Bat Soup

But it’s diluted with sky, not water,
the aerial plankton on which they sup.
Our solitary pipistrelle flickers
over her chosen suburban quarter,
echo-locating, to siphon it up.
It nourishes birds as well as bats –
high-flyers that feed on the wing,
swifts, house-martins – this floating gruel
of hymenoptera, midges and gnats,
thunderbugs, beetles, aphids, flies,
moths, mosquitoes, and flying dots
almost too small to be worth naming.
Some of it swirls at a lower level –
a broth of midges over a pool
at dusk or a simultaneous hatch
of mayflies boiling up from Lough Neagh:
swallow-fodder, and also a splotch
to plaster on any passing windscreen,
though even at speed there’s never so much
as of yore; bad news for the food-chain,
but somehow ‘où sont les neiges d’antan’
sounds too noble a note of dole
for a sullying mash of blood and chitin.
(And we can’t hear what the bats are screaming.)

by Fleur Adcock
from Glass Wings
publisher: Bloodaxe, Newcastle, 2013

From CNN:

It is not possible to dial an Iranian number from an Israeli telephone. It will simply not go through. That lack of communication stems from the government level, where there is no dialogue between the two countries aside from public speeches meant to carry weighty threats of war to each camp.

That is why it was so difficult for Ronny Edry, an Israeli graphic designer based in Tel Aviv, to get his message across to the people of Iran.

“My idea was simple, I was trying to reach the other side. There are all these talks about war, Iran is coming to bomb us and we bomb them back, we are sitting and waiting. I wanted to say the simple words that this war is crazy,” said Edry.

Using his graphic design skills and his wife's help (she is also a graphic designer), he plastered memes over pictures of himself, his wife, his friends and his neighbors. He then posted them on the Facebook page of Pushpin Mehina, his small design school, with a resounding message:

IRANIANS, we will never bomb your country, We *Heart* You.

The response, said Edry, was overwhelming. “In a few hours, I had hundreds of shares and thousands of likes and it was like something was happening.

More here. And the Iranian response: “Israel, we love you too!”:

“My Israeli friends, I do not hate you; I do not want war. love, Peace,” read many Iranian posters that were posted by Iranians to the new group page. Most of the Iranians, who posted messages to the Facebook group, did so with their faces partially veiled, probably out of fear from the Iranian authorities. On Saturday, Edry said that Iranian group members explained that they could be arrested if recognized in the photos.

“Dear Israeli Friends and World! Iranians love peace and we hate hate!…and we don't need any Nuclear Power to show it!” one poster caption stated.

“I’m from Iran and love your idea and your efforts against war and for peace. I am really happy to get to know you and people like you, and hope to find more people like you. Here in Iran the situation is complicated and many people hate the governments and their bullshit,” another anonymous Iranian wrote in a poster he published.

More here.

This LSE study argues that it is very unlikely. From the Intro by Ramachandra Guha:

Superficially, India seems to have travelled a long way from the summer of 1948. Now – despite the dissensions in the borderlands, in Kashmir and the north-east – it is clear that India is and will be a single country, whose leaders shall be chosen by (and also replaced by) its people. Indians no longer fear for our existence as a sovereign nation or as a functioning democracy. What we hope for instead is a gradual enhancement of our material and political powers, and the acknowledgement of our nation as one of the most powerful and respected on earth.

But, the more things appear to change, the more they are actually the same. For today, the Indian state once more faces a challenge from left-wing extremism. The Prime Minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh, has identified the Communist Party of India (Maoist), known more familiarly as the Naxalites, as the ‘greatest internal security threat‘ facing the nation. The Home Ministry lists more than 150 districts as being ‘Naxalite affected’. This is an exaggeration, for with even one single, stray incident, a State Government is moved to get a district listed under that category, so as to garner more funds from the Central treasury. Still, the Naxalites do have a considerable presence in some forty or fifty districts spread out over the central and eastern parts of the country. Their greatest gains have been among tribal communities treated with contempt and condescension by the Indian state and by the formal processes of Indian democracy.

The conventional wisdom is that the erstwhile Untouchables, or Dalits, are the social group who are most victimised in India. In fact, the tribals fare even worse. In a recent book, the demographer Arun Maharatna compared the life chances of an average Dalit with that of an average tribal. On all counts the tribals were found to be more disadvantaged. As many as 41.5 percent of Dalits live below the official poverty line; however, the proportion of poor tribal households is even higher, at 49.5 percent. One-in-six Dalits have no access to doctors or health clinics; as many as one-in-four tribals suffer from the same disability.

From The New York Times:

In today’s world of Apple, Google and Facebook, the name may not ring any bells for most readers, but for decades — from the 1920s through the 1980s — Bell Labs, the research and development wing of AT&T, was the most innovative scientific organization in the world. As Jon Gertner argues in his riveting new book, “The Idea Factory,” it was where the future was invented.

Indeed, Bell Labs was behind many of the innovations that have come to define modern life, including the transistor (the building block of all digital products), the laser, the silicon solar cell and the computer operating system called Unix (which would serve as the basis for a host of other computer languages). Bell Labs developed the first communications satellites, the first cellular telephone systems and the first fiber-optic cable systems. The Bell Labs scientist Claude Elwood Shannon effectively founded the field of information theory, which would revolutionize thinking about communications; other Bell Labs researchers helped push the boundaries of physics, chemistry and mathematics, while defining new industrial processes like quality control. In “The Idea Factory,” Mr. Gertner — an editor at Fast Company magazine and a writer for The New York Times Magazine — not only gives us spirited portraits of the scientists behind Bell Labs’ phenomenal success, but he also looks at the reasons that research organization became such a fount of innovation, laying the groundwork for the networked world we now live in.

More here.

From Nature:

Why a U.S. Army soldier suspected of killing 16 civilians in Afghanistan did what he did is still unclear, but one thing is certain: his lawyers are likely to invoke emerging science about the effects of war on the brain to aid in his defense. In fact, even before Staff Sgt. Robert Bales' identity was revealed, unnamed US officials were telling major news outlets that the suspect had suffered a traumatic brain injury, or TBI. Shortly thereafter, Bales’ lawyer publicly suggested that his client suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), even though it does not appear to have been previously diagnosed.

How much either TBI or PTSD could explain a pre-planned rampage is up for debate, however. According to Dr. James Giordano, director of the Center for Neurotechnology Studies at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Virginia, TBI manifests itself through a variety of complaints, which may range from mild to moderate. These could include disorientation, ringing in the ears, vertigo, and headaches, as well as a more profound constellation of severe neurological and psychological symptoms, such as impaired impulse control, acting out and aggressive behavior. “What we're seeing is that TBI presents as spectrum disorder with a variety of effects,” says Giordano. In fact, some people make a complete recovery from TBI, while others develop more severe conditions down the road, and it’s difficult to predict which injuries will persist, according to Giordano. “One would think the milder the injury, the less severe the symptoms,” says Giordano. “That’s not always the case.” The Pentagon estimates that over 230,000 troops have suffered some form of TBI over the past 10 years.

More here.

Claire Jarvis in Paper Momument:

In “I, Heidi, Take Thee, Spencer,” the final episode of the fourth season of MTVs glossy quasi-reality show The Hills, antagonist Heidi Montag (flighty and airbrushed, surgically enhanced, blonde) reaches out to the program’s protagonist, her onetime “best friend” Lauren Conrad (given to seriousness and heavy eye makeup, less obviously surgically enhanced, blonde). The conversation shifts from the sentimentally banal (they “miss each other,” but things “are what they are”) to the absurd; in one oddball moment, Heidi, incapable of turning off the LA body-flattery she’s absorbed over the past few years, asks Lauren, “Have you been working out a lot?” Still, the intensity of this attempted reconciliation is larded with pathos. Never mind that this pair’s enmity has outlasted its friendship by a good two MTV “years,” or that their “reconciliation” has been prompted only by their simultaneous attendance at one of the many “young Hollywood” parties that litter the program’s mise-en-scène (Heidi is “working” as a functionary for an event-planning firm; Lauren, in one of the program’s neverending assertions of hierarchy, is a valued “guest”). No, The Hills accords the event a full measure of dignity, embedding the minimal dialogue in a choreography of meaningful glances and unspeakable sentences: Is this a soap opera or a Henry James novel?

The encounter’s signal moment—a clue to the show’s novel depiction of time—arrives when Heidi asks:

[sighing] Don’t you feel, like, you’re, like, eighteen again, nineteen? I feel like I don’t really get older, time just keeps, like, passing by. And I’m like wait, like, two years ago, three years ago seems, like, five minutes ago, so much.

Heidi’s awkwardly telescopic nostalgia (in which two or three years can feel like five minutes) reminds us that The Hills happens in both television time and “real” time. Over the years, Heidi participates in the bildungsroman of contemporary America—leaving home, getting a job, making consequential life decisions along the way, like everyone else in the real world. Unlike Heidi, though, most people in similar circumstances mark their aging all too clearly: time marches on, and the shift from teenager to adult comes with the attendant discovery that life is not endless. But that’s only part of Heidi’s complaint. More centrally, Heidi’s perception of temporal dissonance shows how parceled her existence has become over the past several years—fit into five-minute segments for mass-market consumption. With this partitioning, MTV conditions the viewers, and possibly Heidi herself, to think of Heidi Montag as “Heidi Montag.” As the program overlays a novelistic plot arc on Heidi’s life, it also impresses it with an unchanging Californian ambience, one patterned on the many fictional Californias of film and television, polished for home viewing. Things unarguably happen on The Hills, but Heidi’s right: on this show, three years ago is the same as the present moment. How can a show so preoccupied with marking the passage from youth to adulthood seem so listlessly static? And why is this listlessness so fascinating to watch?

Benjamin Fong in the NYT's Opinionator:

Death is supposed to be an event proclaimed but once, and yet some deaths, curiously enough, need to be affirmed again and again, as if there were a risk that the interned will crawl back up into the world of the living if fresh handfuls of dirt are not tossed on their graves. One such member of the living dead, accompanying the likes of God and Karl Marx, is Sigmund Freud. How often one hears, thanks recently to the fetishization of neuroscience, that psychoanalysis is now bunk, irrelevant, its method decadent and “dangerous,” as the recent David Cronenberg film, “A Dangerous Method,” informs us.

Over the years, the “talking cure” — so dubbed by Bertha Pappenheim, a.k.a. “Anna O.,” who became Freud’s first psychoanalytic case study — has received quite a bit of ridicule and reworking. With countless children and adults taking behavior-altering drugs, many are again tolling the bell for psychoanalysis. Who wouldn’t choose fast-acting pills over many years on the couch, health insurance companies most of all? Perhaps, after surviving scandal, revision and pop characterization, drugs and money will definitively put old Sigmund to rest.

If psychoanalysis were simply a way of “curing” certain individuals of socially unwanted behavior, then I would have no problem with its disappearance. Similarly, if psychoanalysis were just a way for wealthy individuals to talk to one another about their lackluster existences, it might as well continue on its way to the dustbin of history. And if, God forbid, psychoanalysis has devolved into just another addition to the theory toolkit of academics in the humanities, someone ought to put it out of its misery now.

Jonathan Kirshner in Boston Review:

The years from the late 1960s through the middle of the 1970s were remarkable ones for American movies. In the words of critic David Thompson, it was “the decade when movies mattered.”

With the collapse of the draconian censorship regime that had imposed a strict moral code on the content of films, the decline of the studio system, and economic and demographic changes in both the industry and its audience, a window of opportunity opened for a new type of commercial film. At the same time, the content of these movies was inevitably shaped by the social and political upheavals of the era: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, and the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon presidency.

These films, filmmakers, and, implicitly, their audiences, were dubbed the “New Hollywood.” New to reflect their relative youth, but also as a nod to the foundational influence of the New European cinemas of the 1950s and 1960s; Hollywood because the makers of these personal, ambitious, arty films nevertheless hoped to return a fair profit. During this golden age, a night at the movies was still an evening’s entertainment, but it was also an invitation to discuss important works of art that were shaped by, and in dialogue with, the political, social, and philosophical issues of their times.

The New Hollywood was a cinema of moral ambiguity. The notorious Production Code Authority, in ruins by the close of 1966, had insisted on movies about right and wrong, with right winning in the end. By contrast, in the world portrayed by the “’70s film” (and in tune with the tenor of the times) choices are not always easy and obvious (Klute, The King of Marvin Gardens), authorities and institutions are compromised (Medium Cool, The Friends of Eddie Coyle), and, finally, the “hero” rarely wins (Chinatown, Night Moves). Individually ’70s films offer character-driven explorations of troubled, imperfect protagonists and complex interpersonal relationships, with no obvious solutions or clean resolutions proffered (or expected). Collectively they reflect a thriving and identifiable film culture—movies that “don’t supply reassuring smiles or self-righteous messages,” but share “a new openminded interest in examining American experience,” as the critic Pauline Kael put it at the time. “Our filmmakers seem to be on a quest—looking to understand what has been shaping our lives.”

These were movies to talk about, and fight about, and accordingly it was also the decade when the critics mattered.

Angela Davis first arrived in Paris in the summer of 1962. She lived with two other American women in a chambre de bonne, six flights up, with a skylight view of the elevators ferrying tourists up and down the Eiffel Tower. The following summer Davis returned to Paris on a formal, yearlong academic program. It was the golden age of study abroad that began in the aftermath of World War II and continued for three decades, sending thousands of American students into French homes and universities. There’s barely a book or article about Angela Davis that doesn’t mention that she majored in French and studied at the Sorbonne. But that period of education and adventure is always overshadowed by the dramas to come: Davis’s association with the Black Panthers; her dismissal from UCLA’s faculty in 1969 for being a member of the Communist Party; her appearance in 1970 on the FBI’s list of ten most wanted fugitives; her acquittal in the kidnapping and murder of a California judge; her research on the prison-industrial complex. Yet a phenomenon as powerful and versatile as the American romance with France has played a vital role in Davis’s story, as it has for women as radically different as Jacqueline Bouvier and Susan Sontag. All three were transformed by studying in France in such a way that they would, in turn, transform the cultural and political life of the United States.

more from Alice Kaplan at The Nation here.

It might be argued that mapping out human knowledge has always, necessarily, been a quixotic project, akin to Casaubon’s “Key to All Mythologies.” It is very likely that few readers ever actually delved very deeply into the “Propaedia,” or made much use of Diderot and d’Alembert’s “map” to navigate the wilds of the 32 individual volumes. The vast majority of people who actually consulted these encyclopedias most likely turned straight to the alphabetical articles, to hunt down specific pieces of information. Today, we use the online resources in the same way. But the ambition mattered. It mattered that one could look at a stack of volumes and say: Here are vast libraries, distilled down into an essence of human knowledge, and organized in a logical order. The books testified to the hope that, ultimately, human beings had at least a measure of control over the overpowering torrents of facts and ideas that they collectively produce. Perhaps no single human being could truly have control—what more quixotic enterprise is there than reading through an encyclopedia from cover to cover? But at least the existence of the books gave us the sense that some points of dry land remained amidst the floods, some fragments shored against our ruins. The disappearance of these grand printed volumes, while inevitable, is yet another depressing sign of just how much we are now adrift in the limitless oceans of information.

more from David Bell at The New Republic here.

One day in early April, I passed a bizarre series of advertisements in my local London tube station. At first sight, they appeared to contrast two identical plastic-wrapped chickens, one of them profusely labelled with health warnings. They were, it turned out, political ads designed to increase turnout for the European Union parliamentary elections in June, which the EU is billing as the biggest transnational ballot in history. It seemed the most inspiring message the organization could muster was that it had enabled us to know exactly what was in our chickens. Later that month, in Strasbourg, I watched Barack Obama address a crowd of well-behaved teenagers. He apologized for the often patronizing tone adopted by his country toward Europe, and rebuked Europeans for their anti-Americanism. He also told them about his desire to see a world without nuclear weapons. “C’est le président du monde,” a small girl said, and she wasn’t exaggerating. I couldn’t help but compare Barack and Michelle’s expansive style with the pursed-lip, pinched presence of our own leaders at the NATO summit taking place that week. In so many material aspects, especially its commitment to the mission in Afghanistan, Europe was failing to deliver. Who would speak for Europe, I asked myself. Not Italy’s grotesque Silvio, caught on camera incurring the Queen’s displeasure after attempting to attract Obama’s attention. Not the diminutive Hello! magazine president from France, with his beaky pop singer wife, nor the former chemist from eastern Germany, nor indeed our own rumpled-suited, frenzied über-geek of a prime minister.

more from Nick Fraser at The Walrus here.

Gish Jen has picked the winners from the nine finalists:

1. Top Quark, $1000: Melissa Fisher, My First Job
2. Strange Quark, $300: Leanne Ogasawara, Leonardo in the Gilded Age
3. Charm Quark, $200: Syed Haider Shahbaz, The Last Novel

Here is what Gish had to say about them:

So difficult to choose! I took something away from every one of these wonderful pieces. Some I eliminated for entirely unfair reasons — deepest apologies especially to Lydia Kiesling whose piece on Sister Carrie married sensibility with insight and might well have won a prize this year had Kiesling not already won one last year. And apologies to the other accomplished finalists as well. There is no doubt in my mind that another judge would have chosen entirely differently than I.

In the end, I picked pieces that seemed to me 1) to be singular — that is, produced by a particular mind animated by a particular subject and 2) to possess momentum — that is, to lead onward or outward in a significant way. My choices, then, were:

For Top Quark: My First Job. This memoir of growing up in Vermont begs to be turned into a book. At once deeply universal and deeply strange, it is wonderfully unpretentious, completely appalling, and appealingly clear-of-heart.

For Strange Quark: Leonardo in the Gilded Age: The frank and passionate engagement of the writer with a painting he or she has never even seen is riveting. The comparison of the hands with the Kudara Kannon Statue, the reflections on the refraction of light in the rock crystal orb, the sudden cut to a book about a court battle involving a putative Leonardo are absorbing, delightful and inspiring. This piece both follows the writer’s idiosyncratic mind and, through its many enriching links, opens the painting out.

For Charm Quark: The Last Novel. It is hard to believe the author is an undergraduate. The summoning of a whole life, the drive to portray art and life in all their irony and complexity, and the grappling, haunted quality here all bespeak promise. I look forward to its fulfillment.

Congrats again to all the finalists, and to the semifinalists, too. So much fine writing and thinking! It’s enough to make a person think the arts are thriving as never before.

Congratulations also from 3QD to the winners (remember, you must claim the money within one month from today–just send me an email). And feel free, in fact we encourage you, to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Thanks also, of course, to Gish Jen for doing the final judging.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed by me, Sughra Raza, and Carla Goller. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about the prize here.

Adelie Penguins Diving, Antarctica.

“At 2 feet in height, Adélie penguins are the smallest of the five Antarctic species. They are mostly black with a white belly. You can easily spot them in Penguin Cam by the white ring around their eye and by their unique bill. Their bill is mostly hidden by black feathers, which makes the exposed tip look like red lips. Adélie penguins also have a long tail.

Next to emperors, Adélies are the most southerly distributed of all penguin species. There are over 5 million of them in the Ross Sea region of Antarctica.

… male Adélie penguins come ashore in early spring to build their rocky nests on the few exposed areas found along the coast. The males will even steal rocks from one another's nests to make sure their nest is the best and biggest when the females arrive in late spring.

When the mating season begins, male Adélie penguins will salute the females with a display of beak-thrusting, neck-arching and fin flapping. The chosen males mate while the others continue to flap and arch in vain. In a month, the female lays her egg, then goes fishing while the male incubates the egg through summer.”

More here and here.