While having not (admittedly) been a great fan of Ronald Reagan and his presidency, I think Mr. Reagan deserves much credit for having nominated Sandra Day O'Connor--who died on Friday, at 93--to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
The legacy of Justice O'Connor--the first woman to serve on the Court--is an honorable and admirable one.
Tuesday's memorial service for Rosalynn Carter--carried on television--was very moving.
Mrs.
Carter was an extraordinary American--and an exceptional citizen of the
world. She led a life of great service, and great purpose.
The following link is to an excellent piece from the website of The Atlantic, by staff writer Tom Nichols, titled "The Juvenile Viciousness of Campus Anti-Semitism." Its subtitle is: "Some of America's students are embracing an ancient evil."
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/11/campus-anti-semitism-hamas-war/675991/
Mr. Nichols writes, for example, that at George Washington University,
activists projected pro-Hamas slogans on the sides of buildings, including “Free Palestine from the river to the sea,” a call for the eradication of Israel. Spare me the sophistry—most recently plumped by Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan—that “From the river to the sea” is merely an anodyne call for freedom and equal rights, or that it somehow can be detached from Hamas’s genocidal meaning...
Mr. Nichols writes:
Good for Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, for denouncing this slogan (despite immediate campus backlash
for doing so); better late than never. Some protesters insist—and many
with undeniable honesty—that they are objecting only to Israeli policy.
But even the sincerest among them often resort to the backbreaking
mental gymnastics required to dismiss the obvious anti-Semitism that is
woven into so many of these protests.
Over the past days, contemplating Hamas's murderous, sadistic, gruesome attacks in Israel, I have thought of the group's reaction, in May of 2011, to the death of the mass murderer Osama bin Laden.
News reports at the time cited Ismail Haniyeh, who today is head of the Hamas Political Bureau; he has held this position since 2017.
One 2011 report said this:
Though he noted doctrinal differences between bin Laden's al Qaeda and Hamas, Haniyeh said: "We condemn the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior. We ask God to offer him mercy with the true believers and the martyrs."
I've long been weary of hearing those who are imbued with a deep
(and often obsessive) animus toward Israel--the hatred, for example,
from conspiratorial sectors on the right (including neo-Nazis, and their
like), and hatred from certain sectors on the left (often today,
notably, coming from repugnant anti-Israel student groups on college
campuses). I've been hearing versions of these anti-Israel voices, with profound
dismay, for decades.
And so, one must make note of one's
support--one's wholehearted support--for the people of Israel, during
this terrible and perilous time.
On Saturday, one also must note, President Biden spoke (importantly, forcefully) in support of Israel's right of self-defense--following the thousands of rocket attacks, that day, from Hamas (and, evidently, from Islamic Jihad as well), and following the hundreds of murders (and the kidnappings) committed by Hamas gunmen during the group's invasion.
Mr. Biden said, in part:
Hamas terrorists crossing into Israel killing not only Israeli soldiers, but Israeli civilians in the street, in their homes. Innocent people murdered, wounded, entire families taken hostage by Hamas just days after Israel marked the holiest of days on the Jewish calendar. It’s unconscionable.
You know, when I spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu this morning, I told him the United States stands with the people of Israel in the face of these terrorist assaults. Israel has the right to defend itself and its people. Full stop.
There is never justification for terrorist attacks.
And my administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering.
I am hopeful that the supremely talented (and extremely courageous) writer Salman Rushdie might be given this year's Nobel Prize in Literature.
The prize will be awarded on Thursday.
On Sunday's premiere of the new season of CBS's 60 Minutes, correspondent Scott Pelley spoke with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The interview (or, more precisely, interviews) took place in Ukraine, in advance of Mr. Zelenskyy's visit, this week, to the United States.
Mr. Zelenskyy remains a remarkable world figure. He is impressively determined, unusually smart, focused, eloquent, human.
Here is the link to the 60 Minutes segment:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zelenskyy-putin-world-war-iii-ukraine-russia-60-minutes/
Scott
Pelley, one notes, is one of the great reporters and interviewers in
CBS News's distinguished history. His piece on Sunday about President
Zelenskyy was in keeping with his longtime commitment to presenting
meaningful, intelligent, superb journalism.
On my list of books to read: novelist and short story writer Ann Beattie's new work, Onlookers.
It is described as being a book of linked short stories, which take place in Charlottesville, VA. The book, published by Scribner, was released on July 18th.
https://www.amazon.com/Onlookers-Stories-Ann-Beattie/dp/1668013657/
As I've mentioned previously, in this space, I lived in Charlottesville--a city for which I continue to feel great affection--from the spring of 1995 until the start of 2001.
https://www.amazon.com/Juneteenth-Annette-Gordon-Reed/dp/1631498835/
Ms. Gordon-Reed is perhaps best known for her 2008 book, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. The book received the 2008 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and, in 2009, the Pulitzer Prize for History.
Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the 2013 Boston Marathon terror attacks.
The devastation was enormous, the attacks hideously cruel. There were three deaths, and hundreds of injuries. Seventeen of those injured lost limbs.
Those killed in the bombings were Martin Richard, age 8,
from the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston; Krystle Campbell, 29, of
Medford; and Lu Lingzi, 23, of China, a graduate student at Boston
University. (Lu Lingzi has often been referred to as Lingzi Lu, in news
stories.)
There was, too, the terrible related violence which took place days later.
There was the April 18th shooting death of M.I.T. police officer Sean Collier, 27.
And: the severe injury suffered by Boston officer Dennis Simmonds--from an explosive device thrown by one of the Tsarnaev brothers, during the April 19th firefight in nearby Watertown. He died a year later, at 28, as a result of the injury.
A Boston transit
officer, Richard Donohue, was shot, near-fatally, during the Watertown
battle. In 2015, local officials said that his injury, in the midst of
the chaos that night, was likely from friendly fire. Officer
Donohue returned to work in 2015, yet in 2016, at age 36, he
retired, due to the continuing effects of his injury.
Here are two moving stories, from yesterday's Boston Globe, about two survivors of the bombings.
The
first is about Jeff Bauman, who was 27 in 2013. He was grievously wounded by the first of the two explosions on Boylston Street.
The
second story is about Jane Richard, 7 years old in 2013, who was
injured terribly by the second bomb. Her brother Martin was killed.
Her mother lost her vision in one eye; her father was wounded as well.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/04/13/sports/jeff-bauman-boston-marathon-bombing/
Here, too, is the first part of a lengthy Boston Globe article about the Richard family, published in April of 2014; there is a link, at the end, to the second part of the article:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/04/12/loss-and-love/a19pcWz6WF5nNozPPItwYI/story.html
I was recently putting together a post about the subject of writing, and mathematics.
Last Friday (April 7th), before I was able to finish the post, The New York Times published an essay about the subject, by British mathematician Sarah Hart. (Dr. Hart's book, Once Upon a Prime, was published this week by Flatiron Books; its subtitle--The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature--was also the title of the recent Times essay.)
https://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Prime-Connections-Mathematics/dp/1250850886/ref
My interest in writing about the subject was rooted in a couple of things I had recently read.
The first was an obituary, from The New York
Times online archive, of the novelist James M. Cain--who wrote such works as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934),
Double Indemnity (1936), and Mildred Pierce (1941). Mr. Cain died in 1977, at age 85.
The obituary was by the book critic John Leonard, and included the following, about Mr. Cain's writing style:
In his last years, Mr. Cain explained that it was "my algebra...moves...progressions. Suspense comes from making sure your algebra is right."
A few days after seeing this, I was looking at the Wikipedia page about the novelist Thomas Pynchon. The page included an excerpt of a New Yorker review of Mr. Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow; the review was by the poet, and essayist, L.E. Sissman. Mr. Sissman wrote, of Mr. Pynchon: "He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks."
(I will note that I have not yet read Gravity's Rainbow--have wanted, though, to do so for years--yet its opening words ["A screaming comes across the sky."] constitute, I think--I am certainly not alone in believing this--one of fiction's great introductory sentences.)
After stumbling upon these references to math and writing. I looked online to see what else I might locate about the subject. I landed on a 2012 essay from The New Yorker, by writer Alexander Nazaryan, "Why Writers Should Learn Math."
Mr. Nazaryan wrote, in the piece:
Poets have been more conversant with mathematics than fiction writers, probably because they have to pay attention to the numerical qualities of words when working in meter, forced to consider the form and even physical shape of what they write, not just its meaning. Wordsworth praised “poetry and geometric truth” for “their high privilege of lasting life,” while Edna St. Vincent Millay remarked that “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.”
Fiction writers have rarely expressed such earnest appreciation for mathematical aesthetics. That’s a shame, because mathematical precision and imagination can be a salve to a literature that is drowning in vagueness of language and theme. “The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics,” Ernest Hemingway wrote to Maxwell Perkins, in 1945. Even if Papa never had much formal training in mathematics, he understood it as a discipline in which problems are solved through a sort of plodding ingenuity. The very best passages of Hemingway have the mathematical complexity of a fractal: a seemingly simple formula that, in its recurrence, causes slight but crucial changes over time. Take, for example, the famous retreat from Caporetto in “A Farewell to Arms”:
When daylight came the storm was still blowing but the snow had stopped. It had melted as it fell on the wet ground and now it was raining again. There was another attack just after daylight but it was unsuccessful. We expected an attack all day but it did not come until the sun was going down. The bombardment started to the south below the long wooded ridge where the Austrian guns were concentrated. We expected a bombardment but it did not come. Guns were firing from the field behind the village and the shells, going away, had a comfortable sound.
Mr. Nazaryan continued:
The procession here has an algebraic deliberateness, but that simplicity gives way to a complexity of meaning. Hemingway starts with the material (snow, wet, daylight, sun) only to end with the unexpected and intimate “comfortable sound” of the receding Austrian guns... Everything in this passage is intentional, from the plain imagery to the heightening of narrative urgency that comes with the repetition of “we expected.”
In last week's New York Times essay, referred to above, mathematician Sarah Hart wrote this:
Good mathematics, like good writing, involves an inherent appreciation of structure, rhythm and pattern. That feeling we get when we read a great novel or a perfect sonnet — that here is a beautiful thing, with all the component parts fitting together perfectly in a harmonious whole — is the same feeling a mathematician experiences when reading a beautiful proof.
Dr. Hart also wrote:
Great literature and
great mathematics satisfy the same deep yearning in us: for beauty, for truth,
for understanding. As the pioneering Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya
wrote: "It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in [one's] soul
… the poet must see what others do not see, must see more deeply …. And the
mathematician must do the same.”
The short work of fiction, at the link below, is by the writer Rivka
Galchen. The story, "How I Became a Vet" (about a veterinarian), is
from the March 13, 2023 issue of The New Yorker; it appeared on the magazine's website on March 6th.
I think it is beautifully written, and beautifully conceived.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/13/how-i-became-a-vet
Here, too, is an interview with Ms. Galchen, about the story:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/rivka-galchen-03-13-23
A good interview, with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky--conducted by Wolf Blitzer--aired on CNN this evening.
The interview was broadcast during the network's 9-10 p.m. (ET) program. The program has been without a permanent host since the December, 2021 departure of Chris Cuomo.
Vladimir Putin's murderous, catastrophic war against Ukraine has now lasted one year.
Putin, of course, did not get what he expected, in response to his merciless invasion.
What he got (in addition to solidarity with Ukraine, from much of the world) was the valiant, indefatigable leadership
of Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's President--and the courage and resolve
of the citizens Mr. Zelensky leads.
Good wishes for the New Year...
(One must note: the years, with age, do feel as though they pass by with greater speed.)
