“For environmental, business, and political organizations alike, the term that has come to stand for the hope of the natural world is ‘sustainable,’ ” Curtis White writes in Tin House. “But you would be mistaken if you assumed that the point of sustainability was to change our ways.” In the essay that follows, an excerpt from his latest book The Barbaric Heart, White offers a vivid critique of the mainstream response to the environmental crisis.

At the core of our problems, White argues, is something he calls the Barbaric Heart—visible in the ways that our culture considers violence a virtue—and its fundamental discord with the professed values of sustainability. He writes:

The artful (if ruthless) use of violence is obviously something that we admire in those sectors of the culture that we most associate with success: athletics, the military, entertainment (especially that arena of the armchair warrior, Grand Theft Auto), the frightening world of financial markets (where, as the Economist put it, there are “barbarians at the vaults”), and the rapacious world we blandly call real estate development. . . .

The idea that we can “move mountains” is an expression of admiration. When it is done with mammoth machines provided by the Caterpillar Company of Peoria, Illinois, it is also a form of violence (as the sheered mountain tops of West Virginia confirm).

To any complaints about the disheartening destruction and injustice that comes with such power, the Barbaric Heart need only reply: the strong have always dominated the weak and then instructed them. That is how great civilizations have always been made, from the ancient Egyptians to the British in India to Karl Rove and George Bush.

It’s a whirling, complicated critique—but wholly worth reading. Tin House also followed up with White in a delightful e-mail interview.

Source: Tin House

Move over Sesame Street. Clever skits that target older generations (remember Sesame Street’s Bruce Springsteen parody, “Born to Add”?) have been replaced by the hyper pre-teen SpongeBob SquarePants.

Though it's hard for many adults to feel comfortable with such tinsel flashing before our youngsters’ eyes, James Parker, writing for the very mature Atlantic magazine, embraces that change. Parker offers up a philosophical view of SpongeBob, dissecting the “postmodern place” that is Bikini Bottom (SpongeBob’s home), and explaining why kids love—and should love—the golden sponge:

As a cartoon, SpongeBob SquarePants absorbed the advances made by John Kricfalusi’s The Ren and Stimpy Show—the mood swings, the fugue-like interludes, the surreal plasticity of the characters—but without the earlier show’s edge of psychic antagonism […] But where Ren and Stimpy seemed bent on freaking out the more fragile (or stoned) sectors of its audience, the SquarePants writers are interested in stories, even in lessons. Again and again, a kind of innocence triumphs—over fear, over snobbery, and over skepticism.

If your eyes hurt at sight of SpongeBob’s manic grin, try reading this story and consider Parker’s plea: “Embrace him, drained adult. Where you see his little yellow flag, salute it; it’s a sign of life.”

For more, watch Parker analyze a few scenes from the show in the video below:

Source: The Atlantic

Image by  Stéfan , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Mark Twain wasn’t just a riverboat pilot, a raconteur, a mustache pioneer, and one of the great early American celebrity-authors: He was also an animal rights activist. The new Twain compilation Mark Twain’s Book of Animals (University of California Press) explores Twain’s treatment of animals —in literature and in life—throughout his career and arrives at an inescapable conclusion: He was a softie when it came to the beasts. Twain may have come to largely despise what he famously called “the damned human race,” yet he turned into a puddle of mush at the sight of a kitten.

In her introduction, editor Shelley Fisher Fishkin traces Twain’s sympathy for animals to his youth and especially to his mother, who kept a house full of cats with names like Blatherskite and Belchazar and once soundly berated a man in the street for beating his horse. Fisher Fishkin also digs up evidence that a formative experience for Twain was his shooting of a bird as a child, an act he deeply regretted. In the previously unpublished “Family Sketch,” he writes:

. . . I shot a bird that sat in a high tree, with its head tilted back, and pouring out a grateful song from an innocent heart. It toppled from its perch and came floating down limp and forlorn and fell at my feet, its song quenched and its unoffending life extinguished. I had not needed that harmless creature, I had destroyed it wantonly, and I felt all that an assassin feels, of grief and remorse when his deed comes home to him and he wishes he could undo it and have his hands and his soul clean again from accusing blood.

Fisher Fishkin goes on to follow the threads of Twain’s animal fascinations and sympathies in his writings, from his early celebrated story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” to his “Letter to the London Anti-Vivisection Society,” which is perhaps the best known expression of his views on animal cruelty. “From 1899 until his death in 1910,” writes Fisher Fishkin, “Mark Twain lent his pen to reform efforts on both sides of the Atlantic and became the best-known American author—and, indeed, the most famous American celebrity in any field—to give outspoken, public support to agitation for animal welfare.”

Peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff sandwiched between two pieces of white bread, known as the fluffernutter, may be one of the most cherished foods in New England. And when Massachusetts State Senator Jarrett Barrios tried to restrict Marshmallow Fluff intake among school children—limiting public schools to just one serving per week—Barrio’s constituents rebelled. As Katie Liesener eruditely reports for Gastronomica, “fluff runs deep in this country.” 

In response to Barrio’s regulation attempt, residents organized a movement to declare the fluffernutter the official Massachusetts state sandwich. Barrio eventually withdrew his anti-fluff legislation, and a loyal aide assured the Associated Press that “He loves Fluff as much as the next legislator.” Liesener provides an engaging and wonderfully crafted profile of the controversy, dubbed a “kerfuffle,” and the enigmatic company behind the iconic Marshmallow Fluff. “Outsiders may know New England for its baked beans and chowder,” Liesener writes, but deep in the hearts and pantries of New England homes lies a jar of Marshmallow Fluff.

Source: Gastronomica

Image by jessamyn, licensed under Creative Commons.

Literary critics have long argued that novels are inherently anti-religious. They believe that novels, with their many voices and styles, necessarily challenge the certainty of a worldview with a divinely authored text at its core. In the book The Broken Estate James Wood said, “it was not just science but perhaps the novel itself which helped to kill Jesus’ divinity, when it gave us a new sense of the real.”

This view is overly simplistic (pdf), Justin Neuman writes for Culture magazine. According to Neuman, too many people assume a sharp divide with religion on one side and debate, questioning, and literary freedom on the other. This marginalizes many aspects of religion that encourage the pursuit of knowledge and freedom. It also misses the potential that both novels and religion have to change people’s worldviews for the better.

Source: Culture

Image by (michelle), licensed under Creative Commons.

We struggle with how to write about poetry at Utne Reader, and it’s not because we don’t read it and love it. The closest we’ve come lately in our pages is an interview with undertaker and writer Thomas Lynch: “The reason poets aren’t read,” he said, “is that we don’t hang any of them anymore”:

We don’t take them seriously; we don’t think that poetry can move people to do passionate things. But poets did. Poets could change cultures. Before there was so much contest for people’s attention, poets were the ones who literally brought the news from one place to another, walking from town to town, which is how we got everything to be iambic and memorable and rhymed and metered, because the tradition was oral before it was literary.

That was the last best thing I had read about poetry—until I stumbled upon an essay by Karin de Weille in the Writer’s Chronicle. Lynch’s spiel was profound, but it was almost like he was eulogizing poetry. Not so in de Weille’s piece, How We Are Changed by the Rhythms of Poetry. “A poem designed to evoke anger,” she writes, “does much more than give us information about the triggering event; it shapes our energy into the very rhythms of anger. A series of words is chosen because it literally causes us to sputter and spit, stirring up memories and experiences from our personal past, reviving the emotion itself.”

Poetry, de Weille adds, “asks us to pump this life into our throats and out through our mouths. Then it can circulate among us, with total disregard for the distinctions that otherwise rule our lives.”

Visit our new homepage for great writing, curated by Utne Reader editors and always changing.

Source: Writer’s Chronicle (Article not yet available online)

In 1654, people weren’t smoking tobacco. They were “drinking” smoke from pipes. And in the early nineteenth century, English speakers referred to a set of false teeth as a “ratelier,” derived from the French word for “rack.” These insights come from the food magazine Gastronomica, where Mark Morton has compiled a linguistic history of chewing tobacco, false teeth, and other non-food items that people stick in their mouths.

In the article, Morton revives the word “gamahuche,” an awkward and little-known euphemism for oral sex. He also sheds some light on the history of “toothpaste,” a word which appeared in English long after the Romans were using human urine to whiten their teeth. An advertisement in The American Railroad Journal used the term “toothpaste” in 1832, just 13 years after the Family Receipt Book suggested the use of gunpowder as a tooth whitener.

Source: Gastronomica