from Song of Myself

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid
and self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands
of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. . . .

A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses,
Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,
Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,
Eyes full of sparkiling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.
His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,
His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around
and return.

by Walt Whitman

From Sheknows.com:

Food extracts as powerful as drugs

In his $40M laboratory at the University of Montreal, Dr. Richard Beliveau used to test new drugs that may help treat cancer. One day, tugged by children with leukemia who stopped him in the corridor of the hospital to ask if he had something new for them to use, he started experimenting with simple food extracts. Beliveau discovered that many simple food extracts had anticancer properties as powerful as many of the drugs he had been testing for the past 30 years. Lenny, one of his friends, learned that he had pancreatic cancer. His wife begged Beliveau to help her design an anticancer diet. She fed Lenny, every day, three times a day, with foods that all had been tested for their anticancer properties. Lenny lived five years beyond his prognosis.

Curry power

Today, the MD Anderson Cancer Center, the largest cancer research institution in the world, is also exploring this avenue. Long used in Ayurvedic medicine in India, the common spice turmeric (one of the main spices in curry) has been found to contain the most potent natural anti-inflammatory ever described – the molecule “curcumin”. Researchers at MD Anderson have shown that it inhibits cancer growth by not only reducing inflammation (necessary for invasion of neighboring tissues) but by inducing cancer cell death (“apoptosis”), slowing down the growth of new blood vessels necessary for tumor expansion (“angiogenesis”), and increasing the efficacy of chemotherapy. This research was recently reviewed in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (2008).

More here. (Note: I highly recommend the excellent book Anti-Cancer Diet by David Servan-Schreiber.)

And the fights. I’ve seen everything from slap fights and chest-bumping matches, which occur with greater frequency as race day wears on, to terrifying, bloody, ten-on-one gang-style assaults. The most notorious combatant was Lee Chang Ferrell, who, during the seventh race in 1999, jumped the infield’s fence, ran onto the track, planted his feet into the dirt, and fixed his eyes on the thoroughbreds thundering toward him, poised to duel. As the horses swerved to the rail to dodge Ferrell, he swung his fist and caught jockey Jorge Chavez’s leg. Chavez’s horse, which was toward the front of the pack, turned an ankle and lost pace, while the others sped by untouched. Somehow Ferrell avoided what should have been a certain mauling. In the photograph printed in the Baltimore Sun the next day, he looked almost heroic as he braced to strike the stampeding fleet. A news story published on the day of last year’s Preakness reported that Ferrell has no memory of the encounter.

more from Ben Yaster at Triple Canopy here.

The first words of “In a Perfect World” are startling: “If you are READING this you are going to DIE!” They come straight from Sara’s journal, which is conspicuously left in the open, as if inviting the detested Jiselle to read it. (She does.) The words are doubly unnerving for us, the readers, for surely they are accurate: By reading the novel, we are reading the journal, too, and the curse turns out to be the common curse on all mankind. Yet we read on, forgetting those words, as Kasischke subtly, believably frees her characters from their anguish. Their resourcefulness in the face of the plague and the gradual mending of seemingly irreparable rifts feel both inevitable and true. Without giving anything away, the book’s final, winding sentence at last puts the words “a perfect world” in their perfect place. The reader may well come away with the odd, exhilarating feeling that a spell has both been cast and broken.

more from Ed Park at the LA Times here.

More than almost any other contemporary poet, Derek Walcott might seem to be fulfilling T. S. Eliot’s program for poetry. He has distinguished himself in all of what Eliot described as the “three voices of poetry”: the lyric, the narrative or epic, and the dramatic. Since at least his 1984 book “Midsummer,” Walcott has been publishing what might be described as concatenated lyrics, individual poems numbered consecutively and intended to form a conceptual whole. His long 1990 poem “Omeros” would be called canonical were that word not so problematic these days. And, like Eliot, Walcott is also a playwright. Through his long connection with the Trinidad Theater Workshop, he has amassed an impressive body of dramatic works, both in prose and in that tricky form called verse drama. But the kinship with Eliot, for Walcott, extends beyond genre. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot opined that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” Walcott has deliberately avoided the confessional path pioneered by his early friend and supporter Robert Lowell, choosing instead a post-Romantic voice, closely allied with landscape, in which the particulars of a life are incidental to a larger poetic vision, one in which the self is not the overt subject.

more from Karl Kirchwey at the NYT here.

Sinead's Voice

Sinead's voice falls into me, impregnating me
as the Holy Spirit impregnated the Virgin Mary.

“Sometimes I am told in commendation . . .
that my movement perished
under the firing squads
of 1916,” wrote Yeats.

Over half a century later,
in a documentary, I see Ben Bulben,
and at its foot, the poet's grave
surrounded by the evening halo.

Still fearing my own end
I foretell the end of the world.
Life still scares me.
Restless, my horse still neighs in his stable.

On the other side of the scales
is the voice of Sinead O'Conner,
perfumed in musk,
like amber in which
forever the whale's death shriek
is captured.

In Sinead's voice, Yeats calm
departure always resounds.

Now it falls into me and impregnates me
like the light of a forgotten
pagan god.

by Peter Semolic
from Hiša iz besed
publisher: Aleph, Ljubljana, 1996
translation: 2004, Ana Jelnikar

From The New York Times:

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll focusing on Tea Party supporters found most of them very angry, generally well-educated, financially secure and deeply pessimistic about the direction of the country. We asked political analysts and historians what they found most illuminating about the poll’s findings, and whether the views of the Tea Party backers have commonly run through American politics.

• Rick Perlstein
• Michael Lind
• Steven F. Hayward
• Alan Wolfe
• Paul Butler
• Amity Shlaes
• Alan Brinkley Lorenzo Morris
• Susan R. Estrich
• Bob Moser
• David Gergen
• Andrew Kohut
• Douglas Schoen

Past Grievances, Present Hype

Rick Perlstein is the author of “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America” and “Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.”

Watching the rise of the Tea Party movement has been a frustration to me, and not just because it is ugly and seeks to traduce so many of the values I hold dear. Even worse has been the overwhelming historical myopia. As the Times’s new poll numbers amply confirm — especially the ones establishing that the Tea Partiers are overwhelming Republican or right-of-Republican — they are the same angry, ill-informed, overwhelmingly white, crypto-corporate paranoiacs that accompany every ascendancy of liberalism within U.S. government. “When was the last time you saw such a spontaneous eruption of conservative grass-roots anger, coast to coast?” asked the professional conservative L. Brent Bozell III recently. The answer, of course, is: in 1993. And 1977. And 1961. And so on.

More here.

William Dalrymple in The Business Standard:

The Bhuttos’ acrimonious family squabbles have long resembled one of the bloody succession disputes that habitually plagued South Asia during the time of the Great Mughals. In the case of the Bhuttos, they date back to the moment when Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was arrested on July 5, 1977. Unsure how to defend their father and his legacy, his children had reacted in different ways. Benazir believed the struggle should be peaceful and political. Her brothers initially tried the same approach, forming al-Nusrat, the Save Bhutto committee; but after two futile years they decided in 1979 to turn to the armed struggle. Murtaza was 23 and had just left Harvard where he got a top first, and where he was taught by, among others, Samuel Huntington. Forbidden by his father from returning to Zia’s Pakistan, he flew from the US first to London, then on to Beirut, where he and his younger brother Shahnawaz were adopted by Yasser Arafat. Under his guidance they received the arms and training necessary to form the Pakistan Liberation Army, later renamed Al-Zulfiquar or The Sword.

Just before his daughter Fatima was born, Murtaza and his brother had found shelter in Kabul as guests of the pro-Soviet government. There the boys had married a pair of Afghan sisters, Fauzia and Rehana Fasihudin, the beautiful daughters of a senior Afghan official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Fatima’s mother was Fauzia. For all its PLO training in camps in Syria, Afghanistan and Libya, Al-Zulfiquar achieved little except for two failed assassination attempts on Zia and the hijacking of a Pakistan International Airways flight in 1981. This was diverted from Karachi to Kabul and secured the release of some 55 political prisoners; but it also resulted in the death of an innocent passenger, a young army officer. Zia used the hijacking as a means of cracking down on the Pakistan Peoples Party, and got the two boys placed on the Federal Investigation Agency’s most-wanted list. Benazir was forced to distance herself from her two brothers even though they subsequently denied sanctioning the hijack, and claimed only to have acted as negotiators once the plane landed in Kabul. While much about the details of the hijacking remains mysterious, Murtaza was posthumously acquitted of hijacking in 2003.

I first encountered the family in 1994 when, as a young foreign correspondent on assignment for the Sunday Times, I was sent to Pakistan to write a long magazine piece on the Bhutto dynasty. I met Benazir in the giddy pseudo-Mexican Prime Minister’s House that she had built in the middle of Islamabad. It was the beginning of Benazir’s second term as Prime Minister, and she was at her most imperial. She both walked and talked in a deliberately measured and regal manner, and frequently used the royal “we”. During my interview, she took a full three minutes to float down the hundred yards of lawns separating the Prime Minister’s House from the chairs where I had been told to wait for her. There followed an interlude when Benazir found the sun was not shining in quite the way she wanted it to: “The sun is in the wrong direction,” she announced. Her hair was arranged in a sort of baroque beehive topped by white gauze dupatta like one of those Roman princesses in Caligula or Rome.

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend Nighat Mir in Karachi).

Jerry Coyne discusses Sean Carroll's interview in the New York Times in his blog, Why Evolution Is True:

Carroll is a smart and amiable guy, and gives a good interview. There’s one place, however, where I think he misses the mark. That’s where he discusses the effect of time’s directionality on biology, specifically ageing:

Q. THE CENTERPIECE OF THE RECENT MOVIE “BENJAMIN BUTTON” AND THE ABC TELEVISION SERIES “FLASH FORWARD” IS THE TIME TRAVEL. HOW DO YOU RATE THE SCIENCE OF THOSE ENTERTAINMENTS?

A. Well, the Benjamin Button character ages in reverse. In “Fast Forward” people glimpse the future. These are great story-telling devices.

But the writers can’t resist the temptation to bend the rules. If time travel were possible, you still wouldn’t be able to change the past — it’s already happened! Benjamin Button, he’s born old and his body grows younger. That can’t be true because being younger is a very specific state of high organization. A body accumulates various failures and signs of age because of the arrow of time.

But I don’t think that entropy (at least in bodies) is the only solution here, or even an important solution, for it’s perfectly possible for a body to be immortal, and some plants (and bdelloid rotifers, who appear to reproduce largely asexually) have approached physical immortality. There’s far more to ageing than just “the arrow of time.” Indeed, the inexorable increase in entropy encapsulated in the second law of thermodynamics, a law that holds over the whole universe, is violated locally by two biological phenomena: development and evolution.

More here. [Sean admits that ageing is too complicated to be explained by entropy alone.]

Anthony Gottlieb in More Intelligent Life:

There was once a website on which academic philosophers listed the curious things that strangers had said to them upon learning that they were in the presence of a philosopher. The following conversation allegedly took place on an aeroplane:

“May I ask you a question?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a philosophical question. Is that ok?”

“Sure.”

“There’s a boy I fancy. Should I text him or e-mail him?”

In a similar vein, also from the skies:

“What do you do?”

“I’m a philosopher.”

“What are some of your sayings, then?”

This exchange makes professional philosophers titter, because their daily work is far removed from the production of sage utterances. But the request for “sayings” was not an unreasonable one. The great philosophers of old are remembered largely by their posthumous contributions to dictionaries of quotations. How is an ordinary person to know what today’s professional philosophers think?

One answer – a novel one, it seems – comes from a new survey of philosophers’ views. A preliminary analysis of the results has been published in an electronic journal, PhilPapers. Unfortunately, however, the survey was written for philosophy nerds. So here is a translation for airline passengers.

From History Matters:

As slavery collapsed at the close of the Civil War, former slaves quickly explored freedom’s possibilities by establishing churches that were independent of white control, seeking education in Freedmen’s Bureau schools, and even building and maintaining their own schools. Many took to the roads as they sought opportunities to work and to reconstitute their families. Securing their liberty meant finding the means of support to obtain land or otherwise benefit from their own labor, as Jourdon Anderson made clear in this letter to his former owner. He addressed Major Anderson from Ohio, where he had secured good wages for himself and schooling for his children. Many freedpeople argued that they were entitled to land in return for their years of unpaid labor and looked to the federal government to help achieve economic self-sufficiency. Black southerners understood the value of their own labor and looked for economic independence and a free labor market in their battle over the meaning of emancipation in post-Civil War America.

Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

Read the rest of this remarkable letter here. [Thanks to David Schneider.]

Chadwick Jenkins in Popmatters (via bookforum):

[S]o we come to the subject of this essay: David F. Prindle’s well intentioned but deeply flawed effort, Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution. Prindle’s project is one that I cannot help but applaud. He endeavors to expose the deep connections between the political and the scientific beliefs of a prominent public figure.

By all rights, this ought to be a stellar book, but it quickly flounders in its inability to forge any real causal (or even implicative) connection between Gould’s politics and his science. Indeed, Prindle offers us an almost immediate opportunity to gauge his failure by providing a rare glance into the process of publication. He reproduces two reader reviews that he received from a publisher other than Prometheus Books.

One reader excoriates Prindle’s project as completely wrong-minded insofar as science is an objective pursuit and politics play no role. The other reader revealingly claims that Gould’s “political and social views biased his scientific views” and that these “social attitudes… led him to his exaggerated views on the role of chance in evolution” (p.12; emphases mine).

Now this leaves Prindle in a rather precariously moderate position, and in this case the moderate position is not necessarily the rational one. On the one hand, reader 1 disavows any linkage between the scientific and the political. On the other hand, reader 2 basically disavows anything resembling the scientific. Everything is simply political.

Both worldviews, at least, can claim to be coherent. Prindle, in attempting to forge a weakly buttressed middle ground, finds himself steeped in contradiction. The problem arises from the “Credo” he includes in his introduction, in which he proclaims that he believes that “there is such a thing as objective reality in nature, independent of the human mind” (p. 12). Only a few short pages later, Prindle asserts that Gould’s “scientific ideas were seamlessly wedded to his political positions, so that his methodological and philosophical stance always buttressed his political values and vice-versa” (emphasis mine).

Let us think about this carefully for a moment-something that Prindle obviously never bothered to do. There are only a few possibilities here:

1) Gould’s pursuit of scientific method led him to certain political beliefs (Prindle explicitly denies this);

2) Gould pursued science in a more or less purist manner and his scientific insights fortuitously coincided with his political outlook, in which case the science is all that truly matters (this approximates the first reader response that Prindle rejects);

3) Gould held certain political beliefs and he twisted his scientific outlook to buttress those beliefs (this conforms to the second reader response that Prindle’s Credo contradicts);

4) Gould’s political beliefs predisposed him to certain insights into the truth; and finally

5) by some magic coincidence, Gould’s science and his politics not only coincided but were mutually reinforcing.

Since Prindle rejects the first three positions, that leaves us only with the last two.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the NYT:

For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.

How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.

The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”

Brad DeLong comments:

1. The first generations of African kings who began selling slaves to European traders for guns indeed did not know what slavery was like on the other side of the Middle Passage–they thought it was like slavery in Africa, where if you become a slave you then become part of a single household in which you have roughly the status of the very poor third cousin. But slavery in the Caribbean was a much harsher and more vicious institution–as capitalist slavery driven by production of staple cash crops so often is.

2. Once the slave trade was started and once the kings of Africa knew what they were doing, no individual African kingdom along the coast can back off and stop. If it does, the guns and ammunition stop coming–and it gets conquered in short order by its coastal neighbors who are still engaged in the slave trade.

3. Only when European consumer demand for Caribbean staple crops appears–only when the profits from slave agriculture and thus slave-raiding become really large–is it worth African kings' while to start substantial slave-raiding in the interior (and is it worth the Europeans' while to start shipping people across the Middle Passage).

That Henry Louis Gates makes fun of these arguments doesn't make them untrue.

And so I reject the quitclaim deed he offers: just because there were people with skin of another color on another continent who aided and conspired with my ancestors in their crimes does not mean that I am quits of all obligations as I sit here still enjoying the fruits of their crimes.