In The Literary Review of Canada, Tom Jokinen writes about the problem of boredom and Saul Bellow’s antidote: “‘We are in a state of radical distraction,’ he writes in ‘A World Too Much with Us,’ an essay for the journal Critical Inquiry, in 1975, the same year Humboldt’s Gift appears. ‘I don’t see how we can be blind to the political character of our so-called ‘consumer’ societies. Each of us stands in the middle of things, exposed to the great public noise…All minds are preoccupied with terror, crime, the instability of cities, the future of nations, crumbling empires, foundering currencies, the poisoning of nature…To recite the list is itself unsettling.’ (T.S. Eliot could no longer read the daily paper, Bellow writes. ‘It was too exciting.’) The list is unsettling. But familiar, too. We’re living it, again and always. This is what Bellow is driving at with Charlie Citrine’s imagined project on boredom. Crises tend to pile up, repeat themselves. The more crises you have in your morning news, the longer the list of frustrations, the eyes inevitably glaze over…Here is Bellow’s antidote to the evil of banality: to think more, to look hard at the world instead of looking away. This is where Zachary Leader finds the key to Charlie Citrine, and by definition to Saul Bellow himself.”

The high art of French comics: “It’s a big year for comic book anniversaries. Batman’s 80th is this year, and Asterix is turning 60. But at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in France, which finished on Sunday, there was a sense that the form’s best days may be yet to come — in the French-speaking world, at least.”

Katharine Smyth visits Virginia Woolf’s summer retreat in Cornwall: “On my last morning in St Ives, I dove beneath the waves at Porthmeor Beach—dodging the noxious jellyfish that Woolf described as ‘lamps, with streaming hair’—and then sat dripping on the sand, overcome, not for the first time that trip, by a kind of quiet, spreading contentment. Woolf would retreat to Cornwall again and again over the course of her life, lured by its sea air and seclusion; this spot ‘on the very toenail’ of England, as her father called it, seemed to offer her a sustenance unlike that of anywhere else in the world.”

Why are farming video games so popular in Europe? “Never operated a tractor before? Can’t tell the difference between a bale of hay and a bale of straw? That’s fine. Even people with supple hands and no manual labor experience can compete in this challenge, which exists entirely in cyberspace and comes with a substantial cash prize. You’ll have to be in Europe, though, where the popularity of online farming-simulator gaming has reached a level that now supports a 10-tournament esports season, which will culminate with a €100,000 ($114,074) grand prize.”

Ned Balbo wins the 2019 New Criterion Poetry Prize.

The first handshake: “The classical archeologist Janet Burnett Grossman, in her article “Funerary Sculpture,” published in The Athenian Agora, defines dexiosis as a ‘gesture symbolizing connectedness,’ which isn’t too different from today. Sculptures often show mortals and gods communing through a handshake, and instances of them on graves and steles signify everything from marriage to peace between warring cities.”

Essay of the Day:

In Wired, Evan Ratlife writes about the South African programmer who became one of the largest suppliers of illegal painkillers to the United States:

“On a gray afternoon, three men enter a drab hotel room for a business meeting, months in the making. Two are white: a portly South African and his muscled European deputy. The other, with dark hair and a paunch of his own, is Latino—Colombian, or so he says. The hotel is in the Liberian capital, abutting the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of West Africa, but it could be any number of places in the world. The men’s business is drugs and weapons, and drugs and weapons are everywhere. They shake hands, nod heads, and begin speaking in the elliptical but familiar way of people who share the vernacular of a trade. They are cautious, but not cautious enough. A video exists to prove it.

“‘I can see why you picked this place,’ says the South African, settling his substantial bulk into a maroon leather couch pressed against the wall. ‘Because it’s chaotic. It should be easy to move in and out, from what I’ve seen.’ His name is Paul, and to a trained ear his cadence carries a tinge of not just South Africa but his childhood home, Zimbabwe, where he lived until his teens. His large white head is shaved close, and what hair remains has gone gray as he approaches forty. He has the look of a beach vacationer cleaned up for a dinner out, in an oversize blue polo shirt and a pair of khaki cargo shorts. His clothes seem out of keeping with both the scope of his international influence and the deal he is about to complete, with a man he believes to be the head of a South American drug cartel.”

* * *

“In March 2012, six months before Paul and Pepe’s meeting in Liberia, agents from the United States Drug Enforcement Administration walked through the glass doors of a small pharmacy on Main Street in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. They were armed with search warrants targeting its 82-year-old owner, Charles Schultz. A pillar of the local community for four decades, Schultz had been charged with shipping more than 700,000 illegal painkiller prescriptions from the back of his two local pharmacies. In return, the agents calculated, he had received more than $27 million in wire transfers from a mysterious Hong Kong bank account.

“Roughly a month later, officers from the Organized Crime and Triad Bureau in Hong Kong raided a warehouse in Tsuen Wan, a bayside district north of the city. Inside they discovered twenty tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, divided into a thousand bags and falsely labeled as sodium chloride. It was enough to create an explosive 10 times more powerful than the one used in the Oklahoma City bombing.

“On the warehouse lease they found the name of an Israeli-Australian citizen, a former member of an elite division of the Israeli Defense Forces. When they raided the man’s office and apartment, they turned up deeds for two stash houses, receipts for tens of millions of dollars in gold bars, and handwritten directions to a meeting in Buenaventura, Colombia, with a man named ‘Don Lucho’—the head of one of the world’s biggest cocaine cartels.

“Then, in November, a pair of spear fishermen diving off an atoll in Tonga discovered a wrecked forty-four-foot sailboat with a badly decomposed body on board. Lining the walls of the boat’s cabin, local authorities found, were 204 bricks of cocaine, neatly wrapped in brown plastic and worth more than $90 million on the street in Australia, where they suspected it had been destined.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Japan’s snow-covered trees

Poem: Amit Majmudar, “Detachment”     

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