Rahila Gupta in New Humanist:

On World Hijab Day, 1 February, the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB) will premiere Women Leaving Islam online, a documentary which explores the violence and repression that Islam’s modesty culture visits upon its women. Six women from the most diverse backgrounds, from different countries in the world and different wings of Islam but now settled in Europe and Australia, talk movingly of their journey from the hijab to freedom. I defy you not to cry along with them. None of them could have openly come out as atheists in their countries of origin without being declared an apostate or blasphemer either by the state or the wider community.

Apostasy and blasphemy are criminal offences punishable by death in 13 Muslim-majority countries. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are on that list and the home countries of two of the women: Fauzia Ilyas and Rana Ahmad. When Fauzia wanted to divorce her excessively religious and controlling husband, the court granted a divorce but gave the custody of her little daughter to her husband because he told the courts that she had renounced Islam and was a blasphemer. When her home was attacked by a mob, she fled and sought refuge in the Netherlands. Being a woman and an ex-Muslim in Pakistan is “a dangerous combination” she says. Ironically, as an asylum seeker in Amsterdam, she found that the centres were full of religious Muslims who were not welcoming of her.

Rana Ahmad was forced into going to Mecca by her mother who suspected that her religious faith was a bit shaky. Her act of rebellion, of coming out loud and proud while remaining safe, was to find a camera in a quiet part of the Kaaba, writing the words “Atheist Republic” on a piece of paper and flashing it in front of the CCTV. Eventually she fled Saudi Arabia and later described the experience: “At the moment when I was in the middle of the sea between Turkey and Greece, I get the feeling that if I die at this moment, I am happy because I tried to be free… But I ask why it has to be so expensive. It’s broken me from inside.”

More here.

Rachel Cooke at The Guardian:

A year before his death in 1992, Francis Bacon quietly slipped into the Prado in Madrid, discreetly followed by its deputy director, Manuela Mena. There, he spent 90 minutes alone with its collection of Velázquez (it was a Monday, and the museum was closed). What did Mena make of Bacon, who was then 81, and in the habit of using shoe polish to colour his hair? “I’ve never seen somebody so gentle,” she said. “He looked you straight in the eye. He wanted to see who you are. He had… this security in himself.” Bacon lingered longest, she recalled, in front of Mars Resting (1640), in which Velázquez depicts the Roman god of war with his face in shadow – a decision that whispers a loss of masculine power, even as the muscles on his torso seem to ripple like damask in a breeze – and we can assume that he was grateful for the chance to have done so: afterwards, he sent Mena the most beautiful flowers she had ever received.

more here.

Steffie Nelson at the LA Times:

In the essay, Didion describes a particular “shimmer” that would form around images in her mind, creating a frame of sorts that pulled her in, impelled her to set down words as a means of telling the scene into being. She compares this shimmer to the way a schizophrenic or someone under the influence of psychedelic drugs is purported to perceive his surroundings — ”molecular structure breaking down,” foreground and background “interacting, exchanging ions.”

“I’m not a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinogens,” she continues, “but certain images do shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you can’t miss [it].” Didion goes on to illustrate several tableaux that emitted the shimmer: the minor actress with long hair and a short halter dress, walking alone through a Las Vegas casino at 1 a.m., who inspired the dissolute ennui of her 1970 Hollywood novel, “Play It As It Lays”; and an early morning at the Panama airport, heat rising off the tarmac, into which the author inserted Charlotte Douglas, one of the main characters in “A Book of Common Prayer,” with her square-cut emerald ring and a demand for tea made from water boiled for 20 minutes (no doubt drawing on Didion’s own bout with dysentery after visiting said airport).

more here.

The Celestial Set-Up

imagine staring up into an open umbrella
_______________ you’re holding as it pivots

after the defeat after the ruin
_______________ and the flawed reconstruction
________ what’s left but drawing the body into
its own circle spinning around an axis

not like a small country flailing spikes
________ from its malignant crown
but in star clusters
islands breaking into archipelagos

by this I mean a network of events
_______________ or love moving on the epidermis
a crackle on a hand
________ in the small distance unravelling in tenses
between your past and my future

_______________ performing a horizontal music
in relation to the touch of breath
________ or the edge of this poem falling into space
where every revolution is still happening in your skin

when does holding out your hand
_______________ become a question
which way to the centre
________ and how will I know when I get there
when the city is both a practice of scars and
________ a pattern of what’s in the air
in other words in song
an accumulation of detail invisible until you’re dead

for now we wander slowly about the star sphere
________ in a discontinuity that exists as aperture
to defer the sound of an ending not to
________ stop there just look
__         don’t look at the sun

by Zoe Skoulding
from The Celestial Set-Up
publisher: Oystercatcher, 2020

Yelena Furman in The Baffler:

AS A PROFESSOR OF MINE in graduate school used to say, there is more to Russian literature than Tolstoevsky, a witticism borne out of frustration with American readers’ familiarity with just two writers at the expense of a vast and varied body of works. You can add Chekhov, Turgenev, Pushkin, and several twentieth-century names to the list of Russian writers read by English speakers. To a large degree, this paucity is not surprising: the availability of English translations depends on a combination of financial factors and publishers’ preferences, which tend toward known entities. The field of English-language translation constitutes a kind of canon of its own.

In the twenty-first century, when notions of canon formation have undergone significant expansion, the translation of Russian works in the United States has begun to reflect this shift. As the Russian Library at Columbia University Press states on its website, it publishes “works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations.” Archipelago Books, Deep Vellum, and Ugly Duckling Presse have brought out translations of several notable contemporary Russian writers. Now, NYRB Classics has published Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov (translated primarily by Donald Rayfield, along with pieces by Robert Chandler and William Edgerton), bringing together previously and newly translated works by a writer whose “absence from classic Russian literature lists must end now!” as the blurb by Gary Shteyngart exhorts. (Presumably he means in the United States, since Leskov is known in Russia, although secondarily to the nineteenth-century giants.) Rayfield recently spoke about his work on the volume for Read Russia’s Russian Literature Week.

Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895) had a tumultuous personal life and, in a related development, was a bilious human being. As Rayfield notes in his introduction, his father died when Leskov was a teenager, after which he was pawned off on relatives who did not want him. During his marriage, his wife “suffered from psychotic episodes” which Leskov “probably exacerbated,” and she lived out her days in a mental institution. Due to subsequent relationships that went awry, including one with his servant, he at a certain point “became the sole charge of four children by three different women.”

More here.

Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

It’s tempting to presume a clear line between intention and accomplishment, but Janice P. Nimura, in her enthralling new book, “The Doctors Blackwell,” tells the story of two sisters who became feminist figures almost in spite of themselves. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, in 1849, and she later enlisted her younger sister Emily to join her. Together they ran the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children and founded a women’s medical college — even though, as Nimura puts it, opening a separate school for women was just about the last thing they had planned to do.

The Blackwell sisters had initially cast themselves as exceptions, seemingly content to be the only women allowed into the room. Their temperaments were decidedly different: Elizabeth was self-assured and occasionally grandiose; Emily was quieter and more methodical, though her apparent equipoise concealed an inner turmoil. They treated the women in their care with sympathy, but empathy — the sense that they inhabited the same ordinary plane as their patients, or even other women — seemed mostly to elude them. Elizabeth, especially, would rhapsodize about humanity in the abstract, even as actual experiences of clinical intimacy could unnerve her. “I feel neither love nor pity for men, for individuals,” she declared as a young doctor, in a letter to one of her brothers. “But I have boundless love & faith in Man, and will work for the race day and night.”

The broad outlines of their lives could have made for a salutary tale about the formidable achievements of pioneering women; instead, Nimura — a gifted storyteller whose previous book, “Daughters of the Samurai,” recounted another narrative of women’s education and emancipation — offers something stranger and more absorbing. She begins with her subjects’ early lives in Bristol, where their father, a sugar refiner, introduced his young children to antislavery politics. Samuel Blackwell’s eight British-born offspring — a ninth would be born after they immigrated to the United States — “grew strong on a diet of nature, literature and political consciousness,” Nimura writes.

More here.

Morgan Meis in Slant Books:

I want to write about a certain kind of prose. It is the kind of prose that gets lost in itself. The kind of writing that tumbles head over heels and threatens to drown in its own wake. But not quite. The kind of prose that drowns completely is not so interesting. And the prose that never gets lost is not so interesting either. In my opinion. You’ve got to teeter around and stumble just at the edge there. In my opinion.

I’m thinking right now of Ingeborg Bachmann. She was a poet but she gave up poetry. She was a philosopher but she gave up philosophy. She was a person but she gave up being a person. Or tried to. I don’t know. She died in Rome in 1972 from the results of smoking a cigarette in bed. She was hooked, at that point, on pills and drink. So it was a kind of lazy, slow moving suicide. She couldn’t teeter on the edge anymore and so she just went over. Maybe.

She wrote a novel before she died. I guess you can call it a novel. Better, let’s say she wrote a piece of prose just a couple of years before that cigarette and the pills got her. It is called Malina. It is impossible to say what Malina is about and so I will not try. It isn’t about anything. It is about everything. It is the story of a love affair, but not really.

More here.

Kyle A. Thomas, Peter DeScioli, and Steven Pinker:

Imagine spilling a plate of food into your lap in front of a crowd. Afterwards, you might fix your gaze on your cell phone to avoid  acknowledging the bumble to onlookers. Similarly, after disappointing your family or colleagues, it can be hard to look them in the eye. Why do people avoid acknowledging faux pas or transgressions that they know an audience already knows about?

Following a transgression, people feel the negative self-conscious emotions of shame, embarrassment, or guilt, and these emotions help them regulate their relationships. A transgressor has displayed ineptitude, which can damage his reputation as a valuable cooperator, or a disregard for someone’s welfare, which can damage his reputation as a trustworthy cooperator. The discomfort caused by the resulting emotions, even when privately felt, motivates a person to manage these threats by drawing his attention to the transgression and motivating him to make amends and avoid similar acts in the future.

The idea that self-conscious emotions regulate relationships also explains why the presence of an audience intensifies feelings of embarrassment, shame, and guilt.

More here.

Micah Rosen in Taxis:

It was February 20, 1939, two days before George Washington’s birthday. Fritz Kuhn, leader of the prominent pro-Nazi German American Bund, took the stage at Madison Square Garden. Behind him stood a towering 30-foot portrait of the first US president between giant swastikas, and around him twenty thousand rally-goers. Posters at this infamous Pro-America Rally promised a “mass-demonstration for true Americanism,” bringing National Socialist ideals to the American people. Participants waved American flags, marched to loud drum rolls, and heard pro-fascist speeches. Speakers urged the audience to embrace National Socialism, not merely to show support for Germany, but above all because it was fundamentally American.

The event met with widespread condemnation. New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia called it an “exhibition of international cooties.” Others were critical, but did not see great cause for alarm. Shortly after the event an editorial in the New York Times expressed confidence that the rally-goers were no more than a harmless fringe group. “The Bund, functioning freely, is its own best argument against itself,” read the piece. “We are not, to state the case mildly, afraid of the Bund. The limits to which this or any group… may go are definite.”

But to one young man by the name of Peter Viereck, there was more cause for concern. A twenty-two-year-old poet and student of history at the time, Viereck feared the implications of rallies like this — both for his family and his country. Just five years earlier, when he was in college, his German-American father, George Sylvester Viereck, had stood on the same stage and proclaimed his support for Hitler to a crowd of tens of thousands of Nazi sympathizers.

More here.

Greg Miller in Nieman Lab:

The United States of America was founded on a conspiracy theory. In the lead-up to the War of Independence, revolutionaries argued that a tax on tea or stamps is not just a tax, but the opening gambit in a sinister plot of oppression. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were convinced — based on “a long train of abuses and usurpations” — that the king of Great Britain was conspiring to establish “an absolute Tyranny” over the colonies.

“The document itself is a written conspiracy theory,” says Nancy Rosenblum, a political theorist emerita at Harvard University. It suggests that there’s more going on than meets the eye, that someone with bad intentions is working behind the scenes. If conspiracy theories are as old as politics, they’re also — in the era of Donald Trump and QAnon — as current as the latest headlines. Earlier this month, the American democracy born of an eighteenth century conspiracy theory faced its most severe threat yet — from another conspiracy theory, that (all evidence to the contrary) the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Are conspiracy theories truly more prevalent and influential today, or does it just seem that way?

The research isn’t clear. Rosenblum and others see evidence that belief in conspiracy theories is increasing and taking dangerous new forms. Others disagree. But scholars generally do agree that conspiracy theories have always existed and always will. They tap into basic aspects of human cognition and psychology, which may help explain why they take hold so easily — and why they’re seemingly impossible to kill. Once someone has fully bought into a conspiracy theory, “there’s very little research that actually shows you can come back from that,” says Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge whose research focuses on ways to combat misinformation. “When it comes to conspiracy theories, prevention is better than cure.”

More here.

Prospect Park Lament

On the first day I took secateurs to Prospect Park and cut out some forsythia.
On the second day I ate garlic by the bulb.
On the third day I heard the crackle of my lungs and remembered hiding out once
…………….. in an attic padded with fiberglass.
On the fourth day I watched the neighbors leave.
On the fifth day I ordered pineapple linzer sandwich cookies from the
…………….. shut-down tea-house.
On the sixth day, countryhouseless, I thought of Basho:
In Kyoto,
hearing the cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto.
From black bananas I made bread.
hen I gambled in the stock market with the extra black bananas.
Then my Adam’s apple became a sweet gumball fruit. Then an avocado stone.
Then I stood on my balcony and cried for the clerks and the nurses.
I  cried for my city wheezing under its viral load.
I cried for the ventilators lost in the warehouses.
Then I ordered a nebulizer, Sunshine chorella tablets, meyer lemons,
…………….. 91% isopropyl rubbing alcohol, albuterol, Annie’s Shells and Cheese,
and macadamia nut milk over the internet.
Then I attended a funeral on Zoom.
Then I learned how to be a crow and a pigeon.
Then I sweat out what had entered via my thumb pad into the corner of my eye.
Then I gave up my unclean hands to the sky, and got on my clothesline
and sang for the dead.

by Anna McDonald
from National Poetry Library

Fawzia Afzal-Khan in Counterpunch:

My daughter, a Pakistani American mother of two young children, married to an African American man of Jamaican parentage, is understandably excited about our new Veep-to-be, Kamala Harris. She keeps sending me articles by “desi” women like herself in relationships with Black men, who are excited about this new chapter dawning in American history.

What is particularly poignant for young mothers of biracial kids like hers, is the hope that Kamala’s ascension to the second most powerful position in the country’s leadership, will simultaneously mitigate the anti-Black racism within the South Asian community. Thus, when Sharda Sekaran, a “Blindian” (Black and Indian) young woman interviewed for a recent essay in The Lily that my daughter sent me this morning, interprets Kamala Harris’ election as “a validation of the identity I’ve had to fight for”— how can one not feel elated at the prospect of people like my own darling granddaughter growing up feeling similarly empowered in their identities as Black South Asians for the first time in US history? How can I deny that as a Pakistani immigrant myself, I’ve not seen the anti-black prejudice that one associates largely, if not exclusively with white supremacy, also prevalent in my own “desi”- American community?But the question that doesn’t get raised in these expressions of delight at having one’s “identity” now represented at the highest levels of officialdom, is whether having a “Blindian” woman as Vice President is enough of a victory against the forces of regression. The title of the recent article in The Lily, “Kamala Harris has elevated the Blindian community: ‘It’s a validation of the identity I’ve had to fight for’” —begs the question, is the “validation” that may come from seeing a Black and Desi woman “elevated” to high office really worth all the excitement and anticipation? In other words, is identity politics at the level of representation enough, by itself?

I’m old enough to remember first hand a similar excitement many of us who were new immigrants from countries of the global South like Pakistan, felt when the Reverend Jesse Jackson created his National Rainbow Coalition as a platform for his 1984 presidential run.

More here.

Joel Whitney at the Poetry Foundation:

During the mad rush of leaving, they had to find homes for 60 animals, a menagerie of horses, snakes, turtles, and various other creatures. Only two made the cut to tag along with them: their blue budgie parakeet, Bird, who went eerily still as they crossed the Sonoran Desert, and their Doberman, Kinch, who panted in the scorching heat.

Traveling with their 10-year-old daughter Linda and their friend Raf in a red Dodge, George and Mary Oppen fled Redondo Beach, California, on June 11, 1950. They were in flight from the FBI. Special agents had visited their house days earlier to ask about the Oppens’ relief work during the Depression, and about a former roommate now suspected of espionage. Nationally, it was a tense time. North and South Korea would clash two weeks later, launching another war. Dissent was unpatriotic; a person’s past could send them to prison. Case in point: The Oppens’ friend Dalton Trumbo, a screenwriter who was blacklisted after he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, spent most of that year in a Kentucky prison for contempt of Congress. Having worked with the Communist Party USA during the Depression, the Oppens knew they were considered enemies of the state. They headed toward Tucson, and to the border beyond. They spent the next decade in Mexico City, under constant surveillance. They called themselves political refugees.

George famously stopped writing during this period. His silence lasted 25 years.

More here.

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

No matter how much we might try and hide it, there’s an enormous problem staring us all in the face when it comes to the Universe. If we understood just three things:

1. the laws that govern the Universe,
2. the components that make up the Universe,
3. and the conditions that the Universe started off with,

we’d be able to do the most remarkable thing of all. We could write down a system of equations that, with a powerful enough computer at our disposal, would describe how the Universe evolved over time to transform from those initial conditions into the Universe we see today.

Every single event that occurred in our cosmic history — to the limits of classical chaos and quantum indeterminism — could be known and described in great detail, from the individual interactions between quantum particles to the largest cosmic scales of all. The problem we face, when we try to do exactly that, is that despite all we know about the Universe, what we predict and what we observe don’t quite match up unless we add at least two mystery ingredients: some type of dark matter and some type of dark energy. It’s a remarkable puzzle to solve, and something every astrophysicist has to reckon with. While many love to present alternatives, they’re all even worse than the unsatisfying fix of dark matter and energy. Here’s the science of why.

More here.

Bernie Sanders in The Guardian:

A record-breaking 4,000 Americans are now dying each day from Covid-19, while the federal government fumbles vaccine production and distribution, testing and tracing. In the midst of the worst pandemic in 100 years, more than 90 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured and can’t afford to go to a doctor when they get sick. The isolation and anxiety caused by the pandemic has resulted in a huge increase in mental illness.

Over half of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck, including millions of essential workers who put their lives on the line every day. More than 24 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed or have given up looking for work, while hunger in this country is at the highest level in decades.

Because of lack of income, up to 40 million Americans face the threat of eviction, and many owe thousands in back rent. This is on top of the 500,000 who are already homeless.

Meanwhile, the wealthiest people in this country are becoming much richer, and income and wealth inequality are soaring. Incredibly, during the pandemic, 650 billionaires in America have increased their wealth by more than $1tn.

More here.

Two Exhausted Bodies

My insides are a flooded field. Though the field outside is larger and I have played there, laid
down there, ran through it over and again, I have never spilled over its boundary.

I don’t know why pebbles
keep tumbling from my ears.
It’s been happening since yesterday.
They don’t hurt my ears.
My ears don’t ache… I just feel thirsty.
I often miss myself.
Recently I realized
that’s why I drink water before bed.

My friend’s question—Why do we think about our past, these days, especially our childhood?
—compelled us to open all the doors and windows. I don’t know if he swats the stars away from
his face like me.

This morning he was not aware
that a star had fallen between us while we slept.
We both forgot
to look for it.
Neither of us stumbled as we left the room.
I wish everything had been stolen
like my shoe at the mosque—

Even so, I didn’t return home barefoot; my insides were enough for me then, and I didn’t ever
allow myself to miss myself.

I wanted to tumble from my insides,
but many things must be tightened
when they come loose.
That inner distance, neither loosening
nor tightening.
Perhaps the boundary between two fields was too small a space for deception.

by Xosman Qado
from Plume Magazine
translated by Zêdan Xelef and David Shook