…
Monet’s Waterlilies
Robert Hayden

…………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………
Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

Thanks to Fred Lapides

…

From Nature:

They say that laughter is the best medicine, and now research is beginning to prove that this adage might be truer than we think. Laughter has long been known to make people happier, but a new study has shown that even anticipating a good laugh is good for your health. When stressed out, the body constricts blood vessels, elevates the production of potentially damaging stress hormones, and raises blood pressure. Short periods of stress are normal and not dangerous, but over long periods of time stress weakens the immune system and makes heart problems more likely.

In 2005 researchers found that laughing lowers blood pressure, but the biochemical mechanism within the body remained unclear. Now Lee Berk at Loma Linda University in California and his colleagues have revealed part of the answer. Back in 2006, Berk and his colleagues found that merely anticipating laughter boosted the production of mood-elevating hormones called β-endorphins and the immunity-enhancing human growth hormone by 27% and 87%, respectively. This led the team to wonder whether the link between lowered blood pressure and laughter could be the result of laughter somehow interfering with the production of stress hormones.

More here.

From The New York Times:

If Rod Serling were alive and writing episodes for “The Twilight Zone,” odds are he would have leaped on the true story of Anne Adams, a Canadian scientist turned artist who died of a rare brain disease last year. Trained in mathematics, chemistry and biology, Dr. Adams left her career as a teacher and bench scientist in 1986 to take care of a son who had been seriously injured in a car accident and was not expected to live. But the young man made a miraculous recovery. After seven weeks, he threw away his crutches and went back to school.

According her husband, Robert, Dr. Adams then decided to abandon science and take up art. She had dabbled with drawing when young, he said in a recent telephone interview, but now she had an intense all-or-nothing drive to paint. “Anne spent every day from 9 to 5 in her art studio,” said Robert Adams, a retired mathematician. Early on, she painted architectural portraits of houses in the West Vancouver, British Columbia, neighborhood where they lived.

In 1994, Dr. Adams became fascinated with the music of the composer Maurice Ravel, her husband recalled. At age 53, she painted “Unravelling Bolero” a work that translated the famous musical score into visual form. Ravel and Dr. Adams were in the early stages of a rare disease called FTD, or frontotemporal dementia, when they were working, Ravel on “Bolero” and Dr. Adams on her painting of “Bolero,” Dr. Miller said. The disease apparently altered circuits in their brains, changing the connections between the front and back parts and resulting in a torrent of creativity.

More here.

Every actor dreams of a breakthrough role, the part that stamps him in the public memory, and Mr. Heston’s life changed forever when he caught the eye of the director Cecil B. De Mille. De Mille, who was planning his next biblical spectacular, “The Ten Commandments,” looked at the young, physically imposing Mr. Heston and saw his Moses.

When the film was released in 1956, more than three and a half hours long and the most expensive that De Mille had ever made, Mr. Heston became a marquee name. Whether leading the Israelites through the wilderness, parting the Red Sea or coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets from God in hand, he was a Moses to remember.

more from the NY Times here.

Damian Kulash, Jr. in the New York Times:

Recently, the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust task force invited me to be the lead witness for its hearing on “net neutrality.” I’ve collaborated with the Future of Music Coalition, and my band, OK Go, has been among the first to find real success on the Internet — our songs and videos have been streamed and downloaded hundreds of millions of times (orders of magnitude above our CD sales) — so the committee thought I’d make a decent spokesman for up-and-coming musicians in this new era of digital pandemonium.

I’m flattered, of course, but it makes you wonder if Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner sit around arguing who was listening to Vampire Weekend first.

If you haven’t been following the debate on net neutrality, you’re not alone. The details of the issue can lead into realms where only tech geeks and policy wonks dare to tread, but at root there’s a pretty simple question: How much control should network operators be allowed to have over the information on their lines?

Most people assume that the Internet is a democratic free-for-all by nature — that it could be no other way. But the openness of the Internet as we know it is a byproduct of the fact that the network was started on phone lines. The phone system is subject to “common carriage” laws, which require phone companies to treat all calls and customers equally. They can’t offer tiered service in which higher-paying customers get their calls through faster or clearer, or calls originating on a competitor’s network are blocked or slowed.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Charles Kupchan on what Obama may mean for the rest of the world, throw away threat to bomb Pakistan not withstanding, in Reset Dialogues on Civilization:

How do you explain the fact that Obama seems to be the favourite of the “rest of the world”?

Part of it is that he would represent a new vision of the United States, one which is very multicultural and multiethnic. At a time in global politics in which globalization and migration are raising concerns about multiethnicity and social cohesion people would see Obama’s election as a sign of progress on that front. And also there is a widespread discontent with President Bush and its two terms in the White House and there is a belief – whether justified or not – that Obama would constitute the most significant change from the Bush years.

Do you agree with this belief?

I do. I think that Obama’s background and Obama’s instincts are likely to result in a more distinct foreign policy and form of government than that which would be brought forward by Hillary Clinton. I also think that he would be more successful in trying to bring together what remains of a much divided country.

From Scientific American:

• An alarming number of sports—baseball, football, track and field, and especially cycling—have been shaken by doping scandals in recent years.
• Among the many banned drugs in the cycling pharmacopoeia, the most effective is recombinant erythropoietin (r-EPO), an artificial hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells, thereby delivering more oxygen to the muscles.
• Game theory highlights why it is rational for professional cyclists to dope: the drugs are extremely effective as well as difficult or impossible to detect; the payoffs for success are high; and as more riders use them, a “clean” rider may become so noncompetitive that he or she risks being cut from the team.
• The game theory analysis of cycling can readily be extended to other sports. The results show quantitatively how governing bodies and antidoping agencies can most effectively target efforts to clean up their sports.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Among other things, Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, is a hymn to the creative and destructive power of female beauty. The heroine is a young woman of such transporting physical allure that on seeing her men fall instantly and insanely in love, heedless to the ensuing dangers. Wherever could he have come by the idea? ‘Ridiculously beautiful, comically beautiful’ was how he once described Padma Lakshmi, the woman who became his fourth wife. But in fact, Rushdie insists, he had the concept of the novel before he met the Indian-American model, actress and cookbook author. Still, that piece of chronology won’t prevent many readers from glimpsing the shade of Lakshmi in the ‘slender’ and ravishing ‘banquet for the senses’ that is Qara Koz, a woman ‘meant for palaces, and kings’.

According to Rushdie, the irony is that not only did she not inspire the book, she was very nearly the cause of its demise. ‘To put it bluntly,’ he says, ‘I had to write it in spite of her. Because what happened to me last year when I was writing this book was a colossal calamity.’ By this he means the end of his marriage. In January of 2007, Lakshmi asked for a divorce. ‘It was like a nuclear bomb dropped in your living room when you’re trying to work,’ he says. ‘I really feared for a time at the beginning of last year that I’d lost the book. I was in such a state of turmoil that I couldn’t work. I’ve always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk. And I got scared because I thought, if I lose this, I’ve lost everything. Genuinely, I think it was the biggest act of will that I’ve ever been asked to make, including after the fatwa, just to pull my head back together.’

More here.

Jack Handey in The New Yorker:

We are gathered here, way far in the future, for the funeral of Jack Handey, the world’s oldest man. He died suddenly in bed, according to his wife, Miss France.

No one is really sure how old Jack was, but some think he may have been born as long ago as the twentieth century. He passed away after a long, courageous battle with honky-tonkin’ and alley-cattin’.

Even though Jack was incredibly old, he was amazingly healthy right up to the end. He attributed this to performing his funny cowboy dance for friends, relatives, and people waiting for buses. All agreed it was the most hilarious thing they had ever seen, and not at all stupid or annoying.

Jack’s death has thrown the whole world into mourning, and not in a fakey, sarcastic way. He was admired by people of all ages and stripes, and by all animals, including zebras. Even monsters liked him. He had his playful side and his serious side, but ninety-nine per cent of the time he had his “normal” side.

He started out life as a baby but worked his way up to an adult. But even when he was a full-grown adult he never forgot that he was a baby. His philosophy of life was a simple one. “I’m-a no look-a for trouble, because-a trouble, she’s-a no good,” he would often say, in his beloved fake Italian accent. He was quick with a laugh, but just as quick to point at what he was laughing at. Children loved him, but not in the way his teen-age niece claimed. He was always thinking of ways of helping people, and was wondering how he might do some of those things when he died.

More here.

Arthur Lubow in the New York Times Magazine:

Every Jean Nouvel building tells a story. Typically, architects begin the design process with a sketch pad or scale models, but Nouvel starts with an idea he can express in words. “Everyone is a product of his epoch,” he told me recently. “For me, I was born in France after the war; I was in the milieu of Structuralist thinkers. If I don’t have a good analysis of something, I am lost.” Once Nouvel examines his given conditions and decides that the best architectural solution is, say, a skyscraper without visible base and summit, or a mechanized geometric facade that casts filigreed shadows, he can get going. But to this cerebral process he appends a counterweight: the sensuous love of the material components of a building. “What I like is the poétique of the situation,” he said, in Gallically accented English. “I am a hedonist, and I want to give pleasure to other people.” That avowal of hedonism gained credibility from the surroundings in which it was made: Le Duc, arguably the best seafood restaurant in Paris, where the waiter knew without instruction to bring Nouvel’s standard order of marinated raw fish followed by poached lobster dressed with olive oil.

Nouvel treats favorite restaurants as his office annexes, where he can develop his creative ideas in stereotypically French fashion — over long, wide-ranging discussions, lubricated by excellent food and wine. From this unchanging routine he achieves a wild variety of results. Most visitors to Paris would probably be surprised to learn that a single architect is responsible for the Fondation Cartier, a light-flooded, rectangular glass building in the Montparnasse district that is sandwiched elegantly between two huge glass screens, and the Musée du Quai Branly, a hodgepodge of vividly colored components with a spooky, tenebrous exhibition hall that veers perilously close to kitsch. “Of course, you can find a lot of contradictions between all my buildings,” Nouvel told me. “I have no global reasons; I have particular reasons.” Other critically praised architectural firms, like Herzog & de Meuron and Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, make similar claims. Nouvel’s projects, however, lack not only a recurring formal vocabulary but even a readily apparent common sensibility.

Nouvel is, at 62, a bulky man with an enormous shaved head, an intense gaze, bushy black eyebrows and an all-black wardrobe that he often complements with a broad-brimmed black hat. He makes an unmistakable impression, yet despite his powerful personality, he is exceptionally good at allowing a building to take on a personality of its own. With some of his projects, that personality is coolly and irresistibly seductive, and with others, it is brassy, even cheesy.

More here.  Plus, a video:

Wajahat Ali speaks with Ishmael Reed, at Goatmilk:

“Hey, Waj. Come on in. Did you bring your mom’s Biryani?” asks an eager and excited Ishmael Reed, the MacArthur Genius recipient, Pulitzer Prize nominated author and all around, all-star, controversial rabble-rouser.

Sorry, mom couldn’t make it this time. She asked for a rain check,” I reply and see Reed’s anticipation and grin fall for a moment.

“Well, it’s ok, no problem. Next time. Hey, does that Pakistani joint on San Pablo in Berkeley still serve goat? I think we’ll go get the goat special. Here, come on in to the kitchen, let’s do this.”

Entering the Reed household is like stepping foot into a delicate and vast Archival section of a genius-madman’s library. A wondrous display of books – running the gamut of diversity from novels to poetry to politics to sociology – somehow elegantly juxtaposed to African, European, and American art sculptures and paintings. Then, there’s the papers, including newspapers, reports, journals, and essays, piled on top of one another like a carefully constructed Jenga puzzle ready to blow over at the threat of a loud, inappropriate violent sneeze or negligent and thoughtless sway of a reckless hand gesture. Boxes of books and decades old papers, no doubt a culmination of research Reed uses for his novels and polemical essays, line the stairwells and hallways. This is a house is where documents come to retire: a senior citizens home and Valhalla for pugilistic evidence.

An open laptop sits on Reed’s kitchen table which is currently sharing space with nearly a dozen books and short stories Reed is reviewing and editing for an epic short story Anthology he is publishing in the Summer: Pow Wow: A Century of Short Fiction from Then To Now. The television is on; it’s CNN covering the Democratic Primaries.

More here.

Elif Batuman in the LRB:

The term ‘graphic novel’ is dismissed by most of its practitioners as either an empty euphemism or a marketing ploy. As Marjane Satrapi puts it, graphic novels simply enable ‘the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad’; according to Alan Moore, they allow publishers to ‘stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel’. Moore and Satrapi, in common with many others, want their work to be known as ‘comics’. But ‘graphic novel’ can usefully designate a certain type of comic: a single-author, book-length work, meant for a grown-up reader, with a memoiristic or novelistic narrative, usually devoid of superheroes. By contrast, the older and more capacious term ‘comic book’ recalls the thinner, serialised, multi-authored or ghost-written publications rife with Supermen and She-Hulks. Some comics, of course, straddle (or elude) both categories; but in broad terms ‘comic book’ and ‘graphic novel’ serve to distinguish two trends in the history and form of comics.

From The Guardian:

Joan Didion’s memoir about trying to come to terms with her husband’s death has become ‘the indispensable handbook to bereavement’. Then her 39-year-old daughter also died. As The Year of Magical Thinking comes to London, David Hare describes the challenge of bringing one writer’s grief to the stage.

You may say the story of The Year of Magical Thinking is of a woman who has to do what is, for her, the hardest thing in life: to admit her own helplessness. The distinctive power of the play comes from the fact that it is written by a non-believer. Unlike previous popular works on the subject, it offers no comfort. In facing death, Joan tells us we are facing meaninglessness. And yet, in spite of the classical seriousness of the theme and the disturbing closeness of the events – Quintana had died at New York Cornell only six months before we began working – I made a conscious decision to behave as if this were a play like any other. Nothing, I thought, could be worse than to go into this project aiming to wrap the author in cotton wool. If she could face down the horror, then so could we. Indeed, I suspected the very reason Joan was doing the play was to return herself to a version of normality. The most unhelpful thing I could do would be to go round with a long face.

Later, deep in rehearsals, Joan would recount her anger at a mourner who had come up to her at John’s funeral and told her how terrible she must be feeling. Joan had taken the woman’s words not as an act of consideration, but of aggression. If she hadn’t been feeling terrible before, she certainly was now.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

More than 100 cities across the country start to burn after King’s assassination, and Boston appears to be ripe for trouble. The city was no paradise of race relations, and this is where King earned the title of “doctor,” from Boston University. He met his wife there. People — such as African Americans forced to live in ghettos in Roxbury, in the South End — remember.

And who has a concert scheduled for the next night?

James Brown! Babybabybaby!

Scenario 1: Let the concert go on, and you have about 15,000 fans, presumably most of them black, come to downtown Boston for a concert by Soul Brother No. 1, who wasn’t exactly in line with that nonviolence thing, with security provided mostly by white cops with billy clubs. Scenario 2: Cancel the concert, and have those 15,000 come downtown to find out The Man wouldn’t let The Godfather in town.

This is what’s known as a lose-lose situation.

Brand-new mayor Kevin White is adamant that the show must be canceled. He’s talked into changing that position by Tom Atkins, a Harvard Law student who happens to be the only black person on the city council. (And, you know, thereby deputized to deal with This Negro From Out of Town.)

White decides to solve the problem by slapping the show on live television, and offering refunds to anyone who asks.

More here.

Dutch artist Guido van der Werve makes the kind of films Caspar David Friedrich might have dreamt up if he had had a sense of humour and access to a camera. Saturated in an atmosphere of melancholy, loss and loneliness, preoccupied with dead composers and centuries-old dance forms, yet fired by a love of both the piano and slapstick, Van der Werve’s beautifully shot vignettes include: the hapless artist narrating the history of Steinway pianos while sitting mournfully on a piano stool; trudging slowly before an icebreaker in the Gulf of Finland; standing for 24 hours at the geographic North Pole, refusing to turn with the world, surrounded by stately dancing ballerinas after being knocked down by a car on a depressing suburban street; and meditating on meteorites while building a space rocket in his living-room. The films are usually accompanied by Romantic piano music played by Van der Werve, who trained as a classical musician. Frédéric Chopin is his favourite composer (because ‘his music often sounds very simple, and I think you have to reach a really high level of understanding in order to be able to do that’), although he is also fond of Sergei Rachmaninov, Sergei Prokofiev and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Recently he has begun writing his own lush scores. Happily, despite skating close to pathos, Van der Werve’s films never quite fall into it. A crescendo of melancholy can abruptly shift key and tone and segue into a light-hearted mood of absurdity at the least predictable of moments.

more from Frieze here.

“Shadow Country” is a great big book that I read in the early spring of this year as American culture celebrated a pair of monomaniacal killers, Sweeney Todd and Anton Chigurh. The central axle of Peter Matthiessen’s magnificent and capacious novel is another larger-than-life figure, E.J. Watson (Bloody Watson, Emperor Watson), who was a brave and indefatigable pioneer in the Florida Everglades and an astonishing liar and murderer.

For his renegade behavior, his rigid code for revenge, his skill with firearms, his winning volubility and, finally, his reflection, he dwarfs these other killers. Watson is at once a real man in a rough world and a figure cut from legend (some of which he encouraged). Ultimately, he represents the American conquest of the frontier, which this novel proves once and for all was not a pretty or romantic enterprise or one accompanied by fairness or justice. Watson did what he wanted when he wanted, regardless of the law as it was at the outset of the 20th century.

Such a book requires a vivid and convincing world, and Matthiessen — who knows the truth of place as well as any writer — gives us an effulgent setting here, the edge of edge, the raw and ravishing Everglades deep in Florida as the 19th century turned.

more from the LA Times Book Review here.

Quaint and antique, the cry for love of country that Sir Walter Scott made in his poem “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” is something schoolchildren quit memorizing a century ago. Its stirring theme rouses a patriot’s yearning: “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, / Who never to himself hath said, / This is my own, my native land!”

It’s easy to forget, given the sensitivities that have been awakened in this country since 9/11, thrusting lifelong citizens under suspicion for having foreign-sounding names and subjecting visitors to the indignity of being fingerprinted, that America was conceived in a spirit of openness, as a land where people could build new identities, grounded in the present and the future, not the past. This dream, despite current fears, has in great part been made real. And the fact that America is still a place where the rest of the world comes to reinvent itself — accepting with excitement and anxiety the necessity of leaving behind the constrictions and comforts of distant customs — is the underlying theme of Jhumpa Lahiri’s sensitive new collection of stories, “Unaccustomed Earth.”

more from the NYT Book Review here.

…
The Cossacks

Linda Pastan

For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming.
Therefore I think the sun spot on my arm
is melanoma. Therefore I celebrate
New Year’s Eve by counting
my annual dead.

My mother, when she was dying,
spoke to her visitors of books
and travel, displaying serenity
as a form of manners, though
I could tell the difference.

But when I watched you planning
for a life you knew
you’d never have, I couldn’t explain
your genuine smile in the face
of disaster. Was it denial

laced with acceptance? Or was it
generations of being English–
Brontë’s Lucy in Villette
living as if no fire raged
beneath her dun-colored dress.

I want to live the way you did,
preparing for next year’s famine with wine
and music as if it were a ten-course banquet.
But listen: those are hoofbeats
on the frosty autumn air.

,,