#eliot a. cohen

[quotesfrommyreading]

Much of the public discussion of Ukraine reveals a tendency to patronize that country and others that escaped Russian rule. As Toomas Ilves, a former president of Estonia, acidly observed, “When I was at university in the mid-1970s, no one referred to Germany as ‘the former Third Reich.’ And yet today, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we keep on being referred to as ‘former Soviet bloc countries.’” Tropes about Ukrainian corruption abound, not without reason—but one may also legitimately ask why so many members of Congress enter the House or Senate with modest means and leave as multimillionaires, or why the children of U.S. presidents make fortunes off foreign countries, or, for that matter, why building in New York City is so infernally expensive.

The latest, richest example of Western condescension came in a report by German military intelligence that complains that although the Ukrainians are good students in their training courses, they are not following Western doctrine and, worse, are promoting officers on the basis of combat experience rather than theoretical knowledge. Similar, if less cutting, views have leaked out of the Pentagon.

Criticism by the German military of any country’s combat performance may be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the Bundeswehr has not seen serious combat in nearly eight decades. In Afghanistan, Germany was notorious for having considerably fewer than 10 percent of its thousands of in-country troops outside the wire of its forward operating bases at any time. One might further observe that when, long ago, the German army did fight wars, it, too, tended to promote experienced and successful combat leaders, as wartime armies usually do.

American complaints about the pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive and its failure to achieve rapid breakthroughs are similarly misplaced. The Ukrainians indeed received a diverse array of tanks and armored vehicles, but they have far less mine-clearing equipment than they need. They tried doing it our way—attempting to pierce dense Russian defenses and break out into open territory—and paid a price. After 10 days they decided to take a different approach, more careful and incremental, and better suited to their own capabilities (particularly their precision long-range weapons) and the challenge they faced. That is, by historical standards, fast adaptation. By contrast, the United States Army took a good four years to develop an operational approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq that yielded success in defeating the remnants of the Baathist regime and al-Qaeda-oriented terrorists.

A besetting sin of big militaries, particularly America’s, is to think that their way is either the best way or the only way. As a result of this assumption, the United States builds inferior, mirror-image militaries in smaller allies facing insurgency or external threat. These forces tend to fail because they are unsuited to their environment or simply lack the resources that the U.S. military possesses in plenty. The Vietnamese and, later, the Afghan armies are good examples of this tendency—and Washington’s postwar bad-mouthing of its slaughtered clients, rather than critical self-examination of what it set them up for, is reprehensible.

The Ukrainians are now fighting a slow, patient war in which they are dismantling Russian artillery, ammunition depots, and command posts without weapons such as American ATACMS and German Taurus missiles that would make this sensible approach faster and more effective. They know far more about fighting Russians than anyone in any Western military knows, and they are experiencing a combat environment that no Western military has encountered since World War II. Modesty, never an American strong suit, is in order.

  —  Western Diplomats Need to Stop Whining About Ukraine

[deadpresidents]

You used to list the books you've been reading every few weeks but I haven't seen a post like that in a minute. Anything good that you've been reading?

It has been a long time since I last posted one of those lists of recent reads -- probably about six months, so I'm not going to list everything I've read since then. And I don't remember exactly what I included last time, so hopefully I don't double-dip.

•Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician [2024] by James M. Bradley (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) If you want to make me happy, just publish a new book about one of America's more obscure Presidents. And in December 2024, we got a new biography of Martin Van Buren with fresh research from sources not previously available to earlier biographers, resulting in an updated, comprehensive book about Van Buren that now becomes one of the definitive biographies of our eighth President.

•Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents [2024] by Nigel Hamilton (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) I'm also an easy mark for books about Jefferson Davis -- not out of any sort of affinity for him or the Confederacy, of course -- but just because of his unique place in history as an American President who also wasn't really an American President (although, technically, he was.) Throw Lincoln into the mix and you don't have to sell me very hard on this book.

•Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East [2024] by Robert Fisk (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) I wish Fisk had lived to write about the latest Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it doesn't require much imagination to know what he would have thought about it: he wrote honestly, critically, and with deep understanding about the subject for 40+ years while reporting from the heart of the struggle in the Middle East.

•The Garfield Orbit [1978] by Margaret Leech and Harry J. Brown (BOOK)

•The World and Richard Nixon [1987] by C.L. Sulzberger (BOOK)

•John Lewis: A Life [2024] by David Greenberg [2024] (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000-Year History of Iraq [2024] by Bartle Bull (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare On How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall [2023] by Eliot A. Cohen (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•A Very Personal Presidency: Lyndon Johnson in the White House [1968] by Hugh Sidey (BOOK)

•The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis [2024] by Michael W. Higgins (BOOK | KINDLE)

•The President: A Minute-by-Minute Account of a Week in the Life of Gerald Ford [1975] by John Hersey (BOOK | KINDLE)

•The Lone Star: The Life of John Connally [1989] by James Reston Jr. (BOOK)

•The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky [2024] by Simon Shuster (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great [2024] by Rachel Kousser (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•American Gothic: The Story of America's Legendary Theatrical Family -- Junius, Edwin, and John Wilkes Booth [1992] by Gene Smith (BOOK | KINDLE)

•Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire [2002] by Tom Chaffin (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps [2024] by Jonn Elledge (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•Eisenhower For Our Time [2024] by Steven Wagner (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

•The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy [1996] by Robert D. Kaplan (BOOK | KINDLE)

•The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat [1983] by Ryszard Kapuściński [Translated by William R. Brand & Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand] (BOOK)

•A Heartbeat Away: The Investigation and Resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew [1974] by Richard M. Cohen and Jules Witcover (BOOK)

•American Roulette: The History and Dilemma of the Vice Presidency [Revised & Updated, 1972] by Donald Young (BOOK)

•Centers of Power in the Arab Gulf States [2024] by Kristian Coates Ulrichsen (BOOK | KINDLE)

•The Formation of the UAE: State-Building and Arab Nationalism in the Middle East [2024] by Kristi Barnwell (BOOK | KINDLE)

•Iranian-Saudi Rivalry Since 1979: In the Words of Kings and Clerics [2023] by Talal Mohammad (BOOK | KINDLE)

•The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned [2024] by John Strausbaugh (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Just as Andrei Sakharov was the most prominent late twentieth century exponent of the Westernizer school of Russian political and social thought, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the best manifestation of the Slavophile school. This rehashing by Eliot A Cohen of Solzhenitsyn's Harvard commencement address from 1978 is the day's essential read. While clearing out a storage room filled with books, I came across a slim volume, A World Split Apart, the text of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard commencement address. I remember listening to the speech at the time and being disconcerted by the petulant commentary it elicited. Solzhenitsyn had been in the United States only three years, having been expelled by the Soviet government and living as a recluse in Vermont. The consensus—certainly among the great and the good of Cambridge, Massachusetts—was that he was an ultranationalist, a reactionary, and, above all, an ingrate. At the time, I thought the reaction peevish and beside the point. Rereading the speech, it seems even more urgent that we pay heed to his excoriating critique of Western liberalism.

Solzhenitsyn did misunderstand some of the key elements of Western, and specifically American, liberal democracy. He was no democrat, although he unreservedly opposed cruel and arbitrary government. It is true, too, that his deep religious faith and mystical belief in Russia’s destiny were and remain alien to most non-Russians. And it is true, as well, that he had cordial if cautious relations in the early 2000s with Vladimir Putin, although he was staunchly in favor of letting the Soviet Union’s subject nations, including even Ukraine, go their own way. But what matters now as it did then is his critique of us. We have just seen a feckless House of Representatives pass a ludicrous impeachment of a Cabinet secretary by one vote—and then skip town while avoiding a vote on aid to Ukraine. We have seen the West’s inability to prevent the murder, by direct or indirect means, of a heroic dissident, Alexei Navalny, and the gleeful insouciance of the Russian dictator hours after it was reported. We have seen a foreign war used as an excuse to hound Jews on campuses and in the streets, and we have the horrifying spectacle of a possible return to the presidency of one of the most corrupt and dangerous politicians in American history. Which makes it worthwhile to return to Solzhenitsyn’s speech, a dark reflection for a different dark time.

The speech begins with a slap to our face: “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.” That is as true now as it was then, possibly truer. At home, a great political party collapses in craven subservience to a demagogue. Abroad, we fear to arm Ukraine adequately to defeat a monstrous aggressor; we fear to punish an Iranian regime that has repeatedly sought to kill our people and occasionally succeeds; we fear to face the fact that all of us in the liberal-democratic world are spending way less than what we need to defend ourselves. Domestically, we fear to dissent from the orthodoxies of our respective subcultures. Nowhere is this more true than among those who should prize intellectual courage, as Solzhenitsyn did. “Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad.” When the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression consistently rates America’s oldest and most prestigious university one of the very worst for freedom of speech, something is deeply amiss. And that is, of course, Harvard, the very university at which Solzhenitsyn spoke, whose motto is Veritas—“Truth.”

One is hard-pressed today to name more than a handful of truly courageous professors, deans, and university presidents willing to jeopardize their careers and their social standing by taking unpopular stands—unyielding opposition to DEI rules and bureaucracies, for example. The very notions that reasonable people can disagree on important matters, that one’s point of view reflects individual thought rather than identity or tribe, and that physical intimidation has no place in civilized politics are all at risk. Solzhenitsyn talked about intellectuals because, as a Russian of that ilk, he believed that writers were the conscience of their countries. For politicians he had little use, but surely courage is sorely lacking there as well. When Donald Trump sneered at John McCain, a heroic figure if ever there was one, who had suffered terribly for his country and loved it unreservedly, Trump paid no political price. Which means that the problem was not so much Trump as it is us. It has been a very long time since a rising young American politician, badly injured in his own war service, published Profiles in Courage and was acclaimed for it.

At the root of the West’s troubles, Solzhenitsyn believed, was the view that man is the measure of all things, that social problems of all kinds can be managed away, that evil is not embedded in human nature, and that the ultimate purpose of life is happiness. In large measure, we in the West still believe these things. Above all we talk endlessly about happiness, as measured by psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists. To which Solzhenitsyn observed, if “man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die.” And as he pointed out, if such a credo holds, “for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good?” Which may explain the struggles of many armies, including the American, to fill their ranks.

By Eliot A. Cohen

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Eliot A. Cohen

Published: Dec 23, 2023

Like many alumni of Harvard, I have been following the misadventures of President Claudine Gay—first her coolly calibrated reflections on arguments for the genocide of Jews, and now accusations about the intellectual integrity of her published work—with appalled fascination. It is the latter topic on which I can claim some expertise.

I learned about plagiarism at Harvard by an accident of academic politics. The department of government, where I had received my Ph.D., had an opening for an assistant professor in the field of international affairs, and it had (in the department’s opinion) two equally attractive candidates. With Solomonic wisdom, they divided the position in half, offering me and my competitor half-time administrative positions. Mine was as the Allston Burr Senior Tutor in Quincy House.

The Harvard houses are modified versions of Oxford or Cambridge colleges. They are residences but not dormitories. Associated with each house was a group of faculty and visiting fellows who regularly dined and spoke there, and who helped constitute each house’s Senior Common Room. There was a staff of resident tutors, mainly graduate students, who taught sections of major courses and advised students in a variety of ways. And then there were the master and the senior tutor, also resident. The former presided over the collective life of the house; the latter was responsible for the students as individuals.

I should note here that the term senior tutor connoted a function that was chiefly educational. Harvard now calls them resident deans, because they came to do everything but educate, including directing students to mental-health resources and responding to the varied crises of a student’s life in the pressure cooker that is the college.. Harvard dropped the term master in 2016 because it reeked of the antebellumplantation. (Oddly enough, this compunction has not prevented Harvard from continuing to offer master’s degrees, for which it charges very healthy tuition.)

Harvard then took plagiarism seriously—and in one way still does, disciplining dozens of students every year for this gravest of academic sins. Even transgressions falling short of plagiarism could still constitute “misuse of sources,” for which a year’s probation and suspension from participation in extracurricular activities were the usual response. Plagiarists, meanwhile—those who had lifted someone else’s language without quotation marks or citation—were bounced from the college for a year, during which time they were required to work at a nonacademic job (no year-long backpacking trip) and refrain from visiting Cambridge. They would be readmitted after submitting a statement that examined their original misdeed and reflected on it.

The senior tutor was the one who received any initial complaint from a faculty member, some of whom were (or feigned to be) shocked when they learned that plagiarism could have material consequences. They would assemble the dossier, counsel the student, and present the case to the administrative board, composed of all the senior tutors and a few faculty and deans, about 20 people in all. The senior tutor would present the student’s case to his or her colleagues, and we would deliberate.

If the board voted to rusticate the offender, the student could make a personal appeal, which was surprisingly rare. After long conversations with their senior tutor, most of the students understood that they had gone seriously astray, and left with a feeling of, if not relief, then of catharsis. They could return to school with the slate wiped clean, and with much greater maturity and sense of purpose. This was, in part, because most plagiarists are not depraved or even lazy, but simply insecure. They came back as much more independent and self-reliant characters, which was what we wanted.

It was a very good system. Harvard’s approach to plagiarism then rested on the notion that even a disciplinary process should be educational. At its heart was the importance of accepting responsibility for one’s actions. It was not enough to correct the errant document; it was necessary to look at oneself in the mirror and say, “I did this, and it was wrong.” I believe that this approach was rooted in Harvard’s lingering mission of developing leaders of integrity and courage.

A leader must begin with a deeply rooted sense of responsibility; from there one moves to accountability, the ability to own one’s organization’s failings. For example, if Jewish students are being harassed and threatened on the university campus where one is president, it means saying, “I own this. I will fix it,” in simple and unqualified terms.

The members of the administrative board were predominantly teachers and scholars, not administrators, and that was crucial. We did not bring in lawyers. We did not hire expensive plagiarism experts as consultants. We read the materials carefully (the dossiers could be quite thick), deliberated, and made a decision. If a senior tutor got carried away defending a student from their house, their colleagues would gently but firmly nail the case to the undisputed facts. And when faculty members tried to intercede, they were equally firmly told that they were responsible for the grading side of the education, and we were covering the disciplinary side.

It is undisputed that Claudine Gay used other scholars’ language, often with the slightest modification or none, and occasionally without even a footnote acknowledgment. Were that not so, she would not have recently requested corrections to work dating back to her dissertation. I have looked at the evidence presented in various places, none of which has been controverted, and it is clear to me that this is plagiarism. For example, as The Harvard Crimson reports, her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation includes this paragraph:

The average turnout rate seems to increase linearly as African-Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. (If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one way to think about bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatterplot. A linear form would only result if the changes in one race’s turnout were compensated by changes in the turnout of the other race across the graph.)

A 1996 scholarly paper by Bradley Palmquist and Stephen Voss reads as follows:

The average turnout rate seems to decrease linearly as African Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot (resulting only when changes in one race’s turnout rate somehow compensated for changes in the other’s across the graph).

It is a pretty complete steal, with the bizarre substitution of “increase” for “decrease.”

Even if, in the most tolerant and sympathetic of readings, this and similar copying merely constitute “misuse of sources,” it is disqualifying for a position of leadership at any university. Her failure to accept responsibility in stark and unqualified terms makes matters worse.

The Harvard Corporation has stood by President Gay, even as scandal has mounted. The New York Post reports that when it first raised the plagiarism accusations with Harvard, the response was not a comment on the evidence, but a 15-page letter from Harvard’s defamation lawyer. Instead of standing up for Harvard’s motto, Veritas, (“truth”), the corporation has hunkered down.

Students have a keen scent for the stink of hypocrisy; they understand Gay’s original misdeeds and the evasions of the Harvard Corporation. They may even realize that something has gone deeply awry with the university when a Harvard professor dismisses the claims as a right-wing attack and tells The New York Times,“If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting [the accusations] some credence,” as though the facts depend on the politics of those who point them out.

I have no idea how as a teacher at Harvard today I could look an undergraduate in the eye and hold forth about why plagiarism is a violation of the values inherent in the academic enterprise. They would laugh, openly or secretly, at the corruption and double standards. And I would not blame them for doing so.

President Gay is in a tough spot. The Harvard Corporation deserves to be in a much tougher spot, because it has betrayed the values that the university once cherished and that it still proclaims. In both cases, the remedy indicated is the one we senior tutors applied to many a student years ago: fess up, withdraw, and reflect.

[thatwritererinoriordan]

[mariailoveyou-guerin]

If y’all know Veronica Mars the oc and LoVe or Sethmer you’ll know exactly what I mean by this!

ofc pope is Veronica Seth Cohen and Alec

Cleo is Summer Roberts and Elliott

JJ is Logan Echolls and leverage Parker

no one knows them like I know them!

[andhumanslovedstories]

can i get a list of that book haul? those look like some interesting books, especially the non-fiction ones

ah yes, the book haul featured in this episode of our podcast, which I said was a financial intervention for my book buying habits, but relistening to it, I realize that Cyrus doesn't ACTUALLY dissuade me from going this apeshit on books again. So I'm going to go with a better accountability: I'm gonna schedule this post to reblog in six months, and if I haven't read at least five of these books, I'll think of a real stern consequence for myself.

(I will not learn. I will not change. I'm gonna die under a collapsed pile of books I keep meaning to get to.)

Fiction:

The Twelve Dancing Princesses and Other Fairy Tales retold by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, illustrated by Kay Nielsen

Groove, Bang, and Jive Around by Steve Cannon

Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park

You've Got Mail: The Perils of Pigeon Post (volume 2) by Blackegg

In Praise of the Stepmother by Mario Vargas Llosa

The Disabled Tyrants Beloved Pet Fish (volume 3) by Xue Shan Fei Hu

Over the Gate by Miss Read

Other Names for Love by Taymour Soomro

Rules for Ghosting by Shelly Jay Shore

The Eyes are the Best Part by Monika Kim

Kinnporshe (volume 1) by Daemi

The Reformatory by Tanararive Due

Nonfiction:

An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence by Zeinab Badawi

Trapped in the Mirror: Adult Children of Narcissists in Their Struggle for Self by Elan Golomb, PhD

By His Own Hand?: The Mysterious Death of Meriwether Lewis edited by John D.W. Guice

The Father by Arthur D. Coleman, M.D., and Libby Lee Coleman, PhD

Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead

A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest (Third Edition) by Robert H. Ruby, John A. Brown, and Cary C. Collins

Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive by Eliot Stein

Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell

An Intimate Life: Sex, Love, and My Journey as a Surrogate Partner by Cheryl T. Cohen-Greene with Lorna Garano

Poetry:

Wound From the Mouth of a Wound by Torrin A. Greathouse

[mariacallous]

Especially since it's Eliot Cohen making that bullshit argument

[sweetdreamsjeff]

The poetry that inspired Jeff Buckley

Aimee Ferrier

Sun 1 October 2023 21:15, UK

Voices as incredible as the one belonging to Jeff Buckley don’t come around too often. Unfortunately, after releasing one record, Grace, Buckley, with all his potential, was taken away too soon. At the age of 30, the singer went for a swim from which he never returned, drowning in the Mississippi River.

Yet, his legacy lives on as one of the most influential artists to emerge from the 1990s, and his music is widely celebrated today for its emotional and lyrical complexity. Not only did Buckley possess an otherworldly voice, but he was also an extremely gifted guitar player and writer, with all his talents combining to create a masterful body of work.

Even when Buckley was covering other artists’ songs, such as ‘Lilac Wine’, ‘The Other Woman’ and ‘Hallelujah’, he imbued the pieces with his own distinctive style. Yet, his penchant for covers wasn’t a reflection of an aversion to writing. Buckley knew how to pen a stunningly poetic track, with songs like ‘Lover, You Should’ve Come Over’ and ‘Morning Theft’ suggesting that even if Buckley didn’t have the vocal pipes he was gifted with, he’d get by just fine as a writer.

Buckley took inspiration from many different writers and musicians when writing his own songs. Musically, Buckley looked back to folk artists like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and, of course, his own father, Tim Buckley, from whom he was estranged. Elsewhere, he loved the work of Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the rich tones of Nina Simone, and Led Zeppelin, calling Robert Plant “my man”.

However, when it came to his literary inspirations, Buckley had an extensive book collection, which he no doubt looked to for ideas when writing his lyrics. He owned a lot of poetry, with Rainer Maria Rilke proving to be a particular favourite. Not only did Buckley own Dunio Elegies, Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations Poems from the Book of Hours, but he also owned his epistolary collection Letters to a Young Poet.

Buckley was also a fan of the classic American poet Walt Whitman, owning Leaves of Grass and From the Soil. Of course, no poetry collection is complete without copies of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell and Illuminations, alongside some Charles Baudelaire – Buckley-owned Paris Spleen. The singer also owned the Selected Poems of confessional poet Anne Sexton and modernist writer T.S Eliot.

Check out Buckley’s complete poetry collection below.

The poetry that inspired Jeff Buckley:

Dunio Elegies – Rainer Maria Rilke

Poems from the Book of Hours – Rilke

Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations – Rilke

Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman

From This Soil – Whitman

The Odyssey – Homer

Early Work, 1970-1979 – Patti Smith

You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense – Charles Bukowski

Selected Poems of Ezra Pound

The Complete Lyrics – Hank Williams

A Haiku Journey: Basho’s Narrow Road to a Far Province – Matsuo Basho

Paris Spleen – Charles Baudelaire

The Captain’s Verses – Pablo Neruda

Selected Poems – T.S. Eliot

A Season in Hell and Illuminations – Arthur Rimbaud

Writing and Drawings – Bob Dylan

Ode to Walt Whitman – Federico Garcia Lorca

New Poems: 1962 – Robert Graves

Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems – Jim Carroll

Selected Poems of Anne Sexton – Anne Sexton

Selected Poems – John Shaw Neilson

Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge – Demore Schwartz

The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara – Frank O’Hara

Poems – Pier Paolo Pasolini

Space: And Other Poems – Eliot Katz

Tim Buckley Lyrics

[imall4frogs]

“What will stick will be the videos of grandmothers dragged into captivity, children shot dead, young women stripped naked, corpses desecrated. For many Jews, the echoes are primal, and go back to the two-and-a-half-millennia-old Book of Lamentations: ‘Her virgins are afflicted … Her young children are gone into captivity … The youth and the old man lie on the ground in the streets … Thou has slaughtered unsparingly.’ The scenes are ones that scar so much of Jewish history, from the massacres of the Crusades to the pogroms of the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the ultimate horror of the Holocaust. They are deep and indelible in the psyche of even the Israeli who surfs on Saturday and doesn’t mind a ham sandwich; they will color everything that follows hereafter.”

—Eliot A. Cohen for The Atlantic

[quotesfrommyreading]

Nor can the troops on the front line be sheltered from the brutal truths about their leaders and the war itself that Prigozhin uttered on his abortive march on the Kremlin. Someone at last has said it, and the someone who did, brute though he may be, is the kind of leader who visited the front lines, paid his men and their survivors well, and has a kind of thuggish charisma that Putin lacks. Presumably, Ukrainian psychological-warfare experts are spreading the Prigozhin videos and audio recordings far and wide among their enemies.

  —  The Three Logics of Russia's Prigozhin Putsch

[justforbooks]

John Burnside

Poet, winner of the TS Eliot and Forward prizes and the Whitbread poetry award, memoirist, novelist and academic

Being John Burnside was a remorseless exercise in human resilience. Even after he left behind childhood deprivation and became a professor at an ancient university, there were always demons to be banished, myths to be busted and issues urgently to be addressed for Burnside, who has died aged 69 after a short illness. Writing was his best revenge, the means by which a sense of stability could be imposed on personal turbulence.

It was his abusive, alcoholic father George who taught him how to make a living by telling stories, though the stories his father told were more often than not lies. “No one,” recalled John in A Lie About My Father (2006), the first of three celebrated memoirs, “ever did find out where my father came from. He was really a nobody: a foundling, a throwaway. The lies he told were intended to conceal this fact, and they were so successful that I didn’t know, until after he died, that he’d been left on a doorstep in West Fife in the late spring of 1926, by person or persons unknown.”

John’s debut collection of poetry, The Hoop, appeared in 1988, and few were the following years when there was no new book from him. His poetry, like his prose, often drew on the past and his own experience, such as The Woman Taken in Adultery, from A Normal Skin (1997), and Memories of a Non-existent Childhood, from Still Life with Feeding Snake (2017): “For years I was lost in the details / heart like a flower, / tending towards the light, / the fog of the cursive, / the beauties of mistranslation.”

For his 2011 collection Black Cat Bone, he won the TS Eliot prize and the Forward prize; he was one of only four poets – the others being Ted Hughes, Sean O’Brien and Jason Allen-Paisant – to win both prizes for the same book. In 2000, The Asylum Dance won the Whitbread poetry award. A Lie About My Father was chosen as the Scottish Arts Council’s nonfiction book of the year and the Saltire Society Scottish book of the year.

Last year he was awarded the David Cohen prize for literature in recognition of his entire body of work. Previous winners include VS Naipaul, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing and Seamus Heaney.

Secrets, passed from father to son, defined John’s youth and obsessed his adulthood. He was born in Dunfermline, but was raised in a prefab in Cowdenbeath. Once a thriving mining community, nicknamed “the Chicago of Fife”, by the time of John’s birth it had lost its raison d’etre and everyone who could escape did.

For the Burnsides the hoped-for nirvana was the new town of Corby, Northamptonshire, which attracted so many unemployed Scots to its steelworks it was known as Little Scotland. By then, however, as John recalled in his memoir, his father had begun to fall apart, physically and mentally; his much-loved mother, Theresa, did her best to keep up appearances, attending mass and reading Mills & Boons by the yard.

For his part, John took to smoking dope and playing “childish pranks” for which he was expelled from school. By 16 he had progressed to LSD, which he found more rewarding than the communion host. “Acid did what the host failed to do,” he wrote. “Acid was the only real sacrament to which I had access … Here I was, the boy who had seriously thought about a vocation. Now, though the source wasn’t quite what I’d expected, I had one.”

Of an autodidactic tendency, he read deeply and widely, claiming he was “a Seneca nut into my 20s”. He attended Cambridge College of Arts and Technology (“for something to do”), thereafter becoming a computer software engineer. He began to publish poetry in the 1980s, and became a full-time writer, moving back to Fife in 1996 after a long period in Surrey.

In 1997 came The Dumb House, the first of John’s eight novels. Fantastical, disturbing, chilling, it is full of startlingly arresting sentences that provoked critics such as Karl Miller to describe the author as an “extraordinarily good writer”. Rereading it recently, I caught echoes of Proust: “For a long time, I refused to speak – or so my Mother told me.”

For John, his formative years in Cowdenbeath and Corby were the ore from which he sought to extract diamonds. In Living Nowhere (2003), for example, he returned to the Corby of the 70s, where the hope of a better future for its transplanted inhabitants and their offspring is dashed by violence that hangs over the town like the ash and stench from the steelworks.

His taste was catholic, his enthusiasms boundless and his curiosity infectious. In his third memoir, I Put a Spell on You (2014), he describes incidents from his life and muses on popular music, classical literature, old and foreign movies, Diane Arbus and Mel Lyman, the American folk musician and film-maker who provided a link between Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol.

The book’s title is taken from the much-covered song written by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, another maker of his own myths. The version John first heard as a nine-year-old was by Nina Simone and whenever he heard her or anyone else sing he was transported back to Cowdenbeath. There, as a teenage barfly, he heard a girl called Annie sing it in a cafe, not long after which she was murdered.

Burly, bespectacled, latterly bearded, John taught for many years in the English department at St Andrews University, where he became professor in creative writing in 2009. Among his colleagues were Douglas Dunn, Robert Crawford, Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson.

As my wife and I witnessed when we paid an annual visit to the university, John was an impassioned and eloquent educator and revered by his students. Not so long ago, he sent us a copy of his 2019 book The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century, generously inscribed and thanking us for “the criticism and the encouragement over many years”. Not many writers are so forgiving of reviewers.

In 2018, writing in the London Review of Books, John told how he was suffering from sleep apnoea, “a condition where the patient stops breathing while asleep, then starts awake and desperately gasps in some air, before settling down again, all in a matter of seconds”. Two years later, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, he suffered “huge heart failure”, as he described it, and was given a “do not resuscitate” order by doctors who feared he would not pull through. Somehow he did and continued to work at full pelt.

In Ruin, Blossom, his most recent collection of poetry, published earlier this year, John explored ageing, mortality and the parlous state of the environment. Having long since rejected organised religion, he labelled himself a “deep ecologist/anarchist”. He was particularly exercised about the building of a windfarm beside a nature reserve near his home a few miles south of St Andrews, not because it spoiled his view but because of the harm it would do to bats, birds and other wildlife.

He wrote regularly for publications including the New Statesman, the TLS, the New Yorker and the Guardian, and became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1998.

He is survived by his wife, Sarah (nee Dunsby), whom he married in 1996, their two children, Lucas and Gil, and their grandson, Apollo.

🔔 John Burnside, writer, born 19 March 1955; died 29 May 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[llxx0715]

I really really really want to make a Floodland deep dive video because like the FUCKING LAYERS that exist in the meta of that album with Andrew comparing the drama of his former bandmates trying to steal his band out from under him with the way the Thatcher administration was trying to steal the livelihoods of millions and also how his drug addictions and the hollow relationships he formed with women can be compared with the rise of fascism as a consequence to the excess of the west. The literary references to Shelley, Eliot, Byron, Cohen, Shakespeare, referencing The Borgias family, middle eastern politics / history, the Bible, the Cold War raging around him, I need to take it apart piece by piece and then sew it back together

[april-is]

April 30, 2023: Oral History of Insatiability, Jason Myers

Oral History of Insatiability Jason Myers

I woke in the wreck of history

still drowsy, a dryness in my

bed, my bones. Would you

like fingers, the Lord asked,

& gave me plenty. There was

no music, no garden in them.

I wanted to be touched the way

I had touched, delicately, but

with great passion. If you want

another kind of lover, Leonard

Cohen crooned. Not my will,

Martin Luther King intoned,

but God's. I wanted a word

for every surface, for the belly

& the underbelly, the line between

the lines. There was a secret

name inside every living thing,

a song underneath every song.

What happened then, I asked,

meaning both before & next.

The Lord said Kabul. Said

manifest destiny. Said Rembrandt

said Bordeaux said Dakota

said Chelsea Hotel said Egyptian

cotton said Homer. The Greek

poet, I asked. No. Homer Plessy.

Oh, I said. I see. But I did not.

Lulls, curtains, continuations.

You want company, the Lord asked,

& made New Orleans, oceans,

rye bread, Cointreau. There

were some companions sent

by another party. There were

days smothered in solitude,

nights when I thought, if only

I could sleep, if only...but I

could not complete the sentence.

Are you hungry, the Lord asked.

Oh my. Oh yes. Oh my yes.

--

Also by Jason Myers: Hotel Orpheus

Jason is an excellent poet and human being. His first book was just published, and it’s gorgeous: Maker of Heaven &.

Today in: 

2022: Try to Praise the Mutilated World, Adam Zagajewski 2021: In Defense of a Long Engagement, Mairead Small Staid 2020: Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness, Mary Oliver 2019: Starlings in Winter, Mary Oliver 2018: Born Yesterday, Philip Larkin 2017: Thus, He Spoke His Quietus, Thomas Lux 2016: Trees, W.S. Merwin 2015: Today and Two Thousand Years from Now, Philip Levine 2014: from For a Long Time I Have Wanted to Write a Happy Poem, Richard Jackson 2013: Tear It Down, Jack Gilbert 2012: from An Atlas of the Difficult World, Adrienne Rich 2011: Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal, Naomi Shihab Nye 2010: from Pioneers! O Pioneers!, Walt Whitman 2009: from The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot 2008: from Five-Finger Exercises, T.S. Eliot 2007: Journey of the Magi, T.S. Eliot 2006: Preludes, T.S. Eliot 2005: A Song for Simeon, T.S. Eliot

-- 

I don’t know where this month went! As always, thanks for letting me spam you, and for your kind notes.

More to come in 11 short months. In the meantime, check it out, you can:

- Visit a random poem sent in the past at april-is.tumblr.com/random - Browse poems by topic - Or skim them chronologically

Until next time, mes amours.

Martha

[reading-writing-revolution]

(via How to Navigate the Era of Trump - The Atlantic)

Many friends, Eliot A. Cohen has found, are despondent over Trump's victory. "I respect their points of view but have decided to look elsewhere for advice, and so have turned to a different set of friends—those sitting on my bookshelves.

Some of these friends have been with me for more than half a century; and they get wiser and more insightful with age. One of the first I turned to is only slightly older than I am: Motivation and Personality, by the academic psychologist Abraham Maslow. The book has a family history: Maslow summered at a lake in Maine in a cabin near one owned by my grandfather, a self-made shoe-factory owner who came to the United States with only the benefit of a grade-school education.“

From Orwell:

[ghelgheli]

The Stuff I Read in June/July 2023

Stuff I Extra Liked is Bold

I forgot to do it last month so you get a double feature

Books

Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee

Heteropessimism (Essay Cluster)

The Biological Mind, Justin Garson (2015) Ch. 5-7

Sacred and Terrible Air, Robert Kurvitz

Wage Labour and Capital, Karl Marx

Short Fiction

Beware the Bite of the Were-Lesbian (zine), H. C. Guinevere

Childhood Homes (and why we hate them) by qrowscant (itch.io)

piele by slugzuki (itch.io)

بچه‌ای که شکل گربه میکشید، لافکادیو هرن

بچه های که یخ نزدند، ماکسیم گورکی

پسرکی در تعقیب تبهکار، ویلیام آیریش

Küçük Kara Balık, Samed Behrengi

Phil Mind

The Hornswoggle Problem, Patricia Churchland,  Journal of Consciousness Studies 3.5-6 (1996): 402-408

What is it Like to be a Bat? Thomas Nagel, (https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674594623.c15)

Epiphenomenal Qualia, Frank Jackson, Consciousness and emotion in cognitive science. Routledge, 1998. 197-206

Why You Can’t Make a Computer that Feels Pain, Daniel Dennett, Synthese, vol. 38, no. 3, 1978, pp. 415–56

Where Am I? Daniel Dennett

Can Machines Think? Daniel Dennett

Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons, Derek Parfit (https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118922590.ch8)

The Extended Mind, Andy Clark & David Chalmers, Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998): 7–19

Uploading: A Philosophical Analysis, David Chalmers (https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118736302.ch6)

If You Upload, Will You Survive? Joseph Corabi & Susan Schneider (https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118736302.ch8)

If You Can’t Make One, You Don’t Know How It Works, Fred Dretske (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4975.1994.tb00299.x)

Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing

Minds, Brains, and Programs, John Searle (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00005756)

What is it Like to Have a Gender Identity? Florence Ashley (https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzac071)

Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data, Emily M. Bender & Alexander Koller (10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.463)

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜 Emily M. Bender et al. (https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922)

The Great White Robot God, David Golumbia

Superintelligence: The Idea that Eats Smart People, Maciej Ceglowski

Misc. Articles

Ebb and Flow of Azeri and Persian in Iran: A Longitudinal Study in the City of Zanjan, Hamed Zandi (https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110694277-007)

WTF is Happening? An Overview – Watching the World Go Bye, Eliot Jacobson

Using loophole, Seward County seizes millions from motorists without convicting them of crimes, Natalia Alamdari

Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens, Cathy J. Cohen, Feminist Theory Reader. Routledge, 2020. 311-323

Is the Rectum a Grave? Leo Bersani (https://doi.org/10.2307/3397574)

Why Petroleum Did Not Save the Whales, Richard York (https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023117739217)

‘Spider-Verse’ Animation: Four Artists on Making the Sequel, Chris Lee

Carbon dioxide removal is not a current climate solution, David T. Ho (https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00953-x)

Fights, beatings and a birth: Videos smuggled out of L.A. jails reveal violence, neglect, Keri Blakinger

Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek, Gabriel Rockhill

The Tyranny of Structurelessness, Jo Freeman

Domenico Losurdo interviewed about Friedrich Nietzsche

Keeping Some of the Lights On: Redefining Energy Security, Kris De Decker

Gays, Crossdressers, and Emos: Nonormative Masculinities in Militarized Iraq, Achim Rohde

On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin

Our Technology, Zeyad el Nabolsy

Towards a Historiography of Gundam’s One Year War, Ian Gregory

Imperialism and the Transformation of Values into Prices, Torkil Lauesen & Zak Cope