Reviews and News:
Is the era of nation-states coming to a close? If so, will it mean a return of the city-state? “The city-state has recently been feted by Forbes magazine (‘A New Era For The City-State?’ 2010), Quartz (‘Nations Are No Longer Driving Globalisation – Cities Are’, 2013), The Boston Globe (‘The City-State Returns’, 2015) and the Gates Foundation-funded How We Get to Next (‘The Rebirth of the City-State’, 2016). The trends that are pinching the nation-state are helping the city-state. In a highly connected, quasi-borderless world, cities are centres of commerce, growth, innovation, technology and finance.”
Jonathan Haidt on the dangers of “concept creep”: “When a word like ‘violence’ is allowed to creep so that it includes a lot of things that are not violence then this causes a cascade of bad effects.”
“Paris is filled with strange museums—from the museum of absinthe to the museum of carnival equipment—but the Musée d’Edith Piaf is among the strangest.”
James Matthew Wilson reviews Catherine Chandler and Timothy Murphy’s religious verse.
Alexander Adams reviews two books on the life and work of artist Bas Jan Ader and his disappearance at sea in 1975: “A conceptual artist who erased himself in an act of brilliant nihilism; a heroic individualist who turned his back on the commercialism of an art world within which he was unable to integrate; a troubled man facing personal and professional crises who threw himself into a fatalistic quest, allowing nature to determine his destiny. He seems like the creation of an inventive novelist or an artistic hoax dreamt up in a Hoxton studio, yet his story is true.”
A jury orders John Steinbeck’s daughter-in-law to pay $13 million in rights dispute.
Essay of the Day:
In Tablet, Paul Berman writes about Philip Levine’s relationship to Detroit and form:
“If you were to remove the line breaks from Levine’s poetry, certain of the poems would reshuffle themselves into impeccable sentences, and you would discover the same kind of catch-in-the-throat portraits of salt-of-the-earth working people that were Sandburg’s specialty, at roughly the same length, too, suitable for the tabloids. Sandburg in his poetry looked to the future, though. He was a friend of Ezra Pound; he wanted to extend the reach of poetry. With Levine I have the impression that he is looking to the literary past. Sometimes he writes in a conventional free verse, but more typically he composes short lines that appear only at first glance to be free verse, and then turn out to be toying with traditional structures of one sort or another. Is he counting syllables? Occasionally he does seem to be doing so.
“He plays with terza rima, without the rima. He establishes a two-foot meter, or three-foot, or four-foot, and sometimes the four feet, stretching their toes, expand into blank verse, give or take a few stimulating irregularities.”
Photo: Rice field and Mount Fuji
Poem: Joy Harjo, “Tobacco Origin Story, Because Tobacco Was a Gift Intended to Walk Alongside Us to the Stars”
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