Sed Libera Nos a Malo

It’s no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature.

That leads to the most important rule of media: Nothing matters, and nothing works. If you’re selling a book, everyone will want you to go on TV to promote the book. That will sell negative ten books. Some stupid tweet will sell 1,600 copies of the book. I mean obviously if Oprah wants to feature you and tells people to get your book, the math changes. Sometimes things do work! But in general nothing matters, and nothing works. You won’t cost yourself your career if you say no.

Both the public intellectual and the public influencer play a quasi-independent role separate from but still dependent on a traditional, culturally powerful institution. Both, in other words, remake a private, institutional role as a public, personal one. In the case of the public intellectual, the institution was the academy and the role was thinking. In the case of the public influencer, the institution is the corporation and the role is marketing. The shift makes sense. Marketing, after all, has displaced thinking as our primary culture-shaping activity, the source of what we perceive ourselves to be. The public square having moved from the metaphorical marketplace of ideas to the literal marketplace of goods, it’s only natural that we should look to a new kind of guru to guide us.

The thing is that you can always go on, even when you have the most terrific ending. For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey. For instance, you write a poem about the crucifixion. You have decided to go ten stanzas—and yet it’s the third stanza and you’ve already dealt with the crucifixion. You have to go beyond that and add something—to develop it into something which is not there yet. Basically what I’m saying is that the poetic notion of infinity is far greater, and it’s almost self-propelled by the form. Once in a conversation with Tony Hecht at Breadloaf we were talking about the usage of the Bible, and he said, “Joseph, wouldn’t you agree that what a poet does is to try to make more sense out of these things?” And that’s what it is—there’s more sense, ya? In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they’re not talking to people anymore, or to some seraphical creature. What they’re doing is simply talking back to the language itself—as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony—those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it’s something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a “read,” commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.

All I shall ever write will only be a feeble part of what I feel."

A campaigner for traffic reform broke out into verse in a court room in an attempt to 'lighten a heavy matter' after he was caught speeding. Film maker Martin Cassini had prepared seven pages of notes for the court but decided to write a poem the day before he was due at Barnstaple Magistrates Court. Cassini, 63, who is currently making a film about traffic signal removal and roadway redesign in Poynton, Cheshire, said he thought the poem would 'help condense some points'. But his poem failed to stop him being hit with a £175 fine. Cassini was also given six points on his licence after he was caught speeding at 91mph on the 60mph A361 North Devon Link road. He admitted speeding but told JPs in verse how he had put his foot down to overtake a slow-moving vehicle. Part of his poem read: 'The outlandish speed was but a short burst, on a dual lane stretch to get up there first, to the top of the hill to avoid getting stuck, down the single lane stretch by a slow moving truck.'

I was very struck by something that I came across in my reading of Jonathan Edwards. I recall him quoting a writer who talks about how whatever we say lives on after us, that we continue to exist so long as any word we say exists in a living mind. And that there should be two judgments: one when we die, and one when the full impact of our lives has played itself out. That is, when every word that we’ve said, for good or ill, basically ceases to be active.... Writing should always be exploratory... It’s like wrestling with the angel: On the one hand you feel the constraints of what can be said, but on the other hand you feel the infinite potential. There’s nothing more interesting than language and the problem of trying to bend it to your will, which you can never quite do. You can only find what it contains, which is always a surprise.

Odors seem to affect the olfactory nerves in certain definite degrees, as sounds act on the auditory nerves. There is, so to speak, an octave of smells, as there is an octave of tones; some perfumes accord, like the notes of an instrument. Thus almond, vanilla, heliotrope, and clematis, harmonize perfectly, each of them producing almost the same impression in a different degree. On the other hand, we have citron, lemon, orange peel, and verbena, forming a similarly associated octave of odors, in a higher key. The analogy is completed by those odors which we call half-scents, such as the rose, with rose-geranium for its semitone; ‘petit-grain’ and neroli, followed by orange-flower. With the aid of flowers already known, by mixing them in fixed proportions, we can obtain the perfume of almost all flowers.

As a philosopher influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, I’d always imagined cheerfulness was a sickly child, born nine months after a Tinder date between Stoicism and Christianity. But that night I learned that cheerfulness was a British orphan smuggled into the US in the early 20th century, and was now making a living spreading itself all over contemporary American kitsch: throw pillows, coffee mugs and slippers. Cheerfulness has planted deep roots in US soil, and the poor Boy Scouts are made to believe she’s a virtue.

Tarantino’s films are often said to be cruel; certainly, they can be extremely brutal. But then again, a similar accusation is often made against the fiction of certain writers — Vladimir Nabokov, Silvina Ocampo, Clarice Lispector — whom I see as deeply compassionate. In reading their work, I’ve been inclined to interpret the unflinching and seemingly cold portrayal of violence and suffering as a kind of morally indignant arraignment of the brutality of the universe we actually inhabit. I hadn’t credited Mr. Tarantino with that much subtlety. Now, I think I may have misjudged him.

Abbott’s take on convicted murderers getting out of prison and not coming back is supported by numbers. But it likely has less to do with their viewing life as “precious and fragile,” as he suggests, than with their simply aging out of crime. A 2011 report tracked 860 people convicted in California released since 1995. Only 1 percent committed new felonies, and none were for murder. By contrast, a 2018 Justice Department report found that 21 percent of all prisoners released in thirty states in 2005 and tracked over a nine-year period were re-arrested for an offense involving violence within three years of their release. To this end, releasing people convicted of murder into society has little risk—and what makes Abbott exceptional, along with his writing, is that he killed again after serving so much time... I can appreciate Abbott’s pain, the power of his writing, its expression, raw and vulnerable. But I can’t say, as Mailer did of Abbott, that the prison system itself made me worse. In fact, being here may have saved my life. In my younger years, despite the difficulties of my childhood, I certainly had more opportunities than Abbott and most of my peers in prison did. I chose to squander them: I sought out “the life,” sold drugs, lured Alex to his death, pulled the trigger. I chose all that. In prison, I choose to commit myself to writing and rewriting the words on the page, sitting on an upturned bucket until my ass is numb and my back burns..... “I want consolation more than anything in this world,” Abbott writes. Abbott wanted to be heard, and Mailer wanted to listen. Being connected to a famous author like Mailer must have made Abbott feel that he mattered..... I remember telling my sponsor, an investment banker and a volunteer who brought AA meetings into Attica, that Esquire was interested in publishing a story I was doing about the mental illness crisis behind bars. He congratulated me, but also offered a knowing smile. I was chasing prestige and he recognized in that transparent need that I could all too easily substitute one addiction for another. I was five years sober then, but sure enough, I relapsed and started popping the muscle relaxers that prisoners would get from the medication line, hold in their mouths, spit out when they were no longer under observation, and deal later. I stopped praying, stopped helping others, and started acting like a jerk again. Eventually, I came to the realization that my reform through writing could only be sustained in my sobriety..... In the March 12, 2009, issue of the Review, some of Mailer’s letters to Abbott were published. His letter to Abbott of 1979 addresses Abbott’s drug use. “And I would say to you that what I found most disturbing in all your thoughts is that what you like,” Mailer writes, “you adopt and adapt automatically to your intellectual system. You need drugs in order to alleviate the soul-killing monotony of prison, so drugs are part of your system.”..... At Abbott’s last day of trial, Mailer pleaded with the press. “Adan has already been destroyed,” he said, “at least let Abbott become a writer.” Then he said, “a democracy involves taking risks.” I’ll admit, reading this made me feel envious, and a bit confused. I didn’t quite understand Mailer’s implicit point that Abbott needed to be free to become a writer. Wasn’t the idea to reaffirm literature itself, in Mailer’s words, “as a human expression that will survive all obstacles”..... In an earlier draft of this piece, my editor told me that I sounded competitive with Abbott and suggested I ease up on him, that I hadn’t yet myself faced the challenges of release, and that the reader might ask, “How do we know Lennon will be different?” There was trust and risk involved with Abbott, he reminded me, and there’s trust and risk involved with me. Fair enough. My prison pedigree, though, is hardly on par with Abbott’s. I don’t see myself as a risk, as Abbott was, to prison order or the safety of society. I’ve also already earned trust from colleagues in journalism as a writer from prison, without a famous writer’s championing my cause. Even so, I try not to see my writing as a passport to freedom so much as I see it as my life’s purpose.

Hagoromo chalk is a bit thicker than standard American chalk. And it’s coated, giving it a slick feel and protecting the fingers from dust. It glides smoothly across the blackboard, producing a consistent line with sharply defined edges. And it’s durable, difficult to snap between the fingers. It has been called the Rolls Royce of chalk—even the Michael Jordan of chalk. The latter analogy implies that the chalk is no mere tool, but itself possesses some kind of power. Indeed, some suggest that Hagoromo gives the user a mental boost, that with the chalk in hand theorems practically write themselves.

What Alexander Pope said of puns—they speak “twice as much by being split”—is true of language as a whole, too. In this respect, puns pun on human life, which is itself equivocal, two faced, duplicitous. Everything does double duty. Doors offer exits and entrances; tears come from comedy and tragedy. James Joyce had a painting of his father’s hometown—Cork, Ireland—framed in cork and hung in his Paris apartment, a physical reminder of his notion of the world as a place “where unexpected simultaneities are the rule … Words move into words, people into people, incidents into incidents like the ambiguities of a pun, or a dream,” according to Richard Ellmann’s biography of the author of Finnegans Wake, a six-hundred-plus-page novel made up almost entirely of macaronic puns. There is no sharp boundary splitting the wit of the scientist, inventor, or improviser from that of the artist, the sage, or the jester. The creative experience moves seamlessly from the “Aha!” of scientific discovery to the “Ah” of aesthetic insight to the “Haha” of the pun and the punch line. “Comic discovery is paradox stated—scientific discovery is paradox resolved,” Koestler wrote.

In theory, other disciplines such as ethics might seem to have more claim to illuminate discussion of God. But the tangible substance of architecture, the fact that in good architecture, every tiny piece is (by ­definition) suffused with God, either more or less, gives the concept of God a meaning essentially translated from the beauty of what may be seen in such a place, and so allows it to disclose God with unique clarity. ­Successful architecture ultimately leads us to see God and to know God. If we pay attention to the beauty of those places that are suffused with God in each part, then we can conceive of God in a down-to-earth way. This ­follows from an awareness in our hearts, and from our ­active effort to make things that help make the Earth ­beautiful. This is not a pastiche of pseudo-religious phrasing. In technical language, it is the structure-preserving or wholeness-extending transformation (described in The Nature of Order and capable of being precisely defined) that shows us how to modify a given place in such a way as to give it more life. When applied repeatedly, this kind of transformation is what brings life to the Earth, in any place.

Last weekend, the Art Department welcomed visitors to a decommissioned building situated on the grounds of the Laguna Bell Substation in Commerce, which it had transformed into “a secret wish-processing facility.” Dandelions, we were told, was ultimately where the white, puffed seeds ended up after being blown by a dreamer — and it turns out that wishes don’t always come true. The seeds were analyzed in a logical, quantitative matter by busy bureaucrats juggling the millions of wishes that floated into their premises... But just as important to the performance was the Art Department’s choice of location, which presented an unlikely metaphor. By imagining the infrastructure of wish making, it also unearthed the role of substations. Like the ubiquity of dandelions, substations can be found in all corners of urban life, even our own backyards, but their pervasiveness rarely register in our conscious. While stepping through Dandelions, catching sights of the generators, transmission towers, and power lines that loom over the building through the windows, it felt as if the infrastructure needed to electrify homes for millions of people were also essential for granting the millions of dandelion wishes made every summer.

Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Met, has tackled that theme for this year’s spring exhibition, Camp: Notes on Fashion (a tip of the chapeau to Susan Sontag’s essay on the subject). Bolton boasts that it “[a]dvances creative and critical dialogue about the ongoing and ever-evolving impact of camp on fashion.” One little point he’s missing, though, is right in the text the exhibition is based off of: “To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it,” Sontag writes. So how can we advance a dialogue on camp if it becomes neutered when we dare speak of it?

Rembrandt’s 1633 painting of the Holy Family effectively undermines “toxic masculinity,” but without trying to sell you shaving cream in the process.