Visiting My Mother’s Wars

My father has taken to dosing my mother with melatonin at night.
Or she would rise at 3 to watch TV and later, after dinner, not know him.

My mother stands pointing at all the flowers gone to the deer;
look at that, they took everything, all of it, even that,
she pokes one final time at a bed of moss roses.

She calls me to the vegetable garden, protected by chicken wire
and points look at that, nothing is growing this year,
it’s awful then tears out the cucumber.

Later, hands on hips, where’s your father? “In the garage,” I say
and her eyes narrow, and suspicious, she calls upstairs,
Bob?! You up there? Bob? He’s always disappearing.

She sits in front of a stack of books, Ugh, there are no good
books anymore. I don’t like any of these, none of them,
even the authors I used to love. What’s for dinner? Soup?

What’s for dinner? I look up from my book, “I think Dad is grilling.”
He thinks he’s boss now. She sits on the couch, arms folded,
What’s for dinner? I can defrost Minestrone.

When she’s not looking, I replant the cucumbers and point,
“Look at how good they are doing, it’s only June.”
My father secretly checks and double checks the stove.

After I’m gone, my mother tells my father that her ex-husband loved cars
and his garage was filled with them. He takes her hand,
says, “That’s me. I’m the only one.”

by E.A. Wilberton
from Rattle #75, Spring 2022

Rachel Moran in Psyche:

While it is fashionable for some female academics, journalists and social commentators to declare the validity of prostitution as employment and to endorse and support this fiction in their books, articles and opinion columns, I note that they resolutely will not practise what they preach. They are not usually willing to have their own bodies used to prove their point. What’s always been particularly galling to me about socially privileged upper middle-class women who popularise these views is that, just like Marie Antoinette before them, they are so far removed from the experience that they cannot relate to it even at a conceptual level. That they are handsomely remunerated to opine on what’s good enough for desperate women is just the spit and polish on the insult.

The philosopher Amia Srinivasan in The Right to Sex (2021) writes: ‘Third-wave feminists are right to say, for example, that sex work is work, and can be better work than the menial work undertaken by most women.’ I wonder if she has reflected on what that really means: that the female cleaning staff who mop floors and scrub toilets in the University of Oxford, her place of employment, could be better off with their mouths and vaginas full of strangers’ penises. If she stopped to offer this advice to one of the cleaning staff passing in the hallway, she’d be hauled up for inappropriate conduct.

More here.

Pratik Pawar in Undark:

When the World Health Organization approved a malaria vaccine for the first time in October 2021, it was widely hailed as a milestone. “This is a historic moment,” said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a statement that month.

The vaccine — dubbed RTS,S — promises a 30 percent reduction in severe malaria in fully vaccinated children. In 2020, a research team estimated that each year, the vaccine could prevent between 3 and 10 million malaria cases, and save the lives of 14,000 to 51,000 small children, depending on how it’s implemented.

What those plaudits often failed to note, though, was that the core ingredient of the path-breaking vaccine was actually almost 35 years old — and that researchers have known since the late 1990s that the formula was probably somewhat effective at protecting against malaria.

At a time when Covid-19 vaccines were developed and authorized in less than one year, the delay for malaria raises a question: Why did a vaccine for a leading global killer take so long to arrive?

More here.

Daniel Driscoll and Mark Blyth at the Heinrich Böll Stiftung:

This paper links two things that are often dealt with separately when discussing what we mean by the word “just” in the notion of a “just transition”. On the one hand, activists and reformers – especially those promoting the United States (US) version of the Green New Deal (GND) – see this as an opportunity to empower marginalised populations and redistribute wealth-generating assets using the state in the form of green industrial policy. On the other hand lies private finance, especially in the form of asset managers, who own huge swathes of global companies. Their investment decisions are critical to the transition, but they have no intention of allowing such a redistribution of assets and power. Indeed, they see the function of the state as using its balance sheet to insure private investors against losses. We use these competing notions of “just” as a way to discuss how we can have a transition that leverages the investments of the private sector without once again simply giving capital everything it wants at the expense of everyone else.

More here.

Diana Kwon in Nature:

The brain is the body’s sovereign, and receives protection in keeping with its high status. Its cells are long-lived and shelter inside a fearsome fortification called the blood–brain barrier. For a long time, scientists thought that the brain was completely cut off from the chaos of the rest of the body — especially its eager defence system, a mass of immune cells that battle infections and whose actions could threaten a ruler caught in the crossfire. In the past decade, however, scientists have discovered that the job of protecting the brain isn’t as straightforward as they thought. They’ve learnt that its fortifications have gateways and gaps, and that its borders are bustling with active immune cells.

A large body of evidence now shows that the brain and the immune system are tightly intertwined. Scientists already knew that the brain had its own resident immune cells, called microglia; recent discoveries are painting more-detailed pictures of their functions and revealing the characteristics of the other immune warriors housed in the regions around the brain. Some of these cells come from elsewhere in the body; others are produced locally, in the bone marrow of the skull. By studying these immune cells and mapping out how they interact with the brain, researchers are discovering that they play an important part in both healthy and diseased or damaged brains. Interest in the field has exploded: there were fewer than 2,000 papers per year on the subject in 2010, swelling to more than 10,000 per year in 2021, and researchers have made several major findings in the past few years.

More here.

Naib Mian in The New Yorker:

In 2019, two Persian paintings sold in a private-auction house, in London, for roughly eight hundred thousand pounds each. The paintings were illuminated manuscripts, or “miniature” paintings, and they belonged to the same book: a fifteenth-century edition of the Nahj al-Faradis, which narrates Muhammad’s journey through the layers of heaven and hell. The original book, once an artistic masterpiece, had been ripped apart, reduced to sixty lavish images. Bound, the manuscript was likely worth a few million pounds; dismembered, its contents have sold for more than fifty million.

The dismembering of manuscripts is part of a larger story, a tale of extractive patronage and the passage of empires. The term “miniature” is a colonial creation, a catchall category for a diverse array of figurative paintings that emerged in modern-day Iran, Turkey, and Central and South Asia. During imperial rule, most illuminated manuscripts were claimed by private collections and museums in Europe, where many still reside in storage, effectively erased. (In 1994, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran had to trade a de Kooning in order to repatriate part of a sixteenth-century manuscript.) The craft, too, was diminished. When colonial schools taught the “fine arts,” manuscript painting was neglected. Even after independence, Pakistan’s premier art academy, the National College of Arts, emphasized Western traditions.

By the time the artist Shahzia Sikander arrived at the N.C.A., in 1987, manuscript painting was seen as kitsch. But, on campus, Sikander was introduced to Bashir Ahmed, one of the few artists linked to the craft’s legacy.

More here.

Desert Soul

I went there to empty out,

pour out the past like dust,

let the wind have its way.

In that near-dead world

I sprouted eyes like a lizard.

How far I was from the pharma-psychology

of civilization!

Just a dot on the horizon,

breathing in the air.

.
by Walt Burnham
6/1/22

Maria Popova at Brain Pickings:

“I’m stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all,” poet Diane Ackerman wrote in her sublime Cosmic Pastoral, “the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else.”

This continues to strike me as a fine way to go through life — perhaps the finest: wonder-smitten by reality, in all its dazzling interleavings.

It strikes me, too, as the deepest fundament of creativity — this willingness to look for and look at, really look at, the totality of being and to see, as Whitman did, that each of us, every ephemeral living thing, is a “kosmos” containing all “races, eras, dates, generations, the past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together”; to see this and, as Virginia Woolf did in that rapturous moment when she realized what it means to be an artist, “have a shock”; to make of that shock something that shimmers with the wonder of existence — that transcendent something we call art.

more here.

Tom Hennigan at The Dublin Review of Books:

What I take from this is not so much that Power is a radical but rather that he believes style is not a substitute for ideas, nor should it be used as an evasive measure to obscure areas of darkness or deployed as a bully in debate. His own clear prose works hard at allowing him to do some expansive thinking in what is still a concise amount of space. In the longer essays various big ideas (example: the Apocalypse) are explored in some depth with a lot of ground crisply covered in relatively few pages.

If his style is clear so is his thinking. Now a university professor, he is versed in the culture wars that consume the humanities, but academia is not his audience here. There is no jargon. In “Pretentiously Opaque” he has good fun laughing at literary theory (“Of course, mocking cherry-picked gobbets of fatuous prose is one of the cheapest tactics available to the enemy of Theory”).

more here.

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

We have probably all seen images from Goya’s so-called Black Paintings whether we realize it or not. The image known as Saturn Devouring His Son (Goya did not title these works, the titles came from later art historians) is especially ubiquitous. The painting depicts the ancient Greek and Roman mythological story in which Saturn (Kronos in the Greek) eats his own children. You’ll remember that there was a prophecy. One of the children of Saturn would overthrow him. Saturn’s solution to this problem was to eat all the children. This worked for a time, until, inevitably, it did not. But that is another story.

In this painting by Goya we see Saturn in all his horrifying, polyphagous glory. The scene is rendered in muddy colors: ochre, brown, black and gray. The figure of Saturn emerges from the darkness and murk, grasping the torso of his son with clenching hands. Saturn has already bitten off the head and is gnawing now on the left arm. There is a certain stringiness of bloody flesh and sinew as Saturn chews and pulls. The scene is awful. And what makes it worse is the look on Saturn’s face. He, too, looks terrified. Wide-eyed, wild-eyed, Saturn gazes directly at the viewer of the scene, as if begging us to intervene in some way, or, perhaps, simply to go away.

More here.

Stuart Ritchie in his Substack newsletter:

Imagine you heard a scientist saying the following:

I’m being paid massive consultation fees by a pharmaceutical company who want the results of my research to turn out in one specific way. And that’s a good thing. I’m proud of my conflicts of interest. I tell all my students that they should have conflicts if possible. On social media, I regularly post about how science is inevitably conflicted in one way or another, and how anyone criticising me for my conflicts is simply hopelessly naive.

I hope this would at least cause you to raise an eyebrow. And that’s because, whereas this scientist is right that conflicts of interest of some kind are probably inevitable, conflicts are a bad thing.

More here.

Nic Johnson and Robert Manduca in the Boston Review:

On or around 1939 debates about international political economy changed. Over the course of the Cold War, economic nationalism—the attempt to use the state to advance a country’s economic interests—was crowded out of official discourse by two competing universalisms, communism on one side and liberalism on the other. Over the last few decades, however, this opposition has been scrambled. First Marxist universalism failed; the Sino-Soviet split fractured the communist project before the USSR collapsed altogether. Then, after a brief period in the sun on the international stage, liberal universalism too began to falter in a declining arc from Iraq and the Global Financial Crisis to Donald Trump’s victory on an “America First” platform.

In the wake of these declensions, two political economic developments have muddied the earlier Cold War waters. In October last year the Biden administration announced that it would leave tariffs on two-thirds of Chinese exports intact. This came as a surprise for those who were hoping that Trump administration policies were pathological aberrations. Trade wars, it seems, have come to enjoy bipartisan support, in the unlikeliest of places—the ostensible headquarters of neoliberal globalization.

More here.

The Journey Back

Larkin’s shade surprised me. He quoted Dante:

“Daylight was going and the umber air
Soothing every creature on the earth,
Freeing them from their labors everywhere.

I alone was girding myself to face
The ordeal of my journey and my duty
And not a thing had changed, as rush-hour buses

Bore the drained and laden through the city.
I might have been a wise king setting out

Under the Christmas lights—except that

It felt more like a forewarned journey back
Into the heartland of the ordinary.
Still my old self. Ready to knock one back.

A nine-to-five man who had seen poetry.

by Seamus Heaney
from Seeing Things
Faber & Faber, 1991

John Konicki and James Pethokoukis at The New Atlantis:

For more than a half-century, America has been a world leader in space, from the space race of the 1960s to the shuttle to numerous deep space probes. But this leadership has often been reluctant — and in tension with a public that has been at best ambivalent and at worst outright opposed to endeavors to explore the universe. Many Americans have little interest in space and would prefer to spend money addressing problems down on Earth. This lack of public support may be why America hasn’t returned to the Moon since the Apollo 17 astronauts lifted off from it in 1972. And so the U.S. space program has yet to achieve its full potential. Despite their love of stories that promote visions of humanity as a space-faring species — such as Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey — Americans haven’t cared enough about the cosmos to fulfill these ambitions.

However, the public space program may be on the cusp of a renaissance.

more here.

Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker:

On a rainy afternoon in mid-April, the singer and songwriter Angel Olsen steered a Subaru through Asheville, North Carolina, while a cardboard box of VHS tapes clattered in the back seat. Olsen, who is thirty-five, had recently excavated them from her childhood home, in St. Louis. Some promised footage of significant events—“Angel’s Graduation,” “Angel’s First Day of Preschool”—and others were labelled “the pokemon” and “world premiere dark horizon.” After pulling up at a video-restoration shop, Olsen did some hasty sorting in the parking lot, trying to decide which tapes were worth dusting off with a tissue and which ones she could toss. Olsen, who was adopted when she was three years old, has spent much of the past two years figuring out what to hold on to and what to surrender. In 2021, her adoptive mother and father died two months apart (her mother, from heart failure, at age seventy-eight; her father, in his sleep, at eighty-nine), shortly after she realized and told them she was gay. Ever since, Olsen has been sifting through the material and psychological aftermath.

more here.

Harmony Holiday in Bookforum:

RICHARD WILLIAMS DEMANDS GLORY. The pursuit of glory is revised madness, the ambition of addicts, to get so high they collapse, and are forced to repeat the ascent as if for the first time. It’s preemptive repentance disguised as innocent yearning to win. You have to need vindication to need victory so desperately. Richard Williams is looking for redemption. In a scene from a 1990s video of Richard, father of tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams, we see him genuflecting on a tennis court in Compton, California, in front of a shopping cart full of tennis balls—the ground swells with them. He’s gathering the splayed balls and placing them into red plastic milk crates with the reverence of a praise dancer. What altar is this? A shrine of crumbling adobe, chalk, felt, and plastic. What utter fixation on the unglamorous, what risk of a dedication with no yield? What we know now turns the pathos in Richard’s gesture here into dramatic irony. The menial duties of this father intent on training his daughters to be the best athletes in the world will be redeemed. He will not kneel and scour the ground for these fuzzy green chess pieces in vain.

Richard has a scar on his shin from where an iron nail was hammered into it by disgruntled whites in his Louisiana hometown when he was just a kid; they were disgruntled because he refused to call them “mister.” A phantom crucifixion seems to trail him. His preemptive penitence is a constant—it seeps into the texture of his presence, into the way he corrects his daughters’ stance during daily practices, his curt benevolence and pent-up rage transmuted by infinite patience.

More here.