Opinion | June 8, 2023: “There’s a well-known passage in the title essay of Joan Didion’s 1979 collection ‘The White Album’ that begins with a litany of 1960s tragedies, including the massacre at My Lai, a harrowing story of child abandonment and a very brief and cryptic mention of Robert Kennedy’s assassination: ‘I watched Robert Kennedy’s funeral on a veranda at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.’ The section concludes with a personal revelation: In June of 1968, Ms. Didion experienced ‘an attack of vertigo, nausea and a feeling that she was going to pass out,’ for which she underwent an extensive psychiatric evaluation and was prescribed amitriptyline, an antidepressant. ‘By way of comment,’ she wrote, ‘I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.’ Over 40 years later, ‘The White Album’ is regarded as…

Timothy Snyder is a historian at Yale Univerity who has written extensively on European history and threats to democracy. This essay is a fascinating history of Ukraine, which was published in The New Yorker.

He writes:

When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it.

Empire’s story divides subjects from objects. As the philosopher Frantz Fanon argued, colonizers see themselves as actors with purpose, and the colonized as instruments to realize the imperial vision. Putin took a pronounced colonial turn when returning to the Presidency…

Almost exactly 10 years ago, I decided to create a website devoted to the New York School of poets and artists and name it Locus Solus, after the legendary little magazine that briefly served as the movement’s house journal. Even at the time, I knew it was swimming a bit upstream to launch a blog just at the very moment that the blogging era seemed to be crashing to a close. But I did so because I’d long felt the need for a place to find commentary, news, reviews, and links related to a movement that I found endlessly fascinating and that others seemed to as well. As I noted on the fifth anniversary of Locus Solus, back in 2018, I didn’t have a clear picture of what this site might become or what kind of audience it might find, but was pleasantly surprised to discover that it…

Syracuse University’s SUPARS system was developed by Pauline Atherton as an early antecedent of what we might today call ‘search’.

“Throughout an unusually sunny Fall in 1970, hundreds of students and faculty at Syracuse University sat one at a time before a printing computer terminal (similar to an electric typewriter) connected to an IBM 360 mainframe located across campus in New York state. Almost none of them had ever used a computer before, let alone a computer-based information retrieval system. Their hands trembled as they touched the keyboard; several later reported that they had been afraid of breaking the entire system as they typed. The participants were performing their first online searches, entering carefully chosen words to find relevant psychology abstracts in a brand-new database. They typed one key term or instruction per line, like ‘Motivation’ in line 1, ‘Esteem’ in line 2, and ‘L1 and L2’ in line 3

Here is one of my semi-regular roundups of recent links and news related to the New York School of poets. (Previous roundups can be found here).

• First, I wanted to use this roundup to mark some of the sad news and sharp losses related to the New York School that I haven’t had the chance to post about here over the past few months. In December 2022 came the huge blow of Bernadette Mayer’s death at the age of 78. As someone who has written about, taught, and loved Mayer’s work for a long time, I have too much to say about her loss to fit in this space, but for now, I wanted to at least point to some of the manyobituaries and tributes to this central American poet. Also, a few weeks ago, the Poetry Project at St. Marks hosted a

Millions of Americans are saddled with debt due to the cost of their college education. I have met adults who were still paying for their college education years after they graduated. As a society, we send mixed messages to young people: we want you to get a college education, but you will have to spend years paying for it.

When I visited Finland a decade ago, I was amazed to learn that all higher education there is tuition-free. My guide explained the Finnish view: education is a human right, and it’s immoral to make people pay for a human right.

We as a nation know that investing in education is good for the nation’s future. We all benefit when more people are better educated and have more skills and knowledge. To the extent that young people are reluctant to assume the high cost of a college education, they will choose…

The Republican Party has an albatross around its neck, namely, the need to feed the fraudulent claim that the 2020 election was stolen. This canard has given them leeway to enact restrictions on the right to vote, typically targeting groups likely to vote for Democrats. DeSantis created a special force to arrest former felons who voted when they were not supposed to, but most of the handful who were arrested were released because the state had sent them registration cards encouraging them to vote.

The latest crazy maneuver by Republicans is to remove their state from a national database that protects election integrity, assuring that no one votes in two states.

First to drop out was Louisiana:

On a night in January 2022, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin stepped on stage in a former airbase in Houma, La.

With American flags draped from the stage, the topic of the…

“Early on in my East Bay ramblings, I found my way into Serendipity Books, on University just up from San Pablo. Sometimes you’re in Ali Baba’s cave and you don’t even realize it. Used to be that every bookman in the area had an anecdote concerning Peter Howard, the legendarily perverse and curmudgeonly proprietor of that cavernous establishment. Peter is now gone, and Serendipity is no more, but the quality of the stock was such that for years afterwards people gossiped about where all the books ended up. Arranged on the floor amidst the general chaos were paper grocery sacks of unpriced books from the library of the late Gus Blaisdell, proprietor of Living Batch Bookstore in New Mexico, which had published the first complete version of Ronald Johnson’s Ark, which went out of print almost immediately and became fabulously expensive until it was reprinted years…

As some of you may know, the literary scholars Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina are currently writing a much-needed biography of Kenneth Koch, which will be the first full-scale treatment of Koch’s life, his wide-ranging work as writer and teacher, his literary influences and relationships, and his connections to the New York School and to his closest friends.

Next week, on Tuesday, June 13, the New York Public Library will host a special event with Hollister and Setina titled “A Life in Boxes: The Kenneth Koch Archive at the Berg Collection,” in which they will discuss their ongoing project and their experience scouring the vast Koch archives held at the NYPL.

Here’s the event description:

Kenneth Koch is best known as a founding New York School poet and pioneer in the teaching of creative writing. His papers form one of the largest collections from a single author at the Library’s…

Noam Chomsky: Moral & Social Thinker: “Noam Chomsky is a powerhouse of insightful thought – this book attests to that. So analyzing or even summarizing Anthony Arnove’s The Essential Chomsky is no simple task. A moderately lengthy and notably chronological collection of texts plucked from Chomsky’s enormous output, The Essential Chomsky leaps from linguistics to Palestine to libertarian socialism and back to linguistics again. Given the political nature of Against the Current, we will focus on Chomsky’s views on political philosophy, morality, U.S. foreign and domestic policy, and propaganda, ending with thoughts on the editing. But first, a few introductory remarks on the man himself. Chomsky is professionally a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he has long supplemented his academic work with writing and lecturing on contemporary political issues. Unlike his writings in the field of linguistics, which can be highly technical, his political work is consistently…