From The Register:
Mead said that we're all taught that there was a revolution in scientific thought that started with relativity and quantum mechanics. “Actually, that's not the case,” he said. “A revolution is when something goes clear around. And what happened starting in the first 25 years of the 20th century was that there was the beginning of a revolution, and it got stuck about a quarter of the way around.”
More here.
What's Genocide?
their high school principal
told me I couldn’t teach
poetry with profanity
so I asked my students,
“Raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Holocaust.”
in unison, their arms rose up like poisonous gas
then straightened out like an SS infantry
“Okay. Please put your hands down.
Now raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Rwandan genocide.”
blank stares mixed with curious ignorance
a quivering hand out of the crowd
half-way raised, like a lone survivor
struggling to stand up in Kigali
“Luz, are you sure about that?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Carlos—what’s genocide?”
they won’t let you hear the truth at school
if that person says “fuck”
can’t even talk about “fuck”
even though a third of your senior class
is pregnant.
I can’t teach an 18-year-old girl in a public school
how to use a condom that will save her life
and that of the orphan she will be forced
to give to the foster care system—
“Carlos, how many 13-year-olds do you know that are HIV-positive?”
“Honestly, none. But I do visit a shelter every Monday and talk with
six 12-year-old girls with diagnosed AIDS.”
while 4th graders three blocks away give little boys blowjobs during recess
I met an 11-year-old gang member in the Bronx who carries
a semi-automatic weapon to study hall so he can make it home
and you want me to censor my language
“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
your books leave out Emmett Till and Medgar Evers
call themselves “World History” and don’t mention
King Leopold or diamond mines
call themselves “Politics in the Modern World”
and don’t mention Apartheid
“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
you wonder why children hide in adult bodies
lie under light-color-eyed contact lenses
learn to fetishize the size of their asses
and simultaneously hate their lips
my students thought Che Guevara was a rapper
from East Harlem
still think my Mumia t-shirt is of Bob Marley
how can literacy not include Phyllis Wheatley?
schools were built in the shadows of ghosts
filtered through incest and grinding teeth
molded under veils of extravagant ritual
“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
“Roselyn, how old was she? Cuántos años tuvo tu madre cuando se murió?”
“My mother had 32 years when she died. Ella era bellísima.”
…what’s genocide?
they’ve moved from sterilizing “Boriqua” women
injecting indigenous sisters with Hepatitis B,
now they just kill mothers with silent poison
stain their loyalty and love into veins and suffocate them
…what’s genocide?
Ridwan’s father hung himself
in the box because he thought his son
was ashamed of him
…what’s genocide?
Maureen’s mother gave her
skin lightening cream
the day before she started the 6th grade
…what’s genocide?
she carves straight lines into her
beautiful brown thighs so she can remember
what it feels like to heal
…what’s genocide?
…what’s genocide?
“Carlos, what’s genocide?”
“Luz, this…
this right here…
is genocide.”
.
Jerry Z. Muller in Foreign Affairs:
Inequality is indeed increasing almost everywhere in the postindustrial capitalist world. But despite what many on the left think, this is not the result of politics, nor is politics likely to reverse it, for the problem is more deeply rooted and intractable than generally recognized. Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it — because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords. Despite what many on the right think, however, this is a problem for everybody, not just those who are doing poorly or those who are ideologically committed to egalitarianism — because if left unaddressed, rising inequality and economic insecurity can erode social order and generate a populist backlash against the capitalist system at large.
More here.
On a June day in 1598, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, nearly three thousand patrons file into The Curtain, a London playhouse on the outskirts of the city, along the Shoreditch road. They wait for the actors of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to take the stage for a hotly anticipated new play by William Shakespeare, the sequel to his enormously popular Henry IV. An instant hit in 1596 and one of the playwright’s most performed in the four hundred years following its premiere, the first part of Henry IV stages the history of England before the Wars of the Roses. King Henry IV struggles to hold on to his throne, in part because of political rebellion, but also because of concerns about his rogue son and heir, Prince Hal. While the play’s historical insights no doubt appealed to Shakespeare’s audience, the real reason for the play’s success lies with Sir John Falstaff, a “villainous, abominable misleader of youth” and Shakespeare’s best-loved comic creation. Falstaff, a portly, drunken knight, is corrupter of the young Prince Hal and hero of the play’s tavern underworld. Known for his drunken antics, Falstaff eventually attracted as much scholarly attention as the solemn and tragic Hamlet.
more from Rebecca Lemon at Lapham’s Quarterly here.
It isn’t easy to even think about Edna St. Vincent Millay’s body of work without also thinking about her—well—actual body. This is entirely her doing. Born in Maine in 1892, she was blessed with not only uncommon genius but the romantic Gibson Girl looks prized by her era—winsome face, comely curves, heavy masses of auburn hair—and she wasn’t afraid to use them. In the spring of 1912, just 20, she put the finishing touches on her epic poem “Renascence” and submitted it to the prestigious Lyric Year poetry contest. When the editor, a man, responded with a letter praising her verse, she replied with a photograph of herself. He asked if he could keep it. Let’s just say Millay placed fourth in the Lyric Year poetry contest but won the war. Published alongside the victors in a commemorative anthology, her poem incited a public sensation that biographer Daniel Mark Epstein ranks on par with that of “The Waste Land” and “Howl”: readers fought the verdict in letters and newspaper columns; the winner recused himself from the awards banquet.
more from Kate Bolick at Poetry here.
Duras writes: “Published literature represents only one percent of what is written in the world. It seems worthwhile to talk about the rest, an abyss, a black night out of which comes that ‘bizarre thing’, literature, and into which almost all of it disappears again without a trace.” I can imagine the whoop of joy Milutis must have hollered when he read the term Duras uses for this Gehenna of Letters: “virtual literature”. Failure, A Writer’s Life is a peregrination through the unpublishable, the unreadable, the abandoned, the abortive, the illegible and the indecipherable. He takes in both the esoteric (Charles Fort, HP Lovecraft, the brilliant Christian Bök, who has “written” a poem into the genetic code of a virus) and the canonical (Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, John Ashbery), as well as digressing to cover photography, film, spam, archives and the nature of the digital text more generally. Duras may have imagined her “virtual literature” as a sealed, silent place of the utterly lost; we, nowadays, have her abyss in perpetual, blaring, online Technicolor.
more from Stuart Kelly at The Scotsman here.
Raymond Tallis at the website of the Institute of Art and Ideas:
But there is something else, which is absolutely central; namely that the unfolding of time appears to be one way. This is in contrast to any direction in space – or any line marking a direction or trajectory in space. The line from A to B is also from B to A; any path going from a lower point to a higher point is also a path going from a higher point to a lower point. The apparent absence of this reversibility is all that there is to the direction of time. The link between earlier time t1 and later time t2 can be traversed in one direction- earlier-to-later – but not in the other direction – later-to-earlier. The path from t1 to t2 is inescapable while the path from t2 to t1 is blocked.
The hunt has therefore been on for something that will give time a direction in this very restricted sense of moving “forward” but not “backward”. This something will account for the difference between time and its spatial companions, a difference that will account for the fact that we can wander at will in space but not in time.
More here.
A poem by the great Gwendolyn Brooks:
The Pool Players. 
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Q. How about the seven pool players in the poem “We Real Cool”?
A. They have no pretensions to any glamor. They are supposedly dropouts, or at least they're in the poolroom when they should possibly be in school, since they're probably young enough, or at least those I saw were when I looked in a poolroom, and they. . . . First of all, let me tell you how that's supposed to be said, because there's a reason why I set it out as I did. These are people who are essentially saying, “Kilroy is here. We are.” But they're a little uncertain of the strength of their identity.
The “We”—you're supposed to stop after the “We” and think about their validity, and of course there's no way for you to tell whether it should be said softly or not, I suppose, but I say it rather softly because I want to represent their basic uncertainty, which they don't bother to question every day, of course.
Q. Are you saying that the form of this poem, then, was determined by the colloquial rhythm you were trying to catch?
A. No, determined by my feeling about these boys, these young men.
Q. These short lines, then, are your own invention at this point? You don't have any literary model in mind; you're not thinking of Eliot or Pound or anybody in particular . . . ?
A. My gosh, no! I don't even admire Pound, but I do like, for instance, Eliot's “Prufrock” and The Waste Land, “Portrait of a Lady,” and some others of those earlier poems. But nothing of the sort ever entered my mind. When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
from “An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks”.
More here. (Note: At least one daily post throughout February will be devoted to African American History Month)
Dawn
It is truly good
to have colors disappear at the end of each day
for me who has a heart so joyfully excited
waiting for them to be born afresh tomorrow morning
My dear one, who has not shown yourself to me
though you are believed to be in this space
That I cannot see you now is also good
for me anxiously waiting for the new morning light –
like I wait for the fir tree, all alone,
to gradually start to glow
casting its shadow like a wingless bird
in the chilly air that allows a faint view of just the curvature of the earth
.
by Kiyoko Nagase
from Bara Shishuh
William Saletan in Slate:
Wrong. Drones kill fewer civilians, as a percentage of total fatalities, than any other military weapon. They’re the worst form of warfare in the history of the world, except for all the others.
Start with that U.N. report. Afghan civilian casualties caused by the United States and its allies didn’t go up last year. They fell 46 percent. Specifically, civilian casualties from “aerial attacks” fell 42 percent. Why? Look at the incident featured in the U.N. report (Page 31) as an example of sloppy targeting. “I heard the bombing at approximately 4:00 am,” says an eyewitness. “After we found the dead and injured girls, the jet planes attacked us with heavy machine guns and another woman was killed.”
Jet planes. Machine guns. Bombing. Drones aren’t the problem. Bombs are the problem.
Look at last year’s tally of air missionsin Afghanistan. Drone strikes went way up. According to the U.N. report, drones released 212 more weapons over Afghanistan in 2012 than they did in 2011. Meanwhile, manned airstrikes went down. Result? Fifteen more civilians died in drone strikes, and 124 fewer died in manned aircraft operations. That’s a net saving of 109 lives.
More here.
Today is the 106th anniversary of Auden's birth. Here are two documentaries about him.
[For Robin Varghese.]
From Columbia Magazine:
In his new book, The Age of Insight, University Professor Eric Kandel explores the interface of art and neuroscience through portraits by three turn-of-the-century Austrian painters.
One of the cornerstones of psychoanalytic thought is that the way to explore other people’s unconscious minds is to first explore your own. The Interpretation of Dreams is essentially Freud’s self-analysis. Klimt never painted any self-portraits or even portraits of men. He painted women exclusively.
More here.
Piers Brendon in Literary Review:
Of course, as Dalrymple acknowledges, history does not repeat itself exactly. The first British assault on Afghanistan was unique in important respects, not least in being the opening gambit in the Great Game against Russia – the Lion's century-long struggle to secure India's northwest frontier against the Bear. It is Dalrymple's achievement to elucidate this distinctive initial episode through a treasure trove of original sources.
More here.
Bryn Williams in Slate:
Each chapter offers a window into a specific cultural practice. These chapters typically follow this script: He posits a difference between traditional and modern society, cherry-picks a few examples from ethnographic or archaeological sources, and provides an evaluation about potential benefits (and/or drawbacks) of the traditional compared with the modern approach. The choice of topics is eclectic: Danger, religion, diet, dispute resolution, childrearing, linguistic diversity, and the treatment of the elderly all get a hearing.
More here.
Philip Hensher in The Independent:
Since 5 February, Bangladesh has been transfixed by this ongoing, immense protest. Hundreds of thousands have occupied Shahbagh Square in protest at a verdict passed by the International Crimes Tribunal on war crimes committed during the genocide which preceded the founding of the country in 1971. One of those found guilty, Abdul Kalam Azad, was sentenced to death. Another, however, Abdul Quader Mollah, the assistant secretary general of a Muslim party which collaborated with the genocidaires, the Jamaat–e-Islami, was given life imprisonment. The protests which followed, and are still continuing, are led by intelligent and liberal people; they are, however, calling with great urgency for the death penalty to be passed on Mollah and other convicted war criminals.
The genocide is still too little known about in the West. It is, moreover, the subject of shocking degrees of denial among partisan polemicists and manipulative historians. Before 1971, Bangladesh was East Pakistan, detached from the main body of the country. The founders had believed that the unity of religion would bind it together. Over time, however, the incompatibility of secular cultures had grown overwhelming. Parts of the Pakistani rulers regarded the Bengalis with open racist contempt.
More here.
No other chapter of our science, including cosmology, has been more exciting in recent decades than genetics. And none has been remotely as portentous for the kinds of lives our descendants will lead. Some of the moral and political problems which the new technology presents are in the future. If it becomes possible to clone human beings, for example, or radically to alter the chromosomes of an early foetus to make a child more intelligent or less aggressive, then people will have to decide whether these interventions should be forbidden or not. But many of the problems are already upon us. Tests, for example, can identify genetic predictors of disease or of predisposition to disease. So we already face difficult questions about how far and when these tests should be allowed, or required, or forbidden; and how far employers and insurance companies should be allowed to ask for the results. Critics of genetic testing have cited various kinds of harm which might result from dissemination of its results.
more from the recently deceased Ronald Dworkin at Prospect Magazine here.
Orlando, written as a romp, a love letter, a gay book in every sense of the word, turned out to be the engine of an exploding freedom in her style. Writing Orlando did Woolf good. Begun as a gift to Sackville-West it became a gift to herself. It is the most joyful of her books. Woolf’s mind was always first-rate, but when she came to write her next book, A Room of One’s Own (1929), she carried across the full-heartedness of Orlando. A Room of One’s Ownis a masterpiece because it is more than a polemic; when she writes about women, about men, about the interplay of the mind, about creativity – above all, about writing – all her thoughts are steeped in feeling. The tract is much more than an argument; it is a passion for life as it could be lived. Sackville-West, who was not a great writer or a deep thinker, and certainly not a faithful lover, released something in Woolf – something that had been pressing at the bars since Mrs Dalloway (1925). The quality of mind that Woolf (following Coleridge) called “androgyny” is really an adventure of the spirit (think Emily Dickinson).
more from Jeanette Winterson at The New Statesman here.
We’ve known for a while that dung beetles always roll straight, without doubling back. “If they don’t roll straight,” said Eric Warrant, a co-author of Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation, “something is wrong.” Yet how beetles manage this, even when they hit a road bump or get temporarily off course, was, until recently, a mystery. The researchers eventually found that dung beetles orient themselves by day with sunlight and by following moonbeams at night. But what continued to intrigue Dr. Dacke, the study’s leader, and her colleagues was how the dung beetles stay their course even on dark nights when the moon is new. What they found was that the earthbound dung beetle can also steer by the stars, using star clusters or the band of the Milky Way as a compass. Our tiniest astronomers, dung beetles are the only known insect — and the only known animal save seals, birds, and people — to navigate by watching the galaxy. If most of human civilization has been designed around the avoidance of dung, the rest has been designed around the avoidance of insects. Insects with a fancy for excrement, like the dung beetle, are even more anathema than many parasites, like mosquitoes.
more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.
Forever
Forever some customer happy to sing along with the supermarket muzak, no matter how hackneyed or crass.
Forever the plangent sound of a motorcycle in the early hours, conjuring a world you once had access to.
Forever the young couple shutting the front door, leaving to conjecture what their next move may be.
Forever the van driver slowing down to check a house number against a delivery invoice.
Forever an old boy on a rickety bike with a loyal following of one terrier-type mongrel.
Forever the husband skulking outside the boutique while his wife seeks approval from a mirror.
Forever the kind who believe in God (a little) and horoscopes (a lot) and cannot resist a buy-one-get-one offer.
Forever those with a lump in the throat at every reconciliation scene, the theme music’s pathos never failing to work its way straight to the left atrium of the heart.
Forever the cleaning woman tapping the pub window with a coin and the helmeted courier leaning his gob to the intercom.
Forever a caller so long on hold she wonders should she redial and brave the bossy touch-tone menu again.
Forever a youngster hacking the grass with bat or stick in what serves as a green space near the housing estate.
