Max Dunbar in 3:am Magazine:

In the autumn of 2010 a beautiful, exasperating young woman appeared in Manchester: Sian Rathore. A singer-songwriter, critic and poet, her inventive approach to the spoken word made her a hit at the poetry nights there, and in terms of content her work eclipsed the more established mediocrities of that city. Sian is very much a poet of the digital age with a lively presence on Twitter, a plethora of blogs and tumblrs, an occasional column for the Huffington Post and a passion for something called ‘flarf poetry’ which I am too old to pretend to understand. So in Sian’s collection there is a poem about bereavement, called ‘She Sometimes Still Emails Him’ – where the narrator has just bought a smartphone and is messaging a dead friend, while still struggling to work out the keypad. (‘Youd; have really lvoed one/Apple make there own Phones now’). Another poem lists the bizarre search terms people have used to find Sian’s blog. The rhythms are like electronica and the locale is contemporary, abounds with references to Blackberry messaging, Spotify and Made in Chelsea. Yet the poetry comes from a traditional place. Sian is better read than most of her peers and her favourite book is Wuthering Heights.

Sian has a somewhat turbulent romantic life, suffers from bipolar disorder and, as a person, can be fairly scattershot and disorganised. So it’s always a double take when you read her stuff and realise quite how disciplined she is as a writer. Every word has been put on trial for its life. That discipline is coupled with a cold, caustic, Parker-style sense of humour. A few lines from her poem ‘The Last Stand of the World’s Most Famous Observational Comedian’, a satire on male dominated stand up, recall even Eliot at his most vitriolic:

The great observer overflows from the seat at the strip club
With white foam collecting at the corners of his mouth
Like small clouds precipitating the sweat on his upper lip
With one hand in his pocket and one between her breasts
Before she forces it back
God, it’s mad in’t it, this so-called ‘women’s lib’
The exotic dancer who had the recent abortion
Notices his failed erection
And sniggers with unsubtle laughter.

More here.

Juan Cole in Truth Dig:

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi may or may not survive Sunday’s massive protests, organized by the youth Rebellion (Tamarrud) Movement. They are, nevertheless, a milestone in modern Egyptian history and a warning to him about his arrogant and highhanded style of governing from his fundamentalist base. Morsi, from the Muslim Brotherhood, represents the equivalent of the American tea party in Egyptian politics—captive to the religious right, invested in austerity and smaller government, and contemptuous of workers and the political left. In his first year in office, the nation’s first freely elected head of state has squandered Egyptians’ willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt. He has acted like the president of the somewhat cultish Muslim Brotherhood, rather than like the president of the whole country. Here are the major errors he has made, which have polarized Egypt and created a severe crisis that some observers worry could turn into a civil war.

On taking office in summer 2012, Morsi did not appoint a government of national unity. He named no politicians from other major parties to important cabinet posts, nor did he reach out to the revolutionary youth. Although he made a neutral technocrat, Hisham Qandil, his prime minister, he put members of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party in charge of key cabinet posts. He thus created the impression that he was trying for a “Brotherization” of the government.

Despite Egypt’s sagging economy, Morsi did not make stimulating it his first priority, and instead tried to please the International Monetary Fund with austerity policies, rather on the model of the Mariano Rajoy government in Spain.

More here.

It has been one year since scientists announced the discovery of a particle believed to be Higgs. Read this essay by a Nobel prize winner in physics.

Frank Wilczek in Big Questions Online:

Imagine a planet encrusted with ice, beneath which a vast ocean lies. (Imagine Europa.)

Within that ocean a species of brilliant fish evolved. Those fish were so intelligent that they took up physics, and formulated the laws that govern motion. At first they derived quite complicated laws, because the motion of bodies within water is complicated.

One day, however, a genius among fish, call her Fish Newton, had a startling new idea. She proposed fundamental laws of motion––Newton's laws––that are simpler and more beautiful than the laws the fish had derived directly from experience. She demonstrated mathematically that you could reproduce the observed motions from the new, simpler laws, if you assume that there is a space-filling medium that complicates things. She called it Ocean.

Of course our fish had been immersed in Ocean for eons, but without knowing it. Since it was ever-present, they took it for granted. They regarded it as an aspect of space itself––as mere emptiness. But Fish Newton invited them to consider that they might be immersed in a material medium.

Thus inspired, fish scientists set out to find the atoms of Fish Newton's hypothetical medium. And soon they did!

That story is our own. We humans, like those fish, have been living within a material medium for millennia, without being consciously aware of it.

More here.

Fair warning: I’m about to use a short phrase, consisting of two words, each of which are so excruciatingly dull that reading either one could very well cause you fall into an extended slumber, like Dorothy approaching Oz. Combined, they may induce a coma. Proceed at your own risk. To wit: Pedestrian infrastructure. Also, I will be writing about Cincinnati. Still with me? Good, because Cincinnati is a pretty fascinating place if your interests run to the history of walking in America in general, or, say, pedestrian infrastructure in particular. It’s home to a couple of groupings of artifacts that bookend the highs and lows of American walking culture over the past century and a half. Let’s start the tour at City View Place, at the edge of the Clifton Heights neighborhood, which I visited a couple of weeks ago. The most interesting thing about this short block is that it wholly lacks a city view. It’s actually at the bottom of a hill. But it ends at a long set of concrete steps that ascend a steep hill. These steps rise through a dense wood — I didn’t realize how shady and dark it was until a cardinal flew past, startling me with its sudden brightness. A few steps later — presto! — I was in another old neighborhood atop a hill filled with elaborately mansarded houses.

more from Wayne Curtis at The Smart Set here.

These have not been good days for the self-made man. The very phraseology offends: in an age when even corporate titans ritualistically affirm the value of teamwork, “self-made” sounds unseemly. “What’s wrong with the ‘self-made’ theory? Everything,” says Mike Myatt, a prominent CEO consultant, in a 2011 article in Forbes, a publication where one might expect to see such a figure affirmed. “If your pride, ego, arrogance, insecurity, or ignorance keeps you from recognizing the contributions of others, then it’s time for a wake-up call,” he admonishes.1 In the 2012 book The Self-Made Myth, authors Brian Miller and Mike Lapham define the phrase as “the false assertion that individual and business success are entirely the result of the hard work, creativity, and sacrifice of the individual with little outside assistance.”2 Such objections do not even begin to broach the difficulties of a phrase like “self-made man” in a postfeminist era, when any generic citation of “man” is at best a faux pas. Given the institutional, much less biological, realities that govern our lives, the very idea of the self-made man sounds like a contradiction in terms. No man is “unaided” because every man is some mother’s son.

more from Jim Cullen at Hedgehog Review here.

Over at Tablet, a podcast:

Questions of character shape public discourse. From Paula Deen to Edward Snowden—the choices people make and actions people take raise questions about free will, personal responsibility, and morality. And yet, researchers in sociology, psychology, and neuroscience are increasingly asserting that the independent self that we are all so attached to doesn’t really exist. What’s more, there are philosophical traditions dating back to Aristotle,Maimonides, and Spinoza that may offer more useful ways of thinking about how to foster ethical behavior and moral societies.

In The Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will, Heidi Ravven, a professor of religious studies at Hamilton College, examines these questions. She joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry on the podcast to discuss how the myth of free will took hold, what Spinoza had to say about it, and why if you want to be a moral person, the last thing you should do is surround yourself with like-minded people. [Running time: 24:52.]

Dhruv Malhotra in The Morning News:

India's prevailing image is one of noisy animation—development, overcrowding, and horrible traffic. In comparison, Dhruv Malhotra's night-scapes of urban India capture the life, or lack thereof, that darkness conceals.

The Morning News: Who are the sleepers?

Dhruv Malhotra: The sleeping human figure, in the context of the larger urban landscape surrounding it, is the metaphor I use to address my own self and the world around me. Usually intentionally obscured, the sleepers are the people in my images who choose to sleep outdoors, for a variety of reasons, and are often guards, migrants, and construction workers, amongst others. The specific person doesn’t much concern me, as my intention is to use the human figure as a metaphor and a point to explore my concerns about the urban landscape.

TMN: If sleepers awaken while you’re photographing, how do you react?

DM: Usually I just speak to them. Some are a bit surprised at being photographed sleeping, but most go right back to sleep after minimal persuasion, once their sense of threat and alarm is allayed.Many of these moments of awakening have translated onto film as ghostly shapes emerging from sleeping bodies—moments of awakening glimpsed along with the dormant potential of the sleeper.

More here.

The Entertainment of War

I saw the garden where my aunt had died

From Scientific American:

The gut bacteria of obese mice unleash high levels of an acid that promotes liver cancer, reveals one of the first studies to uncover a mechanism for the link between obesity and cancer. The research is published today in Nature.

“Obesity in general has many different types of cancer associated with it,” says Eiji Hara, a cancer biologist at the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research in Tokyo and one of the study authors. But in the case of liver cancer, he says, “I never expected the microbiome was linked.” Hara and his colleagues initially set out to study how dying cells influence obesity-linked cancers. Cells that are irreparably damaged or pre-cancerous can become senescent — meaning that they stop dividing for overall health of the organism. But before senescent cells die, they can spew out chemicals that may cause inflammation and promote cancer development. To examine whether senescent cells are involved in obesity-induced cancers, Hara and his colleagues worked with genetically engineered mice whose cells emit light upon becoming senescent. They then primed the mice by exposing them to a carcinogenic chemical, a process that Hara says may be similar to humans’ exposure to environmental toxins, such as air pollution. Researchers then fed the mice either a normal diet or a high-fat diet. After 30 weeks, only 5% of the lean mice developed cancer — in their lungs — whereas all the obese mice developed liver cancer.

More here.

Richard J Williams in Aeon Magazine:

Morningside, a late-Victorian suburb on the south side of Edinburgh is an extremely good-looking place, possessing an architectural integrity rare in Britain today. Never threatened by wartime bombs, post-war developers, or the vicissitudes of the housing market, this suburb has a direct line to the ‘Victorian city’ — and its morality. Its moral character is there for anyone to see: in the bay windows watching over every inch of street, the church on every corner, and the sheer solidity of the stone. Morningside is propriety in built form.

The suburb’s respectability was a huge attraction for me at the anxious moment of buying a flat. But after a few years of living there, that same respectability had become a bore. Then it became oppressive. The buildings began to represent a desiccated social life, defined by emotional reserve and obligation. Patrolled by curtain-twitching killjoys, Morningside seemed determined to put a stop to fun of any kind.

In retrospect, Morningside itself probably had little to do with it. Moving there coincided with the moment at which my wife and I became fully grown adults. It was a structural problem. With two careers, two kids and no money, there was little time for pleasures, sex included. Of course, we bore it all stoically and, after a while, we learned together that this was simply what adult life was like, a mess of contradictory demands, with neither the time nor the space in which they might all be satisfied. We were hardly alone: every other couple we knew seemed to find themselves in the same situation. Still, our feelings were real enough, and being an academic, I set to reading about them.

Elizabeth Stoker in the LA Review of Books:

IT BEGINS with a once-promising student and a number of contributing factors that could perhaps have been tolerated in isolation, but in their confluence bring about horrific crimes.

The student is “a strikingly handsome young man, with fine dark eyes, brown hair, and a slender well-knit figure, taller than the average.” He lives alone in a city of thousands, and unbeknownst to his distantly located but eminently involved mother, he has abandoned his schoolwork. His ideological commitments have become increasingly extreme and convoluted, and despite evidently having maintained at one time a rational, moderate worldview, he has “recently become superstitious.”

He is poor, disenfranchised, and angry, and he is planning cold-blooded murder. The target is a matter of concentrated rage and coincidental opportunity. Though he has meditated upon murder for some time, his plans are expedited when it becomes clear to him that the perfect set of circumstances have arisen for him to carry out his attack without detection.

His reasons are in equal measures strange and sober. They represent grotesquely extreme incarnations of “the most usual and ordinary youth talk and ideas”: a distaste for greed, a disgust with the tyranny of the powerful over the oppressed, and a general sense of personal obligation to defend the world from its infectious elements.

In a tiny apartment lodged in a building of low-income housing units, he prepares himself and his instruments to carry out murder. It is a painstaking process that he approaches meticulously, but is nonetheless sped along by chance. With all of his materials and nerve mustered, he merely awaits his chosen hour.

The Nobel laureate on Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid, a new biography of South Africa’s revolutionary couple.

Nadine Gordimer in Guernica:

Joe Slovo and Ruth First. We are entering their paths.

Both grew up unbelievers in Jewish or any religious faith. They met when Ruth was at the University of the Witwatersrand, Joe just returned from the South African Army in the war against Nazi Germany. His motivation for volunteering, eighteen years old, unemployed, lying about being underage for military call-up—his early alliance with communism, and so to the Soviet Union under attack—was decisive in the act. But there remained the devastating racial dilemma in South Africa. He wrote: “How do you tell a black man to make his peace with General Smuts—butcher of Bulhoek and the Bondelswarts? ‘Save civilization and democracy—must have sounded a cruel parody. And fight with what? No black man was allowed to bear arms…if you want to serve democracy, wield a knobkerrie [wooden club] as a uniformed servant of a white soldier.”

Joe Slovo’s appetite for the pleasures of life is brought face-to-face with his political humanitarian drive when at the end of the war he took a holiday. From Turin to Cairo he went, and with other decommissioned soldiers somehow got to Palestine although travel was restricted because of Zionist resistance to British occupation; on to a kibbutz where “looked at in isolation, the kibbutz seemed to be the very epitome of socialist lifestyle… it was populated in the main by young people with the passion and belief that by the mere exercise of will and humanism you could build socialism as one factory or one kibbutz and the power of example will sweep the imagination of all… worker or capitalist.”

More here.

Matt Bieber in The Wheat and Chaff:

When I was 18, I was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Since then, I’ve occasionally considered writing about my experiences, but I’ve tended not to trust my motives. Writing about my experiences, I thought, would be a way to redeem them, to justify an early adulthood that hadn’t measured up to my adolescent hopes and dreams. I may not have been happy in my twenties, I thought, but at least I’d have a book – and perhaps the beginning of a writing career – to show for it.

It was a cracked notion, of course. I was so caught up in the grip of OCD – and in my flight from it – that I could never have written about those experiences. I didn’t want to spend any more time with them, didn’t want to be anywhere near them.

But at some level, I felt like I was owed. I’ve had to suffer day in and day out for years. Maybe I can cash in on that suffering. This didn’t feel like the noblest of impulses, of course, but I was floundering: what else was I going to do with myself? I was in my mid-20s, moving around a lot and working a series of jobs that didn’t mean much to me. I hadn’t found much direction, and when I looked, OCD was usually in the way.

As I came to see, however, the idea of cashing in on my suffering was itself compulsive – a way to feed an insatiable feeling of insufficiency, to measure up to some external (and endlessly receding) standard. I wanted to write a book because of what it might teach me or might allow me to express, yes, but also because I suspected that lurid stories of suffering would sell, and because I couldn’t imagine how else to feel good about myself. When I saw this – that part of my desire to write was a product of OCD – I decided to treat it that way and did my best not to give in.

More recently, though, things have shifted.

More here.

In “Ghatashraddha,” an early story by Ananthamurthy, a little boy enters the woods at night to search for a friend, accompanied by a man who bears a burning torch. In the brooding darkness, he wants to hold the man tight to dispel his fear. The man dissuades him, saying “You cannot touch me.” Overcome with fright, the child runs away. The story frames one of the most complex and stereotyped aspects of Indian culture, the practice of untouchability. The boy, a Brahmin, reaches out to his Dalit companion for comfort, in poignant violation of the strict ban on physical contact between them. Despite his position in the social order, the older man becomes the arbiter of ritual and purity to a child of the priestly caste, forbidding the touch that would ‘pollute’ the boy. The theme of touch recurs throughout Ananthamurthy’s work with a frequency bordering on obsession—one he has himself acknowledged, and attributed to an abhorrence of untouchability dating back to his childhood days. The power of touch to twist destinies, and the symbolic transformations that such a gesture can undergo through desire, fear, and denial, hold real experiential meaning in his fiction. It is the outgrowth of the author’s own early experiences.

more from María Helga Guðmundsdóttir at Quarterly Conversation here.

From The Guardian:

When F Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, he was, in the words of his biographer Matthew J Bruccoli, “an unemployed screenwriter”, whose fiction was largely ignored, if not entirely forgotten. The Great Gatsby had sold only seven copies in the last year of his life, and his complete works had earned him a grand total of $13.13 in royalties. Not long before his death, Fitzgerald scrawled a list of sources for each of Gatsby's nine chapters, in the back of a book by André Malraux. Some of these notes are slightly mysterious: decades of digging by Fitzgerald scholars has not revealed who exactly “Mary” was, or what precisely the phrase “the day in New York” might mean. Others are readily comprehensible, such as “Gt Neck” – Great Neck being the real-life version of West Egg, the location of Gatsby's Long Island mansion and the narrator Nick Carraway's rented cottage.

Sarah Churchwell's new book uses this list as a starting point in her attempt to “piece together the chaotic and inchoate world behind Gatsby”. It's a sprightly, enjoyable and slightly strange book: part “biography” of the novel, part sketch of the roaring 1920s, part brief account of the second half of Fitzgerald's life. Churchwell is perceptive and well-informed. Gatsby enthusiasts – and what person with a brain isn't one? – will enjoy her reconstruction of the various fragments drawn from life, books and news stories that Fitzgerald combined to make his masterpiece. Great Neck plays a central part in the story. When Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald moved there in late 1922, it had recently been invaded by newly rich, showbizzy New Yorkers (Gatsby's love, Daisy Buchanan, regards West Egg as an “unprecedented 'place' which Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village”). The old money had their grand summer houses on the other side of Manhasset Bay, at Sands Point – East Egg in the novel, where Tom and Daisy Buchanan's white palace sits, with its dock and famous green light, shining across the bay. Zelda later suggested that the main inspiration for Gatsby was a Great Neck neighbour called Max Gerlach, “who was said to be General Pershing's nephew and was in trouble over bootlegging”.

More here.

Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:

Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist and philosopher-king of quantum theory, once said that great truth is a statement whose opposite is also a great truth. This pretty much captured the spirit of those elusive rules that govern the subatomic world, where light can be a wave — no, a particle — well, actually, whatever you need it to be for your particular experiment. It also seems to me to sum up much of the history of science and philosophy, in which the learned consensus keeps swinging between the yin-and-yang theories of existence: free will and fate, change and eternity, atomicity and continuity. These bipolar themes have been on my mind lately. This spring the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin published a new book, “Time Reborn,” reopening a debate supposedly settled by Einstein and his acolytes a century ago: whether time is real or an illusion. Meanwhile, other physicists have been arguing recently that the only way to understand the dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, and perhaps the mass of the newly discovered particle believed to be the Higgs boson as well, is to postulate that our universe is only one in an almost infinite ensemble of universes, each with different properties. The reality of time and the plurality of worlds are only two of the eternal (so to speak) questions. Bob Dylan once wrote a song, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” that consisted entirely, he said, of the first lines of songs he thought he would never have time to write. In that spirit I’d like to blurt out some of the Bohr-like questions about this vat of stars that I’ll never be able to answer before my own time runs away.

Is nature discrete or continuous? Is the universe infinite or finite? Is life inevitable, or is it a lucky accident? Will we ever find company in the cosmos?

Is the truth of the world to be found in the ways things change, like the river that you cannot step into twice, or the ways they remain the same, like the law of gravity or, indeed, the name of that river?

I could go on all day. Feel free to write in with your own. A final answer to any of these questions would be a landmark of human progress. But it might be in the nature of being human that we will never answer them but have to hug them both in a kind of Hegelian surrender. And so we live in the tension between opposites.

More here.

Birmingham River

Where’s Birmingham river? Sunk.
Which river was it? Two. More or less.

History: we’re on tribal ground. When they
moved in from the Trent, the first English

entered the holdings and the bodies of the people
who called the waters that kept them alive

Tame, the Dark River, these English spread their works
southward then westward, then all ways

for thirty-odd miles, up to the damp tips of the thirty-odd
weak headwaters of the Tame. By all of the Tame

they settled, and sat, named themselves after it:
Tomsaetan. And back down at Tamworth, where the river

almost began to amount to something,
the Mercian kings kept their state. Dark

because there’s hardly a still expanse of it
wide enough to catch the sky, the Dark River

mothered the Black Country and all but
vanished underneath it, seeping out from the low hills

by Dudley, by Upper Gornal, by Sedgley, by
Wolverhamption, by Bloxwich, dropping morosely

without a shelf or a race or a dip,
no more than a few feet every mile, fattened

a little from mean streams that join at,
Tipton, Bilston, Willenhall, Darlaston,
Read more »

Simon During in The Immanent Frame:

Is absolute secularity conceivable? The question arises from the paradoxical intuition that the secularization thesis is simultaneously both right and muddled. Perhaps the most fundamental problem with the broader secularization thesis (which I take to claim that, over the past half-millennium or so, Western society has undergone a systemic diminution of religious practice) is that it isn’t clear what the non-secular is. After all, it can be extended from those beliefs and practices that avowedly depend on religious revelation to those that affirm some form of transcendentalism, though they may make no room for God as such. But for a long time both radical atheists and Christian apologists have argued that what looks as if it is secular through and through may not, in fact, be secular at all. From this point of view, important elements of enlightened secularity in particular can be understood, not as Christianity’s overcoming, but as its displacement. Thus, for instance, in his Scholasticism and Politics (1938), Jacques Maritain, following Nietzsche, speaks of the “Christian leaven fermenting in the bosom of human history” as the source of democratic modernity. Here the secular, political concept of human equality is seen to have a Christian origin and to bear a continuing Christian charge, even though its purposes and contexts have changed.

Numerous applications of the displacement model of secularization are current, but here I will point to just one. It concerns philosophical anthropology. The argument is that certain post-Enlightenment concepts of the human (or of “man”) remain Christian in their deep structures. Of these, the most important is the philosophical anthropology of negation (to use Marcel Gauchet’s term), according to which human nature is not just appetitive but necessarily incomplete, that is to say, inadequate to its various ecologies and conditions, and for that reason beset by fear, uneasiness, anxiety, and so on. For those who accept the displacement model, this anthropology, even in its modern forms, remains dependent on the revealed doctrine that human nature as such is fallen. Philosophical anthropology is important for thinking about secularization because the secularization thesis often becomes a proxy for the argument that secularity places human nature at risk.