Adults may feel exiled from the intensity and sweetness of childhood places. But perhaps there are surprising ways home.

Liam Heneghan in Aeon:

I recently sat with pencil sharpened and notebook at the ready, like an anthropologist in exotic terrain, to watch Disney’s The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977), a feature-length collection of the earlier animated shorts. What happened, I wondered, when England’s most famous fictional bear migrated across the Atlantic and settled into an American landscape? Like Pooh, I had grown up in the British Isles and in my ripe maturity emigrated to the US. Like Pooh, I had spent much of my time out of doors. Over the back wall of our family home in southern County Dublin were mile after mile of farm fields, interspersed with shrubby hedgerow. Not quite as bucolic as Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood, perhaps, but there, until the summer dusk drove us home, was where we largely spent our childhood vacations. Like the transplanted Pooh, the terrain in which I now dwell in the New World is hospitable enough in many ways, and yet it is also uncanny. It is not quite home. The suspicion I am investigating here is that, from an environmental perspective, there is more to this bear of ‘very little brain’ than meets the eye.

More here.

Richard Dawkins at his own website:

You have surely heard something like the following two statements, often uttered with a measure of truculence:-

1. “There are 1.6 billion Muslims, nearly a quarter of the world’s population, and we are growing fast.” There is even, sometimes, a hint of menace added. In the words of Houari Boumediene, President of Algeria, “Le ventre de nos femmes nous donnera la victoire” (the belly of our women will give us the victory).

2. “Islamic science deserves enormous respect.” There are two versions of this second claim, ranging from the pathetic desperation of “the Qu’ran anticipated modern science” (the embryo develops from a blob, mountains have roots that hold the earth in place, salt and fresh water don’t mix) to what is arguably quite a good historical point: “Muslim scholars kept the flame of Greek learning alight while Christendom wallowed in the Dark Ages.”

Putting these two claims together, you almost can’t help wondering something like this: “If you are so numerous, and if your science is so great, shouldn’t you be able to point to some pretty spectacular achievements emanating from among those vast numbers? If you can’t today but once could, what has gone wrong for the past 500 years? Whatever it is, is there something to be done about it?”

More here.

Not the Right Place
.
The redpolls this March are far south where they shouldn't be.
.
tearing apart dried flower stalks for the hidden seeds,
the dream of spring they trust will bring them home.
.
Here and now, a first spring spider is falling
past me, towards anywhere on the wind which turns out
to be from a tulip poplar, the kind pioneers
would hollow ou for canoes to carry them everywhere
and towards a moss pool where mosquitos will later
emerge from rafts of eggs.
.
…………………………………………The trouble is, we dream
everything happens where are aren't. That's what the shotgun
dents in the roadsigns leading nowhere tell me.
That's what the two young boys caught last night
on the school fire escape would say, trying
to make love to each other, scared by their lonliness.
.
My grandmother, whenever a relative would die,
hung out a set of clothes for the deceased to claim
or not, as custom had it, watched them shift in
the windy branches.
.
…………………………..Bernie, there's no telling
at what cost all this has come. I have let
these images of flowers, spiders, legends intrude
because I was afraid, because I have discovered, hearing
again the crazy rattle of the redpoll, that shy
bird so easy to forget, so trusting it could be
kept, that for thirty years I had pretended you had moved,
not died, but the boy in that undersized casket
was you, which I still hope to deny, saying you are
here, a simple matter of place after all, as if
I could hang these hopes out for you to fill.

.
by Ruchard Jackson
from Worlds Apart
University of Alabama Press, 1987

From NPR:

Even the smallest dose of power can change a person. You've probably seen it. Someone gets a promotion or a bit of fame and then, suddenly, they're a little less friendly to the people beneath them. So here's a question that may seem too simple: Why? If you ask a psychologist, he or she may tell you that the powerful are simply too busy. They don't have the time to fully attend to their less powerful counterparts. But if you ask Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, he might give you another explanation: Power fundamentally changes how the brain operates. Obhi and his colleagues, Jeremy Hogeveen and Michael Inzlicht, have a new study showing evidence to support that claim. Obhi and his fellow researchers randomly put participants in the mindset of feeling either powerful or powerless. They asked the powerless group to write a diary entry about a time they depended on others for help. The powerful group wrote entries about times they were calling the shots. Then, everybody watched a simple video. In it, an anonymous hand squeezes a rubber ball a handful of times — sort of monotonously. While the video ran, Obhi's team tracked the participants' brains, looking at a special region called the mirror system.

The mirror system is important because it contains neurons that become active both when you squeeze a rubber ball and when you watch someone else squeeze a rubber ball. It is the same thing with picking up a cup of coffee, hitting a baseball, or flying a kite. Whether you do it or someone else does, your mirror system activates. In this small way, the mirror system places you inside a stranger's head. Furthermore, because our actions are linked to deeper thoughts — like beliefs and intentions — you may also begin to empathize with what motivates another person's actions. “When I watch somebody picking up a cup of coffee, the mirror system activates the representations in my brain that would be active if I was picking up a cup of coffee,” Obhi explains. “And because those representations are connected in my brain to the intentions that would normally activate them, you can get activation of the intention. So you can figure out, 'Hey, this person wants to drink coffee.' ” Obhi's team wanted to see if bestowing a person with a feeling of power or powerlessness would change how the mirror system responds to someone else performing a simple action. It turns out, feeling powerless boosted the mirror system — people empathized highly. But, Obhi says, “when people were feeling powerful, the signal wasn't very high at all.”

So when people felt power, they really did have more trouble getting inside another person's head.

More here.

From The Guardian:

A slender, beautifully bound blue hardback showed up on my desk. Its pages were creamy, its typeface clear in a formal, old-fashioned way. Each page number was picked out in scarlet. It was a book to put Kindle out of business, so covetable that, I almost thought, it scarcely mattered what it contained. It was then I noticed its curious title, Things I Don't Want to Know, and a quotation, picked out on the cover in pink type: “To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.” The writer is Deborah Levy, shortlisted last year for the Man Booker for her marvellous novel Swimming Home. Things I Don't Want to Know is published by Notting Hill Editions, a small, choice, independent publisher committed to “reinvigorating the essay as a literary form”. They came up with the idea of commissioning writers to respond to essays of distinction. Levy has had George Orwell's “Why I Write” (1946) at her elbow.

…The opening line hooks one instantly: “That spring when life was hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn't see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations.” She writes about depression, without naming it, in a blackly funny way. She describes directionlessness yet knows where she is going: the essay is immaculately planned. There are many wonderful lines: “When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.” Or: “A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly.” Even the coat hangers in an irregular Mallorcan hotel are perfectly described: “four bent wire clothes hangers on the rail, they seemed to mimic the shape of forlorn human shoulders”.

More here.

Elizabeth Castelli in The Nation:

The “most embarrassing interview Fox News has ever done,” in which anchor Lauren Green challenged the legitimacy of author Reza Aslan for writing Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, seemed to be popping up everywhere on social media last week. The absurdity of the spectacle was multifold: Why—why?!—would a Muslim want to write about Jesus, Green kept asking, as though a nefarious plot to undermine Christianity were somehow afoot. Meanwhile, Aslan made a show of insisting that he possesses not only the academic credentials and but also the professional duty to do so (“My job as a scholar of religions with a PhD in the subject is to write about religions”). The story was quickly framed as a battle between the right-wing Islamophobes of Fox News and Aslan, the defender of intellectual life and scholarship.

Then an article in the right-wing Catholic publication, First Things, challenged Aslan’s claims about his academic credentials (his 2009 PhD is in sociology and was awarded on the basis of a 140-page dissertation on contemporary Muslim political activism) and his academic position (he is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside and does not hold either a doctorate nor a teaching position in the academic study of religion).

Those of us in the academic field of religious studies, especially biblical scholars and historians of early Christianity, found the whole business deeply cringe-worthy.

More here.

Kenan Malik on Jonathan Israel's radical vision, in Eurozine:

Like many before him, Israel lauds the Enlightenment as that transformative period when Europe shifted from being a culture “based on a largely shared core of faith, tradition and authority” to one in which “everything, no matter how fundamental or deeply rooted, was questioned in the light of philosophical reason” and in which “theology's age-old hegemony” was overthrown. And, yet, despite language and imagery that hark back to Kant, Israel is also deeply critical of much of the Enlightenment, and hostile to the ideas of many of the figures that populate the works of Cassirer and Gay. At the heart of his argument is the insistence that there were two Enlightenments. The mainstream Enlightenment of Kant, Locke, Voltaire and Hume is the one of which we know, which provides the public face of the Enlightenment, and of which most historians have written. But it was the Radical Enlightenment, shaped by lesser-known figures such as d'Holbach, Diderot, Condorcet and, in particular, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, that provided the Enlightenment's heart and soul.

The two Enlightenments, Israel suggests, divided on the question of whether reason reigned supreme in human affairs, as the radicals insisted, or whether reason had to be limited by faith and tradition – the view of the mainstream. The mainstream's intellectual timidity constrained its critique of old social forms and beliefs. By contrast, the Radical Enlightenment “rejected all compromise with the past and sought to sweep away existing structures entirely”.

In Israel's view, what he calls the “package of basic values” that defines modernity – toleration, personal freedom, democracy, racial equality, sexual emancipation and the universal right to knowledge – derives principally from the claims of the Radical Enlightenment.

About an hour into The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s meditation on nature, grace, Brad Pitt’s crew cut, and the laying of the foundations of the Earth, I turned to my wife, snuck a Twizzler from the bag in her lap, and said, “I knew this was going to cover a lot of ground, but I really didn’t expect the dinosaurs.” I should have guessed that for a director obsessed with Big Questions, a family drama set in 1950s Texas would also be an epic about the birth of the universe, the origins of life, and, yes, frolicking CGI velociraptors, which give the film a Land of the Lost vibe that is at once sweetly awkward in its earnestness and strangely enjoyable in its chutzpah. From the big bang to suburbia by way of bubbling lava and primordial soup, it aims so high that getting halfway there might be enough. I had much the same sensation—minus the Twizzlers—reading Robert N. Bellah’s massive account of how such a peculiar thing as religion could have come to play an enduring role in human history. Despite its generic title, Religion in Human Evolution is not like so many other “science and religion” books, which tend to explain away belief as a smudge on a brain scan or an accident of early hominid social organization. It is, instead, a bold attempt to understand religion as part of the biggest big picture—life, the universe, and everything.

more from Peter Manseau’s 2011 review of Bellah’s religion book here.

Two of the great pessimistic proclamations of 20th-century literature — Adorno’s “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” and Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” — have at least one thing in common. They both address the inadequacy of language to articulate reality. Better to say nothing, they both say, or at least that’s the first half of what they say. If Adorno leaves off the productive half of the equation — “I’ll go on” — other writers have supplied it for him, in the form of a very large body of work concerned with the Holocaust that is not only ethically accountable but also incredibly rich and inventive. In fact it is not too much to claim, of Holocaust literature, that the struggle to say what is unsayable has paradoxically yielded some of the most extraordinary literary works we have. There are the firsthand accounts by Levi, Wiesel, Borowski and others. There are the formally innovative novels of writers like Perec, Bernhard and Sebald, works written in the shadow of the Holocaust that take as their subjects memory, absence, how we perceive history and how our lives are continually reshaped by past events. More recently there are novels like Joshua Cohen’s “Witz,” a satirical attack on the kitschification of Jewish experience that can also be read as an earnest concern for the legacy of the Holocaust, as we quickly approach the time when there will no longer be any living witnesses. What’s remarkable about the Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian author Imre Kertesz is that his body of work spans all of these subjects.

more from Martin Riker at the NY Times here.

For all Berlin’s faith in the power of ideas, he saw imaginative leadership as crucial; indeed, he described himself as a “natural hero worshipper”. When introduced to John F. Kennedy, his anxiety was acute. As the president quizzed him about intellectuals in Russia, weighing up who had stayed strong and measuring men for their practical use, Berlin was both attracted and repelled. He viewed JFK occasionally as a latter-day Alexander the Great, more often as a Napoleon, and, while friendly with many of Camelot’s inner circle, Berlin remained reluctant to be publicly pinned down to any political position. In the sphere of academic politics he was a true master, bamboozling or silently targeting those who played Moriarty to his Holmes. One such figure was the Polish-Jewish Marxist émigré Isaac Deutscher, and Berlin’s back-channel attacks upon him are the subject of David Caute’s Isaac and Isaiah. Caute, a prolific historian, novelist and journalist, has written widely about the cold war, and was a fellow at All Souls with Berlin between 1959 and 1965.

more from Duncan Kelly at the FT here.

From The Guardian:

Florence Williams in The New York Times:

For a species so pleased with its own brain, we are surprisingly ambivalent about the rest of our body. We tend to admire other people’s bodies, especially if they’re Olympians or shirtless Russian presidents, but most of us are constantly seeking to improve our own by starving or stuffing, injecting, waxing, straightening, piercing, lifting and squeezing. In 2010 in the United States alone, we spent $10 billion on cosmetic surgery, and that’s not including Brazilian Blowouts.

We are also deeply uncomfortable with the bodily aspects of being human. Our brains light up in weird and remarkable ways at the sight of blood or fecal matter as if these weren’t, in fact, perfectly mundane. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams points out in “Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body,” even television cartoons portray the skin as a rubbery and impregnable barrier. Weapons and falling objects dent it or merely bounce off it. You never see Elmer Fudd hemorrhaging through the jugular. Prudery doesn’t really explain our discomfort, but Aldersey-Williams hints at what might, namely fear. We fear the fragility, illness and suffering that are native to our corporeality. In “Anatomies,” he seeks to study the body full-on, frontally. He tells us straightaway that he knew nothing about anatomy when he started. A science writer and art critic, he’s interested in the intersection of science and culture. He thinks we should know our bodies, but he’s less interested in telling us how they work than in exploring how they’ve been perceived through art.

More here.

The Horse Fell off the Poem

The horse fell off the poem
and the Galilean women were wet
with butterflies and dew,
dancing above chrysanthemum

This post is dedicated to our indefatigable and erudite and gifted and multi-talented poetry editor, Jim Culleny, whose birthday it happens to be today. Happy birthday, dear Jim!

From Arabic Literature:

Raja Shehadeh: Do you build on the work of others?

Mahmoud Darwish: Yes. Very much so. I feel that no poem starts from nothing. Humanity has produced such a huge poetic output, much of it of a very high caliber. You are always building on the work of others. There is no blank page from which to start. All you can hope for is to find a small margin on which to write your signature.

RS: What sort of continuity is there in your own poetry?

MD: I have found that I have no poem that does not have its seeds in a poem that preceded it. Several critics have brought this to my attention. There is always a line or a word in an earlier work that I manage to take up and develop. My worry is always what’s next.

RS: Have you been writing prose?

MD: I like prose. I feel that sometimes prose can achieve a poetic state more poignant than poetry. But time is passing and my poetic project is still incomplete. There is competition in my personality between prose and poetry, but my bias is toward poetry.

Much more here. And here is a poem.