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    Helen Vendler: An Appreciation

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    She devoted her life to showing us how and why.Defenses of poetry by modern poets tend to accentuate the negative. “I too, dislike it,” says Marianne Moore, taking for granted that you feel the same way. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” W.H. Auden admits. “A mug’s game,” T.S. Eliot calls it. William Carlos Williams observes that “it is difficult to get the news from poems.” The bad news about poetry is that it’s obscure, difficult, marginal — a trivial pursuit in a culture preoccupied with other fancies.The good news is that nobody told Helen Vendler. Vendler, who died this week at 90, was an admired professor and a tireless, sometimes combative critic. In both those roles she was, above all, a reader of poems. Not an ideal reader (every writer knows there’s no such thing), but an exemplary everyday reader. She read poetry because she liked it, because it stirred her to thought and feeling, because she believed it mattered in the world.“To know that someone out there is writing down your century, your generation, your language, your life,” she wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1972, “makes you long for news of yourself, for those authentic tidings of invisible things, as Wordsworth called them, that only come in the interpretation of life voiced by poetry.” This was by way of saluting James Merrill as “one of our indispensable poets,” but Vendler was also making a case for the indispensability of poetry itself, in the most direct and personal terms. Poetry matters insofar as it matters to you.If it does — if, like me, you have spent at least some of your life over the past half century or so looking at poems — you are likely to find yourself in Vendler’s debt. And also, sometimes, in what can feel like a personal quarrel with her.She was such a ubiquitous presence — the go-to poetry reviewer for serious, nonspecialist publications like The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and this one — and wrote with such calm, rigorous authority, that some resentment was inevitable. The breadth of her knowledge was formidable, but her taste could seem narrow, her enthusiasm a form of establishment-friendly gatekeeping.She upheld a canon of the English lyric, of first-person poems grounded in strong feeling, passed down from Shakespeare and George Herbert (she wrote books about both) through the Romantics to moderns like Yeats, Auden and, above all, Wallace Stevens. Many of the contemporary poets she praised, like Merrill and Robert Lowell, could be assimilated to that lineage. She was suspicious of more experimental or avant-garde tendencies, and skeptical of poetry overtly political or overly personal. Her criticism, too, avoided the theoretical leaps and sweeping cultural statements that animated literary discourse in and out of the academy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      7 Books on Grief, Loss and Bereavement

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      Psychologists, counselors and other experts share the titles they recommend most.Joanna Luttrell is well acquainted with grief. The bereavement coordinator supports families that are navigating a child’s terminal illness at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis.From the moment they receive a diagnosis until a year after the loss, “I send letters, resources, emails,” Ms. Luttrell said, so that families know they have support. A big part of the process, she added, involves sharing books.If there’s a “challenging relationship or situation, I might send out a book right away,” she said. “If they’re looking to process their experience, and their emotional response to their experience, I will send one a bit later.”While grief is universal, it’s complicated and highly individualized, Ms. Luttrell said. Reading books can provide perspective and help mourners feel less alone, she has found.We asked Ms. Luttrell, as well as counselors, psychologists and other experts on loss, to recommend the most helpful books about grief.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kathleen Hanna Reveals the Story of Her Life in ‘Rebel Girl’

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      The first draft of Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk,” was 600 pages long. As she worked to cut the manuscript, Hanna found herself excising page after page of male violence. “It’s pretty sad, if you read the book, because there’s still a lot in there,” she told me. “I had a joke with my editor about it.” Like, she’d already removed a rape and a kidnapping and a guy who threw a wine glass at her head! “What more do you want from me?”Hanna is super funny. When she takes the stage as the frontwoman of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre or the Julie Ruin, she plays a kind of punk trickster, shifting her voice to resemble a bratty Valley Girl, a demonic cheerleader, an obnoxious male fan. She is always subverting femininity and disarming bad guys with her spiky and irreverent lyrics. But when it came time to write her life story, she realized that she could not playfully twist away from her past.“I keep trying to make my rapes funny, but I have to stop doing that because they aren’t,” she writes in the book, which comes out on May 14.Kathleen Hanna at home with her dog, Terry. While writing her memoir, she was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.OK McCausland for The New York Times“Rebel Girl” documents Hanna’s long career as an underground artist and musician, and its striking intersections with the mainstream. In the 1990s, she helped instigate the riot grrrl movement, calling girls to the front of punk venues and setting off a D.I.Y. feminist ethos that was later assimilated into a girl-power marketing trend. She was a friend of Kurt Cobain’s who scrawled the phrase “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on his bedroom wall, inspiring the anthem that exploded into a global phenomenon.Nineties nostalgia applies an appealingly gritty filter to that era’s underground rock scene, but it could be punishing for those who stood in opposition to its white male standard. Hanna has sometimes worried that if she put it all out there, she would be disbelieved. “I’ve been told by men: Oh, you’re just the kind of woman these things happen to, as if I have some sort of smell I’m emanating,” she said. “But I knew that other women would understand.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Many Biographies on the Page and Screen Do You Know?

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      Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about literature that has gone on to find new life in the form of movies, television shows, theatrical productions and other formats. This week’s quiz highlights films that were adapted from the biographies or autobiographies of their notable subjects.Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their screen adaptations. More

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      2 Books That Capture New York

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      A stroll around the city with a great stylist; a comic novel of love and real estate.Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesDear readers,I don’t make any special claims for New York except that it’s the city I know best. Well, that and the fact that people really do talk a lot about real estate, a subject that somehow manages to be tedious and thrilling, crass and impersonal all at once.The other day, I cried on the subway. This in itself wasn’t a big deal; if you live here long enough, the law of averages dictates that at some point you’re going to sob on an uptown 2 train while people studiously avoid your eyes or, occasionally, glare at you with faint irritation. It has always felt to me like a safe place to cry — a sort of international waters.Of course, on this occasion, I ran into someone I’d known slightly since kindergarten. We ignored the fact that I was weeping and talked vaguely about real estate and our plans to skip an upcoming reunion. I got off two stops early for both our sakes, bought a large pineapple juice and thought about E.B. White.—Sadie“Here Is New York,” by E.B. WhiteNonfiction, 1949We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘The Spoiled Heart,’ by Sunjeev Sahota

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      “The Spoiled Heart,” by Sunjeev Sahota, contrasts race and class struggles in the story of a man’s downfall.THE SPOILED HEART, by Sunjeev SahotaThe titular spoiled heart of Sunjeev Sahota’s new novel is not spoiled in the sense of being overindulged. It is spoiled in the sense of being ruptured, through hardship. A tragedy in which a man comes to personal and profession ruin, the novel explores whether the ruination is self-inflicted or societal, and whether it is a degenerative condition or if some radical surgery can reverse it. Certainly, Sahota has a surgeon’s dexterous hands, and the reader senses his confidence.Sahota’s fourth novel is his first to be set entirely in England. His debut, “Ours Are the Streets,” portrays the radicalization of a young boy in Sheffield and his life-changing return to his home in Pakistan. “The Year of the Runaways,” a Booker Prize finalist, follows three housemates in Sheffield and the interconnected tales of their migration from India. “China Room” counterposes the story of a young bride in 1929 rural Punjab with that of a second-generation immigrant battling addiction in 1999. Gender inequality, cultural alienation and generational trauma are some of Sahota’s favored themes, and they carry over into “The Spoiled Heart.”The protagonist is a 42-year-old factory manager in Chesterfield named Nayan Olak, who is hoping to advance his career by running for general secretary of Britain’s biggest union. The caregiver to his abusive father, Nayan grieves for his mother and son, who died in a fire in the family home and shop some 20 years prior. His marriage didn’t survive the tragedy, and now, in the fall of 2017, he is finally pursuing a love interest: Helen Fletcher, newly returned to her hometown with her son.Helen is a home health aide, so when she turns down an offer to care for Nayan’s father, we sense a conspicuous withholding of information. She and her teenage son, Brandon, have had to relocate from London after a public furor over remarks Brandon made at his job that were deemed racist — a story that Helen doesn’t disclose until it finds a horrible parallel in Nayan’s life.Withheld revelations and dark secrets drive the novel’s family saga and romantic strands. But the story’s engine lies in the union leadership contest between Nayan, who is running on a class-struggle platform, and Megha Sharma, a self-described change candidate fighting for racial equality. They’re both of Indian descent, though Megha hails from a wealthy family while Nayan had a far less privileged upbringing.The campaign escalates to a heated town-hall debate comprising the last act of the novel, in which the left eats itself by pitting identity politics against class solidarity. (Sahota himself has said in an interview that Prime Minister “Rishi Sunak is not my racial friend, he is my class enemy.” This might have been Nayan’s line if the novel were set a few years later, after Sunak’s rise to power, also as a professed change candidate.) Ultimately, the politics become personal, and the descending arc of Nayan’s life steepens.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Do You Recognize the 15 Chapter Book Titles Hidden in This Puzzle?

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      Charlotte’s web project was not going well, even though she’d read her assignment inside out and back again. “The great brain who designed this module can’t write directions,” she complained, grabbing a sweet and sour meatball and taking a swig of red Mountain Dew. “This thing is a grade wrecker.”“Oh, hush up and keep grounded,” drawled her sister Coraline, sipping her freshly blended kale smoothie. “Like Vanessa said, it’s not the end of the world if you get an A- in one crazy summer class. You’re way above troublemaker status in this overachieving family.”“At least it’s not killing my thirst for knowledge,” said Charlotte, as she opened another soda.Charlotte’s web project was not going well, even though she’d read her assignment inside out and back again. “The great brain who designed this module can’t write directions,” she complained, grabbing a sweet and sour meatball and taking a swig of red Mountain Dew. “This thing is a grade wrecker.”“Oh, hush up and keep grounded,” drawled her sister Coraline, sipping her freshly blended kale smoothie. “Like Vanessa said, it’s not the end of the world if you get an A- in one crazy summer class. You’re way above troublemaker status in this overachieving family.”“At least it’s not killing my thirst for knowledge,” said Charlotte, as she opened another soda.Charlotte’s web project was not going well, even though she’d read her assignment inside out and back again. “The great brain who designed this module can’t write directions,” she complained, grabbing a sweet and sour meatball and taking a swig of red Mountain Dew. “This thing is a grade wrecker.”“Oh, hush up and keep grounded,” drawled her sister Coraline, sipping her freshly blended kale smoothie. “Like Vanessa said, it’s not the end of the world if you get an A- in one crazy summer class. You’re way above troublemaker status in this overachieving family.”“At least it’s not killing my thirst for knowledge,” said Charlotte, as she opened another soda. More

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      Undeterred, Salman Rushdie Discusses His New Memoir, ‘Knife’

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      Last May, nine months after the knife attack that nearly killed him, Salman Rushdie made a surprise appearance at the 2023 PEN America literary gala. His voice was weak and he was noticeably thinner than usual; one of his eyeglass lenses was blacked out, because his right eye had been blinded in the assault. But anyone wondering whether the author was still his old exuberant self would have been immediately reassured by the way he began his remarks, with a racy impromptu joke.“I want to remind people in the room who might not remember that ‘Valley of the Dolls’ was published in the same publishing season as Philip Roth’s ‘Portnoy’s Complaint,’” he said, riffing on an earlier speaker’s mention of Jacqueline Susann’s potboiler. “And when Jacqueline Susann was asked what she thought about Philip Roth’s great novel” — with its enthusiastically self-pleasuring main character — “she said, ‘I think he’s very talented but I wouldn’t want to shake his hand.’”It was classic Rushdie, improvisational literary wit deployed during a solemn occasion, in this case his acceptance of the organization’s Centenary Courage Award. It was also a triumphant signal that his brush with death — more than three decades after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s murder over the novel “The Satanic Verses” — had dampened neither his spirit nor his determination to live life in the open.His new book, “Knife,” which will be published April 16, is a harrowing account of the attack and its aftermath, and a reminder of how gravely injured he was. It’s also a deeply moving love story that attributes much of his recovery and good spirits to the tender, brave support of his wife of three years, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. (They met at an event in 2017 and flirted over drinks at the after-party; he walked smack into a glass door as he attempted to follow her onto the roof deck. The rest is history.)“I wanted to write a book which was about both love and hatred — one overcoming the other,” Rushdie said in a recent interview. “And so it’s a book about both of us.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Atmosphere of the ‘Manosphere’ Is Toxic

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      To understand the state of men in this country, it’s necessary to know three things.First, millions of men are falling behind women academically and suffering from a lack of meaning and purpose. Second, there is no consensus whatsoever on whether there’s a problem, much less how to respond and pull millions of men back from the brink. Third, many men are filling the void themselves by turning to gurus to guide their lives. They’re not waiting for elite culture, the education establishment or the church to define manhood. They’re turning to Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson and a host of others — including Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson — to show them the way.Not all of these influencers are equally toxic. Tate, for example, is in a class by himself. He’s a pornographer who is facing human trafficking and rape charges in Romania. Peterson, by contrast, mixes good advice with a bizarre ideology. He’ll swing between compassionate insight and wild conspiracy. I’ve known men who genuinely improved their lives through elements of Peterson’s teaching. But to spend time watching and reading these gurus as a group is to understand why men continue to struggle even though the market is now flooded with online advice.It’s as if an entire self-help industry decided the best cure for one form of dysfunction is simply a different dysfunction. Replace passivity and hopelessness with frenetic activity, tinged with anger and resentment. Get in the weight room, dress sharper, develop confidence and double down on every element of traditional masculinity you believe is under fire.Yes, men are absolutely feeling demoralized, as Richard Reeves put it in his brilliant book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.” But what is the influencer advice in response? Lash out. Fight. Defy the cultural elite that supposedly destroyed your life.I’m reminded of my colleague David Brooks’s distinction between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.” As David described it, résumé virtues “are those skills you bring to the marketplace.” Eulogy virtues, by contrast, “are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?” Most of the “manosphere” influencers look at men’s existential despair and respond with a mainly material cure. Yes, some nod at classical values (and even cite the Stoics, for example), but it’s in service of the will to win. Success — with money, with women — becomes your best revenge.The problems with this approach are obvious to anyone with an ounce of wisdom or experience, but I’m reminded of a memorable line from “The Big Lebowski”: “I mean, say what you want about the tenets of national socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” It’s hard to counter something with nothing, and when it comes to the crisis confronting men and boys, there is no competing, holistic vision for our sons.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More