Stanley Cohen in counterpunch:

“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken
.

by William Carlos Williams
from Spring and All
Robert McAlmon's Contact Publishing Co. 1923
.

Rebecca Renner at Literary Hub:

“There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” This is the surprising first sentence of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the 1962 book that arguably sparked the modern environmental movement as we know it. Rachel Carson was a naturalist and science writer whose early work focused on oceanographic conservation. Her most famous book, however, details the harm wreaked on nature and humans by the rampant use of chemical pesticides. One of Silent Spring’s lasting legacies is the grassroots environmental campaign that it stirred up, leading to, among other achievements, the phasing out of DDT in the United States in 1972.

While most people have heard of Silent Spring, even if they don’t consider themselves readers or environmentalists, many fewer have actually read it. Though it was a Book-of-the-Month pick in 1962 and serialized in The New Yorker that same year, the popular furor for the book has since died down, and it is now largely relegated to textbooks or other educational contexts.

That is why its first sentence is so surprising: Silent Spring does not read like a textbook. It begins with a fable and is filled with lyricism and passion throughout.

more here.

Tim Crane at The Point:

The familiar charge that atheism itself is a kind of religion or church is therefore deeply mistaken. Without sacred things, there is no church. But are atheists really excluded from employing some idea of the sacred? While some seem to think that they too are entitled to employ the idea of sacred things, if I am right, they are either mistaken or are using the word in a very different way. The philosopher Simon Blackburn, for example, complains about the “religious appropriation of the sacred” and says that “to regard something as sacred is to see it as marking a boundary to what may be done.” That’s true, but there are many ways of drawing boundaries without marking out the sacred: moral prohibitions and other taboos draw sharp boundaries between things to be done, but these are not necessarily between the sacred and the profane. What atheists mean by calling something sacred, normally, is that it is very precious or has some special kind of significance that goes beyond any pleasure or satisfaction it delivers in a present moment. But the notion of the sacred that I have been using is very different, since it essentially involves religious practice or ritual that “points” towards the transcendent. There can be nothing like this in an atheist’s world picture—and this is why there can be no atheist church.

more here.

Rachel Cusk at the TLS:

The voice of the Italian novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Writings from more than half a century ago read as if they have just been – in some mysterious sense are still being – composed. No context is required to read her: in fact, to read her is to realize how burdened literature frequently is by its own social and material milieux. Yet her work is not abstract or overtly philosophical: it is deeply practical and personal. You come away from it feeling that you know the author profoundly, without having very much idea of who she is.

It isn’t quite right to call these contradictions, because they are also the marks of a great artist, but in this case perhaps it is worth treating them as such, since they enabled Ginzburg to evolve techniques with which contemporary literature is only just catching up. Chief among these is her grasp of the self and of its moral function in narrative; second – a consequence of the first – is her liberation from conventional literary form and from the structures of thought and expression that Virginia Woolf likewise conjectured would have to be swept away if an authentic female literature were to be born.

more here.

Maggie Koerth-Baker in Five Thirty Eight:

If I were a witch, my Hogwarts House would be Ravenclaw. Or possibly Slytherin. It depends on what publication is directing the Harry Potter Sorting Hat’s work.

I am also a mild extrovert, my moral alignment is neutral, and the Star Wars character I’m most like is the Tauntaun Luke sleeps inside of in “Empire Strikes Back.”

Another big part of my personality: I really like online personality quizzes. Maybe you could tell.

But I’ve never really taken these tests seriously. Not even the Myers-Briggs — a test that is frequently used in professional development and hiring settings and costs $50 to take online. ($55.94 with tax. I’m an ENTP.) Call me cynical. Call me a skeptic. Call me a Ravenclaw with a dash of Slytherin. The point is, I always regarded personality quizzes as strangely addictive horse hockey, good for trading memes with friends, excellent at consuming your cash (or your employer’s — sorry, Nate), but not much more. “Astrology for nerds,” I called it. And as my colleagues and I compiled a list of the junk science we were resolved to let go of in the new year, I fully expected to be writing about how I was going to stop taking these damn things.

Instead, I get to spend 2018 immersed in a new series of personality tests — ones that are actually evidence-based and scientifically sound. That’s because, while most of the personality tests shared around the internet are, indeed, bogus procrastination devices, there is a science to personality, and it’s something that researchers really can put into a quantified, testable format, said Simine Vazire, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

The first time I came face to face with a sea lion, I nearly screamed. I was snorkeling, and after a long time spent staring down at colorful corals, I looked up to see a gigantic bull, a couple of feet in front of my mask. Its eyes were opalescent. Its long canines hinted at its close evolutionary ties to land-based predators like bears and dogs. And most unnervingly of all, it was huge.

Mammals tend to get that way when they invade the ocean. The pinnipeds—seals, sea lions, and walruses—tend to be immense blobs of muscle and blubber. The same could be said for manatees and dugongs. And whales are almost synonymous with bigness. Time and again, lineages of furry mammals have gone for a swim and over evolutionary time, they’ve ballooned in size. Why?

Most of the explanations for this trend treat the ocean as a kind of release. The water partly frees mammalian bodies from the yoke of gravity, allowing them to evolve heavy bodies that they couldn’t possibly support on land. The water unshackles them from the constraints of territory, giving them massive areas over which to forage. The water liberates them from the slim pickings of a land-based diet and offer them vast swarms of plankton, crustaceans, and fish to gorge upon.

But William Gearty from Stanford University has a very different explanation. To him, the ocean makes mammals big not because it relieves them of limits, but because it imposes new ones.

More here.

Colin Eatock in his own blog:

Among the many “breakthroughs” that have followed in the wake of Kendrick Lamar’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize for the album Damn is the fact that a hip-hop artist is now being discussed in classical music circles. “What are we to make of this development?”, various classical-music commentators, practitioners and enthusiasts are asking. Is this a good thing? Or a bad thing? Or what?

I’ve noticed that some classical types have been careful to sound respectful and inclusive when discussing this issue. Perhaps fearful of being labelled “elitist,” or hoping that just a little bit of hip-hop’s coolness might rub off on them, they praise Damn for its musical craft, sophistication and cultural authenticity, and say supportive things about Lamar’s prize-win. (See here, here or here.)

On the other hand, the permanently outraged Norman Lebrecht called the decision, “an almighty kick in the teeth of contemporary composition.” And, predictably, the decision has also coaxed some downright racist reactions out of the woodwork. I suspect that some of these outraged folks, bravely defending good taste and high standards, didn’t even know there was a Pulitzer Prize for music until Lamar won it.

As a classical guy myself (living in Toronto, Canada, by the way), I must admit that I didn’t know much about Lamar until a couple of days ago.

More here.

Alain de Botton in School of Life:

The normal way we set about trying to extend our lives is by striving to add more years to them – usually by eating more couscous and broccoli, going to bed early and running in the rain. But this approach may turn out to be quixotic, not only because Death can’t reliably be warded off with kale, but at a deeper level, because the best way to lengthen a life is not by attempting to stick more years on to its tail.

One of the most basic facts about time is that, even though we insist on measuring it as if it were an objective unit, it doesn’t, in all conditions, feel as if it were moving at the same pace. Five minutes can feel like an hour; ten hours can feel like five minutes. A decade may pass like two years; two years may acquire the weight of half a century. And so on.

In other words, our subjective experience of time bears precious little relation to the way we like to measure it on a clock. Time moves more or less slowly according to the vagaries of the human mind: it may fly or it may drag. It may evaporate into airy nothing or achieve enduring density.

If the goal is to have a longer life, whatever the dieticians may urge, it seems like the priority should not be to add raw increments of time but to ensure that whatever years remain feel appropriately substantial. The aim should be to densify time rather than to try to extract one or two more years from the fickle grip of Death.

More here.

I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party
.

In the invitation, I tell them for the seventeenth time
(the fourth in writing), that I am gay.

In the invitation, I include a picture of my boyfriend
& write, You’ve met him two times. But this time,

you will ask him things other than can you pass the
whatever. You will ask him

about him. You will enjoy dinner. You will be
enjoyable. Please RSVP.

They RSVP. They come.
They sit at the table & ask my boyfriend

the first of the conversation starters I slip them
upon arrival: How is work going?

I’m like the kid in Home Alone, orchestrating
every movement of a proper family, as if a pair

of scary yet deeply incompetent burglars
is watching from the outside.

My boyfriend responds in his chipper way.
I pass my father a bowl of fish ball soup—So comforting,

isn’t it? My mother smiles her best
Sitting with Her Son’s Boyfriend

Who Is a Boy Smile. I smile my Hurray for Doing
a Little Better Smile.

Read more »

Martin Oldham in 1843 Magazine:

Claude Monet is known and loved as a painter of light and mist, rivers and sea and water-lily ponds. It is doubtful whether he would have recognised himself as a painter of architecture. “Other painters paint a bridge, a house, a boat,” Monet said in 1895. “I want to paint the air that surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat – the beauty of the light in which they exist.” He was reasserting the Impressionist creed: it was subjective experience that mattered, not objective description. Inconsequential corners of nature were as worthy of his attention as any of humanity’s grand designs. And yet the National Gallery has launched an exhibition called “Monet & Architecture”, which argues that buildings in his paintings are an “overlooked aspect of Monet’s work.”

From INET:

Charlotte Salley in The American Scholar:

Patricia Hampl’s new book, The Art of the Wasted Day, is so delightfully nebulous—dangling somewhere between travelogue, literary criticism, memoir, and love letter, with a couple of philosophical deadlifts thrown in—that it’s worth summarizing her argument right from the get-go: reveries and daydreams are not throwaway instances that we should shrug off or snap out of. Times when we are lost in thought, far away from quotidian woes, are moments to seek out and cultivate. The central concern of her book is to show us how to do just that—how to live a life of the mind in a humdrum world.

We begin with Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler, known as the Ladies of Llangollen, who in 1778 abandoned their duties, routines, and familes in Ireland for a long life of what they called “delicious seclusion” in the Welsh countryside. For the next 50 years, they lived in solitude, savoring each other’s quiet company. Well, almost.

Having become “famous for wishing to be left alone,” as Hampl puts it, they were soon visited by the whole literary kingdom. Wordsworth, Southey, Shelley, and Byron all stopped by, as did Sir Walter Scott and Caroline Lamb. All were enchanted by the two “chatelaines of serenity” who had voluntarily rusticated themselves, eschewing the pleasures and vices of urban society. Instead, the Ladies organized their days around self-improvement activities, clocking everything by what they termed “our System”: hours for language studies, transcription, sketching, long walks, and letter writing. Reading was the centerpiece of each day. A full life, but “so still,” as Eleanor records in her journal. “So silent.”

More here.

Siri Hustvedt in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Antonio Damasio has been an influential and highly regarded neuroscientist for decades, not only in his field but beyond it. As a person who roams among disciplines, I have seen his and his frequent co-author Hanna Damasio’s work referenced by scholars from anthropology to psychology to literary studies. Damasio’s lucid and genial prose style as well as his willingness to push beyond the narrow strictures of neuroscience set his work apart from the countless other scientists who have published books on their research for the general public. Damasio has never been parochial, and he has never condescended to his audience. He writes that hard-to-write book directed at both his peers and uninitiated lay people.

In The Strange Order of Things, he sets out to do nothing less than tell the story of the evolution of mind and culture through his central, organizing theory of homeostasis. Damasio revises the classical conception of homeostasis as an organism’s internal striving for a “neutral” or “balanced” state, a kind of thermostat, for a more dynamic, optimal form of self-regulation that ensures survival. He demonstrates that the simplest life forms, such as bacteria, act under the imperative of homeostasis in self-preserving but also cooperative ways with their own kind. Bacteria are social, and their elaborate, if mindless, social existence is antecedent to (in evolutionary time) but not irrelevant to our own. Homeostasis is present in the simplest creatures, but feeling requires a more recent development in evolution: the arrival of a nervous system that allows an animal to internally map its own bodily structures and experiences.

More here.

Richard King in the Sydney Review of Books:

In 2017 the British Parliament established an official inquiry into fake news, or ‘the growing phenomenon of widespread dissemination, through social media and the internet, and acceptance as fact of stories of uncertain provenance or accuracy’ (it has recently returned from Washington, where it took evidence from tech and media bigwigs), while in January if this year the Italian government encouraged voters to report false stories through a dedicated internet portal set up ahead of last month’s elections. Facebook is now so worried about fake news – ostensibly, at any rate – that earlier this year it announced a plan to rank news sources for credibility based on feedback from users. Even the Vatican is getting in on the act, with Pope Francis using his 2018 World Communications Day address to compare fake news to the snake in the Garden of Eden – an odd choice, given that that slippery customer urged Eve to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Indeed, a cynic, or at least a sceptic, might question why the Catholic Church feels qualified to comment on fake news at all, given its record on issues ranging from the movement of the planets to creationism, not to mention its history of denial and cover-up regarding abuses of those in its charge. But these are ironies for another time …

The point is that we have now reached the stage where post-truth and fake news are so central to the political conversation that groupthink is almost bound to occur and assumptions that may indeed contain some kernel of truth become mere platitudes. One doesn’t have to employ Edenic imagery à la the current Bishop of Rome in order to lapse into ‘Golden Age’ thinking, and for journalists of a certain vintage the temptation to mistake the state of the world for the state of their own bank accounts is a standing one. (Steven Spielberg’s recent film, The Post, which your reporter took a look at here, is a fine example of this dynamic in action.) None of this is to say that we are not in different territory; it is simply to question whether the map of that territory we’ve been offered is an accurate one, and whether certain of its features remain unchartered. Are we really in a ‘post-truth era’? Is fake news a threat to democracy? What responsibility might the very people who complain loudest about these phenomena bear for their prominence in the current environment? We need, I think, to take a step back and consider these, and other, questions, before declaring an emergency. An emergency it may be; but who should we call?

More here.

Alexander Reid Ross in Haaretz:

Compare and contrast:

"We lost. War machine bombs syria. No evidence Assad did it. Sad warmongers hijacking our nation."

"Congratulations to all the war hawks and pundits and regime change propagandists who encouraged [Trump]. There is still no evidence that the [Syrian] government carried out last week’s alleged attack."

Little distinguishes these two tweets' content.

But the first is from conservative talk-radio host Michael Savage, and the second, from regular RT contributor and pro-Assad leftist Rania Khalek.

In recent months, the crossover between leftists and the far-right in defense of Syria's tyrant and Russian geopolitics has become increasingly obvious. Its implications are potentially disastrous for the course of the international left and political society in general.

More here.

Myra Bloom at The Walrus:

Such is the aura of sacredness that attaches to the High Priest of Pathos that dissident views are treated as heresy. Writer and critic Anakana Schofield said it best in an essay published a month before Cohen’s death: “Be very careful challenging opinion on Leonard Cohen, it’s like bringing up someone’s ex-partner with a mistaken warm smile on your face.” Full disclosure: as the child of two Montreal-raised Jews (one of whom is, incidentally, a Leonard), I’ve been steeped in Cohen’s music/legend since I was a zygote, and my love for him abides. Still, I think it worth considering how the posthumous focus on the “later” Cohen—whose grandfatherly, fedora-clad image towers benevolently (in duplicate!) over Montreal—obscures a more complex understanding of a man who, before he became divine, was obsessed with the flesh, and not always in ways that are palatable today.

Given that our threshold for bad male behaviour is currently sitting at an all-time low, we can surmise that Cohen’s “ladies’ man” persona—cultivated in an era when the term still connoted “romantic artist” rather than “pickup artist”—would get less traction now. By his own admission, Cohen was never “very good” at relationships: “I had a great appetite for the company of women,” he said in a 2005 interview. “[But] I wasn’t very good at the things that a woman wanted” (read: fidelity).

more here.

Jesse Alejandro Cottrell at Harper's Magazine:

Since the turn of the decade, the state of Veracruz has suffered some of Mexico’s worst violence, as several drug cartels, including Los Zetas and Jalisco Nueva Generación, have fought to control the state’s lucrative smuggling routes north to the United States. The most reliable estimates put the number of people murdered in Mexico due to organized crime at 80,000 since 2006, and the number of people disappeared at over 30,000, though many deaths and disappearances stay off the record. In 2013, it was reported that police were not notified of as many as 98 percent of disappearances over the previous year. Even when they are notified, government investigations lag far behind. Jorge Winckler, the state prosecutor, found that agents in Veracruz were only looking into about two-thirds of disappearance cases.

The men and women gathered in Córdoba for the forensics workshop were members of a group called Solecito that was formed on WhatsApp in 2014 by a Veracruz mother who had lost her son. She selected a sun to be the icon for the text thread—a bright spot in the darkness—and invited other parents of missing children to share emotional support.

more here.