Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

While Oscar Wilde may have been drawn to beautiful young men and the love that dare not speak its name — a phrase coined by the pretty and ruinous “Bosie,” Lord Alfred Douglas — he gained his fame and success largely through the help of powerful women. In “Wilde’s Women,” Eleanor Fitzsimons reminds us of the many writers, actresses, political activists, professional beauties and aristocratic ladies who helped shape the life and legend of the era’s greatest wit, esthete and sexual martyr. To begin with, there was Wilde’s formidable mother, Lady Jane Wilde. A hot-blooded, Irish nationalist and proto-feminist during her youth, she raged that women were forced into lives of “vacuity, inanity, vanity, absurdity and idleness.” She contended, quite accurately, that “all avenues to wealth and rank are closed to them. The state takes no notice of their existence except to injure them by its laws.” But Speranza — as Lady Wilde was commonly called — also translated poetry from Russian, Turkish, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese. Her collections of Irish folk tales were much admired by W.B. Yeats and she produced the first English version of Wilhelm Meinhold’s great German witchcraft novel, “Sidonia the Sorceress.”

Like her husband, the eminent physician Sir William Wilde, Speranza belonged to Ireland’s intellectual, as well as social, aristocracy. Sir William had been a friend of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, Speranza was the niece of Charles Robert Maturin, author of the Gothic classic, “Melmoth the Wanderer,” and their house was located just down the street from that of Sheridan Le Fanu, editor of the Dublin University Magazine (and author of the best ghost stories of the mid-19th century). Born in 1854, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde grew up surrounded by many of the most interesting people of his time.

More here.

The Gift

he walked into the bakery to buy bread

a big man
well worn cowboy hat
gentle face

we were sitting at a table
drinking our papaya juice
and talking to the dona behind the counter

he turned to us and said
“uma cancão”
and began to sing in a soft sweet voice
he sang of his seventy-three years
he sand of his growing up
he sang of his family and the death of his wife
he sang of his travels
and he sang of his cows

I didn’t understand all the words
but I understood his song and marveled at its beauty

when he finished singing he smiled at us
took his bread
and walked out

there remained a silence
that was filled
with the gift of his song
.

by Robert Markey
from Poems from Brazil
ISBN 978-1517117993
.
.

Mary Midgley in The Philosophers' Magazine:

I noticed how confused current views about this are when I read a recent piece in the Guardian about how entomologists hunt the impressive Purple Emperor butterfly. Apparently they must lay out its favourite diet, which is chiefly carrion and various kinds of faeces. The writer says that Victorian observers were distressed by these tastes in such a noble animal and “observed these degraded moments with a morbid fascination. For the emperor, however, it is not a question of taste. It is thought that the males replenish themselves after mating with sodium and other chemicals from the rotting matter.”

Thus we see the conscientious butterfly holding its proboscis and resolutely taking its medicine so as to be sure of keeping its love-life in order … And this is the sort of picture that constantly emerges from contemporary evolution-talk, a picture that mixes up two quite different kinds of purpose. The butterfly’s own subjective purpose concerns what it wants to do. But the possible effect on the survival of its species is an evolutionary function, of which the butterfly knows nothing.

It is not surprising that these two ideas get mixed today. Official scientific thought doesn’t now try to distinguish between different forms of purpose; indeed it hardly recognises the concept of purpose at all. Subjective purposes – motives – were outlawed from science-speak by the behaviourists, along with the rest of our inner life. Though their effects are obviously real, they were blotted out so successfully from the perception of the learned that many conscientious thinkers still don’t dare to look at them. Instead, in a way that would have delighted B. F. Skinner, they still try to account for physical actions directly in physical terms. They pick out distinct behaviour-patterns and try to link each to an evolutionary function of its own, without reference to its meaning or its social context.

More here.

Barbara Ehrenreich in The Baffler:

At around the turn of the millennium, some disturbing findings surfaced in the biomedical literature. Macrophages—immune cells whose function is to attack and kill microbes and other threats to the body—do not gather at tumor sites to destroy cancer cells, as had been optimistically imagined. Instead, they encourage the cancer cells to continue their mad reproductive rampage. Frances Balkwill, the British cell biologist who performed some of the key studies of treasonous immune cell behavior, described her colleagues in the field as being “horrified.”

By and large, medical science continues to present a happy face to the public. Self-help books and websites go right on advising cancer patients to boost their immune systems in order to combat the disease; patients should eat right and cultivate a supposedly immune-boosting “positive attitude.” Better yet, they are urged to “visualize” the successful destruction of cancer cells by the body’s immune cells, following guidelines such as:

• Cancer cells are weak and confused, and should be imagined as something that can fall apart like ground hamburger.

• There is an army of different kinds of white blood cells that can overwhelm the cancer cells.

• White blood cells are aggressive and want to seek out and attack the cancer cells.

At a more respectable level of discourse, Harvard physician Jerome Groopman wrote an entire 2012 New Yorker article on scientific attempts to enlist the immune system against cancer—without ever once mentioning that certain types of immune cells have a tendency to go over to the other side.

But the evidence for immune cell collusion with cancer keeps piling up.

More here.

Corey Robin in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

As an archetype, the public intellectual is a conflicted being, torn in two competing directions.

On the one hand, he’s supposed to be called by some combination of the two vocations Max Weber set out in his lectures in Munich: that of the scholar and that of the statesman. Neither academic nor activist but both, the public intellectual is a monkish figure of austere purpose and unadorned truth. Think Noam Chomsky.

On the other hand, the public intellectual is supposed to possess a distinct and self-conscious sense of style, calling attention to itself and to the stylist. More akin to a celebrity, this public intellectual bears little resemblance to Weber’s man of knowledge or man of action. He lacks the integrity and intensity of both. He makes us feel as if we are in the presence of an actor too attentive to his audience, a mind too mindful of its reception. Think Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Yet that attention to image and style, audience and reception, may not only be not antithetical to the vocation of the public intellectual; it may actually serve it. The public intellectual stands between Weber’s two vocations because he wants his writing to do something in the world. “He never wrote a sentence that has any interest in itself,” Ezra Pound said of Lenin, “but he evolved almost a new medium, a sort of expression halfway between writing and action.”

The public intellectual is not simply interested in a wide audience of readers, in shopping her ideas on the op-ed page to sell more books. She’s not looking for markets or hungry for a brand. She’s not an explainer or a popularizer. She is instead the literary equivalent of the epic political actor, who sees her writing as a transformative mode of action, a thought-deed in the world. The transformation she seeks may be a far-reaching change of policy, an education of manners and morals, or a renovation of the human estate. Her watch may be wound for tomorrow or today. But whatever her aim or time frame, the public intellectual wants her writing to have an effect, to have all the power of power itself.

More here.

Orhan Pamuk in The Guardian:

I wrote The Museum of Innocence thinking of the museum, and created the museum thinking of the novel. The museum was not just some idea I chanced upon after the success of the book, nor was it a case of the success of the museum begetting the novel – as when certain blockbuster movies are transposed to book form. In fact, I conceived the novel and the museum simultaneously, and explained the complex link between them in the novel: a young man from a wealthy, westernised Istanbul family falls in love with a poor distant relation, and when his love goes unrequited, he finds solace in collecting everything his beloved has ever touched. Finally, as we learn at the end of the book, he takes all of these objects from daily life – postcards, photographs, matchsticks, saltshakers, keys, dresses, film clips, and toys, mementoes of his doomed love affair and of the Istanbul of the 1970s and 80s whose streets he wandered with his lover – and displays them in the Museum of Innocence.

Back in the mid-1990s, when I first began to work on this idea, my dream was to open the museum on the same day the novel was published. The novel would be the museum catalogue. The order of the entries and their accompanying texts would all be planned and manipulated meticulously, producing a catalogue that could be read and enjoyed as a postmodern sort of novel. But I finished the book before the museum, moulded it back into a traditional novel, without images or annotations, and published it in that form in 2008. When I opened the museum in 2012, I realised it still needed a catalogue to explain the design and composition of the exhibition vitrines I had laboured over endlessly, and to show the objects and photographs included in the collection, so I wrote and published The Innocence of Objects. Now, there is a fourth work, and one that I’d never imagined when I first embarked on this project: Grant Gee’s beautiful, enigmatic documentary film Innocence of Memories. This time I’m not the creative force behind the project; instead, my role is simply that of creator of the film’s true focus, the Museum of Innocence, and author of the texts featured in the film.

More here. (Note: For Abbas who was deeply moved by the Museum of Innocence this past June in Istanbul.)

John Sutherland at The New York Times:

At 17, Iris Murdoch was asked what she intended to do with her life. She gave a one-word answer: “Write.” Sixty years on, what may have been Dame Iris Murdoch’s last coherent words as she was sucked into the darkness of Alzheimer’s disease were: “I wrote.”

She usually did it the hard way: longhand, preferably with a Montblanc fountain pen. Her writing encompassed 26 published novels as well as ­philosophical treatises, essays and, most time-consumingly, an ocean of letters. She ­dutifully replied to every one she received, unless they were “mad or spiteful.” Writing letters, Avril Horner and Anne Rowe note in their introduction to “Living on Paper,” their selection of Murdoch’s correspondence, routinely took up four hours of her afternoon.

They were not drudging hours. For Murdoch, there was a sheer joyousness in sitting down at her desk. “I can live in letters,” she told her oldest friend and sometime lover, Philippa Foot. She took pride in how good she was at it. “I have in fact only once corresponded with anyone (now departed from my life) who was as good at writing letters as I am,” she crowed to Foot — who was perhaps a little miffed at not being that “anyone.”

more here.

Thomas Bunstead's translation at The Quarterly Conversation:

At the moment when the wind gusts in from the south, the wind that arrives from Arizona, soaring up and across the several sparsely populated deserts and the dozen and a half settlements that over the years have been subject to an unstoppable exodus to the point that they’ve become little more than skele-towns, at this moment, this very moment, the hundreds of pairs of shoes hanging from the poplar are subjected to a pendular motion, but not all with the same frequency—the laces from which each pair hangs are of different lengths. From a certain distance it constitutes a chaotic dance indeed, one that, in spite of all, implies certain rules. Some of the shoes bang into each other and suddenly change speed or trajectory, finally ending up back at their attractor points, in balance. The closest thing to a tidal wave of shoes. This American poplar that found water is situated 125 miles from Carson City and 135 from Ely; it’s worth the trip just to see the shoes stopped, potentially one the cusp of moving. High heels, Italian shoes, Chilean shoes, trainers of all makes and colours (including a pair of mythical Adidas Surf), snorkelling flippers, ski boots, baby booties and booties made of leather. The passing traveller may take or leave anything he or she wishes. For those who live near to U.S. Route 50, the tree is proof that, even in the most desolate spot on earth, there’s a life beyond—not beyond death, which no one cares about any more, but beyond the body—and that the objects, though disposed of, possess an intrinsic value aside from the function they were made to serve. Bob, the owner of a small supermarket in Carson City, stops a hundred feet away. From the nearest to the farthest thing, he enumerates what he can see: first the very red mudflat, followed by the tree and the intricacies of its shadow, beyond that another mudflat, less red, dust-bleached, and finally the outline of the mountains, which appear flat, depthless, like the pictures they had in the Peking Duck Restaurant across from Western Union, which shut down, he thinks. But above all, seeing these overlapping strips of colour, the image that comes most clearly to mind is the differently coloured strata formed by the horizontally layered produce on his supermarket shelves. There’s a batch of bacon fries halfway up that come in with a little gift-like offering of round Danish butter biscuit tins strapped on with sticky tape, the lids of which feature a picture of a fir tree with baubles on (he doesn’t know this). Both trees are beginning to stoop.

more here.

Michael Marrus at The Financial Times:

Beginning with the advent of the Nazi party to power in 1933, Cesarani insists that anti-Semitism was not central to the consolidation of its hold on Germany. Persecution and murder did not proceed in an orderly way. From the beginning, and in various ways throughout its 12-year domination, Nazism’s destructive rampage was characterised by “improvisation and muddle”. Again and again, he documents what one author once called “the twisted road to Auschwitz” — the absence of detailed objectives, planning or clear lines of authority — even as Nazism constantly understood Jews as remorseless enemies. Nazism proceeded against the Jews implacably but inconsistently, and to the victims sometimes bewilderingly.

“This shambles was the matrix for subsequent policy initiatives,” Cesarani writes. “Having allowed hurriedly conceived, partially thought-out policies to create a situation that satisfied no one and caused much restlessness amongst loyal party comrades, the Nazi leadership had to figure a way out. This [became] a familiar pattern.” When dealing with the Jews, German instruments were “low-cost and low-tech”.

Even in eastern Europe, where military operations facilitated the radicalisation of anti-Jewish measures, the destruction of Jewry did not flow from a clearly determined plan and a rational allocation of resources. Speaking of Poland, the densest killing ground, he notes that “policy was drawn up on the hoof. What later appeared to be the first stage of a carefully thought-out strategy of anti-Jewish measures was in fact a set of hasty improvisations.”

more here.

ALAN EHRENHALTJAN in The New York Times:

Nineteen eighty was a year of hope for conservatives in America, but it was a hope diminished by decades of consistent failure at the grass roots. Republicans hadn’t controlled either chamber of Congress, or a majority in state legislatures, for a quarter-century. Most governors were Democrats, as had been true since 1970. Not only was the Republican Party overmatched at winning elections, but those with the strongest ideological convictions — “movement conservatives,” as they liked to call themselves — were a faint voice even within Republican ranks. But at the end of that year two things happened. One, as we all know, was the election of Ronald Reagan as president. The other was an utterly private event whose significance would not be noticed for years. Charles and David Koch, the enormously rich proprietors of an oil company based in Kansas, decided that they would spend huge amounts of money to elect conservatives at all levels of American government. David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, but when the campaign was over, he resolved never to seek public office again. That wouldn’t be necessary, he and his brother concluded; they could invest in the campaigns of others, and essentially buy their way to political power.

Thirty years later, the midterm elections of 2010 ushered in the political system that the Kochs had spent so many years plotting to bring about. After the voting that year, Republicans dominated state legislatures; they controlled a clear majority of the governorships; they had taken one chamber of Congress and were on their way to winning the other. Perhaps most important, a good many of the Republicans who had won these offices were not middle-of-the-road pragmatists. They were antigovernment libertarians of the Kochs’ own political stripe. The brothers had spent or raised hundreds of millions of dollars to create majorities in their image. They had succeeded. And not merely at the polls: They had helped to finance and organize an interlocking network of think tanks, academic programs and news media outlets that far exceeded anything the liberal opposition could put together. It is this conservative ascendancy that Jane Mayer chronicles in “Dark Money.” The book is written in straightforward and largely unemotional prose, but it reads as if conceived in quiet anger. Mayer believes that the Koch brothers and a small number of allied plutocrats have essentially hijacked American democracy, using their money not just to compete with their political adversaries, but to drown them out.

More here.

Robert Macfarlane in More Intelligent Life:

The Guadarrama mountains of Spain run from north-east to south-west across the central plains of Castille. They are ancient mountains, formed of pale granite and gneiss, their slopes densely wooded with pines of several species: black pines, maritime pines, sentry pines, Scots pines. I once walked across the range from south to north, sleeping in caves and forest clearings. Years on I still clearly recall the scents of those days and nights: “the piney smell of…crushed needles”, as Ernest Hemingway puts it in “For Whom The Bell Tolls”, “and the sharper odour of…resinous sap”. Hemingway’s novel is set in the Guadarrama during the last May of the Spanish civil war. Its hero is Robert Jordan, a young American fighting for the International Brigade. Jordan, an explosives expert with a profound disinterest in his own fate, is tasked by his Soviet commander with destroying a bridge in the Fascist-held mountains. He joins forces with Republican partisans who have gone guerrilla. Their base for the operation is a cave in the “rim-rock” at the “cup-shaped upper end” of a “little valley”.

In the book’s second paragraph, Jordan unfolds a photostatted map on the “pine-needle floor” of the forest. That contrast between military perception and natural presence preoccupies Hemingway throughout the novel. The landscapes of the Guadarrama are interpreted chiefly in terms of tactics: open ground is read for its lines of fire, “timber” for its cover. Those with close knowledge of the range – like Jordan’s trusted guide Anselmo – are valuable because they can move discreetly through this hostile territory. Yet these tough men remain alert to the beauty of the mountains. When a two-day blizzard blows in, Jordan relishes its wildness, though he knows it will betray their position. Pilar, a fellow partisan, agrees: “What rotten stuff is the snow and how beautiful it looks.” The hurry-up-and-wait aspects of war mean there is time to appreciate the “afternoon clouds…moving slowly in the high Spanish sky”. Maria, Jordan’s lover, speaks of her passion for the pine forest: “the feel of the needles under foot…the wind in the high trees and the creaking they make against each other”. Even their target is assessed both aesthetically and militarily – it is a “steel bridge of a single span”, possessing a “solid-flung metal grace”, standing “dark against the steep emptiness of the gorge”.

More here.

more or less

fifteen years ago more or less
my father killed a man
on the road with his car
of course to him
it isn’t more or less
he knows the date the time
to the minute
the pattern on the man’s shirt
how blood on asphalt looks
only like water
lately he’s been repeating himself
calling to tell me the same things
over and over again
my grandmother has died
his sisters are bitches
there was bone in the ashes
I worry he might disappear
again as he did
fifteen years ago more or less
when the road took the man
more or less
after he died more or less
while my father watched
more or less or more
which is it I want to know
because a thing like that
can never be both
or else it is nothing
only more and never less
or less and never more
more road more black
more wet more night less
stars less sight more
fast more glass
less heart less breath
less hands on chest
more quiet more time
more nothing and always
more and more and more
and more less

by Laurie Anderson
from 32 Poems, Spring/Summer 2015

Sergei Lebedev at Literary Hub:

Moscow is emptying out. Friends, old flames, are leaving. There’s a strange light in familiar windows. Even the city itself, as a space of the memory, belongs now to a past epoch, estranged from many of us who remain.

Walking the streets of the Russian capital today, those of us who were born in the 1970s and 80s realize we were born in a country that no longer exists. We came of age of the 90s, when the Russia that existed then came to us freely, without conditions, like a gift from history. We were spoiled by fate; we felt it was enough to express ourselves in informal signs of community—we waved white ribbons in 2011 to protest flawed elections, but discovered that ribbons were no match for red tape—than in institutional forms of solidarity and democracy: we started few political parties, joined power in few professional unions or public organizations. And so it turned out it was enough for the atmosphere to change, and all of a sudden our generation could only watch; history closed in on us.

Today, it can be said that history is no longer the past, but is walking each step with us. We increasingly perceive uncomfortable parallels with the 1920s and 30s. That we debate which age we’re closer to—the terror of Lenin or the terror of Stalin—speaks volumes about our present situation.

more here.

Douglas Kierdorf at The Boston Globe:

AS ELECTION DAY drew closer, an undercurrent of anxiety and discontent swept the country. The public had lost faith in both political parties that were controlled by big business types who had lost touch with the common people, the professional political class, and lawyers who rigged the game. Meanwhile, mass immigration was choking urban centers with legions of poor, uneducated people who barely spoke the language and were of dubious religious and national allegiance. Rapid technological change was putting people out of jobs and degrading the nature of work for those who had them. Beneath the surface appearance of business as usual, a political upheaval was brewing that would obliterate one of the two major parties and leave the other as only a regional force for two generations.

It was the fall of 1854.

From this period of political upheaval, the country came to know the Know-Nothings, a group whose name is still used as short-hand for xenophobic nativism. But the story of the Know-Nothings is far more complex. Yes, they were militantly anti-immigration, but they were also quite progressive on issues of labor rights, opposition to slavery, and the need for more government spending. Given our current age of anxiety, it’s worth dwelling on a few lessons of an earlier period, which has such obvious echoes.

more here.

Max Nelson at The Paris Review:

It’s a seductively ironic notion that the freedom Genet gave his narrator consisted precisely in letting him abuse and enslave the rest of the book’s characters. But rarely do the figures who move through Our Lady of the Flowers—Divine/Culafroy, but also Darling, her primary male love interest; Our Lady, the young murderer for whose charms Divine falls; and Gorgui, “the big sunny Negro” she treats with a mixture of tenderness and exotic fascination—seem shackled to their fates to the extent Sartre suggests. What gives the book much of its depth is the intensity with which its narrator identifies with these men. “Their density” as characters, in Sartre’s words, might be “measured by the effect they produce in him” (i.e., their ability to arouse him), but they arouse him precisely by giving him bodies to occupy, spaces to inhabit, memories to relive, and frissons to experience outside his prison’s walls.

In some cases, they enjoy all the freedoms of movement he himself lacks. Late in the book, the narrator skims over a period during which Divine “pursued the complicated, sinuous, looped existence of a kept woman.” Each sentence carries her across another ocean, first to the Sundra Isles and Venice:

Then it was Vienna, in a gilded hotel, nestling between the wings of a black eagle. Sleeping in the arms of an English lord, deep in a canopied and curtained bed. Then there were rides in a heavy black limousine … She thought of her mother and of Darling. Darling received money orders from her, sometimes jewels, which he would wear for one evening and quickly resell so that he could treat his pals to dinner. Then back to Paris, and off again, and all in a warm, gilded luxury, all in such comfort that I need merely evoke it from time to time in its smug details for the vexations of my poor life as a prisoner to disappear.

more here.

From KurzweilAI:

Salk researchers and collaborators have achieved critical insight into the size of neural connections, putting the memory capacity of the brain far higher than common estimates. The new work also answers a longstanding question as to how the brain is so energy efficient, and could help engineers build computers that are incredibly powerful but also conserve energy. “This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience,” says Terry Sejnowski, Salk professor and co-senior author of the paper, which was published in eLife. “We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power. Our new measurements of the brain’s memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte (1 quadrillion or 10¹⁵ bytes), in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web.” “When we first reconstructed every dendrite, axon, glial process, and synapse* from a volume of hippocampus the size of a single red blood cell, we were somewhat bewildered by the complexity and diversity amongst the synapses,” says Kristen Harris, co-senior author of the work and professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas, Austin. “While I had hoped to learn fundamental principles about how the brain is organized from these detailed reconstructions, I have been truly amazed at the precision obtained in the analyses of this report.”

10 times more discrete sizes of synapses discovered

The Salk team, while building a 3D reconstruction of rat hippocampus tissue (the memory center of the brain), noticed something unusual. In some cases, a single axon from one neuron formed two synapses reaching out to a single dendrite of a second neuron, signifying that the first neuron seemed to be sending a duplicate message to the receiving neuron. At first, the researchers didn’t think much of this duplicity, which occurs about 10 percent of the time in the hippocampus. But Tom Bartol, a Salk staff scientist, had an idea: if they could measure the difference between two very similar synapses such as these, they might glean insight into synaptic sizes, which so far had only been classified in the field as small, medium and large.

More here.

Using techniques from evolutionary biology, scientists have traced folk stories back to the Bronze Age.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Stories evolve. As they are told and retold to new audiences, they accumulate changes in plot, characters, and settings. They behave a lot like living organisms, which build up mutations in the genes that they pass to successive generations.

This is more than a metaphor. It means that scientists can reconstruct the relationships between versions of a story using the same tools that evolutionary biologists use to study species. They can compare different versions of the same tale and draw family trees—phylogenies—that unite them. They can even reconstruct the last common ancestor of a group of stories.

In 2013, Jamie Tehrani from Durham University did this for Little Red Riding Hood, charting the relationships between 58 different versions of the tale. In some, a huntsman rescues the girl; in others, she does it herself. But all these iterations could be traced back to a single origin, 2,000 years ago, somewhere between Europe and the Middle East. And East Asian versions (with several girls, and a tiger or leopard in lieu of wolf) probably derived from these European ancestors.

That project stoked Tehrani's interest, and so he teamed up with Sara Graça da Silva, who studies intersections between evolution and literature, to piece together the origins of a wider corpus of folktales.

More here.