This Might Be Real

How long in a cold room will the tea stay hot?
What about reality interests you?
How long can you live?
Were you there when I said this might be real?
How much do you love?
Sixty percent?
Things that are gone?
Do you love what’s real?
Is real a partial form?
Is it a nascent form?
What is it before it’s real?
Is it a switch that moves and then is ever still?
Is it a spectrum of cross-fades?
Is what’s next real?
When it comes will everything turn real?
If I drink enough tea to hallucinate, is that real?
If I know I’m waiting for someone but I don’t know who, is he real?
Is he real when he comes?
Is he real when he’s gone?
Is consequence what’s real?
Is consequence all that’s real?
What brings consequence?
Is it what’s real?
Is it what turned everything to disbelief, the last form love takes?
.

by Sarah Manguso
from Siste Viator
Four Way Books, 2006

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David Oshinsky in The New York Times:

Few American jurists are as revered as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. A United States Supreme Court justice for close to 30 years, Holmes wrote seminal opinions that were clear and clever and elegantly phrased. It was Holmes who defined the limits of free speech in 1919 by noting that the law did not protect someone “falsely shouting fire in a theater.” And it was Holmes who thoughtfully amended those words a decade later by writing that nothing in the Constitution was more sacred than “the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” By most accounts, Holmes, an upper-crust Bostonian, served the nobler instincts of America’s privileged classes. That is why his reckless majority opinion supporting forced sterilization in a 1927 case remains an enigma. Was it an isolated misstep or something more: an indictment of Justice Holmes and the Progressive movement he appeared to embrace? America in the early 20th century was awash in reform. As giant corporations took root, so too did calls to check their power. Laws were passed setting maximum hours and minimum ­wages, limiting child labor, preserving natural resources and breaking up the “trusts” that were said to be destroying fair competition. Not all of these laws worked out as planned, and some were eviscerated in the courts. But a new force had been unleashed, aiming to serve the greater good not by destroying big business but by curbing its abuses. Progressivism was always more than a single cause, however. Attracting reformers of all stripes, it aimed to fix the ills of society through increased government action — the “administrative state.” Progressives pushed measures ranging from immigration restriction to eugenics in a grotesque attempt to protect the nation’s gene pool by keeping the “lesser classes” from reproducing. If one part of progressivism emphasized fairness and compassion, the other reeked of bigotry and coercion.

“Imbeciles,” by Adam Cohen, the author of “Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America,” examines one of the darkest chapters of progressive reform: the case of Buck v. Bell. It’s the story of an assault upon thousands of defenseless people seen through the lens of a young woman, Carrie Buck, locked away in a Virginia state asylum. In meticulously tracing her ordeal, Cohen provides a superb history of eugenics in America, from its beginnings as an offshoot of social Darwinism — ­human survival of the fittest — to its rise as a popular movement, advocating the state-sponsored sterilization of “feeble­minded, insane, epileptic, inebriate, criminalistic and other degenerate persons.” According to the New York attorney Madison Grant, whose immensely influential 1916 tract, “The Passing of the Great Race,” became standard reading for eugenicists — Hitler himself is said to have called it “my bible” — about 10 percent of Americans produced unworthy offspring and had to be stopped.

More here.

The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world.

Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic:

Friday, august 30, 2013, the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America’s reign as the world’s sole indispensable superpower—or, alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss and stepped back from the consuming void—began with a thundering speech given on Obama’s behalf by his secretary of state, John Kerry, in Washington, D.C. The subject of Kerry’s uncharacteristically Churchillian remarks, delivered in the Treaty Room at the State Department, was the gassing of civilians by the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.

Obama, in whose Cabinet Kerry serves faithfully, but with some exasperation, is himself given to vaulting oratory, but not usually of the martial sort associated with Churchill. Obama believes that the Manichaeanism, and eloquently rendered bellicosity, commonly associated with Churchill were justified by Hitler’s rise, and were at times defensible in the struggle against the Soviet Union. But he also thinks rhetoric should be weaponized sparingly, if at all, in today’s more ambiguous and complicated international arena. The president believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq. Obama entered the White House bent on getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan; he was not seeking new dragons to slay. And he was particularly mindful of promising victory in conflicts he believed to be unwinnable. “If you were to say, for instance, that we’re going to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and build a prosperous democracy instead, the president is aware that someone, seven years later, is going to hold you to that promise,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, and his foreign-policy amanuensis, told me not long ago.

More here.

Rachel Feltman in the Washington Post:

Until now, only humans seemed to use syntax this way. But a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications suggests that the Japanese great tit — a bird closely related to the North American chickadee — uses grammatical rules like these in its calls.

All language, human and otherwise, revolves around turning meaningless sounds into something more. It's widely accepted that many non-human animals use what's called referential communication — specific sounds mean specific things to the receiver. Beyond that, there are two kinds of syntax that make speech more complicated, but also more useful: phonological and compositional. Humans have both, and until this new study, non-human animals had only been shown to have the former.

Phonological syntax turns sounds that individually have no meaning into ones with meaning. Suffixes and prefixes are a good example in human language, and other animals use strings of different notes that are never used individually. The Campbell's monkey adds an “oooh” sound to the end of its vocalizations to increase the intensity of the message, and this sound is never used on its own — so that's another example. Another study found that some birds won't respond to calls unless the notes involved are made in the right order.

More here.

Joseph E. Stiglitz in Evonomics:

American inequality didn’t just happen. It was created. Market forces played a role, but it was not market forces alone. In a sense, that should be obvious: economic laws are universal, but our growing inequality— especially the amounts seized by the upper 1 percent—is a distinctly American “achievement.” That outsize inequality is not predestined offers reason for hope, but in reality it is likely to get worse. The forces that have been at play in creating these outcomes are self-reinforcing.

America’s current level of inequality is unusual. Compared with other countries and compared with what it was in the past even in the United States, it’s unusually large, and it has been increasing unusually fast. It used to be said that watching for changes in inequality was like watching grass grow: it’s hard to see the changes in any short span of time. But that’s not true now.

Addressing inequality is of necessity multifaceted—we have to rein in the excesses at the top, strengthen the middle, and help those at the bottom. Each goal requires a program of its own. But to construct such programs, we have to have a better understanding of what has given rise to each facet of this unusual inequality.

More here.

“Do-tin cheezaan Agha Sahab diyan” (Two-three items of Agha Sahib’s), she said in Punjabi, her voice cracking. She was referring to the pre-Independence poet and playwright Agha Hashar Kashmiri.

“Daagh vi gaana jay” (You must sing Daagh too), I said. “Othay sab Daagh de deewane ne” (Everyone there is crazy about Daagh)—Daagh Dehlvi, the nineteenth-century poet.

“Aa!” she said, and stared at me in appalled agreement, as if I had recognised an old vice of Calcutta’s citizens.

more here.

Thanassis Cambanis at The Boston Globe:

AMHERST COLLEGE GRADUATE Daniel Bliss founded the Syrian Protestant College in 1866, with high hopes to spread Christianity in the Levant. Instruction was in Arabic, and Bliss planned to quickly turn it over to local leadership. Within decades, however, Bliss had clashed with a faculty member who wanted to teach Darwin’s theory of evolution and shut down a student protest movement. English replaced Arabic, and “native instructors” were relegated to secondary status. Eventually, the institution gave up on its failed missionary aims and in 1920 adopted it modern name, the American University of Beirut.

It became a cornerstone of an era of ferment in Arab political life. Liberals, nationalists, revolutionaries, communists, and others were agitating throughout the Levant and the Arab region. In the half century that followed — through World War II and decolonization, the establishment of Israel and the displacement of Palestinians, and a long cycle of regional wars — it was an epicenter of political activism and research in and about the Arab world.

Until the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975, AUB hosted some of the most influential and prolific figures of Arab political and intellectual life.

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Jake Marmer at Tablet:

Avant-garde poets are supposed to be difficult and incomprehensible, forgotten and miserable. The density ofdiscourse around Bernstein’s work, combined with the impressive number of domestic and international awards and distinctions he’s received in recent years, continues to baffle and inspire. The new collection of Bernstein’s essays Pitch of Poetry finally offers some insight into the seeming paradox of his mass appeal: For all of its classic avant-garde tropes—complexity, insider references, and elitism—the collection is also irresistibly entertaining, chatty, and thought-provoking—philosophically, politically, and technologically.

In the late 1970s, Charles Bernstein, along with poet Bruce Andrews, launched L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, a now-legendary literary journal. The journal’s name became both the signpost for a new literary community and a loosely defined set of poetic affinities shared by that community’s members. In an overview of the key tendencies associated with Language poetry, Bernstein points to the “new approach to the essay, averting exposition in favor of wild combinations, shifts of mood and tone, hyperbole, enigma, lyric exuberance, rhythmic propulsion, telegraphic immediacy, digression, aphorism, contradiction, investigation, and dialogue.”

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Ornstein and Mann in The Atlantic:

Donald Trump’s emergence as the GOP frontrunner and likely nominee creates an existential crisis for the Republican Party, as the angry populism exploited and incited by Republican leaders in Congress to regain majority control turns inward to consume its host. The potential outcomes are bad for the party and its adherents—but even worse for the rest of America.

After his very good night Tuesday, including a huge victory in Florida, Trump could indeed wrap up the party nomination before July, or be so close to the magic 1,237 delegates that it would be impossible to deny him the nomination. One of the two major parties would then be led by a man noted for his divisive, taunting and dangerous language, his extreme proposals on immigration and trade, his lack of knowledge about even basic public policies—and a set of ideas, on Social Security, Medicare, health reform and Planned Parenthood at odds with the entire Republican Party platform and nearly all of its members of the House and Senate. No doubt, most of those members, along with the other presidential candidates and party nabobs, would dutifully get behind their nominee—the mantra is “Anyone would be better than Hillary Clinton.” But that would mean not only forfeiting a chance to broaden the party base beyond a core of working-class white voters, but also creating irresolvable dissonance between the standard bearer and the party hierarchy, even greater than that between Barry Goldwater and the then-moderate GOP establishment in 1964.

To be sure, American politics are different in many ways than they were in 1964.

More here.

From Nature:

Vladimir Nabokov's influence on Russian and English literature and language is assured. Many people also know of the novelist's lifelong passion for butterflies. But his notable contributions to the science of lepidopterology and to general biology are only beginning to be widely known. Nabokov was no amateur entomologist. He served for six years as curator of the butterfly collection at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and published a dozen papers on taxonomy — the description and classification of organisms — that remain important. His observations on butterfly morphology have stimulated breakthrough research in evolutionary biology. Several of his original biogeographic hypotheses have been confirmed in the past few years. Fine Lines, a collection edited by Stephen Blackwell and Kurt Johnson, explains the importance of Nabokov's scientific work and traces its influence on his novels.

…The decision to open the book with the drawings is a masterstroke. They illustrate one of the most important aspects of Nabokov's creativity — his tremendous attention to details, described with scrupulous precision. In his novels, he seamlessly marshals minutiae — impressions, passing fancies, ideas — to create a universe strongly rooted in observation. The particular or apparently trivial was, for him, always worth probing. In his entomological studies, he analysed fine, nearly invisible, dots on the wings of New and Old World butterflies to hint at what may have happened on Earth millions of years ago.

More here.

Sorraya Khan in Guernica:

In the beginning, 5 Queen’s Road was my Pakistan. The house didn’t belong to me, and although it was my grandparents’ home, it didn’t belong to them, either. None of which stopped any of us from believing it did. The house was partitioned shortly before British India was, in 1947. The border that cleaved the latter produced the independent nations of India and Pakistan; the border that cleaved the former shifted, growing or shrinking depending on perspective and the passage of time. When I first arrived as a child, the inhabitants had already been mired in war for so long their memories were blurred and no one I knew could accurately recall its trajectory. Only two facts were worth remembering: my family had neither instigated nor perpetuated the conflict.

The house came to my grandparents in the chaos of Partition. It had been built by the British in the early 1940s and eventually sold to Dina Nath, a Hindu, who decided against leaving Lahore for India in the summer of 1947. Instead, Dina Nath drew a line down the middle of the house and searched for a Muslim tenant to live on the other side, hoping that the presence of a Muslim might protect him from the raging violence against Hindus who had dared remain in Pakistan. My grandparents, their seven children, my grandfather’s mother, and several of his brothers moved in. For reasons that are unclear and now impossible to know, my grandfather and Dina Nath grew to dislike each other until eventually the men stopped speaking. By all accounts, Dina Nath’s initial partitioning was generous, but over time the border moved until all that was left of my grandparents’ side was the house I knew. It consisted of two bedrooms and bathrooms, oddly shaped living and dining rooms, a study, and, for some mysterious reason, the entire back lawn, of which a corner was an outside kitchen where my grandmother prepared all our meals.

Sixteen years after Partition, and in the winters that followed (thanks to the “home leave” benefit of my father’s UN job), I came to a house crumbling under the weight of their feud.

More here.

Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books:

Glory, for the translator, is borrowed glory. There is no way around this. Translators are celebrated when they translate celebrated books. The best translations from the Italian I have seen in recent years are Geoffrey Brock’s rendering of Pavese’s collected poems,Disaffections, and Frederika Randall’s enormous achievement in bringing Ippolito Nievo’s great novel Confessions of an Italian into English. Brock, who has also given us an excellent version of Pinocchio, finds an entirely convincing English voice for the troubled Pavese. Randall turns Nievo’s lively, idiosyncratic pre-Risorgimento prose into something sparklingly credible in English. However, neither of these fine books became the talk of the town and their translators remain in the shadows.

The Complete Works of Primo Levi, which contained the work of ten different translators, offered an example of the general situation in microcosm. Levi is remembered above all for his Auschwitz memoir, If This Is a Man, and to a lesser degree for The Truce, an account of his return from the camps, and The Periodic Table, an engaging collection of autobiographical essays drawing on his work as a chemist. These three books, whose translations I discussed in the previous posts in this series, have monopolized critical comment on The Complete Works and inevitably brought prestige to their translators, Stuart Woolf and Ann Goldstein. But they amount to fewer than 600 of almost 2,800 pages. The other writings, comprising about 1,600 pages of stories and essays, 150 pages of poems, a novel, If Not Now, When?, and a fiercely controversial reflection on concentration camp survivors, The Drowned and the Saved, have received at best generous nods and asides from the critics, while their eight translators were fortunate if they were named at all.

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Erica Klarreich in Quanta:

Two mathematicians have uncovered a simple, previously unnoticed property of prime numbers — those numbers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers, it seems, have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that immediately follow them.

Among the first billion prime numbers, for instance, a prime ending in 9 is almost 65 percent more likely to be followed by a prime ending in 1 than another prime ending in 9. In a paper posted online today, Kannan Soundararajan and Robert Lemke Oliver of Stanford University present both numerical and theoretical evidence that prime numbers repel other would-be primes that end in the same digit, and have varied predilections for being followed by primes ending in the other possible final digits.

“We’ve been studying primes for a long time, and no one spotted this before,” said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the University of Montreal and University College London. “It’s crazy.”

The discovery is the exact opposite of what most mathematicians would have predicted, said Ken Ono, a number theorist at Emory University in Atlanta. When he first heard the news, he said, “I was floored. I thought, ‘For sure, your program’s not working.’”

This conspiracy among prime numbers seems, at first glance, to violate a longstanding assumption in number theory: that prime numbers behave much like random numbers.

More here.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein at Edge.org:

A lot of moral questions can be answered in terms of mattering. My intuition is that the concept of mattering bridges the is-ought gap. To determine that certain things matter is also to say that we ought to pursue them, so it’s a bridge concept.

The is/ought gap was first pointed out by David Hume. You’re reading along, says Hume, it’s some philosopher and he’s talking about “this is the case,” “that is the case,” and suddenly, there’s this move to “this ought to be the case,” “that ought to be the case.” In a very famous paragraph in A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume said, “How can you derive 'ought' statements from 'is' statements?” There’s a logical gap.

It’s been taken to be axiomatic ever since Hume—among a whole class of philosophers—that there is this is/ought gap. There are “is” statements, describing states of affairs, and there are “ought” statements, which aren’t simply descriptive of states of affairs but rather assessing them in terms of their value, even asserting that what is the case ought not to be the case. And what has been taken to be axiomatic is that you can’t derive “ought” from “is” and anybody who claims otherwise is committing some sort of fallacy. They’re illicitly hiding the “ought” statements among the “is” statements. To a certain extent that’s true. If your premises contain no soupcon of an “ought,” then your conclusions can’t either. You can’t get something from nothing.

But here’s the thing. There are certain statements that we make about ourselves that are already “ought” statements and that are impossible to live without, and certain consequences follow from that.

More here.

Rona Cran at the Times Literary Supplement:

The roster of correspondents in Sandra Spanier’s Kay Boyle: A twentieth- century life in letters reads, as Spanier herself observes, “like a Who’s Who of twentieth-century arts and letters”. It includes James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, Carson McCullers, Samuel (“Sam”) Beckett, Richard Wright, Kurt Vonnegut, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, Alfred Stieglitz and Louise Erdrich. Also on the roster is Spanier herself, whose friendship with Kay Boyle was sparked when she sent her a copy of her PhD thesis in 1981. To her surprise, Boyle responded in depth “over a period of several months”, and the resulting friendship is marked by “more than five hundred pages of correspondence”. It is marked, too, by this lavish collection of letters, commissioned by Boyle in 1991, the year before her death at the age of ninety, and meticulously edited by Spanier.

This is a long book, covering seventy-four years. It is astonishing to realize, therefore – and this goes some way towards mitigating the perhaps unavoidably frustrating time lapses that occur within the correspondence – that the 378 letters included are but a tiny fraction of the 7,000 obtained by the editor, which is itself only a proportion of the estimated 30,000 letters Boyle wrote during her lifetime. A minor modernist – part of the so-called Lost Generation associated with Paris in the 1920s – Boyle published over forty books, including novels, poems, short stories and non-fiction, in every decade since 1920 up until her death, but without much mainstream success. Her relative obscurity partly owes something to Edmund Wilson’s derision of her only bestselling novel,Avalanche (1944), as “a piece of pure rubbish”, and partly (ironically) to her relatively broad profile in the 1920s and 30s, when she appeared in almost every little magazine from Broom to transition, as well as in publications such as the New Yorker, Harper’s and Town and Country, making it difficult to place her as either a popular writer or a member of the avant-garde.

more here.

David Graeber at The Baffler:

Is it possible to become bored with hopelessness?

There is reason to believe something like that is beginning to happen in Great Britain. Call it despair fatigue.

For nearly half a century, British culture, particularly on the left, has made an art out of despair. This is the land where “No Future for You” became the motto of a generation, and then another generation, and then another. From the crumbling of its empire, to the crumbling of its industrial cities, to the current crumbling of its welfare state, the country seemed to be exploring every possible permutation of despair: despair as rage, despair as resignation, despair as humor, despair as pride or secret pleasure. It’s almost as if it’s finally run out.

On the surface, and from a distance, Britain looks like it’s experiencing one of the stranger paroxysms of masochistic self-destruction in world history. Since the Conservative victory of 2010, first in coalition with the Liberal Democrats and now on its own, the British government has set out to systematically unravel much of what makes life good and decent in the country. Conservative leaders started by trashing the United Kingdom’s once proud university system, while eyeing the greatest source of national pride and dignity, the universal health guarantees of the National Health Service.

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Stoddard Martin at Literary Review:

Roth was one of the best German feuilletonistes of his generation. As a Jew, he was starved of outlets once the Nazis took control. There were émigré publishers, but circulation was small and profit scant. Roth’s fiction was less cosmopolitan than Zweig’s and could not gain a footing in the American market, let alone reach the benchmark set by, say, Thomas Mann’s. Was Roth a better writer than either? Like many who are alcohol-driven, he was brilliant at using language and in puncturing hypocrisy, but his work never aspired to the philosophical heft of The Magic Mountain. As for Zweig’s, it is now being rerated: biographies, reprints of his work and novels about him are proliferating. Is this due to a sense that his importance as a writer has been overlooked, an admiration for his humanist efforts in an age of intolerance, or just a slightly prurient fascination with his fate as a German-speaking Jew facing historic calamity?

Summer Before the Dark belongs to the last of these tendencies. Zweig, Roth and friends gather in Ostend for a month in the summer of 1936. They worry over the headlines of the day: the propaganda eyewash being prepared for the upcoming Berlin Olympics; the racial implications of Max Schmeling’s victory over the ‘Brown Bomber’ Joe Louis in the boxing ring; the show trials of those who have been brave or rash enough to stay at home, among them Etkar André, a communist activist in Hamburg, who has been sentenced to death. A fearful, often self-pitying bunch, they loiter in cafes along the beach promenade, sporadically discarding their pessimism for hopes of political change, rushes of creativity or glissandos of joshing and complaints about absent fellow émigrés – Klaus Mann comes in for it for his forthcoming ‘novel of revenge’ Mephisto, the plot allegedly purloined from another of their number, Hermann Kesten. Zweig’s role as mother hen to Roth is countered by the pitying passion of young Irmgard Keun, the only writer in the group to leave Germanophone Europe by choice rather than necessity.

more here.