Brandon K. Thorp in The New York Times:

When the Oscar nominations were announced last month, revealing that not one black actor was in the running, the resulting furor touched on the performances that critics said should have been considered: What about Idris Elba in “Beasts of No Nation”? Michael B. Jordan in “Creed”? Will Smith in “Concussion,” or one of the stars of “Straight Outta Compton”? The uproar over #OscarsSoWhite made me curious. What does the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences value in black performance? Black artists have been nominated for best actress or actor on 30 occasions, for work spanning 28 films. Over the last few weeks, I watched all of them. These movies have a lot in common, not least that most were directed by white men. Only three were directed by black men and none by women. Perhaps these numbers aren’t surprising, given the well-known demographics of the film industry. Other numbers are more eye-opening. Consider: In the history of the Oscars, 10 black women have been nominated for best actress, and nine of them played characters who are homeless or might soon become so.

…What they’re not full of is characters who resemble ordinary people. And when such people do make an appearance, the camera tends to linger on the parts of their lives most likely to interest white Americans struggling to reckon with their country’s racist past. We learn all about Miss Daisy — her son, her childhood, her politics. But we hear only a sentence or two about the family of her driver (Morgan Freeman). Similarly, there’s a lot of information about Billy Bob Thornton’s Hank in “Monster’s Ball.” But watching Halle Berry as the bereft Leticia Musgrove, we see only her wretchedness, and her eventual rescue by a white man.

More here. (Note: At least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month throughout February)

Zoë Carpenter in The Nation:

For a poor woman born in the Roaring Twenties, getting to age 50 was something of an accomplishment. She had to contend with diphtheria and tuberculosis, hookworm and polio, not to mention childbirth, which killedabout 800 women for every 100,000 births at the beginning of the decade. Widespread use of penicillin to treat infections was still 20 years away; Medicaid, four decades. If she did make it to 50, on average she would live to be 80 years old. That sounds pretty good, until you consider that the richest women born at the same time lived about four years longer.

Americans have become much healthier since then, generally speaking, thanks to scientific advances, higher living standards, better education, and social programs. Life expectancy hit a record high in 2012. But as with economic prosperity, gains in physical health haven’t been spread equally. Instead, they’ve been increasingly skewed towards the wealthy—and a new analysis from the Brookings Institution indicates gaps in lifespan between the rich and the poor are getting worse, not better.

More here.

Phillip Barron at The Quarterly Conversation:

In an epistolary keynote address delivered this past June, poet Aaron Abeyta tells the Association of American University Presses “perhaps we are all here to trace and collect words, to sow meaning; we collect that thing which people discard as ordinary and bring it to a page of life where it can flourish and be the map of human struggle and therefore an instruction as to how we can all survive.” When I read his letter, I am interested in who “we” are. On one reading, Abeyta includes himself with the academic book publishers he addresses, thinking of writers and publishers collaborating to bring pages to life. On another reading, Abeyta identifies with his high school teacher who, to address his unruly classroom behavior, gave the freshman the key to the cabinet with seniors’ books. In the cabinet he found Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, learned that he would “love books and their saving power”, and discovered his own career path to university professor. On yet a third reading, perhaps Abeyta’s “we” speaks of writers and specifically poets. Writers are, after all, the ones who collect language, that “which people discard as ordinary.”

The speaker in Scott T. Starbuck’s poem, “Speaking to a Street Person about the Problem with North America,” attends a house party where dancing and music rage on even while the house begins to burn. Smoke enters

through door cracks
and no one can hear the sirens
because music and laughter
are too loud for all
except us dogs to hear.

Once again, I am interested in the “us.”

more here.

Jonathan Kandell at The New York Times:

His Italian publisher, Bompiani, confirmed his death, according to the Italian news agency ANSA. He died at his home in Milan, according to the Italian news website Il Post. No cause was given.

As a semiotician, Mr. Eco sought to interpret cultures through their signs and symbols — words, religious icons, banners, clothing, musical scores, even cartoons — and published more than 20 nonfiction books on these subjects while teaching at the University of Bologna, Europe’s oldest university.

But rather than segregate his academic life from his popular fiction, Mr. Eco infused his seven novels with many of his scholarly preoccupations.

In bridging these two worlds, he was never more successful than he was with “The Name of the Rose,” his first novel, which was originally published in Europe in 1980. It sold more than 10 million copies in about 30 languages. (A 1986 Hollywood adaptation directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Sean Connery received only a lukewarm reception.)

The book is set in a 14th-century Italian monastery where monks are being murdered by their co-religionists bent on concealing a long-lost philosophical treatise by Aristotle. Despite devoting whole chapters to discussions of Christian theology and heresies, Mr. Eco managed to enthrall a mass audience with the book, a rollicking detective thriller.

more here.

Julian Baggini at The Financial Times:

When a 26-year-old Iris Murdoch first read Jean-Paul Sartre, she marvelled at the excitement she felt: “I remember nothing like it since the days of discovering Keats and Shelley and Coleridge when I was very young!” Many have experienced a similar thrill on encountering existentialist philosophy, with its intoxicating mix of continental sophistication, intellectual angst and rousing calls to freedom. Sarah Bakewell was one of them but, like so many others, she found in time that the works she once devoured “remained on the far reaches of my bookcase, making it look like a spice shelf in a demiurge’s kitchen: Being and Nothingness, Being and Time, Of Time and Being, Totality and Infinity.”

Existentialism has come to be seen as something of a young person’s game, intoxicating and fresh in spirited youth but shallow and pretentious in sober maturity. Historically it also seems past its prime, having gone from being a radical new philosophy to just another movement in the history of ideas. No wonder, then, that Bakewell says: “It has become harder to revive that initial thrill.” Yet that is exactly what she has managed to do in a book that is a kind of collaboration between her exhilarated younger self and the more measured, adult writer she has become. These co-authors are as generous with each other as they are with their subjects, resulting in a work that is both warm and intellectually rigorous.

more here.

And Soul

My mother died one summer—
the wettest in the records of the state.
Crops rotted in the west.
Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens.
Empty deck chairs collected rain.
As I took my way to her
through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly
behind houses
and on curbsides, to pay her
the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something
I remembered
I heard once, that the body is, or is
said to be, almost all
water and as I turned southward, that ours is
a city of it,
one in which
every single day the elements begin
a journey towards each other that will never,
given our weather,
fail—
the ocean visible in the edges cut by it,
cloud color reaching into air,
the Liffey storing one and summoning the other,
salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and,
as if that wasn't enough, all of it
ending up almost every evening
inside our speech—
coast canal ocean river stream and now
mother and I drove on and although
the mind is unreliable in grief, at
the next cloudburst it almost seemed
they could be shades of each other,
the way the body is
of every one of them and now
they were on the move again—fog into mist,
mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze
that lay on the railings of
the house she was dying in
as I went inside.
.

by Eavan Boland
from Domestic Violence
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
.

Angela Flournoy in The New York Times:

When Delvin Walker, the protagonist of Charlie Smith’s novel “Ginny Gall,” is deep into his prison sentence for a crime he did not commit, a fellow inmate introduces him to the work of Zora Neale Hurston. The inmate quotes a line memorized from Hurston’s essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”: “I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature has somehow given them a lowdown dirty deal.” Delvin lets out a low whistle of disbelief in response. “Well, no wonder I never heard of that woman,” he says, and the inmate posits that, unlike them, Hurston must be “somebody who’s found a way out of the general disrespectfulness.” “Ginny Gall,” Smith’s eighth novel, is an intricate examination of the coming-of-age of a young black man caught in the cross hairs of American racial history. It is a sustained look at black suffering in the Jim Crow South, and a meditation on the hows and whys of black endurance.

The novel attempts to answer the question implied by Hurston’s quote and rightly picked up by Delvin and his friend: How can a person resist succumbing to that sobbing school of Negrohood when his life is filled with racial injustice and general, persistent disrespect? And why not succumb? With a story that is equal parts — and often simultaneously — moving and harrowing, Smith offers no easy answer, but suggests that the small, fleeting, unin­fringeable moments of life itself may hold the key.

More here. (Note: At least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month throughout February)

From Nature:

Research as Art is less about the stunning picture, and more about the story. It’s about what goes on behind the research; what it means to be a researcher. The most compelling submissions aren’t an image that was lying unappreciated on a lab hard drive for years, or a beautiful false-coloured electron microscopy image. They are the submissions that describe the years of failure in the laboratory, the imposter-syndrome and the way you question yourself daily. Submissions can be very personal.

…This year was the first time the wonderful judging panel selected my favourite as the overall winner: Rising from the Page: Bringing Medieval Women to Life (pictured, top) by Sparky Booker and Deborah Youngs. They are historians, working primarily with medieval legal texts. Perhaps not the easiest subject matter in this context, but they created a submission that represented their research, their process, the challenges they face in lifting these experiences from incomplete text and presenting a rounded view of medieval women. And they did it in a unique and clever way, with a paperchain of women, cut from a manuscript, literally rising from the page.

More here.

Philip Gorski in Public Books:

The social sciences have an ethics problem. No, I am not referring to the recent scandals about flawed and fudged data in psychology and political science.1 I’m talking about the failure of the social sciences to develop a satisfactory theory of ethical life. A theory that could explain why humans are constantly judging and evaluating, and why we care about other people and what they think of us. A theory that could explain something so trivial as the fact that social scientists care about data fudging.

This is not to say that we have no theories. It’s just that they’re bad theories. Consider evolutionary game theory.2 It says that ethical life results from individual rationality. How so? Assume a population of self-interested actors. (A big assumption!) Have them play a one-on-one, zero-sum game with each other, over and over again. (Prisoner’s dilemma, anyone?) The winning strategy will be something called “tit-for-tat.” The rules of TFT are as follows: 1) be nice in the first round; 2) copy your partner on all subsequent rounds. In other words, if they are mean, you should be mean back; if they act nice, you should, too. In the long run, individuals who follow the TFT strategy will be better off than people who follow a mean strategy. Or so the computer simulations tell us.

This theory is morally satisfying. Nice guys don’t finish last after all! But it is not intellectually satisfying. Human evolution didn’t really work this way. Earlyhomo sapiens was not modern homo economicus. Our ancestors were not isolated monads. They lived in small groups. They were social animals. A good theory would start with good assumptions—realistic ones. Ethical life just doesn’t feel like game theory. Often, it’s hot emotion, not cool calculation. It’s filled with anger and sorrow, love and joy, not minimizing and maximizing. Finally, a good theory would have to account for why we have moral emotions in the first place. In particular, it would have to account for “niceness” itself.

More here.

This is ten years old but something I had never seen before (am surprised I missed it) and now find extremely interesting. Not only was Einstein wrong, he was wrong about gravitational waves! This is Daniel Kennefick in the September 2005 issue of Physics Today:

Letter from Einstein to journal editor

Albert Einstein had two careers as a professional physicist, the first spent through 1933 entirely at German-speaking universities in central Europe, the second at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1933 until his death in 1955. During the first period he generally published in German physics journals, most famously the Annalen der Physik, where all five of his celebrated papers of 1905 appeared.

After relocating to the US, Einstein began to publish frequently in North American journals. Of those, the Physical Review, then under the editorship of John Tate (pictured in figure 1), was rapidly assuming the mantle of the world’s premier journal of physics. ¹ Einstein first published there in 1931 on the first of three winter visits to Caltech. With Nathan Rosen, his first American assistant, Einstein published two more papers in the Physical Review: the famous 1935 paper by Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) and a 1936 paper that introduced the concept of the Einstein–Rosen bridge, nowadays better known as a wormhole. But except for a letter to the journal’s editor he wrote in 1952—in response to a paper critical of his unified field theory work—that 1936 paper was the last Einstein would ever publish there.

Einstein stopped submitting work to the Physical Review after receiving a negative critique from the journal in response to a paper he had written with Rosen on gravitational waves later in 1936. ² That much has long been known, at least to the editors of Einstein’s collected papers. But the story of Einstein’s subsequent interaction with the referee in that case is not well known to physicists outside of the gravitational-wave community. Last March, the journal’s current editor-in-chief, Martin Blume, and his colleagues uncovered the journal’s logbook records from the era, a find that has confirmed the suspicions about that referee’s identity. ³ Moreover, the story raises the possibility that Einstein’s gravitational-wave paper with Rosen may have been his only genuine encounter with anonymous peer review. Einstein, who reacted angrily to the referee report, would have been well advised to pay more attention to its criticisms, which proved to be valid.

More here. [Thanks to Ashutosh Jogalekar. And plain text version here.]

Charles Koch, yes, of the Koch brothers, in the Washington Post:

As he campaigns for the Democratic nomination for president, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) often sounds like he’s running as much against me as he is the other candidates. I have never met the senator, but I know from listening to him that we disagree on plenty when it comes to public policy.

Even so, I see benefits in searching for common ground and greater civility during this overly negative campaign season. That’s why, in spite of the fact that he often misrepresents where I stand on issues, the senator should know that we do agree on at least one — an issue that resonates with people who feel that hard work and making a contribution will no longer enable them to succeed.

The senator is upset with a political and economic system that is often rigged to help the privileged few at the expense of everyone else, particularly the least advantaged. He believes that we have a two-tiered society that increasingly dooms millions of our fellow citizens to lives of poverty and hopelessness. He thinks many corporations seek and benefit from corporate welfare while ordinary citizens are denied opportunities and a level playing field.

I agree with him.

More here.

Michael LaPointe at the LA Review of Books:

IN EARLY DECEMBER, Beijing issued its first-ever red alert for air pollution. Hazardous airborne particles had risen to nearly 15 times what the World Health Organization deems safe. Schools closed, and half of all cars had to stay off the road — odd-numbered license plates one day, even-numbered the next. The Beijing Times called it “airpocalypse.”

Some dozen years before, László Stein, a renowned Hungarian poet, fell asleep in Beijing’s Guangji Temple. He dreamt that he was joined by the master calligrapher Tang Xiaodu, to whom he put a desperate question. Stein, he explained, had been coming to China for years in search of its classical culture, and though he’d never found it, he’d been consoled just thinking that “the sky that clouded above him was the same sky that clouded above Li Taibai and all of Chinese classical poetry, and all of Chinese tradition.” Now he had to ask the master: “Are the heavens here above them really the same?” Tang Xiaodu took a long time to reply. “No,” he finally said, “these are not the same heavens any more.”

Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens, a book of quasi-fictional reportage by László Krasznahorkai (who styles himself the poet Stein throughout), is a travelogue under modern China’s apocalyptic sky. The book, which many will find controversial, details Stein’s pilgrimage in search of the authentic current of Chinese tradition, a search that leads him to denounce the country’s so-called economic miracle as a general collapse.

more here.

Eric Ormsby at The New Criterion:

It was a sad day for poetry when Ezra Pound discovered Confucius. Like some latter-day Don Quixote addled by tales of chivalry, Pound became enthralled by Confucian precepts, and though they never had any appreciable influence on his own thoughts or actions—he was the least Confucian of men—those precepts, or his version of them, scrambled his brains for the next sixty years. As A. David Moody tells it in the opening volume of his magisterial biography, the third and final volume of which has now appeared, the encounter came about in October 1913 when Pound first read theAnalects in French translation.1 He then moved on to Allen Upward’sThe Sayings of Confucius of 1904 and the die was cast. In China Pound believed he had found his “new Greece.” Of course, Pound’s discovery of China led to two of his finest—and most idiosyncratic—achievements as a translator: Cathay of 1915 and The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius of 1954, the 305 odes he translated during his confinements at St. Elizabeth’s hopsital. These utterly original re-creations of ancient Chinese lyrics, in a manner and idiom all his own, are probably what he will best be remembered for in future years, and rightly so. As the late Simon Leys remarked,

Pound had a mistaken idea of the Chinese language, but his mistake was remarkably stimulating and fecund as it was based on one important and accurate intuition. Pound correctly observed that a Chinese poem is not articulated upon a continuous, discursive thread, but that it flashes discontinuous series of images (not unlike the successive frames of a film).

more here.

Alex Abramovich and Emily Barton at The Paris Review:

Which brings us in a roundabout way to “the question of whether [Nasty Girl] is ultimately a song about power.” You write: “I think it is, and actually a pretty smart one, in that it doesn’t assert either of the easy sides of the argument (i.e., either the gazer or she who holds the gaze being empowered) but ricochets between them, which may be why there’s that infinite regression in who’s imagining what in the song’s set up.” That’s beautifully phrased, and just right: infinite regression, and the ensuing layers of ambiguity—aren’t those the very reasons it’s taking us two days, and six thousand words, to decode a song that takes five minutes to listen to (that is, if you’re able to listen to it just once!)? If you’ll allow me one more tangent, is it a coincidence infinite regression, and neurotic self-awareness/reflexivity, are also the concerns of some of the more interesting writers working today?

“Drive Me Wild” is another good song to bring into the mix. (I’m curious: Why are you more willing to ascribe authorship to Moonsie than Matthews?) You’d have to rope in R. Kelly—“Girl you remind me of my Jeep, I want to ride it”—to come up with a better example of woman-as-commodity fetish. And, like R. Kelly’s song, this one strikes me as especially sad. Look, Moonsies is saying. I know you’re going to objectify me no matter what I do or say, so I’m going to beat you to the punch and objectify myself. The world this song is describing is a world in which no one really looks into another’s eyes, except to catch their own reflection. And what the song has in common with “Nasty Girl” (or, at least, the interpretation of “Nasty Girl” we seem to be working toward) is internalization, bred of an anticipation which may or me not be rooted in some form of something a more religious man might call despair.

more here.

Gretchen Reynold in The New York Times:

The benefits of mindfulness meditation, increasingly popular in recent years, are supposed to be many: reduced stress and risk for various diseases, improved well-being, a rewired brain. But the experimental bases to support these claims have been few. Supporters of the practice have relied on very small samples of unrepresentative subjects, like isolated Buddhist monks who spend hours meditating every day, or on studies that generally were not randomized and did not include placebo­ control groups. This month, however, a study published in Biological Psychiatrybrings scientific thoroughness to mindfulness meditation and for the first time shows that, unlike a placebo, it can change the brains of ordinary people and potentially improve their health.

To meditate mindfully demands ‘‘an open and receptive, nonjudgmental awareness of your present-moment experience,’’ says J. David Creswell, who led the study and is an associate professor of psychology and the director of the Health and Human Performance Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. One difficulty of investigating meditation has been the placebo problem. In rigorous studies, some participants receive treatment while others get a placebo: They believe they are getting the same treatment when they are not. But people can usually tell if they are meditating. Dr. Creswell, working with scientists from a number of other universities, managed to fake mindfulness.

More here.

Foxes

Christmas night. The three of us,
Eating steak and salad without
A relative between us, beside us,
Or even at the end of a table
That would sit twelve, if we had chairs.

He appeared at the floor-deep window,
A sudden little red thought. Lost,
When we looked, like a name on a tongue-end,
Never certain. Ear tips like a claw hammer,
Face like a chisel, then gone.

He was back, two bits later, whippet body
Wanting steak fat. Half grown,
His small feet black as match head,
His nose not able to let
The smell of meat alone.

His very presence begged us for a bit,
Hungry in the houselight. And there she was,
Just as motherless. His sister,
Coming for dinner,
Threading the field like a long needle.
.

by Frieda Hughes
from Wooroloo
HarperCollins, 1998
.

Kiese Laymon in LitHub [h/t: Wendy S. Walters]:

When I was 17 years old, one day after the series finale of The Cosby Show, a 15-year-old black girl named Annie Glover* talked to me about sexual violence at Donnie G’s* party. I listened.

Then she asked me to talk back.

Donnie didn’t drink our entire senior year because he wanted a basketball scholarship. I lied and told Donnie that I wasn’t drinking for the same reason.

Before Donnie’s party, Donnie and I bought two 40-ounces of St. Ides, poured out the malt liquor and filled both empty bottles with apple juice. We checked each other’s noses for floating boogers, checked our breath for that dragon and stuffed our mouths with green Now & Laters. When Donnie’s doorbell rang, we stumbled around the house, whispering Jodeci lyrics inches under the earlobes of girls who didn’t run from us.

About three hours into Donnie’s party, Annie Glover, a friend of Donnie’s sister, asked me to follow her into one of the bedrooms. I walked in the dark room behind Annie Glover loud-rapping Phife’s “Scenario” verse. Once we were both in the room, I complimented Annie Glover on her hair I couldn’t see and asked her where she got the perfume I couldn’t smell. I turned on the light. Annie Glover just sat on the edge of Donnie’s bed, her fists filled with the comforter, her eyes staring towards the window. I wondered how drunk she was.

“You, you look like Theo Huxtable tonight,” I remember Annie Glover stuttering as she got up and turned the light off.

I was a sweaty, baldheaded, 6’1, 240-pound black boy from Jackson, Mississippi. I owned one pair of jeans (some fake Girbauds that were actually my Mama’s) and one decent sweatshirt. Nothing about me looked, moved or sounded like Theo Huxtable.

When Annie Glover asked me if I wanted to see her boobs, I ignored her question, assumed she was definitely drunk, and tried to tell her what I hated about The Cosby Show. The sweaters, the corny kids, the problems that weren’t problems, the smooth jazz, the manufactured cleanliness, the nonexistent poverty residue just didn’t do it for me. It wasn’t only that the Cosbys were never broke, or in need of money, or that none of their black family members and friends were ever in material need of anything important: it was the complete lack of structural, interpersonal or psychological violence in the world that Bill Cosby created. Only in science fiction could a black man doctor who delivered mostly white babies, and a black woman lawyer who worked at a white law firm, come home and never once talk mess about the heartbreaking, violent machinations of white folks at both of their jobs, and the harassing, low down, predictable advances of men at Claire’s office. I remember telling Annie Glover that never in the history of real black folks could black life as depicted on The Cosby Show ever exist. And it only existed on Cosby’s show because Bill Cosby seemed obsessed with how white folks watched black folks watch ourselves watch him.

I didn’t exactly say it that way, though.

More here.