Joseph Luzzi in the New York Times:

“In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood.”

So begins one of the most celebrated and difficult poems ever written, Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” a more than 14,000-line epic on the soul’s journey through the afterlife. The tension between the pronouns says it all: Although the “I” belongs to Dante, who died in 1321, his journey is also part of “our life.” We will all find ourselves in a dark wood one day, the lines suggest.

That day came six years ago for me, when my pregnant wife, Katherine, died suddenly in a car accident. Forty-five minutes before her death, she delivered our daughter, Isabel, a miracle of health rescued by emergency cesarean. I had left the house that morning at 8:30 to teach a class; by noon, I was a father and a widower.

A few days later, I found myself standing in a cemetery outside Detroit in the cold rain, watching as my wife’s body was returned to the earth close to where she was born. The words for the emotions I had known till then — pain, sadness, suffering — no longer made sense, as a feeling of cosmic, paralyzing sorrow washed over me. My personal loss felt almost beside the point: A young woman who had been bursting with life was now no more.

More here.

From My Underwood Typewriter:

1. When his .38 caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up in Long Beach, California would-be robber James Elliot did something that can only inspire wonder. He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked.

And Now, The Honorable Mentions:

2. The chef at a hotel in Switzerland lost a finger in a meat cutting machine and after a little shopping around, submitted a claim to his insurance company. The company expecting negligence sent out one of its men to have a look for himself. He tried the machine and he also lost a finger. The chef’s claim was approved.

4. After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies. The deception wasn’t discovered for 3 days.

More here. [Thanks to Frans de Waal.]

James Campbell at The Times Literary Supplement:

By the end of his life, in a paradox that itself seems to have come from the pages of fiction, Salinger, on the run from celebrity, not there but always there, was as prominent as any of his intermittently missing characters. What made him a fascinating presence in the minds of his predators, of which Shields and Salerno are perfect examples, was precisely his desire for self-effacement, his wish to go “underground” in Cornish, New Hampshire, just as Holden needed to do the same thing in New York City in order to straighten himself out after boarding school. For long periods, Salinger appeared to have satisfied his own wishes, but then there would be a snooper, a doorstepper, a photographer waiting to snap him as he exited the post office, a reporter on assignment for Time or Life, a woman pretending to be stranded at night after her car had broken down, a former lover eager to confess (Joyce Maynard, At Home in the World, 1998), even a daughter, Margaret, who felt that Daddy had been a disappointment (Dream Catcher, 2001) and that everyone ought to know.

All turn up, in one shape or another, in Salinger, “The official book of the acclaimed documentary film” that was released in the US earlier this year to various reactions, the least of which, it is fair to say, was acclaim. One contributor describes the pursuit of the shy author in terms that, under healthy scrutiny, would be regarded as perverse: “There was a bounty on Salinger’s head. Everyone wanted a photograph of this guy, and no one could get it”.

more here.

James Wood at The London Review of Books:

For someone growing up with the music of Benjamin Britten, it was sometimes hard to recall that his last name was not ‘Britain’. The race that Nietzsche had deemed heavy-hoofed and unmusical, whose last truly great composer had been Purcell, a nation that had been doing nothing very much, musically, but warbling in cathedrals for a couple of centuries, had somehow managed to produce a 20th-century composer of international stature, whose last name was that of the nation itself. We’d done it! Here was Benjamin Britain OM, ‘Baron Britain of Aldeburgh’, whose Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestrawas as close to state music as a piece not actually the national anthem could be, and which cleverly merged spiky modern fugue with a stately theme from Purcell himself. In the same way, his many songs and adapted folk songs sounded a bit old and a bit new, or a bit English and a bit Continental. Palatable modernity: a good postwar flag under which to assemble. No wonder the school system flew it so often, in those countless ‘musical appreciation’ classes.

by Nico Muhly in The Talkhouse:

At first I was anxious about the description of it as a “visual album,” because these days, which albums aren’t? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Lady Gaga video, but I know that her appeal — even to me, not ever having beheld her on purpose — is partially to do with her Visual Presentation. Beyoncé’s songs, on this album, connect to one another not just musically, but via a seemingly personal, almost Forrest Gump-like time-traveling woman’s journey through various eras and — I shudder to say the word — styles. It’s unbelievably ambitious and through-composed; where the music can feel unrelated from one song to the next, the video is especially and carefully elided, and where the video is stylistically at variance from one song to the next, the music itself creates an emulsion between all the various incarnations of Beyoncé, our tour-guide through heaven and hell. Her voice feels, here, stretched in all the best ways, and she is experimenting with various modes of vocal production, vibrato, enunciation, and textual stylization. She is relishing the individual words of her lyrics, and savoring the shapes of the phrases the songs demand of her. When she freaks, as is her wont, a bridge or a second chorus, it is an insane and welcome delight.

Can we start with the statement that I basically loved this album? And then I will go song by song and talk about what, for me, felt like a reinforcement of this love, and where, in places, my love was challenged? I am going to talk, interchangeably, about the music and the videos, as that is how this thing was presented to me, as well as to the poor taxed wi-fi of the rural hotel and its staff. So if you’ve only heard the music, you should probably watch the videos, and if you’ve only watched the videos, you’re probably fine?

More here.

Luc Sante at the New York Review of Books:

Then again, it could be said that historical fiction, like science fiction, is really always about the present. Llewyn Davis is a creature of the here and now, not of 1961. He has none of the communitarian goodwill, the erudite passion, or the optimistic idealism that marked the period. He is a confused, irascible striver who isn’t sure what he is striving for, apparently seeking a career when folk music was about the last place you’d look for one. It is suggested that he has been flopping on friends’ floors for months, when, at the time, people generally only did that when they first hit town, since it wasn’t hard to scratch up the twenty or thirty bucks a month it took to rent a tenement flat fifty years ago.

But if you excise the period details, he makes sense. Whereas in a better time he would spend five or ten years woodshedding and developing a soul, he has no choice but to enter some kind of race right away or die on the vine. He is consistently crass because he feels threatened by people and ideas he can’t dominate—and he can’t dominate very much because he feels threatened. (How else to explain his heckling an Appalachian singer, complete with autoharp and authentically awkward?) Somehow he has made a connection to something that is genuine and profound—the haunting music—but circumstances force him to treat it as a card to play rather than as a path to explore.

more here.

Catbirds, Mocking Birds, Starlings
.

Birds repeat their parents' songs
As if their lives depend on it.
They do:
Catbirds, mockingbirds, starlings

Mimic birds or fire alarms but sound
Like catbirds, mockingbirds, starlings.
I compare my tongue-tied goodbye:
“You're dying, Mum.”

Stupid: I only hope
She was unconscious. (Was there a hand-squeeze?
Sometimes I tailor comfortless memories.)
I spoke so she'd know I was there, that's all.

Her chest sank on each useless breath:
Her lungs were full of fluid. She was drowning.
Pneumonia, the friend of suffering.
Unthinking, comfortless: at last, a truth we knew.

by John Donlan
July 23, 2004

David L. Ulin in The Paris Review:

I wrote my first first book over the course of three months, from July 23 to October 23, 1979. Four weeks in, I turned eighteen. This was a novel, and not the first I’d attempted; in fifth grade, I had written forty pages of a saga called Gangwar in Chicago, inspired by The Godfather and taking place in a city where I’d never been. Setting the story in Chicago meant scouring the map in World Book for locations: Canal Street, I recall, was one. I chose it because I knew Canal Street in New York, and it seemed the sort of landscape in which a gang war could take place. To this day, I have never seen Chicago’s Canal Street, despite the twenty years I spent visiting my wife’s family in a suburb on the North Shore.

The other novel, the one I finished, was motivated almost entirely by a specific case of envy—of my friend Fred, who had spent the same summer working on a novel of his own. Fred and I were high school writing buddies, confiding to each other, as we wandered the grounds of our New England boarding school, that we both wanted to win the Nobel Prize. Now, he’d written a campus novel, tracing his difficulties as a one-year senior, parsing the school’s social hierarchy in a way that seemed enlightening and true. Fred was more serious, more focused; he not only knew what symbolism was but also how to use it. It made sense that he would write a novel, and that it would be good. A year later, he would write another one, and then we lost track of each other, until six or seven years later, when his short stories started to appear in magazines.

More here.

Daniel Cressey in Nature:

FENG ZHANG: DNA’s master editor: Borrowing from bacteria, a biologist helps to create a powerful tool for customizing DNA. With a nip here and a tuck there, a DNA-cutting mechanism that bacteria use to protect themselves from viruses became one of the hottest topics in biomedical research in 2013. And a young neuroscientist with a penchant for developing tools helped to make it happen. Thirty-two-year-old Feng Zhang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge is among those leading the charge in using a system called CRISPR/Cas to edit genomes cheaply, easily and precisely. In January, his group showed that the system works in eukaryotic cells — ones with membrane-bound nuclei, including those of all animals and plants. This confirmed its potential for tweaking the genomes of mice, rats and even primates to aid research, improve human-disease modelling and develop treatments (L. Cong et al. Science 339, 819–823; 2013). But as hot as the story has been this year, “the CRISPR craze is likely just starting”, says Rodolphe Barrangou, a microbiologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. CRISPRs (clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats) are DNA sequences that many bacteria and archaea use to defend themselves. They encode RNAs that can specifically recognize a target sequence in a viral genome. The RNAs work in complex with a CRISPR-associated protein, or Cas, which snips the DNA of the invader.

…Zhang now says that he feels challenged to be creative with other applications. One particularly ambitious project on his slate is to build a library of CRISPRs that can delete any sequence in an organism’s entire genome in 100–200 base-pair increments. This could make it easier to investigate the function of non-coding DNA. But he is most interested in using CRISPR to treat neuro­psychiatric conditions such as Huntington’s disease and schizophrenia by repairing genes in human tissues. To pursue therapeutic use of the technology, he and other CRISPR pioneers last month launched a company called Editas Medicine, based in Cambridge, that is backed by US$43 million in venture-capital funding. CRISPR “allows us to start to make corrections in the genome”, says Zhang. “Because it’s easy to program, it will open up the door to addressing mutations that affect few people but are very devastating.”

More here. (Note: I am convinced that CRISPR is one of the most important discoveries of the century)

Cal Flyn in The New Inquiry:

Next year the people of Scotland will go to the polls to decide whether their country will stay in the United Kingdom or strike out on its own as an independent country. The crowd were gathered on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill to mark one year to go until the referendum, held on the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn – the legendary Scottish victory led by Robert the Bruce.

Although the referendum itself could go either way (latest polls gives 47 percent for the no’s, 38 percent yes and 15 percent “don’t know”) what is clear is the resurgence in national self-confidence it has brought. With discussions of Scottish culture and identity at the top of the agenda, it has brought clarity and purpose to many young Scots.

And it is outside politics, in the arts, where this transformation has been most marked. In the bookshops and in the bars, there has been a surge of enthusiasm for Scottish writing – poetry, prose and polemic alike – quietly consumed, circulated online, or called to crowds atop stages and soapboxes.

No longer is Scottish literature the preserve of the tartan-clad elderly, the public-spirited librarian, the council-funded initiative, nor the staid set-texts of Scottish school curricula, but a thriving literary scene. These writers are modern, relevant, speaking to their neighbors and friends. Voices of a generation, all of them, and excited to find themselves living through a monumental cultural event. For what is independence but the escape of a culture from the dominance of another?

Back on Calton Hill, the novelist Alan Bissett took the stage. “I don’t know how tae tell you this, Scotland, but I’ve changed ma mind. I had a visitor tae the door last night fae Better Together [the unionist campaign], and what can I say? He brought me round. With… logic.”

Laughter from the crowd. Someone catcalled from the back. Better Together, lapdogs of the English, are always good for a laugh.

More here.

Michael Graziano in Aeon:

Imagine a future in which your mind never dies. When your body begins to fail, a machine scans your brain in enough detail to capture its unique wiring. A computer system uses that data to simulate your brain. It won’t need to replicate every last detail. Like the phonograph, it will strip away the irrelevant physical structures, leaving only the essence of the patterns. And then there is a second you, with your memories, your emotions, your way of thinking and making decisions, translated onto computer hardware as easily as we copy a text file these days.

That second version of you could live in a simulated world and hardly know the difference. You could walk around a simulated city street, feel a cool breeze, eat at a café, talk to other simulated people, play games, watch movies, enjoy yourself. Pain and disease would be programmed out of existence. If you’re still interested in the world outside your simulated playground, you could Skype yourself into board meetings or family Christmas dinners.

This vision of a virtual-reality afterlife, sometimes called ‘uploading’, entered the popular imagination via the short story ‘The Tunnel Under the World’ (1955) by the American science-fiction writer Frederik Pohl, though it also got a big boost from the movie Tron (1982). ThenThe Matrix (1999) introduced the mainstream public to the idea of a simulated reality, albeit one into which real brains were jacked. More recently, these ideas have caught on outside fiction. The Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov made the news by proposing to transfer his mind into a robot, thereby achieving immortality. Only a few months ago, the British physicist Stephen Hawking speculated that a computer-simulated afterlife might become technologically feasible.

It is tempting to ignore these ideas as just another science-fiction trope, a nerd fantasy. But something about it won’t leave me alone. I am a neuroscientist. I study the brain. For nearly 30 years, I’ve studied how sensory information gets taken in and processed, how movements are controlled and, lately, how networks of neurons might compute the spooky property of awareness.

More here.

David Thomson at The New Republic:

To meet O’Toole was to be thrilled, if bewildered, by the restless panache that managed to be life-affirming and self-destructive at the same time. He was very well read, and he wrote two memoirs that are better than most books by actors. Without doubt, he slammed many doors in his career, and earned the reputation of being too difficult. It’s easy to say his Lawrence is all wrong historically, but he carries that film along. The Stunt Man is seldom seen these days, but it is a sardonic dark comedy. In addition, in years when he was working as an alternative to being smashed, he did Captain Tom Cat in Under Milk Wood; Don Quixote in the lumbering Man of La Mancha; Tiberius in the Bob Guccione Caligula; the Roman general in Masada; a brilliant Svengali to Jodie Foster’s Trilby; Henry Higgins in a TV Pygmalion (with Margot Kidder as Eliza); the bicycling tutor in Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, and an enormous amount of rubbish.

He was not like the others. That may have been his cause all along, and there will be O’Toole stories long after respectable actors are forgotten.

more here.

S. Harrison Grigg at Guernica:

The governor decided to dub the region “The Pennsylvania Wilds” after remembering that we were up there, running loose in the woods, and making the first dignitary visit to Tioga County in years. “The Pennsylvania Wilds” was a marketing plan to seduce more leaf peepers, RV campers, and retirees. Outdoor gear shops replaced five-and-dimes; artisan shops filled the smoke shops. Someone even suggested building a casino at the edge of the state forest, near the gorge, to attract more tourists. The New York Times Real Estate section covered us, our affordable acreage plumed as weekend getaway properties. It was a compelling pitch, but the writer complained that the only chain restaurant option was a lonely McDonald’s.

There’s more. The ground, the shale of the canyon, below the state forests, below the farms, holds miles of natural gas. Companies circled over Pennsylvania for decades, but they could never crack the ground because their methods couldn’t safely tap the gas trapped in tiny pores—until hydrofracking.

Now they cut roads into the woods, fly choppers over pastures to haul in supplies, pour concrete well pads, erect compressor stations, and clear-cut miles of forest to run in a line. Millions of gallons of water are drawn from lakes, rivers, wetlands, and wells, and then mixed with sand, chemicals, and some other things that nobody knows and companies don’t have to disclose. This concoction is injected at high force through the massive concrete well, splintering layers of shale like a spoon cracking the surface of a crème brûlée. The toxic water fills the pores, thereby flushing out the gas.

more here.

James Carroll at The New Yorker:

“Who am I to judge?” With those five words, spoken in late July in reply to a reporter’s question about the status of gay priests in the Church, Pope Francis stepped away from the disapproving tone, the explicit moralizing typical of Popes and bishops. This gesture of openness, which startled the Catholic world, would prove not to be an isolated event. In a series of interviews and speeches in the first few months after his election, in March, the Pope unilaterally declared a kind of truce in the culture wars that have divided the Vatican and much of the world. Repeatedly, he argued that the Church’s purpose was more to proclaim God’s merciful love for all people than to condemn sinners for having fallen short of strictures, especially those having to do with gender and sexual orientation. His break from his immediate predecessors—John Paul II, who died in 2005, and Benedict XVI, the traditionalist German theologian who stepped down from the papacy in February—is less ideological than intuitive, an inclusive vision of the Church centered on an identification with the poor. From this vision, theological and organizational innovations flow. The move from rule by non-negotiable imperatives to leadership by invitation and welcome is as fundamental to the meaning of the faith as any dogma.

more here.

Laura Miller in Salon:

Jacqueline Jones’ provocative new history, “Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race From the Colonial Era to Obama’s America,” contains a startling sentence on its 265th page. It comes after Jones quotes Simon Owens, the last of five African-Americans whose life stories she describes in the book. Owens — an auto worker, labor activist and writer who died in 1983 — stated, “I understood as a Negro first, in the South, the North, in the union, in the NAACP, in the C.P. [Communist Party] and in the S.W.P [Socialist Workers Party].” Jones adds, “Because generations of white people had defined him and all other blacks first and foremost as ‘Negroes,’ he had no alternative but to acknowledge — or, rather, react to — that spurious identity.” That racial identities are “spurious” is the foundational argument of this fascinating book. Race is a cultural invention, rather than a biological fact (on this scientists widely agree), and Jones, a history professor at the University of Texas and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, wants to show how pernicious and persistent this falsity is. In the book’s epilogue, she points to an article from the 2012 edition of the New York Times titled “How Well You Sleep May Hinge on Race,” based on a study showing that living in high-crime neighborhood or having chronic conditions like diabetes or hypertension can cause insomnia. But, as Jones observes, these are problems deriving from poverty, not race, and so the article “blatantly conflated socioeconomic status with the idea of race.”

Of the five people whose life stories are told in “Dreadful Deceit,” the first is essentially voiceless: an enslaved man named Antonio, abducted from his homeland in Africa and murdered while being “corrected” by a colonial landowner in 17th-century Chesapeake. As Jones relates, Antonio’s race “had no practical meaning” to the man who purported to own him, Symon Overzee. Describing in well-researched detail the economic and political milieu of the time, she argues that what created Antonio’s vulnerability to Overzee was not his skin color or any other physical trait but his uprootedness, “without a tribe or a nation-state to protect and defend him in the Atlantic world.”

More here.

Marietta DiChristina in Scientific American:

Driving home after a visit with a relative, you suddenly realize you have no specific memory of how you got there. Well, you've taken that trip so many times, you tell yourself, that you could just about do in your sleep. Tying a shoe later, you reflect again on how often you accomplish things while your conscious mind is barely paying attention. Of course, you're not wrong. We all have those moments. At around three pounds, the gelatinlike tissue in your skull accounts for only a couple of percent of your total body mass, but it consumes a lot of energy—some 20 percent of the calories you eat every day. Conscious thought is “expensive” in energy terms. Is it any wonder the brain tends to shift its more costly processing tasks toward becoming more automated, “cheaper” routines?

That thought struck me during one of our weekly editorial meetings some months ago while we were discussing story ideas. How much of our lives is actually decided for us by our brain without our active awareness, I wondered? Naturally, when I asked that question out loud, longtime Scientific American senior editor Gary Stix was only too happy to explore the answer. The outcome is the cover story by Yale University psychologist John A. Bargh, “How Unconscious Thought and Perception Affect Our Every Waking Moment.” Bargh explains how decision making about such tasks as voting, making purchases or even planning vacations often occurs without our giving things much conscious thought. In matters small and large, we routinely arrive at automatic judgments, our behaviors shaped by embedded attitudes. Put another way, awareness about our relative lack of awareness gives us a new appreciation for how profoundly our unconscious mind steers our lives.

More here.

Anjum Altaf in the Friday Times:

Pakistan and India continue to flounder in a relationship marked by a frustrating low-level equilibrium trap. Almost everyone concedes there are gains to making up but no one seems able to transcend the impasse. From time to time there is the promise of a breakout dissipated quickly by a sharp downturn. A flurry of advisories follows on the importance of maintaining the relationship and much posturing later things work themselves back to the annoying status quo.

The sequence has now been repeated often enough to suggest the combination of method and madness that might be at play. The mix of rationality and irrationality is not all that curious. People talk about its various elements but for reasons not hard to decipher refrain from assembling them all in one narrative.

I believe it is worth spelling out the factors that stand in the way of better relations if only to point to the major hurdles that remain to be negotiated. Acknowledging the unpleasant realities is a necessary step to understanding the challenges that lie ahead.

More here.

I'm Alive, I Believe in Everything

Self. Brotherhood. God. Zeus. Communism.
Capitalism. Buddha. Vinyl records.
Baseball. Ink. Trees. Cures for disease.
Saltwater. Literature. Walking. Waking.
Arguments. Decisions. Ambiguity. Absolutes.
Presence. Absence. Positive and Negative.
Empathy. Apathy. Sympathy and entropy.
Verbs are necessary. So are nouns.
Empty skies. Dark vacuums of night.
Visions. Revisions. Innocence.
I've seen All the empty spaces yet to be filled.
I've heard All of the sounds that will collect
at the end of the world.
And the silence that follows.

I'm alive, I believe in everything
I'm alive, I believe in it all.

Waves lapping on the shore.
Skies on fire at sunset.
Old men dancing on the streets.
Paradox and possibility.
Sense and sensibility.
Cold logic and half truth.
Final steps and first impressions.
Fools and fine intelligence.
Chaos and clean horizons.
Vague notions and concrete certainty.
Optimism in the face of adversity.

I'm alive, I believe in everything
I'm alive, I believe in it all.
.
.
by Lesley Choyce
from Beautiful Sadness
Victoria, B.C.: Ekstasis Editions, 1998.