John Ono Lennon MBE, born John Winston Lennon (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as a founder member of the Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Together with Paul McCartney, he formed one of the most celebrated songwriting partnerships of the 20th century.

…In September 1980, Lennon commented about his family and his rebellious nature:

Part of me would like to be accepted by all facets of society and not be this loudmouthed lunatic poet/musician. But I cannot be what I am not … I was the one who all the other boys' parents—including Paul's father—would say, 'Keep away from him' … The parents instinctively recognised I was a troublemaker, meaning I did not conform and I would influence their children, which I did. I did my best to disrupt every friend's home … Partly out of envy that I didn't have this so-called home … but I did … There were five women that were my family. Five strong, intelligent, beautiful women, five sisters. One happened to be my mother. [She] just couldn't deal with life. She was the youngest and she had a husband who ran away to sea and the war was on and she couldn't cope with me, and I ended up living with her elder sister. Now those women were fantastic … And that was my first feminist education … I would infiltrate the other boys minds. I could say, “Parents are not gods because I don't live with mine and, therefore, I know.'

More here.

“The elements into which all poesy is divided are two…metaphor and meter.” Thus writes Snorri Sturluson in the Prose Edda, a handbook compiled by Snorri for the aid of the Icelandic skalds. Of “skaldic metaphor,” he writes, there are three types: “first, calling everything by its name; the second type is that which is called ‘substitution;’ the third type of metaphor is that which is called ‘periphrasis.’” Offering an example of this last, Snorri writes: “Suppose I take Odin, or Thor, or any of the Aesir or Elves, and to any of them whom I mention, I add the name of a property of some other of the Aesir, or I record certain works of his. Thereupon he becomes owner of the name…just as when we speak of Victory-Tyr, or Tyr of the Hanged…that then becomes Odin’s name, and we call these periphrastic names.” So it becomes evident that for Snorri, metaphor, in all of its varieties, is simply a matter of giving the right names to things, and this task of naming he calls one of the two elemental tasks of the poet. There is a remarkable similarity here between Snorri and Aristotle, for one finds that in the Poetics, metaphor is said to “consist in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else,” and to be a master of metaphor, Aristotle claims, is “the greatest thing by far.”

more from Mark Signorelli at Anamnesis here.

The golden age of freethought, which stretched roughly from 1875 until the beginning of the First World War, divided Americans in much the same fashion, and over many of the same issues, as have the culture wars of the past three decades. The argument over the proper role of religion in civil government was (and is) only a subsidiary of the larger question of whether the claims of supposedly revealed religion deserve any particular respect or deference in a pluralistic society. The other cultural issues that divided Americans in Ingersoll’s time are equally familiar and include evolution, race, immigration, women’s rights, sexual behavior, freedom of artistic expression, and vast disparities in wealth. In the 19th century, however, the issues were newer, as was the science bolstering the secular side of the arguments, and the forces of religious orthodoxy were stronger.

more from Susan Jacoby at The American Scholar here.

The so-called “wild” or spontaneous expulsions in Czechoslovakia began almost immediately after liberation, in May to June of 1945. But there was nothing “wild” about this first wave of what Czech officials referred to as národní ocista (“national cleansing”). These expulsions, which resulted in the removal of up to 2 million Germans from Eastern Europe, were planned and executed by troops, police and militia, under orders from the highest authorities, with the full knowledge and consent of the Allies. Eastern European and Allied observers alike remarked on the utter passivity of the victims, the majority of whom were women, children and the elderly (most German men had been drafted during the war and either killed or interned in POW camps). But the “wild expulsions” were justified as self-defense on the basis of exaggerated or invented reports of ongoing resistance activity by Nazi “Werewolf” units. One of the most infamous postwar pogroms was sparked by the accidental explosion of an ammunition dump in Ústí nad Labem in northwestern Bohemia in July 1945. Most of the victims of the explosion were themselves German, but local workers, Czechoslovak Army units and Soviet troops wasted no time blaming Werewolf sabotage and taking revenge. Germans were beaten, shot and thrown into the Elbe River; many observers recall a baby carriage being thrown into the river with a baby inside. The massacre resulted in at least 100 deaths.

more from Tara Zahra at The Nation here.

From National Geographic:

More than 80 Tibetans have self-immolated to protest China's policies in their homeland. This is one man’s story.

At the time he decided to set fire to himself, Jamphel Yeshi was living in the Tibetan refugee colony of Majnu ka Tilla, on the northern outskirts of Delhi. The colony was first settled in 1963, four years after the Dalai Lama escaped to India from advancing Chinese forces. The early residents built thatched huts and made a living brewing and selling chang, a traditional Tibetan barley-and-wheat alcohol. As refugees from the roof of the world, they were unaccustomed to the heat and humidity of the low-lying plain. They had no idea how long they'd be staying but imagined they'd return home soon.

Today, about 4,000 people live in the colony, which has been overtaken by the city: A busy thoroughfare runs alongside it, and Indian neighborhoods have grown up nearby. New construction in the colony is illegal, yet ragged workers continue to dig foundations, carrying rubble and dirt in handwoven baskets balanced on their heads and dumping their contents on the nearby banks of the Yamuna River. They navigate a warren of multistory buildings, a shambolic jumble of several hundred homes with colored prayer flags fluttering from the rooftops. The alleyways, many just wide enough for two pedestrians to pass, are populated by crimson-robed monks and nuns, mangy dogs and barefoot kids, activists and drifters, petty merchants, and beggars with missing or mangled limbs who offer a broad smile and warm thanks for receiving the equivalent of 20 cents. A Tibetan far from home can enjoy familiar scents and tastes here: salty butter tea, steamed dumplings, Tibetan bread and biscuits. (Learn about Tibetan traditions under Chinese Rule.) Jamphel Yeshi—Jashi to his friends—lived with four other Tibetan men in a one-room, windowless apartment they rented for the equivalent of $90 a month. The entrance to the room is through a tiny kitchen area, which is separated from the sleeping quarters by a threadbare curtain in a Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck motif. Jashi's mattress still lies on the floor in a corner, below posters of the Dalai Lama and other senior lamas. His mattress and four others form a U-shape around the perimeter of the room, which is illuminated by three fluorescent tubes. A thin cabinet still holds many of Jashi's books, including several well-thumbed collections on Buddhism, Tibetan politics, and history. During the day, the men would store their personal belongings in two tiny alcoves. Jashi's small nylon suitcase remains where it was when he was alive, holding most of what he owned, including three ID cards, two plastic pens, two rosaries, four cotton sweaters, four pairs of pants, a vest, a scarf, a green and a red string, and a small Tibetan flag. (Related: “Buddha Rising, Buddhism in the West.”)

On the night before he set himself on fire, Jashi was in a cheerful mood.

More here.

The Fish-Wife

Thomas Wright in The Telegraph:

We are approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the annus mirabilis in Keats biography: 1963 saw the publication of both John Keats by Walter Jackson Bate and John Keats: The making of a poet by Aileen Ward. Rereading them after working through the latest clutch of biographies, I am amazed at how well they have stood the test of time. Fifty years on, we have a few more facts and some telling new emphases, but no one has surpassed Bate (no relation) and Ward in the answering of those key questions about personality and development. Bate remains pre-eminent on poetic technique, Ward for psychological acuity. It was in the Romantic period that two roads diverged in the wood of literary Life-writing. Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) had no truck with the idea that biography has a duty to be comprehensive. Boswell only knew Johnson for the last twenty-one years of the great man’s long life, so on the principle that one writes best about what one knows well, his Life was heavily skewed to the later years.

more from Jonathan Bate at the TLS here.

Popularly known as the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes won that title ostensibly by rejecting traditional modes of intellectual inquiry largely associated with commentary on prior texts, and replacing them with the first attempt at a kind of radical phenomenology. The drama of this attempt is conveyed autobiographically in the first of his six Meditations, in which he describes the strenuous process of sloughing off received ideas and subjecting everything he thinks he knows to doubt. He finds it tough going, and repeatedly realizes that he has fallen back on some “long standing opinions” that “take advantage of his credulity.” His last ditch effort to subject all possible knowledge to doubt comes in the form of a figure he calls an evil genius or demon, in Latin a genius malignus, “supremely powerful and clever, who has directed his entire effort at deceiving me. I will regard the heavens, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds, and all external things as nothing but the bedeviling hoaxes of my dreams, with which he lays snares for my credulity.”

more from William Egginton at Berfrois here.

I want to own art like this, but I’m not rich, and I also think it’s a conflict of interest for a critic to own work that he or she may write about. (Reviews can affect market value.) So, last winter, I put out a call on Facebook. I’d pay anyone $155 plus the cost of materials to make me a perfect fake by Richter, Ryman, Flavin, Fontana, Du­champ, Hirst, Guyton, or Agnes Martin. (Why $155? It’s enough money to me that the painting had to be worth it, and 55 is a funnier number than 50.) You can’t just call up a guy and order an ersatz Hirst or Richter—unless you are seeking a flat-out forger, but those folks don’t work for $155 and their numbers aren’t listed. Besides, in the art world, noncriminal fakes aren’t news. We don’t even call them “fakes.” We prefer the term “appropriation,” whereby a new artwork incorporates or reproduces another. Copyists lie on a continuum: At one end, you have extremely original artists (Richard Prince, Elaine Sturtevant) who use the old to make something new.

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

Nico Muhly in Bomb Magazine:

David Lang is one of the most thoughtful composers working today. His music is consistently probing, emotionally urgent, strange, and beautiful. It is also getting simpler as the years roll on—a sign that the mind behind it is undergoing a kind of ritualistic purification. I’ve been obsessed with David’s music since I bought a recording by mail order of his piece cheating lying stealing when I was in high school, and I have written a piano piece called David Lang Needs a Hug.

Nico Muhly So you’re going to San Francisco?

David Lang Yes, I’m doing one of these Iron Man things where I’m leaving at five in the morning, going to rehearsals of music that I wrote for a new production of Sophocles’s Elektra, and then taking the red-eye back.

NM Oh, Jesus.

DL Otherwise I just don’t have time to do anything. I’m trying to live your life, you know.

NM There you go! I had something awful happen to me yesterday. I met with my publishers, and they showed me something I’ve never seen: a list of everything I’ve written. It’s really scary.

DL Because it’s so long?

NM Yeah! Have you ever seen these things?

DL I like them, actually. You’re littering the world—

NM —with your shit. (laughter) Do you have physical copies of your list? I don’t.

DL I don’t either. I don’t even have hard copies of my music; they’re on my computer.

NM I remember when I first saw that giant wall at Philip [Glass’s] house, his shelves full of work, and went, Maybe some day! My idea was maybe someday I’d have a wall that big.

DL I bet you’ll figure out something better to fill it with than music.

NM So what is the piece with So Percussion called?

DL It’s called man made.

NM And what happens in it?

DL It’s a kind of concerto for four solo percussionists, four orchestral percussionists, and a large orchestra commissioned by a bunch of great international orchestras. It premiers with the BBC Symphony next May. I wanted a role for the percussionists in the orchestra along with So Percussion, so that it’s not like a concerto for people coming in from out of town. Actually, I was thinking about Phil’s Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra. Do you know what a brilliant idea it is to bring somebody from the outside and not insult the local guy? It honors the person who’s already there.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

In the rain forests of Costa Rica lives Anelosimus octavius, a species of spider that sometimes displays a strange and ghoulish habit.

From time to time these spiders abandon their own web and build a radically different one, a home not for the spider but for a parasitic wasp that has been living inside it. Then the spider dies — a zombie architect, its brain hijacked by its parasitic invader — and out of its body crawls the wasp’s larva, which has been growing inside it all this time.

The current issue of the prestigious Journal of Experimental Biology is entirely dedicated to such examples of zombies in nature. They are far from rare. Viruses, fungi, protozoans, wasps, tapeworms and a vast number of other parasites can control the brains of their hosts and get them to do their bidding. But only recently have scientists started to work out the sophisticated biochemistry that the parasites use.

“The knowledge that parasites can manipulate their hosts is old. The new part is how they do it,” said Shelley Adamo of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, a co-editor of the new issue. “The last 5 to 10 years have really been exciting.”

In the case of the Costa Rican spider, the new web is splendidly suited to its wasp invader. Unlike the spider’s normal web, mostly a tangle of threads, this one has a platform topped by a thick sheet that protects it from the rain. The wasp larva crawls to the edge of the platform and spins a cocoon that hangs down through an opening that the spider has kindly provided for the parasite.

More here.

Jim Miklaszewski and M. Alex Johnson at NBC News:

The Syrian military is prepared to use chemical weapons against its own people and is awaiting final orders from President Bashar Assad, U.S. officials told NBC News on Wednesday.

The military has loaded the precursor chemicals for sarin, a deadly nerve gas, into aerial bombs that could be dropped onto the Syrian people from dozens of fighter-bombers, the officials said.

As recently as Tuesday, officials had said there was as yet no evidence that the process of mixing the “precursor” chemicals had begun. But Wednesday, they said their worst fears had been confirmed: The nerve agents were locked and loaded inside the bombs.

Sarin is an extraordinarily lethal agent. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's forces killed 5,000 Kurds with a single sarin attack on Halabja in 1988.

U.S. officials stressed that as of now, the sarin bombs hadn't been loaded onto planes and that Assad hadn't issued a final order to use them. But if he does, one of the officials said, “there's little the outside world can do to stop it.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reiterated U.S. warnings to Assad not to use chemical weapons, saying he would be crossing “a red line” if he did so.

More here.

From The New Yorker:

“Hello again,” Hillary Clinton said last week. “It’s so good to see you again. And my husband sends you his very best regards.” She was talking to the King of Thailand, on what was meant to be one of her final trips as Secretary of State, after which she will make some gesture toward retirement. But one wonders if the whole American electorate might, before too long, be treated to the same sort of greeting the King got. Hillary Clinton may be leaving the State Department, but is she really leaving the stage? The idea of her running for President in 2016 may seem fanciful, based on her denials and a dozen other barriers, or unavoidable, given the number of people who seem to think that she’s better positioned than any other Democrat. But if not the New Hampshire primary and Iowa caucus, then where? Do Clintons ever truly go away?

Some of the contradictions in Hillary Clinton’s career can be seen in the talk of, or rather hysteria about, who her successor at the State Department might be. One of the candidates is Susan Rice, who is now the United Nations Ambassador (another is John Kerry). Rice has been browbeaten and vilified in the past couple of weeks in a way that seems completely out of proportion. Rice went on Sunday-morning talk shows four days after the attack and repeated talking points, cleared by the intelligence community, that turned out to be off (although even on that point the gray area may be larger than the Republicans have presented it). For this, she has been talked about as something close to a criminal. After Rice met privately with Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Kelly Ayotte yesterday, the three came out looking and sounding like they’d just been listening to hours of crude and vicious mob wiretaps.

More here.

The Beautiful Sandwich

She could always make
the most beautiful sandwich.
Laced swiss cheese: sliced
crossways, folded once.
Ham in rolls like sleeping bags.
Turkey piled like shirts.
Tarragon. Oregano. Pepper.
Herb dill mayonnaise the color of
skin. On top: the thin, wandering line of
mustard
like a contour on a map
in a thin, flat drawer.
Or a single, lost vein.
The poppyseeds hold on,
for now.

Placed on a plate like isolated
driftwood
or a large, solemn head.
The spilled chips in yellow piles
are like the strange coins
of tall, awkward islanders.
The thin dill pickle: their boat
slides into
the green-sour sea.

by Brad Ricca
from American Mastodon
Black Lawrence Press, 2011

From Nature:

Can heart cells renew themselves, and can scientists help them do so? Two papers published online in Nature today suggest that heart muscle cells can make copies of themselves at a very low rate¹, but that a genetic trick can prompt them to do a better job². Those results give hope that hearts damaged by cardiovascular disease — which causes the deaths of almost 17 million people a year — could be coaxed to regenerate themselves. Heart muscle cannot renew itself very well. Researchers would like to help that process by finding populations of cells in the heart that can do so, and then boosting that capacity. But it has not been easy to find evidence of these regenerating cells, or to assess the extent of their powers.

The two Nature papers aim to get to the heart of the matter. In one, a team led by Richard Lee at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston, Massachusetts, traced the birth and fate of heart muscle cells in mice. Lee and his colleagues found that a small proportion of heart cells — less than 1% — can regenerate themselves normally. After a heart attack that proportion goes up, but only to 3%. “These studies dispel any notion of the heart having a robust ability to regenerate,” says Charles (Chuck) Murry, who studies heart regeneration at the University of Washington in Seattle. That those cells exist at all is heartening, however. “If there is some capacity for the heart to produce new heart muscle cells, that’s a foothold that we can work with,” says Matthew Steinhauser, a co-author on the paper¹ and a member of Lee’s lab. Then, he says, the team can ask: “Can we make it work better?”. A second group has done just that.

More here.

More here.

Ian Tucker in The Observer:

Ian Tucker: Why is popular science reporting important?

Joshua Foer: When the Royal Society was founded in 1660, it was still possible for an educated person, a polymath, actually to know something about everything. Today, that is not possible. Steven Pinker might be a great cognitive scientist but I bet he can't explain how they discovered the Higgs boson.
Brian Greene: He just explained it to me earlier and he did quite a good job.
JF: That speaks to why we need great interpreters more than ever. And what we do becomes more and more important because as science becomes more esoteric it requires people to help the rest of us to understand it.

When you are writing where do you set the difficulty dial? Do you want your readers to finish your book in one sitting or work hard at every sentence to glean some insight from it?

Steven Pinker: Before I wrote my first cognitive book, I got a bit of advice from an editor, which was probably the best advice I ever received. She said that the problem many scientists and academics have when they write for a broad audience is that they condescend; they assume that their target audience isn't too bright, consists of truck drivers, chicken pluckers and grannies knitting dollies, and so they write in motherese, they talk down. She said: “You should assume your readers are as smart as you are, as curious as you are, but they don't know what you know and you're there to tell them what they don't know.” I'm willing to make a reader do some work as long as I do the work of giving them all the material they need to make sense of an idea.

More here.