Martha Nussbaum wins the $1 million Berggruen Prize.
Dominic Green reviews the second volume of Zachary Leader’s biography of Saul Bellow: “The changes of orientation in the last fifty years of Bellow’s life are not aesthetic, but political, social, and marital. His style and reference points are now fixed, and his face is a known quantity. When Herzog brings in the money, he sells his manuscripts, donates his house at Tivoli, New York, to Bard College, and divorces Susan Glassman, his third wife. Other celebrities disburden themselves of their old lives, the better to integrate themselves into their new lives. Bellow, never much of a joiner, becomes increasingly solitary, and not just because fame isolates by amplifying the solitude of talent.”
Watch a clip of the Roy Orbison hologram that will shortly be touring the continent.
A Russian engineer stationed in Antarctica stabbed a co-worker who kept revealing the endings of the books he was reading. “Sergey Savitsky, an engineer at Bellingshausen Station in the South Shetland Islands of Antarctica, stands accused of stabbing welder Oleg Beloguzov in the chest after arguing with him over Beloguzov’s habit of repeatedly spoiling the endings of the books that Savitsky was reading.” (HT: Bill McMorris).
Donald Hall’s productive final years: “Before Donald Hall turned eighty, his writing life, and his life itself, began to founder. After he was named the U.S. Poet Laureate, in 2006, he lost sixty pounds in a year, became ill and depressed, and, by his own account, ‘sank and sank.’ He was, he said, ‘a terrible Poet Laureate.’ After leaving the position, he was too ill to read, much less write, poems. He wound up in the hospital and then in ‘the damned nursing home.’ A physical therapist had to teach him to walk again. A fragment from ‘Meatloaf,’ one of his last good poems, describes his state of mind: ‘My son took from my house / the eight-sided Mossberg .22 / my father gave me when I was twelve.’ Then he lost his muse. As the poem put it, ‘No / more vowels carrying images / leap suddenly from my excited / unwitting mind and purple Bic pen.’ He quit writing poems after seven decades. Yet, beginning in his eighty-third year, he struck one more lode in the story of Donald Hall. He wrote an essay …”
Hannah Sullivan on Sylvia Plath’s letters: “‘All good letter writers’, Virginia Woolf wrote in 1940, a year before her suicide, ‘feel the drag of the face on the other side of the page.’ She meant that the important thing about writing letters isn’t the art of writing but the act of corresponding. Sometimes she linked this to a letter’s disposability, as if the likelihood of its being burned or destroyed fostered a specially ‘intimate, irreticent, indiscreet’ kind of writing. By this standard, Sylvia Plath – who once said that ‘nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing’ – is not one of literature’s great letter writers. Her main correspondent was always her mother, Aurelia, but there are only qualified kinds of intimacy in the letters they wrote. Their satisfaction, Sylvia noted in her journal, was in allowing mother and daughter to ‘verbalize our desired image of ourselves in relation to each other’.”
Essay of the Day:
In The New Atlantis, Micah Meadowcroft argues that whatever we accomplish in space, it will always be less than what we want to accomplish:
“Our eagerness to explore is a kind of collapse of world and environment. In discovery of new material conditions — environments — the spiritual might be changed. The colonization of other planets, of new worlds, is motivated by hope of a new world-view, a search for a permanent transcendence now only occasionally found. As Charles T. Rubin has written in this journal (“Thumos in Space,” Fall 2007), ‘The human explorer manifests his delight, his joy and excitement, at juxtaposing the familiar and the strange; watching, we can, at least in some distant way, feel with him. (Once, merely reading the reports of explorers would have sufficed.)’ President Kennedy said in 1962, ‘We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’ But the relationship between expanded environment and world does not by necessity elevate man’s dignity and stature, and we may choose to go to Mars not because it is hard — though it is surely the greatest technical challenge we have yet presented ourselves — but because it is easy, easier to be explorer than to find another and better sense of self.”
Photo: Tjørnuvik
Poem: Chad Abushanab, “Halloween”
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