In the Footsteps of Du Fu

Posted on by Leanne Ogasawara

by Leanne Ogasawara

1.

American poet, essayist, and translator Eliot Weinberger opens his new book, The Life of Tu Fu, describing a seminal moment in the Tang dynasty poet’s life, when he had just failed the Imperial Examination —for the second time. Weinberger, it should be said, has not written a biography of the eighth century poet as the title of the book might suggest. Nor has he come out with a new translation of Du Fu’s work. Rather, Weinberger has created a montage of fifty-eight original poems inspired by Du Fu’s life. And in his opening gambit, taking on the voice of the young poet, he compares all the candidates who failed the examination that day to hundreds and hundreds of chickens:

They say this is the only tree in the world that has these pears, for these pears have no desire to propagate elsewhere.

I thought of The Old Man Who Called His Chickens. He had hundreds of chickens, each with its own name. He could call its name and the chicken would come. I thought of him when all the candidates, including me, failed the exam.

One wonders: how is it possible that one of the greatest minds the world has ever known failed the examination not once –but twice? Scholars continue to argue about it. But one thing is clear: this second failure was only the start of Du Fu’s troubles!

2.

Considered by some people, and I am one of those people, to be China’s greatest poet, Du Fu’s work never went out of style in China. Not even during the Cultural Revolution, when so much traditional culture was canceled, did Du Fu’s light fade. The reason usually cited for this is that Du Fu has always been considered the poet of the common people. He gave voice to their suffering. And he also understood that violence, natural disasters, and war fell disproportionately onto their heads; for unlike the elite, the poor had few options open to them when things got rough. British historian and documentary film-maker Michael Wood, in his wonderful 2023 travelogue In the Footsteps of Du Fu, writes about China’s millennium-long love affair with the Tang dynasty poet. Tracing Du Fu’s life across the vastness of China, from the mountains of Sichuan to the great lakes of Hunan, he wonders whether there has ever been any other poet in the pre-modern world, who “so urgently recorded what it feels like to be a refugee, fleeing for your life?”

When asked: “Why Du Fu?” Wood replies that Du Fu is fascinating for many reasons, not least of all having been born at the precise moment of lift-off of the glorious Tang, considered to be one of China’s great ages of cultural and literary flowering. While Du Fu began life comfortably well-off during the heyday of the Tang, by mid-life he was suffering through the worst of the great chaos following the An Lushan uprising, which saw millions dead with countless more people fleeing for their lives. Read more »



Lessons From Singapore: Urban Planning and Garden Spaces

Posted on by Eric Feigenbaum

by Eric Feigenbaum

Anyone who has ever watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit knows Los Angeles’ entire trajectory was changed dramatically in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s when politicians and planners of the day  – perhaps spurred by some alleged corruption – believed cars and freeways were the direction of the future and invested massively in roads instead of the Pacific Electric Railway system (aka The Red Car) that provided a vast network of affordable public transportation.

The result was the quintessential example of urban sprawl. Within twenty years Los Angeles quickly grew into one of the world’s physically largest cities, eventually encompassing 502 square miles – 44 miles north to south and 20 miles east to west. And that ignores the areas around it that comprise the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area.

As a result, my hometown, is a patchwork quilt of architecture, design and landscape. Some neighborhoods have charming homes and duplexes built in the 1930s while others are filled with rundown Victorians and still others composed of 1950s cookie cutter bungalows. There are Frank Lloyd Wright houses tucked in obscure locations around the city and ostentatious palaces in the Hollywood Hills or overlooking the coast in Malibu. And we won’t discuss the San Fernando Valley which was developed as a sort of suburb within the city – only with power lines, billboards and all manner of lit-up business signs lining the main thoroughfares.

Perhaps that’s why when I first visited Singapore in 2003, its neatness and composure were striking. Even the drive from the airport to city center – or maybe especially the drive from the airport to the city center – along the East Coast Parkway was remarkable for the rain trees forming a canopy over the neat, clean, fast-moving highway which winds along the water. The City Center had people, but also a sense of calm I’ve never seen in any other major metropolitan.

Singapore is planned city and nation.

Prior to Singapore’s independence in 1965, the island was mostly a dry red sandbar. Singapore’s founders sought to put the nascent nation on the fast track to foreign direct investment and while there were many steps involved, they realized first impressions mattered – a lot. If executives and bankers were going to choose Singapore, they would need to have confidence in the country – and aesthetics played an important part.

“After independence, I searched for some dramatic way to distinguish ourselves from the other Third World countries. I settled for a clean and green Singapore,” wrote Lee Kuan Yew, founding Prime Minister of Singapore. Read more »

Thursday, December 5, 2024

Great Awakenings of the American Man

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

There’s a lot going on right now. Lowlights include racism, misogyny, and transphobia; xenophobia amid undulating waves of global migrations; democratic state capture by right wing authoritarians; and secular state capture by fundamentalist Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu nationalists.

Among the many factors causing and influencing these complex phenomena are: the rebound from Covid lockdowns and the years-long economic upheavals they wrought; brutal warfare in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa among other places; and intense weather-related fiascos stemming from the rise in global temperatures. But one I’d like to focus on is a growing sense of male insecurity.

The latest “crisis” in masculinity is not more important than other issues. However, I’m currently attuned to it for several reasons. One is that as I wade through late middle-age, I’m becoming ever more secure in (ie. relaxed about) my own masculinity, which in turn leads me to better notice gender insecurity in other men. Another is that I believe American male insecurity played a vital role in the recent election of Donald Trump and, as such, demands attention. Qualitative and quantitative data about Trump getting more votes than expected from young men with college education, from black men, and from brown men, signal something. And finally, as a historian, shit storms rising up from perceived crises in masculinity are not new to me.

In the United States, a broad crisis of white masculinity first emerged during the early 19th century. Then, as now, it was driven by economic changes and by challenges to established patriarchy, and it found expression in religion and politics. Read more »

Jury Duty

Posted on by David Winner and Angela Starita

by Angela Starita

Ottoman-era manuscript showing Rumi meeting fellow poet Molla Shams al-Din.

In October, I received a jury summons for Kings County Supreme Court. The first day—exactly two weeks before the presidential election—lawyers vetted potential jurors for a case made against the defendant, David Cruz, who was on trial for second-degree murder and related gun charges. Looking down at my hands when the charges were announced, I had to consciously take in the severity of the case since, of course, the judge had taken a dispassionate tone, the same one he might have used in a civil trial around a sidewalk fall or a landlord withholding heat. I immediately began dreading the possibility of being on the jury, fearing an ambiguous case with vindictive or thoughtless jurors. With an hour to go before dismissal, the lawyers choose me to serve. The judge told the 17 of us to return the following Monday, the day the trial would begin.

I spent the week trying to stop myself from imagining possible scenarios. I met up with a friend whose mother, a smart, generous woman who like most of her family loved Donald Trump, was dying of lung cancer. At the end of the evening, I told my friend my fears about jury duty, possibly jailing the wrong person, and even jailing the right person considering the state of our prison system. Though I hadn’t named the crime, he assumed murder and then stood over me and said, “Well, you’re just better than the rest of us. I guess you’re ready for your robes and sandals.”

Like the rest of his family, my friend is witty, quick with a comeback, and much of our closeness rests on my appreciation of his humor. So standing there on that subway platform, I wondered if he were joking. I said nothing, not quite sure what had just transpired. He took a step back looked worried, then asked what was wrong. Not yet sure what had happened, I made some sort of excuse for going still. Another beat passed, and then he stepped close again and made another holier-than-thou crack. This time, it was clear there was no humor intended.

To be fair, he was drunk and exhausted after months of worry about his mother.  At the same time, his wife has been searching for work, and he really couldn’t see how he could build a reasonable future for his son with only one income. His stress was palpable. Read more »

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

Their Eyes Weren’t Watching God

Posted on by Rafaël Newman

by Rafaël Newman

View upward from the men’s prison at Elmina Castle

Saidiya Hartman made her second trip to Ghana in 1997. She had visited the country briefly the year before, as a tourist, but now, having recently completed a doctorate at Yale and published her first book, she was in Ghana as a Fulbright Scholar searching for historical evidence of local resistance to slave raids. She was also, as a Black American, in quest of a connection with her putative ancestral homeland, and hoping to flesh out her work, both scholarly and personal, in the archives, where she had had a fleeting glimpse of her heritage as the descendant of people kidnapped and indentured, as “chattel,” to slave-owners in the New World.

I chose Ghana because it possessed more dungeons, prisons, and slave pens than any other country in West Africa—tight dark cells buried underground, barred cavernous cells, narrow cylindrical cells, dank cells, makeshift cells. In the rush for gold and slaves that began at the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, Danes, Swedes, and Brandenburgers (Germans) built fifty permanent outposts, forts, and castles designed to ensure their place in the Africa trade. In these dungeons, storerooms, and holding cells, slaves were imprisoned until transported across the Atlantic.

Until it wrested its independence from the British in 1957 Ghana was known as Gold Coast, a name that commemorates the commodity that had first brought Europeans to the region in the 1400s, but which belies the more nefarious commerce that kept them there four centuries long. The country we now call Ghana, named by its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, for a revered but defunct medieval kingdom to its north, was until the 1800s the crossroads for several slave routes from the inland to the sea, and to passage, for those kidnapped, across the Atlantic to a life of servitude. Ghana’s coastline is studded with forts and castles—command centers and entrepôts for the trade in people enslaved from throughout west central Africa: effectively concentration camps—like a string of poisoned beads. Read more »

Tuesday, December 3, 2024

Bouncing Droplets Refute the Multiverse?

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

There’s an old story, popularized by the mathematician Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871) in A Budget of Paradoxes, about a visit of Denis Diderot to the court of Catherine the Great. In the story, the Empress’s circle had heard enough of Diderot’s atheism, and came up with a plan to shut him up. De Morgan writes,

Diderot was informed that a learned mathematician was in possession of an algebraical demonstration of the existence of God, and would give it him before all the Court, if he desired to hear it. Diderot gladly consented: though the name of the mathematician is not given, it was Euler. He advanced towards Diderot, and said gravely, and in a tone of perfect conviction: Monsieur, (a + bn) / n = x, donc Dieu existe; répondez! Diderot, to whom algebra was Hebrew, was embarrassed and disconcerted; while peals of laughter rose on all sides. He asked permission to return to France at once, which was granted.

De Morgan concedes that the story may not be true, yet even at face value, it’s a puzzling anecdote. De Morgan tells us that “Euler was a believer in God, downright and straightforward.” It’s obvious that an algebraic expression has no bearing on God’s existence. In the story, Diderot misses that point (the historical Diderot was not, in fact, so ignorant), but it leads the modern reader to wonder…so what? Diderot may or may not have been an overly dogmatic atheist, but should a “downright and straightforward” believer really defend his beliefs with bullshit?

The modern reader might then ask a followup question. What questionable claims today have been made harder to dismiss by cloaking them in math?

A few possibilities from economics and psychology come to mind, but this column will discuss a new book that advances the charge against quantum physics. Escape from Shadow Physics: The Quest to End the Dark Ages of Quantum Theory, by Adam Forrest Kay, forwards some complaints that readers of popular physics may find find a little familiar (cf. Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math, or Adam Becker’s What Is Real?), but Kay introduces enough historical and philosophical breadth to make his version my new favorite of the bunch, if with some reservations about its conclusions. Read more »

Melancholy and Growth: Toward a Mindcraft for an Emerging World

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by William Benzon

Physiognomy of the melancholic temperament, drawing by Thomas Holloway, c.1789. Wikipedia.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0

If Harold Bloom is correct in asserting that, in some sense, Shakespeare invented the human, not in the sense that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, Alexander Graham Bell the telephone, Thomas Edison the light bulb, Hedy Lamar got a patent for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology, not to mention Yahweh’s work on Adam and Eve, but in the modest sense that he bequeathed us a deeper understanding of ourselves through giving voice to aspects of human behavior that had hitherto gone unremarked. Bloom singles out Hamlet for special consideration, arguing that he is perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest gift – though Falstaff is in the running. Hamlet has come down to us as the melancholy Dane. Accordingly, let us conjecture that modern man was born in melancholy.

A few years later Robert Burton would publish The Anatomy of Melancholy. It was a smash hit and went through five more editions during Burton’s life. It made Burton’s printer a fortune. While the book is indeed about melancholy, it is also about damned near everything else under the sun. It was subsequently parodied in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, no mean feat as the original has something of a parodic character unto itself.

Here is how Burton defined melancholy:

Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or habit. In disposition, is that transitory melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dullness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions, no man living is free, no stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, some time or other he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality.

To live is to know melancholy. We post-moderns are more likely to call it depression.

That’s what this post is about, depression, but also growth. Read more »

Monday, December 2, 2024

A Requiem For Postmortems

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

We might have been a free and a great people together, but a communication of grandeur & of freedom it seems is below their dignity. —Thomas Jefferson, “Jefferson Draft” of the Declaration of Independence, 1776. 

“Despair,” by Edvard Munch, 1894. Munch Museum. Oslo.

George Washington may have been the “Indispensable Man” whose strength we used as our North Star, Benjamin Franklin the cherubic, ever optimistic face we showed to the outside world, James Madison the primary architect of our Constitution, but, for raw emotion wedded to soaring eloquence, no other American of the Revolutionary period quite approached Thomas Jefferson. 

I have never been a big Jefferson fan. He runs a little hot for my taste. I prefer the brooding-yet cerebral miniaturist approach of Lincoln, who says, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

My passion right now is somewhat strained, and I’m concerned that being a free and great people together might be a bit far-fetched. Like just about everyone else on my side of the divide, I want to know what happened and why. How on Earth did we manage to break the GPS and end up right back where we started? 

Let us take a deep breath, and, with the cool professionalism of the Federal Railroad Administration’s Accident Management Branch, examine the wreck. Yes, I know, Trump has targeted the Agency and plans to roll back safety regulations on hazardous gas transit, crew member requirements and fatigue risk, but this is only December 2024, and we are still living the good life.  

OK, exhale. 

This was not a landslide, not actually, and not by any historical metric. Harris clearly lost, Trump clearly won, but Trump’s popular and Electoral Vote margins are more in sync with the trench-warfare-limited-gains of the non-Obama elections we’ve had since 2000. Similarly, it was not a mandate for anything, no matter how often Trump and his team in Congress and the media claim that.    

Why does this feel like a landslide, when historical context tells us it isn’t anywhere near one? Read more »

Developing the Capacity for Rational Choices

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

“As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?” —Furiosa 

Imprisoned climate activist, Roger Hallam, recently wrote about the necessity of expanding emotional well-being as we face bleak events happening around the world. While climate scientists try to “help people through the horrific information that they are being given,” they also need a way to manage their emotional reactions. We can no longer afford to merely distract ourselves from the inner turmoil. Beyond climate, we could very well be entering into a period of much greater conflict at a time of even more viruses, some destructive to our food system. When the watering hole gets smaller, the animals look at one another differently.

To move forward with compassion, at a time when divide and conquer strategies have created polarization and infighting, seems to require an effort from each one of us. 

Hallam writes,

“We might want to think about why saint-like people are enormously influential, even powerful. . . . They see the world as dependent upon the mind. . . . They are not enslaved by the world; their minds are intent, driven even, to change it. They do not see this as an end in itself.”

He explains the journey toward collective action as beginning with exploring the self as it relates to reality. The part of interest to me is this: 

“Some people are so into themselves that they find it almost impossible to get out of themselves. They are stuck, enmeshed. Children are often like this. They are literally overwhelmed by their emotions. . . . You see it a lot in prison–people so full of their distress, their anger, and rage, they cannot see themselves at all. . . . The ability to reflect on yourself, on your emotions and your behavior, leads on to a more general idea, and that is transcendence. This might be described as a deep ability to move outside of oneself, to look at oneself from the outside, simply to watch. . . . The more you practice doing it, the stronger you get at doing it. . .  . The essence of being human is nothing to do with our being in this world–it is to do with having a choice.”

The ability to choose to be responsive instead of reactive can be developed and refined through intentional introspection. This isn’t anything new; it’s an old truth ignored until it becomes crucial to our survival.   Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Purse Strings

My mind’s a purse in which
I keep my stash
if its purse strings are loose
I might add to its load
when new coin comes to town
but if I tighten down
the purse strings of my mind
they’ll garrote its capaciousness
and all that God might have me be
may be hopelessly consigned
to dangle from their noose

Jim Culleny, 2014

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Sunday, December 1, 2024

Of Boathouses and Outhouses

Posted on by David Greer

by David Greer

My friend R is a man who takes his simple pleasures seriously, so I asked him to name one for me. Boathouses, he said, without hesitation.

To the best of my knowledge, R has never owned a boat. No canoe or coracle, not a dinghy or dory, nor even a yacht. His abiding passion has always been small planes, especially the four-seat Beech Bonanza he likes to fly to tiny airstrips scattered about the continent, which serve in turn as starting points for terrestrial excursions (folding bicycle) to the back of beyond with his lady love, B.

So why boathouses?

“Well,” said R, “I love the light of the water reflecting on the walls and ceiling of the boathouse. And it’s hard to imagine a more relaxing sound than the gentle lapping of waves against a boathouse slip. It’s a sound that accentuates the pleasure of writing or reading or simple conversation. If you’re inclined to nap, as one does on holiday, there’s nothing more conducive to drifting off to sleep, and then you have the pleasure of a gentle awakening to a charming view of lake or ocean. All nicely framed by the boathouse doors.”

All of which explains why R and B, on their forthcoming trip to Austria to ride motorcycles on winding mountain roads, plan to rent a lake boathouse (mod cons included) as their base. It will be a peaceful counterpoint to the frenetic ecstasy of navigating the “twisties”, as they call the alpine hairpin turns.

Once upon a time, boathouses were simple affairs, erected for the sole purpose of providing safe haven to boats, the kind operated by sweep of arm and sweat of brow. As with all things simple, times changed. Complexities ensued. The two-stroke engine was invented, so boathouses expanded to accommodate motorboats. Motorboats got bigger, and boathouses got larger still. That gave someone the notion to take advantage of the swelling footprint and add a second storey with a bedroom or two, maybe throw in a bathroom, above the boat slips, to the point that many lakeshore boathouses today are more guesthouse than boathouse. Read more »

On Memory and Forgetting

Posted on by Nils Peterson

by Nils Peterson

A pen between God-fingers, a walking stick dragon,
my blind mind taps along its cane of thought. Rumi (trans. Barks)

Saturday morning. Not quite ready for coffee from the espresso machine. Eyes closed. Brooding over the thises and thats. Remembering the start of a thread of thought that wove forward and backwards over the last couple of days. Now trying to remember and writing some of it down.

Here’s the poem which started it.

Map of the New World

  1. Archipelagoes

At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.
At the rain’s edge, a sail.

Slowly the sail will lose sight of the islands;
into a mist will go the belief in harbors
of an entire race.

The ten-years war is finished.
Helen’s hair, a grey cloud.
Troy a white ashpit
by the drizzling sea.

The drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp.
A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain
and plucks the first line of the Odyssey. Derek Walcott

Reading it touched something that’s been on my mind. I found myself wondering how long it would be before the Homer in the last lines would go unrecognized by everyone except scholars. I fear the loss of the mythologies of Greece and Rome that provided a binding field of imagery and felt-meaning to centuries of poets of the West. Yes, it is part of the general down grading of the humanities but also an understanding that one can no longer be well-educated and eurocentric. And we are finite. We do not have “world enough and time,” memory enough and time. So much must be lost, replaced, Forgotten. Read more »

Friday, November 29, 2024

A Reading Guide for John Milton’s 350th Death Anniversary

Posted on by Ed Simon

by Ed Simon

Paradise Lost

BOOK I

Editor’s Synopsis – As the narrative of Homer’s epic poem The Iliad begins, the Trojan War whose violence it recounts is nearly at an end. Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector, and the rest of the invading Greeks had already been arrayed about the besieged city for a decade at the point where Homer invokes the muses. Homer’s other great epic, The Odyssey, similarly begins in the middle of things; not with brave Ulysses having left Troy to return home to Ithaca, but rather with the hero imprisoned on the idyllic isle of the nymph Calypso. Because Milton was a keen reader of the Greek and Latin classics, he too begins his epic in the middle – in media res – not with the epic War in Heaven whereby Lucifer and a third of the angels who had chosen to rebel against God were caste out, but instead after they’ve already been exiled into the inferno, regrouping following their defeat by the divine host. As a rhetorical gambit, in media res engages the reader by rearranging the chronological expectations of the epic, understanding that implication can often be more effective than straightforward recounting. Arguably the most eminently quotable books of Paradise Lost, with some of Milton’s most familiar turns of phrase, the beginning of the epic lays out its authors purpose – to tell tale of humanity’s initial disobedience and the nature of our fall, to justify the ways of God to man, and to do all of this in a language that had never before been accomplished. What follows is Satan’s rallying of his demonic troops, his justifications for their coming assault on God’s new creation of humans, and his self-serving philosophy of greatness. – E.S. Read more »

Cicadas

Posted on by Azi Amirsadri

by Azadeh Amirsadri

The gym I was trying to like last year had a manic male trainer who wore tight shorts and had a microphone attached to his head. He ran around on a firm mattress-like floor giving members high-fives like the good participants we were supposed to be, and even telling us to high-five each other or clap for ourselves after each section. I introduced myself to him before the session started and told him about my knee issues. He looked at me and then looked away, and said “Only do what feels comfortable because you don’t want to get hurt.” Then he added with enthusiasm ”You will rock this”, giving me a high five. I was secretly worried that I wasn’t going to rock much, given that I was one of the older participants. I felt overwhelmed by the loud music pumping through the big open space, but as I usually do with gyms in general, I thought I had found a place where I could attend the least number of times and get the most amount of benefit, so I signed up for one month to give it a try. This is a gym that offers free childcare and is geared towards women, most of them moms who really like the day care option. The club advertised itself as a place where you give them a week and you will fall in love with the process. When asked if I loved the place during my second visit, I replied “I am trying to figure out if I like it” but the over-enthusiastic receptionist didn’t care for my answer. She asked what I wasn’t sure about and I told her the noise level was too high for me. She had an even louder laugh than the music and the trainer on the microphone combined, and said “Hahaha, you will get used to it. It motivates people to work out longer”.

Another gym I tried for a few months was a high intensity place that was run by very kind people; for most of them, this was their second job and for some, it was their religion. I felt seen and accepted, and the trainers made a lot of accommodations for me. I didn’t have to jump over high black boxes, or climb the wall, or run. For the warm up, I was allowed to walk or use the stationary bike. It was all too good to be true, and everyone would call me by my name, as in “Azi, you are doing great” or “Azi, you are strong today.” Soon enough though, about five weeks in, I hurt my right knee and couldn’t participate anymore. Someone there told me there is no shame in getting hurt and I could still participate in the Murph, even if I don’t complete it. I shook my head in agreement and when I got home, I googled The Murph to see what she was saying. Read more »

Thursday, November 28, 2024

‘This Is Your Funeral’: Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift

Posted on by Claire Chambers

by Claire Chambers

Continuing my previous 3QD post about Pamela Sneed’s Funeral Diva, and an earlier piece contextualizing literary representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, today I want to discuss the work of Sindiwe Magona. She is one of South Africa’s most renowned Black women writers, and her autobiography To My Children’s Children (1990) is required reading about apartheid in the 1950s and 1960s. Magona went on to publish Beauty’s Gift in 2008, a novel dealing with the devastation of AIDS in South Africa during the early twenty-first century. The protagonist is called Beauty and she lives up to that name, being beautiful inside and out. But she exists off-stage, so to speak, since the novel narrates in a non-linear manner some events from August to December 2002.

These are recounted from the perspectives of Beauty’s four closest friends, Amanda, Edith, Cordelia, and Doris, all women in their early to mid-thirties. The novel opens on Beauty’s funeral, described in free indirect discourse through her oldest friend Amanda’s focalization. We find out quickly that Amanda hates Beauty’s surviving husband, Hamilton, as ‘a silent message of loathing’ is exchanged by the two. The reason for this hatred, readers discover, is that the suave ‘man of substance’ Hamilton had conducted multiple love affairs. As a consequence he had infected his wife with HIV, which in her case leads to rapid physical deterioration and death from AIDS soon afterwards. In her ‘Introduction’ to the ten-year anniversary edition of the novel, Magona writes of ‘the raging fire in the country of my birth – a veritable catastrophe that was laying waste to all life – especially young life. Absolute devastation’. She also explores the initial assumption that this was a plague affecting gay men, and her horror on realizing that hardly a home in South Africa would be unaffected by the disease. Accordingly, even as they mourn her, Beauty’s friends start looking at their own marriages, discovering husbands’ infidelities, and worrying about tests and HIV status.

Early on, Magona presents readers of Beauty’s Gift with a startling image: the beautiful and ‘beloved’ Beauty laid to rest in an opulent casket, which is then fixed in the earth with cement to prevent theft. Her friends’ memories of Beauty’s charisma and kindness are concretized by the weight of her death from AIDS. From the outset, funerals emerge not merely as a plot point but a structuring device for understanding the social and political implications of the AIDS crisis in South Africa. After opening her novel with Beauty’s funeral, Magona continues with vignettes about various stages of illness, death, and grief. These include a wake, the mourning period, Beauty’s posthumous ceremony of drinking water and the spade-washing rite, followed by other people’s funerals. Through this framework, Magona creates a narrative of gendered suffering and resilience. Read more »

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

A new view on the gut microbiome and the social contagion of health

Posted on by Jeroen van Baar

by Jeroen van Baar

Humans are beings of staggering complexity. We don’t just consist of ourselves: billions of bacteria in our gut help with everything from digestion to immune response.

In recent years, scientists have started to uncover how this ‘gut microbiome’ shapes a variety of health outcomes including obesity and depression. For instance, when researchers transplanted fecal matter from depressed humans to rats, those rats started showing signs of depression themselves. We’re still unsure why this happens—it could have to do with the production of neurotransmitters, which depends on how food is processed—but the gut microbiome forms a promising horizon of health science.

This has raised the obvious question why the biome in your belly looks the way it does. Where did it come from? We normally assume that the microbiome is mostly shaped by the food we eat. But a new Nature study provides a radical refinement of this story: our social interactions can shape the microbial communities living inside us.

The study involved mapping the social networks and sequencing the microbiomes of 1,787 adults in 18 isolated villages in Honduras. Participants were asked to self-collect stool samples, which were stored in liquid nitrogen and shipped to the USA for analysis. A detailed survey and photographic census helped participants identify their social connections, including their friends and family.

Analyzing the data, the research team found that the gut microbiome looked the most similar between members of the same household: they shared up to 14% of the microbial strains in their guts. However, even friends who see each other regularly shared about 8% of strains, while strangers from the same village shared only 4%. Microbiome similarity even extended to friends of friends, forming potential transmission chains that spread strains within communities. Read more »