Robert Caro’s responses in this NYRB interview are profound, fascinating, and inspiring—as is the portrait of him at his typewriter.
Rebecca Solnit on writing and agency
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
Les Murray, “Animal Nativity”
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.
Restoring the Democrats’ foreign-policy vision
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.
Rereading Mary McCarthy
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.
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.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s “casually Catholic,” Californian upbringing
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.