Columbia University Press

“So where did this idea come about that poems are the opposite of journalism, that poets do what reporters cannot, and vice versa?”—Stephen Burt

The following post by Stephen Burt was originally published on Nieman Reports. In the post Stephen Burt, author of The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence, explores how familiar stories are made fresh again by the way we put them into words:

The most famous statements about poetry and journalism hide an equation inside an opposition: “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack// of what is found there” (William Carlos Williams). Or else they hide an opposition inside an equation: “Poetry is news that stays news” (Ezra Pound).

Reported stories, poets might have it, confine themselves to what’s going on right now, and then go away, replaced by other reportage. Journalism considers external, verifiable facts, which stay the same no matter who speaks about them, while poets consider the inward, the private, the potentially eternal, the claims which are different in each poet’s heart, mind or words. Jahan Ramazani, a critic at the University of Virginia, has written about how poets imitate, and use, and transform, the news: “By contrast with the seemingly passive mediation of current events by the reporter,” Ramazani explains, “the poet’s use of language and form must actively re-create … an imaginative event that recurs perpetually in the sustained present of poetry’s inventiveness.”

There is something to that opposition; otherwise, it would not persist as it does. And yet you can find poems that report news, or poems that react to news, from any period you care to name. Some of them even count as what we call “lyric,” the supposedly timeless or private kind of poetry that is sometimes opposed to the news: They embody strong feeling and they resemble song. Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional,” whatever you think of its politics, is both a compressed songlike work, whose word choices embody complex feeling, and a comment on current events (Queen Victoria’s Jubilee). So are Williams’s own poems about Sacco and Vanzetti and about the death of FDR. So—often at a lower level of craft—are many short, songlike poems from the late 1960s about the war in Vietnam.

You can have—you can attempt to embody in verse, to compress, to make eloquent—feelings or complicated inward responses, responses that reveal your character, to almost anything: to a twig or a fallen leaf or a sexual overture but also to what we now call headline news. The form of the sonnet, so often associated with erotic love, has become so prominent in English in part because poets use it to react to the news: Milton in the English Civil War, Wordsworth on the fall of the Venetian Republic and the capture of Toussaint L’Overture, several now-forgotten Victorian poets on dispatches from the Crimean War, Gwendolyn Brooks on poverty, race, Chicago, and World War II. Many of the supposed oppositions between poems and news just dissolve on scrutiny: Poetry often reacts to public events; poetry can be pellucid (as in Louise Glück or Christina Rossetti) as well as opaque; and journalists can take on complicated ideas with specialized vocabulary (collateralized mortgage obligations, for example, or mitochondrial DNA).

So where did this idea come about that poems are the opposite of journalism, that poets do what reporters cannot, and vice versa?

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This week our featured book is The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, by Michael M. Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd, published by Columbia Business School Publishing, an imprint of Columbia University Press. Enter our Goodreads book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy!

Today, we have a guest post from Michael Weinstein, in which he explains how The Robin Hood Foundation decides what to fund when there are so many important programs that need funding.

The Robin Hood Foundation and “Relentless Monetization”
Michael M. Weinstein

We philanthropists face gnarly decisions. To fight poverty, do we train chronically unemployed women to drive commercial trucks or instead pour money into pre-kindergarten programs for poor youngsters? Do we train male ex-offenders to serve as drug-abuse counselors for adolescent boys or fund charter schools? We can’t afford to do everything.

In The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, Ralph Bradburd and I set forth a framework for making the right choices — spending philanthropic dollars with maximum impact.

Our framework, which we dub “relentless monetization,” uses the workhorse of modern economics, benefit-cost analysis, to help funders decide which grants to make. Spending dollars on programs with the highest benefit/cost ratios puts dollars where they do the most good. For example, taking dollars out of one project and spending them on a project whose benefit/cost ratio is twice as high amounts to raising and spending twice as many philanthropic dollars.

The framework does indeed bite hard. Here’s one of many examples.

At the Robin Hood Foundation, we once proudly funded what we saw as the best permanent supportive housing residence in the city. The grantee takes in homeless families, provides them excellent mental-health and other services, and keeps them safely, permanently housed. Using representative numbers, Robin Hood might have spent $300,000 a year to help house 60 families. We say this residence was best because none–not one–of its families returned to the streets. Case closed: great grant.

Or was it? Once our metric algorithms were in place and staff did the arithmetic, the benefit/cost calculation came in low—indeed, very low. Did we immediately pull the plug? No. Perhaps our algorithms were wrong and were missing key benefits. Perhaps our equations were right but our numbers were wrong. We did eventually pull the funding plug, but we did so only after two years of scrutiny. The answer was that permanent supportive housing is a frightfully expensive way to fight poverty. Here, Robin Hood would spend $300,000 a year to save the same 60 families year in and year out. We do that nowhere else. At our schools, the students in the sixth grade change each year. In our carpentry-training program, the trainees change each year. In our micro-lending programs, borrowers change each year.

Our point is not to criticize permanent supportive-housing programs. They pursue an inspiring and important mission. But for Robin Hood in particular, the strategy is not cost-effective. We can spend the $300,000 in other ways that lift significantly more poor New Yorkers out of poverty over any defined period.

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This week our featured book is Animal Oppression and Human Violence, by David A. Nibert, Professor of Sociology at Wittenberg University. We’ll be featuring content from the book and original posts from the author all week! Be sure to enter our book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy of Animal Oppression and Human Violence!

Today we have the second half of a guest post by David A. Nibert (read the first half here). In this post, Nibert argues that the pervasive presence of domesecration in modern society has profoundly negative effects on humans as well as animals.

In the United States, the relentless quest for profits through the exploitation of domesecrated animals was primarily responsible for the continual expropriation of Native American lands for expanding ranching enterprises. Once indigenous peoples, buffalo and other “obstacles” were cleared from the Great Plains – territory U.S. leaders once promised to Native Americans in perpetuity – wealthy investors flooded the region with cows and sheep. Railways and giant slaughterhouses, constructed and staffed by oppressed immigrants, allowed the rise of the powerful U.S. “meat” industry. Not long after Blackmar’s drivel about the “service” animals were “rendering” to humans, Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle provided a true picture of the nightmarish condition of domesecrated animals in Chicago slaughterhouses and the predatory treatment of the workers there.
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This week our featured book is Animal Oppression and Human Violence, by David A. Nibert, Professor of Sociology at Wittenberg University. We’ll be featuring content from the book and original posts from the author all week! Be sure to enter our book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy of Animal Oppression and Human Violence!

Today we have the first half of a guest post by David A. Nibert, in which he explains how he first came to be aware of the issues he discusses in his book, and delves into the history of the phenomenon of “widespread and systemic oppression of other animals by humans.”

I never thought much about other animals or food production when I was younger. As a college sociology student in the early 1970s, I learned about racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression – but scarcely a word was mentioned about the oppression of other animals. Professors spouted the traditional prattle about the virtues of animal “domestication” and the “mutually beneficial partnership” that resulted. This perspective has remained largely unchanged for decades and reflects a statement made in 1896 by Frank Wilson Blackmar, who later would become president of the American Sociological Association.

The domestication of animals led to a great improvement in the race. It gave an increased food supply through milk and the flesh of animals. . . . One after another animals have rendered service to man. They are used for food or clothing, or to carry burdens and draw loads. The advantage of their domestication cannot be too greatly estimated.
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The following post is by Siobhan Phillips, author of The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse:

We come on poetry in any number of ways. We dip into anthologies, page through journals, take in our favorite’s latest book; catch poems in a link, sidebar, scrapbook clipping, subway poster, or app spin; hear them in the ghost of someone’s half-memorized quotation, in music and commercials and movies, in or our own not-quite-accurate regurgitations. The range of prompts and magnets for poetic experience in our lives is one good reason that poetry remains a year-round activity.*

This April, I’d like to make the case for a particular type of poetry-experiencing: the Collected Poems. Fat volumes in sober fonts gathering all of one writer’s work. Uniform format, chronological logic. Practically, they can be unwieldy and theoretically, they can seem naive. Why take on these bricks if the author serves merely as a convenient category of organization and chronology implies a false ideal of progress? Once I begin to read, though, objections dissolve. I’m seduced by the sense of comprehensiveness, a deepening into the fullness of a single sensibility. Collecteds show how poetry is a style of thought—a way of living and doing as well as a product of living or something done. They dramatize poetry’s oscillation between the single poem, a defined work, and the general medium, an indefinite capacity.

I’ve been thinking about this, maybe, because there have been a more-than-usual number of worthy Collecteds published since Poetry Month 2012. We now have the no-longer-neglectable achievement of Joseph Ceravolo, for example—part collage, part missal. The full record of Lucille Clifton’s oracular, conversational testimony. The eclectic geography of Ed Dorn, moving from gunslingers of the nineteenth-century west to crusaders in thirteenth-century Europe. Jack Gilbert’s mobius strip of spare and self-indulgent. The meta-mythical case studies of Louise Gluck. In a review of Marianne Moore, David Bromwich speaks of an “atmosphere-of-Mooreishness,” and that’s what I relish in Collected reading: the atmosphere of whoever-ishness. Such flavor—an outsider’s intimacy—comes before judgment and (I think) has a value apart from it. One won’t like all of any book on this list; at least, I don’t.
But reading through them clarifies what I do—and how I do, as well.

I want to resist, then, an idea of the Collected as comprehensive and impossible—books that are meant to sit on the shelf for occasional reference. Think of them as immersive and malleable—books that one can enter and navigate according to one’s own predilections. Mixing the sounding of dark fathoms with the cruise control through flat patches, skipping back and ahead. Pausing, checking how far I’ve come. Reading a Collected, single poems I already know swim up into different and clearer position (”Mock Orange,” “Searching for Pittsburgh”) even as single poems I didn’t already know take on the status of landmarks (“Lighthouse”). Tuned to a poet’s key, I can better appreciate both its sometime modulations and its consistent overtones. How much of Clifton is about her mother, how much of Gluck is witty; how romantically prophetic is early Dorn (and how that prophecy curls into satiric disgust by the last writing). In The Poetics of the Everyday, I argued for verse-making as analogue and practice for daily existence, with its steady pattern of consistency and steady potential for change. Making my way through Collecteds reminds me that the reading poetry as much as writing it can mark and constitute what I might risk calling the life of the mind. Or even just life?

*See Mike Chasar’s Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America for details.

“My adaptation of ‘I Know a Man’ … also links me to the popular reading practices I study and value—practices that respect and honor important texts not by preserving those texts in the unchanging museum space of an anthology, but by adapting them….”—Mike Chasar, on his tattoo of lines from Robert Creeley’s “I Know a Man”

In the following post, Mike Chasar, author of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America, talks about his tattoo of a line from a Robert Creeley poem:

In the Fall of 2012, I had two phrases from one of my favorite poems—Robert Creeley’s “I Know a Man”—tattooed on my arms: “drive, he sd” inked on my right arm, and “look out where yr going” on my left. For the design, I chose to enlarge the text of the poem as it appeared in the first edition of Creeley’s 1962 collection For Love, its first (so far as I can tell) of many reprintings in books and anthologies. Unlike many people, who choose highly stylized handwritten designs for their text-based tattoos, I wanted it to look as much as possible like the poem had been printed directly onto my skin.

I can’t remember when I first encountered Creeley’s poem—it was probably in an assigned high school or undergraduate poetry anthology—but it became newly meaningful for me during the completion of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America. While rewriting Chapter Four, which focuses on the poetic language play of automobile culture and how that play affected the poetry of William Carlos Williams, I remembered “I Know a Man.” In addition to the poem’s content (“why not, buy a goddamn big car, // drive, he sd”), it displays some of the contracted language and breezy diction characteristic of automobile speed reading and follows, I think, in a tradition of poets writing about automobile culture that Williams helped to inaugurate. Insofar as it helped, last-minute, to establish a historical narrative for Chapter Four, “I Know a Man” served as sort of capstone for the chapter and book, bringing the manuscript to completion.

The last lines of “I Know a Man” use the contracted language and diction imported from automobile culture partially to help confuse or blur the sources of the poem’s conversation between the narrator and his friend (famously not named John):

… shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.

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In the following essay, Thomas Doherty, author of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, examines how the ant-fascist movement in 1930s Hollywood shaped the blacklist in 1950s Hollywood:

Last November, the Hollywood Reporter deviated from its normal beat and published and in-depth investigation of itself. Part historical reclamation, part act of contrition, the lengthy article by Gary Naum and Daniel Miller dredged up the paper’s complicity in facilitating the Hollywood blacklist, specifically the animating role of its founding editor, W. R. “Billy” Wilkerson.

Citing chapter and verse from Wilkerson’s front-page column, a must-read fixture of the trade press from 1930 to 1960, the piece traced an ideological vendetta by a mean SOB who, if he did not singlehandedly launch the blacklist era, worked tirelessly to sustain it. Along with the anguished self examination, a sidebar article by Willie Wilkerson, editor Wilkerson’s son, apologized for the sins of his father.

Like a lot of commentators on-line, I was put off by Wilkerson Jr.’s posthumous hit on his father—a gesture that struck me as an odd sort of oedipal payback— but Naum and Miller’s article was a solid job of history, backed up by exhaustive research in the paper’s back pages and sobering reflections from the dwindling number of alumnae of the blacklist era. It was also more temperate in tone than most inquiry into what jas become the bitterest slice of Hollywood history. I am always amazed at how raw and close to the bone the subject of the blacklist is, how ferocious the passions remain even after half a century, despite the fact that the battles are mostly vicarious now, fought by descendents, literal and spiritual, a generation or two removed from the main action.

The last major venting of authentic bile from actual participants was during the controversy that arose over the honorary Oscar awarded to director Elia Kazan in 1999. In 1952, in a closed session before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Kazan “named names”—informed on his former comrades in arms—and, worse, refused to apologize for doing so. Worse yet, he used his free pass to make indisputably great movies. Like the old joke about Irish Alzheimer’s disease, where the afflicted forget everything except the grudges, the surviving octo-and-nanogenarians went at each other once again, but mainly it was an ex post facto donnybrook. During the tense ceremony, younger members of the Academy audience showed their colors by (variously) sitting on their hands, standing up to cheer, or tepidly applauding.

Like Baum and Miller, I’ve spend a good deal of time scrolling through back issues of the Hollywood Reporter over the years, lately for a study how the motion picture industry responded to the rise of fascism in the 1930s. (The short answer: pretty well, on average, especially compared to the rest of America.) My own sense was that the sackcloth and ashes routine was a bit overdone: the piece didn’t unjustly malign editor Wilkerson but it left a lot unsaid and brushed over some of the historical complexities. As befits its masthead, the Hollywood Reporter‘s role during the blacklist was mainly reportorial not prosecutorial. In general, it reflected mainstream industry attitudes when it insisted that the Hollywood Ten be called the Unfriendly Ten, so as not to sully the industry as a whole with the antics of the witnesses called before the original HUAC hearings in October 1947. (These are the iconic hearings that are invariably unspooled in archival documentaries of the era: the testimony from HUAC’s other Hollywood-centric hearings was denied newsreel coverage).

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Our featured book this week is Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life by Michael Marder, with a foreword by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala. Enter our book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy!

The following is an abridged version of a debate between Michael Marder and Gary Francione, author of, among other works, Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation.

The debate and the questions were inspired by Michael Marder’s controversial New York Times op-eds Is Plant Liberation on the Menu? and If Peas Can Talk, Should We Eat Them? which generated a variety of responses from animal right advocates, philosophers, and others.

How does plant ethics relate to veganism?

Michael Marder: Plant ethics shares with veganism a strong commitment to justice, which is to say, to the reduction of violence humans perpetrate against other living beings. It is by no means a threat to or an invalidation of veganism. Rather, plant ethics is an open invitation to fine-tune our dietary practices in keeping with the philosophical and botanical considerations of what plants are, what they are capable of, and what our relation to them should be.
[…]
[Plant ethics] does not mean that, having entertained the real possibility of violence against plants, vegans would throw their hands up in despair and concede that it is pointless to alleviate animal suffering by refusing to consume animal flesh and by-products. What it implies is that they would not rest on the laurels of their accomplishments but would consider residual violence against other living beings, such as plants, thoroughly instrumentalized by the same logic that underpins human domination over other animal species.

Gary Francione: If plants are not sentient—if they have no subjective awareness—then they have no interests. That is, they cannot desire, or want, or prefer anything. There is simply no reason to believe that plants have any level of perceptual awareness or any sort of mind that prefers, wants, or desires anything.
[…]
I do believe that we have an obligation not to eat more plants than we need to live, but that is because I think that overeating is a form of violence to our own bodies. I also believe that we have an obligation to all sentient inhabitants of the planet not to use more non-sentient resources than we need. In both cases, we have obligations that concern plants but these obligations are not owed directly to plants.
[…]
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This week Columbia University Press goes Badiou! Our featured books are The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts / Tragédie en trois actes and Plato’s Republic by Alain Badiou, both translated by Susan Spitzer with introductions by Kenneth Reinhard. In today’s post, Ward Blanton discusses the importance of The Incident at Antioch in “rethinking … those old, old questions about ‘Jerusalem and Athens’ which seem to lodge so naturally around the figure of Paul.”

Professor Blanton is a Reader in Biblical Cultures & European Thought in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kent. Among other books and collections, he spearheaded Columbia’s translation of Stanislas Breton’s A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul. His next book, A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life, is in press with Columbia’s series Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture.

Paula Versus the New Philosophers, or, Incident in Beijing

Ward Blanton, University of Kent

I’m not sure whether others have been struck by some of the public interactions of Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley, interactions which invariably start to circulate around the question of whether or how political creation relates to political disappointment. The more the matter is tabled the more memory of older conflicts—for and against Kant, for and against Levinas, or for and against a Lutheran inflection of newness and identity within the Pauline legacy—begin to churn toward the surface. I confess I like such moments as we continue to struggle with how we imagine or conceptualize the political—as we speculate on our own political chances. As if to stir gently what has always for me been a pleasing pot, I could begin by naming a disappointment I have undergone in relation to that remarkable play, The Incident at Antioch. Above all, I was sorry when I realized we couldn’t include portions of it in our Paul and the Philosophers (Fordham, 2013). True enough, it didn’t make any sense to publish a short selection of Susan Spitzer’s beautiful translation at the very moment that the entire play would become available… but for my disappointment logistics are generally beside the point entirely! In truth, I was disappointed that I would no longer have a great excuse to say there what I really wanted to say about Badiou’s play, namely, that I think The Incident at Antioch is one of the most important contemporary spurs for a rethinking of those old, old questions about ‘Jerusalem and Athens’ which seem to lodge so naturally around the figure of Paul.
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This week Columbia University Press goes Badiou! Our featured books are The Incident at Antioch/L’Incident d’Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts / Tragédie en trois actes and Plato’s Republic by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer with introductions by Kenneth Reinhard. In this post, Susan Spitzer discusses the experience of translating two very different works by Badiou.

Translating Alain Badiou’s The Incident at Antioch and Plato’s Republic
Susan Spitzer

Although the translator’s initial encounter with the foreign-language text, to which so much time will be devoted, is not often discussed, I doubt I’ll ever forget the heart-sinking feeling I had on first opening Alain Badiou’s L’Incident d’Antioche. The play was utterly different from anything I’d read before, and translating it, I knew immediately, would be a daunting task. As I later remarked in my Preface to the translation, “The Incident at Antioch is characterized by a rich linguistic mélange, a virtual kaleidoscope of styles and genres: poetic or highly elevated literary language, language borrowed directly from the Bible or with religious overtones, pompous rhetoric, made-up proverbs, everyday French that often tends towards the colloquial, if not at times the vulgar, all overlain with the remnants of a certain Marxist vocabulary or with terminology bearing the stamp of Badiou’s own philosophical œuvre, and studded with allusions to, or quotations from, Marx and Engels, Goethe, Shakespeare, Racine, La Fontaine, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Greek mythology, along with myriad references to the contemporary world.”

Fortunately for me, Badiou was (and still is) a regular visitor to Los Angeles, so I was able to corral him into assisting me with the translation issues that confronted me at every turn. Most of the time, thanks to his generosity and patience, I would come away from these sessions relieved to have finally (or so I hoped) understood what was meant. But on one occasion he was of no help at all. Expecting a simple answer to my query about the source of certain lines in Act I that he had enclosed in quotation marks, I was surprised to hear him say, “No, no, it’s not a citation; it’s just the characters reciting their lines in a sort of chorus.” My intuition told me otherwise, but what is a translator to do when the author explicitly tells her she is over-reaching? The answer, it now seems obvious, was: Google! I entered one French phrase after another into the search engine, only to come up empty-handed. I then played around with the lines a bit, in case Badiou hadn’t followed the exact order of words in what I was still convinced was a citation. No luck. Next I tried numerous versions of my own tentative translation of the phrases or lines. Finally, when I was almost ready to concede defeat, I hit the jackpot: the lines, somewhat altered, were from The German Ideology! No one was more surprised, or pleased, I hasten to add, than Badiou himself when I apprised him of this. He had simply forgotten, having written the play some twenty-odd years before, about his own idiosyncratic use of Marx and Engels in this one particular scene.

Translating his Plato’s Republic was a different experience altogether. No dread on first perusing the text; on the contrary, irrepressible laughter. I knew from the outset that the book, a sparkling theatrical dialogue interspersed with novel-like narrative passages, would be a real romp for a literary translator. Not that there weren’t thorny passages – when Badiou’s mathematics met Plato’s, for example, or when the umpteenth appearance of “ce qui de l’Être s’expose à la pensée” (“that which of Being is exposed to thought”? “that aspect of Being which is exposed to thought”? “that of Being which is exposed to thought”?) made me tear my hair out – but overall it was a sheer delight to be part of the process of what was then a still-unfolding work. Badiou would send me each chapter when he finished it, and I would eagerly await the next installment to see what remarkable changes he had wrought on Plato’s immortal work. After receiving his blessing for the American-English slant I was determined to give the translation, I felt free to sprinkle the text with slang, where I deemed appropriate, and even the odd Yiddishism (“these vacationing culture-vultures, these mid-summer mavens of the minor arts”). Socrates, or at least this thoroughly contemporary version of him, was, needless to say, very philosophical about it all. I’m now looking forward excitedly to meeting up with him again sometime soon in the screenplay Badiou is currently writing about the life of Plato.

Copyright 2013 by Susan Spitzer

The following essay on the role of the nightclub in Bollywood film is by Kush Varia, author of Bollywood: Gods, Glamour, and Gossip, our featured book of the week. For more on the book, you can also read an interview with Kush Varia or win a FREE copy of the book.

Nightclub scenes offer a variety of pleasures in Bollywood film, including visual spectacle in stages and settings, differing dance styles, and numerous costume changes. These scenes also position songs in a realistic setting as opposed to those that appear in the infamous Bollywood romantic dream sequences.

From the Fifties to the present we can trace recurring patterns in the presentation of the nightclub ranging from celebrations of different dance styles to explorations of moral issues. Protagonists role in the club also changes from being seated audience members or star attractions on stage to finally becoming revelers themselves.

In Aasha (1957) we get a sneak peak into a ladies-only cabaret (spot the male lead disguised in Islamic dress). Although the show is live, there is still a segue into fantasy as Vyjayanthimala’s character changes costume from a Dietrich-esque top hat and tails to pedal pushers and finally, appearing out of nowhere, a sky blue sequined dress topped off with a fez-style hat suggesting the exotic Arabian nights, a reoccurring theme in Bollywood film.

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The queen of the cabaret stage was the extremely versatile dancer Helen, whose exotic Burmese background increased the fantasy element of her scenes. In Howrah Bridge (1958) she takes the name of Chin Chin Choo and sings of her adventures with Aladdin and Sinbad.

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“When we open a book and turn its pages, our paleopoetic past is never very long ago or far away.”—Christopher Collins

The following essay is by Christopher Collins, author of Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination

In both biological and cultural evolution there is no turning back, no do-overs. As I began planning the project that would become the book, Paleopoetics, the principle of evolutionary biology that change is cumulative intrigued me the most. Steven Mithen had put it this way: “Evolution does not have the option of returning to the drawing board and beginning anew; it can only ever modify what has gone before. That is, of course, why we can only understand the modern mind by understanding the prehistory of the mind.” Culturally evolved skills, such as fire use, cooking, agriculture, writing, mathematics, and empirical science, like the genetically inherited traits upon which they are built, have been preserved and elaborated to generate further innovations, a progressive process that Michael Tomasello has called the “cultural ratchet.”

Then the idea struck me: there is no turning back because we carry within us our own biological past and nowhere is that past more systematically present than in our brain. It follows then that biological and cultural evolution form a continuum and, though the older functions of the brain are manifestly different from the newer functions, both sets are interdependent thanks to the plasticity of this organ. I subsequently became aware of “dual-systems theory,” a cognitive model that differentiates such opposites as impulse and planning, parallel and serial processing, nonverbal and verbal communication, and concrete and abstract thought. The primary goal of dual-systems theory is to explain illogical, maladaptive human behavior as the result of an unresolved conflict between the prehuman and the fully human brain.

While I find myself agreeing that conflict can arise when these opposite features compete for dominance, I can also see them as complementary functions. In Paleopoetics I explore the possibility that the arts, specifically the verbal arts, integrate these opposites, momentarily reconciling the old, long established modular centers with the more recently connected circuitry of the anatomically modern brain.

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“This strange happenstance of the DA 14 flyby and the Chelyabinsk explosion on the same day is a wake up call about how little we know actually know about space, even in our own region of the Solar System. What else is lurking around out there getting ready to give us a nasty surprise?”—Claude Piantadosi

Last week we featured Mankind Beyond Earth: The History, Science, and Future of Human Space Exploration, by Claude Piantadosi. Of course, at the end of last week a meteor hit earth and underscored Piantadosi’s argument that we need to continue study space. In the following post, Piantadosi recounts his reactions to last week’s event and what it means for science:

I arrived at the laboratory rather early last Friday morning and bumped into my colleague Dr. Jim Logan, who told me that a large meteor had just burst in the air over Russia—injuring more than a thousand people with flying glass and other debris.

“Jim,” I said, a little taken aback, “I thought your old NASA buddies claimed that this thing was supposed to miss us by 17,000 miles.”

“This was not Asteroid 2012 DA14,” he shot back. “This rock came in on a totally different trajectory.”
“Really; now that’s quite a coincidence. Thank goodness for the atmosphere,” I told him. “And knock on wood, still no human in recorded history has ever been killed by a meteor.”

“True… but millions of dinosaurs can’t say the same thing,” he said. “In fact, you could argue that if it wasn’t for the massive asteroid impact 65 million years ago, there wouldn’t be any humans.”
And if we have a repeat of that episode, there won’t be any humans left either.

According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., the so-called Chelyabinsk meteor was a rock 55 feet in diameter, weighing 10,000 tons, and traveling at some 40,000 mph when it hit our atmosphere and exploded. It was the largest air burst in a hundred years— since Tunguska in 1908. And the blast was estimated to be about 500 kilotons, the explosive force of 30 Hiroshima-sized bombs.

This strange happenstance of the DA 14 flyby and the Chelyabinsk explosion on the same day is a wake up call about how little we know actually know about space, even in our own region of the Solar System. What else is lurking around out there getting ready to give us a nasty surprise? Indeed, we are just beginning to catalog and track these objects, for instance, through the NASA/JPL Near-Earth Object Program, which has been in existence only since 1998.

In one respect, ignorance is bliss; we simply do not have the technology to protect ourselves from collisions with such high-velocity celestial bodies. However, we do have the technology to detect, categorize, and track these projectiles, and when it comes to that, as it inevitably will, to move people out of harm’s way. We must be sure that this first step is put into play and that the collection of this vital information remains a permanent part of our commitment to a meaningful, long-term strategy for space exploration. Perhaps over the next hundred years, we’ll develop the technological means to nudge these objects out of Earth-crossing orbits. But this set of circumstances does make one thing very clear: we simply cannot afford the struthonian approach of burying our heads in the sand.

Happy Valentine’s Day! In honor of the occasion, we have a post from Professor Roy Brand, author of LoveKnowledge: The Life of Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida, in which Brand discusses the relationship between love and knowledge.

Love and Knowledge
Roy Brand

What is the love that turns into knowledge and how is the knowledge we seek already a form of love?

LoveKnowledge is a book for lovers, but love is taken here in the widest sense, as the love of life and of humanity, the love for culture, for thinking and for art. Romantic love comes up numerous times, be it in Plato’s Symposium or Foucault’s History of Sexuality. And it is indeed carnal and passionate, far from the view that philosophy is all about abstractions and lofty ideas. But romantic love is a fairly new invention. And it is used nowadays for marketing purposes, such as in this Valentine’s Day. The general Greek word for love is philia, which applies indifferently to the feelings one might have to his family, friends, and lovers. Thomas Mann expresses this in beautiful prose in The Magic Mountain:

Isn’t it grand, Isn’t it good, that language has only one word for everything we associate with love- from utter sanctity to the most fleshly lust? The result is perfect clarity in ambiguity, for love cannot be disembodied even in its most sanctified forms, nor is without sanctity even in its most fleshly…Irresolute? But in God’s name, leave the meaning of love unresolved! Unresolved—that is life and humanity, and it would betray a dreary lack of subtlety to worry about it.

To achieve a “perfect clarity in ambiguity” might be the very purpose of philosophy–a practice of love that begins with not knowing and teaches us how to live with uncertainty without being crippled by hesitation.

Today is Valentine’s Day! In honor of the occasion, we have a post from Lawrence J. Friedman, author of The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet, in which Friedman discusses Erich Fromm’s views on love, as articulated in his book The Art of Loving.

Erich Fromm had many “lives”. He was a political activist, a psychoanalyst, a theologian, a personality theorist, a social psychologist, a philosopher, and a clinician. Fromm wrote a great many books. Only one sold less than 1,000,000 copies. Through these volumes, Fromm conveyed the most complex thoughts of Einstein, Goethe, Darwin, Freud, Marx, and other intellectual giants in a way that readers everywhere could understand. In a very real sense, he was an “educator to the world.”

Fromm is primarily known for two of his books. Escape from Freedom (1941) addressed murderous dictators like Hitler who were running rampant over Europe and threatening to extinguish millions. For Fromm, hatred and sado-masochism were basic to their mass appeal. The Art of Loving (1956), on the other hand, was very different. It concerned hope and joyfulness – the upside of human experience. Whereas Escape from Freedom sold roughly 5,000,000 copies, The Art of Loving marketed 25,000,000 copies globally and continues to sell well.

Why has The Art of Loving had such an enormous attraction? Why has it competed with flowers and candy as a Valentine’s Day gift? Why does it appeal to my current Harvard undergraduates just as it appealed, half a century ago, to the undergraduates I studied with at the University of California?

We all seem to be animated by love and downcast by its absence. It is perhaps the most upbeat emotion of human existence. Fromm’s delineation of love is clear. Love requires a good deal of effort on many fronts and for the duration of one’s life. One has to love oneself, other(s), and all of humankind. For Fromm, love is Biblical command to “love thy neighbor as thyself” and then some. Love requires “central relatedness” – allowing the deepest region or essence of one’s spiritual self to enter another self and to extend that entrance into all of humankind. There is a reciprocity of feeling and commitment that begins with self understanding, extends to parental understanding, takes the form of erotic mutuality with a partner, and extends into all of humankind. Fromm’s view of love resembles the Quaker concept of the “inner light of God” that connects (on the deepest possible level) the self, the other, and all of humankind.

If Fromm’s explication of the meaning of “love” was not unprecedented, he advanced it with such animation and freshness of vision that it has appealed to millions. He offered up an inspiring sense of hopefulness in a world that he found blighted for most of his life by war, terrorism, bigotry, famine, and other dispiriting ills. But there was another quality that added a zest and conveyed a credibility to Fromm’s discussion of love. He was in love at a very deep level as he wrote his book about love.

Fromm had three wives and several affairs. The first marriage, to Frieda Fromm Reichmann, ended in divorce. Henny Gurland, his second wife, committed suicide. He started dating Annis Freeman shortly after Gurland’s suicide. Raised in Alabama, Freeman was tall, sensuous, and beautiful. Whereas Fromm Reichmann and Gurland had been Jewish, intellectual, and professional, Freeman was a Gentile and had no vocation. She practiced astrology, meditated, enjoyed tai chi, and took some interest in Eastern spiritual traditions. Despite their differences, Freeman fell quickly and deeply in love with Fromm. She considered all of his thoughts to be brilliant and was thrilled by his every mannerism. From the start, Fromm professed a lifelong commitment to Freeman. He enthusiastically indulged her with tea, pastries, flowers, and all else she might desire. When Fromm was with Freeman, there was not much else that he could desire – not even an affair a film celebrity or dancer.

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“As a lifelong investigator, I have a deep belief that maintaining our research leadership in all facets of science is critical to our nation’s continued success as a forward-thinking civilization. Despite its great costs and high risks, space exploration is still a wholly worthwhile investment for America.”—Claude Piantadosi

Our featured book this week is Mankind Beyond Earth by Claude Piantadosi (remember to enter our Book Giveaway for the chance to win a FREE copy!)

In the following interview, Piantadosi outlines his book and makes a compelling case for manned space exploration in the twenty-first century.

Q: How does your book approach human space exploration?

Claude A. Piantadosi: Mankind Beyond Earth uses space exploration as a model to help guide the reader to a deeper understanding of why we explore and how important exploration is to our species. Space exploration, like past explorations of the oceans and the continents, is ultimately about people and about our ability to adapt. Space is in many ways our most challenging frontier, because the resources we have to advance space exploration are very limited, and they must be put to good use both to develop new technologies and to explore such a uniquely hostile environment. This requires deep scientific knowledge and careful planning, as well as patience, particularly where peoples’ lives are at stake.

Q: Why should we keep sending people into space when robots will do?

CAP: This is one of the most common questions I’m asked by physical scientists, who understand that the cost of a human space mission is at least ten times that of a comparable unmanned mission. The capabilities of robotic probes are increasing dramatically and most of our greatest discoveries in space have come from robotic missions, such as the Mars Rovers. However, the man versus machine tug-of-war creates a false dichotomy. There are roles for both types of missions to space, as my examination of the history of our space program in the book illustrates.

The ability to set the horizons for human and robotic missions in proportion and in tandem is important to our future success in space. A forward-thinking hypothetical is the use of remote mining technology to dig an underground space habitat, say into a hillside or crater rim on Mars. In talking to a couple of professors at the Colorado School of Mines, they think (and I agree) it would be preferable to have the “remote miner” fairly close to the excavation site, perhaps on the moon Deimos or in Mars orbit, instead of 50 million miles away on Earth, where a radio signal takes about four minutes each way and would be accessible to the excavator less than half of the time due to the daily rotations of the two planets on their axes.

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The following post is by Saikat Majumdar, author of Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire. In the essay, Majumdar explains some of the central arguments and interventions of his book.

In praise of the book, Rebecca L. Walkowitz wrote, “Prose of the World is an enormously compelling and vivid study…. The result is an ambitious, timely, and eloquent account of the relationship between early-twentieth-century fiction and the contemporary global novel in English.”

World literature in English today makes up a field of comparative study of its own. It defies the usual equation of nation, language, and literature that has often formed the dominant model of studying comparative literature. To tell the story of this literature is also to tell the story of the British Empire. Prose of the World is an attempt to provide a cultural history of the global British Empire through a map of fiction produced at four representative points across it: Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and India.

However, the most distinctive aspect of Prose of the World is that it is an attempt to provide a cultural history of empire through structures of feeling and emotion. One necessary characteristic of any empire is that it is divided into a metropolis and its peripheries. The metropolis is where political and economic power is centered, usually the imperial capital, and its surrounding areas. Hard power naturally breeds soft power, so the metropolis also appears to be the cultural epicenter of the empire, its singular source of excellence in art, literature, fashion, in short, the center of all excitement, historical progress, and eventfulness. The great capitals of the global Anglophone and Francophone empires, London and Paris, were such metropolitan centers, especially in the heydays of imperialism in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Colonized nations were located along the political and cultural periphery of empire, far from its metropolitan center. Historical and anthropological research as well as literary narratives, reveal how the people in the colonies, often long after decolonization, experienced local and immediate life as lagging far behind in progress, devoid of eventfulness, and generally stifling, claustrophobic and dull. One of the greatest ideological consequences of empire is the feeling that history is concentrated in the metropolitan heart of empire, while the colonial periphery is a place where nothing happens, where life is banal, boring and devoid of historical meaning.

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This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win a FREE copy of Rewiring the Real. Today, we have a guest post from Professor Taylor, in which he discusses Rewiring the Real, Refiguring the Spiritual, and Recovering Place, and tells why Rewiring the Real might have begun, “Philosophy has lost its way.”

“Philosophy has lost its way”
Mark C. Taylor

Rewiring the Real is the second book in a trilogy that includes Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy (2012), and Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill (2014). Refiguring the Spiritual begins, “Art has lost its way;” Rewiring the Real might have begun, “Philosophy has lost its way.” During the latter half of the twentieth-century, art and money entered into an unholy alliance in which artists eager to cash in on new money are selling works to financiers who resell them in hedge funds and private equity funds designed for ultra-rich investors looking for new ways to “diversify their portfolios with asset-backed securities.” While artists are trying to become Wall Street players, philosophers are trying to become scientists. As their work becomes more abstract and highly specialized, philosophers become less concerned about human problems and real world issues.

For art and philosophy to recover their missions, art must become more philosophical and philosophy must become more artistic in and through a rethinking of the interrelationship of art, philosophy and religion. This will require not only a change in substance but, more important, a change in style. This is not an original idea but can be traced to the publication of Kant’s pivotal Critique of Judgment (1790). It is no exaggeration to insist that this work has directly and indirectly shaped all philosophical, theological, artistic and, indeed, cultural discussions and production for more than two centuries. Kant provided the definition of art that became normative for Modernism. During the decade of the 1790s, discussions about Kant’s critical philosophy among a remarkable group of philosophers and writers, including, inter alia, Hegel, Schelling, Schiller, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin, Novalis, and the Schlegel brothers, led to a reconfiguration of the relationship among philosophy, art and religion. While leading thinkers in the eighteenth century had interpreted religion in either epistemological or ethical terms, writers, who gathered in Jena during the seminal decade of the 1790s, reconceived religion in terms of art and aesthetics. In their works, art displaced religion as the primary means for the exploration and expression of religious and spiritual concerns. Some of philosophers who have been most influential recently – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida – are as much artists as philosophers. But they have all remained writers, whose works are literary or even poetic. Some of the leading twentieth-century visual artists – Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Malevich, Rothko, Reinhardt, Newman, Pollack – insist that art has a spiritual dimension.

Refiguring the Spiritual begins with a critique of what I describe as the “financialization of art.” What Andy Warhol is to consumer capitalism, Jeff Koons is to financial capitalism. But there is an importance difference between Andy and his epigone Jeff. While Warhol’s ironic detachment leaves the viewer uncertain whether he is criticizing or endorsing consumerism, there is no ambiguity about Koons. He eagerly endorses practices of the Wall Street wizards who pay excessive prices for eye candy intended to make them feel good. Beuys, Barney, Turrell and Goldsworthy reject this tendency in contemporary art. Each in his own way extends the preoccupations of the modern avant-garde art by drawing on different spiritual traditions (Beuys, Anthroposophy; Barney, Celtic and Masonic mythology; Turrell, Quakerism and Hopi myths and rituals; Goldsworthy, Celtic mythology). Their works are difficult and demanding – they cannot be consumed quickly but take time to appreciate. Though many of their works are expensive to create, they cannot be easily commodified. The primary purpose of their works is not to market them for a profit but to create the opportunity for the cultivation of personal and, by extension, social transformation.

Rewiring the Real extends my analysis from art to literature by analyzing one novel by four important writers: William Gaddis, The Recognitions; Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark; Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves; Don DeLillo, Underworld. Though these writers are very different, they share an appreciation for the ways in which recent technological innovations (Gaddis, electronic media and communications; Powers, virtual reality; Danielewski, Internet and World Wide Web; DeLillo, nuclear power and global financial networks) harbor a latent spirituality in an era that is too often labeled secular and posthuman. Rather than merely critically analyzing these novels, I attempt to engage the authors in a conversation that expands the inquiry beyond the boundaries each writer defines. As these writers begin to “talk” among themselves, we begin to see how their work can help readers understand the ways in which the very sense of reality is morphing in the global world of financial capitalism.

If style is substance and substance is style, then writing must change. In previous works (e.g., Imagologies: Media Philosophy, Grave Matters, Mystic Bones, Hiding, and Motel Réal: Las Vegas, Nevada), I have used different styles of writing and visual design to convey the ideas I am attempting to express. This ongoing experiment continues with this trilogy: Refiguring the Spiritual uses images and design to fashion arguments and Rewiring the Real includes accounts of some of my own artwork as well as my first attempt at writing fiction. Recovering Place will be my most ambitious experiment so far. In this multifaceted work, I take philosophy off the page by creating land art and sculpture (metal, rock, stone and bone) in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, where I live. In addition to a series of aphoristic reflections about the importance of recovering place in a world that is becoming ever more virtual, the book also includes original photographs I have taken of my art in its natural setting. As Kierkegaard, insisted long ago, many of the most important things in life can only be communicated indirectly. I would add to this that there are things that we can apprehend but not precisely comprehend. Through stylistic innovation and artistic design, I have attempted to create performative works that work at multiple levels to transform apprehension as well as introduce new ways of understanding the world in which we dwell.

Mark C. Taylor
Stone Hill

The following post is by Kara Newman, author of The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets. The post was originally published on the blog A Life of Spice:

Few people can claim to have had a food epiphany while reading Barron’s, but that’s what happened to me. In a roundtable discussion of market experts, after many dry pages about where the S&P 500 Index and gold bullion might end the year, commodities trader Jim Rogers offered this wisdom: “Buy breakfast.”

He was referring to futures contracts sold on frozen orange juice and pork bellies, which he expected to appreciate in value during the coming year). But to me, it was more than an abstract investment idea, and I thought of the cartons of Tropicana and BLTs I’d consumed over the years.

Although I had a vague notion of the agriculture and manufacturing associated with bringing food to the table, never before had I contemplated the secret financial life of my meals.

At the time, I was working as a financial editor for a consulting firm, overseeing a team that churned out daily stock and bond market reports for corporate clients. I was given a new and serendipitous task: write a daily commodities report.

Suddenly, I was hungry on the commodities beat, and I wanted to learn more. I enrolled in a course on derivatives offered by the Futures Industry Institute and taught by a commodities trader. The class was geared toward prepping eager young traders for a certification exam. I opened my coursebook, and flipped past the spiderweb diagrams of hedging strategies to the list of products traded as commodities.

It read like a menu: The Livestock category, I read, included cattle and hogs (live and the fabled “pork bellies,” fresh or frozen, a commodity now ubiquitous on trendy restaurant menus but which no longer trade). Meanwhile, the Grains sector spanned the range of wheat, soybeans, oats, and corn. And the Softs group referred to cocoa, coffee, sugar, orange juice and, puzzlingly, also cotton and lumber. (I’m deliberately omitting the distinctly non-edible energy and metals sectors, though they are important commodities too.)

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In the following post, Kate Briggs, the translator of How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, discusses the challenges and joys of translating Roland Barthes.

“If I identify with Robinson Crusoe it’s not only because it took me far longer to write the lecture notes again in English than it did for Barthes to produce them in French (a matter of years versus a matter of months). It is also because translating Barthes has been an extended apprenticeship in writing.”—Kate Briggs

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of a handful of literary works that feature prominently in Barthes’s How to Live Together, and I re-read it for the purposes of the translation. This time around I was struck by one of the projects Robinson Crusoe sets himself quite early on in the novel: he decides to make a table.

The problem is Robinson Crusoe has never made a table before, just as he has never planted a crop before, glazed earthenware or cultivated goats. Of course, Robinson Crusoe is familiar with what it is he’s trying to make. He’s not about to make something wholly unprecedented—to invent the table, for example. His problem is how to make a table in these new, unlikely circumstances. He soon realizes that the methods used back in Hull, England will not work here: he doesn’t have the materials to hand, or the tools, plus there is the issue of personal aptitude (again, he’s never done this before). It is the unavailability of those original means of production that makes his problem interesting: as Robinson Crusoe is well aware, here on his deserted island there can be no question of making a table in the same way as the tables he’d written on prior to the shipwreck. This is the method he eventually comes up with:

If I wanted a board, I had no other way but to cut down a tree, set it on an edge before me, and hew it flat on either side with my axe, til I had brought it to be as thin as a plank, and then dub it smooth with my adze. It is true, by this method I could make but one board out of a whole tree, but this I had no remedy for but patience, any more than I had for the prodigious deal of time and labor which it took me up to make a plank or board. But my time or labor was little worth, and so it was as well employed one way as another…

So: one tree felled for every plank of wood. Some years later, Robinson Crusoe completes his task. The method is almost comical in its laboriousness (Wasn’t there a serviceable tree-trunk or rock ledge nearby?) and yet it is the closest analogy I have to the work of translation.

If I identify with Robinson Crusoe it’s not only because it took me far longer to write the lecture notes again in English than it did for Barthes to produce them in French (a matter of years versus a matter of months). It is also because translating Barthes has been an extended apprenticeship in writing – in writing an extant text again in entirely new circumstances, and with very different means at my disposal. What excites me most about translation – but also one of the things I find most difficult – is the way it forces you out of any acquired writing habits.

Translation is an exercise in uncovering new resources in the familiar language, expanding your vocabulary, giving a different cadence to your sentences. But actually allowing this to happen is not always so easy. I’d often read back over a passage I’d translated and realize that I’d been trying to make Barthes’s syntax fit some preconceived idea of what makes a good sentence. I had missed the point of the writing lesson. It was also important to remember that I was working with lecture notes, not books. The writing I was translating was originally intended to be read aloud in the amphitheatres of the Collège de France, a bit like a score for an oral performance. So the lesson in how to write was in fact a lesson in how to write a lecture course: how to make writing sound as if it had been written to be spoken, how to achieve Barthes’s unique combination of authority and humility– a quality he terms ‘non-arrogance’. Of the many revisions I made to the translation, it was the moments when he addresses his anticipated audience directly – wondering about their interest in his course, for example (Are they bored? Are they disappointed?) – that I found myself returning to over and again. I was working with a written trace of the lectures; nonetheless, those moments seemed especially ephemeral – it felt important to catch them in the right way.

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