Marc Weingarten in Salon:

It was snowing hard when the bank called Nick Popovich. They needed to grab a Gulfstream in South Carolina now. Not tomorrow. Tonight.

All commercial and private planes were grounded, but Nick Popovich wasn't one to turn down a job. So he waited for the storm to clear long enough to charter a Hawker jet from Chicago into South Carolina. There was just one detail: No one had told Popovich about the heavily armed white supremacist militia that would be guarding the aircraft when he arrived.

But then again, no one had told the militia about Popovich, a brawny and intimidating man who has been jailed and shot at and has faced down more angry men than a prison warden. When Popovich and two of his colleagues arrived that evening at a South Carolina airfield, they were met by a bunch of nasty-looking thugs with cocked shotguns. “They had someone in the parking lot with binoculars,” Popovich says, recalling the incident. “When we went to grab the plane, one of them came out with his weapon drawn and tells us we better get out of there.” Undeterred, Popovich continued toward the plane until he felt a gun resting on his temple.

More here.

My Voice gets Black Quiet & I want to Fly
Jim Bell

I’m so tired
of these brown
patient
hills
sitting
over my
shoulder
like buddha
with bumps
laughing
&
no more corn
fields
no more pole
vault
no more
sad
irish eyes
wildly
whacking
at 1950’s
looking

for a mother’s
face to touch
& love
& bring back
home
healed
soft
sober

a father’s
rage
to bottle
& send
back
to his mother’s
buried ground

& the sound
of your lovely
naked voice
leaves
me screaming
at the edge
of an ocean
I want to grow
old & die in

from: Crossing the Bar; poems by Jim Bell
Slate Roof Publishing, Northfield, MA ,2005

From The Boston Globe:

The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine. It was the moment when Boston, and indeed the United States, first emerged as a world-class center of medical innovation. The room at the heart of Massachusetts General Hospital where the operation took place has been known ever since as the Ether Dome, and the word “anesthesia” itself was coined by the Boston physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes to denote the strange new state of suspended consciousness that the city's physicians had witnessed. The news from Boston swept around the world, and it was recognized within weeks as a moment that had changed medicine forever.

More here.

Paul Berman in The New York Times:

The single most thrilling event in Gabriel García Márquez’s life, judging from the biography by Gerald Martin, took place in February 1950, when the novelist, who was 22 and not yet a novelist, though he was already trying to be, accompanied his mother to the backwoods town where he had spent his early childhood. This was a place called Aracataca, in the “banana zone” of northern Colombia. His grandfather’s house was there, and his mother had decided to sell it.

García Márquez himself has described this trip in his autobiography, “Living to Tell the Tale.” But Martin supplies, as it were, the fact-checked version — a product of the 17 years of research that went into “Gabriel García Márquez: A Life,” together with the benedictions of the novelist himself, who has loftily observed, “Oh well, I suppose every self-respecting writer should have an English biographer.” In “Living to Tell the Tale,” García Márquez says that, upon arriving at Aracataca, he entered the house and inspected the rooms. The English biographer, by contrast, observes that García Márquez has also said he never entered. Either way, he saw the house. Childhood vistas presented themselves, and vistas prompted thoughts.

More here.

NOTE: TODAY IS THE LAST DAY FOR VOTING.

Dear Reader,

In case you didn't see it the first time it was posted, you can click here to see the prize announcement which has all the details.

If you'd like to check out the final list of nominees (with links to the posts) for the prize, click here.

When you are ready to vote, click here. Remember, voting ends at midnight on June 8, 2009.

Thanks for participating in our contest, and best of luck to the nominees!

Cheers,

Abbas

Isaiah Berlin used to say that people were his landscape. In the first volume of his letters, Flourishing, edited by Henry Hardy and covering the years 1928 to 1946, he went so far as to declare a positive dislike of nature, suggesting that love of sublime landscapes was linked with reactionary romanticism. It is true that his focus was always on human beings, and this second volume shows him finding fulfilment among them as never before. Returning from war work in the British embassy in Washington, becoming once again and then ceasing to be a bachelor don, taking up the history of ideas and achieving, through a series of radio talks, a degree of celebrity about which he was highly ambivalent, immersing himself in the internecine struggles of All Souls and Oxford, giving advice to heads of state and officials running government agencies – these and other aspects of Berlin’s life are vividly captured in this absorbingly readable second selection. There could hardly be a more intimate portrait of Berlin than that which emerges from these letters. But the man himself is not so easily captured, and sometimes appears quite different from the one who seemed always to feel at home in the world.

more from John Gray at Literary Review here.

With the e-book loomingas an ever-larger presence in the publishing world, it is impossible to resist looking at earlier such shifts. As Byrne notes, the reproduction of a voice became more “real” to the listener than the raw voice itself. The live performance becomes less authentic than the multi-layered, painstakingly assembled released version of a song. Could the same be said for e-books? What is the authentic “thing” of a book — is it the words themselves? Does it matter if they’re in manuscript form or on a page between two covers? I’m interested in his point that “technology feigns neutrality.” Is an e-book reader simply a delivery system? Or are there hidden ways that it’s altering how we read, how we perceive of books, how we imagine books should be formatted and navigated? Can an e-book reader be the exception —is it indeed a neutral technology? David Byrne’s first-person photo book “Bicycle Diaries” is coming out this fall. Looks like it’ll be available in hardcover and on CD — but not as an e-book.

more from Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times here.

Twenty years ago, John Updike published a memoir, “Self-­Consciousness,” which opens with an extended reminiscence of his hometown. The author has been stranded for the evening while his mother and daughter are at the movies, and he walks the streets of Shillington, Pa., in a light rain, reliving the past in the incantatory detail with which he informed and illuminated his fiction, summoning up the names of departed local merchants, of his teachers and elementary school classmates, recalling the material texture of his childhood right on down to the candies, magazines and coloring books offered for sale at the variety store, recording the essence of his time amongst us. “The street,” he writes, “the house where I had lived, seemed blunt, modest in scale, simple; this deceptive simplicity composed their precious, mystical secret, the conviction of whose existence I had parlayed into a career, a message to sustain a writer book after book.” That message, that testimony of an individual and recollective consciousness as it relives and reviews the matter of a lifetime and grapples with the effects of aging, disease, decline and death, is the focus of Updike’s final collection of new fiction.

more from T. Coraghessan Boyle at the NY Times here.

Veneer
Vona Groarke

Give me my hand on his neck and his back to my breast,
my heart ruffling his ribs and their flighty charge.
Give me the sea-grass bristles on his shoulder-blades
and his spine, courteous and pliable to my wrist.

His back is a child’s drawing of seagulls flocked.
I knuckle the air undone by their windward flight
and draw from their dip and rise my linear breath.

Were he standing, my tongue could graze the whorl
at the base of his neck and leave my hand to plane
the small of his close-grained waist.

Were he lying down, I’d crook in the hollow
of him and, with my index finger, slub the mole
at the breech of his back that rounds on darkness
like a knot in veneer: shallow, intricate, opaque.

From: Flight; Gallery Press, Oldcastle, 2002

Phil Plait in Bad Astronomy:

Homeopathy is the antiscientific belief that infinitely diluted medicine in water can cure various ailments. It’s perhaps the most ridiculous of all “alternative” medicines, since it clearly cannot work, does not work, and has been tested repeatedly and shown to be useless.

And for those who ask, “what’s the harm?”, you may direct your question to Thomas Sam and his wife Manju Sam, whose nine-month-old daughter died because of their homeopathic beliefs.

The infant girl, Gloria Thomas, died of complications due to eczema. Eczema. This is an easily-treatable skin condition (the treatments don’t cure eczema but do manage it), but that treatment was withheld from the baby girl by her parents, who rejected the advice of doctors and instead used homeopathic treatments. The baby’s condition got worse, with her skin covered in rashes and open cracks. These cracks let in germs which her tiny body had difficulty fighting off. She became undernourished as she used all her nutrients to fight infections instead of for growth and the other normal body functions of an infant. She was constantly sick and in pain, but her parents stuck with homeopathy. When the baby girl developed an eye infection, her parents finally took her to a hospital, but it was far too late: little Gloria Thomas succumbed to septicemia from the infection.

More here.

Tariq Ramadan at his website:

A powerful speech which was not only ” a speech”: it embodies a vision both positive and demanding. Something has surely changed. As Barack went from personal to universal principles, we are waiting for him to go from ideal to practical. He is young, he is new, he is intelligent and smart: has he the means of being courageous? For it is all about presidential courage as one wonders if it is possible for the United States to be simply consistent with its own values. Could one man tackles and reforms this extraordinary tension that inhabits the contemporary American mindset: on the one hand, promoting universal values and diversity while on the other nurturing a spirit that still has some features of imperial attitude (intellectually, politically and economically). He will not be able to achieve it alone and maybe his greatest challengers so far are more Indian and Chinese than the Muslims. Yet, it remains critical to acknowledge the positive sides of a speech announcing “a new beginning”: it is imperative for the Muslims to take Obama at his word and, instead of adopting either a passive attitude or a victim mentality to contribute to a better world by being self–critical and critical, humble and ambitious, consistent and open. The best way to push Barack Obama to face up to his responsibility in America, in the Middle East or elsewhere is for the Muslims to start by facing up to their own without blindly demonising America or the West or naively idealising a charismatic African-American US President.

More here.

Max Blumenthal in The Daily Beast:

On June 3, a day before President Obama arrived in Cairo, I met Israeli author David Grossman at a café in central Jerusalem. A small, soft-spoken man with a shock of sandy brown hair, Grossman shook with rage when he mentioned the settlers—“They have enslaved the future of Israel”—and insisted that Israel could not negotiate a solution to its conflict with the Palestinians without outside pressure from Obama. As for what form of leverage Obama should employ, Grossman said only that he hoped that any clash between Washington and Israel would “be settled between friends.”

Few Israeli literary figures have critiqued the country’s conflict with the Palestinians as commandingly as Grossman. In 1987, he published a series of searing but uniquely introspective reports from the West Bank that chronicled the mounting rage of Palestinians suffering under a deepening occupation. His dispatches infuriated many Israelis, however, when they were compiled into a book and translated into English as The Yellow Wind. Grossman became an internationally bestselling author, and when the first intifada exploded immediately after the book’s publication, he appeared prophetic.

More here.

From Avaaz.org:

President Obama's speech in Egypt today was a stunning step toward achieving Middle East peace. His first new move: to press Israel's right-wing government to stop their self-destructive policy of building settlements on Palestinian land.

But Obama needs help from around the world to face down the powerful opposition already mobilising against him.

Let's raise a massive global chorus immediately to support Obama’s statement that the settlements in occupied territory must stop, by joining our voices to a petition based on his very own words.

We’ll advertise the number of signatures in key papers in Israel and Washington DC – support Obama’s message now, sign the petition below and spread the word today…

Click here.

From Science:

Quantum mechanics and its bizarre rules explain the structure of atoms, the formation of chemical bonds, and the switching of transistors in microchips. Oddly, though, in spite of the theory's name, physicists have never made an actual machine whose motion captures the quirkiness of quantum mechanics. Now a group from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, has taken a step in that direction by forging a mind-bending quantum connection between two mechanical widgets. Their devices don't look like electric drills or other familiar machines, however: Each is a pair of ions oscillating in an electric field, like two marbles joined by a spring.

The link the researchers created is called entanglement, and it has been made before between certain internal properties of quantum particles, such as the inner gyrations of ions. The new work extends that link to the actual motion of the ions, which is a kind of micro-analog of the swinging of the pendulum of a grandfather clock. “For the first time, the mechanical motion itself has been entangled,” says Rainer Blatt, an experimental physicist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

More here.

From The Telegrapgh:

If you want to learn how to write non-fiction, Orwell is your man. He may be known worldwide for his last two novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. But, for me, his best work is his essays. Who would have imagined that sixteen hundred words in praise of the Common Toad, knocked out to fill a newspaper column in April 1946, would be worth reprinting sixty years later? But here it is, with many of the characteristic Orwell delights, the unglamorous subject matter, the unnoticed detail (''a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature'') the baleful glare, the profound belief in humanity. Because what the piece is really about, of course, is not the toad itself, but the thrill of that most promising time of year, the spring, even as seen from Orwell's dingy Islington flat.

More here.

Robert F. Worth in the New York Times:

Ms. Lootah sees about seven cases a day, individuals and couples. Most of them are native Emiratis, but in the multicultural world of Dubai — where about 90 percent of the population is foreign — she has also counseled some Europeans and Asians. As in the criminal courts next door, a translator sits in on the session, and sometimes even offers advice to bridge cultural gaps.

“Some people are amazed I can work with people with only my eyes showing,” Ms. Lootah said, with a ripple of laughter. “Maybe it’s because of the way I move my hands! But I can tell you that people come here, and they speak very frankly with me.”

She reels off stories from her practice in rapid fire: the Emirati military officer whose wife had an affair because he was away from home too much; the woman who thought fellatio was against Islam (not true at all, Ms. Lootah notes); the wife who discovered her husband dressing up as a woman and going out to gay bars. She seems bent on showing that there is a whole world of sexual confusion that would benefit from open discussion.

More here.

23 May 1989: In China, a student-led democracy movement is gathering momentum. It had begun one month before in the capital and from there had spread throughout the entire country. Its activities are centred on the Tiananmen, the Square of Heavenly Peace in Peking. Not only is this where Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the People’s Republic on 1 October 1949, it is also the site of the mausoleum in which, as if to warn against forgetting the achievements of the Long March, the embalmed corpse of the former communist party leader and head of state is contained. It’s no coincidence that the activists have chosen this place to publicize their demands. Tiananmen is simultaneously a forum, a tribune, and a tribunal. Since 13 May, several thousand people have been holding a hunger strike in an attempt to force the government to enter into dialogue with the protesters. Without success.

more from Wolfgang Kraushaar at Eurozine here.

That sex and drugs go together should be no surprise to anyone, and in Thom Gunn’s poems they become dual aspects of eros: on the one hand, drugs and sex can open us up to vistas of human freedoms and discoveries; and, on the other, they can lead to darker recognitions about the world and ourselves. Gunn’s poems explore both aspects in a way that is compassionate, nuanced, and wide-ranging in scope. So let’s start with Gunn’s attitude toward drugs. I had long known that he used them—for that matter, so had I, speed, heroin, marijuana, a lot of psychedelics—and drug use was one of the bonds of our friendship. I don’t mean that we did drugs together, for we weren’t friends in that way. But I mean the psychological predisposition behind our drug use, the kinds of assumptions we shared about what drugs could teach you, how they opened up avenues of self-knowledge and wide-ranging spiritual and social understandings that would ordinarily be closed to you. You always took drugs for pleasure, of course, but part of that pleasure was the possibilities they gave you to test what it meant to be a human being. You might say that Gunn disagreed with Samuel Johnson when Johnson said that you didn’t need to experience evil in order to shun it—though Gunn never thought of drugs as evil: rather, drugs were part of the pleasure of people who have a romance with experience and, for better and worse, take seriously the choices and obsessions that such a romance involves you in, willy-nilly.

more from Tom Sleigh at Poetry here.

But the problem with late Picasso is real. It has to do with his stubborn insistence on diaristic expressionism increasingly isolated from changing times. Duchamp moved to New York, to the future, Picasso to the Mediterranean, the past. (Try finding a single contemporary artifact depicted in these works. No beer cans or soup cans here.) And anyway, didn’t Warhol, finishing what Duchamp started, drive a stake of ridicule into the heart of sincerity, into merely “optical” talent? From a postmodern point of view, Picasso’s restless hand, even at its most thrillingly uningratiating, even at its most goofy and cartoony, simply runs into a wall when it hits irony, as if trying too hard. To an extent, you can laugh uncomfortably at the current exhibition’s musquetero/clowns with their limp swords, their Marcel Marceau flowers, but is this really the game Picasso means to play or have we been conditioned by Jim Shaw’s thrift store art, Richard Prince’s sad jokes, Kippenberger, Koons, and so on? Picasso’s pretty girls and boys watched by old men seem rather prudish in light of sexual radicals like Aubrey Beardsley and Hans Bellmer, or even the gooey seductions of Lisa Yuskevage. As for tapping into an unbroken stream of blood and sand descending from Minoan funeral games by way of Goya, the lonely torero staring death in the face is, surely, an existential cliché. There are Jackson Pollock paintings from around 1940 of minotaurs’ heads, homages to Picasso by way of Jung, that are so full of punishing psychic fury that the master’s versions in comparison can seem like Cotes D’Azur tourist ceramics.

more from David Brody at artcritical here.