Marjorie Perloff at the Times Literary Supplement:

The later twentieth century can boast of many avant-garde poets and visual artists – think of Augusto de Campos or Ian Hamilton Finlay or Carl Andre – who really do treat linguistic signs as figural elements, who fuse the verbal and the visual. But Twombly isn’t one of them. He mines the poetry in his library – poetry whose aesthetic, as in the case of Rilke or Seferis, seems far removed from his own syncretic collage composition – for thematic material. And in responding to this process, Jacobus inevitably engages in what is traditional source study. She assesses with great acumen what Twombly’s aims were, and shows brilliantly how he combines the various poetic motifs in his painting. But the question remains, to paraphrase Clark, whether the inclusion of handwritten copies of specific poetic passages does anything to the normal art-ness of picture space. Since, for that matter, the poetic material is almost invisible – we have to take the critic’s word for its presence as well as for the further citations with which she often enhances her material – how much does its existence actually affect the space, structure, and scale of a given painting?

Jacobus makes much of the “O” of Rilke’s “Once”, relating it to those other Os that meant so much to Twombly, including the O ofOrpheus. But “Once” is of course not Rilke’s word; his is “ein Mal”, which gets two stresses rather than the one of “Once” and has its own connotations of “once upon a time” fairy tale. But then for Barthes, words, when they are fully visible, as in the case of VIRGIL, function not as pointers but as semi-parodic signs of displacement. VIRGIL, as Barthes pointed out, has its own set of witty references, but surely Virgil’s poetry is not among them.

more here.

Pankaj Mishra in The New Yorker:

The recent political earthquakes have found us intellectually and emotionally underprepared, even helpless. None of our usual categories (left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, reactionary) and perspectives (class, race, gender) seem able to explain how a compulsive liar and serial groper became the world’s most powerful man. Turning away from this unintelligible disaster, many seek enlightenment in literary and philosophical texts from the past, such as Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” George Orwell’s “1984,” and Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here.” It may be more rewarding, however, to turn to Václav Havel: a writer and thinker who intimately experienced totalitarianism of the Orwellian kind, who believed that it had already happened in America, and who also offered a way to resist it. Born in 1936, Havel came of age in Czechoslovakia, whose Communist rulers repeatedly imprisoned and continuously surveilled him while suppressing many of his writings. Defiant right until 1989, when he engineered the fall of the Communist regime, Havel came to be celebrated in the West as a “dissident,” a word commonly used to describe many in Communist countries who valiantly struggled against a pitiless despotism. However, his major prose writings, from the late nineteen-seventies onward, took a mordant view of the self-righteous Cold Warrior from the West who sought to turn the dissident into a distant object of pity and admiration. In one of Havel’s most famous essays, “Politics and Conscience,” from 1984, he asserted that dissidents like him, with their “flawed efforts” for freedom, were engaged in a universally necessary endeavor. He insisted on a “shared destiny” with people in Western democracies, presenting his fate as “a warning, a challenge, a danger, or a lesson” for them.

The problems before humankind, as Havel saw it, were far deeper than the opposition between socialism and capitalism, which were both “thoroughly ideological and often semantically confused categories [that] have long since been beside the point.” The Western system, though materially more successful, also crushed the human individual, inducing feelings of powerlessness, which—as Trump’s victory has shown—can turn politically toxic. In Havel’s analysis, politics in general had become too “machine-like” and unresponsive, degrading flesh-and-blood human beings into “statistical choruses of voters.” According to Havel, “the sole method of politics is quantifiable success,” which meant that “good and evil” were losing “all absolute meaning.”

More here.

Lisa Lieberman in Deathless Prose:

I recently listened to Sissy Spacek’s narration of To Kill a Mockingbird, which was simply wonderful. We’d been assigned the novel in a ninth grade English class—not the ideal circumstances for encountering a work of literature. Laboriously, we dissected the book’s message, extracting solemn truths like that line of Atticus’s: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

The injustice of a white jury in Alabama convicting a black man, Tom Robinson, on false evidence for the crime of raping a white female was awful, but not surprising. I was more shocked when Bob Ewell attacked Jem and Scout. It was 1970 and George Wallace was running an ugly, racist campaign for governor of Alabama. Calling his opponent names, showing ads depicting a white girl surrounded by seven black boys alongside the slogan, “Wake Up Alabama!” He won the election in a landslide and entered the presidential race the day after his victory, gaining momentum in the primaries until an assassination attempt forced him to withdraw.

No, Tom Robinson’s conviction was expected, and I didn’t need to have all of Harper Lee’s foreshadowing pointed out to me by my English teacher. I knew what was coming.

More here.

Jennifer Chu in Phys.org:

Quantum entanglement may appear to be closer to science fiction than anything in our physical reality. But according to the laws of quantum mechanics—a branch of physics that describes the world at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles—quantum entanglement, which Einstein once skeptically viewed as "spooky action at a distance," is, in fact, real.

Imagine two specks of dust at opposite ends of the universe, separated by several billion light years. Quantum theory predicts that, regardless of the vast distance separating them, these two particles can be entangled. That is, any measurement made on one will instantaneously convey information about the outcome of a future measurement on its partner. In that case, the outcomes of measurements on each member of the pair can become highly correlated.

If, instead, the universe behaves as Einstein imagined it should—with particles having their own, definite properties prior to measurement, and with local causes only capable of yielding local effects—then there should be an upper limit to the degree to which measurements on each member of the pair of particles could be correlated. Physicist John Bell quantified that upper limit, now known as "Bell's inequality," more than 50 years ago.

In numerous previous experiments, physicists have observed correlations between particles in excess of the limit set by Bell's inequality, which suggests that they are indeed entangled, just as predicted by quantum theory. But each such test has been subject to various "loopholes," scenarios that might account for the observed correlations even if the world were not governed by quantum mechanics.

More here.

Lovely article about my brother Syed Tasnim Raza by Sean Kirst in the Buffalo News:

I reached Dr. Syed Raza by telephone last week. I was trying to find the man who saved my father’s life.

Was it Raza? Neither of us could be sure.

What is beyond question is that Raza extended hundreds, even thousands, of lives in Buffalo.

He is a cardiac surgeon. He speaks with awe of the feeling when you operate upon a human heart, when you see a heart that was stilled for surgery resume beating again, when you watch as that beating “becomes stronger and stronger.”

It is a miracle, the gift of life itself.

Raza, 70, is with the Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. Most of his career was spent at what is now called Buffalo General Medical Health Center. He learned from Dr. George Schimert, his teacher and mentor, the man Raza describes as the father of open heart surgery in Western New York.

“I love Buffalo,” said Raza, a Bills fan whose children grew up in Cheektowaga and Snyder. He was a surgeon at Buffalo General from 1972 to 2005, when he left to start a new heart program in West Virginia. He is now at Columbia, where he manages postoperative cardiac surgical patients. He enjoys the chance to learn about their everyday lives and priorities.

Over the years, he met some 8,000 other patients in the most intense of ways: He caused their wounded hearts to beat again.

More here.

Podcast length: 28 minutes, click on photo below

David Trotter at the London Review of Books:

‘Of course he shot the fucking elephant.’ The sharpness of Sonia Orwell’s defence of the authenticity of the event on which her late husband based one of his most famous essays tells its own story. Without the experiences enjoyed or endured by Eric Blair, Etonian, colonial enforcer, schoolteacher, down-and-out, grocer, infantryman, there would have been no George Orwell, writer. But much of what we know about Blair, we know from Orwell. And it’s not just a matter of what he did when and where. It’s a matter of why he did it at all. Orwell exists because Blair was the sort of person who thought little of sticking his neck out in a good cause (when he did just that, from a trench on the Aragón front during the Spanish Civil War, someone put a bullet through it). Like it or not, ‘Orwell’ is a brand: ordinariness, common decency, speaking plain truths to power, a haggard, prophetic gaze. It is surely some or all of those qualities, rather than any particular political prescience, which have been invoked by the remarkable spike in the sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four following Kellyanne Conway’s notoriously unblushing embrace of ‘alternative facts’. Orwell didn’t foresee Trump. But if Trump were ever to find out about Orwell, he would probably tweet against him. ‘Really dumb @AnimalFarm. A total loser – no clue!’ Such a reputation takes a lot of preserving.

Darrell Hartman at The Paris Review:

If you love something, you let it go. Cat people understand this intuitively. You never quite possess a cat, and the sooner you acknowledge that, the better. Cats will chase the tinfoil ball, if they are in the mood, but they will almost certainly not bring it back. We forgive them for this because there is no other option.

I have no trouble linking cats to the divine. Chris Marker’s transcendent short film of a sleeping cat is nothing if not an image of Nirvana, pure being, whatever you want to call it. The look in a cat’s eye guides us toward an idea of freedom, as Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested. Having spent a lifetime studying the structures of ancient societies, the French anthropologist understood well the prison cell into which technological man had locked himself. Only at rare moments, Lévi-Strauss posits near the end ofTristes Tropiques, do we see beyond this cell. One of those is “in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.”

To watch films of cats (or even merely videos of them) may not carry the same “serenity” as an exchanged glance—and yet it can be, I propose, a road to a better place. Don’t believe me? Go see Kedi, opening February 10 in New York. Directed by Ceyda Torun, an LA-based filmmaker who grew up in Istanbul, it’s a feature-length documentary that profiles, if that’s the right word, seven alley cats in Istanbul.

more here.

Vidyan Ravinthiran at Poetry Magazine:

“It is easier to think,” wrote Keats to John Taylor, “what Poetry should be than to write it — and this leads me on to another axiom. That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” Bouncing ludically onward, Keats is, in hiscorrespondence, at once the Romantic genius parading his licensed idiosyncrasies and the “camelion Poet” with no identity at all. This famous letter presents us with the drama of consciousness. Reading it, one agrees with Rae Armantrout in her interview with Prac Crit: “objections could be raised to a human consciousness being a unified thing. The present is something that the mind does. They say the subjective present is about three seconds long.” In comparison, Keats’s hotly provisional axiom has turned to marble, his moment of excited phrase-making will last forever. And it hasn’t palled, at least with me, for though we’ve learned cautiousness as to what appears to come “naturally” (especially while reading Armantrout; she makes you contemplate even the back of your hand with bedazzled skepticism), Keats never says that leaves arrive all at once, or without a fight.

Nothing is natural in the work of Rae Armantrout. Our words, gestures, and relationships are conventional, scripted, deformed — or outright produced — by, as she has it, “the interventions of capitalism into consciousness.”

more here.

Maria Vultaggio in IBTimes:

1. “Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise. I rise. I rise.” –Maya Angelou

2. “Racial superiority is a mere pigment of the imagination.” –Unknown

3. “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” –Toni Morrison

4. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” –Martin Luther King Jr.

5. “In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.” –Thurgood Marshall

6. “For Africa to me … is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.” –Maya Angelou

7. “Defining myself, as opposed to being defined by others, is one of the most difficult challenges I face.”
 –Carol Moseley Braun

8. “Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.” –Zora Neale Hurston

9. “Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations.”
 –Dr. Mae Jemison

10. “For I am my mother's daughter, and the drums of Africa still beat in my heart.” –Mary McLeod Bethune

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

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Any insect unlucky enough to land on the mouth-like leaves of an Australian pitcher plant will meet a grisly end. The plant's prey is drawn into a vessel-like ‘pitcher’ organ where a specialized cocktail of enzymes digests the victim. Now, by studying the pitcher plant's genome — and comparing its insect-eating fluids to those of other carnivorous plants — researchers have found that meat-eating plants the world over have hit on the same deadly molecular recipe, even though they are separated by millions of years of evolution.

…Australian pitcher plants produce deadly ‘pitcher’ leaves — which resemble a toothy grin — as well as flat leaves. After sequencing the species’ genome, Albert’s team identified genes that are activated differently between the pitcher-like leaves and the plant's other, non-carnivorous, leaves. These included genes involved in making starches and sugars that may help to produce the nectar that lures insects to their deaths, as well as genes encoding waxy substances that may make it hard to escape from the pitcher. To determine how pitchers eat their prey, the researchers sampled the digestive cocktail from Cephalotus and several other unrelated carnivorous plants and identified a total of 35 proteins, using mass spectrometry. Many of the proteins are related to those that other flowering plants use to fend off pathogens^2–5. For instance, plants typically produce enzymes that break down a polymer called chitin as a defence against fungi, which make their cell walls out of the chemical. But Albert suspects that Australian pitchers and other carnivorous plants have repurposed the enzyme to digest insect exoskeletons, which are also made of chitin.

More here.

Phillip Lopate in the Times Literary Supplement:

We are already on the third of a projected seventeen volumes, minimum, which will include in their entirety every surviving letter, postcard and telegram sent by Hemingway. Meticulously edited, with shrewd introductory summaries and footnotes tracking down every reference, the series brings into sharp focus this contradictory, alternately smart and stupid, blustering, fragile man who was also a giant of modern literature.

The third volume, ably edited by Rena Sanderson, Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon, takes us through a particularly eventful and productive patch of Hemingway’s life, from 1926 to 1929. At the beginning he is just tackling the rewrites of The Sun Also Rises (1926) and seeing through publication his satiric novel The Torrents of Spring (1926) – his first, chronologically speaking, though it is seldom credited as such. He will switch publishers to land with the prestigious editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s, will write some of his greatest short stories for the collection Men Without Women (1927), and go on to compose his second proper novel, the hugely successful A Farewell to Arms (1929). Having entered the four-year period aged twenty-seven as a promising if uncommercial newcomer backed by obscure experimental presses, he will exit it at thirty transformed into a literary lion and international celebrity. In the process he will leave his first wife Hadley, on whose slender trust fund he has been subsisting, for his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer, a much more wealthy heiress; he will abandon bohemian Paris and return to the United States, indulging a newfound passion for big game fishing; his father will have committed suicide and he himself will assume the role of paterfamilias and the responsibility of extended family provider.

Throughout these years, Hemingway will dash off letters to some ninety-nine recipients, varying the tone with each: to Maxwell Perkins, for instance, he is respectful, keeping up the salutation “Dear Mr. Perkins” until well into their collaboration; to F. Scott Fitzgerald he is jokey but also longing for the other man’s companionship; to his mother Grace, he is painfully reserved and hostile.

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

There might be no getting around what Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” With an experiment described today in Physical Review Letters — a feat that involved harnessing starlight to control measurements of particles shot between buildings in Vienna — some of the world’s leading cosmologists and quantum physicists are closing the door on an intriguing alternative to “quantum entanglement.”

“Technically, this experiment is truly impressive,” said Nicolas Gisin, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva who has studied this loophole around entanglement.

According to standard quantum theory, particles have no definite states, only relative probabilities of being one thing or another — at least, until they are measured, when they seem to suddenly roll the dice and jump into formation. Stranger still, when two particles interact, they can become “entangled,” shedding their individual probabilities and becoming components of a more complicated probability function that describes both particles together. This function might specify that two entangled photons are polarized in perpendicular directions, with some probability that photon A is vertically polarized and photon B is horizontally polarized, and some chance of the opposite. The two photons can travel light-years apart, but they remain linked: Measure photon A to be vertically polarized, and photon B instantaneously becomes horizontally polarized, even though B’s state was unspecified a moment earlier and no signal has had time to travel between them. This is the “spooky action” that Einstein was famously skeptical about in his arguments against the completeness of quantum mechanics in the 1930s and ’40s.

More here.

Brian Resnick in Vox:

Dan Kahan is a professor of law and psychology at Yale whose research over the years has taught us something critically important about political debate today.

It’s this: While we would like to believe we can persuade people on the other side of a political debate with evidence, his studies show the other side is likely to become even more deeply entrenched in its view in the face of more information. His findings are a blow to the great underlying assumption of democracy: that an informed public is the key for a government that works.

The phenomenon is called “politically motivated reasoning,” and it finds people use their minds to protect the groups to which they belong from grappling with uncomfortable truths. The motivation to conform is stronger than the motivation to be right.

That’s why his latest research finding “is totally unexpected,” he says. There’s an antidote to politically motivated reasoning, it turns out. And it’s wonderfully simple: curiosity.

More here.

Sheila Dow over at INET:

Gains from trade is another value-laden topic which loomed large in the US presidential debate. Mainstream theory concludes that more trade is always beneficial in aggregate, but it does so on the assumption that the DSGE structure remains unchanged, i.e. that there have not been irreversible changes in structures, behaviour and the exercise of power. What gained most attention in political debate was the other more obviously value-laden mainstream assumption, that aggregate gains benefit society even if the winners don’t compensate the losers. There is no escaping the fact that economics continues to be a moral science. Economists therefore have a moral responsibility to be transparent about the value judgements embodied in their theories, and to be prepared to debate them. This would address any suspicion that economists were serving vested interests. But there is a more profound moral responsibility which arises from the nature of economic knowledge itself. Experience has shown that predictive success is an inadequate basis for appraising theories, such that different bodies of theory using different methodological approaches co-exist (even if most are discouraged by purveyors of the mainstream). This is particularly the case for a field whose subject matter is a complex, evolving, open system. Knowledge about the economy is uncertain, severely limiting the scope for classical logic. Drawing instead on a range of lines of reasoning and types of evidence, what is required of the economist is reasonable judgement. As Marcuzzo (2010: 45) points out, reasonableness is a moral quality which addresses the collective good rather than the personal benefit sought by individual rationality.

It is therefore immoral not only to conceal value judgements, but also to present as scientific truth a conclusion which is approach-specific. It is incumbent on all economists to be prepared to explain their approach and defend it relative to others. Economists, as experts, know better than those who do not make an in-depth study of the economy. But no one economist can claim to “know best” without imposing her own value judgments on society and without arguing why her approach to economic knowledge is better than alternatives.

For experts to impose value judgments on society is also undemocratic.

More here.

Daniel Penny in Boston Review:

In her 1975 New York Review of Books essay “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag interrogates what was then a growing trend within 1970s popular culture of reviving fascist imagery after three decades of total rebuke. Sontag begins by examining Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl’s photography book, The Last of the Nuba, in light of Riefenstahl’s involvement in the Third Reich. Sontag tracks a set of visual sensibilities across Riefenstahl’s filmmaking career, arriving at a kind of taxonomy of fascist aesthetics, which she calls “both prurient and idealizing.” For Sontag, fascist artworks share:

a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, and extravagant effort; they exalt two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry . . . around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets.

Sontag connects these obsessions with theatrical control to the rise of Nazi imagery in cinema, erotica, and fine art in the 1970s. Arthouse films such as The Damned (1969) and The Night Porter (1974) use the “supremely violent but also supremely beautiful” imagery of the SS to lasciviously explore the twisted psychologies of sadomasochism-loving Nazis; while films such as Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975) epitomize the cresting wave of Nazisploitation, in which “far-out sex has been placed under the sign of Nazism.” As Sontag sees it, the unique appeal of Nazis in the context of sadomasochist fantasy is twofold: first, by the 1970s, fascism had become both novel to young people, yet also taboo; and second, fascism provides a readymade sexual fantasy that requires little imagination, “a master scenario available to everyone,” replete with a highly organized visual system: “The color is black, the material is leather. . . .”

More here.