The Mumpsimus

"Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here." —Cooper, Interstellar "This is what I mean when I'm talkin' about time, and death, and futility." —Det. Rust Cohle, True Detective Season 1 "Making kin and making kind ... stretch the imagination and can change the story." —Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble In his brief book The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us , Adam Kirsch proposes that radical pessimism and fervent transhumanism are opposite poles of an anti-human spectrum: "The antihumanist future and the transhumanist future are opposites in most ways, except the most fundamental: they are worlds from which we have disappeared, and rightfully so." Reading the book is like watching Matthew McConaughey's character of Detective Rust Cohle from True Detective speak for a while and then give over the stage to McConaughey's character from Interstellar , Cooper. While the character of Cohle ha...

My new book About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community has now been published by Punctum Books as an Open Access work, which means there is a free PDF and the paperback is published at a reasonable price. The book's copyright is replaced by a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, giving everyone the freedom to copy, share, and remix the work for noncommercial purposes. This summer, I'm going to play around with alternate forms myself (at the very least an ePub file for ebooks, but maybe also an illustrated website). About That Life was not going to be a book. I began writing it moments after I learned of Barry Lopez's death on Christmas Day, 2020. Lopez had been my workshop leader at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in the summer of 2000, and he really changed my approach to life and especially to writing. I wanted to write a short article in his memory, and I especially wanted to share the writing exercises he h...

  You know the story: once upon a time, the world was full of magic, then the Enlightenment and Darwin banished superstition, and though there was much scientific progress, the world no longer had a sense of wonder and mystery — the world had become modern and disenchanted. A moment’s reflection on history and culture will poke holes in this story, but it continues to hold power as a belief (particularly for people in North America and Europe) about who we are and how we got to here and now. Every idea of Modernity as a social and historical concept relies on the idea of the disenchanted modern against the enchanted primitive. (My own book on modernism explores the idea of crisis , and certainly enchantment/disenchantment fits into that topic.) Arguments about disenchantment tend to be about its extent and its positive and/or negative effects. The idea of disenchantment holds appeal because it fits so easily alongside other ideas that structure stories of where we are going and whe...

  Over at my academic blog, I have written a post about ideas of strength and kindness . Part of it is about teaching (hence the reason it is at the academic blog), but a lot of it is also about reading and writing, and it ends with a poem by Liu Tsung-Yuan, so it may be of interest to a more general audience as well. Here is how the post begins: Take a moment, settle yourself, and note your immediate emotional response to these words: kindness joy contemplation generosity love peace Now think about them in the context of your work. Would your work be better if there were more of these things? Do you feel that they are relevant to what you do every day? I’ll be honest: a deep part of myself resists these words. On one hand, this makes no sense. Since adolescence, I have described myself as a pacifist (or aspiring pacifist); I don’t have many heroes (I’m skeptical of the whole concept) but if I have any they are people who in one way or another devoted themselve...

Some preliminary, inadequate notes on J.M. Coetzee's new novel, The Childhood of Jesus , after a first reading: Kafka and Cervantes haunt this novel, as they haunt so much of Coetzee's work. Cervantes is there on the pages — the boy David carries around a children's copy of Don Quixote  and learns to read from it. Kafka is more of a ghost in the book, a presence haunting its words.  The Childhood of Jesus  tempts us toward reading it as allegory, a tendency common to Kafka's work, and Coetzee has written insightfully about Kafka many times, including a valuable essay on "Translating Kafka" in Stranger Shores  that criticizes Edwin and Willa Muir's allegorical and religious reading of Kafka and the effect it had on their translations. Reading Coetzee allegorically is always a false path and yet one he seems to enjoy tempting readers toward. This time, the temptation is even in the title. The title is mischievous, because there is no character named...

Ron Silliman has written an interesting post about, among other things, how he reads: I’m always reading a dozen books at once, sometimes twice that many. [...] In part, this reading style is because I have an aversion to the immersive experience that is possible with literature. Sometimes, especially if I’m "away" on vacation, I’ll plop down in a deck chair on a porch somewhere with a big stack of books of poetry, ten or twelve at a time, reading maybe up to ten pages in a book, then moving it to a growing stack on the far side of the chair until I’ve gone through the entire pile. Then I start over in the other direction. I can keep myself entertained like this for hours. That is pretty close to my idea of the perfect vacation. I’ve had this style of reading now for some 50 years – it’s not something I’m too likely to change – but I’ve long realized that this is profoundly not what some people want from their literature, and it’s the polar opposite of the experience of ...

I'm not writing about nature. I'm writing about humanity. And if I have a subject, it is justice. And the rediscovery of the manifold way in which our lives can be shaped by the recovery of a sense of reverence for life. --Barry Lopez The final guest on the final episode of Bill Moyers Journal was Barry Lopez , and it's half an hour of riveting, inspiring conversation.  The video is here. Ten years ago this summer, I attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and Barry Lopez was my workshop leader.  Those were some of the most powerful and invigorating days of my life, because Lopez was exactly the person I needed to work with at that particular moment, a moment when I doubted the purpose of writing and felt that I had wasted the countless time I had spent in the activity of writing stories and plays and essays, almost none of which at that point had been read by anyone other than my friends and teachers.  I went to Bread Loaf because it felt like a last cha...

Peter Singer, in an interview with Christine Smallwood at The Nation : You're a utilitarian . Utilitarianism tries to maximize the net surplus of happiness over misery in the world. What if billionaire Larry Ellison's yacht makes him really, really happy? This is what some call the utility monster argument. We would have to assume that Larry Ellison actually has capacities for happiness that are vastly greater than anyone else's. Ellison's yacht cost $200 million, and if we assume that $400 can repair an obstetric fistula, that means that the suffering relieved by 500,000 obstetric fistula repairs is not greater than the happiness that Ellison gets from his yacht. That, I think, is not physically possible. But if we ever encountered Martians who could convince us that they had a vastly greater capacity for happiness than we do, then it could be a problem. Then the moral position would be to let the Martians colonize Earth and make us their slaves. Yes, that does seem...

When I wrote about Issue 1 yesterday , I noted it with amusement, but didn't give it much thought, because even as a piece of conceptual art it didn't really seem to me to be doing much that was particularly new in an interesting way. Steve Shaviro thinks that may be one way to find meaning in it : ...given all the questions about the status of the author that have been raised in the last half-century or so, it only makes sense that I should be credited with the authorship of something that I had nothing to do with writing. Remember, Roland Barthes proclaimed “the death of the author” more than forty years ago, in 1967. And even well before that, in 1940, Borges proposed a literary criticism that would “take two dissimilar works — the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights , for instance — attribute them to a single author, and then in all good conscience determine the psychology of that most interesting homme de lettres …” (from “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”). Issue 1 is a logica...

Michael Hamburger (1924-2007), poet and translator Wikipedia entry The Poetry Archive (short bio; text and audio of poems) Interview Daily Telegraph obituary Independent obituary Posts by Reginald Shepherd on Hamburger Richard Rorty (1931-2007), philosopher and critic Waggish on "the three Rorties" Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry Rorty's homepage at Stanford Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry Articles by Rorty in Dissent Wikipedia entry Washington Post obituary Todd Gitlin on Rorty Jo-Ann Mort's addendum to Gitlin A collection of Rorty links A critique of Rorty by Michael Albert Rorty on Pragmatism Ousmane Sembène (1923-2007) writer and filmmaker Wikipedia entry IMDB entry NY Times obituary "Ousmane Sembène: The Life of a Revolutionary Artist" by Samba Gadjigo 2005 interview in The Guardian Guardian obituary Literary Encyclopedia entry Woman Is the Future of Man: Ousmane Sembène on Moolaadé 2005 Socialist Worker interview Emory Uni...