Daffodils

I hunker down, and see the daffodils
At eye-level, with the light coming through them.

It has happened once before.
I am being born. There is yellow light,

Indefinable, but absolutely pure,
Irradiating everything – maybe a vein or two,

My mother’s or my own, the yolk of an egg
Or a streak of red in a bloodshot eyeball –

Either way, the world in its primary state
Being given. Ever afterwards

Yellow is my colour. And it multiplies
Endlessly. But nothing is the same.

The Spring comes in. Again it is making windows
Of itself, to be seen but not seen through.
.

by Harry Clifton
from The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass
publisher Bloodaxe, Newastle, 2012

Neha Sharma on the Indian General elections, Arundhati Roy, and the secular ideal, in the LA Review of Books:

Roy’s nonfiction abandons the careful cadence of her Man Booker–winning novel, The God of Small Things (1997), and employs a combative approach. Roy’s critique of Indian democracy — which underscores most of her nonfiction, from Listening to Grasshoppers to Broken Republic — makes me feel like a reluctant trainee in a guerrilla camp. Critics have derided Roy as a polemicist, an agitator, and a hypocrite, but I believe her greatest failings in her nonfiction are her inability to appreciate complexity and her tendency to dehumanize her opponent.

Her lack of insight is best exemplified by Walking with the Comrades and “TheTrickledown Revolution,” her sympathetic essays about the Naxal movement, which is currently India’s biggest internal security threat. The Naxal movement — inspired by the tenets of Mao — is an armed struggle by adivasis(tribals) to reclaim their mineral-rich land, which the government-owned National Mineral Development Corporation is mining for bauxite. It seemed like a worthy cause, and Roy became a voice for the oppressed, but not a reasonable one. Over the past decade the “cause” inspired disenchantment among many of its own members because of the escalating violence — killing civilians and scapegoating bottom-rung public employees, like teachers and constables. But Roy stood strong in her support for the Naxals, with complete disregard for the brutality and destruction the movement spawned. The main characters of Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest novel, The Lowland (September 2013), are both immediate and collateral victims of the Naxal conflict, and, unlike Roy, the author allows for the inhumanity and disillusionment that an extremist revolution might engender, its noble motivations enmeshed in undesirable consequences.

Now Roy’s recalcitrance is given new relevance by the verdict of the 2014 prime ministerial elections in the world’s largest democracy: on May 16, the majority chose Narendra Modi — a Hindu nationalist who was once accused of abetting a pogrom against Muslims while he was the chief minister of Gujarat — as the 15th prime minister of India.

“The Doctor and the Saint”and its reaffirmation of Ambedkar’s views on Hinduism, caste, and social reform come at a time when the new regime might herald a resurgence of Hindu nationalism, in a country that has struggled and failed time and again to uphold the secular ideal.

More here.

Russell Bennetts and Daniel Tutt interview Simon Critchley in Berfois (image by Tommaso Galli):

You present Carl Schmitt’s reading of Hamlet and discuss the politics of Hamlet, what you call “Hamletization”. It’s probably the most important reading of the political implications ofHamlet. Based on his reading of Hamlet, Schmitt argues that all politics happens in a radical decision to establish sovereignty. This strikes a similar chord to Badiou’s theory of the truth event, and even Žižek’s idea of the act – a sort of radical, earth-shattering moment to break us out of what’s rotten in Denmark. To what extent is that a plague of modernity, this “Hamletization”? One could also apply Foucault’s biopolitics as a kind of impossibility of real politics, where we lack the capacity for real change to take place. Countless political theorists since Schmitt present a theory of an act or an event to break out of this deadlock of the political. Are we doomed to a Schmittian politics? How is this connected to what Hamlet tells us about the modern condition, politically speaking?

Critchley

The first thing is that it’s not clear what the ‘modern condition’ is. One of the axes that we’re grinding in this book and in my own current work on ancient tragedy is to try and destabilise the distinction between ancient and modern tragedy and, by implication, antiquity and modernity. I don’t believe in modernity. I don’t believe there is such a thing as modernity. And you get a kind of modernity fundamentalism in all kinds of areas of inquiry.

If you look at a play like Hamlet, it’s more like there’s some relationship between a world that is passing away and a world that is coming into existence. The play seems to be taking place at a kind of end between those two moments – the old and the new. The old is still there, though it’s in crisis – the king has been murdered – so the order of sovereignty based on kings has been destabilised with the murder of Hamlet’s father. And the new world is coming into being, which looks like a world of crime and opportunism, and that’s what’s wrong. The play is kind of juxtaposed between the two domains. It’s as if what most philosophers want to say of Shakespeare is that he’s the philosopher of modernity – that’s what you get with Hegel, Schelling, everyone. And we’re not so sure about that. And if you look at antiquity, it’s not clear what’s ancient about antiquity.

Ancient drama is as modern as modern drama. In exactly the same way, if you look at ancient tragedies, you find a world that has passed away – a world of myth – and the world that’s coming into existence – the world of law. And there’s a crisis.

More here.

Russell Arben Fox at Front Porch Republic:

So I come back, once again, to Norman Mailer’s “left conservative” formulation: to “think in the style of Karl Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke.” Porcherism can’t be friendly to the present global liberal regime, as much as we may pragmatically work with it, because we see it premised upon the valuation of states and corporations and individuals who build their webs of connection in anything but Burkean, organic ways. The state, the corporation, even the sovereign individual all have their intellectual place in our accounting of the present world, and may be defended in better or worse ways. But absent a real communitarian context–a liveable, sustainable, historical one–they will follow paths that can never truly privilege place, and all too often will instead undermine it. That’s a fairly grand conclusion to come to about an online, ideological debate, I know. But for those few of us who have found an intellectual home in the combination of traditionalism with radicalism, it’s an important one to never forget either.

more here.

Christopher Ketcham in The New Republic:

In early 2010, the editors at Harper’s Magazine began reviewing a lengthy manuscript submitted by Chris Hedges, a former New York Times reporter. In the piece, Hedges had turned his eye to Camden, New Jersey, one of the most downtrodden cities in the nation. Hedges’s editor at Harper’s, Theodore Ross, who left the magazine in 2011 and is now a freelance writer, was excited when he saw the draft. “I thought it was a great story about a topic—poverty—that nobody covers enough,” Ross said.

The trouble began when Ross passed the piece along to the fact-checker assigned to the story. As Ross and the fact-checker began working through the material, they discovered that sections of Hedges’s draft appeared to have been lifted directly from the work of a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter named Matt Katz, who in 2009 had published a four-part series on social and political dysfunction in Camden.

Given Hedges’s institutional pedigree, this discovery shocked the editors atHarper’s. Hedges had been a star foreign correspondent at the Times,where he reported from war zones and was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for covering global terrorism.

More here.

Jacob Mikanowski in The Point:

This is how you cook potatoes the Noma way: Find an organic farm in the Danish countryside. Persuade the farmer to leave a field fallow for a full year and then have him dry out the hundreds of kinds of grasses, plant tops and weeds that have grown in it in the absence of crops. Unearth a few new potatoes fresh from a neighboring field. Pack each one individually in the dried weeds. Then wrap them in salt dough. Roast. When they’re done, mash them lightly with a little bit of butter. Pack the mash in skins made of dehydrated milk, creating “ravioli.” Sprinkle with wild herbs, chickweed, yarrow and glazed snails. Add a sauce of buttermilk blended with newly cut grass. Prepared this way, the dish should allow the green flavors from one field to merge with those of the potatoes from below. According to René Redzepi, the chef who created it, the completed ensemble should taste “exactly like the wonderful, heartwarming scent of a freshly mowed lawn on a summer’s day.”

When Redzepi described this recipe in front of a packed audience at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre this past November, I found myself strangely moved. It sounds like a lot of work, but it contains a beautiful thought, of hay, herbs, sun, grass, earth, a particular season in a particular place. It’s like something out of a poem by Wordsworth or John Clare. It’s the kind of recipe that has lifted Redzepi to culinary fame. In the nine years since he opened his restaurant in a Copenhagen warehouse, Noma (the name is a combination of the Danish words for Nordic and food) has become one of the most sought-after tables in the world. Starting in 2010, it was named the best restaurant in the world three years in a row, a position it only lost this year, to El Celler de Can Roca in Spain.

More here.

Robert Fisk in The Independent:

So after the grotesquerie of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 suicide killers of 9/11, meet Saudi Arabia’s latest monstrous contribution to world history: the Islamist Sunni caliphate of Iraq and the Levant, conquerors of Mosul and Tikrit – and Raqqa in Syria – and possibly Baghdad, and the ultimate humiliators of Bush and Obama.

From Aleppo in northern Syria almost to the Iraqi-Iranian border, the jihadists of Isis and sundry other groupuscules paid by the Saudi Wahhabis – and by Kuwaiti oligarchs – now rule thousands of square miles.

Apart from Saudi Arabia’s role in this catastrophe, what other stories are to be hidden from us in the coming days and weeks?

The story of Iraq and the story of Syria are the same – politically, militarily and journalistically: two leaders, one Shia, the other Alawite, fighting for the existence of their regimes against the power of a growing Sunni Muslim international army.

While the Americans support the wretched Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his elected Shia government in Iraq, the same Americans still demand the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad of Syria and his regime, even though both leaders are now brothers-in-arms against the victors of Mosul and Tikrit.

More here.

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

A reservoir of water three times the volume of all the oceans has been discovered deep beneath the Earth's surface. The finding could help explain where Earth's seas came from.

The water is hidden inside a blue rock called ringwoodite that lies 700 kilometres underground in the mantle, the layer of hot rock between Earth's surface and its core.

The huge size of the reservoir throws new light on the origin of Earth's water. Some geologists think water arrived in comets as they struck the planet, but the new discovery supports an alternative idea that the oceans gradually oozed out of the interior of the early Earth.

“It's good evidence the Earth's water came from within,” says Steven Jacobsen of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The hidden water could also act as a buffer for the oceans on the surface, explaining why they have stayed the same size for millions of years.

Jacobsen's team used 2000 seismometers to study the seismic waves generated by more than 500 earthquakes. These waves move throughout Earth's interior, including the core, and can be detected at the surface. “They make the Earth ring like a bell for days afterwards,” says Jacobsen.

By measuring the speed of the waves at different depths, the team could figure out which types of rocks the waves were passing through. The water layer revealed itself because the waves slowed down, as it takes them longer to get through soggy rock than dry rock.

More here.

Mike Melia at PBS Newshour:

Charles Wright, a master of capturing landscape and meditation in verse, has been named the next Poet Laureate of the United States by the Library of Congress. It is the latest in a long list of honors and awards for Wright, who is considered one of the greatest American poets of his generation.

At times self-effacing, Wright shies away from the public eye and was reluctant to take the post. “My wife kept nudging me to do it and also others have said, ‘You know, you should do it.’ And I hadn’t done it before when it was offered to me and I always felt sort of bad about that — that I snuck into the shadows where I am more comfortable,” Wright said to Jeffrey Brown in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “I’m going to try to pull up my socks here and see what happens.”

Wright will succeed Natasha Trethewey as the Library’s 20th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. “For almost 50 years, his poems have reckoned with ‘language, landscape, and the idea of God,’” said Librarian of Congress, James Billington. “Wright’s body of work combines a Southern sensibility with an allusive expansiveness, for moments of singular musicality.”

Born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, in 1935, Wright came to poetry at the age of 23 while serving in the Army in Verona, Italy. He had “an epiphanic moment” while reading Ezra Pound and began writing his own verse.

More here.

James Gallagher in BBC:

The activity of hundreds of genes was altered when people's sleep was cut to less than six hours a day for a week. Writing in the journal PNAS, the researchers said the results helped explain how poor sleep damaged health. Heart disease, diabetes, obesity and poor brain function have all been linked to substandard sleep. What missing hours in bed actually does to alter health, however, is unknown. So researchers at the University of Surrey analysed the blood of 26 people after they had had plenty of sleep, up to 10 hours each night for a week, and compared the results with samples after a week of fewer than six hours a night. More than 700 genes were altered by the shift. Each contains the instructions for building a protein, so those that became more active produced more proteins – changing the chemistry of the body. Meanwhile the natural body clock was disturbed – some genes naturally wax and wane in activity through the day, but this effect was dulled by sleep deprivation.

Prof Colin Smith, from the University of Surrey, told the BBC: “There was quite a dramatic change in activity in many different kinds of genes.” Areas such as the immune system and how the body responds to damage and stress were affected. Prof Smith added: “Clearly sleep is critical to rebuilding the body and maintaining a functional state, all kinds of damage appear to occur – hinting at what may lead to ill health. “If we can't actually replenish and replace new cells, then that's going to lead to degenerative diseases.” He said many people may be even more sleep deprived in their daily lives than those in the study – suggesting these changes may be common.

More here.

Helen Morgan in ArtAsiaPacific:

Jonathan Benthall at the Times Literary Supplement:

“The whole Question is this: Are Lust and Hunger both alike Passions of physical Necessity, and the one equally with the other independent of the Reason, & the Will? Shame upon our Race, that there lives the Individual who dares even ask the Question!” Thus Coleridge annotated his copy of An Essay on the Principle of Population by Malthus, appalled by his claim that human beings are dominated by the need for sexual outlets as well as for physical sustenance. Coleridge’s is but one example of the obloquy that the Revd Thomas Malthus FRS (1776–1834) has attracted. Yet Malthus has intermittently attracted admirers – including Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, H. G. Wells, John Maynard Keynes, Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. Now two outstanding scholars hail him independently as one of the great canonical thinkers who set an agenda that has permanent immediacy. Robert J. Mayhew’s speciality is historical geography and intellectual history; Alan Macfarlane is a social anthropologist and historian who has published widely on England, Nepal, Japan and China.

In his admirably rounded Malthus: The life and legacies of an untimely prophet Mayhew draws our attention to the actual writings of this pioneer of demography and political economy, and to his historical context, especially the revolutionary enthusiasm which Malthus was concerned to dampen. He questioned the belief that redistribution of resources to the poor would advance social progress: the poor would cancel it out by having more children.

more here.

Jonathan Russell Clark at The Millions:

Epigraphs, despite what my young mind believed, are more than mere pontification. Writers don’t use them to boast. They are less like some wine and entrée pairing and more like the first lesson in a long class. Writers must teach a reader how to read their book. They must instruct the tone, the pace, the ostensible project of a given work. An epigraph is an opportunity to situate a novel, a story, or an essay, and, more importantly, to orient the reader to the book’s intentions.

To demonstrate the multiple uses of the epigraph, I’d like to discuss a few salient examples. But I’m going to shy away from the classic epigraphs we all know, those of Hemingway, Tolstoy, etc., the kinds regularly found in lists with titles like “The 15 Greatest Epigraphs of All Time,” and talk about some recent books, since those are the ones that have excited (and, in some cases, confounded) me enough to write about the subject in the first place.

A good epigraph establishes the theme, but when it works best it does more than this.

more here.

Gary Gutting in the New York Times:

Many philosophers at leading American departments are specialists in metaphysics: the study of the most general aspects of reality such as being and time. The major work of one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, is “Being and Time,” a profound study of these two topics. Nonetheless, hardly any of these American metaphysicians have paid serious attention to Heidegger’s book.

The standard explanation for this oddity is that the metaphysicians are analytic philosophers, whereas Heidegger is a continentalphilosopher. Although the two sorts of philosophers seldom read one another’s work, when they do, the results can be ugly. A famous debate between Jacques Derrida (continental) and John Searle (analytic) ended with Searle denouncing Derrida’s “obscurantism” and Derrida mocking Searle’s “superficiality.”

The distinction between analytic and continental philosophers seems odd, first of all, because it contrasts a geographical characterization (philosophy done on the European continent, particularly Germany and France) with a methodological one (philosophy done by analyzing concepts). It’s like, as Bernard Williams pointed out, dividing cars into four-wheel-drive and made-in-Japan. It becomes even odder when we realize that some of the founders of analytic philosophy (like Frege and Carnap) were Europeans, that many of the leading centers of “continental” philosophy are at American universities, and that many “analytic” philosophers have no interest in analyzing concepts.

More here.

Brad Plumer in Vox:

The world's plant and animal species are going extinct at a rate 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than they did before humans came along. If that continues, we could lose one-third to half of all species by the end of the century. A variety of birds, frogs, fish, mammals — gone.

Those grim statistics come from a big recent study inScience, led by Duke University biologist Stuart Pimm. The paper was the most comprehensive attempt yet to calculate a “death rate” for the world's species — an update on work first begun in 1995.

It's not an easy calculation to make: We still haven't fully tallied all the current species on Earth, for instance. So the researchers had to make estimates on how many species there are likely to be, how many are dying off, and what that “death rate” likely was before humans ever arrived on the scene.

Based on updated research, Pimm and his colleagues estimated that roughly 0.1 out of 1 million species went extinct each year before humans showed up. That's the “background rate.” But nowadays, thanks to deforestation, habitat loss, and other factors, the “death rate” has increased to an estimated 100 to 1,000 extinctions per million species-years.

That's a big deal. And, not surprisingly, many of the media reports on Pimm's paper underscored that the Earth is now facing a “sixth extinction” comparable to the five earlier mass extinctions in history.

More here.

Amy Davidson in The New Yorker:

George Will is a victim: a victim of a particular thing he calls “victimhood,” which comes with “privileges,” nice things that George Will, or people like George Will, don’t get to have. And this thought, in a column that Will published this past weekend in the Washington Post, is not just attached to a standard rant about, say, affirmative action. Colleges and universities have now learned, he writes, “that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate”; he sees this quite plainly in “the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. ‘sexual assault.’ ” Students and educators, in Will’s world, are being swarmed by covetous young women.

Why might one covet the “status” of a survivor of sexual assault, and what are these “privileges” that Will sees? Does he worry that he will be asked to give up his seat for some eighteen-year-old girl who has reported a rape? Or is it that she will be allowed to go to the front of the line in the dining hall at her college, or be deferred to in a way that strikes him as unseemly? Perhaps what he calls a privilege is a young woman such as that being listened to by her elders and having her story taken seriously. That counts as a privilege—an extra benefit—only if a girl, in the normal course of things, wouldn’t and needn’t be heard. “Privilege” suggests puzzlement with the very idea of a voice like that mattering, and, potentially, changing the life of a young man. The image Will is conjuring up is of deceptive or “hypersensitive, even delusional” women clamoring for attention, and deliriously pleased to have found a way to get it.

More here.