The Carpet Merchant

Wary as an animal she sniffs the air
enters the color of wounds, shadows
of crushed aubergine, the cedar dark
where fretted shutters jigsaw the blazing light.

Outside the cries of saffron vendors
fade, the clatter of the bazaar
where fair-haired English teachers
flirt with traders for Turkish delight.

Elegant he sits her on soft cushions
nods to the olive boy to bring her cayi
and limpid apple tea, clicks his fingers
to conduct the symphony of rugs.

which unroll like prayers, The knots
are looped and dropped, he explains,
for perfection belongs to Allah.
He offers her weaves of indigo,

faded of cochineal, where trellises
of butterflies symbolize the transience
of love, and corrugated arcs a nomad's
thirst for waves. he tells her this was

his father's house. How as children
they jumped naked to the sea from the carved
balcony, as he pushes to the shutter,
brushing a cool hand against her white shoulder.
.

by Sue Hubbard
from Everything Begins with the Skin
Enitharmon Press, 1994

Charlotte Shane at Bookforum:

Anesthesia has been around for over 170 years, and in spite of its inherent drama it’s impressively nonlethal. Current estimates place the death toll at about one in two hundred thousand or even one in three hundred thousand, which means—according to the earnest nonprofit the National Safety Council—that you or I are more likely to die from insect stings, “excessive natural heat,” or “contact with sharp objects” than either of us is from being put under. Properly supervised anesthesia is not only exceedingly safe but also ubiquitous, and necessary for a slew of lifesaving and life-improving procedures. Yet in these heady days of organic, “toxin”-free lifestyle goals, wariness of medical convention abounds. People rush to point out that we (“we” meaning doctors, which “we” usually aren’t) don’t really know how anesthesia works, thereby implying that it’s fundamentally suspect. There are movements in opposition to advances like vaccines and hormonal birth control, so it makes sense that anesthesia, too, with its murky chemical magic, would be a source of unease.

Because anesthesia is unlikely to cause death outright, the case against it goes more or less as follows: It’s mysterious and it’s scary. The former is posited as the reason for the latter, but even if there were a flawless explanation for how anesthesia works, we’d still be disconcerted—it strips us of our awareness, movement, speech, and senses.

more here.

Kelly Servick in Science:

Drug-resistant bacteria are thwarting the world’s last-resort antibiotics, leading scientists to seek new compounds from poisonous frogs, backyard soil bacteria, and other wildlife. Now, scientists have found the makings of an exceptional microbe killer inside us: By tweaking a naturally occurring peptide—a short chain of amino acids—found in the human body, researchers have designed a drug that could wipe out obstinate microbes resistant to all available treatments. The candidate, now headed to human trials for skin infections, adds “an important piece … to the puzzle of creating a perfect antibiotic,” says Kim Lewis, a microbiologist at Northeastern University in Boston who was not involved in the work. When a small subset of bacteria survives antibiotic treatment, an infection can get out of control fast. As these resilient microbes thrive, they can group together on a surface—like a wound or a medical device—and encase themselves in a slimy protective layer known as a biofilm. Such colonies are hard for drugs to penetrate, and they harbor dormant cells called persisters that can quietly weather an antibiotic assault only to come roaring back later. Such infections “are the really nasty things for patients,” says immunologist Peter Nibbering at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

Nibbering and a team of Dutch collaborators are trying to combat these biofilm-associated infections by improving on a human peptide called LL-37, which helps regulate the body’s immune response. LL-37 already has some natural bacteria-killing abilities, and the researchers previously shortened the peptide to make a more powerful variant, consisting of 24 of the 37 original amino acids. In the new work, they optimized this peptide by making a series of random replacements to its building blocks without disrupting its overall structure. One variation, dubbed SAAP-148, proved a powerful little weapon, the team reports online today in Science Translational Medicine. Whereas most traditional antibiotics target specific groups of bacteria and kill by disrupting key mechanisms of those microbes, SAAP-148 is more of a generalist. It kills by damaging most any bacterium’s plasma membrane, causing it to spill its contents and deflate.

More here.

Danny Heitman in the Weekly Standard:

In a career that spanned the first half of the 20th century, Henry Louis Mencken became not only one of America’s most memorable prose stylists, but also one of its most prolific ones.

Mencken (1880-1956) led many literary lives, often several at once. He began newspapering in his native Baltimore in 1899, quickly rising from a reporter to an editor and columnist. His bombastic commentaries for the Baltimore Sun gained attention far beyond his hometown, and his work for the Smart Set and the American Mercury affirmed his national profile as the dominant social critic of the 1920s. Mencken wrote about politics, music, drama, and literature, collecting his best essays in Prejudices, a series of six volumes that rests at the heart of his oeuvre. But there was so much more: memoirs, books on theology, ethics, the state of the American woman, and a mammoth philological study called The American Language. The thousands of letters he wrote to everyone from Theodore Dreiser to Ezra Pound to F. Scott Fitzgerald are their own monument to industry.

Mencken once estimated that he had published some 10 to 15 million words in various venues—a stream of production cut short by a 1948 stroke that deprived him of the ability to write. He lingered another eight years, though he casually suggested to British journalist Alistair Cooke that he traced the real time of his death to the year his typewriter fell silent.

But Mencken was much too prodigious a talent to let a small inconvenience like mortality get in the way of his literary legacy. In the more than six decades since his passing, a steady stream of Mencken material has continued to appear for the first time in book form, most of it drawn from his journalism.

More here.

Kastalia Medrano in Newsweek:

A topical gel for the treatment of erectile dysfunction is delivering explosive results through a key ingredient—nitroglycerin, the same substance found in dynamite.

Researchers at the University College Hospital in London and various other United Kingdom medical centers tested the product on a total of 220 male participants, according to the International Business Times. They found that after applying a small amount of the gel (a blob roughly the size of a pea) nearly half of the male participants studied reported getting an erection within five minutes, and 70 percent within 10 minutes—making the gel 12 times faster than industry standard Viagra, according to the Deccan Chronicle.

Erectile dysfunction affects about 40 percent of American men over the age of 40, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Viagra and its impotence-relieving peers, such as Cialis and Levitra, are consumed in pill form and generally take around 30 minutes to an hour to produce any results. Even then, they remain ineffective for approximately 30 percent of men who try them, according to Channel News Asia.

When rubbed onto the skin, the gel releases nitric gases that relaxes muscles, expanding blood vessels and helping increase blood flow.

More here.

Moustafa Bayoumi in The Nation:

A lot of Trump’s politics runs on his own anti-Muslim guano. In 2015 alone, he endorsed the idea of registering Muslims in a national database, said he would “strongly consider” closing down mosques in the United States, and campaigned on barring all Syrian refugees. He promoted the batshit theory that a quarter of US Muslims believe that violence against Americans “is justified as a part of the global jihad.” (In fact, Muslim Americans reject violence against civilians at a substantially higher rate than the general US public, according to the Pew Research Center.) And he called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

Trump’s defenders insisted that this was all just “campaign-trail rhetoric,” as if exploiting bigotry were any different from bigotry itself. But by the end of 2015, hate crimes against Muslims in the United States had rocketed to what was then their highest point since 2001. Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the University of California, San Bernardino, told The New York Times that the anti-Muslim violence in this period seemed to escalate immediately following Trump’s flamethrowing comments.

And the situation did not ease after 2015; instead, it got substantially worse.

More here. [Thanks to Corey Robin and Najla Said.]

Gary Scharnhorst in The Paris Review:

Over a century and a half ago, a columnist for the San Francisco Daily Dramatic Chronicle predicted that Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was “bound to have a biographer one of these days—may it be a hundred years hence!” Albert Bigelow Paine’s official biography of the author was published less than fifty years later. It is an indispensable source for the legend of Saint Mark. Paine portrayed his subject as “the zealous champion of justice and liberty” who was “never less than fearless and sincere. Invariably he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the underdog.” As recently as 2002, Robert E. Weir echoed the dubious claim: Sam “was an indefatigable foe of anything that stood in the way of human progress and individual potential,” as if to suggest that the world would be a better place if only everyone emulated him. Sam Clemens’s most honest comments about his life, or so he asserted, appear in his autobiography, most of which appeared posthumously. “A book that is not to be published for a century gives the writer a freedom which he could secure in no other way,” he explained in 1899. “In these conditions you can draw a man without prejudice exactly as you knew him and yet have no fear of hurting his feelings or those of his sons or grandsons.” “I speak from the grave rather than with my living tongue, for a good reason,” he declared. “I can speak thence freely.” In a March 1904 letter to his friend W. D. Howells, Sam described his autobiography as

Adam Rutherford in Nautilus:

Gopu Mohan at Caravan:

The earliest known inscription of the Tamil word “paraya” is found in a Sangam-era text, Purananuru, composed between the second and third centuries. In his essay “Waiting to lose their patience,” Ravikumar noted that when the first modern edition of Purananuru was published in 1894, many historians claimed that the presence of the word “parayan” in Song 335 implied that a caste system existed 1,800 years ago. “Nondalit commentators understand this to mean that the discrimination and oppression of the parayars/dalits is not of recent origin,” he wrote, “and they derive solace in believing that untouchability is as old as the Sangam period.” The pioneering Dalit intellectual Iyothee Thass questioned the very authenticity of the text in his 1908 article “Is there a book called Purananuru?” According to Ravikumar, there is no way to verify whether the song exists in its original form, or whether it was added in later centuries. The second-oldest inscription of the word is from the thirteenth century, during the Chola period. In this case, Ravikumar writes, there are references to both paraya cheri, or paraya settlement, and theenda cheri, or untouchables’ settlement, indicating that the two were not the same. The conflation of untouchability with “paraya” had not yet occurred.

more here.

Christopher Schaberg at 3:AM Magazine:

What are these airports, what promises do they hold? What secrets do they hide? The piece gets more interesting as we read on. With a widening array of amenities and entertainment options—not to mention employment opportunities— “People will choose to go to the airport.” This is a recurring fantasy fruit that gets juiced from time to time: the idea that airports may become so desirous as to become destinations themselves. There is a threshold here, somewhere, at which point people decide that their present space takes priority over far-flung locales. If the ultimate airport is a rich, luscious place brimming with entrainment and energy, a true magnet for local citizens—and if every airport can become such a site—of what use are the airplanes, of what use the term “destination” as we know it? John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay have called these future nodes aerotropoli, but we might as well ground all the pesky planes and call such a place utopia, instead.

In the next paragraph of the Bloomberg piece, things get even more interesting. We learn about “infrastructure investments and technologies that will, in theory, allow airports to largely eradicate the dreaded waiting.” In theory. Of course, we all know that the practice of air travel is far messier and more uncomfortable than the airline loyalty pamphlets make it appear.

more here.

Gary Scharnhorst at The Paris Review:

Over a century and a half ago, a columnist for the San Francisco Daily Dramatic Chronicle predicted that Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was “bound to have a biographer one of these days—may it be a hundred years hence!” Albert Bigelow Paine’s official biography of the author was published less than fifty years later. It is an indispensable source for the legend of Saint Mark. Paine portrayed his subject as “the zealous champion of justice and liberty” who was “never less than fearless and sincere. Invariably he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the underdog.” As recently as 2002, Robert E. Weir echoed the dubious claim: Sam “was an indefatigable foe of anything that stood in the way of human progress and individual potential,” as if to suggest that the world would be a better place if only everyone emulated him. Sam Clemens’s most honest comments about his life, or so he asserted, appear in his autobiography, most of which appeared posthumously. “A book that is not to be published for a century gives the writer a freedom which he could secure in no other way,” he explained in 1899. “In these conditions you can draw a man without prejudice exactly as you knew him and yet have no fear of hurting his feelings or those of his sons or grandsons.” “I speak from the grave rather than with my living tongue, for a good reason,” he declared. “I can speak thence freely.”

more here.

From the Boston Review:

Editor's Note: Writing about China Miéville in the Guardian, fantasy luminary Ursula K. Le Guin opined, “You can’t talk about Miéville without using the word ‘brilliant.’” Miéville is a rare sort of polyglot, an acclaimed novelist—he has won nearly every award for fantasy and science fiction that there is, often multiple times—who is equally comfortable in the worlds of politics and academia. Combining his skills as a storyteller and Marxist theorist, his most recent book, October, regales readers with the key events of the Russian Revolution. In this interview, Miéville discusses the intersections between his creative oeuvre and the political projects of utopia and dystopia.

Boston Review: You are often quoted as saying that you want to write a book in every genre. Nonetheless, many of your books have centered around themes of utopia and dystopia. Do you feel as though dystopia has finally, well-and-truly slipped the bounds of genre?

China Miéville: Dystopia and utopia are themes, optics, viruses that can infect any field or genre. Hence you find utopian, dystopian, and heterotopian aspects in stories across the board: westerns, romances, crime—let alone, more obviously, in science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy.

To the extent that, before anything else, texts are -topias (particularly utopias) narrowly conceived—warnings, suggestions, cookbooks, or proposals—they are mostly uninteresting to me. Still, the often-repeated slur that utopias are “dull” has never been politically innocent: it bespeaks reaction. When Emil Cioran attacks utopias for lacking the “rupture” of real life—“the totality of sleeping monsters”—he ignores the ruptures and monsters that lurk in -topias too. As texts, -topias get interesting to the extent that they deviate, underperform, or do too much. Rather the excess of the Big Rock Candy Mountain, with its cigarette trees and lemonade springs, than the plod of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). In their conflicts, aporias, and surpluses, they can captivate. Alexander Bogdanov’s 1908 science fiction novel Red Star, for example, is fairly stodgy gruel until the protagonist, Leonid, veers unexpectedly and seemingly off-script through madness and the pedagogy gets opaque.

None of which is to argue against -topias of any prefix, still less of utopian yearning tout court. They are indispensable. But the -topian drive is more contradictory and succulent than some of its vulgar advocates, no less than its critics, make out.

More here.

Jalees Rehman in The Conversation:

In a recent survey of over 1,500 scientists, more than 70 percent of them reported having been unable to reproduce other scientists’ findings at least once. Roughly half of the surveyed scientists ran into problems trying to reproduce their own results. No wonder people are talking about a “reproducibility crisis” in scientific research – an epidemic of studies that don’t hold up when run a second time.

Reproducibility of findings is a core foundation of science. If scientific results only hold true in some labs but not in others, then how can researchers feel confident about their discoveries? How can society put evidence-based policies into place if the evidence is unreliable?

Recognition of this “crisis” has prompted calls for reform. Researchers are feeling their way, experimenting with different practices meant to help distinguish solid science from irreproducible results. Some people are even starting to reevaluate how choices are made about what research actually gets tackled. Breaking innovative new ground is flashier than revisiting already published research. Does prioritizing novelty naturally lead to this point?

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith over at his website:

Those who, with Judith Butler, deny a distinction between sex and gender, however they may think of themselves, are either classical philosophical idealists, or they are anthropocentrist human-exceptionalists, and thus heirs to the legacy of the Christian theological model of the human being.

Consider this from a recent online ‘syllabus’: "Butler proves that the distinction between sex and gender does not hold. A sexed body cannot signal itself as different sexually without cultural gender categories, and the idea that sex comes before cultural factors (which are believed to be only overlaid on top of sex), is disproven in this book. Gender is performance, there’s no solid universal gender basis beneath these always creative performances. There is no concrete sexed body without constructed human categories to interpret it."

At least since Fichte dispensed with the Kantian thing-in-itself, we have been aware of the possibility that there is no concrete external world without constructed human categories to interpret it. That is, if we acknowledge that the world beyond our experience is entirely inaccessible to us by definition, then there are good arguments to the effect that we should not believe it exists at all.

But the philosophical possibility of absolute idealism in no way prevents us from continuing on with our research programmes in, say, fluid dynamics or vulcanology. What makes the human body so different?

The concrete sexed human body is, alongside volcanoes, etc., a thing of nature– unless, that is, you are an idealist and you think there is no such thing as nature at all. But in any case, the sexed human body and the volcano, whether ‘constructs’ or natural objects, can only have the same ontological status– unless, that is, you are a human exceptionalist.

Which brings us to our second point.

More here.

Morning at Speed Products

The operators stood around the cold shop
and coughed at dirty morning jokes about
the mysteries of family life behind
them and the certainty of work ahead.
Then, when the bell rang, they each resolved,
"No man should work, but be,"
and went to put their wrists inside
the safety handcuffs of machines.
Each man was doing life in dreams
for wages, some shit's profits, and his own
payment on his dreamed family plan.

Alan Dugan
from New and Collected Poems
Ecco Press, 1983

Travis Elborough in The Guardian:

1. Hilary Mantel – a little arrogance can be a great help

“The most helpful quality a writer can cultivate is self-confidence – arrogance, if you can manage it. You write to impose yourself on the world, and you have to believe in your own ability when the world shows no sign of agreeing with you.”

2. Leo Tolstoy and HP Lovecraft – pick the hours that work best for you

Tolstoy believed in starting first thing: “I always write in the morning. I was pleased to hear lately that Rousseau, too, after he got up in the morning, went for a short walk and sat down to work. In the morning one’s head is particularly fresh. The best thoughts most often come in the morning after waking while still in bed or during the walk.” Or stay up late as HP Lovecraft did: “At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.”

3. William Faulkner – read to write
“Read, read, read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”

4. Katherine Mansfield – writing anything is better than nothing
“Looking back I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.”

5. Ernest Hemingway – stop while the going is good
“Always stop while you are going good and don’t worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry bout it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.”

More here.

Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New Yorker:

The call came at three in the morning. My mother, in New Delhi, was in tears. My father, she said, had fallen again, and he was speaking nonsense. She turned the handset toward him. He was muttering a slow, meaningless string of words in an unrecognizable high-pitched nasal tone. He kept repeating his nickname, Shibu, and the name of his childhood village, Dehergoti. He sounded as if he were reading his own last rites. “Take him to the hospital,” I urged her, from New York. “I’ll catch the next flight home.” “No, no, just wait,” my mother said. “He might get better on his own.” In her day, buying an international ticket on short notice was an unforgivable act of extravagance, reserved for transcontinental gangsters and film stars. No one that she knew had arrived “early” for a parent’s death. The frugality of her generation had congealed into frank superstition: if I caught a flight now, I might dare the disaster into being. “Just sleep on it,” she said, her anxiety mounting. I put the phone down and e-mailed my travel agent, asking her to put me on the next available Air India flight.