Where it Not

No one paid attention to details.
The day became clear in bits, there was no time
for continuity.

Someone disappeared at the corner.
A wind blew, it was
cloudy. The sun emerged
and hid.

Nothing hurts as it once did.
Were it not so short a time it could have been fun.
Boulevard Sébastopol was snarled
by traffic, but the bus inched
forward.
It was clear that I was late.
My past and future shone to the same degree.

.
by Israel Pincus
from Poetry International Web

George Dvorksy in io9:

[T]he 20th century has often been called Freud’s century. His books landed with the subtlety of hand grenades, featuring such seminal titles as The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), and his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1915-1916).

Freud’s legacy has transcended science, with his ideas permeating deep into Western culture. Rarely does a day go by where we don’t find ourselves uttering a term drawn from his work: Mommy and daddy issues. Arrested development. Death wishes. Freudian slips. Phallic symbols. Anal retentiveness. Defense mechanisms. Cathartic release. And on and on and on.

As psychologist and Freud critic John Kihlstrom himself admits, “More than Einstein or Watson and Crick, more than Hitler or Lenin, Roosevelt or Kennedy, more than Picasso, Eliot, or Stravinsky, more than the Beatles or Bob Dylan, Freud's influence on modern culture has been profound and long-lasting.”

But his legacy is a shaky one. Freud has, for the most part, fallen completely out of favor in academia. Virtually no institution in any discipline would dare use him as a credible source. In 1996, Psychological Science reached the conclusion that “[T]here is literally nothing to be said, scientifically or therapeutically, to the advantage of the entire Freudian system or any of its component dogmas.” As a research paradigm, it’s pretty much dead.

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

In his 1957 structuralist masterpiece, Le croustillant et le gluant, the French anthropologist Jean-Robert Klein argued that the fundamental binary distinction through which the savage mind filters the world is that between the crispy and the chewy. The first and primary domain of application of these concepts is of course the alimentary one, but in primitive cultures, he argued, the crispy and the chewy are often projected from there into the cosmos as a whole. In his own fieldwork among the Yanomamö of Brazil, he showed in more than a few elaborate diagrams that, for them, men, rubber trees, the color green, the East, vipers, and butterflies are held to be ‘crispy’, while women, black, jaguars, the North, the stars, and ground foliage are in turn ‘chewy’.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Klein’s former student, Françoise Pombo, argued in a series of influential publications that her mentor had failed to notice something of great importance. What he was actually in the process of discovering, she claimed, was a tripartite schema, in which the crunchy [le croquant] was to be sharply distinguished from both the crispy and the chewy.

More here.

In the week since Reza Aslan’s Fox News webcast interview, his book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth has become the number one best selling title on Amazon and reached the top of the New York Times Best Seller list. In Zealot, Aslan argues that Jesus of Nazareth would have borne little resemblance to the Jesus of the Gospels. Jesus of Nazareth, was, in Aslan’s view, a political incendiary, a dissident who railed against Roman rule and actively encouraged sedition. The early church, he suggests, subsequently “transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot to a Romanized demigod.” For all of the controversy surrounding Aslan and his book, the work follows in a long tradition of study of the historical figure of Jesus—a subject that has provoked vigorous debate in The New York Review’s pages over the decades.

more from Christopher Carroll at the NYRB here.

So what’s all the fuss about now? Accusations persist that the Tate, by wilfully ignoring Lowry for years, was being snobbish and overbearing, but the Tate must now be sensitive to an art public different from the one to which it formerly catered, and it has reconsidered. This might explain the appointment of a couple of outside curators, who admit that they know little about their subject. “We are not specialists in Lowry”, writes Clark in the catalogue, “or British twentieth-century painting.” But they have glittering American academic credentials (Harvard and Berkeley) and T. J. Clark is a well-known Marxist art historian, the author of The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and politics in France 1848–1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (both 1973). Clark has influenced several generations of students in putting theory before practice, social history before connoisseurship. The exhibition’s title, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, is borrowed from another of Clark’s books, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the art of Manet and his followers (1999). The key phrase comes from Baudelaire who, in the Salon of 1845, first demanded that artists address their own experience and their own times. Baudelaire’s ideal, it turned out, was a jobbing illustrator for the Illustrated London News called Constantin Guys who was an “observer, philosopher, flâneur” and “the painter of the passing moment”. It takes some effort to imagine Lowry the flâneur moving from doorstep to doorstep collecting rents, and even more to grasp how his work “demonstrates important parallels with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French impressionist and realist painting”.

more from Frank Whitford at the TLS here.

They come to us at Independence Square, shadow-like and all whispers. They have selected a leader, perhaps the one with the best English. Now she walks up to me, without any greeting, without introduction, the group of young girls and boys – no older than early teens – standing back a few steps behind her. ‘Can I take a photo of you?’ the messenger girl says in a small, careful voice, a smile wide on her face. It’s not the first time that I’ve been asked to have my picture taken in Uzbekistan and at this point it is starting to feel a little like objectification, as if I am a spectacle of sorts, and in a way I am, because, as the guides explain to me, a black person is a rare sight in Uzbekistan. I am not in the mood, but I try to be philosophical about it. Across from where we stand, a couple is sitting on a grey-white stone bench.

more from Chinelo Okparanta at Granta here.

From The Telegraph:

Simone Weil: The Year of the Factory Work (1934-1935)

Read more »

From Smithsonian:

There’s a word— albeit one not recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary or any psychology manual— for the excessive fear of clowns: Coulrophobia.

Not a lot of people actually suffer from a debilitating phobia of clowns; a lot more people, however, just don’t like them. Do a Google search for “I hate clowns” and the first hit is ihateclowns.com, a forum for clown-haters that also offers vanity @ihateclowns.com emails. One “I Hate Clowns” Facebook page has just under 480,000 likes. Some circuses have held workshops to help visitors get over their fear of clowns by letting them watch performers transform into their clown persona. In Sarasota, Florida, in 2006, communal loathing for clowns took a criminal turn when dozens of fiberglass clown statues—part of a public art exhibition called “Clowning Around Town” and a nod to the city’s history as a winter haven for traveling circuses—were defaced, their limbs broken, heads lopped off, spray-painted; two were abducted and we can only guess at their sad fates. Even the people who are supposed to like clowns—children—supposedly don’t. In 2008, a widely reported University of Sheffield, England, survey of 250 children between the ages of four and 16 found that most of the children disliked and even feared images of clowns. The BBC’s report on the study featured a child psychologist who broadly declared, “Very few children like clowns. They are unfamiliar and come from a different era. They don't look funny, they just look odd.” But most clowns aren’t trying to be odd. They’re trying to be silly and sweet, fun personified. So the question is, when did the clown, supposedly a jolly figure of innocuous, kid-friendly entertainment, become so weighed down by fear and sadness? When did clowns become so dark?

Maybe they always have been.

More here.

Ed Yong in Aeon Magazine:

A few degrees north of the equator, in the hot, humid rainforests of Ghana, two groups of farmers are vying for dominance over the world’s most productive chocolate-growing region. Chocolate is made from cocoa beans found in the large, rugby-ball-shaped pods of cocoa trees. People have been planting these trees in Ghana since the late 19th century and the crop is a mainstay of the country’s economy. But the trees have recently proved an inviting target for a wily group of rival agriculturalists, whose practices threaten the long-term survival of cocoa in Ghana. The trouble is, these competitors aren’t humans. They’re ants.

Ants have been farming for millions of years longer than humans. These particular ants herd mealybugs — small, sap-sucking insects that look like woodlice dipped in flour. The ants shepherd and protect the mealybugs so they can ‘milk’ the sugary nutritious fluids in their waste. The bugs used to drink primarily from local rainforest trees, but when humans started clearing the forest to make way for cocoa, the ants adapted, by driving their livestock into the fresh cocoa pastures.

This strategy shift entangled the cocoa trees in a web of pests and pestilence. When mealybugs drink from trees, they inject them with a pathogen called cacao swollen shoot virus (CSSV). In local rainforest trees, the effects of CSSV are mild, but cocoa — a newcomer to these forests — hasn’t had a chance to evolve countermeasures. As a result, the virus pummels the trees, swelling their shoots and roots well beyond their usual size while draining the colour from their leaves. Before long, often only a few years, the trees die.

Steven Pinker to “neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians,” in The New Republic:

One would think that writers in the humanities would be delighted and energized by the efflorescence of new ideas from the sciences. But one would be wrong. Though everyone endorses science when it can cure disease, monitor the environment, or bash political opponents, the intrusion of science into the territories of the humanities has been deeply resented. Just as reviled is the application of scientific reasoning to religion; many writers without a trace of a belief in God maintain that there is something unseemly about scientists weighing in on the biggest questions. In the major journals of opinion, scientific carpetbaggers are regularly accused of determinism, reductionism, essentialism, positivism, and worst of all, something called “scientism.” The past couple years have seen four denunciations of scientism in this magazine alone, together with attacks in Bookforum, The Claremont Review of Books, The Huffington Post, The Nation, National Review Online, The New Atlantis, The New York Times, and Standpoint.

The eclectic politics of these publications reflects the bipartisan nature of the resentment. This passage, from a 2011 review in The Nation of three books by Sam Harris by the historian Jackson Lears, makes the standard case for the prosecution by the left:

Positivist assumptions provided the epistemological foundations for Social Darwinism and pop-evolutionary notions of progress, as well as for scientific racism and imperialism. These tendencies coalesced in eugenics, the doctrine that human well-being could be improved and eventually perfected through the selective breeding of the “fit” and the sterilization or elimination of the “unfit.” … Every schoolkid knows about what happened next: the catastrophic twentieth century. Two world wars, the systematic slaughter of innocents on an unprecedented scale, the proliferation of unimaginable destructive weapons, brushfire wars on the periphery of empire—all these events involved, in various degrees, the application of sceintific research to advanced technology.

The case from the right, captured in this 2007 speech from Leon Kass, George W. Bush’s bioethics adviser, is just as measured:

Scientific ideas and discoveries about living nature and man, perfectly welcome and harmless in themselves, are being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and dignity. A quasi-religious faith has sprung up among us—let me call it “soul-less scientism”—which believes that our new biology, eliminating all mystery, can give a complete account of human life, giving purely scientific explanations of human thought, love, creativity, moral judgment, and even why we believe in God. … Make no mistake. The stakes in this contest are high: at issue are the moral and spiritual health of our nation, the continued vitality of science, and our own self-understanding as human beings and as children of the West.

These are zealous prosecutors indeed. But their cases are weak.

Ken Feinberg, the man tasked with compensating victims after a devastating tragedy, knows the answer—and it’s rarely the same.

James Oliphant in the National Journal:

To Ken Feinberg, if you lose both your legs, you’re as good as dead.

Here, in the world of the living, inspirational media stories after the Boston Marathon bombings featured survivors who persevered, grittily relearning to walk atop state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs, fighting for normalcy with each new step. But in Feinberg’s world, it made no difference whether a person could still live a rewarding life or never left the race’s finish line. That didn’t enter the equation—his equation. His choice. His rules. Whether you died at the scene or you lost both your legs, you received the same amount of money—$2.2 million—from the victim fund established in the wake of the attack. If you lost one limb, you received considerably less. If you were hospitalized but kept your limbs, then still less.

Feinberg is the nearly ubiquitous expert who has been called in to divvy up funds for the fallen and the injured in a stomach-churning sequence of tragedies, from the Sept. 11 attacks to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, from the Virginia Tech shootings to the Boston bombings. He’s Death’s accountant. When the stands collapsed at the Indiana State Fair in 2011, killing seven, they called Ken Feinberg. When a gunman murdered 27 children at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, they called Ken Feinberg. His is the grimmest of specialties.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

These simple creatures were devised by a group of scientists to study life’s complexity. There are lots of ways to define complexity, but the one that they were interested in exploring has to do with how organisms behave.

Every creature from a microbe to a mountain lion can respond to its surroundings. E. coli has sensors on its surface to detect certain molecules, and it processes those signals to make very simple decisions about how it will move. It travels in a straight line by spinning long twisted tails counterclockwise. If it switches to clockwise, the tails unravel and the microbe tumbles.

A worm with a few hundred neurons can take in a lot more information from its senses, and can respond with more behaviors. And we, with a hundred billion or so neurons in our brains have a wider range of responses to our world.

A group of scientists from Caltech, the University of Wisconsin, Michigan State University, and the Allen Brain Institute wanted to better understand how this complexity changes as life evolves. Does life get more complex as it adapts to its environment? Is more complex always better? Or–judging from the abundance of E. coli and its fellow microbes on the planet today–is complexity overrated?

More here.

More here.

Emily Esfahani Smith in The Atlantic:

For at least the last decade, the happiness craze has been building. In the last three months alone, over 1,000 books on happiness were released on Amazon, including Happy Money, Happy-People-Pills For All, and, for those just starting out, Happiness for Beginners.

One of the consistent claims of books like these is that happiness is associated with all sorts of good life outcomes, including — most promisingly — good health. Many studies have noted the connection between a happy mind and a healthy body — the happier you are, the better health outcomes we seem to have. In a meta-analysis (overview) of 150 studies on this topic, researchers put it like this: “Inductions of well-being lead to healthy functioning, and inductions of ill-being lead to compromised health.”

But a new study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) challenges the rosy picture. Happiness may not be as good for the body as researchers thought. It might even be bad.

More here.

From The New Statesman:

This letter by D H Lawrence, written in 1928 and published in the NS of 13 October 1934, is one of the pieces in “The New Statesman Century”, our anthology of the best and boldest writing from the first 100 years of the NS, with contributions from Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens and Bertrand Russell. This 250-page special issue is out now, available in selective WHSmiths and online at: newstatesman.com/century

And it all looks as if the years were wheeling swiftly backwards, no more onwards. Like a spring that is broken and whirls swiftly back, so time seems to be whirling with mysterious swiftness to a sort of death. Whirling to the ghost of the old Middle Ages of Germany, then to the Roman days, then to the days of the silent forest and the dangerous, lurking barbarians.

Table in the Wilderness

I draw a window
and a man sitting inside it.

I draw a bird in flight above the lintel.

That's my picture of thinking.

If I put a woman there instead
of the man, it's a picture of speaking.

If I draw a second bird
in the woman's lap, it's ministering.

A third flying below her feet.
Now it's singing.

Or erase the birds,
make ivy branching
around the woman's ankles, clinging
to her knees, and it becomes remembering.

You'll have to find your own
pictures, whoever you are,
whatever your need.
.

by Li-young-Lee
from Book of my Nights
BOA Editions, 2001