Here Comes Another Impulse

An interview with Joyce Carol Oates, Nicholas Kristof's polemic op-ed in the NYT, Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, and a round-up of this week's articles and essays.

In this week’s newsletter: several articles and essays I read this week including Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed in the NYT and Jafari Sinclaire Allen’s piece in The Nation about Black Studies, Misha Glenny on M.C. Escher, and an essay by Simone Weil. Plus a visual library and a chronicle I wrote.

CHRONICLE

Here Comes Another Impulse

Here comes another impulse, I’ve known them all my life. That irresponsible urge to quit my job, change cities, get a tattoo, stay late at a bar, have children, speak my thoughts. When did we start perceiving living as irresponsible? When did we start measuring sanity through our capacity to adapt and adopt? Must we all be contrived to the logic of the majority? I’ve found no pleasure in inching closer to success; I’ve found no pleasure fantasizing about being like the charlatans around me. Yet I’m a charlatan too, I lie. The truth is impossible to convey, everyone lies. Why can’t I go out on the streets, grab a stranger by the shoulder and shake them? And why, just because I started working on something, is it assumed I must continue? There’s an impulse to do something and I’m listening to it.

If people weren’t impulsive our world would be empty. I’d be looking at blank canvases, staring at white pages, drinking from empty cups. We already thought about this though. Now we rarely think without it being in reaction to something. I want to crumble this computer like a piece of paper, like a drawing I messed up in preschool. All the beautiful drawings my daughter made on the wall in this room. Headlines are enough to make me want to jump out of the day and so now I skip most mornings. We’ve been rendered incapable of movement: we can’t cross borders, we can’t receive a proper education.

When I look up from this page the tree is full of breeding pigeons. I open the window to hear the birds but all I hear are cars, motorcycles, a woman screaming into her phone. On Sundays, I hear them coo. Now I listen to her conversation: on the other side someone bought too many baguettes without looking at the budget.

The last time I had an impulse I spoke to a father-of-saint in Brazil on the phone. He performed a ritual to reveal my divination using cowrie-shells. It was like having long hair and shaving it off, the Bible was the hair, talking with Orixás was shaving it off. Iemanjá is my Orixá he said. They say she cleanses me of sorrow. Should my impulse come from distress perhaps she can be my hero, save me from my own emotions. The woman outside has found me too. I want to tell her that I haven’t cried in a very long time.

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VISUAL LIBRARY

Row 1: Minsei Tominaga, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jonathas de Andrade. Row 2: Kishin Shinoyama, Giovanni Bellini, unknown. Row 3: Nobuyoshi Takagi, Nobuyoshi Takagi, Kishin Shinoyama.

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TOP SHELF: ADDED TO THE PILES

Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge has been sitting on my bookshelf for many years. I bought it when a friend was transitioning more than fifteen years ago. We had a book club and said we’d add this one to our list. We never read it. I’m pleased to find in it today storytelling that breathes, empty spaces. Vidal has the strength to take readers wherever he wants them to go. During the day I’ve been reading a lot of essays (and writing a lot less). I’m particularly curious about William Hazlitt’s take on John Milton, so I bought The Spirit of Controversy and Other Essays. A lot of times I find I have these gaps in reading from not having studied literature in school, Hazlitt is mentioned so many times it’s time I take it on. In parallel I’m reading The Essays by Francis Bacon, as well as Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature.

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A VIDEO

Joyce Carol Oates talks about her practice for the Louisiana Channel.

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ARTICLES I READ THIS WEEK

1. All I can think about is Nicholas Kristof’s article The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians published last week in the NYT. Read I recommend Jasper Diamond Nathaniel’s follow-up in his newsletter Infinite Jazz. Read

2. Jafari Sinclaire Allen’s essay The Dismantling of Black Studies in the Nation is extraordinary and urgent. Allen is the director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies. Read

   What is being unmade this time is not only the right to vote or the right to citizenship—both of which are being whittled away—but also the right to know, the right to make knowledge, and the right to tell the truth.

3. For Persuasion, the literary critic and essayist William Deresiewicz writes about the state of American education. Deresiewicz is a former English professor at Yale University. Read

   When people talk about the college classroom as a training ground for citizenship, they mean the inculcation of a certain set of virtues and habits. You sit around the table wrestling with Locke or Dostoevsky, and you learn to have a civil conversation: to disagree respectfully, to listen, to consider arguments, to change your mind.

4. In The MIT Press Reader, the philosopher Alex Rosenberg writes about what happens when we attach emotions to narrative history. Read

   The causal factors narrative history invokes, such as the beliefs and desires that are supposed to drive human actions, rely on a scientifically unwarranted theory of mind. It‘s one that breeds emotions such as anger, shame, jealousy, retribution, and vengeance, and has wreaked havoc throughout recorded history.

5. In The Querent, Alexander Chee writes about visiting his mother on mother’s day. It’s calm, gentle, loving, and full of warm (and funny) moments. Read

   I should mention, I have boring dreams quite often. Years ago, I dreamed that I asked my husband for a Kleenex, and when I woke up, I told him about it. “Another victory for your unconscious,” he said, and went back to sleep.

6. For the BBC In Our Time podcast, Misha Glenny looks at the life and work of M.C. Escher. Listen In The Book Review’s latest episode, Patrick Radden Keefe talks about his new book London Falling. Listen

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ESSAYS I RECOMMEND THIS WEEK

1. An Essay of Dramatic Poesy by John Dryden. Read

2. The Future of Criticism by Edward W. Said. Read

3. The Image of Proust by Walter Benjamin. Read

4. Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil. Read

5. My First Acquaintance with Poets by William Hazlitt. Read

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CURRENTLY AT RUE DE CHABROL

My Morning Read

It’s Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling.

Vita’s Bedtime Story

My husband is in-and-out of London for work and recently he brought back the Funnybones collection for Vita. The volume we have is a compilation of different stories which are all quite lyrical, and just spooky enough not to give any of us nightmares (I’m scared of my own shadow). Vita’s favorite story is called Bumps in the Night, and she likes it when I’m the one that reads it.

What My Husband’s Listening To

At Source by Caterina Barbieri and Bendik Giske

A Movie I’m Thinking About

All Your Faces directed by Jeanne Herry

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A POEM

It is not to be Thought of by William Wordsworth

It is not to be thought of that the Flood
Of British freedom, which, to the open sea
Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity
Hath flowed, "with pomp of waters, unwithstood,"
Roused though it be full often to a mood
Which spurns the check of salutary bands,
That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible Knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.—In every thing we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.

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COVER IMAGE

A video by Jonathas de Andrade, O Peixe [The Fish], 2016.