After Lorca

—for M. Marti

The church is a business, and the rich
are the businessmen.
…………………………….When they pull on the bells, the
poor come piling in and when the poor man dies, he has a wooden
cross, and they rush through the ceremony.

But when a rich man dies, they
drag out the sacrament
and the golden Cross, and go doucement, doucement
to the cemetery.

And the poor love it
and thinks it’s crazy.

by Robert Creely
from Naked Poetry
Bobbs Merrill Company, NY, 1969

—(doucement: gently)

Ben Dreith in dezeen.com:

Colorado-based Prometheus Materials has developed masonry blocks from a low-carbon cement-like material grown from micro-algae. The blocks, which meet the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standards, were made using an organic cement-like material grown in bioreactors that reproduces itself in ways similar to coral.

“Coral reefs, shells, and even the limestone we use to produce cement today show us that nature has already figured out how to bind minerals together in a strong, clever, and efficient way,” said Prometheus Materials co-founder Wil V Srubar III. “By working with nature to use existing microalgae to bind minerals and other materials together to create new types of sustainable biocomposite building materials, we can eliminate most, if not all, of the carbon emissions associated with traditional concrete-based building materials.”

More here.

Katherine Gammon in Nautilus:

The organoids are coming, the organoids are coming! That’s not a midnight proclamation of science gone rogue—but right. These tiny three-dimensional structures made from human cells are now allowing scientists to perform important medical experiments that can’t be performed on humans themselves. And just as promising, they may obviate many animal experiments done for humans’ sake.

Despite their near ubiquity, a surprising number of animal experiments result in data that is neither valuable nor applicable to humans. Even between closely related animal species, testing does not produce the same results. For example, cancer experiments had similar outcomes in rats and mice only a little more than half of the time.¹ “How can the rodent models predict human outcomes if they cannot predict each other very well?” asks Lena Smirnova, a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing. Organoids, Smirnova says, represent a significant step forward. To grow an organoid, scientists start with stem cells, which have the potential to become any type of cell and can come from an embryo, a biopsy taken from a person, or from other adult cells coaxed back into stem cell capabilities (known as pluripotent stem cells). These biological acrobats are induced to turn into specific cell types by adding chemical signals in a sequence that mimics how those cell types develop from stem cells in an embryo.

More here.

Daniel Immerwahr in The Guardian:

On the first page of his 2015 blockbuster book, Prisoners of Geography, Marshall invited readers to contemplate Russia’s topography. A ring of mountains and ice surrounds it. Its border with China is protected by mountain ranges, and it is separated from Iran and Turkey by the Caucusus. Between Russia and western Europe stand the Balkans, Carpathians and Alps, which form another wall. Or, they nearly do. To the north of those mountains, a flat corridor – the Great European Plain – connects Russia to its well-armed western neighbours via Ukraine and Poland. On it, you can ride a bicycle from Paris to Moscow.

You can also drive a tank. Marshall noted how this gap in Russia’s natural fortifications has repeatedly exposed it to attacks. “Putin has no choice”, Marshall concluded: “He must at least attempt to control the flatlands to the west.” When Putin did precisely that, invading a Ukraine he could no longer control by quieter means, Marshall greeted it with wearied understanding, deploring the war yet finding it unsurprising. The map “imprisons” leaders, he had written, “giving them fewer choices and less room to manoeuvre than you might think”.

There is a name for Marshall’s line of thinking: geopolitics. Although the term is often used loosely to mean “international relations”, it refers more precisely to the view that geography – mountains, land bridges, water tables – governs world affairs. Ideas, laws and culture are interesting, geopoliticians argue, but to truly understand politics you must look hard at maps.

More here.

Madeleine Cuff in New Scientist:

Delegates at the COP27 climate summit in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, have agreed to create a global “loss and damage” fund to provide cash for vulnerable nations hit by the impacts of climate change.

After more than 20 years of campaigning by developing countries battered by increasingly severe droughts, storms and other extreme weather, rich nations finally relented in the early hours of 20 November and backed plans for a compensation fund.

Details of how the fund will operate, including the crucial question of which nations will contribute, are still to be worked out, but activists and delegates from vulnerable nations said the agreement was a historic victory for climate justice.

More here.

Brian Stewart in Quillette:

Barely four decades into its existence, the Islamic republic is confronted by another eruption of public rage, this time brought about by the nation’s women, that may yet end in revolutionary change. A majority of Iranians now groaning under this austere order have no recollection of the revolution that produced it, and reject its central justification—an Islamic concept known as velayat-e faqih, or “guardianship of the jurist.” Originally conceived as a license for the clergy to assume responsibility for orphans and the infirm, the late Ayatollah Khomeini amended it to encompass the whole of society. By these means were his unfortunate subjects relegated to the status of state property.

More here.

David Goldblatt in the London Review of Books:

Today more than 2.3 million people live in Doha, while Qatar as a whole has a population of 2.9 million, just 300,000 of whom are Qatari citizens. The rest are migrant workers, only a small proportion of whom – Arabic Levantine and Indian families that arrived a generation or two back – have residence rights. Everyone else is there on a temporary work visa: professionals from the Global North; Filipinos, who make up a large proportion of Qatar’s domestic workers and cleaners; Africans, many of whom work as taxi drivers or security guards; and almost a million men from South Asia, Nepal and Bhutan who have toiled to build the new city. This racialised hierarchy, as John McManus argues in his anthropological account of Qatar, is a modern version of the British Empire’s ethnic division of labour.

More here.

Skye Thomas in The White Review:

In the three-minute short MANGOES (1999) by Berlin-based Pakistani artist Bani Abidi, two women sit next to each other on a white table, each with a mango on a plate in front of them. Both women are played by Abidi. One character has her hair up in a bun, the other loose and flowing down her shoulders. One is Indian, the other Pakistani, both members of the diaspora of an unspecified country. They slice and pull open their respective mangoes, sucking the flesh clean off the skin. The fruit is an oblique symbol of their melancholy and wistful nationalism. As they eat, they speak about the mango-eating traditions of both nation states, but the conversation soon grows strained as they compete over which has more varieties of mango. It’s an arbitrary, quasi-comic tension, but perfectly representative of the sentiments of animosity and hostility that have ruled Indian and Pakistani relations for over seven decades since the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Much of Indian/Pakistani difference is mediated and maintained by trivial, and often untrue, distinctions. But it is the myth of this difference that reinforces the border and fuels its continuing clashes. Abidi uses the mango to disturb the border relation: while the Indo-Pak border is a physical site of military presence, surveillance and catastrophe, it is also something a bit more intangible, something conjured and retained in the imagination of those that inhabit it.

Abidi is interested in the ways that we – more specifically, those of us from previously colonised countries with violent histories – internalise the grand rhetorics of nationalism.

More here.

Joanna Cresswell in Lensculture:

The Blindest Man follows the story of the elusive Chouette d’Or (or ‘golden owl’)—a golden sculpture buried somewhere in France in 1993 by an author working under the pseudonym of Max Valentin. The same year, Valentin—whose real name was later revealed to be Régis Hauser—released an accompanying book entitled On The Trail of the Golden Owl, which included 11 cryptic clues as to the statuette’s exact location. It became something of a phenomenon in France back then, and almost 30 years later, many people continue to search for it. To this day, however, it remains unfound, and the author has long since passed. Made in France between 2015 and 2018, the pictures in The Blindest Man introduce us to a number of different people on the hunt for the golden owl, following along on their failed routes. These people are referred to as ‘the searchers’.

Each of the 11 clues in Valentin’s On The Trail of the Golden Owl consists of a riddle and a painting, and these two components are heavy with symbolism. The paintings of long grasses, cockerels and keys are simple and bold, while the accompanying words speak of phantom images we have to conjure for ourselves: a spiral with four centers, the arrow of Apollo, an opening that reveals a heavenly light. In turn, similar symbols are woven throughout Graham’s photobook—a spiral staircase leading nowhere, for instance, or a single peacock lingering on a hillside.

More here.

A Game of Chess

In Washington Square Park, astonishing late October
turns a yellow leaf as airily as spring.
Everything slices up the light—the office towers,
the bough above a woman cutting a man’s hair

by the finished roses. Water blazes from the fountain
and bible quotes done in chalk are dust beneath
the feet of the fiddler playing bluegrass for a few coins.
It is so very hard to get close to anything.

Over where the public chess tables
stand in latticed shade, their concentration
makes the players seem all of a piece,
and the heart wants to sleep. But even here
a small upheaval . . .

A black man, serious and soft, and a white boy
maybe ten years old, pressed into his sharp collared shirt,
engage in the abstract and the real.

Here, I am given the space to see
the boy let go his queen
too soon, the look on his face.

The man takes the queen away
and the empty square is an immensity
the boy cannot move

then the man succeeds in taking us all in
when he puts her back contrariwise,
leans and smiles—Don’t you be doing that again.

And a boy grows in the light, and a man loses
because he loves. And all the season does
is throw down leaves and divvy up the sun
above the chessmen on their chequered field.

by Cally Conan-Davies
from the Hudson Review

Bad Patriot Poem

sun bears are the smallest bear species
the 2nd smallest bear species is
not the moon bear although they are
relatively small when compared
to other bears such as polar bears
if left alone most dog breeds would
die off and the ones remaining would
adapt through natural selection
to survive in the wild like wolves
the new variety of poodle will be
smaller but also have warmer legs
because humans will be gone
and their fur will not be shaved
for aesthetic reasons

this morning i woke up in iowa city
in seoul my brothers who i may
or may not have are getting ready
for bed no one here looks like
me everyone looks at me hi
hello i say i’m trying my best
to be american no one here thinks
i can be an american

by Sean Cho A.
from The Rumpus Magazine

Jake Mearns at the LARB:

THERE IS NO other novel quite like Michael Fessier’s 1935 genre-bending Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind. At first glance, the San Francisco–set tale is classic noir, narrated in the steely patter of Depression-era hard-boiled crime fiction. An average Joe, John Price, happens upon a murder in the street; he then becomes unwillingly entangled in the perpetrator’s subsequent killings; and finally, he must prove his innocence when the police try to railroad Price for the other’s crimes. But what elevates Fully Dressed into a class all its own is how Fessier incorporates fantastical characters and events that are alien to noir. The incongruity between the novel’s deadpan, tough-guy prose and its wildly surreal content makes Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind a haunting novel that’s impossible to put down.

more here.

Haruki Murakami at the New York Times:

What books would you recommend to somebody who wants to understand present-day Japan?

The same trend is found almost everywhere, I think, but in Japan, too, women writers — especially those of the younger generation — are quite active in publishing novels and are gaining a large, receptive readership. Personally, I like Mieko Kawakami’s novel “Natsu Monogatari” (“Summer Tales”). She has such sensitivity as a writer and is a deeply committed storyteller. This novel was translated and published in English in 2020 under the title “Breasts and Eggs.”

What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing?

It’s an interesting question, but I’ve never really thought about it. Writing a lengthy novel is a job that takes time and patience over the long haul, and it’d be kind of disruptive if I had to give up reading the books I want to read while I’m writing.

more here.

Howard LaFranchi in The Christian Science Monitor:

Just how anti-American is Pakistan?

Judging by the outpouring of domestic political support that former Prime Minister Imran Khan received when he claimed the United States was in on the assassination attempt against him this month, quite a lot. Go back to 2018, when the Trump-like populist Mr. Khan swept into power by shrewdly tapping into a deep vein of anti-American sentiments over the war on terror, and the antagonism seems confirmed. Top it off with widespread support for Mr. Khan’s further claim that it was U.S.-engineered “regime change” that caused his ouster from power in April of this year. It would all seem to add up to a deep well of anti-Americanism.

But hold on.

The hugely popular Mr. Khan appeared to switch gears this week when he told foreign journalists that he is ready to work with the U.S. – and even more surprisingly, that he no longer blames the U.S. for his removal from power in a vote of no confidence.

More here.

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post: