by Mara Jebsen

There was a special skull in Paris in the late 1800s. Like all skulls, it once belonged to a larger structure–a display at the Ecole des Beaux Arts offered to young artists studying anatomy. Amongst these is the young poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke, though struck by the “manifold interlacing of the muscles and sinews” and the “complete agreement of the inner organs with one another”, can’t handle the majesty of an entire corpse. He comes to fix his attention uniquely on the skull. He gets hold of it.

Rilke takes the skull back to his student quarters to spend many nights with it. He contemplates it by candlelight, and keeps it company, until, as we’d expect (for its Rilke, Paris, candlelight, skull) he has a strange thought. . .

But first I want to turn your attention to another skull. This one appears in a poem which appeared to me, appropriately enough, in an anthology of Russian poetry : “In the Grip of Strange Thoughts”. The second skull is a photographic reproduction, an X-Ray, of the one inside the actual poet’s head. Its no good– me trying to describe this skull–as Elena Shvarts does it with such stinging radiance that I can hardly describe her powers of description. She writes:

And my God/growing dark/Slipped me this photograph/In which my glowing skull/Etched from the invisible/Swam, blocking out the dusk/And the stripped naked park

She’ll go on in the poem to be bemused, casual, even crude. But in this moment she’s struck and trembling with the oddness of her own skull. She seems to be naming something intrinsically weird. . .

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by Tolu Ogunlesi

The first time I met ‘Kissbaby’, 21, he was a security guard at the Silverbird Galleria in Lagos. I was driving out of the parking lot, and as is standard practice in Lagos, tipped him. Then I became curious. I wanted to know what he did with all the tips he got. What I heard was somewhat surprising. He told me he saved up all his money to pay for recording sessions at music studios.

By the time I meet him again, a few months after the first encounter; he has left his security-guard job. “The salary is too poor; not enough to fulfil my needs… mostly my studio stuff.” That is not all. “The work is not encouraging,” he says. “People always underrate you whenever they see you putting on security uniform.”

But his job is about the only thing that’s changed. The passion for music is still as potent as ever. “As you see me, looking at my appearance, you see music in me. Even if I am not there, my shirt is smelling of music!” he declares. Even the job was meant to be a way of furthering his musical ambitions. “The main reason I decided to work was because of my music, so I’d be able to get money and come out with my album.” His decision to get a job at the Galleria, he says, was influenced by his desire to network, to seek a “connection” that’d advance his budding music career.

The Galleria (a popular hangout for celebrities, and home to one of Lagos’ biggest music stores) is part of the Silverbird Group, which is arguably Nigeria’s largest and most prominent entertainment conglomerate, encompassing radio, television, beauty pageants, and music festivals. “Different types of people always come in… I met them,” he says.

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I
My sister latched the door:
A tube of light through the pane
stunned the cement floor.

My kid brother and I sat
naked near a bucket,
a canister to scoop water

Lifebuoy soap on chipped saucer,
a cylindrical container poised on bricks,
faucet crudely soldered to hem.

Under the container,
nuggets glowed on a charcoal burner
heating up the water.

Let’s be clear about this: No
shower, no tub, no sink, no mirror,
only a hole in the floor

for draining waste bath water out to a gully.
To be fair to bathrooms he had known,
Father had named The Cube.

II
Dizzy and nauseous, heart faster,
beads of sweat on bony chest,
the more I breathed, the more I gasped,

wondering what was taking my sister
so long to scoop water from the bucket
and shower it on my head..

She dragged herself to the door
on tip-toe to reach the latch, fell back,
slowly rose, her fingers clawing the pane.

My kid brother collapsed
on the floor, his mouth an O.
Are we playing dead?

Charcoal, the Mother of All Coals,
Father later said, burns quickly
in airtight rooms, releases deadly gas.

You can’t see, smell, or taste it.
Inhaled, it displaces oxygen
we breathe to stay alive.

I remember only blurs: glass
shattering, treetops waving, sirens,
a cold mask on my face: breathing.

III
Farouk, older brother, waiting
his turn to bathe, sat on a small
crate outside the Cube, reading

Superman, wondered
why no waste water flowed
out to the open gully

in the courtyard. He bolted upstairs
to tell Father, who ran down
without touching the handrail,

broke the glass, unlatched the door,
dragged us all out, and sent Farouk
on his Hero bike to summon Red Cross.

IV
My sister gradually grew
protective of me and my kid brother
who stopped sucking his thumb, after all.

Praised for his presence of mind,
Farouk promised but never gave me his comics
and never lets us forget his heroics.

V
Seeing her three angels in mortal poses,
Mother ripped her blouse,
pummeled her bosom.“ There is no god

but God, no god but God, no god”
The next day, my parents sacrificed
a lamb, gave meat to refugees

camped in Murree
near the Cease Fire Line,
after the first war over Kashmir.

For Farooq

Rafiq Kathwari is a guest writer at 3quarksdaily.

by George Wilkinson

Animals have the remarkable capability of self-maintenance, including healing of and functional recovery from damage. In contrast, inorganic materials are degrade over time and must be repaired or replaced to maintain function.

Self-healing materials are a class of smart materials, inspired by biological systems, which have the ability to repair damage autonomously. This idea occurs frequently in science fiction, from the Terminator to self-healing buildings. In present-day self-healing materials, physical damage alters the local properties of the engineered material, in many cases prompting a chemical reaction which re-forms the material at the site of damage. The promise of this type of material is that they would last longer, because damage could be preemptively and locally healed, preempting secondary damage and restoring the material’s strength. Self-healing would be a useful property in the paint job on a car; in prosthetic joints; or, in the future, on the exterior of spacecraft.

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by Jen Paton

In America we believe in chasing our dreams. Our young people are smart and can do whatever they want to do when they grow up. They should chase their dreams even as our economy falters and youth employment hits its lowest rate since records began (that would be 1948). Even now, especially now, “it’s really important that students have someone there to relate to them … I’m there to guide them to their dream,” says Lauren Berger, aka the “Intern Queen,” who runs an internship listing and advice site. She founded it after completing fifteen unpaid internships during her four years as an undergraduate, convinced she had expert advice to provide aspiring interns. Her book, “All Work and No Pay” comes out next year. Despite the title, I don’t think it’s an anti-internship polemic. Berger is one of legion middlemen who middle class, college educated students can consult to find opportunities to work for little or no pay. At the University of Dreams, one can pay upwards of $8000 for a summer internship – inclusive of college credit and housing.

To the growing subset of overeducated, under-or-unemployed wannabe white-collar workers, for those of us who can afford it or finagle a loan, working for free has become normal. The internship is understood as a way to gain experience in your chosen field or even just to figure out what you want to do. The London University where I took my MA hosted a panel discussion for those interested in media and arts careers (I realize this is already, sadly, a questionable premise). The panel featured young and youngish professionals in museums, television, and PR, describing how they go their start and how “we” – mostly BA students, but some MAers like myself, might think about building ours. All agreed that the unpaid internship was fundamental.

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by James McGirk

As I approach my fifteenth year living in the United States, I thought I ought peek under the hood and scrape some of the gunk off my filters to see how much distortion and prejudice has crept in between my ears. Marco Polo, patron saint of expatriate literature provides an excellent experimental model for doing so. Polo didn’t write his account of his 24-years exploring on behalf of the Kublai Kahn, Travels of Marco Polo; technically he dictated it to Rustichello de Pisa, three years after returning to Italy, while imprisoned in a Genoese prison.

Before Rustichello put his quill in Marco Polo’s inkwell, Polo just seemed like an old crank. One of those old traveler types who recounts ribald stories in exchange for food and drink; to his incredulous neighbors he was a merchant who had set out on an errand for a foreign sovereign and returned home twenty-four years later without much to show for it beyond some very strange stories. It wasn’t until he was captured by the Genoese and thrown in jail with a romance author were his stories documented and eventually published. The story goes that Marco Polo dictated his travels to Rustichello de Pisa out of sheer boredom. Although one does wonder whether the forced encounter between Polo and his amanuensis was entirely coincidental.

Even after dozens of folios and translations, Travels of Marco Polo retains the rolling rhythm of memories recounted out loud. Polo describes city after city, first outlining demographics and key economic details before meandering into anecdote. I thought I should go through the cities I had lived in the United States and, without doing any research whatsoever, I would describe the cities as if I were imprisoned in Genoa, and forced to affect Marco Polo’s style. I will begin my journey in Colorado as I did long ago:

The Mountain City of Boulder

Let me begin in the small mountain state of Colorado, in the city of Boulder, a city of some 60,000 souls laying approximately a day’s journey from the great aerodrome of Denver International Airport. Boulder is subject to the President of the United States of America, and its inhabitants worship myriad gods and goddesses, though most accept Jesus Christ as their lord. The city rests at the base of a great cliff, in the foothills the Rocky Mountains, the tallest and most forbidding of mountain ranges in the United States of America, though its highest peaks are dwarfed by the Himalayas.

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by Hasan Altaf

Looking back, I'm not sure how I got through my entire education, studying literature and writing, without ever really reading Greek drama; there was of course Shakespeare; Chaucer, at one point; I even have a vague memory of the Jataka tales, but no teacher or professor ever had me read or think about Greek tragedy. The stories we all knew, of course – Oedipus, Troy, Heracles, capricious deities – but we never actually read the material.

This did not strike me as a problem. Most people, after all, get through life just fine without Greek tragedy, and in any case it is hard to imagine literature more ancient and more removed from us; its relevance seemed questionable. A friend, however, recommend the poet Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, a novel in verse that recreates the story of Geryon (in the myth, a many-headed monster Heracles kills to steal his cattle – one of the labors; in Carson's hands, an awkward, lonely child growing up), and I liked Carson's work, so I picked up another book of hers, Grief Lessons. Mostly I just liked the title, but it turned out to be a translation of four plays by Euripides. The book sat on my bookshelf for years, moving from Baltimore to Pakistan to DC, until I finally got around to it. Since then I have been oddly hooked; when you find yourself looking forward to comparing two translations of Sophocles' Elektra, you know something has gotten to you.

I am, obviously, no expert in this material; my knowledge of ancient Greece is essentially limited to what I remember of the myths and what Wikipedia tells me (among other things, that Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, was famous for her boots).

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by Maniza Naqvi

“I mean they’re what— all of nineteen or twenty at most? And when push comes to shove they are going to get hurt around here aren’t they? Occupy Wall Street? Taking on the police—and for what–where will this go?”

“What do you mean for what–what do you mean where will this go?” Brian looks at me in irritation.

“What are they asking for Brian?” I shout over the sloganeering and the police helicopters over head. It’s Friday late afternoon and I look at all the young people barely out of their childhood—now sitting down in the courtyard of the Police Headquarters—with their big cardboard hand made signs around them saying, “Occupy Everything,” and shouting, “We are the 99%.”

“Can’t you read the signs? They’re protesting Wall Street. They want to change the system.” Brian replies. “And that’s important.”

“So why are they protesting at the Police Headquarters—why not at 200 West Street at Goldman Sach’s headquarters? Why protest against police brutality—why not Goldman Sach’s brutality? I mean I agree with Mayor Bloomberg—these guys are doing their job and their being paid only US$30-50,000 a year. I mean the cops are part of the 99% as well! Aren't they? They are on the opposite side of the barricades but they are on the same side aren't they? They face the same issues don't they?”

“That’s not the point!”

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by Meghan D. Rosen

Each year, the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz accepts 10 students and, for nine writing-intensive months, teaches them how to become better science journalists. This year, I am happy to say that I am one of the 10. My nine fellow classmates come from a wide variety of scientific backgrounds (from marine biology to mechanical engineering to neuroscience). We have a self-proclaimed ‘fish guts scientist,’ a potato pathologist, a reality TV star with survival skills (from the Discovery Channel’s, ‘The Colony’), a raptor surveyor (aka ‘hawk lady’), and an agricultural writer who grew up on a dairy farm.

It’s a diverse bunch of people, with a broad set of experiences, and the best part is: they all like to talk about science. I think I’m in heaven.

One of our recent assignments was to answer a classmate’s question that was about (or loosely connected to) our field of study. The constraints: we couldn’t use any jargon in the answer, it had to be clear to a non-scientist, and we had to do it in 200 words or less. Here are some of the question ideas we kicked around: Why does a golf ball have dimples? How does a submarine judge depth? Why do tarantulas migrate? How does the brain form memories?

I liked the challenge – answer a could-be complicated question with clarity–, and the idea of directly connecting scientists with people looking for answers to life’s curiosities.

So, this month, I’m trying an experiment for the readers of 3QD. Do you have any burning science-based questions that you’d like answered? Do you want to know how something works? Is there anything that you wish was just explained more clearly? If so, leave a question in the comments. I’ll solicit answers from my classmates, and get back to you next month. To help us get us started, I’ve included my own question and answer below (and yes, I stuck to the word limit –I even had two words to spare!).

Question: Why are doctors now recommending fewer screenings for breast cancer?

The idea behind breast cancer screening is simple: the sooner you find a lump, the sooner you can fight it. Until two years ago, the standard for care was frequent screenings and aggressive treatment. We were constantly on guard (yearly mammograms) and ever ready to wage surgical war (lump or breast removal). Intuitively, it made sense – root out the cancerous seed before it sprouts. Early detection should save lives, right? Not necessarily.

In 2009, an independent panel of experts appointed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that mammograms didn’t actually cut the breast cancer death rate by much: only about 15 percent. But we were screening more women than ever. So why were so many people still dying?

The problem isn’t detection: mammograms are pretty good at pinpointing the location of an abnormal cell cluster in the breast. But not all abnormal cells are cancerous, and mammograms can’t tell the harmless ones from the dangerous ones. In other words, a lump is not a lump is not a lump.

Today, doctors are divided. Some think excessive screening forces thousands of women to undergo unnecessary surgeries. Others think one life saved is worth the cost.

by Fred Zackel

As the 2011 Nobel Prize announcement nears (October 12th for our handicappers), the U.K. betting site Ladbrokes has posted odds for the prize, putting Thomas Pynchon at (give or take) 10/1 odds to win the prize for literature.

I got my fingers crossed.

First off, Pynchon is clever and that makes his playfulness most pleasurable. His favorite playground is America’s fondness for conspiracy theories. These theories, no matter how whacko they sound, summarize and reflect cherished American values and morals. Lots of us are alienated from official reality. We find it easy (and maybe self-defeating) to deny its validity. (As a student of mine once said, “I think a lot of the time we take for granted the history of the world.”) But what if our own conclusions are denied legitimacy? What Pynchon does that is so subversive is to deny them closure. And seeing how those well-intentioned wackos are left high and dry actually adds to my merriment.

I first discovered Pynchon as the best man for Richard Farina’s marriage to Mimi Baez. I was a big fan of Farina’s novel “Been Down So Long It Looks Up to Me,” and so I went looking for Pynchon’s first novel. “V” was a rabbit hole, or maybe an oubliette. I fell. Maybe I was pushed. One enigmatic woman may have been at the nexus of the great events of the 20th century? I also traveled decades and the world with a schlemihl named Benny Profane and with Herbert Stencil, questing after his father, who may have been a legendary British spy. Hunting alligators in the New York sewers? A living figurehead lashed to the bow-sprit of a boat? Jewish princesses getting nose jobs? Coeds with 72 pairs of Bermuda shorts? All culminating in the trash heaps of Malta a half-century before? A long, strange trip indeed. And I was hooked by a sideways look at how we perceive reality. And conspiracy. “They – whoever ‘they’ were – seemed to be calling the tune,” was one ominous thought. Later, “Any situation takes shape from events much lower than the merely human.” Most importantly I learned that progress was best imagined as only a new coat of paint on our xebec adrift.

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Old Lovers

Two old lovers
–ships beached
near the sea of love

in a cove off a bay
no storm can reach,
lean into each other
longing

not for past passion,
not listening for a poet’s speech
just listing, leaning each into each

by Jim Culleny
2009

By Dave Munger

For nearly a year now, I've been writing here about poverty in America and what it's like to be in my brother's shoes: Like millions of Americans, Mark is a man who has worked hard for most of his life but is now unable to support himself. For a variety of reasons, today's column will be my last for 3QuarksDaily, and I thought I'd use it to sum up what I've learned over the past year.

1. Poor people are just like everyone else. This should be obvious, but for many, it's not: Most poor people want to be productive members of society. They have dreams and aspirations and to the extent that they are able, they are working to achieve them.

2. Poor people are not just like everyone else. This is the less-obvious corollary. Nearly every poor person has suffered enough misfortune to render him or her incapable of earning enough to cover even the basic necessities of life; nearly everyone else has not. In Mark's case, his body simply wasn't suited to the hard, physical jobs he was able to find. Eventually his body gave out, and he was forced to give up his long-established independent lifestyle and ask for help from the government, friends, and family.

3. Poor people are not like other poor people. Some poor people are lazy, some are not. Some poor people are uneducated, some are not. For every stereotype about poor people, there are thousands—millions—of poor people who do not fit that stereotype. But that doesn't mean there aren't some aspects of being poor that impact nearly all poor people. For example,

4. Trouble disproportionately impacts the poor. For most people, an unexpected setback like a car breakdown or an illness is an annoyance, but for the poor, it can unleash a catastrophic cascade of events. If your car breaks down and you have only $200, which you were planning on spending for the electric bill, you may face a choice between living without power or living without a job: If you can't pay to get the car fixed, you can't get to work. Many poor people have no sick leave: Get so sick that you can't work, and you get fired.

5. Getting government aid is hard, dehumanizing work. When Mark finally realized he could no longer support himself, it took years for him to be officially deemed “disabled” and therefore eligible for Federal assistance. Worse, the process almost requires that a person abandon hope: “You have to convince yourself you're disabled,” Mark said at the time. “Your whole life you've been thinking about taking care of yourself [and suddenly] you're no good anymore and you need help.”

The process of justifying your aid doesn't stop once you are place on Social Security Disability. You still need to prove, twice a year, that you need medical coverage, food stamps, and continually demonstrate that you are disabled and unable to work.

I could go on, but one thing I've learned about poor people over the past year is that cataloging their problems doesn't help much.

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By Namit Arora

Homer’s Iliad is the story of an epic war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The apparent cause of the war was the ‘abduction’ of Helen by Paris—Helen was the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta; Paris was the son of Priam, king of Troy. Menelaus, his pride wounded, called on other Greek kings bound to him by an oath. Joining forces, they set sail and laid siege to the coastal city of Troy in Asia Minor. Mostly an account of the last days of the war, the Iliad teems with intrigue, character, and incident.

Herodotus, the 5th century BCE historian regarded as the father of history, lived more than three hundred years after the Iliad was written. He is justly famous for preferring rational—rather than mythical and supernatural—explanations for human events; to understand his past he looked to the actions, character, and motivations of men. Among the more charming passages of Histories is his take on the Trojan War. In his day and age, the Iliad was considered a true account of Greek ancestry and it was obligatory for every Greek schoolboy to read it. Cultivated Greek gents were expected to recite colorful stretches from it.

From the start, Herodotus had trouble with the Iliad. He found it odd that the Trojans, ‘when the Greeks ran off with their women, never troubled themselves about the matter; but the Greeks, for the sake of a single [Spartan] girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam’. He doubted that Helen could have been taken from Sparta against her wishes, and even if she was, wasn’t that deed the work of a rogue, unworthy of such a large mobilization by the Greeks? What also didn’t sit well with his sense of human nature was the response of the otherwise reasonable Trojans to the Greek invasion, for ‘surely neither Priam nor his family could have been so infatuated as to endanger their own persons, their children and their city, merely that Paris might possess Helen.’

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