Emily Dickinson: post-9/11 poet?

I began to consider this question after returning to Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, her kaleidoscopic, deeply researched, brilliantly written 1985 tour-de-force, which has been reissued with a new introduction by Eliot Weinberger.

Weinberger calls My Emily Dickinson a “classic” of “avant-gardist criticism,” and he invokes a lineage of poets’ criticism extending from William Carlos Williams (In the American Grain) to Charles Olson (Call Me Ishmael) to “Susan Howe herself, the most Americanist of American poets.”

Howe’s book is simultaneously a dazzling exploration of Dickinson’s power and an anatomy of the American cultural imaginary. “The vivid rhetoric of terror,” Howe writes, “was a first step in the slow process of American Democracy.” This rhetoric of terror—fueled by a double legacy of Calvinist predestinarianism and violent frontier experience—animates some of Dickinson’s best work.

more from Boston Review here.

If you want to know how we ended up getting seduced by a woman in a plastic Viking hat chatting away through an already-encrusted bloody nose while holding a piece of Styrofoam cheese in an emergency room parking lot, or if you’re wondering why we fell in love as she cheese-guitared Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” on a mountaintop perch—well, that part is pretty hard to explain. But if you’re curious just when shaky, hand-held, low-res video became our absolute favorite artistic medium, we can tell you precisely: about three minutes into Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn’s “Can’t Swallow it, Can’t Spit it Out,” at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Many of the other artworks installed in the museum also tried to reflect the ugly, over-complicated chaos of our newest late-capitalist moment—intricate, idiosyncratic maquettes of storefronts, sweatshop floors, and storage rooms—but boy did we prefer that stuff when it was outside in the dirty city, still menacing and boldly unintentional. Inside, we were more drawn to Melanie Schiff’s washed-out, murky interiors; Walead Beshty’s similarly faded, body-sized photos of office ruins; Joe Bradley’s sneaky arrangements of bright rectangles; and Matthew Brannon’s little print of a cigarette, an ashtray, and a glass, with the legend: “Finish your drink, we’re leaving.”

more from n+1 here.

For students of comics history, there are few names that strike the ear and the imagination quite like Ditko’s. In a field defined by brilliant oddballs, embittered journeymen, penniless geniuses and colorful hacks, Ditko is the strident hermit king. He gave the world Spider-Man but then more or less bugged out, deciding in 1969 to stop doing interviews and making public appearances. Now 80, Ditko lives in New York City, and although you can track down his studio, nobody I know who’s done so has gotten past the front step. It’s not that Ditko is unfriendly — he’s willing to talk, apparently (in one case, for more than an hour), but only while standing in his doorway, blocking any view into his home and his life.

If you’re a journalist, however, it’s a different story. Last year, the BBC aired a documentary, “In Search of Steve Ditko,” in which reporter Jonathan Ross, accompanied by Neil Gaiman, sought an audience with Ditko. He refused to speak on camera, which only reinforces the idea of him as the J.D. Salinger of super-hero comics. This, I suppose, makes Peter Parker a wall-crawling Holden Caulfield.

more from The LA Times here.

From The Guardian:

Until fairly recently, Jhumpa Lahiri didn’t have much name recognition in this country. But in the US, where she grew up and lives, and in India, where her parents were born, she’s had star status since the beginning of her career. Her first story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), which she finished not long after turning 30, won a string of awards that culminated in the Pulitzer prize for fiction. Her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was also well received and became a US bestseller; a less well received film of it by Mira Nair was released in 2006. Her marriage in Calcutta in 2001 to Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a Guatemalan-American journalist, was given Hollywood-scale coverage by the local media, complete with paparazzi shots. And – unusually, to say the least, for a serious piece of writing, let alone a story collection – her new book, Unaccustomed Earth, went straight to the top of the New York Times fiction bestseller list.

One of the things that make Lahiri’s success in the marketplace all the more surprising is her lack of interest in either charming her readers with exoticism or dazzling them with a slick style. Unflashily written, long, almost grave in tone, her new stories patiently accumulate detail, only gradually building up a powerful emotional charge. And until not so long ago, her subject matter – the experiences of first and second-generation Bengali immigrants to the United States – would have been of marginal interest to most American readers.

More here.

From Science:

NASA’s “follow the water” approach to finding life–or evidence of past life–on Mars has finally hit pay dirt. Three weeks into its 90-day mission, the Phoenix lander has scraped a few centimeters down to an irrefutable layer of water ice in the martian arctic. The first robotic contact with water on Mars promises a score of chemical analyses in the next few months that could reveal whether this ice ever melted to liquid water that could have supported living organisms. And the discovery has already revealed some new mysteries beyond the question of life.

“It is with great joy that I report we have found the proof that this material really is water ice,” Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, said during a media teleconference today. The kilometers-thick ice cap to the north of Phoenix’s landing site is exposed water ice, but orbital observations of the past decade had implied that ice must also lurk beneath just a few centimeters of loose soil well south of the ice cap. So NASA sent Phoenix to a safe-looking spot where, if past climates were warm enough, that ice might have melted to form a cozy zone for life between the ice and the soil surface. Phoenix’s first digging exposed a thin layer of white material, but team members couldn’t tell whether it was ice or perhaps salts. So they waited and watched the trench. In 4 days, at least eight crouton-sized white chunks formed by the digging disappeared, vaporized into the cold, dry air. “Salt does not behave like that,” said Smith, “so we are confident now that this is ice.” “The big story is that we can reach down and touch it now,” said team member Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University in College Station.

More here.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith over at the Immanent Frame:

Boyer presents a picture of human behavior as largely a matter of the automatic, unconscious workings of evolved mental mechanisms, and he promotes the description of such workings as a properly scientific explanation of religion that trumps all other accounts. Indeed, for Boyer, it is precisely insofar as an explanation of some phenomenon—any phenomenon—is put in terms of what he refers to repeatedly as “underlying causal mechanisms” that it counts as genuinely scientific. In relation to these central features of Religion Explained, two important points should be made.

First, it should be recognized that neither the computational-modular model of the mind nor the idea of innate, automatically triggered mental mechanisms is a foregone conclusion of contemporary cognitive science or of any other science. The computational model has been significantly challenged both by practitioners of cognitive science per se and by researchers and theorists working in a number of related fields, including evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, paleoanthropology, and philosophy of mind. Moreover, a number of important alternative models of cognition have been developed in these and other fields…The alternative models often give considerable attention to a number of features of human cognition slighted in Boyer’s book and in the new cognitive accounts of religion more generally. Among them are the significance, for humans, of ongoing individual experiential learning; the complex social dynamics involved in the transmission of skills and beliefs; the presence among post-Paleolithic humans of such crucial cultural cognitive resources as transgenerational material culture, schools, texts, and duplicated images; and the significant differences among individuals with regard to various aspects of cognition.

Contrary, then, to the assumptions of paradigmatic evolutionary psychology and the claims of current cognitive explanations of religion, it is by no means clear that our interactions with our environments are determined largely by the operation of mental mechanisms hardwired at birth or that various widespread and recurrent features of human behavior and culture, including those associated with religion, are best explained by reference to a universal and virtually uniform species-specific mind.

In Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution, one of my favorite movies, the young protagonist, Fabrizio—he’s in his early twenties—is torn between the doctrinaire Marxism he’s vowed to commit his life to—the revolution he professes to believe in with all his heart and soul—and the bourgeois pleasures that, presumably, the revolution is meant to put an end to. He’s so serious-minded—that is, he takes himself so seriously—that he can’t just admit that, like most of us, he’s easily seduced by sensual delights and youthful frivolities, which his sober politics are too narrow to permit. But he loves arguing about American movies over coffee with his (non-Marxist) friends and the bustling squares and antique architecture of Parma, where he grew up in a very comfortable home, and going to the opera with his family in the magnificent opera house that was built for the kind of people he’s not supposed to approve of. Truth be told, Fabrizio is a terrible fraud. And if he weren’t, if he were really as pure of mind and straight of purpose as he wants to believe he is, then we wouldn’t identify with him, and we wouldn’t sympathize with him.

The art I love most dearly emerges from an acknowledgment that we’re none of us pure of either mind or heart. It’s the art of mixed tones—buffoonery mixed with regret, as in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro; comic absurdity mixed with heartache, as in Chekhov’s stories; salvation that appears improbably out of despair, as in Shakespeare’s King Lear, or when all hope is lost, as in The Winter’s Tale.

more from The American Scholar here.

Corey Robin in The Nation:

In “Conservative Thought,” an unjustly neglected essay from 1927, Karl Mannheim argued that conservatives have never been wild about the idea of freedom. It threatens the submission of subordinate to superior. Because freedom is the lingua franca of modern politics, however, they have had “a sound enough instinct not to attack” it. Instead, they have made freedom the stalking horse of inequality, and inequality the stalking horse of submission. Men are naturally unequal, they argue. Freedom requires that they be allowed to develop their unequal gifts. A free society must be an unequal society, composed of radically distinct, and hierarchical, particulars.

Goldwater never rejected freedom; indeed, he celebrated it. But there is little doubt that he saw it as a proxy for inequality–or war, which he called “the price of freedom.” A free society protected each man’s “absolute differentness from every other human being,” with difference standing in for superiority or inferiority. It was the “initiative and ambition of uncommon men”–the most different and excellent of men–that made a nation great. A free society would identify such men at the earliest stages of life and give them the resources they needed to rise to pre-eminence. Against politicians who subscribed to “the egalitarian notion that every child must have the same education,” Goldwater argued for “an educational system which will tax the talents and stir the ambitions of our best students and…thus insure us the kind of leaders we will need in the future.”

Sean Carroll:

I feel compelled to offer up another round of predictions, now that we’ve narrowed the field to two major candidates. By why not make it more fun and have a prediction contest? Anyone can join in, just by leaving your prediction the comments. Entries that appear before the end of June will officially count.

But to make things somewhat science-y, let’s use equations to judge who will win. Each prediction consists of two numbers: the fraction f of the total popular vote cast for the two major candidates that goes to Barack Obama, but also the standard deviation σ of your prediction for that percentage. We are thus ignoring the electoral college entirely, and dealing with the annoyance of third-party candidates by concentrating exclusively on McCain vs. Obama. And we are assuming for purposes of misleadingly-precise quantification that each prediction follows a normal (Gaussian) distribution:

And here is the rub:  the winner is not the one whose fraction f is closest to the final answer, but the one whose value of P(x) is the highest, when x is equal to the fraction of votes Obama actually does win.  The smaller your standard deviation is, the higher your P(x) will be for x very close to your predicted value f , but the faster it will die off as you get further away. So if you are extremely confident, you can ensure victory by choosing an appropriately tiny standard deviation on your prediction. Contrariwise, if you choose a large standard deviation, you might get lucky if none of the confident folks comes close to the actual result. Cool, eh?

Sarah Baxter in The Times:

WHAT do the daughter of Richard Nixon, a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and the son of Milton Friedman, the monetarist economist, have in common? They are all Obamacons: conservatives, Republicans and free market champions who support Barack Obama, the Democratic party nominee, for president.

The Obama campaign has a sharp-eyed political operations team tasked with seeking out prominent endorsers “on both sides of the aisle”, according to a campaign official. It came tantalisingly close to securing one of the biggest names in politics when Colin Powell, secretary of state during President George W Bush’s first term in office, said last week that he might vote for Obama.

Powell said Obama and John McCain, his Republican opponent, “have the qualifications to be president, but both of them cannot be”. He added that he would neither vote for Obama because he was African-Ameri-can nor for McCain because of his military service but for the individual who “brings the best set of tools to the problems of 21st-century America . . . regardless of party”.

His argument was echoed by Peggy Noonan, a conservative commentator who wrote woundingly in The Wall Street Journal last week that: “Mr McCain is the old America, of course; Mr Obama the new.” Although she did not explicitly back either candidate, she said: “America is always looking forward, not back, it is always in search of the fresh and leaving the tired. That’s how we started.”

Zeilinger and his group have only just begun to consider the grand implications of all their work for reality and our world. Like others in their field, they had focused on entanglement and decoherence to construct our future information technology, such as quantum computers, and not for understanding reality. But the group’s work on these kinds of applications pushed up against quantum mechanics’ foundations. To repeat a famous dictum, “All information is physical.” How we get information from our world depends on how it is encoded. Quantum mechanics encodes information, and how we obtain this through measurement is how we study and construct our world.

I asked Dr. Zeilinger about this as I was about to leave his office. “In the history of physics, we have learned that there are distinctions that we really should not make, such as between space and time… It could very well be that the distinction we make between information and reality is wrong. This is not saying that everything is just information. But it is saying that we need a new concept that encompasses or includes both.” Zeilinger smiled as he finished: “I throw this out as a challenge to our philosophy friends.”

A few weeks later I was looking around on the IQOQI website when I noticed a job posting for a one-year fellowship at the institute. They were looking for a philosopher to collaborate with the group.

more from Seed here.

Publishers are often seen as venal; desperate for sales, indifferent to art, puffing their fiction lists with substandard titles of proven mass appeal. And yet, it is not easy to sell books. A willingness to peddle repetitive rubbish isn’t enough; our vain, trash-loving, elitist souls also want to be fed; we need to feel that we are discerning readers. So the publishers must delicately exploit the middle ground between high and low. Elements of genre writing are often introduced to spice up the “literary” kind – Martin Amis does it in Night Train, Ian McEwan in Saturday, John Banville in The Book of Evidence – and some genres are given credence, their merits discussed. They are reclaimed for seriousness; seriousness is arguably the better for it. Yet one staple of genre fiction, the sentimental, soft-focus romance novel, remains apparently beyond rescue – it is too embarrassing, too silly, too feminine to be salvageable. The comic becomes the graphic novel, science fiction becomes dystopia, thrillers become political satires, but the love story can be nothing but itself.

more from the TLS here.

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) once described himself as the last of the romantics and the first of the moderns, which may account for the winning combination of the playful and the serious in his writing. Today he is largely remembered for his ballad-like poetry, much of it set to music by Schubert, Wolf and other lieder composers. In his own day, however, this author of such verse masterpieces as “Die Lorelei” — about the siren who lures Rhine boatmen to their doom — was equally celebrated as a prose writer, spending much of his adult life in Paris as a journalist, explaining the French to the Germans and the Germans to the French.

Among Heine’s most charming prose offerings is “Travel Pictures,” a series of eccentric travel memoirs now published in a beautiful new edition. The first, “The Harz Journey,” appeared in 1826 and begins this way: “Famous for its sausages and university, the City of Gottingen belongs to the King of Hanover and has 999 hearths, various churches, a maternity hospital, an observatory, a students’ lock-up, a library and a Ratskeller in which the beer is very good.”

more from the WSJ here.

///
Fergus Falling
Galway Kinnell

He climbed to the top
of one of those million white pines
set out across the emptying pastures
of the fifties – some program to enrich the rich
and rebuke the forefathers
who cleared it all at once with ox and axe –
climbed to the top, probably to get out
of the shadow
not of those forefathers but of this father
and saw for the first time
down in its valley, Bruce Pond, giving off
its little steam in the afternoon,

pond where Clarence Akley came on Sunday mornings to cut
down the cedars around the shore, I’d sometimes hear the slow
spondees of his work, he’s gone,

where Milton Norway came up behind me while I was fishing and
stood awhile before I knew he was there, he’s the one who put the
cedar shingles on the house, some have curled or split, a few have
blown off, he’s gone,

where Gus Newland logged in the cold snap of ’58, the only man will-
ing to go into those woods that never got warmer than ten below,
he’s gone,

pond where two wards of the state wandered on Halloween, the Na-
tional Guard searched for them in November, in vain, the next fall a
hunter found their skeletons huddled together, in vain, they’re
gone,

pond where an old fisherman in a rowboat sits, drowning hooked
worms, when he goes he’s replaced and is never gone,

and when Fergus
saw the pond for the first time
in the clear evening, saw its oldness down there
in its old place in the valley, he became heavier suddenly
in his bones
the way fledglings do just before they fly,
and the soft pine cracked . . .

I would not have heard his cry
if my electric saw had been working,
its carbide teeth speeding through the bland spruce of our time, or
burning
black arcs into some scavenged hemlock plank,
like dark circles under eyes
when the brain thinks too close to the skin,
but I was sawing by hand and I heard that cry
as though he were attacked; we ran out,
when we bent over him he said, “Galway, Inés, I saw a pond!”
His face went gray, his eyes fluttered close a frightening
moment . . .

Yes – a pond
that lets off its mist
on clear afternoons of August, in that valley
to which many have come, for their reasons,
from which many have gone, a few for their reasons, most not,
where even now an old fisherman only the pinetops can see
sits in the dry gray wood of his rowboat, waiting for pickerel.

//

From The Harvard Gazette:

Call it magic, but the rain held off while Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling delivered the keynote address this afternoon (June 5) at Harvard University’s annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

For her own moment at the podium, the 42-year-old author confessed that “I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today.” Rowling came up with two themes, captured neatly in the title of the address itself: “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.” Failure came fast. “A mere seven years after my graduation day,” she said, “I had failed on an epic scale.” Shattered by the end of a brief marriage, jobless, and a single mother, Rowling said she was “as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless.”

But adversity uncovered personal strengths that immediate success or comfort might never have revealed: her strong will, “more discipline than I had suspected,” she said, and “friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.” Failure also stripped away the inessential, said Rowling, who signed her first (and very modest) book contract in 1996. What was essential had remained. “I was set free,” she said. “I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored; and I had an old typewriter and a big idea.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Lead study author Cassian Yee, an immunologist, says that he and his team removed so-called CD4+ T cells (a type of infection-fighting white blood cell) from a 52-year-old man with stage IV (the most advanced) melanoma—the deadliest form of skin cancer; it had spread to a lung and a groin lymph node. The researchers grew T cells (that target a specific protein, or antigen, on the tumor cells) in the lab until they had a population they believed was large enough to destroy the cancer.

They infused five billion of the cloned cells into the patient. Two months later, PET (positron emission tomography) and CT (computed tomography) scans did not reveal any tumors—and the patient has remained disease-free for two years, Yee says. “This is the first example that I can think of where someone actually grew CD4+ T cells outside the body and gave [them] back and got results,” says Willem Overwijk, an immunologist at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, who was not involved in this study.

More here.

Makes sense to me.  Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution:

In More Sex is Safer Sex Steven Landsburg famously argued (based on work by Michael Kremer) that if more people, especially more sexually conservative people, had sex the AIDS epidemic could be reduced.  Landsburg wrote:

Imagine a country where almost all women are monogamous, while all men demand two female partners per year. Under those circumstances, a few prostitutes end up servicing all the men. Before long, the prostitutes are infected; they pass the disease on to the men; the men bring it home to their monogamous wives. But if each of those monogamous wives were willing to take on one extramarital partner, the market for prostitution would die out, and the virus, unable to spread fast enough to maintain itself, might well die out along with it.

In The Wisdom of Whores (see also my earlier post) Elizabeth Pisani says that such a country exists, it’s Thailand, and the results of more sex were safer sex – exactly as Landsburg argued. Here’s Pisani’s story…

Speaking of Ashis Nandy, he and Arjun Appadurai discuss the issue over at The New School:

John Horgan and George Johnson discuss the future, the Monty Hall problem, and, yes, the singularity, over at blogginheads tv.

Lawrence Hill in bookforum:

Is it a problem that many of the most famous and enduring fictional accounts of African Americans have been penned by whites? After Styron released his Pulitzer Prize–winning Confessions in 1967, some African-American writers were so incensed that just a year later they retaliated with the essay collection William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. I think that Styron, Twain, Stowe, and Lee wrote valuable books that deserve to be read and understood within the body of literature exploring the black experience in America. However, I do deplore that voices by African-American and African-Canadian writers continue to be crowded out of the picture. True, W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and, more recently, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World have been duly embraced, as have Alex Haley’s astoundingly resilient Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But the average elementary or high school student in the United States or Canada who wants—or is told—to learn something about black culture and history is more likely to begin and end his or her reading with Twain and Lee than with any of these African-American writers.

One way to interrupt this trend—whether unconscious or deliberate—of ignoring African-American writers is to incorporate memoirs into the body of Civil War literature. In its transparency and vitality, the African-American memoir has the power to reach out and grab readers and hold them chapter after chapter. A great slave narrative, for example, offers the drama of fiction and the cutting edge of historical fact.

In Bearing Witness: Selections from African-American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, editor Henry Louis Gates Jr. observes that memoir plays a central role in African-American literature.