Month: September 2018

Robert Graves: The Reluctant First World War Poet

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Peter Parker at The New Statesman:

“My experiences in the First World War have haunted me all my life,” Edmund Blunden confessed the year before he died, “and for many days I have, it seemed, lived in that world rather than this.” Siegfried Sassoon felt much the same, and despite producing many volumes of verse on other topics both men would continue to be fêted as war poets.

In contrast, the war was a major part of the All That to which their erstwhile friend and fellow soldier Robert Graves attempted to say Good-bye in his celebrated 1929 memoir, and he would thereafter excise his war poetry from selected and collected editions of his poems. As a result, this poetry is less well known than that of his peers. Charles Mundye’s excellent Robert Graves:  War Poems (2016) showed just how many of them there were, and this first volume of Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s new biography convincingly makes the case for Graves as a major war poet, however much he attempted to escape that role.

more here.

The British in India : Snobbery, harems and boredom

Posted on by Azra Raza

Anne de Courcy in The Telegraph:

Paul Scott, author of The Jewel in the Crown (1966), said of India: “It was mysteriously in our blood and perhaps still is.” Despite the comparatively small number of British who actually went there – in 1901, at the height of the Raj, there were only about 155,000 in the subcontinent – there was an extraordinary bond. Some families didn’t come home for centuries, but stayed in India “generation after generation, as dolphins follow in line across the open sea,” as Kipling put it. David Gilmour, author of Curzon (1994) and The Ruling Caste (2005), has tackled this rich history in The British in India, from the granting of the East India Company’s charter in 1600 to the mid-1960s, when the hippy invasion began. Although the chronology is never in doubt, his treatment is grouped by topic – intimacies, formalities, voyages, working life, and so on. The result is somewhat like a tapestry.

He makes it plain that his subject is not the morality of ruling great swathes of land that belonged to others. “I am not going to attempt… to produce a balance sheet, to weigh indigo planters who tyrannised Indian peasants against doctors who saved Indian lives, or to balance the undoubted violence of British soldiers against the deeds of a famine worker or a builder of canals.” Instead, he gives us just about everything one has ever heard of, or would wish to know, about the British in India, from what these expatriates ate – anglicised curries and kedgeree, with chicken as a backstop – to their painful separation from their children, who were sent “home” to school at the age of five. Superbly researched, The British in India is authoritative and comprehensive.

More here.

Scientists Are Retooling Bacteria to Cure Disease

Posted on by Azra Raza

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

In a study carried out over the summer, a group of volunteers drank a white, peppermint-ish concoction laced with billions of bacteria. The microbes had been engineered to break down a naturally occurring toxin in the blood. The vast majority of us can do this without any help. But for those who cannot, these microbes may someday become a living medicine. The trial marks an important milestone in a promising scientific field known as synthetic biology. Two decades ago, researchers started to tinker with living things the way engineers tinker with electronics. They took advantage of the fact that genes typically don’t work in isolation. Instead, many genes work together, activating and deactivating one another. Synthetic biologists manipulated these communications, creating cells that respond to new signals or respond in new ways.

Until now, the biggest impact has been industrial. Companies are using engineered bacteria as miniature factories, assembling complex molecules like antibiotics or compounds used to make clothing. In recent years, though, a number of research teams have turned their attention inward. They want to use synthetic biology to fashion microbes that enter our bodies and treat us from the inside. The bacterial concoction that volunteers drank this summer — tested by the company Synlogic — may become the first synthetic biology-based medical treatment to gain approval by the Food and Drug Administration. The bacteria are designed to treat a rare inherited disease called phenylketonuria, or PKU. People with the condition must avoid dietary protein in foods such as meat and cheese, because their bodies cannot break down a byproduct, an amino acid called phenylalanine.

More here.

A Return to Philip Roth

Posted on by Adele A. Wilby

by Adele A. Wilby

The link to Charles McGrath’s ‘No Longer Writing, Philip Roth Still Has Plenty to Say’ which appeared in the New York Times in January, only a few months prior to Roth’s death in May this year, was forwarded to me by a friend who thought I might find the article interesting. How indebted I am to my friend that he thought of me in those terms, for the sending of that article rekindled my acquaintance with Roth; life’s events and circumstances had left my reading of his work to the margins.

After reading that January interview, I was surprised and saddened to hear the announcement that Roth had died; despite his eighty-five years there was no suggestion of ill health on his part in the interview. However, the numerous critical and appreciatory obituaries propelled me into reflection on what I might have missed over the years by failing to read this major twentieth century literary figure that has now left us, and that it was time I returned to Roth to discover for myself what all the praise and criticism of his literature was all about. All that remained of my reading of Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Human Stain forty years ago was the impression that they were good books. Fired up with a renewed enthusiasm to ‘return’ to the Roth I had left behind, unsure of what to select from his numerous writings, but armed with my own life story and political history, I chose his I Married a Communist to start reading him again.

I married a communist in the political heyday of the Cold War seventies and eighties, and we could be thought of as politically active in the decades that followed. Thus, with the value of hindsight, of having at least temporarily succumbed to a socialist ideology and politics, and the development of a healthy skepticism of all ideologies, I have to admit to a curiosity as to how Roth would present politically engaged persons, and the socialist politics of the era, albeit in the United States, and I was not disappointed.

My first reaction after reading the final sentence, closing the book and resting it on my lap was to heave a heavy sigh of great satisfaction. Roth, I felt, had written a great book. Read more »

The Eye’s Mind

Posted on by Joshua Wilbur

by Joshua Wilbur 

I would never call myself a birdwatcher. I’m confident—arrogant even—about blue jays and cardinals, but everything else is a crapshoot. I identify finches as sparrows, sparrows as hawks, hawks as starlings. I’m more often wrong than right.

That said, I do like to watch birds. In college, I would go to the Boston Aquarium to see the African penguins. Peering over the central railing, I would pick out a single penguin from the group and follow its (his? her?) every move for as long as possible. Into the water, out of the water, into the water again…

These days I spend a lot of time in Central Park, where countless pigeons roam the paths.  When I’m not in a rush, I’ll find a bench and read for awhile, and, inevitably, the legion arrives. Again, I like to pick out one member of the group and see what it does.  Whether penguin or pigeon (or finch or sparrow or gull), what fascinates me about watching birds is how contingent—how utterly arbitrary— their actions can seem.

Why does the bird take three steps this way instead of that way?

Why does it fly to that tree in particular?

Why does it return to the ground at my feet, turn a few circles, and continue its march along the sidewalk?  

I understand, of course. It’s looking for food. But there’s a wide gulf between a pigeon’s world and mine. And I feel that divide most strongly when I look into a bird’s eyes. I’ll stare down at a pigeon, focus on the red and orange and black of its vigilant eye, and think about a very old question: “Is anyone in there?” Read more »

Letters in the Age of Science: A 19th-century Case for Optimism

Posted on by Jeroen Bouterse

by Jeroen Bouterse

The past years have seen many debates about the limits of science. These debates are often phrased in the terminology of scientism, or in the form of a question about the status of the humanities. Scientism is a notoriously vague term, and its vagueness can be put to the advantage of either side. If you position yourself among the ranks of those fighting against scientific overreach, it helps to define scientism as the easily refuted view that there is no knowledge outside of science; don’t the humanities produce knowledge as well? If, on the other hand, you believe that the methods and results of science can still profitably be exported to new markets, you will need as harmless a definition as possible – scientism becomes nothing more, for instance, than the claim that science encourages us to make an effort to understand things.

Are we bound to talk past each other, then, adapting our language to fit our intuitions? Not necessarily. Scientism can be the label for a well-defined philosophical position, and several articles in a recent volume on the subject manage to prep it for conceptual analysis. This is never a waste of time. However, interesting discussions can also take place in the grey zone between philosophical analysis and vague intuitions.

My favorite example of this comes from the 19th century. It concerns an exchange between Thomas Henry Huxley and Matthew Arnold. Neither of them use the term ‘scientism’, or provide a formal definition of the issue, but both manage in a delightful way to have a productive debate about the reach of science.

Huxley is now most famous as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’: the enthusiastic promoter and exegete of Charles Darwin. Darwin himself took care not to go beyond defending the content of his new theory of evolution, which was radical and controversial enough as it stood. To his friend Asa Gray he confessed that he found his knowledge of the more gruesome phenomena in nature hard to square with belief in a good and omnipotent God; but when he received letters from eager theology students asking him to clarify the implications of his theory for divinity, he tended, ever-politely, to evade them. Read more »

Cultural Divides, from Snow to Snowflakes

Posted on by Thomas O'Dwyer

by Thomas O’Dwyer

Kenneth WidmerpoolThe career of Kenneth Widmerpool defined an era of British social and cultural life spanning most of the 20th century. He is fictional – a character in Anthony Powell’s 12-volume sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time – but he is as memorable as any historical figure. In the first volume, he is a colourless Eton public schoolboy. Across the series, he tunnels his way under British upper-class and bohemian society. A powerful and sinister self-made monster, he even gains a life peerage. In the final volume, the aged Widmerpool joins a hippie cult and dies naked while chasing girls in the woods. Widmerpool lived and prospered in the solid certainties of his acquired culture. He died in the midst of its fragmentation.

Widmerpool was an original snowflake – one who believed that he was so unique that greatness and adulation were his destiny. His lowly father sold fertilisers. His mother raised him to be this snowflake with an inflated uniqueness that would override his mediocrity. The metaphor then was poetic – snowflakes are lovely, and no two are alike.

Today, we have a “snowflake generation,” defined by British author Claire Fox in her 2016 book I Find That Offensive!: “It is a derogatory term for one deemed too vulnerable to cope with views that challenge their own, particularly in universities and other forums once known for robust debate.” With some irony, these delicate modern snowflakes are also called “new Victorians.”

The collapse of cultural certainties was most clear in Britain but rippled through all Western societies. The origin of certain culture-war debates, which erupt from time to time like temperamental volcanoes, is pinned on one Englishman, Lord Charles Percy Snow. A chemist and novelist, Snow in 1959 published The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. He first delivered it as a lecture at Cambridge University. Snow observed that a group of educated people talking in a room would make allusions drawn from books and the arts. Not one of them would be expected to make, or understand, a reference to “the second law of thermodynamics.” Half of human culture – science – appeared to be non-existent for literary intellectuals.

Snow found this odd and alarming, and he considered it a problem whose solution was obvious. Read more »

Learning To Live Without A Car

Posted on by Mary Hrovat

by Mary Hrovat

It’s a Saturday in May. I’m 17, and I’ve spent the morning washing and waxing my first car, a 1974 Gremlin. I’m so delighted that I drive around the block, windows down, Chuck Mangione playing on the radio. Feels so good, indeed. I’ve successfully negotiated a crucial passage on the road to adulthood, and I’m pleased with myself and my little car. Times change, though, and sometimes even people change. Forty years later, with, I hope, many miles ahead of me, I sold what I expect to be my last car.

When I bought the Gremlin, I lived in Phoenix. I had walked to grade school, and my siblings and I regularly walked to the grocery store and the public pool; all of these places were within about half a mile of our house. However, my full-time job was 10 miles away. I’d been commuting by bus or riding with a friend who worked at the same place. I also took evening classes a couple of days a week at a community college (about 8 miles away), again riding with my friend. The college was not as easily accessible by bus as my job was, and I anticipated being a full-time student that fall. Buying the car was one step toward my goal of getting a degree.

I assumed, along with just about everyone else, that a car was necessary equipment for adulthood, or at least a necessary price you pay for independence. Buying the car was a way of beginning to separate myself from my parents. I was proud of myself for arranging and paying for my driving lessons, finding a car to buy, and writing a check to pay for it. These things represented initiative and independence (although I couldn’t have saved the money if I hadn’t been living at home). Read more »

Back Formations and Neologisms

Posted on by Gabrielle Durham

by Gabrielle C. Durham

I like playing Scrabble, and part of the reason is creating new words. That and the smack talk. I played a game with the swain of the day decades ago, and he challenged my word, which was not in and of itself surprising. As you may recall, if you lose a challenge, you lose a turn. With stakes so stupendously high, you mount a vigorous defense. I ended up losing the battle (and probably won the war) and thought no more of it. The ex-boyfriend brought it up a few years ago; I think he has put that on-the-spot coinage next to a picture of me in his mind. It is a shame that the word he will forever associate with me is “beardful.”

My linguistic brain coined this neologism by merging noun + common suffix “ful,” as in words such as “youthful,” “fearful,” and “handful,” to create an adjective. Easy and legit, right?

A neologism is a new word or a new way of using a word and is not yet commonly accepted; it may never be mass-accepted, and it may stay new for decades. To survive its infancy, it needs to identify a durable, meaningful concept. The word or usage has to be relevant.

One form of a neologism is a back formation, which is typically shortening an existing word and changing the part of speech. An example is the verb “burgle” from the noun “burglar.” “Burglar” has been with us for centuries as a noun, and someone – let’s blame Shakespeare – realized that a verb would make the world shimmer that much more brightly. Thus was “burgle” begat. Read more »

A meeting with V. S. Naipaul

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

I met him at a Starbucks outside the Tower of London. It was pre-arranged. I had told him I was an independent blogger. He told me he preferred to talk to independent writers these days; the mainstream media was more trouble than what it was worth. It helped that I wrote for a site that he regularly read and admired.

The complexities of the London tube have thwarted me on more than one occasion, and this time was no different.  I was a full fifteen minutes late. He was sitting in a cafe, his signature fedora on his head, but still dressed inconspicuously enough so as to seem like one of the many people thronging the cafe.

“Mr. Naipaul”, I said, extending my hand. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you.”

“Oh yes, please, I was expecting you. Please, call me Vidia”

Taken a little aback by the very informal moniker I was supposed to address him by, I exclaimed, “Ok, thank you. And so sorry”, I said, “I have to admit that the tube, as wonderfully efficient as it is, challenges me every time I visit the city.”

“Indeed. It was difficult to get around the first time I visited too, more than fifty years ago. Often when I thought I had made it to my destination, I realized I was back where I started. Shall we?” Read more »

Poem

Posted on by Rafiq Kathwari

SCOFFLAW

There’s a lighthouse chasing us
just as I forewarned
when she jumped the queue
veered the red Renault
onto a prohibited bus lane
on New Kent Road.

We idle on the verge. A world tilts.
Bobby, rotund in blue,
knocks boldly on the pane.
She lowers the window.

“Well, then?” he asks,
“When I passed my driving test,
she says to the wheel,
“there were no bus lanes.”

“Young lady,” he says,
to her profile, “When
I passed my driving test,
there were no women drivers.”

“That’s sexist. Isn’t it?” she says.
“Getting cheeky, eh?” he says.
She giggles. He laughs, “Don’t
do it again, luv.” Nods.

I nod back. He plods
back to the lighthouse.
She shifts gears.
We give each other a high five.
In the rear view,
lighthouse appears closer than it is.

By Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit

What Your Child Learns From Trees at Story Time

Posted on by Liam Heneghan

by Liam Heneghan

No one warned me that after my children finally left home when I secured the doors at night I would, in effect, be locking them out.

People deal with the mild trauma of being an “empty nester” in different ways, I suppose. Some handle it with quiet grace, some move cocktail hour to the early afternoon, some repurpose the bedrooms into a karaoke lounge, a discotheque and so on. I took the quieter route and reread all their childhood books—from nursery rhymes to the Hunger Games series and other novels for young adults.

I was first struck by the prevalence of animals themes in these books. For example, in Eric Kincaid’s superb collection of Nursery Rhymes (1990)—a favourite of our two boys—over forty percent of rhymes concern animals. However, a word search of a book I subsequently wrote on the topic of nature in children’s books called Beasts at Bedtime (2018) showed that I might just as well have called it “Trees at Bedtime.” In addition to the innumerable references to “beasts”, there are almost 200 references to trees in the book.

Trees are represented in these stories in all their remarkable forms: magical trees in fairy tales to trees like JK Rowling’s compellingly violent Whomping Willow at Hogwarts.

It is clear that many writers of children’s stories—especially the so-called classic writers—did not accidentally stumble onto such themes. Beatrix Potter, JRR Tolkien, Ursula LeGuin and many others, had a keen eye for nature, and often had an acute awareness of its devastation. The destruction of trees was a point of moderate obsession for Tolkien who famously wrote, “I take the part of trees as against all their enemies.”

What, I wonder, should we make of this veritable forest of arboreal allusions in children’s stories? Read more »

It’s Gonna Be A Good Day

Posted on by Max Sirak

by Max Sirak

This month, in the midst of my grief and loss, I decided to self-medicate.

No, not like that. I didn’t go on some sort of drug-fueled bender.  Nor did I delve the depths of the bottle. Instead, I took some of my own medicine.

What I mean is, throughout my life, whenever a person I cared about was down in the dumps, my go-to move was to make them a mixtape. In high school this was because a friend was going through a breakup. Until last week, the most recent mix I made for a friend was over the loss of a pregnancy.

However, a handful of days ago, I decided to do for myself what I’d always done for others. Meet “It’s Gonna Be A Good Day,” the music-baby I made for me. 

It’s 53% hip hop.

There’s some language that may offend.   

But, should you happen to find yourself with an open mind and the desire to have a good day, I encourage you to give it a spin. Who knows? You might like it. And it might work.

It did for me. Read more »

Where do you live: Conducting Electricity

Posted on by Christopher Bacas

by Christopher Bacas

In the Municipal building on Livingston Street, two floors are reserved for Housing cases. In each court, dozens of people work and wait, a Bosch tableau with an international cast. HPD lawyers work the perimeter. They bring Respondents to the bench, confer with them in the hallway and negotiate with Petitioners on their behalf. HPD attorneys also lunch with landlord’s counsel. There is little ethical or proximate difference between Officers of the Court, save who signs their checks and the pay scales. To a person, they distribute a crushing weight, balancing malfeasance and negligence, plunder and systemic rot. The lasting effect of a day in Housing court isn’t the stipulation Management makes for repairs, nor the tenant’s payment (sometimes, less an abatement), it is feeling that force haul you down and watching others already borne off by it.

We arrived by scuffling shoes and creaking doors, then slid into crowded pews, all the grim mugs on a subway car faced in the same direction. The docket was packed; twenty or more cases in a six-hour work day. Some would resolve in a few minutes, others stretch to an hour or more. The judge cuts off ramblers and ranters. While you wait, you rehearse your statement.

The electrical system in our building was nearly 90 years old. Its central node, a rectangular graphite board the size of a medicine cabinet. Protruding from it, six paired brass claws held six shotgun shell 60-amp fuses, no covering nor shielding. To replace fuses, small plastic pliers hung on a hook nearby. Current flowed to smaller boxes with smaller fuses in each unit’s kitchen. Air conditioners, particularly older models, can continuously pull 20-30 amps. Entertainment and communications: flickering modems, cable boxes, charging stations and flat-screens add to the load. Multiply by twenty-five units… Read more »

Dennett as Synthetic Philosopher

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Eric Schliesser in Digressions & Impressions:

Despite Dennett’s training in philosophy (at Oxford, no less, under Ryle), his appointment in a well-regarded philosophy department, and his continued self-identification as a philosopher (“Philosophers, like me” (407)), I suspect that many professional philosophers find Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back, if they read it all with any care, barely philosophy. Dennett offers few structured arguments (with carefully numbered premises), no clear dilemmas/trillemas (etc.) nor the apparent paradoxes that are the staple of our profession nor does he deploy the conceptual distinctions that populate, say, recent philosophy of mind. With a few notable exceptions (Peter Godfrey Smith, Ruth Millikan, Dan Sperber, Bryce Huebner, Jody Azzouni, etc.) Dennett rarely mentions other living philosophers whose work he draws upon.

In some respects Dennett is a legacy philosopher, our intellectual celebrity in the world of public intellectuals, admired or reviled (due to his association with New Atheism). One can easily imagine that Dennett’s latest work shares the fate of Rorty’s late work: mainstream professional philosophers recognizing the name, and paying respectful lip-service to his importance while ceding engagement with his ideas to other disciplines and TED audiences. This would be a mistake. Dennett’s late work is brimming with new ideas (developed in more scholarly publications for over a decade) and insightful changes of heart. (Some other time I offer examples; but recall here.) Along the way, Dennett has become an exemplar for an entirely different way of doing philosophy. I call this (recall here and here): synthetic philosophy.

More here.

Ten years after the financial crash, the timid left should be full of regrets

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Larry Elliott in The Guardian:

Placards are being prepared. Photo-opportunities are being organised. A list of demands is being drawn up by a coalition of pressure groups, unions and NGOs. Yes, preparations are well under way for protests to mark next month’s 10th anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers – the pivotal moment in the global financial crisis.

Make no mistake, the fact that events will take place in all the world’s financial centres is no cause for celebration. On the contrary, it is a sign of failure. The banks were never broken up. Plans for a financial transactions tax are gathering dust. Politicians toyed with the idea of a green new deal and then promptly forgot about it. There never was a huge swing of the pendulum away from the prevailing orthodoxy, just a brief nudge that was quickly reversed. The brutal fact is that the left had its chance, and it blew it.

Ten years on, international finance is as powerful as it ever was. There has been only cosmetic reform of the banking industry. Corporate power is ever more concentrated. The benefits of the weakest global recovery from recession in living memory have been captured by a tiny minority. Wages and living standards for the majority in developed countries have grown only modestly, if at all.

More here.

Old Rivals, New Allies?

Posted on by Robin Varghese

Samuel Moyn reviews A Foreign Policy for the Left by Michael Walzer in Modern Age:

In A Foreign Policy for the Left, Walzer has updated some of the accessible and sprightly essays he published in Dissent and elsewhere since 2001 to explain how American progressives should think about their state’s global activities. His central argument is negative: the American left should not stick to what Walzer calls its “default” position of recommending standoffish withdrawal from world affairs.

Like an annoyed teacher who has seen generations of students repeat the same mistakes, Walzer lectures the left on the defects of the confection of anti-imperialism, isolationism, and pacifism he thinks it offers too reflexively. To the contrary, Walzer’s main point is that sometimes American hegemony, “internationalism,” and military force serve progressive ends.

I grant that it is sometimes genuinely worrisome when Americans, on both the left and the right, find excuses for disclaiming responsibility and doing nothing in response to international aggression or humanitarian abuses. But this fact hardly minimizes the even greater risk that Walzer courts—that of prettifying interventionism—as if it were the sole alternative to withdrawal. If inaction and isolation are sometimes sins, it is also true that America’s left and right have erred even more grossly through staunch interventionism and showy moralism.

Like many who defined their leftism around the cause of humanitarian intervention after the Cold War, Walzer is fixated on the quandary of when American military power should be deployed to prevent or halt mass atrocity. The experiences of the 1990s, from failures in the face of slaughter in Bosnia and Rwanda to “success” in Kosovo, crystallized a sense of obligation and even optimism about the beneficence of American force, if properly applied.

Unfortunately, the history of the current century points the other way: from Iraq (where many progressive hawks supported a catastrophic neoconservative adventure) to Trump’s recent Syrian intervention, the litany of armed American incursions has ranged from the feckless to the ruinous.

More here.