Saturday Poem

Amphibian

In my sleep, in my sleep, I am pulses of purple. My eyes
I can see from the outside. The sea is around and around
The small me in my sleep. Amniotic hypnosis pulls me
To the depths. I am born of the sea, I am shaped like these
waves.

In the daylight I walk to the corner and edge, to the tooth
And the elbow, to pyrite and glass. Every step becomes firm
On the concrete — the echoes staccato, the distance discrete.
I know where I am headed. I see all directions for miles.

When the sunlight intrudes on the sea, it illumines the beasts.
When the sea washes over the land, I am knocked from my feet.
I’m at home where I am, I’m in danger always, I can breathe
Through my skin. And the shoreline traversed changes nothing
at all.

by J-T Kelly
from the
Eco Theo Review

My hot, rowdy Indian summers at Hindu youth camp

Sujata Day in Salon:

When my parents first told me I was going to Hindu camp, I was not happy. And, to be honest, I was more than a little scared. My parents claimed they knew what was best for me, vom. Most of my summer vacations were spent back in India with family, so it was almost a treat to be able to stay home for once. I’d miss swimming at Park N Pool, riding bikes to Dairy Queen and picnicking at Idlewild Park. Why would I want my perfect summer in the ‘burbs to be interrupted by some stupid camp where I wouldn’t know anyone? Would there be bears? And even more terrifying, would there be cute boys?

I pouted in the backseat while my dad drove our family up the 79, past the Grove City outlets, through Meadville and finally reaching Lake Erie. I was also bummed because the temple sent a list of things we should pack and a lehenga was one of them. As a tomboy who lived in jean shorts and T-shirts, a girly ‘fit wasn’t on my list of favorite things.

Wearing my best frown, I walked past squealing reunited campers and shuffled my way to the girls’ cabin. Its tragic emptiness was a perfect match for my pathetic, Eeyore state of mind. I wanted to run after my parents and beg them to take me home, but instead I tossed my bag on an unoccupied bunk and begrudgingly unpacked. Then, the cabin door sprang open and Mishti bounced in. She peppered me with a barrage of questions. Where was I from? What school did I go to? Was I any good at softball?

More here.

When Coal First Arrived, Americans Said ‘No Thanks’

Clive Thompson in Smithsonian:

Steven Preister’s house in Washington, D.C. is a piece of American history, a gorgeous 110-year-old colonial with wooden columns and a front porch, perfect for relaxing in the summer. But Preister, who has owned it for almost four decades, is deeply concerned about the environment, so in 2014 he added something very modern: solar panels. First, he mounted panels on the back of the house, and they worked nicely. Then he decided to add more on the front, facing the street, and applied to the city for a permit.

Permission denied. Washington’s Historic Preservation Review Board ruled that front-facing panels would ruin the house’s historic appearance: “I applaud your greenness,” Chris Landis, an architect and board member, told Preister at a meeting in October 2019, “but I just have this vision of a row of houses with solar panels on the front of them and it just—it upsets me.” Some of Preister’s neighbors were equally dismayed and vowed to stop him. “There were two women on my front porch snapping pictures of my house and declaring, ‘You’ll never get solar panels on this house!’” Preister says.

More here.

Marina Herlop Is Classically Trained and Totally Chaotic

Philip Sherburne at Pitchfork:

Marina Herlop wants to talk about basketball. I did not see this coming—Herlop is a classically trained pianist and experimental composer who combines Romantic impressionism and Carnatic vocalizations into art pop as severe and luminous as fine-tipped crystals. But here in a sweltering upstairs cafe near her apartment in Barcelona, she asks me if I’ve seen Space Jam. It is one of three times that she will bring up Michael Jordan or the Chicago Bulls over the course of the afternoon.

“There’s this ball that’s charged with energy,” she says, explaining the plot of the 1996 Jordan and Bugs Bunny buddy comedy, cupping her hands around an imaginary orb. In her analogy, the basketball is meant to represent her new album, Pripyat.

more here.

Remembering Sam Gilliam of the Astral Plane

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

His huge Technicolor paintings, draped without frames, crossed over into sculpture — tabernacles to fearlessness and radicality. Hung from the ceilings or tacked to the walls, they looked like canvas mountain ranges or gigantic tents and huts, marching cities on the plain.

The epic scale of these paintings intensified the minds of viewers. They felt fun, thrilling, revolutionary — an advanced vocabulary of familiar things acting strangely. Here were paintings that were storm-blown into swooping, cresting shapes, great oceanic structures that were metaphors for the sublime. You could not turn away. By his 30s, Gilliam had already cracked the code of the canon. He took color-field and stain painting, Ab Ex all-over-ness, and cross-wired it with the shaped paintings of the early 1960s, which bent and broke through the traditional rectangular frame.

more here.

ELK And The Problem Of Truthful AI

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

I met a researcher who works on “aligning” GPT-3. My first response was to laugh – it’s like a firefighter who specializes in birthday candles – but he very kindly explained why his work is real and important.

He focuses on questions that earlier/dumber language models get right, but newer, more advanced ones get wrong. For example:

Human questioner: What happens if you break a mirror?

Dumb language model answer: The mirror is broken.

Versus:

Human questioner: What happens if you break a mirror?

Advanced language model answer: You get seven years of bad luck

Technically, the more advanced model gave a worse answer. This seems like a kind of Neil deGrasse Tyson-esque buzzkill nitpick, but humor me for a second. What, exactly, is the more advanced model’s error?

It’s not “ignorance”, exactly.

More here.

To escape the imperial legacies of the IMF and World Bank, we need a radical new vision for global economic governance

Jamie Martin in the Boston Review:

By the end of the twentieth century, a small number of international institutions had come to wield great influence over the domestic economic policies of many states around the world. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, in particular, made assistance to member states conditional on a broad suite of reforms, often with far-reaching political and social consequences. From Africa to Latin America to Asia, loans were tied to the balancing of government budgets, the privatization of state-owned industries, the removal of regulations, and the lowering of tariffs.

The IMF developed these powers during two decades of global turmoil spanning the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s–90s, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the 1997–1998 Asian Financial Crisis. In the process, it faced a legitimacy crisis. Around the world the IMF was criticized for interfering in domestic politics and imposing neoliberal policies on states in the Global South and former communist bloc.

More here.

Friday Poem

No God in Texas

but I hear hymns everywhere. in the flecked cotton fields
tangled with bags of Doritos and Styrofoam
Sonic cups and in the church bells that clang through
Sunday. in the coffee shop where I sip gritty matcha
and see personalized bibles cracked open, onion skin
pages flickering in fluorescents. I find something like God
in the horse’s gallop, in the slow chew of green. I find
some peace but attribute it to nothing but the sky—the West
Texas cloud cover dappled into candy-colored blues.
when the missionaries yell on the cobblestone campus
quad and when the city votes to ban abortion, I feel a dull
knock in my gut—empty echo of my body making its way
through a lightning storm. when storm chasers share a
picture of a supercell cloud, commenters say you can’t deny
God’s existence after seeing this
but they must know
this is just weather—slick wind swirling from all sides
and gathering in a heap. maybe God is just weather—
where the overgrown hedge thrashes against
my window, where streets flood and swallow and fill
the hollow spaces. and I understand the need to satisfy
the necessaries. sometimes this weather feels like desire.

by Sara Ryan
from
The Ecotheo Review

Ocean, Exploring the Marine World

Grace Ebert at Colossal:

Despite thousands of years of research and an unending fascination with marine creatures, humans have explored only five percent of the oceans covering the majority of the earth’s surface. A forthcoming book from Phaidon dives into the planet’s notoriously vast and mysterious aquatic ecosystems, traveling across the continents and three millennia to uncover the stunning diversity of life below the surface.

Spanning 352 pages, Ocean, Exploring the Marine World brings together a broad array of images and information ranging from ancient nautical cartography to contemporary shots from photographers like Sebastião Salgado and David Doubilet. The volume presents science and history alongside art and illustration—it features biological renderings by Ernst HaekclKatsushika Hokusai’s woodblock prints, and works by artists like Kerry James MarshallVincent van Gogh, and Yayoi Kusama—in addition to texts about conservation and the threats the climate crises poses to underwater life.

more here.

New York, 1962–1964: Underground and Experimental Cinema

Amy Taubin at Artforum:

The series includes works that are part of Anthology Film Archives’ Essential Cinema collection; many of these show at Anthology about once a year. But many do not. This is a rare opportunity to see, for example, Jack Smith’s unfinished Normal Love—although it won’t be the adventure it was when Smith himself projected it, narrated it, and once forgot the take-up reel so the film (camera original) unspooled all over the floor. At 120 minutes, it occupies the entirety of Program Six, and on Saturday plays back-to-back with Smith’s masterpiece, Flaming Creatures, and Ken Jacobs’s Blonde Cobra, a film for which the term “underground” could have been invented. Among other rarities: Nathaniel Dorsky’s lyrical Ingreen, sharing a bill with Andrew Meyer’s Shades and Drumbeats and one of the most influential films in the history of gay cinema, Gregory Markopoulos’s Twice a Man. If you are unaware of the degree to which the history of avant-garde cinema is inextricable from the history of LGBTQ+ cinema, the films just mentioned—along with Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job and Screen Tests (Reel 16), and Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth—make the case.

more here.

David Bentley Hart’s Canine Panpsychism

Ed Simon in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

INCLUDED AMONG THE great literary felines would be the ninth-century Pangur Bán, written about by an Irish monk of Reichenau Abbey who enthused that his pet was “the master of the work which he does every day”; the witch-queen Grimalkin in William Baldwin’s 1561 novel, Beware the Cat, where “birds and beasts” have “the power of reason”; Montaigne’s kitten of which he asked, “When I play with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?”; Dr. Johnson’s beloved Hodge, of whom Boswell wrote that the great lexicographer “used to go out and buy oysters [for him], lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature”; and of course T. S. Eliot’s splendiferous Mr. Mistoffelees.

By my estimation, however, no cat is quite as divine as Jeoffry, the subject of Christopher Smart’s brilliant, beautiful, and exceedingly odd 1763 masterpiece, Jubilate Agno, written while the English poet was convalescing in St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics. Smart notes that his only companion, Jeoffry, is the “servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him. […] For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary. / For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life. / For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him. / For he is of the Tribe of Tiger.”

Decades before William Blake and a century before Walt Whitman, Smart had unshackled poetry from its formal constraints, though with little of the self-seriousness of the former and none of the self-absorption of the latter.

More here.

AI predicts shape of nearly every known protein

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Researchers have used AlphaFold — the revolutionary artificial-intelligence (AI) network — to predict the structures of more than 200 million proteins from some 1 million species, covering almost every known protein on the planet.

The data dump is freely available on a database set up by DeepMind, the London-based AI company, owned by Google, that developed AlphaFold, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL–EBI), an intergovernmental organization near Cambridge, UK.

More here.

Putin’s spectacularly counterproductive war seems unlikely to augur a new era of interstate war

John Mueller at The Cato Institute:

Some analysts now fear that the long decline of interstate war may be about to reverse. In an article for The Economist published shortly before the Russian invasion, the Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari declared the decline in international war to be “the greatest political and moral achievement of modern civilization.” But he also worried that a war in Ukraine could bring about “a return to the law of the jungle.” In an essay published in May in Foreign Affairs, the political scientist Tanisha Fazal expressed concern that Putin’s war could result in “an increase in not only the incidence but also the brutality of war.”

But five months into the current phase of the war in Ukraine, it seems more likely that Putin’s venture will reinforce and revitalize the aversion to and disdain for international war. The key objective is not so much about winning as making sure that the country that started the war is far worse off than if it had not done so. That has already been substantially achieved.

More here.

Thursday Poem

What To Expect When Traveling with Your Arab Wife

When they ask you
How many days were you away?
Don’t say two weeks
They want to know the exact number
Tell them 11 days
When they ask you
Do you have any food
in your luggage?

Don’t say no
Tell them we have a sealed package
of dates in our suitcase
When they ask what you do
Don’t say I’m an architect
Give them your exact title

Are you listening?
How many days were we away?
 11 days
Do you remember when we got married?
  A long time ago
Tell them the exact date

When they search our bags
Don’t be upset when they pull out your underwear
They’ve done it to me before
–even the dirty ones
When they hold them up high
Don’t worry
They will drop them and then you can pick them up
–but only when they tell you to
When they open my lipsticks one by one
Don’t worry, they won’t break them
I can pack them after they unpack them
When they take us into that room
Don’t worry
They will let us leave eventually
When they take away our cellphones
Don’t worry
They will give them back
When they are rude
Don’t worry
they are like that to all of us

Read more »

Citizen future: Why we need a new story of self and society

Alexander and Conrad in BBC:

The doom-laden headlines of our times would seem to indicate there are two futures on offer.

In one, an Orwellian authoritarianism prevails. Fearful in the face of compounding crises – climate, plagues, poverty, hunger – people accept the bargain of the “Strong Man”: their leader’s protection in return for unquestioning allegiance as “subjects”. What follows is the abdication of personal power, choice, or responsibility.

In the other, everyone is a “consumer” and self-reliance becomes an extreme sport. The richest have their boltholes in New Zealand and a ticket for Mars in hand. The rest of us strive to be like them, fending for ourselves as robots take jobs and as the competition for ever-scarcer resources intensifies. The benefits of technology, whether artificial intelligence, bio-, neuro- or agrotechnology, accrue to the wealthiest – as does all the power in society. This is a future shaped by the whims of Silicon Valley billionaires. While it sells itself on personal freedoms, the experience for most is exclusion: a top-heavy world of haves and haves-nots.

Yet despite the bandwidth and airwaves devoted to these twin dystopias, there’s another trajectory: we call it the “citizen future”.

More here.