Matt Kaul

Robert Caro’s responses in this NYRB interview are profound, fascinating, and inspiring—as is the portrait of him at his typewriter.

The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity, so there’s another kind of success in becoming conscious that matters and that is up to you and nobody else and within your reach.

~ From Rebecca Solnit’s excellent writing advice

The Iliad of peace began when this girl agreed. Now goats in trees, fish in the valley suddenly feel vivid.

Swallows flit in the stable as if a hatching of their kind, turned human, cried in the manger showing the hunger-diamond.

Cattle are content that this calf must come in human form. Spiders discern a water-walker. Even humans will sense the lamb,

He who frees from the old poem turtle-dove and snake, who gets death forgiven who puts the apple back.

Dogs, less enslaved but as starving as the poorest human there, crouch, agog at a crux of presence remembered as a star.

Samuel Moyn calls for Democrats to restore the liberal internationism that formed the core of its foreign policy, prior to Clinton and the rise of neoliberalism:

A foreign policy based on expansive militarism and endless war is neither liberal nor internationalist. If the true meaning of those now abused terms is to be recovered, a good deal of retrenchment and restraint is critical…. The United States cannot even begin to think about bringing freedom and equality to the rest of the world until it cleans its own house.

B.D. McClay’s review essay on Mary McCarthy is excellent, homing in on precisely those qualities of her writing that make McCarthy so simultaneously worthwhile and difficult:

If neither God nor political ideology could be counted on as firm guidelines for behavior, what, exactly, was one supposed to use? While others leaned on concepts like decency, McCarthy herself moved in a different direction. Whatever was painful, whatever was hard to say, whatever you didn’t want to look at, whatever you were afraid to do—that was where you needed to direct your attention. Find, in yourself, in the world, the points of self-delusion, and expose them. Do this over and over. You could call this honesty, or a kind of emotional masochism, or the last remnants of a Catholic upbringing.

I read The Group as an undergraduate, and found it both brilliantly readable and incredibly mean-spirited. McClay’s essay helps me better understand this reaction. And learning of Mailer’s disgust and O’Conner’s support makes me much more inclined to read her other novels.

This delightful essay from Sven Birkerts describes his time with a trio of poet-pals who lived & taught in Boston in the 80s: Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, & (especially) Derek Walcott.

More from that essay on Paul Thomas Anderson:

Such restorative attachments are one response to the epidemic of spiritual hunger and spiritual crisis in Anderson’s American West, where the promise of Manifest Destiny had trailed off into the sea.

Wonderful essay in The Point on Paul Thomas Anderson:

Anderson describes himself as shaped by a casually Catholic upbringing, and in his films ideas about sin and expiation jostle against his distinctly Californian passion for the panaceas of personal therapy and self-help.

Seamus Heaney has noted that if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art. It is enough.

~ Christian Wiman, quoted in a wonderfully contrarian essay called “The Case Against Reading Everything”

I still think the greatest gift you can give your kids is easy exposure to interesting things. Not compelling them to go see things, but making them feel that art and literature are just parts of the world.

~ Adam Gopnik, in a thoughtful profile

Imagine if the New York Review of Books had hired a slightly stoned Edwardian fop as art director and you’ve got … Rolling Stone at its point of highest development.

~ Andrew Ferguson, on Jann Wenner

Very proud of my sister-in-law, Krista Costin, who is performing Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with the MN Orchestra.

Snack time, listening to and imitating Auntie @kristacostin live on #classicalmpr. Sounds wonderful! #auntikrista #bach

This interview with Sonny Rollins is amazing.

The idea of jazz is so spiritual, and it has such great qualities, that it will always withstand whatever the larger culture is.

I loved fishing and silence. Walking in the hills…. I didn’t talk much. Had opinions about everything. Life and death. Good and evil. I was a film buff. Loved music. I’d stopped reading contemporary novels. More than anything, I loathed half-hearted, spineless people.

Tonight’s listening: Emerson String Quartet, Chaconnes and Fantasias: Music of Britten and Purcell. It’s beautiful and mysterious music, highly recommended.

Two exceptional recent Commonweal essays:

• David Bentley Hart demolishes an attempt to defend the death penalty
• Samuel Moyn reviews Jeremy Waldron’s new book on equality

While you’re there, go ahead and also read Anthony Domestico on what you can learn about Millennials by reading their novels rather than silly Internet “think pieces” about them (that is, us).

The Brad Mehldau show tonight at the Dakota Jazz Club was so, so good. Among the highlights from a set filled with new material:

• A new Mehldau tune, “Bel and the Dragon”
• A new, wildly polyrhythmic composition co-written by Ballard and Mehldau
• A beautiful rendition of “Wolfgang’s Waltz,” from an album, Rising Grace, that I’ve been listening to constantly over the past couple weeks

What a gift to see musicians like these in one’s city. Mehldau mentioned a couple times how much they loved playing the Dakota. A treat for everyone.