The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica

Presiding over a formica counter,
plastic Mother and Child magnetized
to the top of an ancient register,
the heady mix of smells from the open bins
of dried codfish, the green plantains
hanging in stalks like votive offerings,
she is the Patroness of Exiles,
a woman of no-age who was never pretty,
who spends her days selling canned memories
while listening to the Puerto Ricans complain
that it would be cheaper to fly to San Juan
than to buy a pound of Bustelo coffee here,
and to Cubans perfecting their speech
of a “glorious return” to Havana–where no one
has been allowed to die and nothing to change until then;
to Mexicans who pass through, talking lyrically
of dólares to be made in El Norte–
all wanting the comfort
of spoken Spanish, to gaze upon the family portrait
of her plain wide face, her ample bosom
resting on her plump arms, her look of maternal interest
as they speak to her and each other
of their dreams and their disillusions–
how she smiles understanding,
when they walk down the narrow aisles of her store
reading the labels of packages aloud, as if
they were the names of lost lovers; Suspiros,
Merengues, the stale candy of everyone’s childhood.
She spends her days
slicing jamón y queso and wrapping it in wax paper
tied with string: plain ham and cheese
that would cost less at the A&P, but it would not satisfy
the hunger of the fragile old man lost in the folds
of his winter coat, who brings her lists of items
that he reads to her like poetry, or the other,
whose needs she must divine, conjuring up products
from places that now exist only in their hearts–
closed ports she must trade with.

by Judith Ortiz Cofer
from Literary Paterson

Ian Black in The Guardian:

In May 1453, Ottoman military forces under Sultan Mehmed II captured the once great Byzantine capital of Constantinople, now Istanbul. It was a landmark moment. What was viewed as one of the greatest cities of Christendom, and described by the sultan as “the second Rome”, had fallen to Muslim conquerors. The sultan even called himself “caesar”.

After a lengthy siege, Mehmed rode his white horse to Hagia Sophia, the sixth-century Greek Orthodox Church of Divine Wisdom, at the time the largest building in the world. He ordered a single minaret to be added, turning it into a mosque, but refrained from remaking Constantinople as a purely Muslim city. Instead, he promoted the Sunni-dominated tolerance and diversity the Ottomans had been practising for more than a century in south-eastern Europe – long before European Christian societies tolerated their religious minorities. The new Ottoman ruling class was composed mostly of converted Christians.

Marc David Baer’s core argument in this highly readable book is that more than 600 years of the Ottoman empire should be seen as an inseparable part of the history of Europe, and not as something detached from it, as with false narratives that paint the east and west, and Christianity and Islam, as antithetical. Traditional European accounts of Ottoman rule tend to emphasise religion rather than secular matters in line with the significance attached to the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. But, as the author contends, “their story is the unacknowledged part of the story the West tells about itself.”

More here.

Tad Friend in The New Yorker:

We turn to the Internet for answers. We want to connect, or understand, or simply appreciate something—even if it’s only Joe Rogan. It’s a fraught pursuit. As the Web keeps expanding faster and faster, it’s become saturated with lies and errors and loathsome ideas. It’s a Pacific Ocean that washes up skeevy wonders from its Great Garbage Patch. We long for a respite, a cove where simple rules are inscribed in the sand.

You may have seen one advertised online, among the “weird tricks” to erase your tummy fat and your student loans. It’s MasterClass, a site that promises to disclose the secrets of everything from photography to comedy to wilderness survival. The company’s recent ad, “Lessons on Greatness. Gretzky,” encapsulates the pitch: a class taught by the greatest hockey player ever, full of insights not just for aspiring players but for anyone eager to achieve extraordinary things. In the seminar, Wayne Gretzky tells us that as a kid he’d watch games and diagram the puck’s movements on a sketch of a rink, which taught him to “skate to where the puck is gonna be.” Likewise, Martin Scorsese says in his class that he used to storyboard scenes from movies he admired, such as the chariot race in “Ben-Hur.” The idea that mastery can be achieved by attentive emulation of the masters is the site’s foundational promise. James Cameron, in his class, suggests that the path to glory consists of only one small step. “There’s a moment when you’re just a fan, and there’s a moment when you’re a filmmaker,” he assures us. “All you have to do is pick up a camera and start shooting.”

When MasterClass launched, in 2015, it offered three courses: Dustin Hoffman on acting, James Patterson on writing, and Serena Williams on tennis. Today, there are a hundred and thirty, in categories from business to wellness. During the pandemic lockdown, demand was up as much as tenfold from the previous year; last fall, when the site had a back-to-school promotion, selling an annual subscription for a dollar instead of a hundred and eighty dollars, two hundred thousand college students signed up in a day. MasterClass will double in size this year, to six hundred employees, as it launches in the U.K., France, Germany, and Spain. It’s a Silicon Valley investor’s dream, a rolling juggernaut of flywheels and network effects dedicated to helping you, as the instructor Garry Kasparov puts it, “upgrade your software.”

The classes are crammed with pro tips and are often highly entertaining. Neil Gaiman explains the comfort and tedium of genre fiction by noting that, in such stories, the plot exists only to prevent all the shoot-outs and cattle stampedes from happening at the same time. Serena Williams advises playing the backhands of big-chested women, because “larger boobs” hinder shoulder rotation. And the singer St. Vincent observes that the artist’s job is to metabolize shame.

More here.

Nicholas Utzig in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In the last chapter of his first book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, Spencer Ackerman reminds his readers of Bernie Sanders’s June 2019 assertion: “There is a straight line from the decision to reorient U.S. national-security strategy around terrorism after 9/11 to placing migrant children in cages on our southern border.”

But Ackerman takes the analysis further in both directions, charting a path from Timothy McVeigh’s April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City to the insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.

More here.

Samuel Loncar at Marginalia Review:

Academics use the category of magic, well, often magically, to dismiss the phenomenon they are studying, to banish the subject matter from living contact with their present reality. Ancient philosophy is over there, good and dead, and we enlightened modern philosophers and scholars are over here, living, present, pristine and modern, washed clean of ancient superstitions. But magic is rather sticky, hard to wash off from the hands or the delicate underside of the modern mind, to which it clings like a sinister visitor who has always arrived, but is still waiting to announce itself.

Whether we believe in magic or not, whether we honor names or not, names are magical and magical are our names. They are magical because we answer to them, and through them make the world answerable to us. Try just inventing a name that “sticks.”

more here.

Ed Simon at The Millions:

Take the word “understand;” in daily communication we rarely parse it’s implications, but the word itself is a spatial metaphor. Linguist Guy Deutscher explains in The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention how “understand,” derived from the Middle English understanden, itself from the Anglo-Saxon understandan, and ultimately from the Proto-Germanic understandana. “The verb ‘understand’ itself may be a brittle old skeleton by now,” Deutscher writes, “but its origin is till obvious: under-stand originally must have meant something like ‘step under,’ perhaps rather like the image in the phrase ‘get to the bottom of.’” Such spatial language is common, with Deutscher listing “the metaphors that English speakers use today as synonyms: we talk of grasping the sense, catching the meaning, getting the point, following an explanation, cottoning on to an idea, seeing the difficulty.” The word “comprehend” itself is a metaphor, with an etymology in the Latin word prehendere, which means “to seize.” English has a propensity to those sorts of metaphors, foreign loan words from Anglo-Saxon, Frisian, and Norman; Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish; Abenaki, Wolof, and Urdu, which don’t announce themselves as metaphors precisely because of their foreignness—and yet that rich vein of the figurative runs through everything. Dan Paterson gives two examples in his voluminous study The Poem, explaining how a word as common as “tunnel” is from the “Medieval English tonel, a wide-mouthed net used to trap birds, so its first application to ‘subterranean passage’ will have been metaphorical—and would inevitably have carried the connotation ‘trap’ for a little while.”

more here.

Aaron Benanav in The Nation:

For the longest part of our history, humans lived as hunter-gatherers who neither experienced economic growth nor worried about its absence. Instead of working many hours each day in order to acquire as much as possible, our nature—insofar as we have one—has been to do the minimum amount of work necessary to underwrite a good life.

This is the central claim of the South African anthropologist James Suzman’s new book, Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, in which he asks whether we might learn to live like our ancestors did—that is, to value free time over money. Answering that question takes him on a 300-millennium journey through humanity’s existence.

More here.

Peter H. Schuck in Quillette:

Sometimes our most precious cultural institutions fail to live up to their high educational and moral commitments and responsibilities. These failures especially damage the social fabric because they tend to harm many people who rely on them and tarnish the high ideals that the institutions claim to exemplify.

An incident in early October involving MIT, a jewel in world academia’s crown, presents an especially egregious instance of this institutional failing, aggravated by that university’s cowardice in the face of intimidation and threats by self-righteous students and their faculty allies. MIT had invited Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago geophysicist, to deliver the prestigious John Carlson Lecture on climate and the potential of life on other planets—a topic on which Abbot is a recognized expert. Unfortunately for Abbot and his intended audience, however, he had recently committed the campus equivalent of hara-kiri by taking seriously the norms of academic freedom which MIT and other schools claim to cherish.

More here.

The Poem of Chalk

On the way to lower Broadway
this morning I faced a tall man
speaking to a piece of chalk
held in his right hand. The left
was open, and it kept the beat,
for his speech had a rhythm,
was a chant or dance, perhaps
even a poem in French, for he
was from Senegal and spoke French
so slowly and precisely that I
could understand as though
hurled back fifty years to my
high school classroom. A slender man,
elegant in his manner, neatly dressed
in the remnants of two blue suits,
his tie fixed squarely, his white shirt
spotless though unironed. He knew
the whole history of chalk, not only
of this particular piece, but also
the chalk with which I wrote
my name the day they welcomed
me back to school after the death
of my father. He knew feldspar,
he knew calcium, oyster shells, he
knew what creatures had given
their spines to become the dust time
pressed into these perfect cones,
he knew the sadness of classrooms
in December when the light fails
early and the words on the blackboard
abandon their grammar and sense
and even their shapes so that
each letter points in every direction
at once and means nothing at all.
At first I thought his short beard
was frosted with chalk, as we stood
face to face, no more than a foot
apart. I saw the hairs were white,
for though youthful in his gestures
he was, like me, an aging man, though
far nobler in appearance with his high
carved cheekbones, his broad shoulders,
and clear dark eyes. He had the bearing
of a king of lower Broadway, someone
out of the mind of Shakespeare or
Garcia Lorca, someone for whom loss
had sweetened into charity. We stood
for that one long minute, the two
of us sharing the final poem of chalk
while the great city raged around
us, and then the poem ended, as all
poems do, and his left hand dropped
to his side abruptly and he handed
me the piece of chalk. I bowed,
knowing how large a gift this was
and wrote my thanks on the air
where it might be heard forever
below the sea shell’s stiffening cry.

by Philip Levine
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

Mathew Lyons in New Humanist:

We don’t know his real name. In early inscriptions it appears as Yhw, Yhwh, or simply Yh; but we don’t know how it was spoken. He has come to be known as Yahweh. Perhaps it doesn’t matter; by the third century BCE his name had been declared unutterable. We know him best as God.

God, as he is now understood by monotheistic religions, wasn’t always a singular deity. When Sargon II of Assyria conquered Israel in the eighth century BCE, he described seizing statues of “the gods in whom they trusted”. Who were these other gods – and what was Yahweh to them? Thanks to second-millennium BCE texts from the Syrian city-state Ugarit, we know that Yahweh was once a minor storm god of a wild, mountainous region south of the Negev desert. He was part of a large pantheon of Levantine gods headed by the patriarch El and his consort Athirat.

El, not Yahweh, was most likely the first god of the people of Israel. But early in the first millennium BCE, Yahweh displaced him. This Yahweh is the god whom Francesca Stavrakopoulou – professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient religion at the university of Exeter – anatomises. He is not the perfect, abstract, immaterial being of modern conception; his is a visceral presence with an all too corporeal reality and many of the flaws that flesh is heir to.

He is very much made in the image of man. In texts, he is described as having radiant and red-hued skin, a ruddy complexion being an ancient marker of divine power, virility and strength. His beard is long but carefully groomed, and his hair is curled, black and lustrous. The older, white-haired god with whom we are more familiar is the creation of the prophet Daniel, writing in the second century BCE. At first, Yahweh was not entirely man-like, however. “God, who brought [Israel] out of Egypt, has horns like a wild ox!” the prophet Balaam exclaims in the Book of Numbers, the fourth book of the Hebrew Bible. In some early temples he was represented by golden statues of a divine bull.

More here.

Melinday Moyer in Scientific American:

The body’s constellation of gut bacteria has been linked with various aging-associated illnesses, including cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Now a study has found that aging itself is associated with microbiome changes, and that these alterations are distinct from those connected to diseases or medication use. The findings raise the possibility that shifts in gut bacteria help drive the aging process—and that protecting these microbes could help people lead longer, healthier lives.

In the new study, published in Cell Reports on September 28, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles sampled bacteria from the small intestines of 251 people between the ages of 18 and 80 who were undergoing upper endoscopies, when a doctor sticks a small probe down the throat and past the stomach. Usually, researchers study gut bacteria through stool samples. But those microbes, coming from the very end of the bowel, can be quite different from bacteria in the small intestine, closer to the stomach. That’s where most digestion and nutrient absorption occurs. “All the magic happens in the small intestine,” says study co-author Mark Pimentel, a gastroenterologist at Cedars-Sinai.

After analyzing the samples, the researchers found that aging was linked with changes in bacterial populations. Older people had more bacteria from the families Enterococcaceae, Lactobacillaceae, Enterobacteriaceae and genus Bacteroides, “and those are all groups of bacteria that can cause disease in humans,” says Heidi J. Zapata, an infectious disease specialist and immunologist at the Yale School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. E. coli bacteria, which belong to the Enterococcaceae family, for instance, can cause diarrhea and urinary tract infections. Overall bacteria diversity also declined as people got older, going down as people headed towards age 80. Low diversity has been linked to health problems too, Pimentel says. Studies have found a relationship between low bacterial diversity and Crohn’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome and colorectal cancer, among other conditions.

More here.

An excerpt from Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse in Scroll.in:

To this day nobody knows exactly what transpired in Selamon on that April night, in the year 1621, except that a lamp fell to the floor in the building where Martijn Sonck, a Dutch official, was billeted.

Selamon is a village in the Banda archipelago, a tiny cluster of islands at the far southeastern end of the Indian Ocean. The settlement is located at the northern end of Lonthor, which is also sometimes referred to as Great Banda (Banda Besar) because it is the largest island in the cluster. “Great” is a somewhat extravagant epithet for an island that is only two and a half miles in length and half a mile in width – but then, that isn’t an insignificant size in an archipelago so minute that on most maps it is marked only by a sprinkling of dots.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

People are most likely to die of extreme cold in Sub-Saharan Africa, and most likely to die of extreme heat in Greenland, Norway, and various very high mountains. You’re reading that right – the cold deaths are centered in the warmest areas, and vice versa.

This has got to all be wrong, right? 10% of Africans freezing to death, a substantial number of Greenlanders dying of the heat? The paper doesn’t have any answers. It just presents its mathematical model and runs away. So what’s going on?

More here.

Yascha Mounk in Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: I’ve just read a draft of your next book. Though there have been many defenses of liberalism in the last few years, there haven’t been any so far which I felt made the thoughtful but also full-throated defense of liberalism that we need. But in my opinion, your book succeeds.

What is this tradition called liberalism?

Francis Fukuyama: It’s a really old doctrine. And I think there are several reasons that it’s been around for such a long time: A pragmatic, political reason; a moral reason; and then there’s a very powerful economic one.

The practical one, I think, is one that we’ve lost sight of, which is that liberalism is really a doctrine meant to deal with diversity. When people really don’t agree on some fundamental issues, how do you get them to live peacefully with one another? That’s related to liberalism’s origin: It came out of the wars of religion in Europe following the Protestant Reformation, when Protestants and Catholics spent 150 years killing each other. And the founders of liberalism basically said, “Look, if we’re going to base a society on some religious doctrine of some particular sect, we’re never going to live in peace, because nobody agrees on those. And so let’s detune politics and agree that we all need to live together and push religion into the private sphere. So you can worship whatever you want, but you’re not going to impose it on anyone else.”

More here.

the first creation story i every heard

goes like this: in the beginning, there was no light.
everything that existed was a deep sleep.
a mother stirs in the long night she rears, and names it absence.
from absence, she makes two sons, one son makes man, another
makes war. man makes a sword, makes la ballista, makes gunpowder,
and kills the sons, kills the mother. it is from their blood you are given
genesis, mission, decimation, and the colonial church. after a few hundred years
you are given an american flag, no generators, a tin roof, and paper towels
…. for a flood.
*
the word hurricane is taino- from hurakán, phonetic descendent of Juracan:
god of the storm, second self-willed son, who brought his chaos to the west.
summers of rage, i remember. calabash tree through kitchen window, no
…. running water.
a drowned shore, dead fish fetid and bleaching under an exiled sun. remember,
…. how luis
died stepping on a live wire? i read somewhere that electricity is just lightning
…. pretending 
to be permanent, maybe it is the same for the storm. maybe it is the same for
…. the flood.
remember, remember, the cries and himnos in the dark of those forty nights?
*
“you are native before you are american,” is one of the few things i can recall
…. my father telling me.
i thought this meant being tapped into a primordial grief. my displaced rage, my
…. native guard.
inside me, an acreage and an armada of ships, of men waged from absence. what
…. i wage
is far worse. after all, it was i who inherited the sleeplessness, the torrent, the flag,
…. the gun
tossed into the sea. it was i who fashioned this great loneliness, who threw my
…. arms around
each wandering son i loved and whispered “ven a casa.” come home to a place
…. that cannot
exist again. cariño, natiao, tell me where will you run from the powers that come
to thrash and skin and bleed you?
*
i open for a lover against the seawall of a river named mantazas. spanish for massacre.
a few close centuries ago, hundreds of shipwrecked men lined themselves along
…. this shore
and presented their necks. we grow along these estuaries of blood.
i salvage what i can at the edge of a mouth, at the ellipse
of a body, water racking the skin of my many griefs. i became what birthed me,
with a storm in the passage of my throat.

the story will end how it begins: a long night, a woman labored
with the first emptiness. she writhes, opening her mouth, expelling light.

by Lauren Licona
from Muzzle Magazine (reading here)
Spring 2021

Steven G. Kellman at The American Scholar:

The life and work of Stephen Crane derived gravity from brevity. Not one of his novels is much more than a hundred pages long, and they and his short stories strip language to its potent minimum. Crane’s short but prodigious life—he died, of tuberculosis, five months before his 29th birthday—observed the same concision. His hold on the public imagination has also lacked longevity. Crane’s most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), is no longer required reading in American schools, and his other greatest hits—Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), “The Open Boat” (1897), The Monster (1898), “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1898), and “The Blue Hotel” (1898)—have fallen out of the cultural conversation.

Novelist Paul Auster aims his new book about Crane at “those who know little or nothing about him,” which, apart from a small cadre of scholars, is the entire species lector americanus. Describing his subject as a “burning boy of rare preciousness who was blocked from entering the fullness of adulthood,” he invites the reader to share his own intense reactions to Crane’s writing and the twists and turns of the man’s abbreviated career.

more here.