Alan Jacobs

A young lion sleeps, indifferent to the thunderstorm rolling in behind him; from a collection of wildlife photographs of the year

From a photo essay on the disappearing old neighborhoods of Shanghai

The study was done on land owned by Iowa State University called the Marsden Farm. On 22 acres of it, beginning in 2003, researchers set up three plots: one replicated the typical Midwestern cycle of planting corn one year and then soybeans the next, along with its routine mix of chemicals. On another, they planted a three-year cycle that included oats; the third plot added a four-year cycle and alfalfa. The longer rotations also integrated the raising of livestock, whose manure was used as fertilizer.

The results were stunning: The longer rotations produced better yields of both corn and soy, reduced the need for nitrogen fertilizer and herbicides by up to 88 percent, reduced the amounts of toxins in groundwater 200-fold and didn’t reduce profits by a single cent.

In short, there was only upside — and no downside at all — associated with the longer rotations. There was an increase in labor costs, but remember that profits were stable. So this is a matter of paying people for their knowledge and smart work instead of paying chemical companies for poisons. And it’s a high-stakes game; according to the Environmental Protection Agency, about five billion pounds of pesticidesare used each year in the United States.

For expert writers like Bellow, Woolf, Carter and Nabokov, excess, somewhat paradoxically, is of the essence – so that excess might not even be the correct term after all. Life, they seem to say, is rarely transparent, and therefore neither are their sentences. More than this, their sentences do not merely reflect reality in any passive or apathetic sense, but actively work to create their own multiple realities. This is not to conflate their styles. They are fiercely individualistic writers. Excess serves very different functions for each of them, whether as an expression of wonder, adaptability, individuality, free will; or as a means of self-fashioning; even as a survival tactic. But whatever it embodies or performs, the sentence in their hands is expansive rather than constrictive. They demonstrate to us, again and again, that sentences are made up of multiple units – from the clause to the phrase to the individual word to the punctuation mark – and that each of these units can be its own little world, its own site of possibility. When the units are made to work in unison, the sentence becomes a powerful space of transformation and particularity that transcends any straightforward declarative utterance.

Above all else, language should be generous and liberating, and these writers remind us of the pure pleasure to be found in the free play and musicality of words. Their sentences sing rather than grumble or shout, and we are all the richer for them.

At last, having been (always attended by the cat) all over the house and having seen the whole stock of miscellaneous lumber, which was certainly curious, we came into the back part of the shop. Here on the head of an empty barrel stood on end were an ink-bottle, some old stumps of pens, and some dirty playbills; and against the wall were pasted several large printed alphabets in several plain hands.

“What are you doing here?” asked my guardian.

“Trying to learn myself to read and write,” said Krook.

“And how do you get on?”

“Slow. Bad,” returned the old man impatiently. “It’s hard at my time of life.”

“It would be easier to be taught by some one,” said my guardian.

“Aye, but they might teach me wrong!” returned the old man with a wonderfully suspicious flash of his eye. “I don’t know what I may have lost by not being learned afore. I wouldn’t like to lose anything by being learned wrong now.”

“Wrong?” said my guardian with his good-humoured smile. “Who do you suppose would teach you wrong?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House!” replied the old man, turning up his spectacles on his forehead and rubbing his hands. “I don’t suppose as anybody would, but I’d rather trust my own self than another!”

mwfrost:

If you’re like me, and enjoy giggling at the stuff stupid people say in public, you should see all the google results that discuss the “Paleozoic diet.”

Until you’ve tried sous vide trilobite, don’t knock it, dude.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvJ-f4ykvBE?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=187]

Apropos of absolutely nothing, this is my all-time favorite Apple ad.

Joseph Conrad, who had seen a revolution or two, put it this way:

‘A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time … The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane and devoted natures, the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims—the victims of disgust, disenchantment—often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured—that is the definition of revolutionary success.’

Liberal democracy, for all of its enormous and inherent flaws, is not a thing to be discarded lightly. The only alternative so far, in modern society, is fascism—and I see lots of fascists at both ends of the political spectrum, lots of would-be commissars and commandants, who would be happy to step into the vacuum. We’ve been here before, between the world wars. Economic crisis, political stalemate: despair at liberal democracy is exactly what they brought on, and fascism, too often, was precisely the result. The hazy dream, the purifying fire: not these again, not these.

Why I Resigned the Paterno Chair - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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