Roger Cohen in the New York Times:

We have a new verb, “to Goldstone.” Its meaning: To make a finding, and then partially retract it for uncertain motive. Etymology: the strange actions of a respected South African Jewish jurist under intense pressure from Israel, the U.S. Congress and world Jewish groups.

Richard Goldstone is an author of the “Goldstone Report,” an investigation of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009. It found that Israel had engaged in a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population,” for which responsibility lay “in the first place with those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw the operations.” It said both Israel and Hamas may have committed crimes against humanity in a conflict that saw a ratio of about 100 Palestinian dead (including many children) for every one Israeli.

Now Goldstone’s volte-face appears in the form of a Washington Post op-ed. It’s a bizarre effort. He says his report would have been different “if I had known then what I know now.” The core difference the judge identifies is that he’s now convinced Gaza “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”

More here.

Julian Baggini in The Philosopher's Magazine:

Sally Haslanger is angry. “I entered philosophy about 30 years ago,” she told me at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting in Boston. “I had a budding feminist consciousness, and I thought then that there weren’t enough women on the reading lists in my classes or among my teachers. But I thought things would certainly change, given the importance of the feminist movement. I’ve been though the profession now and worked hard on the Committee on the Status of Women. I’ve worked hard in other forums like SWIP – the Society for Women in Philosophy – that were trying to advance women’s interests. After 30 years I was seeing that there wasn’t really that much change, and that made me mad.”

Haslanger is not alone. Women’s under-representation in philosophy has been well known for decades, but there does not seem to have been sufficient collective will to really grapple with the problem. Now, however, there are signs that things are changing. “There’s been a lot of momentum gathering in the UK dealing to a great extent with the under-representation of women in philosophy,” says Jules Holyroyd, one of the organisers of a well-attended conference in Cardiff last November, on the issue of all under-represented groups, not just women.

Although the dearth of women is obvious, until recently no one had tried to analyse the data to establish the facts. Two years ago, tpm conducted its own survey and found that only 18 percent of full-time permanent academic philosophers working in leading higher education institutions in the UK were female. The comparable figure in the USA was 22 percent. (See tpm 47)

Since then, Helen Beebee has been gathering more comprehensive data for the British Philosophical Association, of which she is director. What this shows is that women become scarcer the higher up the career ladder you go.

“Women start out not too badly under-represented,” she told me in Cardiff. “About 47 percent of undergraduates in philosophy in the UK, single or joint honours, are women. That goes down to about 30 percent at PhD level, then it drops to about 21 percent at permanent staff. It’s more than 21 percent at junior lecturer level and it goes down to about 15 percent at professor level.”

Similar patterns have been found in America and Australia. But why?

Allison Joyce in The Virginia Quarterly Review:

At the center of Dhanbad City, in the Jharia region of northeastern India, amid a handful of concrete buildings, stands the enormous bronze statue of a coal miner. He is shirtless, muscular, and handsome. He strides doggedly forward, a mining helmet on his head, a pickax slung over his shoulder. The message is clear: Coal is my life. The area around Dhanbad produces India’s highest grade of coking coal, which in turn fuels the blast furnaces used for smelting steel. Contained in twenty-three large underground mines and nine open cast mines across an expanse of 450 square kilometers, Jharia’s heart of coal also produces power: two thirds of all electricity in India is generated in coal-fired plants. The earth beneath Jharia contains one of the largest coal reserves in the world.

But the coal is also on fire.

Mining started in Jharia in the 1890s, and by 1916 newspapers were reporting underground coal fires. According to these accounts, most fires started by spontaneous combustion; the deep mine tunnels had been improperly vented, leading to a buildup of volatile gases. Those fires have now burned for nearly a century, smoldering and spreading over 60 square kilometers, both at the surface and underground, with some fires reaching depths of 140 meters. More than 12 percent of the total deposits in the Jharia coalfields, or about 1.45 billion tonnes of coal, are now blocked from further development by these fires.

The land around Jharia is dominated by open mines laced with fissures and shafts, which act as bellows and chimneys, feeding and venting the subterranean fires. In some places, smoke, gases, and flames shoot up from the earth, and the ground has been known to collapse—sometimes with fatal consequences. Waterways are endangered, infrastructure has been destroyed, and even for those who step carefully, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and methane permeate the air, and many of the eighty thousand people who live in the region suffer from respiratory and skin problems.

Bokahapadi Village is the deadliest part of this deadly region, so when I arrived in Jharia, I wanted to see it.

Jessica Holland in The National:

Gwen Dylan is an artist in her 20s living in Eugene, Oregon, who deals with the same issues as everyone else: relationships, needy friends, criticism of her work. There’s something else, though: she has to eat human brains once a month to survive. That’s the set-up of a smart new comic-book series by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred which turns the usual zombie narrative on its head.

Instead of one individual struggling to stay alive amid infected undead hoards, iZombie has our protagonist attempting to maintain her identity despite the fact that at some point – she can’t remember when – she died and came back to life hungry for human flesh. Out in May, iZombie is one more example of a trend that, like its subject matter, refuses to die. Once the preserve of B movies and nerds, zombie stories have gone mainstream in the past 10 or so years, with clever, knowing films such as Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later reinventing the genre as one with mass appeal. Mainstream releases such as Zombieland, starring Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg, followed, along with countless books and television series.

In its original traditions, the zombie was a corpse reanimated by witchcraft – not brought back to life, merely moving. The basic premise of the current zombie story is simple: an infection (probably caused by human folly) turns huge swathes of the population into groaning monsters with below-average IQs. Classically, they shamble along slowly and feed on brains, although there have been variations.

The central metaphor is that it takes courage to be an individual and to think for yourself; if we’re not careful we’ll allow mass culture to rot our brains.

Over at The Immanent Frame, a few pieces on Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon and an interview with Lofton about her new book. Daphne Brooks:

If, like me, you’ve filled up your sabbatical time this year logging countless hours of watching The Oprah Winfrey Show’s Season 25: The Farewell Season, as well as its behind-the-scenes sister show on OWN, the Queen of All Media’s brand new cable network, then you’ll probably find it hard to select just one favorite moment from a season so awash with the spectacular celebration, tender adoration, (self-) righteous vindication, and tearful adulation of the most successful woman ever to work in the television industry. How to choose between the mega-“my favorite things” two-day gift giving extravaganza (an event that our lady of sumptuous philanthropy likened to the beauty of good things happening to good people) and the “come-to-Jesus” estranged friends truth-and-reconciliation episodes featuring Whoopi Goldberg and former self-help protégé Iyanla Vanzant?

But the scene that stands out in my memory, and the scene that crystallizes the arguments of Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, Kathryn Lofton’s arresting new study of “the good news” delivered and commodified by the “symbolic figure” that is Winfrey, is one in which the talk show host looked out tearfully across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia and registered her awe at seeing a garnet red “O” emblazoned in lights at the center of that country’s national landmark. O-vercome with emotion, Winfrey turned the magnitude of that gesture into a teachable moment with her audience the following day, by describing how this was the symbol of what it means to work hard and dream big.

And so O goes. As Lofton brilliantly observes (and I quote at length here, as it is my favorite passage in the book),

She is capitalist and capital; she is a commodity and consumer. Oprah is a product, but Oprah’s product is not individual objects. Her patents are not mechanical innovations or engineering improvements. She does not design fabric or copyright personal recipes. Rather, her taste is her product. Her O is what sells. The O is her signature, her initial, and her trademark. It is a sound, a reminder of her televised exclaimations: “Oh, no.” “Oh, yes.” “Oh, please.” “Oh, I never.” “Oh!” “Oh?” “Oh.” Awed, orgasmic, thrilled, worried and converted, an O is the noise of emotional presence and ready delight (what I feel right now, right here, before this new thing, new experience, or new encounter—Oh!) should not confuse the consumer with its earthy sheen. The O is never unscheduled or chaotic. It is cadence. For every girly (womanly, interviewing, ministerial, listening, awakening) “oh,” there is a corporate O labeling a magazine, a book, a bracelet, or a piece of stereo equipment. The O circles her consumer selections with her emboss, bequeathing her halo upon her beloved choices. The O envelops the commodities that she has chosen expressly for herself and now, expressly for you. She is a pitchwoman of her own consumption; her consumption is her commodity.

I have been enveloped by the O for some twenty-five years now, at once seduced, delighted, and irritated by—and yet drawn to—the image of a profoundly self-assured, brash, and at times entertainingly ego-driven baby-boomer African American woman who climbed the ladder of extreme wealth, fame, and social and cultural power in the post-Civil Rights era just as I was coming into intellectual and political consciousness as a black feminist scholar in the 1980s and ’90s. For me, Oprah Winfrey took the “temple of my familiar” (to borrow a line from brilliant novelist Alice Walker, a Winfrey “legend,” whose Color Purple opened a key chapter in her own self-professed spiritual awakening odyssey)—multicultural, middle-class woman-centered popular culture—and transformed that experience into universalized self-reckoning and a mega-million dollar empire.

From Seed:

Ms. Johnson’s 8th graders are gathering for art class. They collect their pastels and charcoals, their graphite sticks and Strathmore sketchpads. But today, instead of the fake-fruit basket that’s been collecting dust since summertime, Ms. Johnson pulls out a biology textbook. “I want you to pick one thing in here to illustrate,” she says. “It can be anything — a chloroplast or a reptile, mitosis or evolution. But here’s the catch: You have to cover up the picture in the book and just use your imagination. What color would your ribosome be? How would you show out-of-Africa? Imagine that you’ve never before seen the double helix…Could you sketch some DNA?” This scenario may sound far-flung, but it’s just what American school kids need, if you ask the scientists, artists, educators, business leaders, and policy makers gathering this week in Washington DC for The Art of Science Learning.

From Guardian:

David Foster Wallace, the most gifted and original American novelist of his generation, took his own life in 2008. His widow, the artist Karen Green, talks of the struggle to deal her loss and her decision to publish his unfinished work, The Pale King

The first piece of art that Karen Green made after her husband, David Foster Wallace, took his own life on 12 September 2008, was a forgiveness machine. She is standing in the neat, white studio at her house at Petaluma, north of San Francisco, explaining to me how the machine worked and how it didn't. “Before David died,” she says, “I had been working on some machines, with a five-year old – the son of a friend who had a gallery down the road from mine.” There had been a recreating-a-pig-from-bacon machine, and a prototype for a machine that cleverly pitted dates. The day that her husband hanged himself she had been working on a political machine that involved a bright-coloured circus tent, elephants and donkeys. For a long while after that, she says, she couldn't make any art at all, wondered if she ever would again, but eventually, tentatively, she developed the idea for her conciliatory Heath-Robinson. “The forgiveness machine was seven-feet long,” she says, “with lots of weird plastic bits and pieces. Heavy as hell.” The idea was that you wrote down the thing that you wanted to forgive, or to be forgiven for, and a vacuum sucked your piece of paper in one end. At the other it was shredded, and hey presto. Green put the machine on display at a gallery in Pasadena near the Los Angeles suburb, Claremont, where she and Wallace had lived in the four years they had been married. She was fascinated by the effect that it had on people who used it. “It was strange,” she suggests, “it all looked like fun, but then when the moment came for people to put their message actually in it, they became anxious. It was like: what if it works and I really have to forgive my terrible parent or whoever.”

More here.

Jolene H. Tan reviews John Teehan's In the Name of God: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Ethics and Violence, in Evolutionary Psychology:

In the Name of God, by John Teehan, takes the evolutionary framework and applies it to the reading of religious texts. The result is a provocative discussion of the ubiquitous phenomenon of religious belief that can change the way we understand the role of religion in society. With a selected focus on the religious text of Judaism and Christianity—the Bible, Teehan persuasively argues that these religions evolved to solve the unique problems encountered as humans moved from small societies organized based on kinship, to larger complex societies made up of strangers. Religion, therefore, is an institutionalization of a moral code to implement large-scale cooperation beyond kin, in order to promote “social cohesion and individual striving” (p.192). Morality and violence, far from being contradictory concepts, are merely flip sides of the same coin.

Teehan’s analysis spans a wide range of material but his incisive and focused approach conveys arguments without overwhelming the reader. Drawing from the latest research in cognitive science, he provides a background of our evolved moral psychology (Chapter 1) and also explains the psychological basis of religious belief (Chapter 2). After setting the stage, the evolutionary lens is focused on the religious text of Judaism, as he examines the portrayal of Yahweh (God) through the Hebrew scripture and the Ten Commandments (Chapter 3), as well as on Christianity, with emphasis on the gospel teachings of Jesus Christ (Chapter 4). Finally, he addresses the critical issue of religious violence as culminated by the events of September 11 (Chapter 5) and tries to synthesize the lessons of the previous chapters with the environment of the modern day to show how a moral system that avoids the discussed pitfalls may be forged (Chapter 6).

Whereas the mention of religion and evolution in the same breath is usually accompanied by fierce criticism or emotionally charged arguments, Teehan’s take is refreshingly neutral. He sidesteps metaphysical issues of the existence of God, and instead discusses our evolved predisposition to believe in supernatural agents and the resulting conception of God. In particular, our instinct to view supernatural agents in the ontological category of person, and our ability to conceive of some minimally counter-intuitive super traits (e.g. invisibility, immortality, prescience) as plausible, led to the representation of God as a “full access strategic agent”—a divine moral enforcer who is privy to all moral lapses and capable of dealing out divine punishment.

Jerry Coyne, also in The Guardian:

Templeton plies its enormous wealth with a single aim: to give credibility to religion by blurring its well-demarcated border with science. The Templeton Prize, which once went to people like Mother Teresa and the Reverend Billy Graham, now goes to scientists who are either religious themselves or say nice things about religion.

Rees is no exception. Though a professed nontheist, he also claims to be an “unbelieving Anglican” who goes to church “out of loyalty to the tribe”. He has criticised Stephen Hawking for arguing that we don't need God to explain the origin of the universe, and supports “peaceful co-existence between religion and science because they concern different domains”.

Templeton funds many other scientists who study Big Questions – those areas of science that the foundation sees, contra Rees, as overlapping with religion. These include studies of cosmology, human altruism, spiritual healing, and the contribution of faith to human virtue. Established scientists, all too eager to take anyone's money in an era of reduced funding, are then paraded by Templeton like prize horses and permanently installed in its online stable.

Templeton's enterprises include a $200,000 “epiphany prize” for movies and television programmes that “increase man's understanding and love of God”. Winners include Mel Gibson's baleful and antisemitic The Passion of the Christ. There are also fellowships for journalists studying science and religion, and stipends for budding theologians.

Many of these awards show a cronyism that has always infected Templeton. As journalist Sunny Bains has shown, the organisation often awards money to the people who run it. At least 8 of the last 13 Templeton Prize winners, for instance, were on Templeton's board of advisers before receiving their award (Rees is not one of them).

Templeton's mission is a serious corruption of science. Like a homeopathic remedy, it dilutes the core of the scientific enterprise, which has achieved its successes by holding doubt as a virtue and faith as a vice. The situation in religion is precisely the opposite, which is why theology remains mired in the Middle Ages.

Seamus Heaney in The Guardian:

One of the words that recur in Miłosz's prose and poetry is “incantation”, meaning rhythmical language dictated, he would affirm, by a “daimonion”. And from beginning to end the poems do seem to arrive with an unforced certitude, to be touching down into the here and now out of an elsewhere, as if he were “no more than a secretary of the invisible thing”. And that brimming creativity gives credence to his traditional sense of himself as the inspired poet:

Whatever I hold in my hand, a stylus, reed, quill or a ballpoint,
Wherever I may be, on the tiles of an atrium, in a cloister cell, in a hall before the portrait of a king,
I attend to matters I have been charged with.

And yet the poem which opens on these long perspectives (“From the Rising of the Sun”) is suddenly dramatising the displaced person's predicament in an immediate heartfelt idiom:

Never again will I kneel in my small country, by a river,
So that what is stone in me could be dissolved,
So that nothing would remain but my tears, tears.

“I attend to matters I have been charged with”: having outlived many of his Polish contemporaries, having watched the Soviets clamp down in Poland, Lithuania and the other Baltic states, Miłosz saw it as his writerly responsibility to bear in mind the dead who had perished in the uprising and the concentration camps and those others who were still suffering in the gulags. Hence his poem “Dedication” and its much-cited lines, “What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people?”.

He was poised between lyricism and witness.

In the Economist:

ALMOST as soon as radios were invented, people speculated about using them to listen to—and maybe even talk to—extraterrestrial civilisations. Since the 1960s attempts have been made to do so by sifting through signals from outer space in search of alien chit-chat. More recently, the use of lasers in telecommunications has suggested to some that they might be a better way to communicate across vast distances, so searching for telltale flashes from the sky is now in vogue.

But techniques that work well on Earth are not necessarily ideal for talking across the vast chasms that separate stars. And for several years John Learned of the University of Hawaii and Anthony Zee of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been promulgating what they believe is a better idea. They suggest that any alien civilisation worth its salt would alight not on the photons of the electromagnetic spectrum—whether optical or radio-frequency—to send messages to other solar systems. Rather, it would focus its attention on a different fundamental particle, one that is rather neglected by human technologists. That particle is the neutrino.

Neutrinos, it must be confessed, are neglected for a reason. Though abundant (the universe probably contains more of them than any other sort of particle except photons), they are fiendishly difficult to detect. That is because they interact only occasionally with other forms of matter. But that is precisely why Dr Learned and Dr Zee like the look of them. Light and radio waves are absorbed and scattered by interstellar gas and dust. Neutrinos would pass straight through such obstacles, and could easily be detected by neutrino telescopes on Earth (which typically consist of giant vats of water or, more recently, huge chunks of Antarctic ice).

The two researchers go further. They argue that powerful beams of neutrinos could be used to turn entire stars into flashing beacons, broadcasting information across the galaxy. Outlandish as this sounds, it is an idea that can easily be checked, for astronomers are already sitting on the data that might contain these extraterrestrial messages. They just need to analyse those data from a new perspective. Dr Learned and Dr Zee are therefore trying to persuade someone who studies the data in question to take their idea seriously and spend a little time having a look.

Fifty years ago, on April 12, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth. Walter Famler in Eurozine:

On 12 April 1961, a rocket weighing 287 tons rises from the launching pad. However only a few people know the secret of the name of the world's first cosmonaut. Not even the wife and parents of the 27 year-old pilot have been informed as the space ship, marked Vostok 1, ascends into the sky. When it has circled the earth and 108 minutes later has landed on a Russian field, Gagarin becomes world famous. Immediately after the launch, the Soviet news agency TASS cables the announcement of the first manned space journey around the globe. The fact that the mission narrowly escaped disaster because the capsule almost burnt up on re-entering the earth's atmosphere becomes known only decades later.

Two days after his flight, Gagarin is received in the Kremlin by Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet Premier. His journey of several kilometres through Moscow in an open car adorned with flowers turns into a triumphal procession; masses of cheering people form an honour guard from the airport to the Red Square. While still in orbit, Gagarin has been promoted to major, and now the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union are pinned to his chest. Half a century later, when you look at the old newsreels, the youthful officer with open shoelaces walking down the red carpet and leaping up the steps to the Lenin Mausoleum, saluting with a smile and announcing his return, looks more than ever as if he comes from a different universe.

At first, Gagarin enjoys his popularity. Soon, however, he experiences the greatest possible contradiction between collective and individual. From nowhere he becomes a “pop star” in a system that defines the individual only as the product of society and in the long term is unable to cope with the singularity of a phenomenon of this dimension.

David Runciman reviews Nicholas Shaxson's Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World and Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, in the LRB:

Since the 1980s more and more corporations have moved to Delaware to take advantage of the state’s extreme laissez-faire attitude to the rights of shareholders and employees against company managements. If you took your business to Delaware (and this was often just a question of establishing a shell office and filling in some forms), it would be much harder for anyone to prove anything against you, because the Delaware courts did not think that much of what you did was any of their concern. Again, other states faced a choice: they could try to isolate Delaware by tightening up their own standards or they could try to compete for a share of the spoils. Enough of them decided to compete to start a race to the bottom. Offshore had moved onshore.

When officials from Delaware toured the globe in the late 1980s advertising their services (and hoping, among other things, to provide a haven for all the hot money that was expected to flow out of Hong Kong in the run-up to the handover to China), they did so under the slogan ‘Delaware can protect you from politics.’ Shaxson defines a tax haven as ‘a place that seeks to attract business by offering politically stable facilities to help people or entities get around the rules, laws and regulations of jurisdictions elsewhere’. But this is the crux: where is the politics? Why aren’t these moves more politically unstable, or at least politically contentious? In the case of Delaware, as with other goldfish bowl communities, size probably tells (for a long time Delaware politics was shaped by the influence of the Du Pont family, whose vast chemical operations dominated the local economy). What, though, about Washington, where the shift to an offshore mindset at the national level might be expected to run up against some serious political opposition? What happened to the representatives of all those people who don’t have lots of money to move around, who can’t relocate even if they wanted to, and who have an interest in a fair, open and broadly progressive tax system? Didn’t they notice what was going on?

This is the question that Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson tackle in Winner-Take-All Politics. They don’t spend much time talking about offshore, but the story they tell has striking parallels with the one laid out by Shaxson. One of the ways you can identify an offshore environment, according to Shaxson, is that local politics gets captured by financial services.

From The Telegraph:

Hardy, who wrote his first three novels at the cottage, was forced out into the world by his marriage. For 10 years the couple moved between lodgings in London and the West Country, waiting for children who never came and dealing with the books that did. These were Emma’s years as muse and helpmeet to her husband, making fair copies of his manuscripts and taking dictation when he was ill. But increasingly Hardy was moved to establish a distance between his work and his wife, and decades of estrangement would pass before Emma, by virtue of her sudden death and the storm of remorse it provoked, became useful to her husband once more.

Is it possible that Emma was an essential buffer zone between Hardy and the background which continued to supply his material once he had left it behind? In the 10th year of the marriage the prosperous man of letters bought a plot of land outside Dorchester just an hour’s walk from his humble birthplace. He designed the house himself and commissioned his father and brother to build it. “They had just built a new house, which he recoiled from,” reported Fanny Stevenson in the autumn of 1885.

More here.

From The New York Times:

What do colon cancer, ant colonies, language and global warming have in common? This might sound like the front end of a joke, but in fact it’s a serious challenge to the standard view of evolution. Martin A. Nowak, the director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard, has devoted a brilliant career to showing that Darwin, and particularly his followers, batted only two for three. Random mutation and natural selection have indeed been powerful motors for change in the natural world — the struggle for existence pitting the fit against the fitter in a hullabaloo of rivalry. But most of the great innovations of life on earth, Nowak argues, from genes to cells to societies, have been due to a third motor, and “master architect,” of evolution: cooperation.

“SuperCooperators” (written with Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist magazine) is an absorbing, accessible book about the power of mathematics. Unlike Darwin with his brine bottles and pigeon coops, Nowak aims to tackle the mysteries of nature with paper, pencil and computer. By looking at phenomena as diverse as H.I.V. infection and English irregular verbs, he has formally defined five distinct mechanisms that have helped give rise to cooperative behavior, from the first molecules that joined to self-replicate, to the first cells that formed multicellular organisms, all the way to human societies, which exhibit a degree of cooperation unmatched in all creation. In Nowak’s view, figuring out how cooperation comes about and breaks down, as well as actively pursuing the “snuggle for existence,” is the key to our survival as a species.

More here.

Afterlife

Older people are exiting this life as if it were a movie… “I didn’t get it,”
they are saying.
He says, “It didn’t seem to have any plot.”
“No.” she says, “it seemed like things just kept coming at me. Most of the
time I was confused… and there was way too much sex and violence.”
“Violence anyway,” he says.
“It was not much for character development either; most of the time
people were either shouting or mumbling. Then just when someone started
to make sense and I got interested, they died. Then a whole lot of new
characters came along and I couldn’t tell who was who.”
“The whole thing lacked subtlety.”
“Some of the scenery was nice.”
“Yes.”
They walk on in silence for a while. It is a summer night and they walk
slowly, stopping now and then, as if they had no particular place to go.
They walk past a streetlamp where some insects are hurling themselves at
the light, and then on down the block, fading into the darkness.
She says, “I was never happy with the way I looked.”
“The lighting was bad and I was no good at dialogue,” he says.
“I would have liked to have been a little taller,” she says.

by Louis Jenkins
from North of the Cities
Will o’ the Wisp Books, 2007
© Louis Jenkins.

more from The Guardian here.

What are the Illuminations? Originally an untitled, unpaginated bunch of manuscript pages that Arthur Rimbaud handed to his former lover Paul Verlaine on the occasion of their last meeting, in Stuttgart in 1875. Verlaine had recently been released from a term in a Belgian prison for wounding the younger poet with a pistol in Brussels two years earlier. Rimbaud wanted his assassin manqué to deliver the pages to a friend, Germain Nouveau, who (he thought) would arrange for their publication. This casual attitude toward what would turn out to be one of the masterpieces of world literature is puzzling, even in someone as unpredictable as its author. Was it just a question of not wanting to splurge on stamps? (Verlaine would later complain in a letter that the package cost him “2 francs 75 in postage!!!”) More likely it was because Rimbaud had decided already to abandon poetry for what would turn out to be a mercantile career in Africa, trafficking in a dizzying variety of commodities (though not, apparently, slaves, as some have thought). He had, after all, seen his previous book, A Season in Hell, through publication, though he had left the bulk of the edition with its printer, whom he wasn’t able to pay. Like Emily Dickinson, he had seen “the horses’ heads were toward eternity.” In the penultimate strophe of “Adieu,” the last poem of A Season in Hell, he had written: “Meanwhile, this is now the eve. Let’s welcome the influx of strength and real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with burning patience, we will enter splendid cities.”

more from John Ashbery at Poetry here.