The Dish

We often see them as separate issues, especially with the PTSD and suicide epidemic among soldiers returning from war and the horrible, systematic crisis of sexual assault against women in the military. And most often they are. But they can be connected. And sometimes they should be. Patrick Stewart gives a truly moving and beautiful account of domestic violence against his own mother in his own childhood. But what I admired most about his impromptu speech was his insistence that ending domestic violence against women is above all the work of men. Men alone can end this – and must.

Composer and software engineer Stephen Malinowski made a stunning visualization of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, a ballet that premiered 100 years ago this week:

In an interview, Malinowski describes his inspiration:

From your vantage point, what’s the benefit of visualizing scores?

People usually respond to sound in a unitary way. It’s the reason why you can’t follow more than one conversation at a time at a party, for example. But with vision, your brain is trained to comprehend multiple things at once: you can take in many more elements simultaneously. In music, there’s often much more going on than you can grasp in that moment of hearing. When you have a visualization, your eyes lead your ears through the music. You take advantage of your brain’s ability to process multiple pieces of visual information simultaneously. … When that information is presented as graphs, it’s very easy to understand.

Malinowski created similar visual scores for pieces by Debussy and Beethoven.

Evan Kindley, an editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, recently revealed a policy regarding first-time authors: either review the book positively, or not at all. “I just think it’s ethical to give writers a grace period,” he tweeted.  Scott Esposito wants clarification:

Where is the line between “constructive critique” and “reviewing positively”? Surely most first-time writers would benefit from honest feedback from competent critics. If the critic ultimately sees the book as a failure, then the constructive critique would not be run?

D.G. Myers dislikes the policy:

If the only values assigned to first books are going to be positive values, they will quickly become debased. Orwell understood the danger clearly:

For if one says—and nearly every reviewer says this kind of thing at least once a week—that King Lear is a good play and The Four Just Men is a good thriller, what meaning is there in the word “good”?

If all first books are good in some fashion or other, what is the point of calling any of them good? No discrimination is involved, only a priori institutional policy. To lay down special rules for first books may seem to relieve the anxiety of criticism, but the problem of individual judgment is not solved; it is merely eliminated from critical practice. The consequences are not pretty.

The Paris Review posts a long excerpt of an interview with Imre Kertész, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature. How Kertész responds to the above question:

I was able use my own life to study how somebody can survive this particularly cruel brand of totalitarianism [the Holocaust]. I didn’t want to commit suicide, but then I didn’t want to become a writer either—at least not initially. I rejected that idea for a long time, but then I realized that I would have to write, write about the astonishment and the dismay of the witness—Is that what you are going to do to us? How could we survive something like this, and understand it, too?Look, I don’t want to deny that I was a prisoner at Auschwitz and that I now have a Nobel Prize. What should I make of that? And what should I make of the fact that I survived, and continue to survive? At least I feel that I experienced something extraordinary, because not only did I live through those horrors, but I also managed to describe them, in a way that is bearable, acceptable, and nonetheless part of this radical tradition. Those of us who were brave enough to stare down this abyss—Borowski, Shalamov, Améry—well, there aren’t too many of us. For these writers, writing was always a prelude to suicide. Jean Améry’s gun was always present, in both his articles and his life, always by his side.

I am somebody who survived all of it, somebody who saw the Gorgon’s head and still retained enough strength to finish a work that reaches out to people in a language that is humane. The purpose of literature is for people to become educated, to be entertained, so we can’t ask them to deal with such gruesome visions. I created a work representing the Holocaust as such, but without this being an ugly literature of horrors.

Perhaps I’m being impertinent, but I feel that my work has a rare quality—I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.

(Photo of Kertész as an adolescent, taken from the website of the play adapted from his novel “Kaddish for an Unborn Child”)

In 1957, New Republic editor Gilbert A. Harrison asked pioneering psychologist Carl Jung for his take on the “modern myth” of UFOs. From his reply:

[T]he problem of the Ufos is, as you rightly say, a very fascinating one, but it is as puzzling as it is fascinating; since, in spite of all observations I know of, there is no certainty about their very nature. On the other side, there is an overwhelming material pointing to their legendary or mythological aspect. As a matter of fact the psychological aspect is so impressive, that one almost must regret that the Ufos seem to be real after all. I have followed up the literature as much as possible and it looks to me as if something were seen and even confirmed by radar, but nobody knows exactly what is seen. In consideration of the psychological aspect of the phenomenon I have written a booklet about it, which is soon to appear. It is also in the process of being translated into English. Unfortunately being occupied with other tasks I am unable to meet your proposition. Being rather old, I have to economize my energies.

Colin Marshall comments:

Jung, as you can see, doubled his own interest in the subject by not only considering flying saucers a social phenomenon, but as a real physical phenomenon as well. Serious enthusiasts of both Jung and UFOs might consider bidding on the original letter, now up for auction. Estimated sale price: $2,000 to 3,000.

Louise Mensch considers it mired in identity politics and postmodern etiquette:

We have the unfruitful spectacle of some of the most leftwing commentators in Britain wondering if they are being leftwing enough, or if their background even gives them the right to make an argument. “Check your privilege”, for example, is a profoundly stupid trope that states that only those with personal experience of something should comment, or that if a person is making an argument, they should immediately give way if their view is contradicted by somebody with a different life story. …

At this point, I had drifted off into Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where Stan and Judith are debating whether they should stick up for Stan’s “right to have babies” even though he can’t have babies. And that is what the modern feminist movement has become. Full of intersectionality, debates about middle-class privilege, hand-wringing over a good education (this is again “privilege” and not well-deserved success), and otherwise intelligent women backing out of debates and sitting around frenziedly checking their privilege.

It does nothing. It accomplishes nothing. It changes nothing.