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What The Fish Say

My godson wanted to go look at fish but I told him, today, beauty is canceled.
We cried. I felt bad. I counted the unbeautiful like broken ribs.
Shrapnel in the olive tree. Child-sized tourniquet.
Saint Porphyrius’ watching and weeping.
My father phones to tell me they’re down to vinegar; they pour into
open wounds. His friend found some wild tomatoes. Cooked them
in the street for his children. Over there, it’s a god-lent shovel.
A murmur in water. The dark between angels is still time spent waiting for light.
My father finds the photo albums to remember the streets that once existed.
My godson has not stopped describing his desire for fish.
Their bodies are neon and possible. The water is full of his daydreams.
I scavenge his tiny wants. And after, I dream of the hospital. Ice cream trucks
filled with bodies. A friend dies on that blacktop like a fish. So few people
will name him. I said today I am choosing the space between angels. There is
nothing left to choose. I sew beauty between layers of skin. It seeps out
without my noticing. When I see it I get angry because how dare life go on?
My godson phones to say the fish are possible. We are possible.
The sky is full of broken windows and so is the dream. My eye sees the way
the past lurches forward, covering ground like we cover old scars.
It says what the fish say: witness me.

by A.D. Lauren-Abunassar
from Split This Rock

—A.D. Lauren-Abunassar is a Palestinian-American writer, poet, and journalist.
Her work has appeared in Poetry, Narrative, Rattle, Boulevard, and elsewhere.
Her first book, Coriolis, was winner of the 2023 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. 

Paul Cooper at Literary Hub:

One Sumerian epic poem called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta gives the first known story about the invention of writing, by a king who has to send so many messages that his messenger can’t remember them all.

His speech was substantial, and its contents extensive… Because the messenger, whose mouth was tired, was not able to repeat it, the lord of Kulaba patted some clay and wrote the message as if on a tablet. Formerly, the writing of messages on clay was not established. Now, under that sun and on that day, it was indeed so.

The Sumerians had two things in virtually limitless abun­dance: the clay beneath their feet, and the reeds that grew on the marshes and riverbanks—and these combined to create the written word. They made marks on palm-sized tablets of wet clay with the ends of cut reeds, and the distinctive shape of these impressions gives this form of writing its name, from the Latin for “wedge-shaped”: cuneiform. The oldest cuneiform clay tab­lets come from the Sumerian city of Uruk, and date to the late fourth millennium BCE. They are ergonomically shaped to the human and, and as a result are roughly the dimensions of a mod­ern smartphone.

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William Mark Stuckey in The Conversation:

Today, researchers are looking toward building quantum computers and ways to securely transfer information using an entirely new sister field called quantum information science.

But despite creating all these breakthrough technologies, physicists and philosophers who study quantum mechanics still haven’t come up with the answers to some big questions raised by the field’s founders. Given recent developments in quantum information science, researchers like me are using quantum information theory to explore new ways of thinking about these unanswered foundational questions. And one direction we’re looking into relates Albert Einstein’s relativity principle to the qubit.

More here.

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Yascha Mounk at his own Substack:

I first came to the United States for an academic exchange at Columbia University in 2005, and have spent the bulk of my time here since starting my PhD at Harvard University in 2007. No country changes nature overnight, and America still retains many of the virtues with which I fell in love all those years ago. But there are days when I fear that the place has been transformed so deeply that the qualities that would once have been touted as quintessentially American have forever been lost.

Thinking highly of your compatriots and caring deeply about the fate of your country were once seen as virtues; now, such sentiments are rejected as proof of naïveté, perhaps even of an insidious commitment to the status quo. A young politician’s promise of “Hope and Change” once inspired America; today, many young Americans pride themselves on having awoken to the fraudulence of such illusions.

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Jenessa Abrams at the LARB:

SHORTLY AFTER Alice Munro died, a line from the title story of her 2009 collection Too Much Happiness began circulating on the internet: “Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind […] When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.” The quote appeared in white font over a black background. The only attribution was to Munro, so at the time, I assumed it was something she had said in an interview. It felt piercingly ironic that the female winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature was being remembered for a remark she made about women’s supposed inability to live outside the context of men. Then, I learned the line was delivered by a character in “Too Much Happiness,” Munro’s fictional account of a real 19th-century woman, Sofya Kovalevskaya. Shortly afterward, the world learned of the sexual abuse Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, experienced as a child from her stepfather, Munro’s second husband. An abuse that Munro herself had learned of decades ago and chose to ignore.

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Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

The medals keep coming for US swimmers at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris — and that’s in part thanks to science.

Several of the athletes on Team USA have improved their times dramatically in recent years, and some of these improvements could be down to Ken Ono, a mathematician at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Working for years with students who are on the university’s swimming team, Ono has developed techniques to monitor the fine movements of the body in the pool. He and his collaborator Jerry Lu, who is at the Sports Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, then create 3D models of the athletes and suggest tiny changes that can shave off precious fractions of a second at every stroke.

Ono, whose day job is studying problems in number theory, spoke with Nature from Paris, where he is supporting the swimming team.

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Tanya Harrod at Literary Review:

This remarkable book begins dramatically and truthfully: ‘A monstrous child is blocking my view and has carved a nest in the soft darkness of my head. It eats the hours, this child, leaving me only crumbs.’ Motherhood can be overwhelming, however longed for. It is never a small thing, even if the rest of the world chooses to ignore it or view it as a block to professionalism. Cyril Connolly’s remark in Enemies of Promise (1938), ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’, was, of course, a reference to male creativity. But women have routinely been brainwashed into concurring with this dismissive observation – made, admittedly, before Connolly had children. In the 1950s, respected male tutors in colleges of art would dismiss female making as ‘frustrated maternity’. The sculptor Reg Butler asked Slade School of Fine Art students in 1962, ‘Can a woman become a vital creative artist without ceasing to be a woman except for the purposes of a census?’ 

The 20th century proved a surprisingly bleak period for the recognition of women’s artistic activity. The flood of books on women artists which had appeared in the 19th century dwindled. And the women’s movement of the 1970s grappled with a peculiarly limited art world, characterised by exclusionary boundaries and plenty of straightforward misogyny.

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The Chilean Forest

Under the volcanoes, beside the snow-capped mountains,
among the huge lakes, the fragrant, the silent, the tangled
Chilean forest…

My feet sink down into the dead leaves, a fragile twig crackles,
the giant rauli trees rise in all their bristling height,
a bird from the cold jungle passes over, flaps its wings,
and stops in the sunless branches. And then, from its hideaway,
it sings like an oboe…

The wild scent of the laurel, the dark scent of the boldo herb,
enter my nostrils and flood my whole being…
The cypress of the Guaitecas blocks my way…

This is a vertical world: a nation of birds, a plenitude of leaves…

I stumble over a rock, dig up the uncovered hollow,
an enormous spider covered with red hair
stares up at me, motionless, as huge as a crab…
A golden carabus beetle blows its mephitic breath at me,
as its brilliant rainbow disappears like lightning…

Going on, I pass through a forest of ferns
much taller than I am: from their cold green eyes
sixty tears splash down on my face and, behind me,
their fans go on quivering for a long time…
A decaying tree trunk: what a treasure!…

Black and blue mushrooms have given it ears,
red parasite plants have covered it with rubies,
other lazy plants have let it borrow their beards,
and a snake springs out of the rotted body
like a sudden breath, as if the spirit of the dead trunk
were slipping away from it… Farther along,
each tree stands away from its fellows…

They soar up over the carpet of the secretive forest,
and the foliage of each has its own style, linear, bristling,
ramulose, lanceolate, as if cut by shears moving in infinite ways…

A gorge; below, the crystal water slides over granite and jasper…
A butterfly goes past, bright as a lemon, dancing between
the water and the sunlight… Close by, innumerable calceolarias
nod their little yellow heads in greeting…

High up, red copihues (Lapageria rosea) dangle like drops
from the magic forest’s arteries…

A fox cuts through the silence like a flash, sending a shiver
through the leaves, but silence is the law of the plant kingdom…

The barely audible cry of some bewildered animal far off…
The piercing interruption of a hidden bird… The vegetable world
keeps up its low rustle until a storm chums up all the music of the earth.

Anyone who hasn’t been in the Chilean forest
doesn’t know this planet.

I have come out of that landscape,
that mud, that silence, to roam,
to go singing through the world.

by Pablo Neruda
from Memoirs

Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader:

Fifty years ago, a young woman was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a ragtag group of revolutionaries willing to kill for gentle causes. For weeks, she recorded strident, sarcastic messages at her captors’ bidding, messages that bewildered and disturbed their intended audience. In time, she was taught the group’s thinking, given a nom de guerre (Tania), and handed a sawed-off carbine. She waved it around to help the SLA rob a bank—and later sprayed bullets from a machine gun to help them escape arrest. Of her own volition, she hid out with them for nearly a year. Public response swung from warm concern to fury.

I was too young to make sense of any of this, but the name still fizzes in my memory. In two years, Patty Hearst made the cover of Newsweek seven times. In the initial rush of sympathy, one man offered to go hungry until she was returned; another offered to give up his salary to feed the poor and thus placate her kidnappers. Strange allies surfaced, among them cult leader Jim Jones, the Moonies, and later, Charles Manson. When she turned fugitive, reports of sightings poured into the FBI.

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James Woodford in New Scientist:

A backup of life on Earth could be kept safe in a permanently dark location on the moon, without the need for power or maintenance, allowing us to potentially restore organisms if they die out.

Mary Hagedorn at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute in Washington DC and her colleagues have proposed building this lunar biorepository as a response to the extinctions occurring on Earth.

The plan has three main goals: to safeguard the diversity of life on Earth, to protect species that might be useful for space exploration, such as those that could provide biomaterials for food or filtration, and to preserve microorganisms that may one day be needed for terraforming other planets.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

Traditionally, Donald Trump has been the expert at creating insults that get under his opponents’ skin. But over the past week or so, Kamala Harris and her allies have come up with a put-down so devastating that Republicans seem to have no answer for it. They’re calling Trump and his VP nominee J.D. Vance “weird”.

“Weird” doesn’t seem like a particularly harsh or savage label. It’s much more milquetoast than any number of insults Trump has deployed over the years. But it appears to be driving MAGA types absolutely up the wall…

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Sandra Simonds at Poetry Magazine:

While Knott may have alienated his peers in what Charles Bernstein dubbed “official verse culture,” by the 1970s and ’80s his irreverent style, trickster persona, and anti-establishment ethos were precisely why he found fans in the emerging punk rock scene. In their novel Inferno (2016), Eileen Myles calls Knott a “genius” who lived in a “hovel” and looked “generally greasy.” They also remark, “people claim that Bill Knott was the inspiration for punk.” Perhaps Knott’s connection to punk rock explains why the foreword of the reissued Naomi Poems is written by Richard Hell, a pioneer in the punk movement known for his bands Television and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Upon encountering the collection at age 18 or 19, within a year of its release, Hell says the book felt “like an infection or injection.” He was captivated by its “all-pervading condition of longing, adoration, fear, and fury, lurching from near-worship of ‘Naomi’ into anger and despair at, among much else, the bloodthirsty American military and their corporate cohort.”

Star Black, Knott’s former partner, mentioned to me in a phone conversation that Thurston Moore of the band Sonic Youth exchanged poems and music with Knott. When I reached out to Moore via email, he recalled that he asked Knott to open for Sonic Youth in the early 2000s but the poet “demurred.”

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David Gelles in The New York Times:

David Keith was a graduate student in 1991 when a volcano erupted in the Philippines, sending a cloud of ash toward the edge of space. Seventeen million tons of sulfur dioxide released from Mount Pinatubo spread across the stratosphere, reflecting some of the sun’s energy away from Earth. The result was a drop in average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere by roughly one degree Fahrenheit in the year that followed. Today, Dr. Keith cites that event as validation of an idea that has become his life’s work: He believes that by intentionally releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, it would be possible to lower temperatures worldwide, blunting global warming.

Such radical interventions are increasingly being taken seriously as the effects of climate change grow more intense. Global temperatures have hit record highs for 13 months in a row, unleashing violent weather, deadly heat waves and raising sea levels. Scientists expect the heat to keep climbing for decades. The main driver of the warming, the burning of fossil fuels, continues more or less unabated. Against this backdrop, there is growing interest in efforts to intentionally alter the Earth’s climate, a field known as geoengineering. Already, major corporations are operating enormous facilities to vacuum up the carbon dioxide that’s heating up the atmosphere and bury it underground. Some scientists are performing experiments designed to brighten clouds, another way to bounce some solar radiation back to space. Others are working on efforts to make oceans and plants absorb more carbon dioxide.

But of all these ideas, it is stratospheric solar geoengineering that elicits the greatest hope and the greatest fear.

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