Her Copy of the Epic

That afternoon I held the frayed edges
of my mother’s college Odyssey.
I touched her graphite in the margins, and
I felt the cheap acid paper of Fitzgerald’s
1962 translation. All edges become curves.

I read what Homer said of young Telemakhos,
“The son is rare who measures with his father,”
and the comment she left in a hand that has not changed,
or not much, “descent from a super-race?”
likewise men lag behind their works, their inventions.

Above the suture, the needle’s widening eye –
I had spent my Saturday wandering
through the bookstores in the Square,
reading dust jackets, trying to think
a thought so big you could fit your life through it.

My eyes on the nymph at the violin,
case open for homage. We’re more than a stone’s throw from rocky
soiled Ithaka. All hands on the bowstring
my hands can’t pull. She bows into her applause, the clink
of nickels, above which I can’t raise my voice.

It started to rain very gently. The margins
Seemed inviting.

by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
from Sleep on It;
Hot Metal Bridge, Spring 2010

From Salon:

To discuss the book, Salon asked Curtis Sittenfeld, author of the acclaimed novels “American Wife” (a compassionate, fictionalized history of Laura Bush) and “Prep” (a keenly observed coming-of-age tale), to interview Traister over the phone. A transcript of their conversation follows.

For me, reading this book, there were so many revelations. I thought I had followed the election closely, but as I read I kept thinking, “Oh, I never saw that. I never realized that.” I think a lot of people who read the book will have a similar reaction to mine, but I also think that before cracking it open, before buying it, people might think: What is there that's left to say about the 2008 election? Do you feel like you're fighting an uphill battle in terms of that perception?

When Michiko Kakutani wrote her “Game Change” review in the New York Times, she started with some sentiment like, “Ugh, who needs another book about the election?” But my reaction to that — and every other book that is going to come out about the election, including mine — is that, oh my God, everything in America was busted open during that election. Between race and gender and Obama and Hillary and Palin, there was so much that had never happened before in American history. There will be scores more books about this election, and each of them will offer their own set of revelations about this election, which happens to be a completely gripping narrative, by the way. The greatest thing that happened to me writing this book was remembering how great the story of the election is, so even if you lived it, even though I'd written about it as it was taking place, when I went back to write about it in retrospect, I was like, “Did that really happen?”

More here.

From PhysOrg:

New research published today, Wednesday 15 September, in New Journal of Physics, uses a particle model to explain the collective decision making process of flocks of birds landing on foraging flights. Using a simple self-propelled particle (SPP) system, which sees the birds represented by particles with such parameters as position and velocity, the researchers from Budapest, Hungary, find that the collective switching from the flying to the landing state overrides the individual landing intentions of each bird.

In the absence of a decision making leader, the collective shift to land is heavily influenced by perturbations the individual birds are subject to, such as the birds' flying position within the flock. This can be compared to an avalanche of piled up sand, which would occur even for perfectly symmetric and cautiously placed grains, but in reality happens much sooner because of increasing, non-linear fluctuations.

More here.

Humans are carbon-bond consumers. Carbon bonds come into the front end of your feeding tubes in the form of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins; you then break those chemical bonds to extract energy, and excrete the residue as carbon dioxide, water vapor and various solid waste. Sometimes, however, some of these chemicals can make their way from your digestive system and into your brain; the consequences can be subtle or profound. The distinction between what is considered a food (something that your body wants or needs in order to function optimally) or a drug (something that your brain wants or needs in order to function optimally) is becoming increasingly difficult to define. Indeed, the routine use of some substances, such as stimulants and depressants, is so universal that most of us do not even consider them to be drugs, but, rather, actual food. Is coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol, cocoa, or marijuana a nutrient or a drug? In truth, anything you take into your body should be considered a drug, whether it’s obviously nutritious or not.

more from Gary Wenk at Seed here.

Test your religious literacy: Which sacred text says that Jesus is the “word” of God? a) the Gospel of John; b) the Book of Isaiah; c) the Koran. The correct answer is the Koran. But if you guessed the Gospel of John you get partial credit because its opening passage — “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God” — is an implicit reference to Jesus. In fact, when Muhammad described Jesus as God’s word, he was no doubt aware that he was affirming Christian teaching. Extra-credit question: Which sacred text has this to say about the Hebrews: God, in his “prescience,” chose “the children of Israel … above all peoples”? I won’t bother to list the choices, since you’ve probably caught onto my game by now; that line, too, is in the Koran.

more from Robert Wright at The Opinionater here.

On 18 July 1573, the Venetian Inquisition summoned Paolo Veronese to answer questions about the Last Supper that he had painted for the Convent of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. In Veronese’s magnificent image, Palladian architecture frames the central scene, while Hogarthian servants and soldiers talk and scuffle in the foreground. The extras who give the painting its life and color provoked dry, precise queries: “What signifies the figure of him whose nose is bleeding?” “What signify those armed men dressed in the fashion of Germany, with halberds in their hands?” “And the one who is dressed as a jester with a parrot on his wrist, why did you put him into the picture?” Veronese did his best to satisfy the inquisitors. The figure with the bleeding nose, he explained, “is a servant who has a nose-bleed from some accident.” The jester with the parrot “is there as an ornament, as it is usual to insert such figures.” As to the halberdiers, he offered a more theoretical explanation: It is necessary here that I should say a score of words. … We painters use the same license as poets and madmen, and I represented those halberdiers, the one drinking, the other eating at the foot of the stairs, but both ready to do their duty, because it seemed to me suitable and possible that the master of the house, who as I have been told was rich and magnificent, would have such servants.

more from Anthony Grafton at Cabinet here.

Robert C. Morgan in The Brooklyn Rail:

I find it encouraging to know that there are still exhibitions being mounted capable of altering one’s aesthetic or historical point of view. Such an experience happened this past summer at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice with Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus, a relatively modest exhibition tracing the concept of utopia in art from the late 1790s to the early avant-garde movements of the 20th century. The exhibition was not a typical chronology; there were surprises and curious leaps as one moved, for example, from the Arts and Crafts guilds in England to the Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire or from the Neo-Impressionists in France to the De Stijl movement in Holland. This lack of predictability questioned what has been accepted as mainstream art for more than two centuries, and implied that the neat packages and categories of specialization of art survey courses may be too pristine. Often, not enough emphasis is given to the exceptions to the logic of historical progression, where major leaps occur as a result of works that appear out of sequence and are therefore not accurately understood, assimilated, evaluated, or even recognized.

In all fairness, what I garnered from this exhibition may not have been what the curator, Vivian Greene, intended. After two fully engaged and stimulating viewings of Utopia Matters, I was provoked once again to rethink the Greenbergian slant on Modernism and to conjure up that familiar, age-worn bifurcation between the avant-garde and kitsch. According to Greenberg’s essay, titled “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” originally published in 1939, and later shortened and revised in 1961, the avant-garde presumably evolved first, only to be followed by the phenomenon of kitsch whereby synthetic saplings—later appropriations from the originals—were produced to fill the mindless consumerist demand created by the Industrial Revolution. In fact, if I understood one aspect of this exhibition correctly, it is that the more familiar Modernist paradigm should be seen in reverse, namely, that the avant-garde emerged a century after kitsch had already found an alternative aesthetic to the mainstream that the Neo-Classical paintings of Jacques-Louis David helped supplant.

by Pete Simonelli

The foil on the pack catches my eye. An emptiness is captured there. The sky. The foil is reflecting the sky. Rhymes with it.

M. DeCapite

If he looks outside again,
perhaps the evening sky will blue a little more,
and the image half seen in the neighbor’s window
might bore into the lately-dulled warrens of his curiosity
and prowl among other burdensome urges not soon
(or already half-) written,
and find the same small, transcendent nudge
a sky and a pack of Camels once gave him.
He might see, as Morandi did,
that the trouble with getting any image right
is not a question of the wrong-aged soul
dithering between minutiae (such as light)
and intrigue (such as pussy)
but simply:
the little chasm of a late afternoon between the two boxes,
in the one and darkest shadow,
where who knows what truly sits on the table.
So he turns
(because you always must), and
before the image could disappear or, worse,

disappoint,

his eye led not just to a source—
………………..or some glimpsed body
of a source—
but the emulsion, too,
the fade,
just to see something take hold
then die.

[Originally published in the Breakwater Review.]

Ashley Mears in Jezebel:

Suckers are not born a minute, but dreamers are. We all dream — of fame, fortune, and glory — and for teenage girls, all three are rolled into one tenacious fantasy: the dream of being a fashion model.

Anatomy of a Scheme: Why Teenagers Dream of Becoming Models, and How Modeling Agents Could Care Less

Enter the Model Search, an event run by corporations like iPOP, IMTA, and ProScout, who promise a shot at making these dreams come true for fees ranging from a few hundred to several thousand dollars.

One such Model Search was underway last month at a hotel in midtown NYC, where, over a few days, thousands arrived to impress representatives from over 100 international modeling and talent agencies. In the modeling showcase alone, over 500 people ages 13-25 strutted down an elevated runway constructed in the hotel's ballroom, alongside which rows of agents sat and watched.

I followed a modeling agency's scout — let's call her Allie — as she attended the search for three days. As it turns out, Allie and the hundreds of agents here are not too interested in what's on the runway. They actually find it all rather boring and tasteless.

Is Zionism undergoing redefinition? I see more and more pieces and discussions like this one. Mitchell Plitnick over at his blog:

In my recent piece on the Israeli demand to be recognized “as a Jewish state,” I made the point that there is no clear definition of what it means t be a Jewish state. There is no consensus in Israel as to what this means; indeed, this has been a question that has vexed Jews both in Israel and the Diaspora since the birth of the Zionist movement.

That put me in mind of a question a good friend asked me some time ago. Knowing that I am a strong believer in a two-state solution, he asked me whether I believed it was possible for Israel to be both Jewish and democratic.

My answer was yes, but not until the term “Jewish state” is defined more clearly and very differently than I perceive it to be used in common parlance today.

The issue of Israel’s identity is one that can only be resolved by Israelis, of course (I note: Israelis, which means all citizens of the state, Jewish or not). But what kind of state we in the Diaspora, as well as non-Jews not connected to Israelis or Palestinians, will choose to support is a question that we can answer. It is one that is being asked more and more these days as Israeli policies generate growing discontent around the world.

Ashlee Vance in the NYT:

Businesses in the South Park district of San Francisco generally sell either Web technology or sandwiches and burritos. Bespoke Innovations plans to sell designer body parts.

The company is using advances in a technology known as 3-D printing to create prosthetic limb casings wrapped in embroidered leather, shimmering metal or whatever else someone might want.

Scott Summit, a co-founder of Bespoke, and his partner, an orthopedic surgeon, are set to open a studio this fall where they will sell the limb coverings and experiment with printing entire customized limbs that could cost a tenth of comparable artificial limbs made using traditional methods. And they will be dishwasher-safe, too.

“I wanted to create a leg that had a level of humanity,” Mr. Summit said. “It’s unfortunate that people have had a product that’s such a major part of their lives that was so underdesigned.”

A 3-D printer, which has nothing to do with paper printers, creates an object by stacking one layer of material — typically plastic or metal — on top of another, much the same way a pastry chef makes baklava with sheets of phyllo dough.

The technology has been radically transformed from its origins as a tool used by manufacturers and designers to build prototypes.

Porch and Sundial

Stephan Leacock and Po Chu-i, two strange
old men I've loved a long time in your words,

since lone boyhood, only today did I see
you talk together. Leacock on the sundial

of the calm house you built by Couchiching
two summer late, for by then Beatrix was dead,

you graved a motto of your mind: Breves
Horas—Longas Annos: hours are brief,

years long. From your own chair I've watched
the lake's deeper-than-Aegean sapphire flash

through oak and pine to where she would have stood
in the porch's grace. And I recalled you, Po:

“Next year I'll build a screen porch here on this side
for my treasure, my wife.” And later on you say,

in another poem, that “joyful people hate
the hours that rush away and unhappy people

can't stand the creep of the interminable years.”
You two agreed: frantic, desperate, joy

always will tip itself over into sadness,
and may god let the two things flicker

in us like gray and green of the aspen leaves,
not be all joy in youth and grief ever after.

by A.F. Moritz
from The Hamilton Stone Review,
Summer 2010, Issue 21

Nadeem Aslam in The Guardian:

To coincide with Granta's publication of its issue devoted to the best new writing from Pakistan, an extract from one of its standout stories.

In the beginning, the great river was believed to flow out of a lion's mouth, its size reflected in its ancient name – Sindhu, an ocean. The river was older than the Himalayas; the Greeks had called it Sinthus, the Romans Sindus, the Chinese Sintow, but it was Pliny who had given it the name Indus. One night under the vast silence of a perfect half-moon and six stars, a mosque appeared on a wooded island in the river, and Leila was woken by the call to prayer issuing from its minaret just before sunrise. It was the day she was to be blessed with a son. As she knew there was no mosque within hearing distance, her initial impression was that the air itself was singing. Leila manoeuvred herself out of bed and went towards the door, making sure not to disturb her mother-in-law who had taken to sleeping in the same room as her in these last days before the birth. The servant girl appointed outside the door had fallen asleep, and as Leila moved past, a bad dream caused the girl to release a cry of fear.

Leila was fourteen years old, thin-framed with grey, glass-like eyes and a nervous flame always burning just beneath her pale skin. She pursued the song of faith drifting in the fifty-roomed mansion that had been in her husband's family for several generations. The river with its boats and blind freshwater dolphins and drowned lovers was half a mile away, and there was nothing but rocky desert and thick date orchards between the riverbank and the mansion. Long after the voice withdrew, she continued her search for its origins, now and then placing an ear against a wall. Earlier in the night she'd heard momentary fragments of other songs from the men's side of the mansion, where her husband was celebrating the imminent arrival of his first son in the company of musicians and prostitutes. No doubt they were all asleep by now.

More here.

Refecting on the changed nature of Europe 20 years after the collapse of communism, a perceptive British sociologist proclaimed boldly that “we are all post-communist now”.[49] This is to be understood not as a description of political reality in contemporary Europe, but rather as a challenge that European nations and their elites in both East and West must take seriously, if the European project is to succeed. In a similar vein, when Jerzy Buzek, on his election as President of the European Parliament, proclaimed in his acceptance speech that “there is now no ‘you’ (in the West) and ‘us’ (in the East): we live in a shared Europe”, it was a statement of intent, rather than a statement of fact.[50] Debates about key historic events and their meaning serve as a reminder that there are still significant divisions between the two parts of Europe that used to be divided by the Iron Curtain, just as there are divisions between the nations of Europe regardless of their geographic location. Yet, to accept that a Europe of 27 nation-states must live with discord is true to the legacy of EU founding fathers such as Jean Monnet and Konrad Adenauer, as much as it is to the legacy of the architects of the Velvet Revolutions of 1989 such as Adam Michnik and Vaclav Havel. With their mixture of idealism and pragmatism, these Europeans understood that the true meaning of politics consists in accepting dissonance while not giving up aspirations for more harmony.

more from Stefan Auer at Eurozine here.

In the far western expanse of the Sahara is the world’s longest continuous wall. It starts in Morocco and slithers down through the desert for 2,400 kilometres to the Atlantic Ocean. More than 130,000 soldiers line its perimeter. Made of sand and stone, it stands one and a half metres wide and between two and three metres tall, and has command posts every two miles. Motion sensors, barbed wire and several million landmines provide an extra layer of defence. For most of its course, it cuts across a sparsely populated region that Morocco regards as its southern provinces. On maps the area appears as Western Sahara. The UN calls it a “non-self-governing territory”. It is Africa’s last colony, where a near-forgotten liberation war lies dormant. The wall is sometimes referred to as Hassan’s Wall, after King Hassan II of Morocco, who annexed most of what was then called Spanish Sahara when Spain pulled out in 1976. About half of the indigenous population, the Saha­rawis, who had been promised a vote on self-determination by Spain, fled across the desert to refugee camps in an inhospitable corner of Algeria in order to escape Moroccan rule.

more from Xan Rice at The New Statesman here.

From The New York Times:

In 2006, a hunter in the Canadian Arctic shot a bear that had white fur like a polar bear’s but had brown patches, long claws and a hump like a grizzly bear’s. DNA analysis confirmed the animal was a hybrid of the two species.

While one might think that these oddities are examples of some kind of moral breakdown in the animal kingdom, it turns out that hybridization among distinct species is not so rare. Some biologists estimate that as many as 10 percent of animal species and up to 25 percent of plant species may occasionally breed with another species. The more important issue is not whether such liaisons occasionally produce offspring, but the vitality of the hybrid and whether two species might combine to give rise to a third, distinct species. While several examples of human-bred animal hybrids are well known and can thrive in captivity including zorses (zebra-horse), beefalo (bison-beef cattle) and, of course, mules (donkey-horse), naturally occurring animal hybrids have many factors working against their longer-term success.

More here.

In 1936 Mao Tse-Tung, then a cave-dwelling revolutionary, told Edgar Snow his life story. Snow recorded Mao’s self-serving autobiography in Red Star Over China, which for decades made the American’s name as the leading reporter in China. Back in China twenty-four years later, Snow was pestered by news agencies enquiring about mass starvation. The Snow of the 1930s had gone into the field to see for himself a prolonged drought in the north-west, where people were rumoured to be selling their children. But this time he relied on his access to top officials such as Premier Zhou Enlai, and foreigners who flacked for China such as the New Zealander Rewi Alley. In the book he wrote about that trip, The Other Side of the River, Snow stated, ‘I saw no starving people in China … Considerable malnutrition undoubtedly existed. Mass starvation? No.’ And most positively: ‘Whatever he was eating, the average Chinese maintained himself in good health, as far as anyone could see.’

more from Jonathan Mirsky at Literary Review here.

Sughra Raza. Untitled. July 2010.

Acrylics on canvas.

POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR in The New York Times:

Little did we know that it would take almost a full decade for the proverbial 9/11 fallout to fall out, for anti-Muslim xenophobia to emerge, fully formed and fever-pitched, ostensibly over plans to build an interfaith cultural center near ground zero. Even in New York, stronghold of progressive ethics and cultural diversity, my former home of 12 years, August 2010 became the evil twin of that still-innocent August 2001. In addition to the mosque, of course, there was the Florida pastor who wanted to burn Korans on the Sept. 11 anniversary, and who has yes-no-maybe-so reconsidered, after a hearty load of negative press and a dab of executive-branch headshaking. And, hey, what do you get when you put a drunk white college student, who had actually been to Afghanistan, into the cab of a Bangladeshi Muslim? The wrong answer and a stabbing, allegedly.

It’s one test I would have passed. For the record: I am not Muslim. My immediate family ultimately kept us as agnostic as possible; religion went only as far as my mother praying to the American concept of a guardian angel and my dad “studying” Zoroastrianism. But most of the extended Khakpours are Muslim and, culturally, it’s a part of me insofar as I am a Middle Easterner. I am also a New Yorker, a deal that was sealed forever nine years ago. I had just moved from Brooklyn to downtown Manhattan to shack up with a boyfriend. The studio was 25 floors up, with a nearly all-glass wall that framed a perfect view of the World Trade Center. Now, when I look back on ages 23 to 32, every aspect of my life is shadowed by what I saw through the glass that blue-and-gold Tuesday morning: two towers, each gashed and stunningly hazed in the glitter of exploding windows, falling, one after the other, over and over again. But what was once simple apprehension and mortification and trepidation has become increasingly entangled with feelings of exhaustion and marginalization and even indignation.

More here.

Errors

How wide the gulf between o and i:
He loves with his wife and daughter
in New Haven, his bio read.
An accident of the hands, funny
in the way wrecks often are.

But don't discount the hands,
the way they know the girl will return
one day from college with her arms spilling
like her mother's once did. How he'll see
her almond sweater and the snow

as it stops in the window, and he'll wish
he'd had sons. He'll be vigilant
from here on, aware of the sanctity of letters.
He'll realize as never before that his wife's
and daughter's names both begin with C—

that they are both about sight,
about water. The difference between live
and love will expand to dive and dove,
and he won't know present
from past, past from flying.

For now, he sometimes opens
his wife's shirt in the kitchen,
and wants but does not want
to find someone looking—his daughter,
the mowing neighbor, anyone—

as if to confirm, so that he may say
in the end: Once, there were two bodies
in the same place, and one of them was mine.

by Bethany Tyler Lee
from The Cortland Review,
Issue 48, August 2010