Prufrock: The Bicycle at 200, “Sensitivity” Readers, and Walt Whitman’s Lost Novel

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Milo Yiannopoulos loses book deal and CPAC invite over comments on underage sex.

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A short history of the bicycle: “In 1817, a former forester by the name of Karl Drais undertook an excursion on the paved road from Mannheim, Germany to Schwetzingen, just west of Heidelberg, and back. These eight miles took him just an hour (a stagecoach would have needed about four). Instead of merely walking, he drove himself or rode on a special vehicle he had constructed for himself: the Draisine, or dandy horse, made from wood. The local newspaper didn’t even take notice. We don’t know if Drais was aware of the importance of his vehicle, which we remember today as the prototype of the first bicycle — in other words, the first mechanical individual means of transportation without a horse.”

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From the sensitive to the “sensitivity” reader. “The Chicago Tribune reports that book publishers have begun to increase use of so-called ‘sensitivity readers’ to examine manuscripts and to offer feedback in terms of any racist, sexist or otherwise offensive content.”

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Why do people who see UFOs feel so good? “Call it psychospirtual, call it religious, call it whatever, but the vast majority of these people are transformed in a very positive way.”

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The complexity and depth of Nō drama: “It’s odd if people describe the Nō performances as a thing that is simple or unsophisticated or unelaborated. The poem, to begin with, is not simple; but it has a lyrical slenderness which wouldn’t, one would guess, lead anybody to think of going to such lengths as to distribute its recitation among a chorus and actors, thus requiring perhaps eleven men to say the words, with two or three drums and a flute added, and masks and costumes fit for a museum, and angelic properties, and special stages, and attendants to wipe, in hot weather, the sweat from immovable hands and from under chins. The volume of what goes to a performance is large, but it’s all cut down outwardly and bent inwards. As for the recitation, the first necessity is to eliminate direct expressiveness in the saying of the words. This seems obvious in the saying of any good poetry. The chorus chants (it’s rather like a Gregorian chant), the actors intone. Both may come to singing, only not with any tune that might carry you off by itself. Yet, within the limitations of intoning, with some turns, the actor taking the women’s parts will achieve a pitch of pathetic intensity beyond the reach of one who sings words to an air that has an existence of its own, or who recites with meaning. The Nō actor is not directly expressive, it’s always the poem he is doing and throwing you back on.”

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Essay of the Day:

What happened in 2000? Not much, but it marks the beginning of a slow decline in available hourly work per capita coupled with a solid increase in overall wealth and a surprising upturn in opioid overdoses. Nicolas Eberstadt in Commentary:

“In our era of no more than indifferent economic growth, 21st–century America has somehow managed to produce markedly more wealth for its wealthholders even as it provided markedly less work for its workers. And trends for paid hours of work look even worse than the work rates themselves. Between 2000 and 2015, according to the BEA, total paid hours of work in America increased by just 4 percent (as against a 35 percent increase for 1985–2000, the 15-year period immediately preceding this one). Over the 2000–2015 period, however, the adult civilian population rose by almost 18 percent—meaning that paid hours of work per adult civilian have plummeted by a shocking 12 percent thus far in our new American century.

“This is the terrible contradiction of economic life in what we might call America’s Second Gilded Age (2000—). It is a paradox that may help us understand a number of overarching features of our new century. These include the consistent findings that public trust in almost all U.S. institutions has sharply declined since 2000, even as growing majorities hold that America is ‘heading in the wrong direction.’ It provides an immediate answer to why overwhelming majorities of respondents in public-opinion surveys continue to tell pollsters, year after year, that our ever-richer America is still stuck in the middle of a recession. The mounting economic woes of the ‘little people’ may not have been generally recognized by those inside the bubble, or even by many bubble inhabitants who claimed to be economic specialists—but they proved to be potent fuel for the populist fire that raged through American politics in 2016.

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“In the fall of 2016, Alan Krueger, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, released a study that further refined the picture of the real existing opioid epidemic in America: According to his work, nearly half of all prime working-age male labor-force dropouts—an army now totaling roughly 7 million men—currently take pain medication on a daily basis.

“We already knew from other sources (such as BLS ‘time use’ surveys) that the overwhelming majority of the prime-age men in this un-working army generally don’t ‘do civil society’ (charitable work, religious activities, volunteering), or for that matter much in the way of child care or help for others in the home either, despite the abundance of time on their hands. Their routine, instead, typically centers on watching—watching TV, DVDs, Internet, hand-held devices, etc.—and indeed watching for an average of 2,000 hours a year, as if it were a full-time job. But Krueger’s study adds a poignant and immensely sad detail to this portrait of daily life in 21st-century America: In our mind’s eye we can now picture many millions of un-working men in the prime of life, out of work and not looking for jobs, sitting in front of screens—stoned.”

Read the rest.

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Photo: Wildfires at dusk

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Poem: Michael Shewmaker, “The Devil in Grand Saline”

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