.[8] Other important "New Sincerity" bands included Doctors Mob,[9][10] Wild Seeds,[11] and Glass Eye.[12] Another significant "New Sincerity" figure was the eccentric, critically acclaimed songwriter Daniel Johnston.[4][13]

Despite extensive critical attention (including national coverage in Rolling Stone and a 1985 episode of the MTV program The Cutting Edge), none of the "New Sincerity" bands met with much commercial success, and the "scene" ended within a few years.[14][15]

Other music writers have used "new sincerity" to describe later performers such as Arcade Fire,[16] Conor Oberst,[17] Cat Power, Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom,[18] Neutral Milk Hotel,[19] Sufjan Stevens,[20] Idlewild,[21] and Father John Misty,[22] as well as Austin's Okkervil River[23] Leatherbag,[24] and Michael Waller.[25]

Critic Jim Collins introduced the concept of "new sincerity" to film criticism in his 1993 essay titled "Genericity in the 90s: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity". In this essay he contrasts films that treat genre conventions with "eclectic irony" and those that treat them seriously, with "new sincerity". Collins describes,

the "new sincerity" of films like Field of Dreams (1989), Dances With Wolves (1990), and Hook (1991), all of which depend not on hybridization, but on an "ethnographic" rewriting of the classic genre film that serves as their inspiration, all attempting, using one strategy or another, to recover a lost "purity", which apparently pre-existed even the Golden Age of film genre.[26]

Cinematic examples of New Sincerity

Sources:[27][28][29][30][31]

In response to the hegemony of metafictional and self-conscious irony in contemporary fiction, writer David Foster Wallace predicted, in his 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,"[1] a new literary movement which would espouse something like the New Sincerity ethos:

The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of "anti-rebels," born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall to actually endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point, why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "How banal." Accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity. Willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

This was further examined on the blog Fiction Advocate:[32]

The theory is this: Infinite Jest is Wallace's attempt to both manifest and dramatize a revolutionary fiction style that he called for in his essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." The style is one in which a new sincerity will overturn the ironic detachment that hollowed out contemporary fiction towards the end of the 20th century. Wallace was trying to write an antidote to the cynicism that had pervaded and saddened so much of American culture in his lifetime. He was trying to create an entertainment that would get us talking again.

In his 2010 essay "David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction," Adam Kelly argues that Wallace's fiction, and that of his generation, is marked by a revival and theoretical reconception of sincerity, challenging the emphasis on authenticity that dominated twentieth-century literature and conceptions of the self.[2] Additionally, numerous authors have been described as contributors to the New Sincerity movement, including Jonathan Franzen,[33] Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers,[34] Stephen Graham Jones,[35] and Michael Chabon.[36][37][38]

"New sincerity" has also sometimes been used to refer to a philosophical concept deriving from the basic tenets of performatism.[39] It is also seen as one of the key characteristics of metamodernism.[40] Related literature includes Wendy Steiner's The Trouble with Beauty and Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just. Related movements may include post-postmodernism, New Puritans, Stuckism, the Kitsch movement and remodernism, as well as the Dogme 95 film movement led by Lars von Trier and others.[41]

"The New Sincerity" has been espoused since 2002 by radio host Jesse Thorn of PRI's The Sound of Young America (now Bullseye), self-described as "the public radio program about things that are awesome". Thorn characterizes New Sincerity as a cultural movement defined by dicta including "Maximum Fun" and "Be More Awesome". It celebrates outsized celebration of joy, and rejects irony, and particularly ironic appreciation of cultural products. Thorn has promoted this concept on his program and in interviews.[42][43][44][45]

In a September 2009 interview, Thorn commented that "new sincerity" had begun as "a silly, philosophical movement that me and some friends made up in college" and that "everything that we said was a joke, but at the same time it wasn't all a joke in the sense that we weren't being arch or we weren't being campy. While we were talking about ridiculous, funny things we were sincere about them."[46]

Thorn's concept of "new sincerity" as a social response has gained popularity since his introduction of the term in 2002. Several point to the September 11, 2001, attacks and the subsequent wake of events that created this movement, in which there was a drastic shift in tone. The 1990s were considered a period of artistic works ripe with irony, and the attacks shocked a change in the American culture. Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, published an editorial a few weeks after the attacks claiming that "this was the end of the age of irony".[47] Jonathan D. Fitzgerald for The Atlantic suggests this new movement could also be attributed to broader periodic shifts that occur in culture.[36]

As a result of this movement, several cultural works, including many identified above, were considered elements of "new sincerity",[36] but this was also seen to be a mannerism adopted by the general public, to show appreciation for cultural works that they happened to enjoy. Andrew Watercutter of Wired saw this as having been able to enjoy one's guilty pleasures without having to feel guilty about enjoying it, and being able to share that appreciation with others.[48] One such example of a "new sincerity" movement is the brony fandom, generally adult and primarily male fans of the 2010 animated show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic which is produced by Hasbro to sell its toys to young girls. These fans have been called "internet neo-sincerity at its best", unabashedly enjoying the show and challenging the preconceived gender roles that such a show ordinarily carries.[49][50]

A review of a 2016 play by Alena Smith The New Sincerity observes that it 'captures the spirit of an age lightly lived and easily forgotten, which strives for a significance and a magnitude that won't be easily achieved'.[51]

In the early 2020s, the shift toward a more overt embrace of New Sincerity was codified in James Poniewozik's New York Times piece titled, "How TV Went From David Brent to Ted Lasso."[52] Poniewozik details the shift, arguing that "In TV's ambitious comedies, as well as dramas, the arc of the last 20 years is not from bold risk-taking to spineless inoffensiveness. But it is, in broad terms, a shift from irony to sincerity. By "irony" here, I don't mean the popular equation of the term with cynicism or snark. I mean an ironic mode of narrative, in which what a show 'thinks' is different from what its protagonist does. Two decades ago, TV's most distinctive stories were defined by a tone of dark or acerbic detachment. Today, they're more likely to be earnest and direct." Poniewozik goes on to address possible impetus for doing away with the disjoint between writer and character ascribing some cause to what Emily Nussbaum calls "Bad Fans",[53] but the thrust of his critique centers on the possible shift towards the representation of new and previously unrepresented voices. As Poniewozik puts it, "In some cases, it's also a question of who has gotten to make TV since 2001. Antiheroes like David Brent and Tony Soprano, after all, came along after white guys like them had centuries to be heroes. The voices and faces of the medium have diversified, and if you're telling the stories of people and communities that TV never made room for before, skewering might not be your first choice of tone. I don't want to oversimplify this: Series like " Atlanta," "Ramy," " Master of None" and " Insecure" all have complex stances toward their protagonists. But they also have more sympathy toward them than, say, " Arrested Development." [54] With this perspective in mind and the populous shift towards an embrace of diverse views and opinions,[55] the appearance of new sincerity in film and television is understandable if not expected. However, it is important to note that prior to the current shift towards New Sincerity, popular culture had embraced a period of "High Irony", as Poniewozik deems it.[54]

This conception of "new sincerity" meant the avoidance of cynicism, but not necessarily of irony. In the words of Alexei Yurchak of the University of California, Berkeley,[56] it "is a particular brand of irony, which is sympathetic and warm, and allows its authors to remain committed to the ideals that they discuss, while also being somewhat ironic about this commitment".[56][57]

In American poetry

Since 2005, poets including Reb Livingston, Joseph Massey, Andrew Mister, and Anthony Robinson have collaborated in a blog-driven poetry movement, described by Massey as "a 'new sincerity' brewing in American poetry - a contrast to the cold, irony-laden poetry dominating the journals and magazines and new books of poetry".[58] Other poets named as associated with this movement, or its tenets, have included David Berman, Catherine Wagner, Dean Young, Matt Hart, Miranda July (who is also a filmmaker herself),[59] Tao Lin,[59] Steve Roggenbuck,[59] D. S. Chapman, Frederick Seidel, Arielle Greenberg,[18] Karyna McGlynn, and Mira Gonzalez.[60]

1. Adam Kelly. "David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction". Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays. Ed. David Hering. Austin, TX: SSMG Press, 2010. 131-46.

2. ^ Williams, Iain (May 27, 2015). "(New) Sincerity in David Foster Wallace's "Octet"". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 56 (3): 299-314. doi:10.1080/00111619.2014.899199. ISSN 0011-1619. S2CID 142547118.

3. ^ Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock'N'Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Wesleyan University Press, 1994) (ISBN 9780819562760), p. 148-149 & p.271 n.84. (excerpt available at Google Books).

4. ^ "Jesse's Music Bio" at Jesse Sublett's Little Black Book (retrieved September 18, 2009).

5. Peter Blackstock, ^ "'is it worth the admission....'" Archived December 4, 2008, at the Wayback Machine, No Depression blog post dated January 15, 2008.

6. Regarding ^ Jesse Sublett and his band, The Skunks, see Ken Lieck, "Young, Loud, and Cheap: The Skunks, the Band That Broke Austin Out of the Seventies", Austin Chronicle, December 8, 2000, and Jesse Sublett, Never the Same Again: A Rock 'N' Roll Gothic (Ten Speed Press, 2004), ISBN 978-1-58008-598-4 (excerpts available at Google Books).

7. ^ "Donald Trump and the "New Sincerity" Artists Have More in Common Than Either Would Like to Admit". pastemagazine.com. August 9, 2016.

8. Kristin Gorski, ^ Almost Famous: The Austin Texas Soundtrack Circa 1985 Archived October 16, 2008, at the Wayback Machine, Annabelle Magazine, No. 12 (2006).

9. Michael Corcoran, "The New Sincerity: Austin in the Eighties", reprinted in Michael Corcoran, ^ All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music (University of Texas Press, 2005), ISBN 978-0-292-70976-8, pp. 150-156.

10. ^ Robert Christgau, "Vibrators", The Village Voice, March 27, 2001.

11. Jim Collins, "Genericity in the 90s: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity" in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins, eds., ^ Film Theory Goes to the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1993) (ISBN 0415905761, ISBN 978-0-415-90576-3), p. 242, 245.

12. ^ Moats, Michael (September 19, 2012). "The Infinite Jest Liveblog: What Happened, Pt. 2".

13. Gorenstein, Zuzanna. ^ New Sincerity and the Contemporary American Family Novel: Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Dissertation, Free University of Berlin, December 2014. Retrieved July 22, 2020.

14. Jensen, Mikkel. 2014. "A Note on a Title: ^ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" in The Explicator, 72:2, 146-150. [1]

15. ^ Gaudet, Joseph (Spring 2016). "I Remember You: Postironic Belief and Settler Colonialism in Stephen Graham Jones's Ledfeather". Sail. 28.

16. ^

17. ^ Hamilton, Caroline D. (October 21, 2010). One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing and Publicity. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. ISBN 9781441167491.

18. ^ Hoffmann, Lukas (2016). Postirony: The Nonfictional Literature of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8376-3661-1.

19. Raoul Eshelman, ^ "Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism" in Anthropoetics 6 (2000/2001). See also his book, Performatism or the End of Postmodernism. Davies Group: Aurora, Colorado 2008.

20. Timotheus Vermeulen & Robin van den Akker, ^ "Notes on metamodernism" in Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2 (2010)

21. Alexei Yurchak, "Post-Post-Communist Sincerity: Pioneers, Cosmonauts, and Other Soviet Heroes Born Today", in Thomas Lahusen and Peter H. Solomon, eds., ^ What Is Soviet Now?: Identities, Legacies, Memories (LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2008), ISBN 978-3-8258-0640-8, p. 258 & n.4, excerpt available at Google Books.

22. Ben Kharakh, ^ "Jesse Thorn, America's Radio Sweetheart" Archived September 29, 2008, at the Wayback Machine in Gothamist, posted November 2, 2006.

23. ^ "Interview: Jesse Thorn, Part 1" Archived September 13, 2017, at the Wayback Machine, The Merlin Show, posted June 4, 2007.

24. Dan Brodnitz, ^ "An Interview with The Sound of Young America's Jesse Thorn" Archived October 19, 2008, at the Wayback Machine, O'Reilly Digital Media, posted September 15, 2008.

25. ^ But see Bill Forman, "Müz: The New Ambiguity", Metro Santa Cruz, March 8-15, 2006 (opining that New Sincerity is "just another ironic hoax").

26. Jonathan Valania, ^ "Q&A: With Jesse Thorn, America's Radio Sweetheart", Phawker, September 15, 2009.

27. ^ Beers, David (September 25, 2001). "Irony is dead! Long live irony!". Salon.

28. ^ Watercutter, Angela (September 21, 2010). "Sincerely Ours: Glee's Success Cements Age of Geeky 'New Sincerity'". Wired.

29. ^ Ghomeshi, Jian (December 7, 2011). (Curious about Bronies? Adobe Flash) (Radio broadcast). CBC Radio.

30. ^ Watchcutter, Angela (June 9, 2011). "My Little Pony Corrals Unlikely Fanboys Known as 'Bronies'". Wired.

31. ^ Poniewozik, James (July 26, 2021). "How TV Went From David Brent to Ted Lasso". The New York Times.

32. ^ "That Mind-Bending Phone Call on Last Night's "Breaking Bad"". Newyorker.com. September 16, 2013.

33. Poniewozik, James (July 26, 2021). "How TV Went from David Brent to Ted Lasso". The New York Times.

34. Alexei Yurchak biography Archived June 20, 2013, at the Wayback Machine at University of California, Berkeley Department of Anthropology website (retrieved February 15, 2009).

35. Katy Henriksen, ^ " Drunk Bunnies, The New Sincerity, Flarf: How Blogs are Transforming Poetry" Archived November 10, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, EconoCulture, January 23, 2007.

36. ^

37. ^ Blueskye, Brian (July 19, 2013). "Western Lit: SoCal Poet Mira Gonzalez's Debut Collection Finds Success With Deep Simplicity".

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Toggle the table of contents From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia New Sincerity (closely related to and sometimes described as synonymous with post-postmodernism) is a trend in music, aesthetics, literary fiction, film criticism, poetry, literary criticism and philosophy that generally describes creative works that expand upon and break away from concepts of postmodernist irony and cynicism.

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#DavidFosterWallace #Sincerity

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Dear Isabela,

We had talked about the pain in your back and how this is related to tics. That some tics come back again that you remember from your childhood. You also told me about your dialogues with Ansenali (did you ever think about translating the dialogue into music, so that the meaning of the words disappears, but that the rhythm and sound capture a kind of feeling that has to do with the dialogue, is the dialogue not kind of therapeutic? Revolving around an empty space of being ok, would sound and rhythm also be able to catch the generosity of the dialogue?).

You are busy trying to relate these dialogues to an animation showing a rising burning sun behind a line of trees. Or are they separate from each other: the animation and recorded dialogue? I cannot remember this well anymore. You are trying to capture with this image of the rising sun and the line of trees (especially with the help of color)  that feeling of being enclosed in the environment. How the happy environment with joyful people clash with your inner state of desperation/loneliness?

I once read a beautiful line from the writer David Foster Wallace (see post 1) who was given the commission to stay a week on a cruise ship to write an essay concerning his observations: There's something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship's structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair. The word "despair" is overused and banalized now, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. It's close to what people call dread or angst, but it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable sadness of knowing I'm small and weak and selfish and going, without doubt, to die. It's wanting tojump overboard.

David Foster Wallace tried to reclaim sincerity in the postmodern/capitalistic world of the 90’s.

Maybe there’s a relation here with your interest in the writer Yukio Mishima (see post 2).

Both felt a groundlessness, a bit of being out of tune with their surroundings, missing a kind of authentic generosity in a capitalistic environment, swallowing up traditional rituals for communal care. That’s why historian Federici (see post 3) tries to reclaim commons (a communal care which you can experience and find by being in a band, the word band etymologically derives from the word "a flat strip," also "something that binds," Middle English bende, from Old English bend "bond, fetter, shackle, chain, that by which someone or something is bound).

The Southern Korean thinker Byung-Chul-Han (see post 4) also goes into this tension/struggle between a capitalistic environment and the individual, trying to find peace. Zygmunt Bauman (see post 5) calls this the liquid society.

I don’t know if this all has anything to do with your experience of a peaceful sunny outer world versus an unnoticed sad inner world. Maybe you were more talking about a personal experience/pain that is also might be related to your back problems and having these moments of being groundless (thinking of your childhood of always being on the move, if I understood you correctly.) But after our talk, I was wondering how much the cultural environment we are living in is contributing to this feeling, as we can read in the books of Mishima and Wallace. It’s just a wild guess for my side. Someone who wrote a lot about being home and groundless was Heidegger (post 6) and one who wrote about the nomadic identity is Braidotti (post 7). It also reminds me of the drawing of your father, it’s like he was saying that home depends also on your perspective and that it moves along with you depending on who you are. Or something like that. Toka-Pa Turner (post 8) wrote about these kinds of things in her book Belonging.

But this is a long story.

We came to the conclusion to base your essay on the book The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz (see post 9). The book outlines a code of conduct based on ancient Toltec wisdom – advocating freedom from self-limiting beliefs that bring suffering and limitation to one's life. You could summarize every chapter (every agreement) and write about how you relate to it. Can you relate things to your personal experiences?

Your statement (derived from the book The Four Agreements) “Do not make assumptions”, made me think of stoicism (Massimo Pigliucci and Jules Evans try to relate stoicism to modern life, see post 10). Stoicism is claiming that we have to understand that we can’t control everything that’s outside of us, we can let go for instance anger about a certain person because we have no influence on the person. The anger doesn’t contribute to our own being, we can disentangle ourselves from the person.

The philosopher Nussbaum (post 11), who worked further on the thoughts of stoicism, believes that stoicism denies a kind of entanglement with our dear ones, this is an entanglement we can’t control (even by trying to deny certain feelings), and that we somehow have to deal with this. She admired the Stoic philosophers, who believed that ungoverned emotions destroyed one’s moral character, and she felt that, in the face of a loved one’s death, their instruction would be “Everyone is mortal, and you will get over this pretty soon.” But she disagreed with the way they trained themselves not to depend on anything beyond their control. For the next several days, she felt as if nails were being pounded into her stomach and her limbs were being torn off. “Do we imagine the thought causing a fluttering in my hands, or a trembling in my stomach?” she wrote, in “Upheavals of Thought,” a book on the structure of emotions. “And if we do, do we really want to say that this fluttering or trembling is my grief about my mother’s death?” According to her, we need to recognize how hard it is, even with the best intentions, to live a virtuous life. She relates her thinking to therapeutic philosophy, a “science of life,” which addresses persistent human needs. Nussbaum: “I like the idea that the very thing that my mother found cold and unloving could actually be a form of love. It’s a form of human love to accept our complicated, messy humanity and not run away from it.”

At last, I have the idea that Jack Kerouac (post 12) was searching for a generous way of writing, he was influenced by Zen-Buddhism, let the emptiness speak without forcing something. An example is the book Old Angel Midnight: Old Angel Midnight is a long narrative poem by American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac. It was culled from five notebooks spanning from 1956 to 1959, while Kerouac was fully absorbed by his studies of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy. Kerouac initially experimented with Old Angel Midnight (then called "Lucien Midnight") in 1953 in his diary titled "1953. Notes again." In entries dated from November 20 to December 3, 1953, he made notes on "Lucien Midnight" which was to be originally conceptualized in what he called "book movie" form, when he closed his eyes and projected onto paper a cinematic sense of what he heard. A bookmovie, he explained in Some of the Dharma, is a "prose concentration camera-eye visions of a definite movie of the mind with fade-ins, pans, close-ups, and fade-outs."

Best regards,

Hille

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#MonoHa#ArtMovement#Japan

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Lee Ufan at work in his Paris studio, February 2014
Photograph © Simon Grant

The movement, led by the artists Lee Ufan and Nobuo Sekine, was one of a number of groups engaged in 'not making'. Founding member Lee observed that an artist's ability to make things had been nullified by technology. As a result he rejected traditional ideas of representation in favour of revealing the world as it is by engaging with materials and exploring their properties. In 1968 Sekine displayed a 2.7 metre-high tower of dirt next to an identically shaped hole in the ground as an illustration of this concept.

Other artists related to the mono-ha movement include Susumu Koshimizu, Kishio Suga and Noriyuki Haraguchi.

The name mono-ha was coined slightly derogatorily by a journalist in response to the lack of polish and perceived lack of skill displayed in the making of the work. As the movement gained international recognition, and through its association with arte povera, mono-ha came to be widely respected as a movement that was critically engaged.

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The movement, led by the artists Lee Ufan and Nobuo Sekine, was one of a number of groups engaged in 'not making'. Founding member Lee observed that an artist's ability to make things had been nullified by technology.

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The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (金閣寺) by Yukio Mishima - Book Summary, Analysis, Review

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The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima (BBC 1985)

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"Strangely, solving this problem conjures up a sort of giddy feeling in the Spirited Man. Like he’s not really supposed to be spending time on this problem. Like he’s skipping school. Like an outlaw rush, or therapy" “the Spirited Man cannot help himself. He’s compelled to fix. Compelled to improve a thing when it ain’t right. Or fix something when it don’t work”

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"I took my furoshiki wrapper and made a bundle of my Buddhist dictionary and the flute that Kashiwagi had given me. As i set out for the university, carrying this bundle and my satchel, my mind was absorbed with the idea of departure"

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Mononoke Movie - Official Trailer | AniTV

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Hélène Grimaud: Bach - Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor

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Hélène Grimaud: Bach - Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOHiI_5yycU

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"Music is like a dream. At the same time it is, on the contrary, like a more distinct form of consciousness than that of our normal waking hours. [...] My spirit was familiar with the joy of embodying itself in music. For in my case, unlike that of Kashiwagi, music was truly a consolation"

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"We drank delicate Japanese tea and ate a sort of dry western cake that I had never tasted before. The more tense I became, the more the crumbs dropped from the cake onto my shiny, black- serge trousers".

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"This short sword, which all the middle-school students were admiring, was truly a beautiful ornament. It was said that the students at the Naval Academy were in the habit of using their swords secretly to sharpen their pencils. How elegant, I thought, to use so solemn a symbol for trifling matters of this sort?"

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William Tell Overture_DxB Mall_09.12.2011 (Converted) 2

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#JoepVanLieshout

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Joep van Lieshout lives and works in Rotterdam. In 1995 he founded Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL), undermining the myth of the individual artistic genius.

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#JosephCornell

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Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 - December 29, 1972) was an American visual artist and filmmaker, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker. He was largely self-taught in his artistic efforts, and improvised his own original style incorporating cast-off and discarded artifacts. He lived most of his life in relative physical isolation, caring for his mother and his disabled brother at home, but remained aware of and in contact with other contemporary artists.

Joseph Cornell was born in Nyack, New York, to Joseph Cornell, a textiles industry executive, and Helen Ten Broeck Storms Cornell, who had trained as a nursery teacher. Both parents came from socially prominent families of Dutch ancestry, long-established in New York State. Cornell's father died April 30, 1917, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. Following the elder Cornell's death, his widow and children moved to the borough of Queens in New York City. Cornell attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in the class of 1921. Although he reached the senior year, he did not graduate. Following this, he returned to live with his family.

Except for the three-and-a-half years he spent at Phillips, he lived for most of his life in a small, wood-frame house on Utopia Parkway in a working-class area of Flushing, along with his mother and his brother Robert, whom cerebral palsy had rendered physically disabled. Aside from his time at Andover, Cornell never traveled beyond the New York City area.

Sculpture and collage

Joseph Cornell Untitled (Dieppe) c. 1958, Museum of Modern Art, (New York City).

Cornell's most characteristic art works were boxed assemblages created from found objects. These are simple shadow boxes, usually fronted with a glass pane, in which he arranged eclectic fragments of photographs or Victorian bric-a-brac, in a way that combines the formal austerity of Constructivism with the lively fantasy of Surrealism. Many of his boxes, such as the famous Medici Slot Machine boxes, are interactive and are meant to be handled.

Like Kurt Schwitters, Cornell could create poetry from the commonplace. Unlike Schwitters, however, he was fascinated not by refuse, garbage, and the discarded, but by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects he found on his frequent trips to the bookshops and thrift stores of New York. His boxes relied on the Surrealist use of irrational juxtaposition, and on the evocation of nostalgia, for their appeal.

Cornell often made series of boxed assemblages that reflected his various interests: the Soap Bubble Sets, the Medici Slot Machine series, the Pink Palace series, the Hotel series, the Observatory series, and the Space Object Boxes, among others. Also captivated with birds, Cornell created an Aviary series of boxes, in which colorful images of various birds were mounted on wood, cut out, and set against harsh white backgrounds.

In addition to creating boxes and flat collages and making short art films, Cornell also kept a filing system of over 160 visual-documentary "dossiers" on themes that interested him;[citation needed ] the dossiers served as repositories from which Cornell drew material and inspiration for boxes like his "penny arcade" portrait of Lauren Bacall. He had no formal training in art, although he was extremely well-read and was conversant with the New York art scene from the 1940s through to the 1960s.[citation needed ]

His methodology is described in a monograph by Charles Simic as:

Somewhere in the city of New York there are four or five still-unknown objects that belong together. Once together they'll make a work of art. That's Cornell's premise, his metaphysics, and his religion. ... Marcel Duchamp and John Cage use chance operation to get rid of the subjectivity of the artist. For Cornell it's the opposite. To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions.

In his later years, Cornell utilized the help of assistants to create his artworks. These assistants included both local art students and practicing artists such as Larry Jordan and Terry Shutté. He greatly enjoyed working with young artists and teaching them his methods and art practices.

Experimental film

Joseph Cornell's 1936 found-film montage Rose Hobart was made entirely from splicing together existing film stock that Cornell had found in New Jersey warehouses, mostly derived from a 1931 "B" film entitled East of Borneo. Cornell would play Nestor Amaral's record Holiday in Brazil during its rare screenings, as well as projecting the film through a deep blue glass or filter, giving the film a dreamlike effect. Focusing mainly on the gestures and expressions made by Rose Hobart (the original film's starlet), this dreamscape of Cornell's seems to exist in a kind of suspension until the film's most arresting sequence toward the end, when footage of a solar eclipse is juxtaposed with a white ball falling into a pool of water in slow motion.

Cornell premiered the film at the Julien Levy Gallery in December 1936 during the first Surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Salvador Dalí, who was in New York to attend the MoMA opening, was present at its first screening. During the screening, Dalí became outraged at Cornell's movie, claiming he had just had the same idea of applying collage techniques to film. After the screening, Dalí remarked to Cornell that he should stick to making boxes and stop making films. Traumatized by this event, the shy, retiring Cornell showed his films rarely thereafter.

Joseph Cornell continued to experiment with film until his death in 1972. While his earlier films were often collages of found short films, his later ones montaged together footage he expressly commissioned from the professional filmmakers with whom he collaborated. These latter films were often set in some of Cornell's favorite neighborhoods and landmarks in New York City: Mulberry Street, Bryant Park, Union Square Park, and the Third Avenue Elevated Railway, among others.

In 1969 Cornell gave a collection of both his own films and the works of others to Anthology Film Archives in New York City.[citation needed ]

Selected filmography

Cornell's first major museum retrospective, curated by legendary museum director Walter Hopps, was entitled An Exhibition of Works by Joseph Cornell. It opened at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) in December 1966, then traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Sold from the estate of Edwin and Lindy Bergman, Chicago-based collectors and art patrons, Cornell's Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall) (1946) fetched $5.3 million at Christie's New York, setting an auction record for the artist. The jewel-like box, with images of Bacall on blue background, was inspired by To Have and Have Not, a film starring Bacall and Humphrey Bogart.

Cornell was wary of strangers. This led him to isolate himself and become a self-taught artist. Although he expressed attraction to unattainable women like Lauren Bacall, his shyness made romantic relationships almost impossible. In later life his bashfulness verged toward reclusiveness, and he rarely left the state of New York. However, he preferred talking with women, and often made their husbands wait in the next room when he discussed business with them. He also had numerous friendships with ballerinas, who found him unique, but too eccentric to be a romantic partner.

He devoted his life to caring for his younger brother Robert, who was disabled and lived with cerebral palsy, which was another factor in his lack of relationships. At some point in the 1920s, or possibly earlier, he read the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, including Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Cornell considered Eddy's works to be among the most important books ever published after the Bible, and he became a lifelong Christian Science adherent. Christian Science belief and practice informed Cornell's art deeply, as art historian Sandra Leonard Starr has shown.[citation needed ]

He was also rather poor for most of his life, working during the 1920s as a wholesale fabric salesman to support his family. As a result of the American Great Depression, Cornell lost his textile industry job in 1931, and worked for a short time thereafter as a door-to-door appliance salesman. During this time, through her friendship with Ethel Traphagen, Cornell's mother secured him a part-time position designing textiles. In the 1940s, Cornell also worked in a plant nursery (which would figure in his famous dossier "GC44") and briefly in a defense plant, and designed covers and feature layouts for Harper's Bazaar, , Dance Index, and other magazines. He only really began to sell his boxes for significant sums after his 1949 solo show at the Charles Egan Gallery.[citation needed ]

Cornell eventually began a passionate, but platonic, relationship with Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama while she was living in New York in the mid-1960s. She was twenty-six years his junior; they would call each other daily, sketch each other, and he would send personalized collages to her. Their lengthy association lasted even after her return to Japan, ending only with his death in 1972.

Cornell's brother Robert died in 1965, and his mother in 1966. Joseph Cornell died of apparent heart failure on December 29, 1972, a few days after his sixty-ninth birthday. The executors of his estate were Richard Ader and Wayne Andrews, as represented by the art dealers Leo Castelli, Richard Feigen, and James Corcoran. Later, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation was established, which administers the copyrights of Cornell's works and represents the interests of his heirs. Currently, the Foundation is administered by Trustees, Richard Ader, and Joseph Erdman.

Anne Tyler's Celestial Navigation (1974) is a fictional riff on being Joseph Cornell.

The cyberpunk novelist William Gibson uses the finding of mysterious boxes similar to those by Joseph Cornell as a narrative element in his novel (1984).

The Dutch pop band The Nits released a song, "Soap Bubble Box", on their 1992 album Ting, about seeing some of Cornell's boxes in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The song was a minor hit in the Netherlands.

Scholarship on Joseph Cornell's art and life led to Michael Brayndick's dissertation Joseph Cornell and the Dialectics of Human Time; and inspired Brayndick's 1999 play, How to Make a Rainbow with workshop performances in: New York (1998), Connecticut (2000), and the UK (2003), and the world premiere production by On the Spot Theatre at the Greenhouse Theater Center in Chicago (2013).

In 1992, poet Charles Simic published a prose collection inspired by and with images of the work of Joseph Cornell: Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (published by New York Review Books, originally published by Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press).

Singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter imagines Cornell going about his creative life in the song "Ideas Are Like Stars", on her 1996 album A Place in the World.

The English band The Clientele has a song titled "Joseph Cornell" on the group's 2001 album Suburban Light.

Jonathan Safran Foer's anthology A Convergence of Birds (2001) is a collection of fiction and poetry inspired by Cornell's work. Foer, then an undergraduate, solicited all of his favorite authors to contribute to the collection by sending each of them a print of one of Cornell's bird boxes, and an explanation of the project. He was surprised when well-known authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Rick Moody and Barry Lopez responded to his prompts with Cornell-inspired works.[citation needed ]

The American novelist and short story writer Robert Coover published a series of stories entitled The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) in 2002. Akin to short fables, the stories refer to various themes and images in Cornell's Hotel series of boxes.

Charles L. Mee's play Hotel Cassiopeia (2006) is based on the life of Joseph Cornell.

Singer/songwriter Thomas Comerford released the album Archive + Spiral in 2011 which contains the song titled "Joseph Cornell". The song is described as less of an homage and more of a meditation on the mood the artist invokes.

1. ^ Sharp, Jasper; Lea, Sarah (2015). Joseph Cornell: Fernweh (PDF). Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum. ISBN 9783990200964. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2023-04-17.

2. ^ Cotter, Holland (July 13, 2007). "Poetic Theaters, Romantic Fevers". New York Times. Archived from the original on November 5, 2012. But they meant the world to this intensely shy artist, who lived on sweets, worshiped forgotten divas and made portable shrines to them - his version of spiritual art - in the basement of the small house he shared with his mother and disabled brother in Flushing, Queens.

3. ^ "An 'overflowing, a richness & poetry': Joseph Cornell's Planet Set and Giuditta Pasta". Archived from the original on 2018-04-11.

4. ^ Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe (1980). "Joseph Cornell: A Biography". In McShine, Kynaston (ed.). Joseph Cornell. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. p. 113. ISBN 978-0870702723.

5. ^ Corman, Catherine (November 4, 2010). "Surrealist Astronomy in the South Pacific: Joseph Cornell and the Collaged Eclipse". East of Borneo. Archived from the original on September 13, 2011.

6. ^ Borrowed Dreams: Joseph Cornell and the Archive as Psychic Imprint - Art & Trash on Vimeo

7. ^ Joseph Cornell, Wanderlust, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2015, archived from the original on 2017-07-17

8. ^ Joseph Cornell Navigating the Imagination, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 2007

9. Solomon, Deborah, ^ "National Gallery of Art Receives Major Gift of Joseph Cornell Boxes", New York Times, January 15, 2024. Robert and Aimee Lehrman gift of "some 20 boxes and seven collages from throughout [Cornell's] career." Retrieved 2024-01-15.

10. ^ Kazakina, Katya (May 14, 2014). "Billionaires Help Christie's to Record $745 Million Sale". Bloomberg. Archived from the original on May 14, 2014.

11. ^ Taylor, Rachel (May 22, 2012). "Kusama's relationship with Joseph Cornell". Tate. Archived from the original on August 3, 2017.

12. ^ Garreau, Joel (September 6, 2007). "Through the Looking Glass". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on November 3, 2012.

13. ^ Brayndick, Michael (1987). Joseph Cornell and the dialectics of human time (Thesis). OCLC 26696670. OCLC Number: 26696670, University of Iowa

14. ^ Williams, Kent (January 16, 2012). "Album Review: Thomas Comerford - Archive + Spiral". Little Village. Archived from the original on November 16, 2016.

Edwards, Jason; Taylor, Stephanie, eds. (2007). Joseph Cornell: Opening the Box. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. ISBN 9783039110582. OCLC 86069441.

Starr, Sandra Leonard. Joseph Cornell: Art and Metaphysics. New York: Castelli Corcoran Feigen, 1982. LC Catalogue Card Number 82-71787

Joseph Cornell letters and papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession No. 2014.M.30. The collection of thirty-three unpublished letters from Joseph Cornell to Susanna De Maria Wilson, one of his assistants and wife of the minimalist sculptor Walter De Maria.

Joseph Cornell Papers, 1804-1986, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

Joseph Cornell Study Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

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Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 - December 29, 1972) was an American visual artist and filmmaker, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker. He was largely self-taught in his artistic efforts, and improvised his own original style incorporating cast-off and discarded artifacts.

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Espacenet: free access to millions of patent documents. Find out if your invention is unique or if other inventors have filed patent applications that are considered to be prior art.

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The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is a novel by the Japanese author Yukio Mishima. It was published in 1956 and translated into English by Ivan Morris in 1959.

The novel is loosely based on the burning of the Reliquary (or Golden Pavilion) of Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto by a young Buddhist acolyte in 1950. The pavilion, dating from before 1400, was a national monument that had been spared destruction many times throughout history, and the arson shocked Japan.

The protagonist, Mizoguchi, is the son of a consumptive Buddhist priest who lives and works on the remote Cape Nariu on the north coast of Honshū. As a child, the narrator lives with his uncle at the village of Shiraku (師楽), near Maizuru.

Throughout his childhood he is assured by his father that the Golden Pavilion is the most beautiful building in the world, and the idea of the temple becomes a fixture in his imagination. A stammering boy from a poor household, he is friendless at his school, and takes refuge in vengeful fantasies. When a naval cadet who is visiting the school makes fun of him, he vandalises the cadet's belongings behind his back. A neighbour's girl, Uiko, becomes the target of his hatred, and when she is killed by her deserter boyfriend after she betrays him, Mizoguchi becomes convinced that his curse on her has been fulfilled.

His ill father takes him to the Kinkaku-ji for the first time in the spring of 1944, and introduces him to the Superior, Tayama Dosen. After his father's death, Mizoguchi becomes an acolyte at the temple. It is the height of the war, and there are only three acolytes, but one is his first real friend, the candid and pleasant Tsurukawa. During the 1944-5 school year, he boards at the Rinzai Academy's middle school and works at a factory, fascinated by the idea that the Golden Pavilion will inevitably be burnt to ashes in the firebombing. But the American planes avoid Kyoto, and his dream of a glorious tragedy is defeated. In May 1945, he and Tsurukawa visit Nanzen-ji. From the tower, they witness a strange scene in a room of the Tenju-an nearby: a woman in a formal kimono gives her lover a cup of tea to which she adds her own breast milk.

After his father dies of consumption, he is sent to Kinkaku-ji. On the first anniversary of his father's death, his mother visits him, bringing the mortuary tablet so that the Superior can say Mass over it. She tells him that she has moved from Nariu to Kasagun, and reveals her wish that he should succeed Father Dosen as Superior at Rokuon-ji. The two ambitions-that the temple be destroyed, or that it should be his to control-leave him confused and ambivalent. On hearing the news of the end of the war and the Emperor's renunciation of divinity, Father Dosen calls his acolytes and tells them the fourteenth Zen story from The Gateless Gate, "Nansen kills a kitten", which leaves them bemused. Mizoguchi is bitterly disappointed by the end of hostilities, and late at night he climbs the hill behind the temple, Okitayama-Fudosan, looks down on the lights of Kyoto, and pronounces a curse: "Let the darkness of my heart [...] equal the darkness of the night which encloses those countless lights!"

During the winter of that year, the Temple is visited by a drunk American soldier and his pregnant Japanese girlfriend. He pushes his girlfriend down into the snow, and orders Mizoguchi to trample her stomach, giving him two cartons of cigarettes in exchange for doing so. Mizoguchi goes indoors and obsequiously presents the cartons to the Superior, who is having his head shaved by the deacon. Father Dosen thanks him, and tells him he has been chosen for the scholarship to Otani University. A week later the girl visits the temple, tells her story, and demands compensation for the miscarriage she has suffered. The Superior gives her money and says nothing to the acolytes, but rumours of her claims spread, and the people at the temple become uneasy about Mizoguchi. Throughout 1946 he is tormented by the urge to confess, but never does so, and in the spring of 1947 he leaves with Tsurukawa for Otani University. He starts to drift away from Tsurukawa, befriending Kashiwagi, a cynical clubfooted boy from Sannomiya who indulges in long "philosophical" speeches.

Kashiwagi boasts of his ability to seduce women by making them feel sorry for him-in his words, they "fall in love with my clubfeet." He demonstrates his method to Mizoguchi by feigning a tumble in front of a girl. She helps him into her house. Mizoguchi is so disturbed that he runs away, and takes a train to the Kinkaku-ji to recover his self-assurance. In May, Kashiwagi invites him to a "picnic" at Kameyama Park, taking the girl he tricked, and another girl for Mizoguchi. When left alone with the girl, she tells him a story about a woman she knows who lost her lover during the war. He realises that the woman she is talking about must be the same one he saw two years before through a window of Tenju Hermitage. Mizoguchi's mind fills with visions of the Golden Pavilion, and he finds himself impotent. That evening a telegram arrives at the university bearing news of kindly Tsurukawa's death in a road accident. For nearly a year, Mizoguchi avoids Kashiwagi's company.

In the spring of 1948 Kashiwagi comes to visit him at the temple, and gives him a shakuhachi as a present. He takes the opportunity to demonstrate his own skill as a player. In May he asks Mizoguchi to steal some irises and cat-tails for him from the temple garden. Mizoguchi takes them to Kashiwagi's boarding-house, and while discussing the story of Nansen and the kitten, Kashiwagi starts to make an arrangement, mentioning that he is being taught by his girlfriend. Mizoguchi realises that this girlfriend must be the woman he saw at Tenju Hermitage. When she arrives, Kashiwagi breaks up with her, and they quarrel. She runs away and Mizoguchi follows, telling her that he witnessed her tragic scene two years ago. She is moved, and tries to seduce him, but again he is assailed by visions of the temple, and he is impotent.

In January 1949 Mizoguchi is walking through Shinkyogoku when he thinks he sees Father Dosen with a geisha. Momentarily distracted, he starts to follow a stray dog, loses it, and then in a back alley he runs into the Superior just as he is getting into a hired car with the geisha. He is so surprised that he laughs out loud, and Father Dosen calls him a fool. Over the next two months Mizoguchi becomes obsessed with reproducing Dosen's brief expression of hatred. He buys a photograph of the geisha and slips it into Dosen's morning newspaper. The Superior gives no sign of having found it, but secretly places the photo in Mizoguchi's drawer the next day. When Mizoguchi finds it there, he feels victorious. He tears it up, wraps the shreds in newspaper with a stone, and sinks it in the pond.

As Mizoguchi's mental illness worsens, he neglects his studies. On 9 November 1949, the Superior reprimands him for his poor work. Mizoguchi responds by borrowing ¥3000 from Kashiwagi, who characteristically raises ¥500 of the money by taking back and selling the flute and dictionary he had given as presents. He goes to Takeisao-jinja (a shrine also known as Kenkun-jinja) and draws a lot which warns him not to travel northwest. He sets off northwest the next morning, to the region of his birth, and spends three days at Yura (now Tangoyura), where the sight of the Sea of Japan inspires him to destroy the Kinkaku.

He is retrieved by a policeman, and on his return he is met by his angry mother, who is relieved to learn that he did not steal the money he used to flee. Obsessed by the idea of arson, one day he follows a guilty-looking boy to the Sammon Gate of the Myōshin-ji, and is amazed and disappointed when the boy does not set it alight. He compiles a long list of old temples which have burnt down. By May his debt (with 10% simple interest per month) has grown to ¥5100. Kashiwagi is angry, and comes to suspect that Mizoguchi is considering suicide. On 10 June Kashiwagi complains to Father Dosen, who gives him the principal; afterwards, Kashiwagi shows letters to Mizoguchi that reveal the fact that Tsurukawa did not die in a road accident, but committed suicide over a love affair. He hopes to discourage Mizoguchi from doing anything similar. For the last time, they discuss the Zen story of Nansen and the kitten.

On 15 June, Father Dosen takes the unusual step of giving Mizoguchi ¥4250 in cash for his next year's tuition. Mizoguchi spends it on prostitutes in the hope that Dosen will be forced to expel him. But he quickly tires of waiting for Dosen to find out, and when he spies on Dosen in the Tower of the North Star, and sees him crouched in the "garden waiting" position, he cannot account for this evidence of secret shame, and is filled with confusion. The next day he buys arsenic and a knife at a shop near Senbon-Imadegawa, an intersection 2 km to the southeast of the temple, and loiters outside Nishijin Police Station. The outbreak of the Korean War on 25 June, and the failure of Kinkaku's fire-alarm on 29 June, seem to him signs of encouragement. On 30 June a repairman tries to fix it, but he is unsuccessful, and promises to return the next day. He does not come. A strange interview with the visiting Father Kuwai Zenkai, of Ryuho-ji in Fukui Prefecture, provides the final inspiration, and in the early hours of 2 July Mizoguchi sneaks into the Kinkaku and dumps his belongings, placing three straw bales in corners of the ground floor. He goes outside to sink some non-inflammable items in the pond, but on turning back to the temple he finds himself filled with his childhood visions of its beauty, and he is overcome by uncertainty.

Finally he remembers the words from the Rinzairoku, "When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha", and he resolves to go ahead with his plan. He enters the Kinkaku and sets the bales on fire. He runs upstairs and tries to enter the Kukkyōchō, but the door is locked. He hammers at the door for a minute or two. Suddenly feeling that a glorious death has been "refused" him, he runs back downstairs and out of the temple, choking on the smoke. He continues running, out of the temple grounds, and up the hill named Hidari Daimonji, to the north. He throws away the arsenic and knife, lights a cigarette, watches the pavilion burn, and thinks that "I will live".

Mizoguchi　(溝口)

Mizoguchi's father

Mizoguchi's mother

Uiko　(有為子), the girl who is "cursed" by him

Tsurukawa (鶴川), his kind friend, a fellow acolyte

Kashiwagi (柏木), his evil friend, a student at Otani University

Father Tayama Dosen, the Superior at Rokuon-ji

Father Kuwai Zenkai, who visits (ch. 10)

the American soldier and his girlfriend (ch. 3)

the girl whom Kashiwagi tricks (ch. 5)

the girl from Kashiwagi's boarding-house (ch. 5)

the woman from Tenju Hermitage

the naval cadet (ch. 1)

the prostitute Mariko (ch. 9)

the ground floor, Hōsui-in (法水院), from which the Sōsei juts into Kyōko Pond　（鏡湖）

the middle floor, Chōondō (潮音洞)

the top floor, Kukkyōchō (空竟頂)

Allusions to actual history, geography and current science

The real story

The only detailed information in English on the arson comes from Albert Borowitz's Terrorism For Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome (2005), which includes translations of interview transcripts published in the book Kinkaku-ji Enjō (1979) by Mizukami Tsutomo, a novelist who had known the boy at school.

The acolyte's name was Hayashi Yōken, and the Superior's name was Murakami Jikai. The prostitute to whom he boasted was called Heya Teruko. Hayashi's mother threw herself in front of a train soon after the event. His sentence was reduced on account of his schizophrenia; he was released on 29 September 1955, the same year that the rebuilding commenced, and died in March 1956. (Borowitz comments that many accounts avoid giving the acolyte's name, perhaps to prevent him from becoming a celebrity.) The pavilion's interior paintings were restored much later; even the gold leaf, which was mostly all gone long before 1950, was replaced.

Mishima collected all the information he could, even visiting Hayashi in prison, and as a result the novel follows the real situation with surprising closeness.

Film, television, and theatrical adaptations

(1976), an opera by Toshiro Mayuzumi

Kinkaku-ji (2002), a modern dance work by Kenji Kawarasaki (Company East)

Kinkaku-ji (2011), a stage adaptation by Serge Lamothe, directed by Amon Miyamoto (Kanagawa Art Theater)

The Golden Pavilion (2012), an ensemble piece in two movements by Karol Beffa. Le Pavillon d'or (2012), éditions Billaudot

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The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is a novel by the Japanese author Yukio Mishima. It was published in 1956 and translated into English by Ivan Morris in 1959. The novel is loosely based on the burning of the Reliquary (or Golden Pavilion) of Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto by a young Buddhist acolyte in 1950.

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"Music," wrote the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, "has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation."

A new analysis has empirically confirmed something that rings true for many music lovers - that singing, playing or listening to music can improve wellbeing and quality of life.

A review of 26 studies conducted across several countries including Australia, the UK and the US has found that music may provide a clinically significant boost to mental health.

Seven of the studies involved music therapy, 10 looked at the effect of listening to music, eight examined singing and one studied the effect of gospel music.

The analysis, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, confirmed "music interventions are linked to meaningful improvements in wellbeing", as measured quantitatively via standardised quality-of-life survey data.

The effects were similar whether participants sang, played or listened to music.

The authors of the meta-analysis suggest that the benefit of music to mental quality of life was close in effect to improvements in mental health due to exercise and weight loss.

"Future research is needed to clarify optimal music interventions and doses for use in specific clinical and public health scenarios," the authors said, emphasising that there was "substantial individual variation in responses to music interventions" across the studies analysed.

"Many of us know from personal experience how profound a music intervention can be at times that include surgery, ill-health or mental health episodes," said Kim Cunio, an associate professor and convener of musicology at the Australian National University, who was not involved in the research.

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"This study makes the connection between our personal experiences and a growing body of data of peer-reviewed research that makes the case for music as a frontline intervention in our health system.

"All of us are experts in music because we've spent thousands of hours listening to music, codifying it in our brain and responding to it. Is it any wonder what when we listen to music, something remarkable happens?

"When I'm feeling that things are a little bit hard, I turn to music like we all do. Sometimes that music is a deliberate echo of how I'm feeling ... sombre and sad. But sometimes I need music of a completely different feeling that can snap me out of that space.

"This is the true wonder of music - that there is no rule as to what is best to listen to. We have to follow the heart."

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Music improves wellbeing and quality of life, research suggests

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A review of 26 studies finds benefits of music on mental health are similar to those of exercise and weight loss

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#UrsulaLeGuin#CarrierBag

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A paleolithic man crouches in the bushes, waiting for something to catch his attention. The tiniest movement kick-starts the bloodlust, that hard-wired desire to just fucking get it. He flings a projectile in its direction, an arrow or a spear maybe - weapons that create just the right amount of distance between his own body and that of his prey. This is important. If his aim is true, if the animal drops lifelessly to the ground, he will have accomplished two things: one, dinner. Two, and perhaps more important, he will have won.

Human history, or so conventional wisdom goes, is a story of violent, merciless competition. We have come to embrace the idea that a succession of one thing defeating another literally is history, whether that's between species, political leaders, or conflicting ideologies. In our inherited notion of human history, our caveman - and he is always a man - comes home from a hard day on the plains with a wildebeest or a deer slung over his shoulder. His adoring cavewife and cavekids tuck into the prize around the campfire, as the winner recounts the tale of his courage and heroism. Just as significant as the prize, that hard-won carcass of meat, is the story. The drama. Many stories, told in chronological order, are what we call history (perhaps why, in German, the word for story and history are identical: Geschichte.)

This muddle of history and heroism has given us theories of Great Men, and a truly incomprehensible number of World War II documentaries, and also goes some way to explaining our current and insufficient appraisal of climate change. Capitalism, or so wrote Marx back in 1844, supposedly alienates us from four different things: from ourselves, from each other, from the products of our labor, and from nature. We develop an adversarial relationship with each. "Nature"(a constructed, slippery category that shifts over time) can, or even must, be tamed: capricious rivers are diverted, genomes are edited, crude oil is transformed into fuel.

The unpredictability brought on by climate change should, in theory, disrupt this thinking. The catastrophic repercussions of human activity, like melting glaciers and collapsing ecosystems, tell us that "nature" was never really "mastered" after all. Yet the same story persists: humans will win. We must. We always win. Not long ago, I saw a poster in central London, presumably put there by some university department, that said something like "Don't worry. We're on it" - the 'it' being the solution to climate change. The sheer hubris of some of the techno-fixes being bandied about with varying levels of seriousness, like sending a mirror the size of Greenland into space or pumping clouds of sulphur dioxide into the air, border on the dystopian. Conferences may have replaced the campfire, but the principle is basically the same: it's the story, the legend, that matters.

Storytelling is a way of configuring and reconfiguring worlds; narratives can bring realities into being. I once took a writing workshop with someone who swore by power posing - the idea that adopting a wide stance with one's arms raised quite literally invokes stature - and she would spend a minute before every reading "hacking" confidence into her body. With her arms above her head and her legs astride, she swore the technique changed her mentality and made her feel like she controlled the room. Without it, she claimed, she would be a gibbering, nervous wreck. However daft you might think power posing is, I was always impressed by her ability to slip fiction into the realm of the real.

Questioning the spear's phallic, murderous logic, instead Le Guin tells the story of the carrier bag, the sling, the shell, or the gourd.

The generative potential of storytelling is especially pronounced in speculative fiction, a genre that mines our current reality as raw material for imaginary worldbuilding (this includes things like sci-fi, fantasy and horror). The genre's patron saint, Ursula Le Guin, died last year aged 88, but she left behind her a breathtaking legacy of fiercely intelligent books and short stories imbued with her own anarcho-feminist, anticolonial politics. One of her best-known novels, The Dispossessed, imagines a small, separatist planet administered according to anarcho-syndicalist principles, what she subtitles an "ambiguous utopia" full of contradictions and complexity. On the planet Anarres, prison does not exist, work is voluntary, any claim to ownership is dismissed as "propertarian" - yet, despite all this, greed and power can still take hold. It feels like a book of thinking aloud, in which Le Guin is trying to figure out different realities through writing. It speaks to the kind of writer Le Guin was: generous and open minded, investigative and bursting with ideas, willing to be wrong, yet always reaching for a world free from harm.

"The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," an essay Le Guin wrote in 1986, disputes the idea that the spear was the earliest human tool, proposing that it was actually the receptacle. Questioning the spear's phallic, murderous logic, instead Le Guin tells the story of the carrier bag, the sling, the shell, or the gourd. In this empty vessel, early humans could carry more than can be held in the hand and, therefore, gather food for later. Anyone who consistently forgets to bring their tote bag to the supermarket knows how significant this is. And besides, Le Guin writes, the idea that the spear came before the vessel doesn't even make sense. "Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food."

Not only is the carrier bag theory plausible, it also does meaningful ideological work - shifting the way we look at humanity's foundations from a narrative of domination to one of gathering, holding, and sharing. Because I am, despite my best efforts, often soppy and sentimental, I sometimes imagine this like a really comforting group hug. But it's not, really: the carrier bag holds things, sure, but it's also messy and sometimes conflicted. Like when you're trying to grab your sunglasses out of your bag, but those are stuck on your headphones, which are also tangled around your keys, and now the sunglasses have slipped into that hole in the lining.

Le Guin's carrier bag is, in addition to a story about early humans, a method for storytelling itself, meaning it's also a method of history. But unlike the spear (which follows a linear trajectory towards its target), and unlike the kind of linear way we've come to think of time and history in the West, the carrier bag is a big jumbled mess of stuff. One thing is entangled with another, and with another. Le Guin once described temporality in her Hainish Universe (a confederacy of human planets that feature in a number of her books) in the most delightfully psychedelic terms: "Any timeline for the books of Hainish descent would resemble the web of a spider on LSD."

This lack of clear trajectory allowed Le Guin to test out all kinds of political eventualities, without the need to tie everything neatly together. It makes room for complexity and contradiction, for difference and simultaneity. This, I think, is a pretty radical way of looking at the world, one that departs from the idea of history as a long line of victories. Le Guin describes her discovery of the carrier bag theory as grounding her "in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before." The stick, sword, or spear, designed for "bashing and killing," alienated her from history so much that she felt she "was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all."

The only problem is that a carrier bag story isn't, at first glance, very exciting. "It is hard to tell", writes Le Guin, "a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats..."

As well as its meandering narrative, a carrier bag story also contains no heroes. There are, instead, many different protagonists with equal importance to the plot. This is a very difficult way to tell a story, fictional or otherwise. While, in reality, most meaningful social change is the result of collective action, we aren't very good at recounting such a diffusely distributed account. The meetings, the fundraising, the careful and drawn-out negotiations - they're so boring! Who wants to watch a movie about a four-hour meeting between community stakeholders?

The introduction of a singular hero, however, replicates a very specific and historical power relation. The pioneers and the saviors: likely male, likely white, almost certainly brimming with unearned confidence. The veneration of the hero reduces others into victims: those who must be rescued. "The prototypical savior is a person who has been raised in privilege and taught implicitly or explicitly (or both) that they possess the answers and skills needed to rescue others," writes Jordan Flaherty in his book No More Heroes. To be a hero is fundamentally privileged, and any act of heroism reinforces that privilege.

The carrier bag story, with its lack of heroes, is a collective rather than individualist endeavor. It's this that differentiates the carrier bag from Walter Benjamin's "ragpicker," an emblematic modernist figure who "early in the morning, bad tempered and a tad tipsy, spears remnants of discourse and fragments of language with his stick and throws them, grumbling, into his cart." Engaged in endless bricolage, the ragpicker is a serial appropriator - it's John Cage taking the Balinese gamelan as his own, it's Picasso's "primitivism." The carrier bag gatherer, meanwhile, is no lone genius (genius being its own kind of heroism, after all), but rather someone rooted in a shared existence.

We will not "beat" climate change, nor is "nature" our adversary. If the planet could be considered a container for all life, in which everything - plants, animals, humans - are all held together, then to attempt domination becomes a self-defeating act. By letting ourselves "become part of the killer story," writes Le Guin, "we may get finished along with it." All of which is to say: we have to abandon the old story.

The social theorist Donna Haraway, who has been deeply influenced by Le Guin's writings, implores us to tell other stories about this weird shared reality: "It matters what stories tell stories," she writes. "It matters what worlds world worlds." We are still learning how to tell stories about climate change. It is fundamentally a more-than-human problem, one that simultaneously affects all communities of people, animals, plants - albeit asymmetrically. The kind of story we need right now is unheroic, incorporating social movements, political imagination and nonhuman actors. In this story, time doesn't progress in an easily digestible straight line, with a beginning, middle and end. Instead there are many timelines, each darting around, bringing actions of the past and future into the present. It collapses nature as a category, recognizing that we're already a part of it. In a climate change story, nobody will win, but if we learn to tell it differently more of us can survive.

Siobhan Leddy is a writer, editor, and researcher living in Berlin.

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We should all be reading more Ursula Le Guin

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A paleolithic man crouches in the bushes, waiting for something to catch his attention. The tiniest movement kick-starts the bloodlust, that hard-wired desire to just fucking get it. He flings a projectile in its direction, an arrow or a spear maybe - weapons that create just the right amount of distance between his own body and that of his prey.