A Prism: Wet With Wars

this is the chapter of
devastation
this is our oasis
an angle where wars intersect
tyrants accumulate around our eyes
and in the shackle’s verandah
there is enough space for
applause
let us applaud

another evening climbs
the city’s candles
technological hoofs crush the night
a people is being slaughtered across short waves:
but local radio vomits raw statements
and urges us to
applaud

with a skeleton of a burning umbrella
we receive this rain
a god sleeps on our flag
but the horizon is prophetless
maybe they will come if we
applaud
let us applaud

we will baptize our infants with smoke
plough their tongues
with flagrant war songs
teach them the bray of slogans
and leave them beside burning nipples
in an imminent wreckage
and applaud

before we weave an autumn for tyrants
we must cross this galaxy of barbed wires
and keep on repeating
HAPPY NEW WAR!

Baghdad, March 1991
by Sinan Antoon
from Iraq Poetry Today
Zephyr Press, 2003
Translated from the Arabic by the poet

Elizabeth Lopatto in Bay Nature:

In July, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill declaring the lace lichen—found along the Pacific coast and throughout the coast ranges—the state lichen. As of January 1, 2016, California will be the first state ever to designate a lichen as a state symbol.

Lace lichen, Ramalina menziesii, is easily recognized. It is pale green and dangles in strips from trees. It’s sometimes confused with Old Man’s Beard (Usnea sp.), which is also pale green and dangly. Lace lichen’s range stretches from Alaska to Baja California. It’s an important food for deer; it also serves as material for birds’ nests. I see it once, in researching this story, when naturalist Morgan Evans, a former student naturalist aide at Tilden Nature Area in the East Bay hills, removes it from her backpack and spreads it out. Evans is a pleasant and patient woman, whose true love is fungi. Her interest in lichens is an extension of that, she says. Anyway, she found some lace lichen growing in Morgan Territory Regional Park. She figured I’d want to see it and there isn’t much growing in Tilden that she knows of. She hands me the lichen, which feels strangely plasticine. It’s pale green—she wetted it so it wouldn’t crumble when she transported it—and dangles impressively, at least six inches long. Lace lichen can grow as long as a meter, and it has a netted structure that looks, to me at least, more like fishnet stockings than lace. Perhaps fishnet-stocking lichen would be a little too racy a nickname.

Before I tell you more, though, a disclaimer: It turns out lichen identity is fraught with existential issues, not least of which is that lichens are a union between two separate organisms.

More here.

Ajay Karpur at Somatic Labs:

When we think about the content of a conversation, it’s easy to focus on just the verbal information exchanged through spoken words; however, there are many other factors that color our interpretation of conversations and, in turn, the information they communicate. One such consideration is the context provided by prosody—the intonation, stress, tempo, rhythm, and pauses in a person’s speech, all of which lend their voice a unique texture. The brain also employs detailed mappings that link different kinds of facial expressions and gestures with the emotions and nuances that they convey. In fact, up to 65% of the raw information in a conversation is exchanged nonverbally [1]. As we continue to investigate human communication, we uncover a highly complex, multi-modal system that comprises many of our senses—including our sense of touch.

Though modern messaging systems are efficient in transmitting visual information, they provide a limited channel for expressing emotions and fail to capture the nuances of face-to-face conversations. To express emotion, people often resort to using emoticons, emoji, or shorthand abbreviations (such as the ubiquitous ‘lol’). While , , and all convey different “happy” emotions, none of these pictographs can convey what it feels like to see a subtle smile creep across someone’s face and cascade into a joyous laugh.

More here.

Shahzia Sikander in the Los Angeles Times:

Human identity is mercurial. Like a human being, it is alive and liable to shift, evolve, challenge and surprise.

I was born in Lahore, Pakistan, to a family of storytellers. My father was an enthusiastic narrator, with oratory prowess. My first memory is of him reading to me Korney Chukovsky's book “Unusual Tales” translated into Urdu. His creative freedom in customizing the tales as he read out loud was infectious and entertaining. It signaled to me as a young child to be inventive. A couple of years later, encounters with Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, Walter de la Mare alongside the stories of Miraj — the visionary night journey of Prophet Muhammad — felt like the Everest expedition in pursuit of wit, candor and irony. In high school the pendulum swung between Shakespeare and Salman Rushdie and a multitude of sources in between, allowing my imagination to inspect reality from different cultural consequences.

But growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s under a military regime that incessantly institutionalized religion was a deeply conflicting experience. The Hudood ordinances, which limited women's rights, loomed large. Art school was considered immoral. Co-education dissipated. Religious tolerance diminished.

More here.

Dwight Garner at The New York Times:

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was not a splendid little war. It was an especially vicious one. Some 500,000 people died, most in combat or by political execution. A right-wing coup, led by Francisco Franco and backed by Hitler and Mussolini, toppled a democratically elected government.

It was, though, a strangely literary little war. We remember it today through classic accounts like Hemingway’s novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and Orwell’s memoir “Homage to Catalonia.” So many other significant writers and journalists poured into Spain, as observers or participants, it’s hard to keep track of them.

The French novelist André Malraux organized a squadron of volunteer pilots for the anti-Fascist resistance. The aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry reported for a Paris daily. Hemingway’s suite at the Hotel Floridain Madrid was a boozy hangout for a revolving rat pack of well-groomed foreign correspondents, including Martha Gellhorn, with whom he’d begun an affair. Dorothy Parker, Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes and W. H. Auden toured the fighting.

The war resonates visually as well. Robert Capa’s combat photographsare milestones; Picasso’s “Guernica,” painted after the carpet-bombing of that city, is among the most important artworks of our time.

Adam Hochschild’s excellent and involving new book, “Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939,” is not primarily a literary or cultural history. It’s about the moral appeal of the war, about the anti-Fascist and frequently pro-Communist idealism that made so many volunteers from the United States and other countries flood into Spain.

more here.

Colm Tóibín,Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle, etc., at The Guardian:

In the early hours of the Thursday of Easter week 1916 my grandfather came into the front bedroom of the small house in Enniscorthy. His sons woke and watched as he lifted some of the floorboards and removed a rifle. The Rising in Dublin had begun on Monday, but outside Dublin there was confusion. To get a clear idea of what was happening, a man called Paul Galligan had gone by bicycle the 75 miles from Enniscorthy to Dublin, arriving on Easter Sunday. The following day he met with three of the leaders of the Dublin Rebellion in the General Post Office. He was told to go back home to Enniscorthy and instruct the other members of the movement to take the town and hold the railway line, thus stopping British forces from getting from Rosslare to Dublin. He rode back to Enniscorthy by a circuitous route so he would not be detained, arriving on the Wednesday. The Rising in Enniscorthy began the following morning. Between 100 and 200 took part at the beginning, although more joined later. Compared to Dublin, the Enniscorthy Rising was small. No one was killed; two or three were wounded; no buildings were destroyed. “We had one day of blissful freedom,” one of the Enniscorthy leaders said. (The Rising lasted just a few days.) But perhaps its real importance came when the Rebellion ended. The British arrested almost 300 people in Enniscorthy and its environs. One of these – Séamus Doyle – was even sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted. In later years, he lived in a house close to ours and devoted himself to the growing of roses and grumbling about boys who kicked their football into his garden.

more here.

Adam Kosan at The Quarterly Review:

For more than forty years the English poet Christopher Logue worked in fits and starts on his narrative poem War Music, subtitled An Account of Homer’s Iliad. The poem, which he was unable to complete before he died in 2011, was published in several sections titled War Music (1981), Kings (1991), The Husbands (1995), All Day Permanent Red (2003), and Cold Calls (2005), corresponding, respectively, to Books 16-19, 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, and 7-9 of The Iliad. These books have now been brought together in a single volume that tells the story of Logue’s fragmentary and highly original Trojan War. It benefits from the editorial care of Christopher Reid, who has appended excerpts from drafts for the work’s envisioned final section, Big Men Falling A Long Way, along with notes describing the source and contextual details for each draft. As the first volume since Logue’s death to take stock of his major poem, it is auspicious—in time we can expect Reid’s circumspection and restraint to be expanded on by critics working with Logue’s archives.

This is not to say that War Music is in pressing need of elucidation. Logue was vehemently responsive to his times, a rascal, a provocateur, irritating, incisive. His poetry looks out at the world without being topical. He was drawn to ballad forms and created “poster poems” that were sold and hung around London (these pieces were the subject of a recent retrospective at Rob Tufnell). He was a pacifist who protested against nuclear weapons, a satirist who wrote and edited pieces for Private Eye magazine, and, among other things, an actor, screenwriter, and playwright, who collaborated frequently with artists in various media. He was, in short, committed to a public presence for poetry, and this commitment was crucial to the very particular, undiminished energy that we find in Logue’s work. In fact, it might surprise people that he began War Music in 1959—so brilliant, so new, does it remain in a contemporary context.

more here.

Lewis H. Lapham in Lapham's Quarterly:

’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. —David Hume

Nor is it contrary to reason to prefer the sight of a raging inferno or restless typhoon to the view of a worm in one’s apple or a fly in the soup. The spectacle of disaster—real and imagined, past, present, and imminent—is blockbuster box office, its magnitude measured by the number of dead and square miles of devastation, the cost of property, rates of insurance, long-term consequences, short-form shock and awe.

…Behold the world for what it is, a raging of beasts and a writhing of serpents, and know that the war on terror will be with us until the end of our days. Get used to it; harden thy resolve; America is everywhere besieged by monsters that must be destroyed—by any and all means necessary, no matter how costly or barbaric. And yes, Virginia, there is an answer to Adam Smith’s disturbing question—to prevent a paltry misfortune to oneself not only is it possible, it’s also prudent to sacrifice as many of our fellow human beings as circumstances require. The UN Security Council in 1990 imposed harsh economic sanctions on Iraq in order to send a stern message to Saddam Hussein. When Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was asked in an interview on 60 Minutes whether she had considered the resulting death of over 500,000 Iraqi children (of malnutrition and disease for lack of medicine and baby food), she said, “We think the price is worth it.” Together with an estimated $2 trillion, President George W. Bush sacrificed the lives of nearly 5,000 American soldiers and 165,000 Iraqi civilians to prevent America from being harmed by Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. The cost–benefit analysis emerged from the administration’s doctrine of forward deterrence and preemptive strike, a policy predicated on the notion that if any nation anywhere in the world presumed even to begin to think of challenging America’s supremacy (moral, military, cultural, and socioeconomic) America reserved the right to strangle the impudence at birth—to bomb the peasants or the palace, block the flows of oil or bank credit.

Michael Ledeen, foreign-policy adviser to the Bush White House and Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, put the policy in its clearest perspective: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

More here.

John Jeremiah Sullivan in The New York Times:

The blacks-­in-­blackface tradition, which lasted more than a century in this country, strikes most people, on first hearing of its existence, as deeply bizarre, and it was. But it emerged from a single crude reality: African-­American people were not allowed to perform onstage for much of the 19th century. They could not, that is, appear as themselves. The sight wasn’t tolerated by white audiences. There were anomalous instances, but as a rule, it didn’t happen. In front of the cabin, in the nursery, in a tavern, yes, white people might enjoy hearing them sing and seeing them dance, but the stage had power in it, and someone who appeared there couldn’t help partaking of that power, if only ever so slightly, momentarily. Part of it was the physical elevation. To be sitting below a black man or woman, looking up — that made many whites uncomfortable. But what those audiences would allow, would sit for — not easily at first, not without controversy and disdain, but gradually, and soon overwhelmingly — was the appearance of white men who had painted their faces to look black. That was an old custom of the stage, going back at least to “Othello.” They could live with that. And this created a space, a crack in the wall, through which blacks could enter, because blacks, too, could paint their faces. Blacks, too, could exist in this space that was neither-­nor. They could hide their blackness behind a darker blackness, a false one, a safe one. They wouldn’t be claiming power. By mocking themselves, their own race, they were giving it up. Except, never completely. There lay the charge. It was allowed, for actual black people to perform this way, starting around the 1840s — in a very few cases at first, and then increasingly — and there developed the genre, as it were, of blacks-­in-­blackface. A strange story, but this is a strange country.

Picture: Bert Williams having blackface applied in a production still from an uncompleted 1913 film that was identified in the MoMA archives in 2014.

More here.

Elegy For Jane Kenyon (2)
.

Jane is big
with death, Don
sad and kind – Jane
though she’s dying
is full of mind

We talk about the table
the little walnut one
how it’s like
Emily Dickinson’s

But Don says No
Dickinson’s
was made of iron. No
said Jane
Of flesh.
.

by Jean Valentine
from The Cradle of the Real Life
Wesleyan University Press, 2000

Patrick Stokes at ABC:

Conspiracy theories weren't invented by the internet. They go back at least as far as the elite reaction to the French Revolution, with a grand Illuminati-Masonic conspiracy theory taking hold on both sides of the Atlantic before the start of the 19th century. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories had tragic consequences during the last century, while today the Obama administration has had to contend with everything from demands for the president's birth certificate to state governments fuelling rumours of impending martial law. The consequences of conspiracy theories are, as they have always been, concrete and significant.

Most of us use the term 'conspiracy theory' to refer to beliefs we consider outlandish, paranoid, and almost certainly false. Yet strictly speaking this is unfair: on the simplest definition, a conspiracy theory is simply any explanation of observed events that posits two or more actors working in secret. Philosophers who have considered conspiracy theories as a class of explanation insist that there's nothing intrinsically irrational about conspiracy theory so defined. In fact, if we didn't accept the idea of a group of actors plotting in secret, we'd be unable to explain a host of historical events, from the assassination of Julius Caesar to Watergate. Conspiracies happen.

More here.

Huw Price in Aeon:

Three months ago I wrote an essay in Aeon about intriguing developments in low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), a controversial field that traces its origins to the claims of ‘cold fusion’ by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in 1989. Cold fusion itself is widely regarded as discredited, yet there are several recent reports of LENR devices producing commercially useful amounts of heat. As David Bailey and Jonathan Borwein have pointed out in HuffPost Science, it seems increasingly improbable that all these findings are the result of fraud or error, as skeptics assert. But the only remaining alternative – that science simply made the wrong call when it dismissed cold fusion – is still almost invisible in serious scientific conversations and in the mainstream media.

Why is this possibility so broadly ignored? I suggested that it is because LENR is caught in what I called a ‘reputation trap’. Cold fusion has had such a bad name that scientists and journalists put their reputations at risk if they dare to express an interest in LENR. So a fascinating story goes largely unnoticed and unreported.

More importantly, the reputation trap has pushed to the margins an idea that, if it does work, might be just what we need right now: the ‘energy miracle’ that Bill Gates is so desperately seeking.

More here.

John Kaag in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

When the Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio said that his country needed more welders and fewer philosophers, most listeners took him to be taking an anti-intellectual jab at academe, at the cultural and economic viability of high theory. Many of my philosophy colleagues came to the defense of our discipline, supplying statistics that demonstrated the economic payoff from pursuing the love of wisdom.

That response, however, sidesteps what might be most disturbing about Rubio’s comment: the suggestion that welders cannot be philosophers and philosophers cannot be welders. Theoreticians have always been mocked for being only loosely tethered to the world of human affairs (think of Aristophanes’ characterization, in The Clouds, of Socrates as hopelessly detached, flying solo in his balloon). And many philosophers, like Plato, have returned the favor by dismissing the rest of the world as cave dwellers. The advent of philosophy as an academic discipline in the 20th century has done nothing to ease this tension, and we have returned, once again, to the disturbing point where statesmen call for the end of theorizing.

More here.

William Watkin at 3:AM Magazine:

The rate of executions has been decreasing in America for a couple of years now. Some states have just stopped executing. Others such as Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, Maryland and New York have gone even further and taken the death penalty off the statute books. The result is that only a handful of states, die-hard vengeful places like Florida, Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, still doggedly pursue death by lethal injection. The reasons for this are not moral, legal or philosophical. Rather, the slow collapse of one of America’s most cherished and reviled institutions, death row, is due to primarily managerial reasons, specifically the meat and potatoes of any failing business model: supply of stock and training of staff.

There are two fundamental problems with the lethal injection in the US today. Either you can’t get the drugs or, if you can, you just can’t get them in the arms of the accused, without yourself being accused of breaking the eighth amendment, forbidding cruel and unusual punishment. How did we get to this pretty pass, committed as we have been to kill criminals whatever the cost?

Considering the promise of efficiency that is part and parcel of the medicalisation of the death penalty with the development of the lethal injection, it is surprising to note that, according to Austin Sarat, 7% of all lethal injections have been ‘botched’ as opposed to 3% of all other methods. One possible problem with the lethal injection is that to kill someone in this way you need expertise, training and of course the will to kill.

more here.

Joseph Luzzi at The American Scholar:

Part of the problem lies in the difficulty that Dante poses for English translation. He wrote in an intensely idiomatic, rhyme-rich Tuscan with a surging terza rima meter that gives the poem its galloping energy—a unique rhythm that’s difficult to reproduce in rhyme-poor English separated from Dante’s local vernacular by centuries. The content of Dante’s writing presents an even bigger problem. Unlike the other author he supposedly shared the world with, Shakespeare, Dante was self-consciously scholarly and intellectual, filling his verses with allusions to ancient, biblical, and contemporary medieval writing, and tackling a range of theological, philosophical, political, and historical issues. And then there are all those characters! From Inferno 1 to Paradiso 33, scores of different literary personae—some real, some invented, some famous, some obscure—take the stage to plead their case or expound on their joy before the autobiographical character Dante as he journeys from hell to heaven. So in order to “get” Dante, a translator has to be both a poet and a scholar, attuned to the poet’s vertiginous literary experimentalism as well as his superhuman grasp of cultural and intellectual history. This is why one of the few truly successful English translations comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a professor of Italian at Harvard and an acclaimed poet. He produced one of the first complete, and in many respects still the best, English translations ofThe Divine Comedy in 1867. It did not hurt that Longfellow had also experienced the kind of traumatic loss—the death of his young wife after her dress caught fire—that brought him closer to the melancholy spirit of Dante’s writing, shaped by the lacerating exile from his beloved Florence in 1302. Longfellow succeeded in capturing the original brilliance of Dante’s lines with a close, sometimes awkwardly literal translation that allows the Tuscan to shine through the English, as though this “foreign” veneer were merely a protective layer added over the still-visible source. The critic Walter Benjamin wrote that a great translation calls our attention to a work’s original language even when we don’t speak that foreign tongue. Such extreme faithfulness can make the language of the translation feel unnatural—as though the source were shaping the translation into its own alien image. Longfellow’s English indeed comes across as Italianate: in surrendering to the letter and spirit of Dante’s Tuscan, he loses the quirks and perks of his mother tongue.

more here.