Worm Moon

I.
In March the earth remembers its own name.
Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking.
The rivers begin to sing. In the sky
the winter stars are sliding away; new stars
appear as, later, small blades of grain
will shine in the dark fields.

And the name of every place
is joyful.

II.
The season of curiosity is everlasting
and the hour for adventure never ends,
but tonight
even the men who walked upon the moon
are lying content
by open windows
where the winds are sweeping over the fields,
over water,
over the naked earth,
into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities

III.
because it is spring;
because once more the moon and the earth are eloping –
a love match that will bring forth fantastic children
who will learn to stand, walk, and finally run
over the surface of earth;
who will believe, for years,
that everything is possible.

IV.
Born of clay,
how shall a man be holy;
born of water,
how shall a man visit the stars;
born of the seasons,
how shall a man live forever?

V.
Soon
the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft,
will enter his life from the tiny egg.
On his delicate legs
he will run through the valleys of moss
down to the leaf mold by the streams,
where lately white snow lay upon the earth
like a deep and lustrous blanket
of moon-fire,

VI.
and probably
everything
is possible.

by Mary Oliver
from — 12 Moons.

Koh Ewe in Time:

In a place as dry as the desert city of Dubai, whenever they can get rain, they’ll take it. United Arab Emirates authorities will often even try to make it rain—as they did earlier this week when the National Center of Meteorology dispatched planes to inject chemicals into the clouds to try to coax some showering. But this time they got much more than they wanted. Dubai faced torrential downpours on Tuesday, with flooding shutting down much of the city, including schools and its major airport—killing at least one man whose car was swept away as well as at least 18 others in neighboring Oman, including a bus full of schoolchildren. The UAE government media office said it was the heaviest rainfall recorded in 75 years and called it “an exceptional event.” More than a typical year’s worth of water was dumped on the country in a single day.

Now, many people are pointing a finger at the “cloud seeding” operations preceding the precipitation.

More here.

Fara Dabhoiwala at The Guardian:

Everything Must Go is about how, over the past 200 years, writers and artists have built on this inheritance to create new kinds of non-Christian eschatology. Ever since Lord Byron’s poem Darkness (1816), which dispensed with God, people have been creating secular fictions about the three main non-divine ways in which things might end – the annihilation of the planet, the extinction of humankind or the collapse of civilisation. Movies, radio broadcasts, comic books, pop songs, plays, novels, paintings, television shows, video games – it turns out that these scenarios have inspired a huge amount of detailed invention, mainly for entertainment. We love to wallow in our worst nightmares.

The form that such stories take is always influenced by the scientific and environmental events and concerns of their time. In May 1941, months before the start of the top-secret Manhattan Project, author Robert Heinlein published a story about a clandestine scheme to build a weapon from uranium-235.

more here.

Benjamin Markovits at the New York Times:

This week is the 200th anniversary of Lord Byron’s death. The most famous poet of his age (an odd phrase now) died fighting for Greek independence in the marshes of Missolonghi. “Who would write, who had anything better to do?” he once said. There was a strange contest over his body and memory: The lungs and larynx remained in Greece but friends carried the rest back to England, where huge crowds followed the funeral procession. A month after his death, his former editor burned his memoirs, worried they would damage the reputation of a superstar read around the world.

Does anyone read Byron now? He’s one of those unusual figures who have become better known for the lives they led than the books they wrote. Even some of his fans admire the letters more than the poems. It isn’t totally clear what it means to say that Byron is your favorite poet. Of the so-called Big Six Romantics, he’s the hardest to place.

more here.

Death is Smoking my Cigars

You know: I’m drunk once again
here
listening to Tchaikovsky
on the radio.

Jesus, I heard him 47 years
ago
when I was a starving writer
and here he is
again
and now I am a minor success as
a writer
and death is walking
up and down
this room
smoking my cigars
taking hits of my
wine
as Tchaik is working away
at the Pathetique,
it’s been some journey
and any luck I’ve had was
because I rolled the dice
right:
I starved for my art, I starved to
gain 5 god-damned minutes, 5 hours,
5 days-
I just wanted to get the word
down;
fame, money, didn’t matter:
I wanted the word down;
and “they” wanted me to be a stock boy in a
department store.

Well, death says, as he walks by,
I’m going to get you anyhow
no matter what you’ve been:
writer, cab driver, pimp, butcher,
sky-diver, I’m going to get
you…

Ok baby, I tell him.

We drink together now
as one am slides to 2
a.m. and
only he knows the
moment, but I worked a con
on him: I got my
5 god-damned minutes
and much
more.

by Charles Bukowski
from: The Last Night of the Earth Poems.

Jonathan Kandell in the New York Times:

Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82.

His death, at Maine Medical Center, was caused by complications of interstitial lung disease, his wife, Susan Bell Dennett, said. He lived in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Mr. Dennett combined a wide range of knowledge with an easy, often playful writing style to reach a lay public, avoiding the impenetrable concepts and turgid prose of many other contemporary philosophers. Beyond his more than 20 books and scores of essays, his writings even made their way into the theater and onto the concert stage.

But Mr. Dennett, who never shirked controversy, often crossed swords with other famed scholars and thinkers.

More here.

Paul Brown in Singular Discoveries:

The message in a bottle washed ashore on a rocky beach at Coldingham Bay, Scotland, on the morning of March 11, 1909. For anxious relatives and friends, the hastily-scrawled note seemed to confirm their fears that the two-masted sailboat and its ten crew members were lost at sea.

The Snowdrop had departed from Dundee almost a year earlier as part of a small whaling fleet bound for the Arctic waters of the Davis Strait between Greenland and Canada. It was last seen there in the summer of 1908 and reported as “All well.” But when the fleet returned to Dundee with its catch of fifteen whales that November, the Snowdrop was missing, and its fate unknown.

For several weeks, the Dundee whaling community awaited the Snowdrop’s return, expecting that it had been delayed by ice. But by the beginning of 1909, they began to call for shipping agents to send a relief ship in search of the missing boat and crew.

More here.

Nicola Jones in Nature:

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as the chatbot ChatGPT, have become so advanced that they now very nearly match or exceed human performance in tasks including reading comprehension, image classification and competition-level mathematics, according to a new report (see ‘Speedy advances’). Rapid progress in the development of these systems also means that many common benchmarks and tests for assessing them are quickly becoming obsolete.

These are just a few of the top-line findings from the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024, which was published on 15 April by the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University in California. The report charts the meteoric progress in machine-learning systems over the past decade.

More here.

Philip A. Goduti, Jr. in The Conversation:

In my view as a scholar of Kennedy’s life, he set the modern-day standard for public service that is all but absent in the 2024 presidential election dominated by the legal woes of Donald Trump and the age of 81-year-old President Joe Biden.

Kennedy’s lofty rhetoric, coupled with his energetic youth, propelled the nation into what he termed the “New Frontier,” the campaign slogan he used to inspire ordinary citizens to make the world a better place at a time of Cold War nuclear tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

“Let us begin anew … remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof,” Kennedy said during his inaugural address in 1961. “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

More here.

Alex Ross at The New Yorker:

“Noise” is a fuzzy word—a noisy one, in the statistical sense. Its meanings run the gamut from the negative to the positive, from the overpowering to the mysterious, from anarchy to sublimity. The negative seems to lie at the root: etymologists trace the word to “nuisance” and “nausea.” Noise is what drives us mad; it sends the Grinch over the edge at Christmastime. (“Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!”) Noise is the sound of madness itself, the din within our minds. The demented narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” jabbers about noise while he hallucinates his victim’s heartbeat: “I found that the noise was not within my ears. . . . The noise steadily increased. . . . The noise steadily increased.”

Yet noise can be righteous and majestic. The Psalms are full of joyful noise, noise unto the Lord. In the Book of Ezekiel, the voice of God is said to be “like a noise of many waters.” In “Paradise Lost,” Heaven makes “infernal noise” as it beats back the armies of Hell. Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” marshals forces for a different kind of battle.

more here.

Harmon Siegel at Artforum:

IF ITS POTENTIAL BEAUTY is one reason that my MAGA friend can appreciate Impressionism but not its avant-garde successors, another is the movement’s ambiguity between upholding and condemning the forms of authority that dominate modern society. On the one hand, we have the glassy stares of Morisot’s caregivers, the sickly pallor of Degas’s absinthe fiends, and the insectoid inhabitants of Pissarro’s anomic streetscapes––these seem to protest the quotidian cruelties of bourgeois existence, critiquing, respectively, patriarchal subjugation, social disintegration, and bureaucratic administration. On the other, we have Caillebotte’s weekend boaters, Cassatt’s loving families, and Renoir’s dancing couples––these seem to salute the little pleasures of modern life, affirming, respectively, suburban leisure, domestic femininity, and erotic gaiety. These oppositions occur not only between paintings, but even within individual works.

Take Caillebotte’s Le Pont de l’Europe, 1876. In Herbert’s book, the art historian writes that the painter adopted his exaggerated perspective to amplify the “cyclopean metalwork” of the iron bridge as an “embodiment of industrial power [and an] aggressive symbol of the transformation of Paris.”

more here.

Elizabeth Winkler in The Guardian:

Scholars often say that no one doubted Shakespeare’s authorship until the 19th century. The response is a rote way of brushing off persistent questions about the attribution of the world’s most famous plays and poems – but it may not be true. New scholarship suggests that doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship first arose during his lifetime – in a book called Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, published in 1598 by the theologian Francis Meres. Roger Stritmatter, a professor at Coppin State University who has spent years studying Meres’ book, argues that Meres asserted “Shakespeare” as the pseudonym of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Stritmatter’s research has been published in the academic journal Critical Survey. Shakespeare scholar Graham Holderness, who edited the journal, worries that shutting down debate about the authorship endangers academic freedom. “When you come across traditional Shakespeareans comparing Shakespeare authorship doubt to conspiracy theories – anti-vaxxers or climate change deniers – I mean, I think that’s wrong … for all sorts of reasons”, he said.

Palladis Tamia is a “commonplace book” of sayings and comparisons. It has long been known to scholars as an essential text in Shakespeare studies. In a chapter titled, A Comparative Discourse of Our English Poets, with the Greeke, Latine, and Italian Poets, Meres compares English writers with classical writers using an as-so equation. For example: “As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagorus, so the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare.”

More here.

Gillian Dohrn in Nature:

No one wants to eat when they have an upset stomach. To pinpoint exactly where in the brain this distaste for eating originates, scientists studied nauseated mice. The work, published in Cell Reports on 27 March¹, describes a previously uncharacterized cluster of brain cells that fire when a mouse is made to feel nauseous, but don’t fire when the mouse is simply full. This suggests that responses to satiety and nausea are governed by separate brain circuits.

“With artificial activation of this neuron, the mouse just doesn’t eat, even if it is super hungry,” says Wenyu Ding at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Martinsried, Germany, who led the study. Ding and colleagues suspected that this group of neurons was involved in processing negative experiences, such as feeling queasy, so they injected the mice with a chemical that induces nausea and then scanned the animals’ brains. This confirmed that the neurons are active when mice feel nauseous.

More here.

King of the River

If the water were clear enough,
if the water were still,
but the water is not clear,
the water is not still,
you would see yourself,
slipped out of your skin,
nosing upstream,
slapping, thrashing,
tumbling
over the rocks
till you paint them
with your belly’s blood:
Finned Ego,
yard of muscle that coils,
uncoils.
If the knowledge were given you,
but it is not given,
for the membrane is clouded
with self-deceptions
and the iridescent image swims
through a mirror that flows,
you would surprise yourself
in that other flesh
heavy with milt,
bruised, battering toward the dam
that lips the orgiastic pool.

Come. Bathe in these waters.
Increase and die.

Read more »

Alice Park in Time Magazine:

Each of us carts around a 3-lb. universe that orchestrates everything we do: directing our conscious actions of moving, thinking and sensing, while also managing body functions we take for granted, like breathing, keeping our hearts beating and digesting our food. It makes sense that such a bustling world of activity would need rest. Which is what, for decades, doctors thought sleep was all about. Slumber was when all the intricate connections and signals involved in the business of shuttling critical brain chemicals around went off duty, taking time to recharge. We’re all familiar with this restorative role of sleep for the brain–pulling an all-nighter or staying awake during a red-eye flight can not only change our mood, but also affect our ability to think clearly until, at some point, it practically shuts down on its own. When we don’t get enough sleep, we’re simply not ourselves.

Yet exactly what goes on in the sleeping brain has been a biological black box. Do neurons stop functioning altogether, putting up the cellular equivalent of a Do Not Disturb sign? And what if a sleeping brain is not just taking some well-deserved time off but also using the downtime to make sense of the world, by storing away memories and captured emotions? And how, precisely, is it doing that?

More here.

Amanda Montell at Literary Hub:

The attempts I made to get out of my own head were sundry and full of nonsense.

I visited a petting zoo for adults. I tried learning to meditate from a British computer voice. I stocked up on an unregulated nutrition powder called “Brain Dust.” My brain felt like dust. In the last few years, “dread for no reason” became one of my most frequent Google searches, as if the act of typing my feelings to a robot would make them go away. I gorged myself on podcasts about women who’d “snapped,” at once repulsed and tantalized by those who wore their madness on their sleeves. How good it must feel to “snap,” I thought.

My most cinematic attempt at mental rehab involved picking herbs on a farm in Sicily under a light-pollution-free sky. (“At night here, the stars are so close, they could fall into your mouth,” the herb farmer told me, sending my heart to my throat.) With varying degrees of “success,” I was doing everything I could think of to defect from the state of overwhelm and consumption that had become my life in the roaring 2020s.

More here.