Jonathon Sturgeon at The Baffler:

LITERATURE IS NOT LITERATURE UNTIL SOMEONE hates it on principle. Homer and Hesiod weren’t poets, in the way we’ve come to understand the word, until Xenophanes and Heraclitus and Plato attacked poetry’s governing credentials, its pipeline to the Gods. The last of these, speaking through Socrates, displaced poetry’s authority, itself drawn from the Muses, by banishing it from the well-ordered city; poetry’s tendency to arouse madness, its toleration of clashing voices, and its foundational place in the educational curriculum made it the enemy of an imagined republic where all positions were accounted for, where all discourse was to be phlegmatically compassed toward the truth. Paradoxically, though, this exile came to define poetry. Until their banishment, Hesiod and Homer were more like perennial Teachers of the Year or cool, dead popes—but universal. We don’t have a contemporary analogue.

This is the thesis, or a thesis, of William Marx’s The Hatred of Literature, another in a line of books, following Ben Lerner’s Hatred of Poetry, that defines literature through its strongest negative, hatred of it.

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Margaret Drabble at The New Statesman:

Fleur Jaeggy is multi-lingual and has also worked as a translator. Swiss by birth, born in Zurich in 1940 into an upper-class family, she writes in Italian, but she has also translated into Italian Thomas De Quincey’s The Last Days of Immanuel Kant and Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives.

In These Possible Lives (2017, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor) she offers three very short biographical sketches of Keats, De Quincey, and the fin-de-siècle symbolist orientalist Jewish Parisian Schwob. Schwob is a character best known to me, bizarrely, as a kind friend to Arnold Bennett in his lonely Paris days; more pertinently, he was a friend of Stéphane Mallarmé and Alfred Jarry, and is said to have influenced Borges. Her three subjects are loosely linked by opium, by malady, by a delectatio morosa or morbid delight, and her essays are prose poems rather than factual narrations. She does not give facts or dates, but tells us of Wordsworth’s habit of cutting the pages of books with a butter knife, of De Quincey’s nightmares, of Schwob’s love for a tubercular working-class girl and her dolls, of Keats begging “in a lucid delirium” for more laudanum. Their hallucinatory intensity and heightened language recall the prose poems of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, with their invocations of wine and hashish, their pose of le poète maudit.

more here.

.
Here’s a brook in all its April energy.

Up its steep and many-bouldered bank
a profusion of nasturtiums scatter
–“like bright syllables”
a transcendentalist poet might say.

Her eye would read that poem.
She’d hear harmonies of rock and water,
feel the soft touch of sun,
the warm taste of spring,
and think of what it meant.

Yet, air is full of a blue confidence in itself.
The world is full of fullness.

Nothing to transcend here.
.

by Nils Peterson
.

Ann Finkbeiner in Nature:

Freeman Dyson is a mathematically inclined physicist who proved in 1949 that competing theories of quantum behaviour were equivalent. In a career spanning seven decades, he branched out into myriad fields. They included condensed-matter physics, nuclear reactors, astronomical technology, extraterrestrial habitation and advising the US government on national security, sometimes as part of the elite post-war research group JASON.

Dyson grew up in Winchester, UK, and left in 1941 for the University of Cambridge, where he studied mathematics. There, he began a lifelong habit of writing regular letters home. Now, aged 94 and living in the United States, he has published some of them in Maker of Patterns. They cover a remarkable range of scientific interests, acquaintances, opinions and adventures.

The patterns Dyson says he made were first those of ideas in mathematics and physics, and then those in his writing about literature and history. Readers might hope that Dyson’s own pattern — the reference frame in which his remarkable range becomes a coherent whole — would be found in his letters. As a writer who has interviewed Dyson, I would advise against such hope.

The letters read like a travel journal written for people he loves and trusts. “I think the reason I write so openly is just this,” he tells his parents in 1949, “that all these adventures in this strange new world are still somewhat unreal to me, and in writing to you about them, I bring them in contact with my familiar world and lend them some of your reality.”

Dyson notices everything. He describes Americans’ friendliness as a result of their inattention to the past, and thus of their loneliness in time.

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Elie Mystal in the New York Times:

America’s bottomless fascination with “true crime” stories and “murder porn” has been capitalized on by some content creators seeking to inspire changes in the criminal justice system. But the genre tends to let the system itself off the hook. The titillating and gory details of any one case narrow readers’ focus onto particular bad actors, relegating law enforcement to a largely offscreen menace. Literature as a tool for social and legal reform further requires the reader to accept the author’s assertion that the highlighted case produced an incorrect result, which is a big ask in a country that can’t even agree on whether Han Solo shot first.

“The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist,” by the Washington Post journalist Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington, a law professor at the University of Mississippi, avoids these generic problems. There is no murder mystery. The book details the wrongful convictions of two men, Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, in the separate murders of two girls in the same rural Mississippi town in the early 1990s. But the real killer of both 3-year-olds is revealed to the reader before the wrong men are even put on trial. We are also spared the anguish of wondering if the system will ever get it right, for we know the men have already been freed thanks to the work of the nonprofit criminal exoneration organization the Innocence Project.

The crime having been solved early on, Balko and Carrington devote the bulk of the book to pulling back the curtain on the justice system’s little-known but systemic problem that put Brewer and Brooks behind bars: faulty and biased forensic evidence. Junk science convicted these men; real science set them free. The inability of judges and jurors to tell the difference is why innocent men languish in jail while the prosecutors who put them there run for higher office.

More here.

William H. Pritchard in The New Criterion:

Harold Bloom’s new book on King Lear is one in a series he is writing about Shakespeare’s personalities, including Hamlet, Falstaff, and Cleopatra.1 It is a short book of 160 pages, many of them taken up with long quotations from the play usually followed by rather brief comments from the critic. Those who have read Bloom on Shakespeare in previous books—Shakespeare, The Western Canon, The Anatomy of Influence—will find little here that is new except an even greater willingness on Bloom’s part to put himself front and center with utterances such as “It is pitiful that . . .” or “Who would not weep . . .” or “One wishes that . . .” as he takes us through the play. He even has sympathy for the absent Queen Lear: “How horrifying it would have been had she shared Lear’s privations, exposed out on the heath.” From his earlier books, we learn that Lear“ultimately baffles commentary”; that along with Hamlet it is “the height of literary experience”; and that the experience of reading it is (in a loaded word from Freud) “altogether uncanny.”

As in previous books, Bloom the critic operates through paraphrase and strong assertion, even as his posture has become increasingly isolated from other members of his profession. In The Anatomy of Influence, he lists those others in an exuberant way: “The usual rabblement: comma counters, ‘cultural’ materialists, new and newer historicists, gender commissars, and all the other academic impostors, mock journalists, inchoate rhapsodes, and good spellers.” Against them he has constituted himself “a department of one,” his main predecessor being, he admits modestly, Dr. Samuel Johnson.

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Giulia Rhodes in The Guardian:

Dr Barbara Lipska was working at her computer one morning in January 2015 when her right hand suddenly disappeared. Having spent her 40-year career studying the human brain, she immediately knew just how bad this was. The neuroscientist was aware that the most likely explanation was a tumour in the area of her brain governing vision. Having twice overcome cancer – in the breast in 2009 and then melanoma three years later – the spread of the disease was already a frightening possibility.

So when Lipska’s doctor called the following morning to report the results of an emergency MRI scan – three tumours in the brain, one of them bleeding, suggesting metastatic melanoma – she was undoubtedly devastated, but not completely surprised.

The prognosis was “effectively a death sentence”. At her age, then 63, and with that number of tumours, she knew she could expect to have between four and seven months. Instead, three years later, Lipska remains the director of the Human Brain Collection at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland, is training for a summer triathlon and has written an account of her experiences. She hopes this will raise awareness of an aspect of her illness about which, even with her extensive professional experience, she knew very little. “The idea that I might lose my mind didn’t enter my thoughts and was never discussed,” she says. “All anyone focused on was that I might die.”

More here.

Little by little, wean yourself.

This is the gist of what I have to say.

From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more visible game.

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, "The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheatfields and mountain passes, and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding."

You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.

Listen to the answer.
There is no "other world."
I only know what I've experienced.
You must be hallucinating.
.

Jelaluddin Rumi, 1207-1273
from A Book of Luminous Things
translated from the Persian by Coleman Barks

Evan Kindly at The Nation:

In December 1945, Ezra Pound was committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. He was then 60 years old, internationally famous, and under indictment for treason against the United States. In an infamous series of broadcasts made on Italian radio between 1941 and 1943, Pound had declared his support for Mussolini’s regime and his contempt for the Allied forces. He parroted fascist talking points but also added a layer of byzantine anti-Semitic conspiracy theory all his own. “You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-Jewed the Jew,” he admonished the British on March 15, 1942. In other broadcasts, Pound spoke of “Jew slime,” warned of the white race “going toward total extinction,” suggested hanging President Roosevelt (“if you can do it by due legal process”), praised Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and urged his listeners to familiarize themselves with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Pound had arrived at this vicious ideological position gradually. His early work, while always concerned with the relations between art and society, had rarely been political per se. Over the years, though, his long poem The Cantos, started in 1915, had drifted from a preoccupation with mythological subjects to an investigation of economics and governance, influenced by heterodox economists like C.H. Douglas and Silvio Gesell. By the time the Second World War began, Pound had come to blame the practice of usury, propagated by a secret network of nefarious Jewish bankers, for all the evils afflicting the world.

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Anne Wagner at the LRB:

But even the most exuberant combinations of colour, surface and texture don’t necessarily make an ordinary object a sculpture. If a handaxe qualifies, it is as both a spatial and a bodily thing. It is made to be held, and its shape declares that purpose, though in ways that aren’t easy to put into words. Imagine a two-sided tool that is also bilaterally symmetrical – something like a broad-bladed knife, though with one crucial difference. Though planar, the back of each handlaxe is is fuller than the front. There a slight bulge, a rounding, which seems both to echo and await its user’s cupped hand.

One persuasive reason to see at least some handaxes as sculpture stems from their nuanced and exacting display of formal goals. Their consistent use of symmetry is a case in point, given that such equilibrium isn’t particularly helpful where skinning prey and stripping bones are concerned. A double-edged tool doubles the risk of injury to the palm or fingers of the working hand. By these lights symmetrical axes put the threat of injury second to the pleasure presented by a well-balanced form.

These and other features help to explain not only why some handaxes seem exceptional but also why practical necessity alone doesn’t seem a sufficient explanation of their materials and forms.

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Cassandra Willyard in Nature:

On an unseasonably warm February morning, Mark Pierson takes a 20-minute drive to one of Minneapolis’s larger pet shops. Pierson, a researcher in an immunology laboratory at the University of Minnesota, often comes here to buy mice, so most of the staff know him. Today he asks for ten, and an employee fishes them out of a glass box. Pierson requests the smaller mice because they’re typically younger, but he isn’t too picky. They probably all have what he wants: germs. These mice are about to enter one of the most tightly controlled labs in the country, a facility normally reserved for studying dangerous pathogens such as tuberculosis and chikungunya virus. The rodents probably don’t carry serious human infections, but they do harbour diseases that pose a grave threat to the hundreds of other research mice in the building. The pet-shop mice are about to get new room-mates. Each one will bunk with a group of shiny black lab mice, sharing food, water, bedding and, most importantly, pathogens. Until now, the lab mice have been kept in a squeaky clean environment, free from most diseases, so some will fall ill and die. The rest will develop more robust immune systems, more like those of wild mice — and, arguably, humans.

What Pierson is doing breaks the rules. For more than 50 years, scientists have worked to make lab mice cleaner. In most labs today, the animals’ cages are sanitized, and their water bottles and food are sterilized. “We really go to great lengths to keep natural infectious experience out of the mouse house,” says David Masopust, an immunologist at the University of Minnesota who heads the lab where Pierson works. Those efforts have paid off: with the confounding effects of pathogens controlled, mouse experiments have become less variable.

But a raft of studies now suggests that this cleanliness has come at a cost, leaving the rodents with stunted immune systems. In a quest for standardized and spotless mice, scientists have made the creatures a less-faithful model for human immune systems, which develop in a world teeming with microbes. And that could have serious implications for researchers working to usher treatments and vaccines out of the lab and into the clinic. Although it’s not yet possible to pin specific failures on the impeccable hygiene of standard mouse models, Masopust thinks the artificial environment must have some effect. It’s no secret that the success rate for moving therapies from animal to humans is abysmal — according to one estimate¹, 90% of drugs that enter clinical trials fail. “You have to wonder if you might sometimes get misinformed simply because you’re in a clean environment,” says Masopust. That’s why he and other researchers are developing dirtier models that better replicate how the immune system develops in the natural world. Some groups have given their mice infections^2,3, others a more natural microbiome^4,5. But housing the dirtier mice can be risky. Pet-shop mice carry so many infections, it’s as if they came from “a Dickensian orphanage”, says Aaron Ericsson, a microbiome researcher at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Lab-animal caretakers take biosecurity very seriously and mice are a precious resource. “The last thing you’d want to do is have some sort of an outbreak.”

More here.

Dan Dennett in the New York Review of Books:

I thank Galen Strawson for his passionate attack on my views, since it provides a large, clear target for my rebuttal. I would never have dared put Strawson’s words in the mouth of Otto (the fictional critic I invented as a sort of ombudsman for the skeptical reader of Consciousness Explained) for fear of being scolded for creating a strawman. A full-throated, table-thumping Strawson serves me much better. He clearly believes what he says, thinks it is very important, and is spectacularly wrong in useful ways. His most obvious mistake is his misrepresentation of my main claim:

If [Dennett] is right, no one has ever really suffered, in spite of agonizing diseases, mental illness, murder, rape, famine, slavery, bereavement, torture, and genocide. And no one has ever caused anyone else pain.

I don’t deny the existence of consciousness; of course, consciousness exists; it just isn’t what most people think it is, as I have said many times. I do grant that Strawson expresses quite vividly a widespread conviction about what consciousness is. Might people—and Strawson, in particular—be wrong about this? That is the issue.

He invokes common sense against which to contrast “the silliest claim ever made” (I’m honored!), but here is some other common sense that pushes back: when you encounter people who claim to have seen a magician saw a lady in half, counsel them to postpone their extravagant hypotheses—backwards time travel, multi-world wormholes, quantum entanglement, “real magic”—until they have exhausted the more mundane possibilities. Unrevolutionary science has discovered good explanations for such heretofore baffling phenomena as reproduction, metabolism, growth, and self-repair, for instance. So while it is possible that we will have to overthrow that science in order to account for consciousness, we should explore the default possibilities first.

More here.

Randall Colburn in The A. V. Club:

“There is pride to be had where the prejudicial is practiced with precision in the trenchant triage of tactile terminations.”

No, this is not a tongue twister you’d hear muttered in the wings of a high school stage play. This is, no lie, just one of several deadening excerpts from Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, the debut novel of actor Sean Penn, who, terrifyingly, seems to be giving up acting in favor of poorly aping Thomas Pynchon and successfully embodying Charles Bukowski.

The 160-page novel tells the story of its namesake character, a septic tank entrepreneur and contract killer who Forrest Gumps his way through Hurricane Katrina, Baghdad at the outset of the Iraq War, and the “penis-edency” of a Donald Trumpian commander in chief. Huffington Post’s Claire Fallon describes it as “an exercise in ass-showing, a 160-page self-own.” Other reviews are kinder, if similarly unimpressed. The New York Times calls it “agonizing” and “conspicuously un-fun,” while Entertainment Weekly criticizes its “woozy gender politics” while dubbing it “shrill,” “confounding,” and “a little hypocritical.”

But one needn’t dig far to discover the dissertation’s most dunk-worthy declarations, which allow for an astonishing abundance of alliterative announcements.

More here.

Paul Krugman in the New York Times:

These days almost everyone has the (justified) sense that America is coming apart at the seams. But this isn’t a new story, or just about politics. Things have been falling apart on multiple fronts since the 1970s: Political polarization has marched side by side with economic polarization, as income inequality has soared.

And both political and economic polarization have a strong geographic dimension. On the economic side, some parts of America, mainly big coastal cities, have been getting much richer, but other parts have been left behind. On the political side, the thriving regions by and large voted for Hillary Clinton, while the lagging regions voted for Donald Trump.

I’m not saying that everything is great in coastal cities: Many people remain economically stranded even within metropolitan areas that look successful in the aggregate. And soaring housing costs, thanks in large part to Nimbyism, are a real and growing problem. Still, regional economic divergence is real and correlates closely, though not perfectly, with political divergence.

But what’s behind this divergence? What’s the matter with Trumpland?

More here.

Tony Joseph in The Quint:

Before you begin to read this, take a chair and sit down comfortably. Because this is going to take some time, and it is going to address some of the most fundamental questions about how we, the Indians, or South Asians more generally, came to be.

The answers you are going to read are taken from an extensive new study that has just been released, titled ‘The Genomic Formation of Central and South Asia’. It is co-authored by 92 scientists from around the world and was co-directed by Prof David Reich of Harvard Medical School. Reich runs a lab at Harvard that has no equal in its ability to sequence and analyse ancient DNA at scale and speed, and he has co-authored multiple studies in recent years that have changed the way we understand the prehistory of much of the world. His just-released book, ‘Who We Are and How We Got Here’, is currently making waves.

Among those 92 co-authors are scientists who are stars of an equal measure in their own disciplines, like James Mallory, archaeologist and author of the classic ‘In search of Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth’; and David Anthony, anthropologist and author of the ground-breaking ‘The Horse, The Wheel and the Language: How Bronze Age Raiders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World’.

Archaeobotanist Dorian Fuller and archaeologist Nicole Boivin are familiar names in India for the work they have done in the country.

More here.

Tracks

Night, two o'clock: moonlight. The train has stopped
in the middle of the plain. Distance bright points of a town
twinkle cold on the horizon.

As when someone has gone into a dream so far
that he'll never remember he was there
when he come back to his room.

As when someone goes into a sickness so deep
that all his former days become twinkling points, a swarm,
cold and feeble on the horizon.

The train stand perfectly still.
Two o'clock: full moonlight, few stars.

by Tomas Tranströmer
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harcourt, 1996