Year: 2013

From a 1996 interview with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate comes this charmingly antimated clip of David Foster Wallace:

(Hat tip: Julia Carpenter)

Lauren Markham chronicles the rise of a new type of refugee:

Admassu left the Kambata region of Ethiopia in October of 2011, just two months prior to our meeting, because the changing weather rendered his life, in effect, unlivable. He comes from a long line of farmers in one of Ethiopia’s most fertile regions. But since 2005, Teddy translates, the weather has not been right. “Before five years ago, the weather is better for growing something. This time, it’s not good,” Teddy translates. All the weather patterns Admassu had come to rely on are now bunk. “Nothing grows. It’s very dry.” …

Environmental degradation in Ethiopia is widely documented. According to a recent USAID report, in the past thirty years, Ethiopia has seen a rise in temperature that ranges between .1 and .25 degrees Celsius per decade. Concurrently, there has been a steady decrease in annual rainfall since 1996. These changes are most commonly attributed to global climate change. The wicked irony is that although Ethiopia is one of the world’s countries most heavily impacted by the adverse effects of climate change, it contributes the least—less than almost all other developing countries—to the global CO2 emissions that cause the atmosphere to warm.

Reviewing Chris DeRose’s Congressman Lincoln, Damien Ober spots this fascinating detail about the future president’s rise to national prominence:

[T]he central conflict of the 30th Congress was whether the new states would enter the union free or slave. Lincoln, who craved a larger role in the workings of the world, now had his chance. Always the futurist, Lincoln used the federal post system like some pre-electric internet, promoting his speeches to correspondents throughout the country. Mailing by mailing, Lincoln remade himself into Congress’ most outspoken agitator against the president’s justifications for war and a leader in the fight to halt the extension of slavery. In two short years he had risen from a backwoods legislator to a national voice on the hottest topics of the day.

(Lincoln in 1846 or 1847, via Wikimedia Commons)

James Wood reveals why he goes easy on first-time novelists:

I pretty much started my career at The Guardian – it wasn’t the very first review I wrote but it was probably the first that made a name for me: a cruel review of a debut novelist, actually. And I think I was so young, and so ambitious myself to write, that it didn’t register that this was a first-time novelist. It was a first novel, and a pretty terrible novel and I was horrible about it. And who cares, really? Both the review and the novel have been long forgotten, but a few weeks later someone told me that the review had come out on the day of the author’s book launch, that she was in tears, and that it ruined the party. That’s a pretty horrible thing to hear. Nobody wants to be that person, and ever since it’s made me very wary. All the firepower has been concentrated on big names. Delillo’s strong enough to take it: Updike, Pynchon, Auster… I’ve always been tender on first time novelists.

Kaya Oakes found her religion again, in Bach:

I hadn’t touched a cello in 15 years when I discovered the Mass in B Minor, by which time I was deeply into my thirties, married to a musician, my hands permanently bent and hurting from arthritis, and struggling to reconcile with the Catholic church, a protracted battle that continues to consume a rather large chunk of my days. One night when I was killing time before heading off to a catechism class, I found a copy of it at Amoeba Records and stuck it into my car CD slot. The Mass in B Minor begins with a burst from the chorus and orchestra together, the Kyrie: Lord, Have Mercy. Even sitting in the driver’s seat, it was like being knocked to the ground.

The thing about rock music, in all of the forms that I’ve worshipped, is that it’s not about thinking. You have your cerebral performers, but rock music is about the body: the corporeal sensations of fucking, moving, imbibing, ejecting. It is not about the caverns of the mind. And those caverns are where Bach spent his lifetime chasing the intricacies of forms, twisting the ideas of what music can do, wedding it to mathematical possibilities, but never forgetting that, as Keats wheezed, Beauty is Truth. Beauty is the best thing we can point at in order to say “God.”

George Scialabba reviews the first English translation of Albert Camus’s Algerian Chronicles, finding the French theorist’s reflections on the conflict proof of his profundity:

At a press conference in Stockholm after the Nobel ceremony, Camus made a statement widely misreported as “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.” Goldhammer and Alice Kaplan—in her introduction to this edition—perform a considerable service in pointing out that Camus said nothing so simplistic. What he said was: “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.” He was not sentimentally exalting his mother above justice; he was rejecting the equation of justice with revolutionary terrorism.

Richard Brody describes Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder as a film in which “Catholic iconography and Protestant ideals tangle in the American heartland,” summarizing the heart of Malick’s religious vision this way:

For Malick, sacrament isn’t pageantry, isn’t style or theatre; it’s experience. The rigid mediation of such ostensibly Catholic filmmaking is the antithesis of his notion, his literal vision, of a cinema informed by the divine. Malick finds his vaulting spans in immediate vision: he films in a quasi-documentary manner, mixing his world-renowned stars with local residents and filming them on location with a devout attention to the natural landscape and modest, everyday, even banal settings (strip malls, tract housing, offices and stores, laundromats and restaurants of small-town streets).

Malick’s camera is neither weighed down by dogma nor by abstemiousness, neither by renunciation nor by ritual. His fluid, agile, impressionistic, ecstatic, awe-filled and joyful, yet essentially modest and intimate images suggest a transcendentally-guided trip through the world—a wandering that’s tethered to the light, a light that, seemingly beamed from the cathedral, lends a virtual architectural form to the inchoate open spaces of the landscape, and that seemingly guides bodies through it, weightlessly, transforming ordinary strolling into a sort of—well, a sort of ballet. The dancer herself, self-consciously dancing, is—despite her profane emotional voracity—a step closer to the divine than anyone in the movie, including the priest (who, however, graces those in his flock with a reflection of light that nonetheless hardly shines on him).

Josh Larsen, calling To the Wonder Malick’s “most earnest search for God and the film of his in which God is hardest to find,” further details the film’s religious themes here.

Previous Dish on To the Wonder here, here and here.

In an excerpt from his new book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Michael Pollan laments that economic specialization “neatly hides our implication in all that is done on our behalf by unknown other specialists half a world away”:

Perhaps what most commends cooking to me is that it offers a powerful corrective to this way of being in the world — a corrective that is still available to all of us. To butcher a pork shoulder is to be forcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, made up of distinct groups of muscles with a purpose quite apart from feeding me. The work itself gives me a keener interest in the story of the hog: where it came from and how it found its way to my kitchen. In my hands its flesh feels a little less like the product of industry than of nature; indeed, less like a product at all. Likewise, to grow the greens I’m serving with this pork, greens that in late spring seem to grow back almost as fast as I can cut them, is a daily reminder of nature’s abundance, the everyday miracle by which photons of light are turned into delicious things to eat.

For more, check out Pollan’s interview with Adam Platt. A highlight:

I think it’s interesting that this strikingly powerful interest in all things having to do with food coincides with a progressively more mediated, digitized life. We spend our time in front of screens. We don’t exercise our other senses very much. And food is this complete sensory experience. It engages all five senses. It’s a sensual pleasure. And it is also—and I think this is a very important part of the food movement—really a communitarian movement. What’s driving people to food in many, many places is the kind of experience you can have at a farmers’ market. It’s really a new public square.

(Photo by Steve Evans)