The Language Issue

I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant

in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,

then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river

only to have it borne hither and thither,
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh’s daughter.
.

by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
from Pharao's Daughter
Wake Forest University Press, 1988
translated from Irish by Medbh McGuckian

Peter Moskowitz at Poetry Magazine:

Britton’s single volume of poetry, Italy, was published by Little Caesar Press in 1981. The book probably wouldn’t have reached beyond Britton’s small coterie of friends were it not for support from a few devotees of gay poetry. As it was, his friends recall that Italy sold only about 750 copies and got a negative review in the Village Voice. In the early 2000s, the poet Reginald Shepherdbegan collecting Britton’s unpublished works, some of which existed as letters to friends. When Shepherd died in 2008, leaving the book unfinished, poet and editor Philip Clark took up the project. In 2016, he published a second volume of Britton’s work, In the Empire of the Air, which includes Italy and dozens of unpublished works. The book is slim, a little over 100 pages, and most of the poems in it are less than a page long.

Britton’s poems are tight and neat, as if edited with a scalpel. He told friends he wanted his work to be universal and to speak to anyone. In contrast to the sometimes flamboyant self-disclosure of many of his contemporaries, his poems offer little insight into his life, who he was, or what made him tick.

more here.

Kalefa Sanneh at The New Yorker:

Hopkins is now thirty-eight, and one of the most celebrated electronic musicians of his generation. He has a paradoxical ability to make obsessively engineered tracks that sound friendly and generous; his sensibility is openhearted and sometimes sentimental—an approach that can make him seem like an outlier in the world of electronic music. Hopkins is known for his collaborations and soundtracks and, above all, his own albums, which appear every five years or so and then reappear on innumerable best-of lists. Next month, he will release “Singularity,” ending a quiet but dramatic period in his life, during which he recovered from the rigors of touring by subjecting his body to other kinds of stress: desert treks, controlled breathing, freezing baths. Apparently, these exertions had an effect, because the new album is both the gentlest and the most epic of Hopkins’s career.

“Singularity” is an hour-long ode to spiritual transcendence that also resembles pleasant background noise—at least, it does at first. The album includes a handful of wispy, beatless tracks that might be considered ambient music, a genre that Eno invented. In the liner notes to “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” from 1978, Eno wrote that ambient music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Hopkins has been pleased to learn that his albums have generally failed to meet this exacting standard. “Someone will say, I went to do some cooking and put it on, and ended up sitting down and listening to the whole thing,” he says. “Obviously, that’s what you want—you’ve captured them.”

more here.

Julian Barnes at the LRB:

Now, with time and a shift of art-historical wind, we may see Cassatt a little more clearly, and a little more as herself. She is, largely, a painter of the great indoors, the here and now, and of women’s space within it. She does not do landscape or nature – the urban park and the boating lake are as far as that goes; nor does she give us action, history, myth, still life, houses, horses, sunsets or those forbidden parts of the Opéra. She does not do men much, though her double portrait of her brother Alexander with his son Robert, the boy sitting on the arm of his father’s armchair, their black suits blending into one and their button-black eyes popping in parallel towards some unknown object (a joint-television gaze from pre-television times) makes us wish she had portrayed the opposite sex more. She does mothers and babies with an acute eye for the weight and fall of an infant’s flesh, and an acute sense of the weight and fall of an infant’s mood. She made a series of colour prints whose limpidity, grace and line echo and learn from the Japanese without appearing in any way subservient (though it would be good to know what the Japanese thought, and think, about them). She did some rather weak pictures of the big-hatted daughters of friends. And she did several one-off paintings – like Little Girl in a Blue Armchair and In the Loge – whose power has never faded. It is an indicator of Cassatt’s return to wider fashion that Simon Schama included two of her ‘Japanese’ prints in an episode of the TV show Civilisations, while in a later one David Olusoga brought In the Loge to his argument.

more here.

Freeman Dyson in Nautilus:

All through a long life I had three main concerns, with a clear order of priority. Family came first, friends second, and work third.” So writes the pioneering theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in the introduction to his newly published collection of letters, Maker of Patterns. Spanning about four decades, the collection presents a first-person glimpse into a life that witnessed epochal changes both in world history and in physics. Here, we present short excerpts from nine of Dyson’s letters, with a focus on his relationship with the physicist Richard Feynman. Dyson and Feynman had both professional and personal bonds: Dyson helped interpret and draw attention to Feynman’s work—which went on to earn a Nobel Prize—and the two men traveled together and worked side by side. Taken together, these letters present a unique perspective of each man. Feynman’s effervescent energy comes through, as does Dyson’s modesty and deep admiration for his colleague. So too does the excitement each scientist felt for his role in uncovering some of the foundations of modern-day theoretical physics.

March 8, 1948

Yesterday I went for a long walk in the spring sunshine with Trudy Eyges and Richard Feynman. Feynman is the young American professor, half genius and half buffoon, who keeps all physicists and their children amused with his effervescent vitality. He has, however, as I have recently learned, a great deal more to him than that, and you may be interested in his story. The part of it with which I am concerned began when he arrived at Los Alamos; there he found and fell in love with a brilliant and beautiful girl, who was tubercular and had been exiled to New Mexico in the hope of stopping the disease. When Feynman arrived, things had got so bad that the doctors gave her only a year to live, but he determined to marry her, and marry her he did; and for a year and a half, while working at full pressure on the project, he nursed her and made her days cheerful. She died just before the end of the war.

More here.

Freeman Dyson in Nautilus:

All through a long life I had three main concerns, with a clear order of priority. Family came first, friends second, and work third.” So writes the pioneering theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in the introduction to his newly published collection of letters, Maker of Patterns. Spanning about four decades, the collection presents a first-person glimpse into a life that witnessed epochal changes both in world history and in physics. Here, we present short excerpts from nine of Dyson’s letters, with a focus on his relationship with the physicist Richard Feynman. Dyson and Feynman had both professional and personal bonds: Dyson helped interpret and draw attention to Feynman’s work—which went on to earn a Nobel Prize—and the two men traveled together and worked side by side. Taken together, these letters present a unique perspective of each man. Feynman’s effervescent energy comes through, as does Dyson’s modesty and deep admiration for his colleague. So too does the excitement each scientist felt for his role in uncovering some of the foundations of modern-day theoretical physics.

March 8, 1948

Yesterday I went for a long walk in the spring sunshine with Trudy Eyges and Richard Feynman. Feynman is the young American professor, half genius and half buffoon, who keeps all physicists and their children amused with his effervescent vitality. He has, however, as I have recently learned, a great deal more to him than that, and you may be interested in his story. The part of it with which I am concerned began when he arrived at Los Alamos; there he found and fell in love with a brilliant and beautiful girl, who was tubercular and had been exiled to New Mexico in the hope of stopping the disease. When Feynman arrived, things had got so bad that the doctors gave her only a year to live, but he determined to marry her, and marry her he did; and for a year and a half, while working at full pressure on the project, he nursed her and made her days cheerful. She died just before the end of the war.

More here.

The British-Libyan writer on an uncensored Arabian Nights, why Proust makes you feel smarter – and the diaries of a pianist that changed his life.

Hisham Matar in The Guardian:

The book I am currently reading
I have been reading one poem from On Balance, Sinéad Morrissey’s excellent new collection, every night before falling asleep. I have only recently come across the work of the Moroccan essayist Abdelfattah Kilito. I am now on Thou Shall Not Speak My Language. He is marvellously intelligent and witty.

The book that changed my life
The uncensored version of The Arabian Nights, with all its sex and strangeness and horrible intrigue, was read to me when I was too young to understand much of it and so it bled into my consciousness, which is perhaps why I am as suspicious of it as I am trusting. I have since found its ghost lurking in Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and Jorge Louis Borges, among others.

The book I wish I’d written
I have studied with covetous admiration In Search of Lost Time, a book that has expanded my sense of the world and did so in ways that did not seem to bring me out of myself but rather deeper into it. One of Proust’s many gifts is to make you feel smarter, finer and capable of greater sensitivities than you perhaps ever assumed. For me, no novel contains as many ideas or as much pleasure and delight.

More here.

Michael Shellenberger in Forbes:

Over the last year, the media have published story after story after story about the declining price of solar panels and wind turbines.

People who read these stories are understandably left with the impression that the more solar and wind energy we produce, the lower electricity prices will become.

And yet that’s not what’s happening. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Between 2009 and 2017, the price of solar panels per watt declined by 75 percent while the price of wind turbines per watt declined by 50 percent.

And yet — during the same period — the price of electricity in places that deployed significant quantities of renewables increased dramatically.

Electricity prices increased by:

51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy from 2006 to 2016;

24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017;

over 100 percent in Denmark since 1995 when it began deploying renewables (mostly wind) in earnest.

What gives? If solar panels and wind turbines became so much cheaper, why did the price of electricity rise instead of decline?

More here.

Vali Nasr in The Atlantic:

Among the most strident critics of the nuclear deal with Iran are those who believe it furthers the survival of its leadership. By throwing Iran’s rulers an economic lifeline, they believe, the deal is an abject failure. America’s goal, they say, should never have been “denuclearization,” but regime change.

These days, those regime-change evangelists, having shrugged off the lessons of the Iraq War, are back at the helm of U.S. foreign policy. John Bolton, Donald Trump’s new national-security adviser, has long advocated regime change in Iran, and more recently has argued that the administration should openly embrace it as a foreign-policy goal. At the same time, Bolton and his ilk are pushing for a denuclearization deal with North Korea ahead of Trump’s planned summit with Kim Jong Un, the country’s leader. Preparations for the meeting will likely be in full swing by May 12, the next deadline for extending the Iran deal. The Trump administration, in other words, could find itself in the odd situation of tearing down the nuclear deal with Iran while pursuing a similar deal with North Korea.

With proponents of regime change ascendant, the temptation in the Trump administration to cast the deal aside in an effort to weaken Iran is great. Yet the immediate ripple effects of such a decision will breed dangerous consequences, both in Iran and across the Middle East—ones that the Kim regime will be watching carefully.

More here.

John Launer in Literary Hub:

Why do males exist? If you learned biology at school, your teachers will probably have told you it was because combining genes from different individuals—one male and one female—increases variation in a species, and it is variation that helps a species survive.

Unfortunately, most evolutionary experts stopped believing in this explanation over 30 years ago. From a reproductive point of view, no individual is interested in anything very much beyond donating genes to the next generation. As far as whole species are concerned, they are preserved or wiped out more or less at random, largely according to the whims of climate and geology. In addition, you don’t actually need sexes to produce variation: the vast majority of organisms like microbes happily mutate and vary withoutsex.

The great evolutionist John Maynard Smith regarded sex as more or less inexplicable. He talked of “the twofold cost of males.” First, it is incomprehensible that any female should want to throw away half her genes and take on someone else’s, when theoretically she could just produce clones of herself instead. Secondly, the males of many species are entirely useless at doing anything except sitting around, getting fat at the females’ expense, and—in the words of Richard Dawkins—duffing up other males. Among some animals, such as elephant seals, the vast majority of males die as wasteful, disappointed virgins.

Given this wastefulness, it is perhaps not surprising that there are at least 40 species where the female kills the male during or after sex.

More here.

Geoff Dyer at Literary Hub:

Already, by 1960, Garry Winogrand was taking pictures that didn’t make any sense. Even now, we struggle to get a handle on them, but back then, before the pictures had altered the grammar of photography sufficiently to enable us to get to grips with them . . .

The amount of information in the photograph below is considerable but the ordering of it so minimal—or discreet, at any rate—it’s difficult to know how to process it. How many lives are being actively lived in this picture? What is happening? What are we looking at? For one thing, we’re looking at a manifestation or projection of our own confusion in the form of the guy scratching his head, a gesture that might for him be purely mechanical (an itch?) but which here becomes imbued with psychological and existential weight because he is asking the question we are asking: What is going on here? So the person asking this question becomes the key to the riddle of which he is a central part.

This key turns out to be compositional even though, back in 1960, it seemed to many that Winogrand had given composition the elbow—in this instance, quite literally. The elbow is the element on which the whole picture hinges. The head-scratcher’s elbow links arms, as it were, with those of the other walkers—especially the woman in the white dress, behind him and to his left—which leads, in turn, to those of the woman in the black dress, the diagonal straps of which mirror the triangulation of upper and lower arm hinged at the elbow.

more here.

D. Berton Emerson at the LARB:

If meanness is one reason it seems almost impossible to talk to each other across our current political divide, niceness is another. For the vulnerable and the threatened, being nice is not an option, for their lives are on the line. Yet too many Americans retreat behind the no-contest zone of niceness, and prefer not to even try. And this is why Bramen’s book is so important right now: American Niceness does a remarkable job of demonstrating not only the history of deeply entrenched norms of niceness but also the reasons they have lurked beneath our critical radar for so long. Bramen shows impressive range in her analysis, tracking the development of American niceness back to the earliest myths of settler colonialism on the New England shore and forward through the pre–Civil War decades all the way to foreign policy at the turn of the century. It’s an outstanding scholarly book: well researched, well written, and methodologically innovative. I also found it to be incredibly frustrating, because it so aptly demonstrates the embeddedness and pervasiveness of a quality that is both the greatest generator and the greatest inhibitor of positive change. Turns out, American niceness is a real motherfucker.

more here.

Juliette Kennedy at the TLS:

Mathematics springs from creative acts of the human imagination; yet at the same time the creativity of the mathematician is constrained by the fact of the matter. It is not up to the mathematician whether there are infinitely many prime numbers – either there are or there aren’t, and thanks to one of Euclid’s theorems, we know that there are; in fact, it is even provable.

About provability, much is known. For example, many mathematical proofs can be mechanized, that is, checked by a computer. In fact, one could imagine a completely automated practice, where one could theoretically build, say, a Turing Machine, into which one could input any mathematical conjecture and the machine would output a definite answer, yes or no, or true or false, in a finite amount of time.

One way of describing the Incompleteness Theorems (1931) of the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel is to say that he proved, in the form of a mathematical theorem, that the possibility of a fully automated mathematics can never be realized.

more here.

Evelyn Lamb in Smithsonian:

April is both National Poetry Month and Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, so a few years ago science writer Stephen Ornes dubbed it Math Poetry Month. If the words “math” and “poetry” don’t intuitively make sense to you as a pair, poet and mathematician JoAnne Growney’s blog Intersections—Poetry with Mathematics is a perfect place to start expanding your math-poetic horizons. The blog includes a broad range of poems with mathematical themes or built using mathematical rules. Take “Geometry,” by former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove:

I prove a theorem and the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
the ceiling floats away with a sigh.

—from “Geometry” by Rita Dove

…Growney grew up wanting to be a writer. “I read Little Women as a girl, and maybe it was partly the name connection, but I thought that I wanted to be a writer like Jo.” She was also good at math, though, and ended up with a scholarship to study it in college. She stuck with it and earned her Ph.D. in 1970 at the University of Oklahoma. During her career as a math professor, her interest in writing continued. She took poetry classes at a nearby college when she could, discovered the math poetry anthology Against Infinity while doing a sabbatical project about mathematics and the arts, and started to see her feelings about mathematics echoed in poetry. Mathematics and poetry, Growney says, are both “formats that can convey multiple meanings.” In mathematics, a single object or idea might take different forms. A quadratic equation, for example, can be understood in terms of its algebraic expression, perhaps y=x²+3x-7, or in terms of its graph, a parabola. Henri Poincaré, a French polymath who laid the foundations of two different fields of mathematics in the early 1900s, described mathematics as “the art of giving the same name to different things.”

More here.

Evelyn Lamb in Smithsonian:

April is both National Poetry Month and Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, so a few years ago science writer Stephen Ornes dubbed it Math Poetry Month. If the words “math” and “poetry” don’t intuitively make sense to you as a pair, poet and mathematician JoAnne Growney’s blog Intersections—Poetry with Mathematics is a perfect place to start expanding your math-poetic horizons. The blog includes a broad range of poems with mathematical themes or built using mathematical rules. Take “Geometry,” by former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove:

I prove a theorem and the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
the ceiling floats away with a sigh.

—from “Geometry” by Rita Dove

…Growney grew up wanting to be a writer. “I read Little Women as a girl, and maybe it was partly the name connection, but I thought that I wanted to be a writer like Jo.” She was also good at math, though, and ended up with a scholarship to study it in college. She stuck with it and earned her Ph.D. in 1970 at the University of Oklahoma. During her career as a math professor, her interest in writing continued. She took poetry classes at a nearby college when she could, discovered the math poetry anthology Against Infinity while doing a sabbatical project about mathematics and the arts, and started to see her feelings about mathematics echoed in poetry. Mathematics and poetry, Growney says, are both “formats that can convey multiple meanings.” In mathematics, a single object or idea might take different forms. A quadratic equation, for example, can be understood in terms of its algebraic expression, perhaps y=x²+3x-7, or in terms of its graph, a parabola. Henri Poincaré, a French polymath who laid the foundations of two different fields of mathematics in the early 1900s, described mathematics as “the art of giving the same name to different things.”

More here.

For My Father Gazing at the World After His Mother Died

If I said anything, he’d stop, so I just let him be.
Tell me, I wanted to ask, how
to be parentless & alone & secretly
in love with water. There’s a now

we each live in
that sometimes feels more like never
than enough. If my father believes in ascension,
then out there, beyond the lake, his mother lives forever.

In the lake, too. In the wind to comb my father’s hair.
In the tree that wills each holy & parentless
limb to cast a shadow in the morning sun’s light. Out there,
I hope, all we’ve ever missed

becomes all we ever are. I love. I’ve loved. I will love to keep my
                                                          father alive.
When he turned slow to me, he blamed the wind for all his crying.

by Devin Kelly
from Ecotheo Review
March 2018

For My Father Gazing at the World After His Mother Died

If I said anything, he’d stop, so I just let him be.
Tell me, I wanted to ask, how
to be parentless & alone & secretly
in love with water. There’s a now

we each live in
that sometimes feels more like never
than enough. If my father believes in ascension,
then out there, beyond the lake, his mother lives forever.

In the lake, too. In the wind to comb my father’s hair.
In the tree that wills each holy & parentless
limb to cast a shadow in the morning sun’s light. Out there,
I hope, all we’ve ever missed

becomes all we ever are. I love. I’ve loved. I will love to keep my
father alive.
When he turned slow to me, he blamed the wind for all his crying.

by Devin Kelly
from Ecotheo Review
March 2018

Skye C Cleary and Massimo Pigliucci in Aeon:

A strange thing is happening in modern philosophy: many philosophers don’t seem to believe that there is such a thing as human nature. What makes this strange is that, not only does the new attitude run counter to much of the history of philosophy, but – despite loud claims to the contrary – it also goes against the findings of modern science. This has serious consequences, ranging from the way in which we see ourselves and our place in the cosmos to what sort of philosophy of life we might adopt. Our aim here is to discuss the issue of human nature in light of contemporary biology, and then explore how the concept might impact everyday living.

The existence of something like a human nature that separates us from the rest of the animal world has often been implied, and sometimes explicitly stated, throughout the history of philosophy. Aristotle thought that the ‘proper function’ of human beings was to think rationally, from which he derived the idea that the highest life available to us is one of contemplation (ie, philosophising) – hardly unexpected from a philosopher. The Epicureans argued that it is a quintessential aspect of human nature that we are happier when we experience pleasure, and especially when we do not experience pain. Thomas Hobbes believed that we need a strong centralised government to keep us in line because our nature would otherwise lead us to live a life that he memorably characterised as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. Jean-Jacques Rousseau embedded the idea of a human nature in his conception of the ‘noble savage’. Confucius and Mencius thought that human nature is essentially good, while Hsün Tzu considered it essentially evil.

The keyword here is, of course, ‘essentially’. One of the obvious exceptions to this trend was John Locke, who described the human mind as a ‘tabula rasa’ (blank slate), but his take has been rejected by modern science. As one group of cognitive scientists describes it in From Mating to Mentality (2003), our mind is more like a colouring book, or a ‘graffiti-filled wall of a New York subway station’ than a blank slate.

In contrast, many contemporary philosophers, both of the so-called analytic and continental traditions, seem largely to have rejected the very idea of human nature.

More here.

Michael Jordan:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the mantra of the current era. The phrase is intoned by technologists, academicians, journalists and venture capitalists alike. As with many phrases that cross over from technical academic fields into general circulation, there is significant misunderstanding accompanying the use of the phrase. But this is not the classical case of the public not understanding the scientists — here the scientists are often as befuddled as the public. The idea that our era is somehow seeing the emergence of an intelligence in silicon that rivals our own entertains all of us — enthralling us and frightening us in equal measure. And, unfortunately, it distracts us.

There is a different narrative that one can tell about the current era. Consider the following story, which involves humans, computers, data and life-or-death decisions, but where the focus is something other than intelligence-in-silicon fantasies. When my spouse was pregnant 14 years ago, we had an ultrasound. There was a geneticist in the room, and she pointed out some white spots around the heart of the fetus. “Those are markers for Down syndrome,” she noted, “and your risk has now gone up to 1 in 20.” She further let us know that we could learn whether the fetus in fact had the genetic modification underlying Down syndrome via an amniocentesis. But amniocentesis was risky — the risk of killing the fetus during the procedure was roughly 1 in 300. Being a statistician, I determined to find out where these numbers were coming from. To cut a long story short, I discovered that a statistical analysis had been done a decade previously in the UK, where these white spots, which reflect calcium buildup, were indeed established as a predictor of Down syndrome. But I also noticed that the imaging machine used in our test had a few hundred more pixels per square inch than the machine used in the UK study. I went back to tell the geneticist that I believed that the white spots were likely false positives — that they were literally “white noise.” She said “Ah, that explains why we started seeing an uptick in Down syndrome diagnoses a few years ago; it’s when the new machine arrived.”

More here.