Van Gogh Can You Tell Me

van Gogh, can you tell me
where does beauty go when it dies?

van Gogh, can you tell me
why saints live on car exhaust
and are lonely as crushed acorns

while enormous suppurating blisters of men
sleep on beds made of dollars, their pillows
the breasts of fantastic women

van Gogh, can you tell me
you who made paint scream
who drew the expressions of the wind

and portrayed leaves and stars
writhing in agony
as though they were human

tell me which of the satellites
circling the earth
is mine

how many pairs of shoes does it take to
walk to infinity

do you believe the world will ever learn how to
cry in unison

van Gogh, with your skin like scorched leather
from too much time spent in the wheatfields
on your knees, shooting dice with God
over who gets to color sunset

didn’t you ever feel like an asshole

incapable of self-preservation
always crossing at the end

van Gogh, can you tell me
as the sun comes down around my ears in
chunks today

as hummingbirds hover at my window
cursing me in tiny voices

why roads drag you down them
how you are finding light in Paradise
and if you have your own easel
or if God allows you to paint on the sky

by David Lerner
from The Last Five Miles to Grace

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Dino Grandoni in The Washington Post:

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Korsha Wilson in The New York Times:

It was a pregnancy craving for knafeh that got Sarah Hamouda dreaming in chocolate, imagining a bar that recalled the crunchy-creamy Middle Eastern dessert of her British Egyptian childhood. “I told my husband the next day that I wanted to start a chocolate business,” she said from her home in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. She’d never made chocolate before. But, undeterred and halfway through her pregnancy, she began working from her living room, with the elements of knafeh (cream or akkawi cheese, shredded phyllo known as kataifi, nuts or date syrup, and orange blossom or rose water) in mind. Eventually, her “Can’t Get Knafeh of It” bar was born, a milk chocolate shell bursting with pistachio cream and kataifi and adorned with bright yellow and electric green splotches.

Mrs. Hamouda had no idea that it would take on a life of its own, earning the nickname “Dubai chocolate” among fans online and spurring countless imitations. In fact, when the couple opened their online shop in 2022, FIX Dessert Chocolatier — FIX, they said, stands for Freaking Incredible eXperience — “we were selling about a bar a week,” said Yezen Alani, Mrs. Hamouda’s husband. Not one style of bar. One single bar. “There were so many days we wanted to give up,” Mrs. Hamouda said.

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Jonathan Clarke at The Hedgehog Review:

Thomas Lynch may be the only major poet-undertaker writing in English, which must count as a surprise. The two professions seem so perfectly aligned—or rather, so hopelessly entwined. Death poetry is almost its own genre in English, filling up the anthologies: Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death”; Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice”; and most famously, Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” Even as our poets ponder birth, beauty, and desire, we expect them to keep the end in view. A major poet who did not wrestle with death would be like a horse who only makes right turns.

As a poet, Lynch prefers the received forms, especially the sonnet. As an undertaker, he is working within received forms, too. In the 2007 PBS Frontline special, “The Undertaking,” set inside his family’s funeral home, he proceeds as judiciously as his late friend, Seamus Heaney, composing a villanelle. We observe Lynch’s meeting with a young couple whose toddler son is terminally ill. They can’t decide whether they want him buried or cremated. “You’ll want to look to your son to guide you,” Lynch tells them. “When the time comes, you’ll know what to do. I promise you. You’ll know what to do.” Lynch seems to be a man to whom others instinctively turn in a crisis. There aren’t many better qualifications for an undertaker—or for that matter, a poet.

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Alec Nevala-Lee at Asterisk:

In the words of Danny Hillis, the man who conceived the clock in 1989, long before Bezos became involved: “You have to get away from the idea of direct progress and surrender that kind of control in order to find your way.”

According to Hillis — who originally planned to build the clock himself — some of his friends saw the project as a symptom of “a midlife crisis.” Born in 1956, he had written his thesis at MIT on parallel computing, an innovative architecture based on simultaneous calculations by thousands of ordinary microprocessors, and co-founded a supercomputer startup called Thinking Machines. Its most famous product was the Connection Machine, a black cube with blinking red lights that was so photogenic that Steven Spielberg featured it in Jurassic Park.

In 1994, the company went bankrupt. While the Connection Machine worked well for certain applications, like weather modeling, it was hard to program and had trouble attracting commercial clients. For the breakthroughs that Hillis had in mind, he conceded, parallel processing had to improve “by a factor of a thousand, maybe a million.” Hillis had been on the right track, but a decade too early, so perhaps it was unsurprising that he would quit the race to build faster computers,  hoping instead to regain his sense of  deep time.

He had been dreaming about the clock for years, but he first set it down in detail in an essay — later published in Wired — dated February 15, 1995. Noting that society had trouble picturing the far future, he proposed a symbolic object to encourage long-term thinking: “I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium.” It would keep accurate time for ten millennia, or roughly as long as human civilization had already existed. The musician Brian Eno, who later developed the chimes, named it the Clock of the Long Now.

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Samu Czabán at Psyche:

Among the many consequential decisions judges have to make, they weigh in on parole requests: determining whether an individual will regain freedom or remain confined to a prison cell. Several factors normally play a role in these rulings, such as the risk of recidivism, the severity of the crime and the inmate’s behaviour. However, when a group of researchers analysed the decision-making patterns of Israeli judges, more than a decade ago, they noticed something peculiar. The judges released many people at the beginning of the day. But as the hours passed, they became stricter. As lunchtime approached – and the judges presumably grew hungrier – they barely granted anyone parole. Then, after a meal, they became more lenient again. While the conclusions of this ‘hungry judge’ study have since been critiqued, it prompted further consideration of the extent to which justice might depend on extraneous factors such as food breaks.

More here.

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Peter Conrad at The Guardian:

Don’t expect to read Edmund White’s The Loves of My Life with one hand. True, it is subtitled A Sex Memoir, and it hotly reminisces about a few dozen of the 3,000 partners White, who is 85 and still counting, has so far totted up. It does contain some glances at the more esoteric specialities of gay sex, including a scene in which White kneels in an abandoned Manhattan warehouse to imbibe six cans’ worth of warmly recycled beer “from the tap of my date’s microbrewery”. There is also a fortunately terse reference to what in medical shorthand is called a BM. But this coital anthology turns out to be about love and its dreamy spirituality, despite the risque and often risky rutting it describes.

Above all, White’s preoccupation is language, since for him sex initially ignites in the head and is consummated on the page, with bodily pleasure or pain as a merely intermediary stage. The itch of lust, in most of these encounters, soon turns into swooning poetic ardour. “Older queens”, as White says, tutor him in the technical skills that sex requires; to learn about the accompanying emotions, he returns to the Renaissance troubadours, who invented the idea of love in the songs and sonnets they addressed to an inaccessible mistress, “a remote, rather ball-shrinking stand-in for the Virgin Mary”.

more here.

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John Carreyou in The New York Times:

The private jet took off from the Caribbean island of Antigua in April carrying three highly combustible tanks of compressed oxygen and a terminally ill cancer patient.

Kim Hudlow had chartered the plane for her husband, David. She crouched by his side on the five-hour journey to Florida, frantically adjusting the valve on one of the oxygen tanks as he struggled to breathe. A doctor had just told her he was dying. She was terrified he wouldn’t survive the flight. It was an abrupt turnaround. Six days earlier, Ms. Hudlow and her husband, who had late-stage esophageal cancer, had arrived on the tropical island full of hope that a novel blood-filtering treatment offered there would save Mr. Hudlow’s life — or at least prolong it. They were among about two dozen families lured to Antigua by a California start-up called ExThera Medical and its secretive billionaire partner, Alan Quasha.

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From Harper’s Magazine:

Smoky Eye Every Step, a painting by Gina Beavers, whose work is included in the exhibition Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 through May 4 at MOCA, in Los Angeles. 

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Small Poems

1.
Silent morning garden,
sudden crash.
No explanation
in the quiet leaves.
One flower nods:
I heard it too.

2.
morning walk
another X
shining in my path
beautiful slime
of slug’s passing

3.
Summer dawn again
twenty years and more are gone
all of a sudden

4.
caught on roof edge
raindrops catch light
each a perfect world
before it falls

5.
me and the begonia
lit from within, lit without
caught in a net of light

6.
White shines high in a tree—
sudden flowers of a climbing vine,
their fragrance not meant for me

by Johanna Jordan
from Small Poems

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Terry Gross at NPR:

Southern California families who have lost everything the in recent wildfires are reckoning with what it means to start over. Writer Pico Iyer’s eerily timed memoir, Aflame: Learning from Silence, speaks to that experience.

In 1990, Iyer was alone in his mother’s house in Santa Barbara when a wildfire swept through the region. Suddenly, it seemed, he was surrounded by flames.

“I literally didn’t have time to pick up the passport that was two feet away,” Iyer says. “I just grabbed my mother’s cat, raced into a car and drove down the driveway, not thinking that the car was probably the worst place to be.”

Trapped in the car with a panting cat on his lap, Iyer says he tried to focus on keeping the cat alive — and not on how vulnerable felt as as he watched the house he had just escaped from burn to the ground.

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Ben Brubaker at Quanta:

If language models really are learning language, researchers may need new theories to explain how they do it. But if the models are doing something more superficial, then perhaps machine learning has no insights to offer linguistics.

Noam Chomsky(opens a new tab), a titan of the field of linguistics, has publicly argued for the latter view. In a scathing 2023 New York Times opinion piece(opens a new tab), he and two co-authors laid out many arguments against language models, including one that at first sounds contradictory: Language models are irrelevant to linguistics because they learn too well. Specifically, the authors claimed that models can master “impossible” languages — ones governed by rules unlike those of any known human language — just as easily as possible ones.

Recently, five computational linguists put Chomsky’s claim to the test. They modified an English text database to generate a dozen impossible languages and found that language models had more difficulty learning these languages than ordinary English. Their paper, titled “Mission: Impossible Language Models(opens a new tab),” was awarded a best paper prize at the 2024 Association of Computational Linguistics conference.

More here.

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Farrah Jarral in The Guardian:

It was over schnitzel and mash that my friend’s Bavarian grandparents decided to call me a “black devil”, chuckling all the while. Breaded chicken has since been my madeleine, taking me back to racially charged moments I’ve not known quite how to interpret. Is it really racist if they didn’t mean to be rude? What if they have dementia? And if racism = prejudice + power, was being called a black devil while I choked down some potatoes even that big a deal, given that I felt in no way disempowered in the company of my tiny, elderly hosts?

In his succinct and bingeable book The Science of Racism, professor of social psychology Keon West begins by acknowledging that society doesn’t agree on even the most basic aspects of racism, let alone its finer points. Indeed, roughly half of Britons don’t believe minorities face more discrimination than white people in various areas of life. Yet far from being a set of hazy, unanswerable philosophical questions, many of the unknowns about racism are empirically testable, especially if researchers design clever studies.

More here.

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