Radio

I think I forgot to turn
off the radio when
I left my mother’s
womb

In Hasidic Judaism
it is said that before we
are born an angel
enters the womb,
strikes us on the
mouth
and we forget all
that we knew of
previous lives—
all that we know
of heaven

I think that I forgot
to forget.
I was born into two
places at once—

In one, it was chilly
lonely physical &
uncomfortable

in the other, I stayed
in the dimension of
Spirit. What I knew,
I knew.
I did not forget
Voices

The world of spirit
held me in its arms.

by Diane di Prima
from Poetic Outlaws

—Diane di Prima, the Beat Generation icon, who died in 2020, was the author of
“Revolutionary Letters,” “Spring and Autumn Annals,” among many other books
of poetry and prose.

Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:

The cells of all living organisms are powered by the same chemical fuel: adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Now, researchers have found a way to generate ATP directly from electricity, which could turbocharge biotechnology processes that grow everything from food to fuel to pharmaceuticals. Interfacing modern electronics-based technology with biology is notoriously difficult. One major stumbling block is that the way they are powered is very different. While most of our gadgets run on electrons, nature relies on the energy released when the chemical bonds of ATP are broken. Finding ways to convert between these two very different currencies of energy could be useful for a host of biotechnologies. Genetically engineered microbes are already being used to produce various high-value chemicals and therapeutically useful proteins, and there are hopes they could soon help generate greener jet fuel, break down plastic waste, and even grow new foods in giant bioreactors. But at the minute, these processes are powered through an inefficient process of growing biomass, converting it to sugar, and feeding it to the microbes.

Now, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Germany have devised a much more direct way to power biological processes. They have created an artificial metabolic pathway that can directly convert electricity into ATP using a cocktail of enzymes. And crucially, the process works in vitro and doesn’t rely on the native machinery of cells. “Feeding electricity directly into chemical and biochemical reactions is a real breakthrough,” Tobias Erb, who led the research, said in a press release. “This will enable synthesis of energy-rich valuable resources such as starch, biofuels, or proteins from simple cellular building blocks—in the future even from carbon dioxide. It may even be possible to use biological molecules to store electrical energy.”

More here.

From Phys.Org:

A research team headed by Prof. Jacob Hanna at the Weizmann Institute of Science has created complete models of human embryos from stem cells cultured in the lab—and managed to grow them outside the womb up to day 14. As reported today in Nature, these synthetic embryo models had all the structures and compartments characteristic of this stage, including the placenta, yolk sac, chorionic sac and other external tissues that ensure the models’ dynamic and adequate growth.

Cellular aggregates derived from human stem cells in previous studies could not be considered genuinely accurate human embryo models, because they lacked nearly all the defining hallmarks of a post-implantation embryo. In particular, they failed to contain several cell types that are essential to the embryo’s development, such as those that form the placenta and the chorionic sac. In addition, they did not have the structural organization characteristic of the embryo and revealed no dynamic ability to progress to the next developmental stage.

More here.

Thomas Harding at Literary Hub:

Lolita was originally published as a limited edition in France in September 1955. The book was released by Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, a company known for specializing in pornography, but which had also built a reputation for publishing challenging literary titles. The first print run had been 5,000 copies and the book received little attention.

Over the next few months, a handful of copies of Lolita were smuggled into England. A single copy made its way into the hands of Graham Greene, who reviewed it favorably in the Sunday Times. This was followed soon after by a scathing article in the Sunday Express, which denounced the book as “sheer unrestrained pornography.” Shortly after, the British Home Office ordered that all copies entering the country should be seized.

More here.

Jay Owens in The Guardian:

Since modernity began, people have complained about airborne dust – but the measures required to control it have come decades or centuries after, if at all. The coalmines and factories that powered Britain’s Industrial Revolution made a capitalist class very rich, while the cost was borne by their workers in their bodies, lungs and blood. The Ethics of Dust was, for me, about human presence made present – about the building rewritten as not only limestone and glass and a wood-beamed roof, or as big abstract nouns like history and tradition and power, but the material traces of millions of bodies, their labours and their livelihoods. It brings the polis, the people, right into the heart of parliament – and it brings a reckoning with the source of Britain’s historical prosperity, too.

Nobody normally thinks about dust, what it might be doing or where it should go: it is so tiny, so totally, absolutely, mundane, that it slips beneath the limits of vision. But if we pay attention, we can see the world within it.

More here.

Shoaib Daniyal at Scroll.in:

In one of India’s most chilling hate crimes, a Railway Protection Force jawan named Chetansinh Chaudhary shot four train passengers dead on July 31. Three of those people were Muslim. Chaudhary had roamed through the train he had been entrusted to protect, hunting for people who looked Muslim, asked for their names and then pumped bullets into them. In the middle of this terror rampage, Chaudhary also accosted a Muslim woman in a burqa and forced her to chant “Jai mata di”, a popular invocation to the Hindu goddess Durga.

What drove this mass killing? The answer was provided by Chaudhary himself. As a Muslim man lay writhing on the floor, having just been shot, Chaudhary delivered a speech – which he forced other passengers to record. In his rant, Chaudhary spoke of a shadowy theory of people operating from Pakistan. “Inke aqa hai wahan,” he said. Their leaders are there in Pakistan.

His source for this unhinged information, he declared, was the Indian media.

More here.

Geoffrey O’Brien at The Current:

Between 1960 and 1964, Roger Corman directed eight films loosely derived from Edgar Allan Poe and in all but one case starring Vincent Price: House of Usher (1960) was followed by The Pit and the Pendulum (1961); the omnibus feature Tales of Terror (1962); The Premature Burial (1962), with Ray Milland in the leading role; the visually inventive comedy The Raven (1963); The Haunted Palace (1963), named after a Poe poem but based on H. P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward; and the two final films, The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), both made in England. There doesn’t seem to have been any grand plan in view from the outset; if House of Usher had not been so immensely successful, one wonders how many, if any, of its successors would have come to be. Yet they form a body of work not only deeply coherent but uniquely inspired.

In retrospect they seem to have been made in response to an aesthetic impulse as irresistible as the ghostly or mesmeric commands to which their protagonists are often subject. Corman drew on the gifts of many collaborators—cinematographers Floyd Crosby (for the first six), Nicolas Roeg, and Arthur Grant; writers Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, and Robert Towne; composer Les Baxter; and above all production designer Daniel Haller—but the films have a quality of singularly focused intent that sets them apart as an oeuvre within an oeuvre in Corman’s abundant filmography.

more here.

Rowan Williams at The New Statesman:

In 1940, that great and idiosyncratic French philosopher Simone Weil published an essay on the Iliad as “the poem of force”. Despite a grating and drastically misconceived couple of paragraphs contrasting it with the imaginative world of Hebrew scripture, the essay has a good claim to be the most penetrating reflection on Homer’s masterpiece written in the 20th century, and still conveys an exceptional sense of moral and intellectual concentration.

What Weil argues is that the poem is about the actions and processes that reduce persons to things. Not only are we ourselves helpless in the face of fate, we are active in reducing others to greater levels of helplessness; and in so doing, we simply show ourselves to be unfree at a deeper and deeper level. Homer’s unsparing description of human conflict (not just battle and bloodshed but malice, rivalry and terror) shows us a world in which mechanism triumphs over grace – “grace” being understood by Weil as anything that leaves us free to step aside from the tyranny of the ego and make room for one another, free to absorb and not to transmit violence.

more here.

Jake Silverstein in Harper’s Magazine:

Summer in New Orleans is a long slow thing. Day and night, a heavy heat presides. Waiters stand idle at outdoor cafés, fanning themselves with menus. The tourists have disappeared, and the city’s main industry has gone with them. Throughout town the pinch is on. It is time to close the shutters and tie streamers to your air conditioner; to lie around and plot ways of scraping by that do not involve standing outside for periods of any length.

I was so occupied one humid afternoon when I came across a small newspaper notice that announced in large letters, “$25,000 poetry contest.” “Have you written a poem?” the notice began. I had written a poem. I had even considered submitting it to contests, but the prizes offered never amounted to much — a university might put up $100 in the name of a dead professor — and I hadn’t sent it off. This was a different proposition. With $25,000 I could pay off my debts, quit my jobs, and run the air on hi cool for a while. I submitted my poem that very day.

Two weeks later I had in my hands a letter from something calling itself the Famous Poets Society, based in Talent, Oregon. The Executive Committee of its distinguished Board of Directors, the letter informed me, had chosen my poem, from a multitude, to be entered in its seventh annual poetry convention, which would be held September 16–18 at John Ascuaga’s Nugget hotel and casino in Reno, Nevada. “Poets from all over the world will be there to enjoy your renown,” the letter boasted, “including film superstar Tony Curtis.”

This was not exactly what I had imagined.

More here.

Natalia Reagan in Scientific American:

A “Darwinian paradox” is that homosexual activity occurs even though it does not lead to or aid in reproduction. But if you visit three capuchin monkeys in Los Angeles, they’ll show you how beneficial their liaisons are.

Natalia Reagan: Animal Tracks Inc is located about 40 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. This animal sanctuary takes in former exotic pets and entertainment industry animals and gives them a new lease on life. The menagerie includes several capuchin monkeys, kangaroos, wolf hybrids, a baboon named Chrissy and my BFF, a six-banded armadillo called Frank the Tank.  And you might find something else at Animal Tracks.

That is the sound of a lesbian monkey love triangle: three monkeys, two species and one helluva love story. I’m Natalia Reagan, a primatologist and science comedian, and you’re listening to Science, Quickly.

More here.

La Tache 1962

—for Michael Cuddihy

Pulling the long cork., I shiver with a greed so
pure it is curiosity. I feel like the long muscles in a
sprinter’s thighs when he’s in the blocks, like a
Monarch butterfly the second before it begins mi-
grating to Venezuela for the winter—I feel as if I
were about to seduce somebody famous. Pop. The
first fumes swirl up. In a good year the Domaine de
la Romanée-Conti gets maybe 20,000 bottles of La
Tache; this is number 4189 for 1962. In the glass the
color is intense as if from use or love, like a book-
binding burnished by palm oil. The bouquet billows
the sail of the nose: it is a wind of loam and violets.
“La Tache” means “the task.” The word has impli-
cations of piecework; perhaps the vineyard workers
were once paid by the chore rather than by the day.
In a good year there would be no hail in September.
Work every day. Finally, the first pressing of sleep.
Stems, skins, a few spiders, yeast-bloom and dust-
bloom on the skins. . . . Now the only work is wait-
ing. On the tongue, under the tongue, with a slow
breath drawn over it like a cloud’s shadow—, the
the wine holds and lives by whatever it has learned from
3 ½ acres of earth. What I taste isn’t the wine itself,
but its secrets. I taste the secret of thirst, the longing
of matter to be energy, the sloth of energy to lie
down in the trenches of sleep, in the canals and
fibers of the grape. The day breaks into cells living
out their secrets. Marie agrees with me: this empty
bottle number 4189 of La Tache 1962 held the best
wine we have ever drunk. It is the emblem of what
we never really taste or know, the silence all poems
are unfaithful to. Michael, suppose the task is to
look on until our lives have given themselves away?
Amigo, Marie  and  I  send  you  our  love  and  this
poem.

by William Matthews
from Sleek for the Long Flight
White Pine Press, 19722

Gunnhild Øyehaug at The Paris Review:

Who is Sharon Olds? Sharon Olds is an American poet, born in San Francisco in 1942. She has a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and made her debut as a writer in 1980 with the poetry collection Satan Says. Since then, she has established herself as one of the most read, most decorated, and most controversial North American contemporary poets. “Sharon Olds’s poems are pure fire in the hands,” Michael Ondaatje has said. She became particularly well known after she refused to take part in a National Book Festival dinner organized by Laura Bush, then First Lady, in 2005, and wrote in an open letter: “So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.”

The way I discovered her was through a poem on a particular penis, which came as a recommendation from a Finnish Swedish colleague: “Read Sharon Olds’s ‘The Pope’s Penis’!”

more here.

Ellen Peirson-Hagger at The New Statesman:

“Barbenheimer saves cinema!” declared a Daily Mail headline in late July. The tabloid wasn’t the only publication wildly exaggerating the impact of the summer blockbuster releases Barbie and Oppenheimer: two very different works appealing to very different audiences, both released on 21 July, that social media gleefully christened under the portmanteau. Almost every outlet heralded the films as saviours of a dying industry. “Barbenheimer has saved cinema from the jaws of streaming – and not a moment too soon,” announced the i. The “Barbenheimer bonanza” insisted the Guardian, “saved the summer box office”. “Barbenheimer may just have saved London’s cinemas,” claimed Time Out.

On the surface, the box office figures showed a boom in cinema-going. As of 13 August, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling and playfully challenges ideas of the patriarchy, had taken $1.18bn at the worldwide box office. It is the highest-grossing movie in the US made by a female director. Meanwhile Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s biographical thriller starring Cillian Murphy as the scientist who developed the atom bomb, has grossed $649m worldwide, making it the highest-grossing Second World War film.

more here.

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

Morgan Meis: Borromini is a name probably not immediately familiar to your average reader. Can we start with a brief explanation of who he was and why his work is of interest?

Jed Perl: Francesco Borromini is the mystery man of seventeenth-century Roman architecture. Both during his life and after his death – in 1667, possibly a suicide – this great architect was often overshadowed by another artist, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who was not only a great architect but also a transcendent sculptor and a painter of consequence. Bernini’s Rome is all about grand gestures, crowds, spectacles — a place to see and be seen. He did much to shape the public face of Rome as we know it even today, through major commissions that included St. Peter’s in the Vatican and the Four Rivers Fountain in the Piazza Navona. Borromini brought other dimensions to seventeenth-century Rome – qualities of intimacy, fantasy, and interiority in buildings that include the churches of S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane and S. Ivo della Sapienza and the Oratorio dei Filippini.

Deborah Rosenthal: Borromini, like all seventeenth-century Italian architects, used a classical vocabulary of columns, capitals, pediments, arches, and domes that dated back to ancient Greek and Roman times. But he took the stately and sometimes even static Euclidean geometry that those forms suggested to many great architects, and replaced it with a dancing, careening geometry of ovals and spirals and enigmatically torqued spaces.

More here.

Saugat Bolakhe in Quanta:

Memory doesn’t represent a single scientific mystery; it’s many of them. Neuroscientists and psychologists have come to recognize varied types of memory that coexist in our brain: episodic memories of past experiences, semantic memories of facts, short- and long-term memories, and more. These often have different characteristics and even seem to be located in different parts of the brain. But it’s never been clear what feature of a memory determines how or why it should be sorted in this way.

Now, a new theory backed by experiments using artificial neural networks proposes that the brain may be sorting memories by evaluating how likely they are to be useful as guides in the future. In particular, it suggests that many memories of predictable things, ranging from facts to useful recurring experiences — like what you regularly eat for breakfast or your walk to work — are saved in the brain’s neocortex, where they can contribute to generalizations about the world. Memories less likely to be useful — like the taste of that unique drink you had at that one party — are kept in the seahorse-shaped memory bank called the hippocampus.

More here.

John Simpson in The Guardian:

Even people around President Biden now accept that pulling out of Afghanistan in the way the US did two years ago was an utter disaster. It ruined the lives of millions, destroyed the social and economic advances of 20 years, and returned the country’s women to a state of slavery. The result was to make the US look weak and pathetic; no wonder Vladimir Putin decided he could safely invade Ukraine, only six months later.

The suffering of ordinary Afghans as they panicked and tried to escape the Taliban shocked the entire world. The scenes in the approaches to Kabul airport on those 17 boiling hot August days were unbearable. People tore at one another and trod the dying underfoot in order to get to the barbed wire that separated them from the airfield, screaming and waving the bits of paper they hoped would get them out of the country. The Taliban fighters lost all control, hitting out indiscriminately with their rifle butts, and firing into the air or at people’s feet. Some women tried to throw their babies over the barbed wire to the British and American soldiers on the other side; more than one baby landed on the wire itself.

More here.