From The Paris Review:

John was a true poet-critic, in whose work poem and essay inform one another and sometimes change places. One mark of their fellow traveling is a shared commitment to the art of explanation. The basic principles of the sugar-cube story are everywhere in his prose, especially in his perpetual delight at the precision and elegance of a good definition. His virtuoso guide to poetic form, Rhyme’s Reason, begins by telling us that “The study of rhetoric distinguishes between tropes, or figures of meaning such as metaphor and metonymy, and schemes, or surface patterns of words. Poetry is a matter of trope; and verse, of scheme or design.” Could it be said in fewer words? Another Hollanderian impulse is expressed here too, his love of taxonomy, dividing a subject into molecular simples. Many of his great essays make their sense of fundamental topics—like the making of refrains, or asking questions in poetry, or answering them—by counting the possibilities. In “Poetic Answers,” an answer can be a fact, a promise, an imperative; it can bring closure, or refuse it; and on and on, with examples drawn from anywhere and everywhere in English poetry.

If you read “Blue Wine,” you’ll see the same mind at work, or at play. (John loved to consider and confuse the two.) The poem got its start on a visit to Saul Steinberg’s house, where he saw a line of curiously labeled, clear bottles arrayed on a window sill, all filled with the same blue liquid. The poem’s root question is, What is that stuff? and each of its eleven sections offers a hypothesis, indeed, several hypotheses. Some “wise old wine people” speculate that it is red in the cask, blue in the light, the opposite of blood; or that it is no particular blue, but the cosmic blue of generality itself. Then again, it may have been made by vintners after a recipe in Plutarch’s lost essay “On Blue Wine.” Or again, perhaps it turned blue in the cask at the laugh of a Zen master, who posed its surprising color to his students as a koan. Or it is German, Das Rheinblau; or French, Château la Tour d’Eau; or Romanian, “the funny old / Half-forgotten Vin Albastru.” And so on: the poem is giddy with is own answers, its self-begetting explanations.

Of course, as Wittgenstein reminds us, in one of John’s favorite aphorisms, all explanations come to an end somewhere. It was important to how he understood his own career that somewhere along the line he turned away from “essayistic speculation” and began to write “less discursively, more puzzlingly”—so he told The Paris Review in 1985. The explanations, like many in “Blue Wine,” become as likely to be questions of their own.

More here. (Note: My co-author Sara Suleri and I greatly benefited from Rhyme's Reason during our attempts to translate Ghalib. We are deeply saddened by this loss.)

Toby Ash interviews Mark Blyth at Five Books:

The title of this interview is nothing if not ambitious. So, in a nutshell, can you tell us how the world’s political economy does actually work?

Well, it doesn’t work according to the textbooks. If you look at economic textbooks, the whole world is meant to work according to the logic of differential calculus; there are these reciprocal relationships – one side goes up and one side goes down. But deep within it there’s a paradox. On the one side you have Adam Smith, where everyone is pursuing their own self-interest leading to an outcome which is better than any of them could have intended. On the other, you have John Maynard Keynes. Today Keynes is thought of as someone who just talks about deficit spending and so on, but that’s just complete rubbish. Keynes’s central message is that individual rational action can be collectively disastrous. So, if you have a series of economic models in a text book where everything balances out, it’s much more attuned to the world working the way that Smith would like to tell us.

But what if it works the other way? That basically there are fallacies of composition and collective action problems at the base of everything, which means that your own individual best first strategy can lead to everybody having a second best outcome. That’s how I think about the world. Take climate change, for example. Everybody agrees that it’s a problem – unless you’re a crank. Why is it then so difficult to do something about it? Because everybody pursuing their own self-interest can be a really good thing, and it can lead to lots of innovation. But it can also lead to the fragilities that brought us the financial crisis and our inability to solve climate change. So where’s the space between Smith and Keynes? To me, that is where you should look for how the world works.

More here.

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad at Al Jazeera:

It was inevitable that any conversation in Britain on foreign intervention would take place in the shadow of the Iraq War. To sell that war to a reluctant public, Tony Blair’s government fabricated a threat, presented it as imminent and prescribed urgent action. Humanitarian rationales were added afterward. The threat, as many had suspected, proved false, and the war, as everyone feared, created a human catastrophe. The British public, which had opposed the war, felt betrayed. A lesson was learned.

Both sides invoked Iraq in last week’s parliamentary debate. But the only lessons that were drawn were politically serviceable ones. In insisting that Britain must not get involved in “another Middle Eastern war,” the Labour Party implied that Iraq was a disaster due less to Labour’s mistakes than to the intractability of the Middle East. In blaming Blair’s “dodgy dossier,” the Conservatives ignored their own party’s complicity in sanctioning an unnecessary war. Both overlooked the fact that just two years ago, with near unanimity, the House of Commons approved the use of force against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. The lessons of Iraq were no less valid then and the current situation in Syria is direr.

With the exception of some fringe figures, neither side in the debate denies that the regime’s atrocities are ongoing. This wasn’t the case in Iraq: in 2003, Saddam Hussein’s worst atrocities were more than a decade behind him. But last week’s debate in parliament wasn’t concerned with human rights — it couldn’t have been, since the British government was selling chemical agents to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as late as January 2012. The focus was narrower: on the use of chemical weapons in defiance of the “red line” that President Obama claimed the Assad regime could not cross. The evidence for their use, past and present, is substantial, but parliament showed greater caution than it had in the case of Iraq, where only possession was alleged. Because of “Blair's trickery,” writes journalist Brian Whitaker, “the level of proof required for military intervention is not merely high (as it should be) but unrealistically high.”

More here.

Night Psalm

it’s a honky tonk that illumines the night
it’s the keyboard of a honky tonk
down at the feet of things
at the feet of the lampposts
at the acrid feet of the olive trees
it’s a metronome
at the sweeter feet of the lemongrove
at the vlei’s little slippers of water
down at the bottom of the reeds
where the lilies lilt on stilettos
it’s a rickety old honky tonk
maybe a loom
the spool and the shuttle
of a cranky old loom
or a smithy’s tinker and tilt
down in the sump of the night
or a sowing machine with a tapping heel
that jig-jigs yonder in the quag
it’s cheeky jazz on bell tongues
it’s in the hoof of every culm
sans a tune
without amen
it’s a honky tonk
it’s a clapper key
it’s a speckling under the dewclaw
it echoes from under the lavender
they’re foot spoons
they’re foot raps
of crickets and of toads
they’re the ones that are a-tappin’ and a-tickin’
unceasing in the mottle of the grass
to this I hum
to this I strum
to this I swingle
my night psalm
.

by Marlene van Niekerk
from Poetry International, 2013
translation by author

István Aranyosi in the Boston Review:

Richard Dawkins is under attack—at least if the recent tide of opinion pieces targeting him is any measure. Accusers allege that Dawkins’s recent tweets exhibit anti-Muslim bigotry.

Now, I am not a fan or follower of Dawkins qua religious or theological thinker, for the simple reason that his writings fall short of the kind of argumentative sophistication that we analytic philosophers are trained for. If I want to read careful atheist thinkers, I read people like Michael Tooley, Graham Oppy, Quentin Smith, or Adolf Grünbaum.

Yet in spite of this and of the fact that some of Dawkins’s tweets are insensitive and crude, the accusation that he promotes anti-Muslim bigotry or xenophobia is misplaced. In fact, I think that a significant part of what such bigotry usually involves—namely, viewing Muslims as a uniform, monolithic block, coupled with an attempt at racializing Islam—is more characteristic of Dawkins’s accusers.

Here is one of Dawkins’s tweets: “Mehdi Hasan admits to believing Muhamed flew to heaven on a winged horse. And New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist.” It is obvious what is wrong with Dawkins’s claim: Hasan’s religious beliefs are irrelevant to his journalistic activities. It is what we call a “fallacy of relevance” in informal logic. Why do some commentators feel the need to also add that it is racist, or Islamophobic, or anti-Muslim? Just because Hasan is Muslim? That would be another instance of the same fallacy, at least if Dawkins were ready to say something similar of a Christian journalist who happens to believe in, say, the Immaculate Conception. And he is. Do the accusers know he is? I assume they should, given that Dawkins has for a long time been a fierce critic especially of the Christian faith.

More here.

Jeffrey Gettleman in the NYT Magazine:

Kagame has made indisputable progress fighting the single greatest ill in Africa: poverty. Rwanda is still very poor — the average Rwandan lives on less than $1.50 a day — but it is a lot less poor than it used to be. Kagame’s government has reduced child mortality by 70 percent; expanded the economy by an average of 8 percent annually over the past five years; and set up a national health-insurance program — which Western experts had said was impossible in a destitute African country. Progressive in many ways, Kagame has pushed for more women in political office, and today Rwanda has a higher percentage of them in Parliament than any other country. His countless devotees, at home and abroad, say he has also delicately re-engineered Rwandan society to defuse ethnic rivalry, the issue that exploded there in 1994 and that stalks so many African countries, often dragging them into civil war.

Kagame may be the most complicated leader in Africa. The question is not so much about his results but his methods. He has a reputation for being merciless and brutal, and as the accolades have stacked up, he has cracked down on his own people and covertly supported murderous rebel groups in neighboring Congo. At least, that is what a growing number of critics say, including high-ranking United Nations officials and Western diplomats, not to mention the countless Rwandan dissidents who have recently fled. They argue that Kagame’s tidy, up-and-coming little country, sometimes described as the Singapore of Africa, is now one of the most straitjacketed in the world. Few people inside Rwanda feel comfortable speaking freely about the president, and many aspects of life are dictated by the government — Kagame’s administration recently embarked on an “eradication campaign” of all grass-roofed huts, which the government meticulously counted (in 2009 there were 124,671). In some areas of the country, there are rules, enforced by village commissars, banning people from dressing in dirty clothes or sharing straws when drinking from a traditional pot of beer, even in their own homes, because the government considers it unhygienic. Many Rwandans told me that they feel as if their president is personally watching them. “It’s like there’s an invisible eye everywhere,” said Alice Muhirwa, a member of an opposition political party. “Kagame’s eye.”

Brad Plumer in the Washington Post:

3) Elite opinion on war plays a huge role in shaping public opinion. Intervention in Syria is pretty unpopular with the wider American public right now. But it won’t necessarily stay that way. A lot could depend on the words and actions of lawmakers and other elites.

At least, that’s one implication of a 2007 paper by Adam Berinsky of MIT: “When political elites disagree as to the wisdom of intervention, the public divides as well. But when elites come to a common interpretation of a political reality, the public gives them great latitude to wage war.” (See also Berinsky’s book on this topic.)

4) Broadly speaking, military interventions have a poor track record in achieving humanitarian goals. True, the Obama administration isn’t framing a strike on Syria as a humanitarian endeavor (their stated goal is to enforce norms against the use of chemical weapons). Still, Erica Chenoweth of the University of Denver has been highlighting a couple of striking papers on the consequences of intervention:

–A 2002 paper by Patrick Ragan found that outside military interventions don’t typically shorten the duration of civil conflicts. “Regardless of how the intervention is conceived – or empirically operationalized—there seems to be no mix of strategies that lead to shorter expected durations.”

–A 2012 paper by Reed Wood, Jason Kathman and Stephen Gent found that outside military interventions on behalf of rebel factions can actually increase government killings of civilians:

Daniel Bosch in The Daily Beast:

Robert Pinsky’s new anthology with commentary, Singing School, argues that the medium of the poet is the reader’s body, that words and punctuation and tonal manipulations are means to ends felt not in mind but in the mouth, ears, lungs, and trunk of the oral performer of a poem. What good is served, Pinsky would ask, by so much talk about whether or not we have “understood” a work of art, if what we mean by “understanding” largely ignores our embodied experience of that work? Every word of Singing School is pitched against the decapitation of poetry’s head from its body.

Singing School is so lean and mean, any précis calls for a spoiler alert. Its title is lifted from William Butler Yeats’ 1926 poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” and the infamously negative couplet: “Nor is there singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence.” A brief preface orients the reader to the kinds of attention Pinsky will advocate, and he divides the book into four sections or “courses” of 17 to 25 poems, each deftly-curated to tease out the complexity of an important on artistic theme: “Freedom,” “Listening,” “Form,” and “Dreaming Things Up.”

As you will see below, Pinsky spins his picks concisely: the total pedagogical apparatus amounts to just 35 of 222 pages (and many of these pages are full of verse). A lot of the poems in Singing School are canonical, and this fact will make the book a powerful choice for teachers of any high school or early college survey of principal literary genres. Middle school students would love it, too, but most middle school teachers would wrongly assume the poems too difficult. They are only difficult to explain, not to love.

More here.

Matthew Yglesias in Slate:

A study published last week in the journal Science shows that the stress of worrying about finances can impair cognitive functions in a meaningful way. The authors gathered evidence from both low-income Americans (at a New Jersey shopping mall) and the global poor (looking at farmers in Tamil Nadu, India) and found that just contemplating a projected financial decision impacted performance on spatial and reasoning tests.

Among Americans, they found that low-income people asked to ponder an expensive car repair did worse on cognitive-function tests than low-income people asked to consider cheaper repairs or than higher-income people faced with either scenario. To study the global poor, the researchers looked at performance on cognitive tests before and after the harvest among sugarcane farmers. Since it’s a cash crop rather than a food one, the harvest signals a change in financial security but not a nutritional one. They found that the more secure postharvest farmers performed better than the more anxious preharvest ones.

These findings complement the already extensive literature of the negative physical impacts of low socioeconomic status, reinforcing the point that the harms of poverty extend beyond the direct consequences of material deprivation.

More here.

Terrance Tomkow at Tomkow.com:

…the question, What are the laws of nature? may be stated thus: What are the fewest and simplest assumptions, which being granted, the whole existing order of nature would result? Another mode of stating it would be thus: What are the fewest general propositions from which all the uniformities which exist in the universe might be deductively inferred? J.S.Mill, 1843•

… if we knew everything, we should still want to systematize our knowledge as a deductive system, and the general axioms in that system would be the fundamental laws of nature” Frank Ramsey, 1928•

“a contingent generalization is a law of nature if and only if it appears as a theorem (or axiom) in each of the true deductive systems that achieves a best combination of simplicity and strength” David Lewis 1973 •

Vereshchagin & Vitányi,2004•

The quotes from Mill, Ramsey and Lewis above express the what philosphers call the “ Best System Analysis” of Laws.

BSA is probably the most widely accepted answer we have to the question, “What is it to be a Law of nature?” Even so, it is notoriously fraught with unanswered questions. A short list:

Can the account properly distinguish accidental from nomological regularities?

Can it explain the connection between the laws of nature, counterfactuals and dispositions?

Why should we count only generalizations as laws, given that many scientific principles do not obviously take this form? Can't singular statements describing, say, fundamental constants be laws too?

What is the connection between this deductive account of laws and our inductive methods of discovering them?

How does BSA accommodate the existence of probabilistic laws?

What do Mill and Lewis mean when they speak of “simplicity”? Isn't simplicity in the eye of the beholder? If so how can it be a subjective matter what the laws of nature are? Or, if simplicity is just a measure of shortness of our sentences, doesn't that make law-hood a matter of what language we happen to speak?

And, anyway, why should we think that the laws of nature must be simple in any sense?

In this post I want to raise different and, I think, more fundamental problems for BSA and provide an alternative theory of lawhood based on Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT). This new theory is precisely captured in the theorem of AIT that appears above. Don't worry if you don't understand it just now. AIT is a recent development and a novelty to most philosophers. Before we are done, I hope to have explained to you what this equation means and to have convinced you of its deep significance.

More here.

Here’s how my story begins: At the end of August 1966, the young Russian poet Joseph Brodsky was in low spirits. He was having trouble readjusting to Leningrad life on his return from 18 months of exile doing hard labor near the Arctic Circle. Brodsky’s crime was “having a worldview damaging to the state” and “social parasitism . . . except for the writing of awful poems.” There were romantic troubles besides. A colleague was worried, and kept in touch with him while traveling. One night he telephoned Brodsky from Lithuania, where he was staying with friends in Vilnius. “Let him come over here. We are all in a good mood here,” urged the Lithuanian host, Ramūnas Katilius. Brodsky arrived before noon the next day, and even held two readings at the apartment during his stay. Thus began a lifelong friendship with the Katilius family and a long romance with Lithuania, a comparative refuge during the dying years of the Soviet empire. Eventually, Brodsky gained recognition as Russia’s greatest postwar poet and, in exile, a controversial titan on the New York literary scene who taught at several U.S. universities.

more from Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven here.

If, as C. S. Lewis claimed, the old gods die to faith but rise as allegory, then old myths die to religion but rise as fantasy. Thanks to The Golden Bough and its sibling, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, twentieth-century scholars had a field day with medieval romance, combing its enigmatic plots for remnants of pagan lore. These prove to be legion: along with the fairy challenge scenario, they include magic fountains, spinning castles, shape-shifting hags that turn into beautiful maidens, and beheading games that pit a mortal against a supernatural being, who has the unfair advantage of being able to saunter off with his head in his hands. Many of those avid source-hunters — unlike the reading public then or now — were all but immune to the appeal of romance itself. While they pined for lost archetypes, be they Irish, Welsh or Breton, they sneered at French storytellers who had the audacity just to tell stories, rather than painstakingly reassembling the shards of a lost religion. But that critical phase has had its day. Medievalists now prefer to explore the artistry of a Chrétien de Troyes or Marie de France, leaving the archaeology of their tales aside.

more from Barbara Newman at Berfrois here.

Writers on the brain and the mind tend to divide into Spocks and Kirks, either embracing the idea that consciousness can be located in a web of brain tissue or debunking it. For the past decade, at least, the Spocks have been running the Enterprise: there are books on your brain and music, books on your brain and storytelling, books that tell you why your brain makes you want to join the Army, and books that explain why you wish that Bar Refaeli were in the barracks with you. The neurological turn has become what the “cultural” turn was a few decades ago: the all-purpose non-explanation explanation of everything. Thirty years ago, you could feel loftily significant by attaching the word “culture” to anything you wanted to inspect: we didn’t live in a violent country, we lived in a “culture of violence”; we didn’t have sharp political differences, we lived in a “culture of complaint”; and so on. In those days, Time, taking up the American pursuit of pleasure, praised Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism”; now Time has a cover story on happiness and asks whether we are “hardwired” to pursue it. Myths depend on balance, on preserving their eternal twoness, and so we have on our hands a sudden and severe Kirkist backlash.

more from Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker here.

I ask the reader to join me in an excursion of otsoggery [1] that begins in a steamy Japanese dystopia and ends in a suburb of Zürich, having at its center one of the great Latin poets. This expedition stepped off with a note on the American Literary Translators Association online chatroom: “I just finished [Haruki Murakami’s 2010 novel] 1Q84,” Dennis Dybeck wrote,

and was struck by what seemed an odd quote from C. G. Jung. In the novel, an enigmatic character, Tumaru, asks an unfortunate private investigator he’s about to painfully assassinate whether he’s ever heard of an inscription Jung carved in stone. “Cold or not, God is present.” It’s a striking scene with the question almost a meditative consolation for victim, assassin, and the reader, as well. Googling it this morning, it seems that “Cold or not, God is present” is a deliberate misquote of an ancient phrase Jung is said to have found quoted in Erasmus. “Vocatus atque non vocatus, deus aderit.” (Called or not, god is present.) I’m wondering if anyone knows how the pun is handled in the original Japanese.

more from J. Kates at Harvard Review here.

From Smithsonian:

What they don’t tell you about Varanasi, probably India’s holiest city, is that in addition to being filled with sacred temples, mischievous monkeys and bearded ascetics, it’s also full of waste of all kinds: mountains of fetid cow and other, much worse kinds of dung, muddy tributaries of dubious origin, mounds of fast-decaying flowers, shards of shattered clay cups. As I left the utter squalor of Varanasi, a permanent and ancient city of four million, for a temporary religious celebration of even more people nearby, I could only imagine the enormous crowds, inescapable filth and utter chaos that it would produce.

…In the mythology of the Kumbh Mela, gods and demons fought for 12 days over a pitcher (kumbh) of nectar of immortality from the primordial ocean, and the nectar spilled onto the earth at four different places, including Allahabad. The gathering (mela) takes place every three years at one of the four locales in a 12-year cycle—a day of the gods’ time corresponds to a year of human time—with the largest (maha) celebration in Allahabad. The first written record of its occurrence dates to the seventh century A.D. I arrived by taxi at the Kumbh at sunset, expecting throngs of cars, cows and human beings blocking all access points. Instead I glided comfortably into my camp, which sat on a hilltop. I looked out over the fleeting city before me: makeshift shelters constructed on the floodplain of a river that was sure to overflow again in a few months. The soundtrack consisted of dissonant chords of shrill songs, snippets of amped-up holy recitations, a distorted line from a dramatic performance of an Indian epic and the constant rumble of millions of people cooking, chatting, snoring and singing. The horizon was dark and smoky red, with colorful flickers of light piercing the haze in orderly, geometric rows that stretched as far as I could see in three directions. I’d come to witness the spectacle for myself, but also to meet a group of Harvard researchers from the university’s Graduate School of Design. Led by Rahul Mehrotra, an architect from Mumbai before he went stateside to teach, they would closely analyze this unparalleled feat of spontaneous urban organization. “We call this a pop-up megacity,” said Mehrotra, a bearded 54-year-old. “It’s a real city, but it’s built in just a few weeks to instantly accommodate tens of millions of residents and visitors. It’s fascinating in its own right, of course. But our main interest is in what can we learn from this city that we can then apply to designing and building all kinds of other pop-up megacities like it. Can what we see here teach us something that will help the next time the world has to build refugee camps or emergency settlements?”

More here.

From DelanceyPlace:

“On October 29, 1692, Daniel Defoe, merchant, pamphleteer, and future best-selling author of Robinson Crusoe, was committed to King's Bench Prison in London because he owed more than 17,000 pounds and could not pay his debts. Before Defoe was declared bankrupt, he had undertaken such far-flung ventures as underwriting marine insurance, importing wine from Portugal, buying a diving bell used to search for buried treasure, and investing in some seventy civet cats, whose musk secretions were prized for the manufacture of perfume.

…”Typically, creditors obtained a writ of seizure of the debtor's assets. (Historians record that Defoe's civet cats were rounded up by the sheriff's men.) If the assets were insufficient to settle the debt, another writ would send the bankrupt to prison, from which he could win release only by coming to terms with his creditors. Defoe had no fewer than 140 creditors, but he managed to negotiate his freedom in February 1693, though he would continue to evade debt collectors for the next fifteen years. His misadventures later informed Robinson Crusoe (1719), whose fictional protagonist faces financial ruin and expresses remorse at pursuing 'projects and undertakings beyond my reach' and ending up 'the willful agent of all my own miseries.'

…”Defoe's thrice-weekly newspaper, A Review of the State of the English Nation, reported on the progress of the bill and served as its most authoritative advocate. The government, looking to drum up support, purchased and distributed copies, increasing its paid circulation to fifteen hundred. The act was understood as an emergency measure to restore commerce; it was to remain in force for just three years.”

More here.

Country Life
.
.
Sowing a row of early wonder
beets, let's say, or a border
of nasturtiums, you stop
to wonder where you're traveling
by knee.
Into the August tool-shed musk
into a fermenting apple.

There goes the plow sealing
with a new two-foot snowbank
the driveway you cleared all morning.
There go the geese back to the lake
after their dusk feeding
on corn stubble:
it must be March:
next they'll go north to nest.
And if you lie flat and silent
you can hear the suburbs coming
on their elbows.

The stones dance in place.
On one of them a mole is knocking
but it won't come out, this
is its day for dancing.
.

by William Matthews
from Sleek for the Long Flight
White Pine Press, 1988