Friday Poem

El Paso Uno

No one woke up, that Saturday, mourning.
No one woke up that Saturday morning with intentions of becoming a
….. back to school vigil.
No one woke up not expecting to finish out a sophomore year…that had barely be-

gun.

No one woke believing “passageway to the north” would take on a whole new meaning.
No one woke up wanting to be a headline.
No one woke up wanting to be a deadline.

A story
that no one wanted to write.
A story
no one wants to right
or re-write
or re-like.

No one wanted to be number.
No one wanted to be a bilingual hashtag.
No one wanted to be punctuated.
No one wanted to be
period.

No one wanted to be an Old English font.
No one wanted to sprout ink-dried quills.
No one wanted to play chamber music
in this American roulette.
No one wanted this kind of love poem

after death.

If no one wants to be on the front line of a poem.

Put me,
on the frontline

of a poem.

by Hakim Bellamy
from Split This Rock

Jordy Rosenberg’s ‘Confessions Of The Fox’

Izabella Scott in The White Review:

It’s hot as fuck, said the friend who handed me Confessions Of The Fox, a faux-memoir set in eighteenth-century London. I was a little sceptical. After all, this was Jordy Rosenberg’s first novel. A queer theorist and historian of this period, he has re-written an eighteenth-century life from a trans perspective – a fool’s errand, murmured the cynic in me, to claim a world dominated by heteropatriarchy. Yet I found that as well as being hot as fuck, it was also something of a masterpiece.

The novel poses as a lost manuscript, authored by an outlaw named Jack Sheppard, and only recently discovered by an academic. Sheppard was once a popular hero: a celebrity thief, famous for picking the pockets of the rich. Born into poverty in 1702, Jack was sent to the workhouse at six to become a cane-chair maker, and by and by, became a brilliant carpenter. But he remained trapped in a system of exploitative labour, indentured by merchants until he rebelled, becoming a thief and, when he got caught, a jail-breaker. After a series of fantastic escapes from the law, he was publicly executed, aged 22. Even in his own lifetime, Jack was fast transfigured into fiction. At his hanging, a pseudo-memoir was sold among the crowd. Soon afterwards, his life was dramatised in plays and operas, with casts that included his great love, Edgeworth Bess, and his nemesis, Jonathan Wild – creating a rich body of literature to which Rosenberg refers as ‘Sheppardiana’.

More here.

The One Science Lesson Every American Adult Can Learn From Greta Thunberg

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

Like most people on Earth, Greta Thunberg is not a climate scientist. She has no formal scientific training of any type, nor does she possess any expert-level knowledge or expert-level skills in this regime. She has never worked on the problems or puzzles facing environmental scientists, atmospheric scientists, geophysicists, solar physicists, climatologists, meteorologists, or Earth scientists.

Like most of us, she is an ordinary citizen of the world: with strong beliefs, opinions, and political inclinations. But unlike most of us, Greta has shown a willingness to do what most of us refuse to do. Her starting point for how to move forward in the world is to begin from a position of scientific consensus. While most of us prefer to be given the facts and trust that we, intelligent as we are, can figure it out for ourselves, Greta recognizes the unparalleled value that scientific expertise brings to our world.

More here.

Karachi: Where Pakistan’s Tenacity Is on Full Display

Tyler Cowen at Bloomberg:

Karachi feels like a city without a clearly defined past, or at least not one that has carried over into the present. In the 1950s it was known as the “Paris of the East,” but that impression has not aged well. In 1941, before partition, the city’s population was about 51% Hindu. Now it is virtually 0% Hindu, obliterating yet another feature of the city’s history. It is currently a mix of Pakistani ethnicities, including Sindhis (the home province), Punjabis, Pashtuns, the Baloch and many more — indeed, Pakistan in miniature.

In addition to the benefits of urbanization, the generally peaceful nature of the city made a big impression on me. I was told by many people that Karachi was a kind of war zone, and that was to some extent true in the 1990s. The city was overwhelmed by money from trade in drugs and armaments, and the rapid arrival of so many newcomers.

But remarkable progress has been made in the last half decade or so, a testament to the city’s dynamism and ingenuity.

More here.

Reconsidering Cult Novelist Charles Wright

Gene Seymour at Bookforum:

The decades of near-silence that came in the wake of Charles Wright’s trilogy of short novels seem almost as aberrant and disquieting as the novels themselves. Wright died of heart failure at age seventy-six in October 2008, one month before Barack Obama’s election and thirty-five years after the publication of Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About, the last of Wright’s novels, whose 1973 appearance came a decade after his debut, The Messenger. Wright clawed and strained from the margins of American existence for widespread acknowledgment, if not the fame his talent deserved. Cult-hood was the best he got, but it’s been enough. Through the dedication and (even) fervor of his steadfast readers, Wright’s sardonic, lyrical depictions of a young black intellectual’s odyssey through the lower depths of mid-twentieth-century New York City have somehow materialized in another century, much as Wright once imagined himself to move through time and space: “like an uncertain ghost through the white world.”

more here.

The Intelligence of Plants

Cody Delistraty at The Paris Review:

Gagliano concluded, in a study published in a 2014 edition of Oecologia, that the shameplants had “remembered” that their being dropped from such a low height wasn’t actually a danger and realized they didn’t need to defend themselves. She believed that her experiment helped prove that “brains and neurons are a sophisticated solution but not a necessary requirement for learning.” The plants, she reasoned, were learning. The plants, she believed, were remembering. Bees, for instance, forget what they’ve learned after just a few days. These shameplants had remembered for nearly a month.

The idea of a “plant intelligence”—an intelligence that goes beyond adaptation and reaction and into the realm of active memory and decision-making—has been in the air since at least the early-1970s. A shift from religion to “spirituality” in the ‘60s and ‘70s unlocked new avenues of belief, and the 1973 bestseller The Secret Life of Plants catalyzed the phenomenon. Written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, the book made some wildly unscientific claims, such as that plants can “read human minds,” “feel stress,” and “pick out” a plant murderer. Mostly, it proved to be a touchstone.

more here.

A ‘Remarkable’ Exhibition of Saved Artworks

Keith Miller at the TLS:

The truth about art theft in Europe – and Clerville is, among other things, a microcosm, or quintessence, of Europe – is less swashbuckling than most fiction. The exhibition halls at the Palazzo del Quirinale, spacious, sparsely decorated and a little flyblown, are exactly the sort of place where you can imagine Diabolik pulling off a caper, disguising himself as the President, say, or floating through the window on a jetpack. But the works on show in a minor blockbuster earlier this summer, all of it recovered by the TPC, had undergone various indignities that you’d struggle to turn into any kind of entertainment beyond a snuff movie. One masterpiece, a Hellenistic table support from Puglia in painted marble, representing two griffins lunching on a stag, had been hammered into pieces so it could be smuggled out of the country with a consignment of building materials. Three post-Impressionist paintings, smashed and grabbed from the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna twenty-one years ago, were destined for the bonfire, our guide said, if they couldn’t be consigned to their intended buyer. The “Senigallia Madonna” by Piero della Francesca, taken from the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino in 1975, was the subject of television appeals, like any kidnapping victim: “Please don’t touch her with your bare hands.” A stately, plump rococo cabinet had been cut down to fit a smaller space than that from which it had been untimely ripped.

more here.

Consciousness Doesn’t Depend on Language

Christof Koch in Nautilus:

The contrast could not have been starker—here was one of the world’s most revered figures, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, expressing his belief that all life is sentient, while I, as a card-carrying neuroscientist, presented the contemporary Western consensus that some animals might, perhaps, possibly, share the precious gift of sentience, of conscious experience, with humans. The setting was a symposium between Buddhist monk-scholars and Western scientists in a Tibetan monastery in Southern India, fostering a dialogue in physics, biology, and brain science. Buddhism has philosophical traditions reaching back to the fifth century B.C. It defines life as possessing heat (i.e., a metabolism) and sentience, that is, the ability to sense, to experience, and to act. According to its teachings, consciousness is accorded to all animals, large and small—human adults and fetuses, monkeys, dogs, fish, and even lowly cockroaches and mosquitoes. All of them can suffer; all their lives are precious.

Compare this all-encompassing attitude of reverence to the historic view in the West. Abrahamic religions preach human exceptionalism—although animals have sensibilities, drives, and motivations and can act intelligently, they do not have an immortal soul that marks them as special, as able to be resurrected beyond history, in the Eschaton. On my travels and public talks, I still encounter plenty of scientists and others who, explicitly or implicitly, hold to human exclusivity. Cultural mores change slowly, and early childhood religious imprinting is powerful. I grew up in a devout Roman Catholic family with Purzel, a fearless dachshund. Purzel could be affectionate, curious, playful, aggressive, ashamed, or anxious. Yet my church taught that dogs do not have souls. Only humans do. Even as a child, I felt intuitively that this was wrong; either we all have souls, whatever that means, or none of us do.

René Descartes famously argued that a dog howling pitifully when hit by a carriage does not feel pain. The dog is simply a broken machine, devoid of the res cogitans or cognitive substance that is the hallmark of people. For those who argue that Descartes didn’t truly believe that dogs and other animals had no feelings, I present the fact that he, like other natural philosophers of his age, performed vivisection on rabbits and dogs. That’s live coronary surgery without anything to dull the agonizing pain. As much as I admire Descartes as a revolutionary thinker, I find this difficult to stomach.

More here.

The potent effects of Japan’s stem-cell policies

David Cyranosky in Nature:

Tucked away in Tokyo’s trendiest fashion district — two floors above a pricey French patisserie, and alongside nail salons and jewellers — the clinicians at Helene Clinic are infusing people with stem cells to treat cardiovascular disease. Smartly dressed female concierges with large bows on their collars shuttle Chinese medical tourists past an aquarium and into the clinic’s examination rooms.

In a typical treatment at Helene, clinicians take skin biopsies from behind the ear and extract stem cells from the fat tissue within. Then they multiply the cells, infuse them intravenously and, they claim, let them home in on the damage — in this case, arteries stiffened by atherosclerosis. Two posters on the wall outline promising results backed by major pharmaceutical companies and published in top scientific journals. They lend an air of legitimacy, but neither presents data on treatments offered at the clinic. When pressed for details by a visitor (who did not identify himself as a journalist), a concierge said that she could not offer evidence that Helene’s services are effective at treating the condition, mainly because results vary by patient. She eventually explained that the treatment is more for prevention. “It’s for anti-ageing,” she said.

More here.

Thursday Poem

The Man Who Was Thursday

…….. —after G.K. Chesterton

fell in love
with a girl
who was Saturday

She fell in love
with his falling
in love with her

Saturday boobs and her
Saturday laugh and her
Saturday way of not caring

that he was Thursday
because she liked
for the moment

his Thursday glasses and
his Thursday bedtime and
his Thursday-sized salary

that he spent on her
until she almost loved
Thursdays. That and

he was so nearly Friday
that sometimes she would
forget that he would never

have cocky certainty
or casual wear
or pizza nights,

and sometimes he would
forget, too, and they
were happiest then.

by Christopher Curry
from Rattle #46, Winter 2014

The Future of Political Philosophy

Katrina Forrester in Boston Review:

Since the upheavals of the financial crisis of 2008 and the political turbulence of 2016, it has become clear to many that liberalism is, in some sense, failing. The turmoil has given pause to economists, some of whom responded by renewing their study of inequality, and to political scientists, who have since turned to problems of democracy, authoritarianism, and populism in droves. But Anglo-American liberal political philosophers have had less to say than they might have.

The silence is due in part to the nature of political philosophy today—the questions it considers worth asking and those it sidelines. Since Plato, philosophers have always asked about the nature of justice. But for the last five decades, political philosophy in the English-speaking world has been preoccupied with a particular answer to that question developed by the American philosopher John Rawls.

Rawls’s work in the mid-twentieth century ushered in a paradigm shift in political philosophy.

More here.

Google claims it has finally reached quantum supremacy

Suzannah Lyons at ABC News (Australia):

Using a processor with programmable superconducting qubits, the Google team was able to run a computation in 200 seconds that they estimated the fastest supercomputer in the world would take 10,000 years to complete.

The news was first reported last Friday by the Financial Times, after a paper about the research was uploaded to a NASA website and then taken down.

“To our knowledge, this experiment marks the first computation that can only be performed on a quantum processor,” the Google AI Quantum team and their collaborators wrote in the paper, which the ABC has seen.

It’s a milestone, said quantum physicist Steven Flammia of the University of Sydney, who was not involved in the study.

“Prior to this experiment, there was no convincing demonstration of a quantum computation that someone had done on a programmable quantum device that couldn’t be done on a conventional computer,” Professor Flammia said.

More here.

For the sake of life on Earth, we should set an upper limit on the money any person can amass

George Monbiot in The Guardian:

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that when Google convened a meeting of the rich and famous at the Verdura resort in Sicily this July to discuss climate breakdown, its delegates arrived in 114 private jets and a fleet of megayachts, and drove around the island in supercars. Even when they mean well, the ultrarich cannot help trashing the living world.

A series of research papers shows that income is by far the most important determinant of environmental impact. It doesn’t matter how green you think you are. If you have surplus money, you spend it. The only form of consumption that’s clearly and positively correlated with good environmental intentions is diet: people who see themselves as green tend to eat less meat and more organic vegetables. But attitudes have little bearing on the amount of transport fuel, home energy and other materials you consume. Money conquers all.

More here.

Rediscovering Matisse

Hilton Kramer at The New Criterion:

Even those of us who have loved Matisse’s work since we began to look at paintings as a serious interest could not have suspected what it had cost this great artist to persevere in his vocation. Pleasure had so often been invoked as the key to an understanding of his achievement—“Un nom qui rime avec Nice . . . peintre du plaisir, sultan de Riviera, hédoniste raffiné,” as Pierre Schneider sardonically described this mistaken characterization of Matisse—that it has come as a shock to discover the sheer scale of adversity that had to be endured at almost every stage of his life and work.

It was not only that his paintings were initially denounced as the work of a madman. That was the common fate of a great many modernists, even in the heydey of the School of Paris. Matisse’s personal circumstances were also plagued by failing health, failing confidence, and a lack of command in the academic conventions of his medium. (He had never been a good student, and his training was meager.) Even worse, there was his wife’s family’s financial scandal, which, though neither Matisse nor his wife were at fault, nonetheless cast a pall over the family’s name and position.

more here.

Letter from Hong Kong

Jaime Chu at The Baffler:

If at the beginning of the crisis in Hong Kong, three months ago, it was hard for some to imagine how a supposedly democratic conclave within authoritarian China and the pride of imperial capitalists everywhere would soon become the undeclared police state it now is, it’s an even bigger challenge to imagine how the political crisis might be resolved without a dramatic redefinition of the relationship between the semi-autonomous territory and Beijing’s dictatorial central government. The movement—the revolution, the rebellion, the resistance, the terrorism, the uprising, whatever it is called, depending on who you ask—started as a protest against an extradition bill that, if passed, would have left the door open to compromising Hong Kong’s judicial independence from mainland China’s opaque legal system, in turn accelerating the collapse of the former British colony’s administrative autonomy and the personal freedom of its citizens. The bill had refreshed in everyone’s mind protests against controversial high-speed railway construction in 2009, ill-founded electoral “reform” by Beijing that failed to deliver universal suffrage as promised and triggered the Umbrella Movement in 2014, and the abduction of five liberal local booksellers by the Chinese government in 2015.

more here.

The Desperate Plight Behind “Darkness at Noon”

Adam Kirsch at The New Yorker:

This new “Darkness at Noon” arrives in a very different world from that which greeted the original, and one important difference has to do with Koestler’s reputation. In 1940, he was thirty-five and little known in the English-speaking world. He had been a successful journalist in Berlin and a Communist Party activist in Paris, but “Darkness at Noon” was his first published novel. It transformed him from a penniless refugee into a wealthy and famous man, and was also the best book he would ever write. It was followed, in the forties, by an important book of essays, “The Yogi and the Commissar,” and several thought-provoking but less consequential novels of politics and ideas, including “Arrival and Departure,” which reckoned with Freudianism, and “Thieves in the Night,” about Jewish settlers in Palestine.

But after that Koestler’s reputation took a fairly steep dive, as he turned from fiction to pop-scientific works that earned the scorn of actual scientists, especially when he began to embrace E.S.P. and other paranormal phenomena. By the time Koestler died, in 1983—in a double suicide with his wife, Cynthia, after he was given a diagnosis of terminal leukemia—he already seemed to belong to history. And the dive turned into an irrecoverable plummet after the publication, in the past two decades, of biographies by Michael Scammell and David Cesarani, which exposed him as an egotistical monster with a lifelong pattern of abusing women emotionally and physically.

more here.

‘No One Is Above the Law’

David Graham in The Atlantic:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announces the House of Representatives will launch a formal inquiry into the impeachment of U.S. President Donald Trump following a closed House Democratic caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., September 24, 2019. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque – RC130128A6D0

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced today that the House will launch an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. The move follows a sudden shift in the Democratic caucus over the past week, as allegations that the president pressured Ukraine to boost his reelection prospects swirled. Many previously reticent Democrats, chief among them Pelosi herself, have changed their mind and now support an inquiry.

To a great extent, today’s announcement seems to have been inevitable since November 2018, when Democrats won control of the House; or since May 2017, when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey; or even since November 2016, when Trump was elected and horrified Democrats began plotting maneuvers to stop him. The question was always when a critical mass of Democrats would coalesce in favor. But if the path to impeachment was predictable, the path from here is not. History suggests that once investigations into presidents begin, they tend to head in unexpected directions. Speaking briefly late this afternoon, Pelosi accused Trump of repeatedly breaking the law and violating the Constitution.

“The actions of the Trump presidency revealed dishonorable facts of betrayal of his oath of office and betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections,” she said. “Therefore today I’m announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry.”

More here.

Wednesday Poem

Other

When I had yet to learn the nature
of words, I had no sense
the trees and animals
I walked among were something
I was not.

Only when I saw
the swallow fly into the glass
of the window I was
watching through,
and picked it up,
and felt its life struggle
to get back inside,
as its eyes closed
and its head shook
and my hand felt its body
cool and become
a thing somewhere
beyond a glass
that wouldn’t let me through.

by Dan Gerber
Narrative Magazine