What Happened Here Before

— 300,000,000—

First a sea: soft sands, muds, and marls

— loading, compressing, heating, crumpling,

crushing, recrystallizing, infiltrating,

several times lifted and submerged,

intruding molten granite magma

deep-cooled and speckling,

gold quartz fills the cracks—

— 80,000,000—

sea-bed strata raised and folded,

granite far below.

warm quiet centuries of rains

(make dark red tropic soils)

wear down two miles of surface,

lay bare the veins and tumble heavy gold

in streambeds

slate and schist rock-riffles catch it –

volcanic ash floats down and dams the streams,

piles up the gold and gravel—

— 3,000,000—

flowing north, two rivers joined,

to make a wide long lake.

and then it tilted and rivers fell apart

all running west

to cut the gorges of the Feather,

Bear, and Yuba.

Ponderosa pine, manzanita, black oak, mountain yew,

deer, coyote, bluejay, gray squirrel,

ground squirrel, fox, blacktail hare,

ringtail, bobcat, bear,

all came to live here.

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Andrew Motion at the Hudson Review:

“We see the world once, in childhood, the rest is memory.” So says Louise Glück, and her remark is full of wisdom. In Milosz’s case, the sheer eventfulness of his adult existence means that once his childhood was over, “the rest” of his life contained a great deal more than just memory. But there’s no question that the habits and insights of his maturity rest on the foundation of his earliest perceptions. He was born in 1911 to a Polish-speaking family in Szetejnie, Lithuania, which like the adjacent territories of Poland, Latvia and Estonia, was at the time a part of the Russian empire. His family, although not wealthy (his father was an engineer), occupied a somewhat patrician position within this mix of traditions, languages and cultures; despite (and because of) the turbulence produced by the outbreak of the First World War, which resulted in Milosz’s first experience of deracination, he inherited from both his parents a remarkable sense of centeredness. A feeling, that is, not just of why education and high culture mattered, particularly in times of jeopardy, but also of how such things were inextricably bound into the traditions of the Catholic church.

And into the traditions of the countryside. In his entrancing autobiographical novel The Issa Valley, Milosz remembers the landscape around Szetejnie in terms that blend delight in everyday things with the same exalted sense of “something far more deeply interfused” that Wordsworth wrote about in “Tintern Abbey”: “Happy the child,” he says in one typical passage, “who wakes on a summer morning to the oriole’s song outside his window, to a chorus of quacks, cackling, and gaggling from the barnyard, to a steady stream of voices bathed in never-ending light, to appreciate the futility of such musical exertions.

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Gabriel Bell in Salon:

Asked to draw parallels between his fictional narrative of a fascist, anti-Semitic uprising on American soil, Roth said, "Charles Lindbergh, in life as in my novel, may have been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to Fascism, but he was also — because of the extraordinary feat of his solo trans-Atlantic flight at the age of 25 — an authentic American hero 13 years before I have him winning the presidency." He add that actual, real 2018 president Donald Trump is, by comparison, "a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac." It's about as good a summation of what our current commander in chief represents as you'll get.

Roth, when asked if he could have predicted today's political and cultural landscape responds that, "No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today. No one (except perhaps the acidic H. L. Mencken, who famously described American democracy as “the worship of jackals by jackasses”) could have imagined that the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters, would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon." He adds, "How naïve I was in 1960 to think that I was an American living in preposterous times! How quaint!"

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From Phys.Org:

Working memory is a sort of "mental sketchpad" that allows you to accomplish everyday tasks such as calling in your hungry family's takeout order and finding the bathroom you were just told "will be the third door on the right after you walk straight down that hallway and make your first left." It also allows your mind to go from merely responding to your environment to consciously asserting your agenda. "Working memory allows you to choose what to pay attention to, choose what you hold in mind, and choose when to make decisions and take action," says Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor in MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. "It's all about wresting control from the environment to your own self. Once you have something like working memory, you go from being a simple creature that's buffeted by the environment to a creature that can control the environment."

For years Miller has been curious about how working memory—particularly the volitional control of it—actually works. In a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences led by Picower Institute postdoc Andre Bastos, Miller's lab shows that the underlying mechanism depends on different frequencies of brain rhythms synchronizing neurons in distinct layers of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the area of the brain associated with higher cognitive function. As animals performed a variety of working memory tasks, higher-frequency gamma rhythms in superficial layers of the PFC were regulated by lower-frequency alpha/beta frequency rhythms in deeper cortical layers. The findings suggest not only a general model of working memory, and the volition that makes it special, but also new ways that clinicians might investigate conditions such as schizophrenia where working memory function appears compromised.

More here.

Bari Weiss in the New York Times:

I am a proud feminist, and this is what I thought while reading Grace’s story:

If you are hanging out naked with a man, it’s safe to assume he is going to try to have sex with you.

If the inability to choose a pinot noir over a pinot grigio offends you, you can leave right then and there.

If you don’t like the way your date hustles through paying the check, you can say, “I’ve had a lovely evening and I’m going home now.”

If you go home with him and discover he’s a terrible kisser, say “I’m out.”

If you start to hook up and don’t like the way he smells or the way he talks (or doesn’t talk), end it.

If he pressures you to do something you don’t want to do, use a four-letter word, stand up on your two legs and walk out his door.

Aziz Ansari sounds like he was aggressive and selfish and obnoxious that night. Isn’t it heartbreaking and depressing that men — especially ones who present themselves publicly as feminists — so often act this way in private? Shouldn’t we try to change our broken sexual culture? And isn’t it enraging that women are socialized to be docile and accommodating and to put men’s desires before their own? Yes. Yes. Yes.

But the solution to these problems does not begin with women torching men for failing to understand their “nonverbal cues.” It is for women to be more verbal. It’s to say: “This is what turns me on.” It’s to say “I don’t want to do that.” And, yes, sometimes it means saying piss off.

The single most distressing thing to me about Grace’s story is that the only person with any agency in the story seems to be Aziz Ansari. Grace is merely acted upon.

More here.

Stephen McCloskey in The Wire:

Western governments have been fuelling the Yemeni crisis through lucrative weapon sales to Riyadh used in Saudi’s three year bombing campaign. Amnesty International has argued that:

“Countries such as the USA, UK and France, which continue to supply coalition members with arms, are allowing Saudi Arabia and its allies to flagrantly flout international law and risk being complicit in grave violations, including war crimes.”

Amnesty urges these countries to: “immediately halt the flow of arms and military assistance to members of the Saudi-led coalition for use in Yemen. This includes any equipment or logistical support being used to maintain this blockade.”

The UK has licensed $4.6 billion worth of arms sales to the Saudi regime, a relationship described as ‘shameful’ by Campaign Against Arms Trade, given Riyadh’s record as “one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes.”

France, too, has sold “9 billion Euros of weaponry to Saudi Arabia from 2010-2016, amounting to 15-20% of France’s annual arms exports.”

And the US has “designed and negotiated a package totalling approximately $110 billion” with Riyadh in 2017 following on from a total of $115 billion approved in arms sales by the Obama administration in 2009-2016.

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Anuschka de Rohan in The Guardian:

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish.

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Sarah Zhang at The Atlantic:

In the decades after Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico, one of the worst epidemics in human history swept through the new Spanish colony. A mysterious disease called “cocolitzli” appeared first in 1545 and then again in 1576, each time killing millions of the native population. “From morning to sunset,” wrote a Franciscan friar who witness the epidemic, “the priests did nothing else but carry the dead bodies and throw them into the ditches.”

In less than a century, the number of people living in Mexico fell from an estimated 20 million to 2 million. “It’s a massive population loss. Really, it’s impressive,” says Rodolfo Acuña-Soto, an epidemiologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. What can even kill so many people so quickly?

The Spanish, infamously, brought a litany of diseases unknown to the indigenous population—smallpox, measles, typhus—so some experts have suggested cocoliztli is simply one of those. Others, like Acuña-Soto, have argued it is an unknown viral hemorrhagic fever native to Mexico. The cause of cocoliztli has never been conclusively identified.

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Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic:

The reviews of Fire and Fury are in, and they are pretty furious themselves. Michael Wolff, author of the best-selling expose of the Trump White House, has been accused of every kind of journalistic malfeasance: reconstructing scenes he couldn’t have witnessed, retelling gossip as if it were gospel, letting his sources’ agendas drive his portrayals. President Trump himself has attacked the book as “a work of fiction,” and many of the journalists who have weighed in on it basically agree. At least, they complain, there’s no way to tell if the stories Wolff retails are true. To anyone who pays attention to actual American fiction, such attacks have a familiar ring. For the last 15 years—ever since the publication of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, a book sold as a memoir that turned out to be heavily fictionalized—American literature has been obsessed with the blurriness of the line separating fact and fiction. When it comes to genre, most book-buyers are literalists: If it says memoir or nonfiction on the dust jacket, everything inside is supposed to be 100 percent accurate. If it turns out not to be, they feel defrauded. Frey’s publisher had to offer refunds to disgruntled readers who thought they were getting a transcript, but had to make do with a story.

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Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor at The Paris Review:

In a posthumously published essay, Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out that the “black revolution” had gone beyond the “rights of Negroes.” The struggle, he said, is “forcing America to face all of its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

But it had not started out that way. Over the course of a decade, the black struggle opened up a deeper interrogation of U.S. society, and King’s politics traversed the same course.

Indeed, in the early 1960s, the Southern movement coalesced around the clearly defined demands to end Jim Crow segregation and secure the right of African Americans to unfettered access to the franchise. With clear targets and barometers for progress or failure, a broad social movement was able to uproot these systems of oppression. King was lauded as a tactician as well as someone who could articulate the grievances and aspirations of black Southerners.

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Fouad Khan in Nautilus:

"I have a secret to tell you about my city,” she says. “It has to do with what Eve Ensler calls the feminine cell.” It was the autumn of 2016. I’d met her in Quito, Ecuador, at the United Nations’ Habitat III, the biggest global urban development conference in two decades. After a week spent pondering cities, we found ourselves talking to each other like strangers often do in the tired, busy evenings that follow a day’s hustle. “What’s the feminine cell?” I ask. “It’s empathy. It’s respect for the human experience. It’s being aware of the space you take up in the world and how that relates to the commons.” Outside the colors of Quito were drenched in rain as the bars filled with eager conference attendees and locals alike. In the second year of a post-doc studying energy footprint reduction in cities, I was just about beginning to see the connections between social justice, the urban experience, and what makes a city “tick.” “My city is always looking for solutions,” she continued. “There is no ‘place’ in my city. There are only points and routes that connect those points.”

America is having a bit of a moment right now. Powerful men long considered beyond retribution are being called out for their transgressions. Behavior long tolerated in a culture where female objectification is in the very air we breathe is being re-examined. It reminds me of the conversation I had in Quito two years ago.

As we look again at our culture, why stop with behavior? It is also time to re-examine the hardware of our societies. The very infrastructure that we have built—roads, buildings, public spaces, steel, dirt, and concrete—encodes a set of values too. Are these the values we aspire to as a society and civilization? The cities we’ve built don’t provide perfectly equal access to everyone. An obvious case in point: wheelchair ramps, or lack thereof. But even healthy, active residents of all genders may not consider all of a city accessible to them. Men, for instance, typically don’t consider a dimly lit street lined by bars or clubs an unsafe or inaccessible part of town. For women, braving the same street past midnight has completely different connotations. Like video game players who have been leveled up, men can simply access a much larger part of a city or town at a wider variety of times. One Europe-wide survey found that 30 percent of all physical violence and 16 percent of sexual violence against women happens in bars, clubs, discos and other public places²—something that women are very much aware of and which influences how they move around a city.

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Erica Wagner at The New Statesman:

If you have been to the North, you will know that you are at its mercy. In winter the sun barely peers over the horizon; in summer the nights stretch on and on into dawn. The cold won’t nip your nose: it will kill you. Volcanoes erupt and swallow the land. Humanity’s neat ideas about nationhood and identity seem especially fragile: human beings are not the ones in control. In The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat, a collection of stories “from the North”, the editors – Ted Hodgkinson (senior programmer for literature and spoken word at London’s Southbank Centre) and the Icelandic writer Sjón – find a common thread of storytelling across these chill and beautiful lands.

For the book’s purposes nine regions and cultures are included: not just Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and Finland but also Greenland, the Faroe Islands, the Åland Islands and Saami Norway in that country’s far north; a huge geographical span brought together in narrative and united against the elements. The old Nordic sagas are full of magic and terror: their modern equivalents, this book reveals, have many of the same sensibilities.

more here.

Freedom

Freedom is not following a river.
Freedom is following a river,
though, if you want to.
It is deciding now by what happens now.
It is knowing that luck makes a difference.

No leader is free; no follower is free—
the rest of us can often be free.
Most of the world are living by
creeds too odd, chancy, and habit-forming
to be worth arguing about by reason.

If you are oppressed, wake up about
four in the morning: most places,
you can usually be free some of the time
if you wake up before other people.
.

William Stafford
from The Way It Is
Graywolf Press, 1998
.