Jacqueline Banerjee at the TLS:

Emily Brontë was born on July 30, 1818, in the village of Thornton, West Yorkshire, far from the mainstream of literary life. She died of tuberculosis at Haworth Parsonage, not six miles away, at the age of thirty. Her work had startled the critics with the force of its passion, but, over the years, shock was to settle into widespread admi­ration. In 1948, in a note added to the first chapter of The Great Tradition, F. R. Leavis described the author as the genius of her family, and her only novel, Wuthering Heights, as “astonishing”. When he added that it was a “kind of sport”, he was implying not its triviality, but its uniqueness. Forty years later, John Sutherland could introduce it in his Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction as the “twentieth century’s favourite nineteenth-century novel”. Emily’s poetry, which she published with great reluctance, has also continued to rise in the public estimation. The opening line of one of her poems, “No coward soul is mine”, can now be found emblazoned on mugs and key rings. It is even popular as a tattoo.

more here.

.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

Jelaluddin Rumi
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harvest Books, 1996

Jon Cohen in Science:

When Science published a monkey study nearly 2 years ago that showed an anti-inflammatory antibody effectively cured monkeys intentionally infected with the simian form of the AIDS virus, the dramatic results turned many heads. But some skeptical researchers thought the data looked too good to be true and predicted the intervention wouldn’t work on HIV in humans. They were right. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, and a co-author of the Science paper, today reported the failure of a clinical trial that attempted to translate the remarkable monkey success to humans. “We did not see those dramatic results at all,” Fauci said at the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam that is taking place this week.

In the monkey experiment, the animals infected with the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) were treated with antiretroviral (ARV) drugs that suppressed the pathogen, and then given repeated injections of an antibody that blocks a receptor called α4ß7 found on immune cells. The researchers then stopped giving both the antibodies and ARVs, and the monkeys still completely controlled SIV for more than 9 months. The virus quickly came roaring back in control animals that had only received ARVs and then had that treatment halted. Some considered the antibody-treated monkeys cured, as they appeared capable of indefinitely controlling the small quantity of virus that persisted without any further interventions.

…If people reacted like monkeys to the antibody treatment, once vedolizumab blocked α4ß7, they could stop ARV drugs and the HIV that inevitably remained would start to copy itself, but would have difficulty infecting cells and creating new virions. That wasn’t the case, Fauci explained. In all but two of the 18 people, HIV sprang back once they stopped ARVs. Moreover, a team of researchers not involved with the original monkey study attempted to repeat it in another set of the primates, and they reported at the meeting that their experiment had no success. The original monkey results, Fauci said, “might be a fluke.”

More here.

Shehryar Fazli in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

CRITICS GENERALLY DEFINE “Lynchian” as the cohabitation of the macabre and the mundane. The severed ear hidden in the field in Blue Velvet may be the most iconic representation of this junction, but it’s everywhere in David Lynch’s work: from Twin Peaks’s sweet, brochure-like title sequence of a mountainous town that, as it turns out, hides Laura Palmer’s corpse and many other monstrosities, to the arrival of Naomi Watts’s aspiring actress Betty in a dreamlike Hollywood in Mulholland Drive, before the nightmare of that city consumes her. In Lynch’s early work, the small town is the theater of this dance of innocence and evil, but in his later films, namely the loose trilogy of Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006), the macabre and the mundane coexist in the individual soul. Upon reading Room to Dream — Lynch’s newly released experimental memoir — one’s tempted to say that the same coupling exists in David Lynch himself.

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Mary Halton at the BBC:

Researchers have found evidence of an existing body of liquid water on Mars.

What they believe to be a lake sits under the planet’s south polar ice cap, and is about 20km (12 miles) across.

Previous research found possible signs of intermittent liquid water flowing on the martian surface, but this is the first sign of a persistent body of water on the planet in the present day.

Lake beds like those explored by Nasa’s Curiosity rover show water was present on the surface of Mars in the past.

However, the planet’s climate has since cooled due to its thin atmosphere, leaving most of its water locked up in ice.

The result is exciting because scientists have long searched for signs of present-day liquid water on Mars, but these have come up empty or yielded ambiguous findings. It will also interest those studying the possibilities for life beyond Earth – though it does not yet raise the stakes in the search for biology.

The discovery was made using Marsis, a radar instrument on board the European Space Agency’s (Esa) Mars Express orbiter.

More here.

Omar Ali at Brown Pundits:

Pakistan heads to the polls on July 25th. I happen to be in the middle of a move, so I have not been posting much but a short note on the election is certainly due. Back in 2013 Pakistan had its first peaceful democratic transfer of power and it looked like some sort of democracy was finally taking root, with the military still exercising disproportionate influence but with an elected government running most of the country according to its own priorities. Unfortunately, the trend line has since reversed and done so in spectacular fashion. There are many theories about why this particular reversal happened, with some people blaming the party in power (the nominally right of center PMLN) and others the overweening ambitions of GHQ (*General Headquarters. The army). Whatever the triggers, it seems that at some point the army high command decided that it could not coexist with Mian Nawaz Sharif and his politically ambitious daughter (Maryam Nawaz Sharif) and for the last year and a half the army, primarily acting through its intelligence agencies (for the rough stuff) and ISPR (the PR wing of the army, now expanded into a vast public relations operation with a serving general in charge) has been on a crusade against the PMLN in general and Mian Nawaz Sharif (MNS) and his daughter in particular.

More here.

Keith Doubt at berfrois:

It is difficult to understand the genocide because the genocide occurred not in a secret place, but in full view of the observing world. In 1993, Lieutenant General Philippe Morillon, the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) Commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina, came to Srebrenica and, after seeing the death camp circumstances of the civilians living under the siege, declared that Srebrenica was under the protection of the UN. In April 1993, the UN Security Council, adopted Resolution 819 which formally declared Srebrenica a UN “safe area,” following after Morillon’s declaration, and sent UNPROFOR soldiers from Canada, and later the Netherlands to the town. As part of the demilitarization agreement, military commanders defending Srebrenica agreed to turn over their heavy arms in exchange for UN protection. As early as April 1993, Ambassador Diego Arria, Permanent Representative of Venezuela to the UN Security Council, described the situation in Srebrenica as a “slow-motion genocide under the protection of the UN forces” In July 1995, Srebrenica—under the protection of UN forces—became a fast-motion genocide.

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Peter Thonemann at Literary Review:

But Alcibiades, like Byron, clearly had that indefinable something. One catches a glimpse of it in the unforgettable last scene of Plato’s Symposium, when he crashes into the room, blind drunk, flirting with everything on legs, shouting about his love for Socrates. Thucydides captures it in his report of Alcibiades’s speech whipping up the Athenian assembly to vote for the disastrous Sicilian expedition of 415 BC – an extraordinary stew of egotistic bragging (about how successful his racehorses are), mendacious demagoguery and brilliantly acute strategic thinking. The unwashed Athenian masses, not usually prone to atavistic toff-grovelling, absolutely adored him: when Alcibiades finally returned to Athens in 407 BC after eight years of exile, sailing coolly into Piraeus on a ship with purple sails, they welcomed him back with paroxysms of joy.

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Erica X Eisen at The Paris Review:

In the Chester Beatty Library, there are books made entirely of jade. There are picture scrolls featuring calligraphy by the brother of the Japanese emperor. There are papyrus codices that constitute some of the few surviving texts of Manichaeism, a religion of darkness and light that rivaled Christianity in scale until its last believers died out in fourteenth-century China. There are Armenian hymnals, Renaissance catalogues of war machines, and monographs on native Australian fauna. There is all of this and more—thousands and thousands of other works diverse in period and place of origin, waiting for human eyes. And yet as I walk through the galleries, as I survey the cases of books safe behind their glass, it occurs to me that if a book is a thing meant to be read, then in a certain sense, these objects have lost their function to all but the scholarly epigraphists, backs bent in the private study room. And yet far from becoming something less because of this, the books on display have become something more.

Can we recover a physical literature? Can we recover a literature that is not merely read but felt? The library museum gestures at just such a possibility.

more here.

Melanie McFarland in Salon:

“Castle Rock,” Hulu’s longform series ode to Stephen King debuting Wednesday, is a reminder of how differently people can view the same story. By no means is it a “Rashomon”-type of affair; King’s commercial success is rooted in the fact that his stories are straightforward entertainments, with meanings no more complex than the eternal struggles between light and dark or good versus evil. The same applies to “Castle Rock,” a original creation by Sam Shaw (“Manhattan”) and Dustin Thomason, that is foremost a fairly straightforward pastiche of the horror author’s oeuvre. Those who are well-versed in King’s work, whether on the page or by way of one of the 100-plus screen adaptations of his stories — may welcome the Easter egg hunt it offers by dotting each episode with details and character associations from previous works. The most obvious is the town itself. The average filmgoer is much more likely to recognize the second most important character in Castle Rock other than the town itself: Shawshank State Penitentiary. Even those familiar with King by reputation and little else should recognize the classic narrative of the prodigal son returned, personified here in Henry Deaver.

An attorney who specializes in death row cases, Deaver is lured back to Castle Rock at the behest of an unidentified caller. It’s not a trip he wants to take, but something prods him into going. Henry could be thought of the spiritual sibling to Selena St. George, the accusatory daughter in the film adaptation of “Dolores Claiborne.” Like Selena, it’s implied that Henry left town to escape something in his past that the townsfolk won’t allow him to forget. But a key difference, besides their gender, is that Henry, played by Andre Holland, is black.

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Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In early 2014, Laura Brealey was visiting her daughters in Singapore when she slipped on a marble floor and cracked her hip. She had it replaced, but in the process, the surgeons noticed that her breathing sounded odd, and told her to speak to a respiratory specialist. At her daughtJer’s urging, she did so when she returned home to London, England—and was told that she had lung cancer. The doctors moved quickly. That same August, they cut out part of her right lung, and gave her both radiotherapy and chemotherapy. The tumor disappeared. Things were looking promising. But the following summer, Brealey started experiencing fresh pain in her ribs. The cancer was back. When I meet Brealey in April 2016, in a brightly colored room at University College Hospital, she’s about to start her third drug—a new one called nivolumab that her doctor, a young oncologist named Charlie Swanton, is hopeful about. As he preps her for the new treatment, he is also thinking about how to manage the severe pain that the tumor is causing, as it presses against the nerves that run along Brealey’s ribs. “It hasn’t been easy for Laura,” says Swanton. “When I first told her she couldn’t go back to Singapore to visit her family…”

“… I nearly fell off my chair in shock,” she finishes. Brealey, now 75, has bright blue eyes, short white hair, and preternaturally high spirits. “My best friend’s brother calls me the Indestructible Laura. I’m very active. Before this, I was going to the gym, doing aqua-aerobics, pilates, gardening. Now, I just sleep. This has been a nuisance.” She misses the theater, longs to return to Asia, dreams about going on the Trans-Siberian Railway. When she mentions the tumor that is curtailing all of those plans, she talks as if it was an errant child. “It’s so stubborn,” she says. Brealey’s story is typical. An initial wave of treatments seemed to knock a tumor out, but despite the scalpels, the radiation, and the drugs—not to mention relentless optimism—the tumor recurs, seemingly more resilient than before. Stubborn, as she says. Even the latest drugs, tailored to strike at the specific genetic faults behind a person’s tumor, fail to permanently halt the backswing of a tumor’s pendulum.

More here.

As Lazarus

How deep is deep enough
until I reach the bent rafters
of my own ribcage? I test
the extent of my dimensions. This—

this is an effort of pencil checks,
measuring-tape & desperation.
Behind the drywall of sternum
& knucklebone, I am certain
that the same thing that aches
in the attic is what keeps it
standing. How far down is it?
That place I’m afraid to name.
That place where God lives.

I’m pressing up against the door—
an angry thumb against a tooth,
snapped loose in my mouth.
How long have I been straining
at the concrete slab of my own
foundations, barely making a scratch?
Again—again, I’ve been asking God
for permission to uproot my life
like a weed in the asphalt, to split
the stem of my spine & let me sleep.
Again—again, he keeps telling me no.

by Ian Williams
from Ecotheo Review
July 24, 2018

Tom Fletcher in Prospect:

The Hague, September 2016. The speech from the UN high commissioner for human rights was not expected to ruffle feathers. A mild appeal to our better angels and then back to the canapés—traditionally, as one UN speechwriter puts it, “we don’t use adjectives, we don’t name names.”

But instead of platitudes, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein called out a parade of “xenophobes, populists and racists”: Wilders, Farage, Orbán, Le Pen, Trump and—in the same breath—Islamic State (IS). He shook with rage. The room was stunned into silence, then burst into a standing ovation. One ambassador present calls it “a moment of pure authenticity, emotion and reason.” A friend calls it Zeid’s “quantum leap.” But this was not simply a frustrated UN chief shooting from the hip. “He knew exactly what he was doing,” says his wife, Sarah.

There is an air of battered decency to the UN’s top official on human rights. Partly jet lag and the debilitating wade through undrained swamps of bureaucratic treacle. Partly bearing witness to the worst of humanity. As a junior UN official in Bosnia, he was profoundly marked by the sight of the skull of a child as a trophy on a warlord’s car. In a recent statement on Myanmar, he asked: “What kind of hatred could make a man stab a baby crying out for his mother’s milk. And for the mother to witness this murder while she is being gang-raped by security forces who should be protecting her?”

But the weariness is also something deeper. This is a man watching his worldview come under relentless assault. Zeid was a global citizen before the idea went in and then out of fashion.

More here.

Benjamin Moser in The New Yorker:

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Knight of the Imperial Order of the Rose, founder of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, has long been Brazil’s ambassador to the international society of official writers. He seemed to be preparing for the role for most of his adult life, which was so colorless and conventional it might have been taunting future biographers.

An outstanding employee of the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works, Machado, like Kafka (of the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute) and Cavafy (of the Third Circle of Irrigation), wore prim suits, lived in nondescript neighborhoods, worked bureaucratic jobs, and rarely stirred from the city where he was born.

These authors looked like emblems of the petit bourgeois, and the gap between their appearance and their writing made them emblems of something else, too—of the inner life pulsing behind the mask that the modern person dons. That gap allowed such writers to take on an electric symbolism. By presenting no outward challenge to their epochs, they could move freely through them—and eventually define them.

Machado “had a half dozen gestures, habits, and pat phrases,” an early biographer, Lúcia Miguel Pereira, wrote, in 1936. He avoided politics. He was an ideal husband. He spent his free time at the bookshop. And, in founding the Academy of Letters, he brought an administrative structure to literature.

Yet to place this image beside his books is to wonder whether such diligence was a carefully calibrated act—and to see why, despite more than a century’s veneration, the vestment of national spokesman will never quite fit. Machado was too ironic, too mischievous, for the pretentions that the official homages imply.

More here.

Jeff Diamant and Kelset Jo Starr over at the Pew Research Center:

To better examine the prevalence of these attitudes, the Center developed a scale to measure the extent of Nationalist, anti-Immigrant and anti-religious Minority (NIM) sentiment. The NIM scale combines answers to 22 survey questions on a wide range of issues including views on Muslims, Jews and immigrants, as well as immigration policy.

Respondents’ scores increased if they said that immigration to their country should be reduced; that they were unwilling to be neighbors or relatives with Muslims or Jews; that immigrants from certain regions are not honest or hardworking; that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with their national culture and values; that being born in their country is important to being “truly French,” “truly German,” etc.; and for expressing a host of other sentiments on related topics. The higher the score, the more likely a respondent had expressed nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-religious minority sentiments during the survey. Scores on the scale range from 0 to 10.

Relatively few adults in every country surveyed score above 5 on the scale. But there is considerable variation across countries. In Sweden, just 8% of those surveyed scored higher than 5, the lowest amount in any country, while in Italy, 38% did, the highest share in any country. In most countries, the share scoring 5.01 or higher was between 15% and 25%. For example, in both Norway and France, 19% of respondents scored 5.01 or higher.

The NIM scale also provides an opportunity to explore whether factors such as age, political ideology or religious affiliation are associated with these kinds of attitudes.

More here.

Alexander Tesar at The Walrus:

When the acclaimed Inuk film director Zacharias Kunuk attended his first Toronto International Film Festival reception seventeen years ago, he noticed the noise—the deep, resonant mumble of well-dressed partygoers talking over one another, the staccato clink of glasses. In the past, Kunuk had often been the only Inuk at these kinds of parties, which had few analogues in his home of Igloolik, Nunavut. This time, he spotted a few tawny patches of hide amongst the cotton and polyester: some members of his cast who were invited to attend were wearing traditional clothing. Suddenly, he realized what was familiar about the sound: the glamorous party sounded like a herd of walruses.

Kunuk no longer feels out of place at these sorts of events. The film he premiered at that festival, Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), won the Caméra d’Or at the 2001 Cannes film festival and has been called the best Canadian movie ever made.

more here.

Death is Smaller Than I Thought

My Mother and Father died some years ago
I loved them very much.
When they died my love for them
Did not vanish or fade away.
It stayed just about the same,
Only a sadder colour.
And I can feel their love for me,
Same as it ever was.

Nowadays, in good times or bad,
I sometimes ask my Mother and Father
To walk beside me or to sit with me
So we can talk together
Or be silent.

They always come to me.
I talk to them and listen to them
And think I hear them talk to me.
It’s very simple –
Nothing to do with spiritualism
Or religion or mumbo jumbo.

It is imaginary.
It is real.
It is love.

by Adrian Mitchell
from: In Person: 30 Poets
Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, 2008
ISBN: 9781852248000

Valérie Rousseau at The Brooklyn Rail:

By conceiving the notion of art brutin a Europe devastated by the Second World War, French artist Jean Dubuffet questioned the underlying pretense behind the processes of artistic legitimization, dispossessing those authorities empowered to legislate in the art world. He also insisted on the flexible nature of definitions, maintaining that art brutcould incessantly evolve depending on the context of its emergence, knowing that the norm and the margins are perpetually reassessed. Without an art movement or identifiable style, art brut is not a category, but an evolving critical concept. Above all, as observed Céline Delavaux, Dubuffet likely proposed a singular, even poetic and literary way of thinking about art, “It is in the absence of the voice of the madman, the excluded, the uneducated, that his radically subjective art discourse was invented.”

more here.