Michael LaPointe at the LA Review of Books:

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

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

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

more here.

Eric Ormsby at The New Criterion:

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

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

more here.

Alex Abramovich and Emily Barton at The Paris Review:

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

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

more here.

Gretchen Reynold in The New York Times:

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

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

More here.

Foxes

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

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

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

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

by Frieda Hughes
from Wooroloo
HarperCollins, 1998
.

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

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

Then she asked me to talk back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More here.

Anilla Cherian in The Deccan Herald:

Flint’s declaration of financial emergency from 2010, and its demographic profile – which the New York Times editorialist Charles Blow referred to as “mostly black and disproportionately poor”- are indeed not coincidences- they are glaringly sad markers of the intersection between poverty and pollution.

The disproportionate double burden of poverty and pollution cuts across poor communities everywhere. But, what is happening in vastly poorer villages damaged as a result of their heavy dependence on polluting energy sources – where literally millions are being smothered by a toxic cauldron of indoor air pollution?

Where is the global urgency in resp-onding to the long-standing concern that household air pollution resulting from the burning of solid fuels (wood, crop wastes, charcoal, coal and dung) destroys the lives of poor women and children who spend a disproportionate amount of time in front of polluted hearths?

In 2014, the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that 7 million people died – one in eight of total global deaths – as a result of indoor and outdoor air pollution exposure. This finding based on a 2012 data, more than doubles previous estimates, and confirms that air pollution is now the world’s largest single environmental health risk.

Indoor/household air pollution was linked to 4.3 million deaths in 2012, but the impacts of indoor air pollution were found to be staggeringly disproportionate: Low and middle income countries in South-East Asia and Western Pacific suffered the greatest burden of 3.3 million deaths linked to indoor air pollution; and 50 per cent of premature deaths among children under age five was due to pneumonia caused by particulate matter (soot) inhaled from household air pollution. In poorly ventilated dwellings, indoor smoke was found to be 100 times higher than acceptable levels for small soot particles- PM 2.5.

Measuring 2.5 micrometres or less, PM 2.5 has been directly linked with causing strokes, ischaemic heart disease; chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lung cancer. Reducing PM 2.5 emissions is critically important from a human health perspective, but what is often not reflected is that one of the principal components of PM 2.5- black carbon –emitted as a result of the incomplete combustion of solid fuels is known to be a short -term climate pollutant.

What has largely not been addressed is that black carbon emissions are also directly linked to serious, adverse regional and in some cases, more localised climate change impacts including regional rainfall and weather patterns, and also most importantly in the loss of annual production levels of rice, wheat and maize. Curbing PM 2.5/black carbon emissions offers a win-win on two different fronts.

Reducing polluting energy in poor households happens to also offer short term climate change benefits. So, why has so little been done so far about a problem that affects so many? Clean energy measures such as the use of clean-burning biomass stoves, and use of clean energy cook-stoves using modern and renewable energy sources are two specific measures that have long been touted, but for equally long remain unmet.

More here.

Andy Martin in Prospect:

“Hold on a second!” says Dr Watson to Sherlock Holmes (or something like that). “How did you work that out?” Holmes has just come up with some astounding observation. He explains his reasoning. “Of course!” Watson responds, much to the annoyance of Holmes, “it’s obvious.” That is how good philosophy works. The reader—or, in the case of Socrates, the listener—should feel that everything that has been said is obvious, so obvious that no one bothered to say it before. Which is why philosophers often come across, in the words of Erasmus, as “foolosophers.” Michel Foucault said everything he wrote was tautological. And the closing line of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus suggests something similar: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” Wittgenstein presumably had this line in mind when he claimed to have pulled off two great tricks: one was to have solved the problems of western philosophy; the other was to have demonstrated how little he had achieved in doing so.

Philosophers don’t have to be long-winded. Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Hell is other people” is a memorable one-liner; another is the opening line of Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus: “Suicide is the only serious philosophical problem.” Of course philosophers can be teasingly elusive. Take Sartre’s lines about “a binary praxis of antagonistic reciprocity.” Any idea what he was going on about? Someone once told me: “That is a description of my marriage.” Sartre went on to argue that all the contradictions of capitalism are contained in that phrase—but he was, in fact, originally describing boxing. (He would probably never have made it as a sports commentator.) Here is Martin Heidegger hymning a pod of dolphins in the Mediterranean: “So too the birthplace of Occident and modernity, secure in its own island-like essence, remains in the recollective thinking of the sojourn.” Take that David Attenborough!

I am indebted for this last gem to Sarah Bakewell’s engaging and wide-ranging new book, At the Existentialist Café.

More here.

Chad Orzel in Forbes:

The big physics story of the moment is, of course, last Thursday’s announcement that the LIGO experiment hasdetected gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes. This is generally framed as “confirming Einstein’s theory of relativity” (see, for example, Dennis Overbye in the New York Times and Ethan Siegel here), because Einstein maintains a stranglehold on the public conception of physics.

And, inevitably, there’s a bit of push-back, with Kirk Englehardt worrying that the news didn’t produce enough excitement in the general public because it’s too abstract, and professional grump John Horgan raising the issue of whether LIGO was “worth” the money spent on it. Ashutosh Jogalekar picks up on Horgan’s past work, and worries that LIGO might represent a kind of “end of physics”, that if confirming a 100-year-old theory is the most exciting development in recent physics, the discipline is in trouble.

Of course, the Jogalekar/Horgan thesis badly misunderstands why this is the most exciting development in recent physics– it’s nothing to do with Einstein. In fact, confirming General Relativity is just about the least interesting part of this news. The really important story is that LIGO works, and allows the unequivocal detection of colliding black holes, a system that physicists understand pretty well. And it continues to work, with additional gravitational-wave events being analyzed now. This means that when it starts detecting other things that we don’t immediately recognize, physicists can have some confidence that they’re real, and not just a weird quirk of the detector that we don’t understand yet.

More here.

Lisa Randall in Prospect Magazine:

In the solar system, I would hold off colonising Mars. Not because I’m afraid of Martians protesting, but because it would be a good idea to address our problems on Earth first. Besides, Mars doesn’t seem very pleasant. I’m guessing that in the near future our resources can be more sensibly deployed on Earth.

I’m all for continued space exploration—just with a more realistic view of what’s achievable, which is actually pretty remarkable. I would also encourage a renewed ethic of responsibility that would apply to individuals, businesses and politics, in which everyone, including companies, would pay for rubbish disposal and any residual damage, such as environmental or economic crises that result from their actions. My economic team would be charged with devising growth measures that factor in such externalities.

We would also see a lot more scientists, or at least smart people (defined below) in positions of power. Angela Merkel, who studied physical chemistry, has done a pretty good job, despite her current trouble. I do see room for a more rational approach to governance. Clearly these examples show that science training alone is not enough. Scientists don’t know everything, and technologists don’t either. But there is something to be said for knowing what it means to address a problem, or even how to define it. And to know how to recognise the potential limitations of any proposed solution. Most big problems aren’t solved overnight, and scientists know that all too well. The breakthroughs that have changed our lives often derive from these slow-cooked, then flame-broiled discoveries.

More here.

Alan Jenkins at the Times Literary Supplement:

Six years ago Jonathan Bate set out to write, with the co-operation of Ted Hughes’s widow Carol, a “literary Life” of the poet. Its emphasis would be “the development of the poetic voice”, with much detailed analysis of “multiple drafts” of poems in the archives at Emory University and the British Library. (The latter, open to researchers only since 2010 – and therefore not available to Elaine Feinstein, Hughes’s first biographer – contains, Bate tells us, thousands of pages of notes and journals: “an almost complete record of [Hughes’s] inner life”.) In early 2014 the TLS published an essay by Bate, based on his work-in-progress, that combined biographical and critical elements in a discussion of some of those drafts, written after the suicide of Hughes’s first wife Sylvia Plath. At around this time, the estate withdrew its co- operation, and permission to quote extensively from Hughes’s writings with it. So Bate’s approach shifted towards the biographical, his emphasis on to Life rather than Art.

Not much seems to have survived of Bate’s original project in Ted Hughes: The unauthorised Lifeexcept a chapter which expands on his TLS essay, about the writings that were the basis of Hughes’s final volume Birthday Letters (1998); and perhaps the argument that underpins the book. Post-Birthday Letters, elated by the sense of liberation it had brought him, Hughes looked back with regret that so much of his writing life had been spent on works that had, he wrote to Kathleen Raine, enabled him to evade his real subject, the subject of that book: his life with Plath and how it ended. To this reader, that regret seems misplaced, while for anyone contemplating the 1,200-plus pages of his Collected Poems (and that doesn’t include Gaudete), Hughes’s plaint that he had been “blocked ever since Sylvia’s death” will even more conspicuously fail to grip. Nevertheless, this is, broadly, the story Bate’s biography sticks to.

more here.

Jeff Fraiman at The Brooklyn Rail:

Yuskavage would no doubt recognize that her diptych is the distant spawn of a Renaissance master. A formative experience in her education was seeing Giovanni Bellini’s sacra conversazione altarpiece in the church of San Zaccaria, Venice. Her encounter with the painting, which positions saints from different historical periods in communion with the Virgin and Child in an impossible, atemporal meeting, helped the young artist consider the importance of the use of space. It is a short mental leap from Bellini’s religious works to what Yuskavage calls her “symbiotic” portraits, wherein multiple figures populate a painting without necessarily interacting, or even acting, in narratively cohesive ways.

Fireplace (2010) presents two women in a dimly lit interior. One bends forward and covers the other’s ears as if protecting her from an external, imminent danger. The latter figure sits in a 180-degree straddle, her pudendum on full display behind the mounds of fruit stacked in the painting’s lower corners. Her body appears cold, marmoreal even, impervious to the heat emanating from the titular fireplace. The room is illuminated from the right despite the lambent flames at the left; the standing brunette’s right knee, nearest to the fire, remains in shadow. The setup is an inversion of Pliny the Elder’s description of a painting of “a boy blowing a fire, which throws a light upon the features of the youth,” or the paintings of Gerrit van Honthorst, known as Gherardo delle Notti, a Utrecht follower of Caravaggio who introduced torches as an artificial source of light to the tenebristic scenes that proliferated in the early seicento. In Yuskavage’s surreal interior, the lack of internal logic between fire and figures corresponds to the uncanniness of the women themselves.

more here.

Christine Smallwood at Bookforum:

A novel is not designed to be read in one sitting. A reader finds herself in different moods, and different chairs, over the course of a novel; its pages become saturated with meals and conversations and days good and bad. A short story is read all at once, and alone. It might get knitted into life if it is reread many times over the years, but it always arrives complete, a thing apart and sufficient unto itself, like an asteroid. It is at once smaller and more vulnerable than a novel, and stranger and stiffer, somehow more independent. It doesn’t ask for attachment. It asks only to be heard.

Three collections of American short stories have been recently published. They are New American Stories, edited by Ben Marcus; 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, edited by Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor; and The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from the Paris Review, edited by Lorin Stein. Each is a victory lap and a thrown gauntlet. Their editorial sensibilities could be plotted across any number of axes: experimentalism vs. realism; global identity vs. bourgeois America; political fury vs. apathy; situation vs. character. The editors agree on one thing: The story’s prerogative has something to do with provoking feeling—with giving pleasure, making aghast or afraid, breaking hearts, entertaining. Or inflicting pain. “Each story here is a different weapon,” Marcus enthuses in the introduction to New American Stories. “Let’s get bloodied and killed in thirty-two different ways.” Moore compares the story’s business to “open[ing] up a little window or a door” in the mind, an image whose trepanating horror is only momentarily mitigated by that sunny “little.” Stein is less morbid. Rather than treat the story as hole saw, promising explosion or aeration or enlargement, he politely cites its compactness, “the intensity and perfection found only in small things.”

more here.

Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

by Jack Gilbert
from Refusing Heaven
Alfred A. Knopf, 2005
.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

The discovery of yet another period of interbreeding between early humans and Neanderthals is adding to the growing sense that sexual encounters among different ancient human species were commonplace throughout their history. “As more early modern humans and archaic humans are found and sequenced, we’re going to see many more instances of interbreeding,” says Sergi Castellano, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His team discovered the latest example, which they believe occurred around 100,000 years ago, by analysing traces of Homo sapiens DNA in a Neanderthal genome extracted from a toe bone found in a cave in Siberia.

“There is this joke in the population genetics community — there’s always one more interbreeding event,” Castellano says. So before researchers discover the next one, here’s a rundown of the interbreeding episodes that they have already deduced from studies of ancient DNA.

More here.

Douglas Fox in Nature:

In the modern world, it's easy to forget that complex animals are relative newcomers to Earth. Since life first emerged more than 3 billion years ago, single-celled organisms have dominated the planet for most of its history. Thriving in environments that lacked oxygen, they relied on compounds such as carbon dioxide, sulfur-containing molecules or iron minerals that act as oxidizing agents to break down food. Much of Earth's microbial biosphere still survives on these anaerobic pathways.

Animals, however, depend on oxygen — a much richer way to make a living. The process of metabolizing food in the presence of oxygen releases much more energy than most anaerobic pathways. Animals rely on this potent, controlled combustion to drive such energy-hungry innovations as muscles, nervous systems and the tools of defence and carnivory — mineralized shells, exoskeletons and teeth.

Given the importance of oxygen for animals, researchers suspected that a sudden increase in the gas to near-modern levels in the ocean could have spurred the Cambrian explosion. To test that idea, they have studied ancient ocean sediments laid down during the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods, which together ran from about 635 million to 485 million years ago.

In Namibia, China and other spots around the world, researchers have collected rocks that were once ancient seabeds, and analysed the amounts of iron, molybdenum and other metals in them. The metals' solubility depends strongly on the amount of oxygen present, so the amount and type of those metals in ancient sedimentary rocks reflect how much oxygen was in the water long ago, when the sediments formed.

These proxies seemed to indicate that oxygen concentrations in the oceans rose in several steps, approaching today's sea-surface concentrations at the start of the Cambrian, around 541 million years ago — just before more-modern animals suddenly appeared and diversified. This supported the idea of oxygen as a key trigger for the evolutionary explosion.

But last year, a major study¹ of ancient sea-floor sediments challenged that view. Erik Sperling, a palaeontologist at Stanford University in California, compiled a database of 4,700 iron measurements taken from rocks around the world, spanning the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods. He and his colleagues did not find a statistically significant increase in the proportion of oxic to anoxic water at the boundary between the Ediacaran and the Cambrian.

“Any oxygenation event must have been far, far smaller than what people normally considered,” concludes Sperling. Most people assume “that the oxygenation event essentially raised oxygen to essentially modern-day levels. And that probably wasn't the case”, he says.

More here.