November 24, 2017

From The Economist:

One logical response to the diminishing number of workers per pensioner is to raise the retirement age. But that will exacerbate old-age inequality, if mildly. Longer careers will give richer workers more time to compound their advantages. And when retirement eventually arrives, the poor, who die earlier, will have less time to enjoy their pensions.

From The TLS (M. John Harrison on "If you could make a change to anything you’ve written over the years, what would it be?"):

There’s more than one piece I’d like never to have written at all. I’d line-edit some of the older stuff, but it would be a mistake: novels would be longish short stories by the time I’d finished with them. You can ask the question, “Is this word/sentence/paragraph really neccessary?” too often, and anyway it’s best asked at the time, not forty years later. Graham Greene was right, you just shouldn’t publish your first three novels.

From Harper's:

Senegalese doctors compiled reports of people who had suffered penetrating chest injuries caused by swordfish swords, Hong Kong doctors described another case of attempted suicide by chopsticks to the brain, Basel doctors described an attempted suicide by yew needles, Paris doctors described a woman’s addiction to daily bleach showers that last up to eight hours, and Bombay doctors reported breast enlargement and delusional pregnancy in a seventy-year-old straight-identified man following a homosexual encounter.

From The Economist:

Many traditional retail jobs will vanish as shops close and the remaining ones use more automation. Some new jobs will be created, but they may not make up for those that have gone.

From The TLS (Beverley Bie Brahic on Books of the Year 2017):

The Moon Is Almost Full by Chana Bloch (Autumn House). I have pored over this death-tricking collection filled with poems like “Pentimento” with its lament for “how many wrong moves it took / to make a life”. How does Bloch winkle out simple truths with such humour and pointedness? Like Amichai, whom she translated, her deceptively “small” poems discover and celebrate what passes for “ordinary” with sly (sometimes caustic) wit and intelligence.

Christopher Reid’s A Scattering, which is for me an indispensable book, is just out in the US with a new sequence, Anniversary (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). And cruising the internet’s labyrinthine paths I lit on the discreet Douglas Dunn, whose New Selected Poems I read cover to cover before ordering The Noise of a Fly (Faber). Such scrupulous poems, whether they be essaying thoughts or keeping the bloom on a Chardinesque bowl of “Ripe Bananas”.