Lisa Guenther in Aeon:

Why does prolonged isolation typically corrode a prisoner’s ability to perceive the world and to sustain a meaningful connection with his own existence? The short answer to this question is that we are social beings who rely on our interactions with other people to make sense of things. But what does it mean to exist socially, and what is the precise connection between our relations with others, our perception of the world, and the affirmation of our own existence?

My response to this question is shaped by the philosophical practice of phenomenology. Phenomenology begins with a description of lived experience and reflects on the structures that make this experience possible and meaningful. The main insight of phenomenology is that consciousness is relational. As the German philosopher Edmund Husserl put it at the turn of the 20th century, consciousness is consciousness of something; the mind is not a thing but a relation. Meaning is not ‘located’ in the brain like a message in a mailbox; rather, it emerges through an ever-changing relation between the act of thinking and the objects of thought.

Husserl’s student, Martin Heidegger, expanded this notion of relationality into an account of existence as Being-in-the-world. For Heidegger, it is not enough to reflect on the structures of consciousness in a theoretical way. We need to grasp how the meaning of our lived experience arises through a practical engagement with the world, in projects such as hammering a nail or baking a loaf of bread. For Heidegger, as for Husserl, we do not exist as isolated individuals whose basic properties and capacities remain the same in every situation. We are not in the world ‘as the water is “in” the glass or as the garment is “in” the cupboard’, he wrote in Being and Time(1927). Rather, we exist as Being-in-the-world, in a complex interrelation with the situation into which we have been thrown. The work of phenomenology is to make this web of relations visible, so that we can appreciate the complexity of even the most simple, everyday experiences.

Solitary confinement presents a challenge to my practice of phenomenology, both because I have not had this experience myself, and also because the testimony of survivors suggests that the experience of prolonged isolation is also an unravelling of experience: a deterioration of the senses, a becoming-invisible, an annihilation.

More here.

Orhan Pamuk at The New York Times:

Here, in no particular order, are some of the memorable data from Updike’s universe that I learned from this delightfully rich book: He enjoyed poker and golf. At Harvard, he was classmates with Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, “son of the hereditary imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims,” and he made use of the prince’s “fabulously exotic background” in the story “God Speaks.” In 1962, he taught creative writing courses at Harvard Summer School and was not happy about it. When he was writing for The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section, he also composed a 600-page novel called “Home,” set in Pennsylvania, but never published it. He didn’t board an airplane until he was 24, but after he became famous he traveled the world and projected his experiences onto his character Bech. After moving to Ipswich, Mass., which he wrote about in “Couples” (1968), “he threw himself with reckless enthusiasm into the tangle” of suburban infidelities. He wrote so much about sex, as this admiring biography tells us without too much irony, because “he was writing about what he knew.” But there were “only two extramarital affairs of real significance” in his life. He married twice and had four children. At the age of 70, he had “few close friends, none of them intimate.” For a long time, he was in regular correspondence with his mother and with Joyce Carol Oates. He never felt completely at ease with computers; the Internet made him nervous, and he never owned a cellphone. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Updike and his second wife, Martha, were staying in Brooklyn Heights in a 10th-floor apartment from which they witnessed the fall of the twin towers, and he wrote about the experience in The New Yorker. The last book Updike reviewed was an 800-page biography of John Cheever.

more here.

Chris Laoutaris at The Financial Times:

This week marks the 450th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth. Yet the way we remember history’s most renowned playwright might have been very different had it not been for a formidable foe.

In November 1596 a woman named Elizabeth Russell declared war on Shakespeare and his theatrical troupe, in the process nearly destroying the dramatist’s career. Russell rarely features in accounts of Shakespeare’s life, yet her actions determined how we think of him today: as the Shakespeare of the Globe Theatre.

In the National Archives in Kew there is a bundle of curious papers, identified by the prosaic reference number SP 12/260. The documents include two petitions to Queen Elizabeth I’s Privy Council. The first is headed by Lady Russell and records her endeavour to block the opening of a spectacular new theatre which Shakespeare was about to occupy less than a two-minute walk south of her home in Blackfriars, London. This unassuming manuscript discloses a scarcely believable act of betrayal, for among its 31 signatories are Shakespeare’s publisher, Richard Field, and his patron, George Carey, the Lord Hunsdon.

more here.

Boyd Tonkin in The Independent:

From the era of “La Violencia” in the late 1940s, Colombia has weathered more than its fair share of hideous bloodshed, factional strife and chronic instability. But there, on the other side of the balance, stood Gabo: perhaps the best-loved novelist of the entire postwar period. Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez, born on 6 March 1927 during a rainstorm in the backwater of Aracataca near the Caribbean coast, not only described but in a sense created today’s Colombia. The author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera and other masterworks from The Autumn of the Patriarch to The General in his Labyrinth, he put his stamp on his country and on a worldwide republic of letters.

And the former journalist did so with a charismatic allure unmatched since the heyday of Hugo and Tolstoy in the late 19th-century. This supreme storyteller managed, via the magic of his art, to alter the shape of his country’s and his continent’s reality.If Latin America can now hope to boom in freedom, that is in no small part because its writers – and above all Garcia Marquez – came out of the middle of nowhere and by sheer force of talent, will and imagination transformed that nowhere into the centre of the world.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

In the summer of 1981, a Swedish graduate student named Svante Paabo filled a laboratory at the University of Uppsala with the stench of rotting liver. Paabo was supposed to be studying viruses, but he had become secretly obsessed with a more exotic line of research: extracting DNA from Egyptian mummies. No one at the time had any idea if the desiccated flesh of pharaohs still contained any genetic material, so Paabo decided to run an experiment. He bought a piece of calf’s liver and put it in a lab oven at about 120 degrees for a few days to approximate mummification. In the dried, blackened lump of meat, he succeeded in finding scattered fragments of DNA. It was the start of what has turned out to be an extraordinary scientific career. Paabo went on to find DNA in a 2,400-year-old mummy and then from much older animals, like extinct cave bears and ground sloths. In 2010, he became world-famous when he and his colleagues unveiled the Neanderthal genome.

Neanderthals have puzzled scientists ever since their fossils first emerged in a German quarry in 1856. They were clearly ancient (their fossils span a range from about 200,000 to 30,000 years ago) and had distinctive anatomical differences from living humans, such as a thick brow ridge. But Neanderthals had brains as big as ours; they could make sophisticated tools and hunt large mammals. Precisely how they were related to modern humans became the source of a debate that rolled on for decades. In “Neanderthal Man” Paabo offers a fascinating account of the three decades of research that led from a secret hobby to a scientific milestone. The book follows the style of two previous memoirs by pioneering geneticists — James D. Watson’s “The Double Helix” (1968) and J. Craig Venter’s “A Life Decoded” (2007). In “The Double Helix,” Watson described discovering the structure of DNA. In “A Life Decoded,” Venter told how he led a team that developed new ways to read DNA and eventually assembled a rough draft of the entire human genome. Paabo now recounts his success in recovering a human genome that has been sitting in fossils for tens of thousands of years.

More here.

We Join Together Spokes in a Wheel

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it’s the vacant hub
that makes it possible
for the cart to move.

We shape a pot to make a void
to hold whatever we want.

We stand up walls to make a house,
but the hollow within
is where living takes place.

Non-being is at the heart of being.

.
from the Tao The Ching of Lao Tzu, V. 11

Peter Carey in The Guardian:

Sometime in the very early 1970s two Australian friends returned from Colombia and asked me to ghostwrite the story of their adventures, which included a conversation with an unknown writer named Gabriel García Márquez. In an effort to overcome my reluctance they lent me an English edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude. None of us understood that they had thereby changed my life. I tried, and failed, to help them memorialise their adventure. Worse, I “forgot” to return the book. Worse still, I arrogantly decided that this novel by this unknown writer would be of far more use to me than it could ever be to them. I was, at the time I became a thief, stumbling to find a way to escape what Patrick White had called “the dun-coloured realism” of my own country's literature, to make the windswept paddocks on the Geelong Road, say, become luminous and new. The stories worked well enough, but I still wasn't up to the bigger challenge. The absence of placenames in the stories is a good indication of what I was avoiding, a sign that I was still too young (and damaged) to see that Myrniong was a beautiful strange name and that Wonthaggi was a poem unto itself. It would take 10 years (some 20 stories and a novel) to free myself of this colonial bind, but the first step, without a doubt, was when I opened One Hundred Years of Solitude and read: “At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

Thus Márquez threw open the door I had been so feebly scratching on.

More here.

Erika Check Hayden in Nature:

Scientists have identified a long-sought fertility protein that allows sperm to dock to the surface of an egg. The finding, an important step in understanding the process that enables conception, could eventually spawn new forms of birth control and treatments for infertility. “It’s very important, because we now know two of the proteins that are responsible for the binding of sperm to the egg,” says Paul Wassarman, a biochemist and developmental biologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. The work, published today in Nature¹, was led by Gavin Wright, a biochemist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK. He and his team were looking for a counterpart to a protein called Izumo1, discovered in 2005 on the surface of sperm cells².

Scientists knew that Izumo1 allowed sperm to join to an egg to begin the process of fertilization. But nobody knew what protein on the surface of the egg attached to Izumo1. Identifying the proteins involved in the joining step has been difficult because the molecules tend to bind quite weakly to each other. So Wright and his team devised a way to cluster Izumo1 proteins, then searching for the egg-cell proteins that would bind to the clusters in cell culture. Wright compares the technique to constructing a Velcro fastener out of many individual fabric loops: “Each small hook adheres weakly, but when [they are] clustered in an array, even the most fleeting interactions are stabilized and can therefore be detected,” he says. Using this method, the team hooked a protein called folate receptor 4 that is found on the surface of the mouse egg cell. Wright’s team propose renaming the egg protein Juno, after the Roman goddess of fertility and marriage. Izumo1 is also named after a cultural symbol of reproduction — a Japanese marriage shrine.

More here.

Elizabeth Alsop in the LA Review of Books:

IT’S A GOOD TIME to be a canceled show. Last May, Netflix sent the viewing public into paroxysms when it released the fourth season ofArrested Development, which last aired on Fox in 2006. A month earlier, Rob Thomas made Kickstarter history when fans of his UPN series Veronica Mars massively overfunded — by three million dollars! — the show’s “return” as a feature-length film, now playing in theaters. Since then, former AMC series The Killing has been granted new life by Netflix, defunct soaps like All My Children and One Life to Live have been revived as streaming web series, and NBC’s Heroes, it was just announced, will return in rebooted and “reborn” form this summer.

There are, it seems, second acts in American television. Or, as Lacey Roseput it in The Hollywood Reporter, “canceled doesn’t necessarily mean canceled anymore.” Instead, shows like 24, Futurama, Unforgettable, and Cougartownhave become the beneficiaries of a new televisual world order, whereby any series threatened with cancelation can be, in Rose’s words, “revived thanks to creative deal-making,” or — in the case of NBC’s Community — rescued by socially-mediated displays of viewer displeasure.[1]

All of this, of course, hardly comes as news. Back in 2012, New Yorkmagazine’s Matt Zoller Seitz was already bemoaning the rise of “zombified” media; the byproduct, in part, of new and more potent forms of fan empowerment. Since then, critics have been eager to read the cultural tea leaves. There’s been no shortage of speculation about what this wave of revivals could cumulatively portend for television makers and viewers in the 21st century.

Yet despite the critical attention to this phenomenon, there’s been comparatively little curiosity about the psychology behind it.

More here.

Peter Gordon in The New Republic:

Walter Benjamin passed some of the happiest moments of his life wandering shirtless in the sun on the Spanish island of Ibiza. In a letter in 1932, he wrote that the little Mediterranean island lacked modern conveniences, such as “electric light and butter, liquor and running water, flirting and newspaper reading.” The nearest village boasted a mere seven hundred inhabitants, who got by without modern farm equipment: the economy ran mostly on goats. During his two stays there, in 1932 and 1933, Benjamin strolled the beaches and explored the island’s interior in the company of his friend Jean Selz, who would recall that “Benjamin’s physical stoutness and the rather Germanic heaviness he presented were in strong contrast to the agility of his mind, which so often made his eyes sparkle behind his glasses.” Together they took long walks through the countryside, but the walks were “made even longer by our conversations, which constantly forced him to stop. He admitted that walking kept him from thinking. Whenever something interested him he would say, ‘Tiens, tiens!’ This was the signal that he was about to think, and therefore stop.” Among the German guests on the island this idiosyncrasy was well-known and they gave the strange apparition a nickname: “Tiens-tiens.” The village locals called him el miserable. It is true that Benjamin was poor and prone to depression. But out of each day he crafted a scholar’s idyll: he rose early and bathed in the ocean, then ascended the hills to his favorite spot, where he retrieved a hidden lounge chair from the bushes. He sat there among the fig trees for the full length of the morning, writing, or reading Lucretius.

We do not imagine Benjamin on the beach. He was a poet of the city, one of the most probing critics of the bourgeois experience. In manifold essays and books, some of them fragmentary and left unpublished until much later, he sought to portray modern life in all its richness and variety—its literature, its dreams, its cultural detritus. Like a ragpicker in the marketplace (this was his own comparison), nothing seemed to him without significance.

More here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

Compared to most lives, John Updike’s was golden from the get-go. The adored only son of a highly educated mother (who herself wrote fiction, some of it eventually published in the New Yorker), the star student of Shillington, Pa.’s high school, recipient of a scholarship to Harvard, an invaluable contributor to the Harvard Lampoon (“seven cover illustrations, more than a hundred cartoons and drawings, sixty poems, and twenty-five prose pieces”), winner of a year’s fellowship to Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, a staff writer for the New Yorker in his early 20s, and then a successful and wealthy novelist for the next 50 years, as well as an underrated poet and a superb reviewer of books and art exhibitions, Updike could apparently do no wrong.

Except, of course, in his private life. Just before his senior year at Harvard, Updike married an intelligent and quietly attractive Radcliffe student named Mary Pennington.

more here.

from a 1925 essay by Virginia Woolf in berfrois:

To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one knows about her. It is also to become aware of the credulity, not very creditable to one’s insight, with which, half consciously and partly maliciously, one had accepted the late Victorian version of a deluded woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more deluded than herself. At what moment and by what means her spell was broken it is difficult to ascertain. Some people attribute it to the publication of herLife. Perhaps George Meredith, with his phrase about the “mercurial little showman” and the “errant woman” on the daïs, gave point and poison to the arrows of thousands incapable of aiming them so accurately, but delighted to let fly. She became one of the butts for youth to laugh at, the convenient symbol of a group of serious people who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the same scorn. Lord Acton had said that she was greater than Dante; Herbert Spencer exempted her novels, as if they were not novels, when he banned all fiction from the London Library. She was the pride and paragon of her sex. Moreover, her private record was not more alluring than her public. Asked to describe an afternoon at the Priory, the story-teller always intimated that the memory of those serious Sunday afternoons had come to tickle his sense of humour. He had been so much alarmed by the grave lady in her low chair; he had been so anxious to say the intelligent thing. Certainly, the talk had been very serious, as a note in the fine clear hand of the great novelist bore witness.

more here.

Clarissa Hyman at the Times Literary Supplement:

A paradox pervades the Sicilian citrus groves and gardens. The scent is intoxicating but too often the fruit lies rotten on the ground, unwanted and worthless. In this maddening, singular island, where they say the sun drives you crazy and the moon makes you sad, the irony is your breakfast orange juice will most likely be diluted, long-life concentrate from oranges grown in Brazil.

Helena Attlee acknowledges the complexities of international trade in The Land Where Lemons Grow: The story of Italy and its citrus fruit, her fascinating grand tour of the citrus-growing regions of Italy. Her focus is less on global agro-economics than on the history of the fruit in its adopted home, and the migration of waves of citrons, sour oranges, lemons, sweet oranges and mandarins to the welcoming soil of Mediterranean Europe.

A distinguished garden writer, Attlee fell under the spell of citrus over ten years ago and the book, like the eleventh labour of Hercules to steal the golden fruit of the Hesperides, is the result. She writes with great lucidity, charm and gentle humour, and wears her considerable learning lightly.

more here.

Father
You were mine
With
Your subtle
Limp
And
Fedora mustache
As we
Silently
Went
About
The
Business
Of
Shuffling
The
Papers
On
Those
Cold
Damp
Mornings
Both
Wishing
The
News
Wasn’t
So
Damned
Important
.

by Bill Schneberger

Jonathan Kandell in the New York Times:

Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.

Cristóbal Pera, his former editor at Random House, confirmed the death. Mr. García Márquez learned he had lymphatic cancer in 1999, and a brother said in 2012 that he had developed senile dementia.

Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers — Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them — who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience.

“Each new work of his is received by expectant critics and readers as an event of world importance,” the Swedish Academy of Letters said in awarding him the Nobel.

Mr. García Márquez was a master of the literary genre known as magical realism, in which the miraculous and the real converge. In his novels and stories, storms rage for years, flowers drift from the skies, tyrants survive for centuries, priests levitate and corpses fail to decompose. And, more plausibly, lovers rekindle their passion after a half-century apart.

More here.

Lullaby for a Daughter

Go to sleep. Night is a coal pit
full of black water —
……… night is a dark cloud
full of warm rain.

Go to sleep. Night is a flower
resting from bees —
……… night's a green sea
swollen with fish.

Go to sleep. Night is a white moon
riding her mare —
……… night's a bright sun
burned to black cinder.

Go to sleep,
night's come,
cat's days,
owl's day,
star's feast of praise,
moon to reign over
her sweet subject, dark.

by Jim Harrision
from The Shape of the Journey
Copper Canyon Press, 1998

Eva Saulitis in Orion Magazine:

FOR TWENTY-SIX SEPTEMBERS I’ve hiked up streams littered with corpses of dying humpbacked salmon. It is nothing new, nothing surprising, not the stench, not the gore, not the thrashing of black humpies plowing past their dead brethren to spawn and die. It is familiar; still, it is terrible and wild. Winged and furred predators gather at the mouths of streams to pounce, pluck, tear, rip, and plunder the living, dying hordes. This September, it is just as terrible and wild as ever, but I gather in the scene with different eyes, the eyes of someone whose own demise is no longer an abstraction, the eyes of someone who has experienced the tears, rips, and plunder of cancer treatment. In spring, I learned my breast cancer had come back, had metastasized to the pleura of my right lung. Metastatic breast cancer is incurable. Through its prism I now see this world.

…NO ONE TEACHES US how to die. No one teaches us how to be born, either. In an essay about visiting the open-air cremation pyres of Varanasi, India, Pico Iyer quotes the scholar Diana L. Eck: “For Hindus, death is not the opposite of life; it is, rather, the opposite of birth.” It happens that my stepdaughter, Eve, is pregnant. I’ve known her since she was three years old; she’s thirty now. One late afternoon this spring, early in her pregnancy, early in my diagnosis, we picked bags of wild rose petals together in a meadow below my house; she intended to make rose-flavored mead. We hadn’t talked much about the implications of my cancer recurrence; in the meadow, we almost didn’t have to. It hovered in the honeyed sunlight between us. That light held the fact of life growing inside her and the cancer growing inside me equally, strangely. We talked around the inexplicable until, our bags full of pale pink petals, we held each other in the tall grass and cried. Watching her body change in the months since, without aid of technology or study or experience, watching her simply embody pregnancy, should teach me something about dying. In preparation for giving birth, she reads how-to books, takes prenatal yoga, attends birthing classes. She studies and imagines. Yet no matter how learned she becomes, how well informed, with the first contraction, her body will take over. It will enact the ancient, inborn process common to bears, goats, humans, whales, and field mice. She will inhabit her animal self. She will emit animal cries. She will experience the birth of her child; she will live it. Her body—not her will or her mind or even her self—will give birth. Can I take comfort in the countless births and deaths this earth enacts each moment, the jellyfish, the barnacles, the orcas, the salmon, the fungi, the trees, much less the humans?

More here.

Annie Sneed in Scientific American:

Nematode worms, fruit flies, mice and other lab animals live longer, healthier lives when they eat less than they otherwise would if more food were available. Primates may also benefit, and perhaps humans—which is why research funds are pouring into this phenomenon. But all this raises a puzzling question: Why did creatures evolve such a mechanism in the first place? Researchers have declared the most popular theory doesn’t make evolutionary sense, and they’ve proposed a new explanation in its place. The most prominent theory involves what happens physiologically during times of food scarcity. When the living is good, natural selection favors organisms that invest energy in reproduction. In times of hardship, however, animals have fewer offspring, diverting precious nutrients to cell repair and recycling so they can survive until the famine ends, when reproduction begins anew. Cell repair and recycling appear to be substantial antiaging and anticancer processes, which may explain why underfed lab animals live longer and rarely develop old-age pathologies like Margo Adler agrees with the basic cellular pathways, but she’s not so sure about the evolutionary logic.

Adler, an evolutionary biologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, says this popular idea relies on a big assumption: that natural selection favors this energy switch from reproduction to survival because animals will have more young in the long run—so long as they actually survive and reproduce. “This idea is repeated over and over again in the literature as if it’s true, but it just doesn’t make that much sense for evolutionary reasons,” she says. The problem, Adler says, is that wild animals don’t have the long, secure lives of their laboratory cousins. Instead, they’re not only endangered by famine but by predators and pathogens, random accidents and rogue weather as well. They also face physiological threats from a restricted diet, including a suppressed immune system, difficulty with healing and greater cold sensitivity. For these reasons, delaying reproduction until food supplies are more plentiful is a huge risk for wild animals. Death could be waiting just around the corner. Better to reproduce now, Adler says. The new hypothesis she proposes holds that during a famine animals escalate cellular repair and recycling, but they do so for the purpose of having as many progeny as possible during a famine, not afterward.

More here.

Sukhdev Sandhu, William Gibson, Mark Romanek, and Joanna Hogg discuss Marker in The Guardian (h/t: Meg Toth; image of a museum built by Chris Marker in Second Life). Sandhu:

Marker didn't regard artistic forms as sacred. He didn't believe in the primacy of celluloid or the cinema screen. He was continually embracing and experimenting with new technologies: one of his richest later works was a CD-Rom entitled Immemory (1997); he created Photoshop cartoon-collages for the French website Poptronics; the Whitechapel show includes a projection of Ouvroir: The Movie (2010), a tour of a museum he created on Second Life, as well as the UK premiere of Zapping Zone (Proposal for an Imaginary Television) (1990-94), a sprawling assemblage of videos, computers and light boxes.

“Marker was always interested in transformation,” recalls Darke. This fascination with the ability of new technologies to transform ideas of human identity, social connection and the nature of memory makes him a strikingly contemporary figure whose work has been embraced by young art students as much as cinephiles. His claim to be a “bricoleur” – a collector of pre-existing visual material – is resonant now that the harvesting, assembling and curation of images has become as important as their creation. His fondness for revisiting old material and reusing it in new contexts resonates with the present era's unprecedented ability not only to store huge digital archives, but to click, drag and recontextualise their contents across limitless formats.

At a time when corporations and governments alike are hell-bent on surveilling and snooping on citizens, Marker's anonymity feels like a thrilling and prophetic act of resistance.

More here.