Beasts Bounding Through Time

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory
moving this little bit of light toward us
impossibly.

by Charles Bukowski
from Poetic Outlaws

Lydialyle Gibson in Harvard Magazine:

“SOMETIMES I THINK I know where I’m going, but once you draw a line, you know, it tends to have a mind of its own,” says painter Judith Seligson ’72. She’s standing in the living room of her Manhattan apartment, looking at an installation of her work that hangs above the sofa: a carefully arranged group of geometric abstractions in oil paint—her signature style—with suggestive titles like “Do Less,” “Danger,” “Super-Fluidity,” and “Missing in Action.” The works span some 20 years of artistic endeavor, their odd angles and straight lines playing off each other from their separate framed canvases, with deep purples and greens and oranges softening into pale pinks and blues. “To me, each shape is like an individual in a community,” Seligson says. “They cohere to themselves, but they also interact.” Eventually, “the painting finds a place where this shape or that color can kind of break off like a piece of cake.” That’s when she knows something is complete.

More here.

Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

Lucid dreaming is quite peculiar. We become aware that we are dreaming. In normal dreaming, we lack this reflective capacity. Lucid dreamers report that these experiences are extremely vivid, fantastic, and perceptually immersive, like virtual reality. In our new paper, we wanted to explain these differences in a model using the predictive coding framework. The main idea is that the brain is a prediction-generating machine.

Say I see someone in a dream. She’s probably my sister. No, she’s my girlfriend. No, she’s my mother. My brain is trying to make the best guesses of these images. And there is no constraint, no bottom-up input coming from the external world to fit or to shape these predictions. So the brain is just jumping from one prediction to the other. What we argue is that, in lucid dreaming, this is different. I see someone that speaks, let’s say, in a language that is different from the language that I know she usually speaks. This creates a prediction error. And I’m not changing the identity of the person. Instead, I realize, “Okay, something is not going on correctly here.” This is a momentum for lucid dreaming, this prediction error, that will trigger the insight that I’m in a dream. We call this a superordinate self model: “I am dreaming. I’m lying in bed. But I’m having a dream and I’m having these ideas.” This will create a top-down model to which everything that is strange and surprising will be easy to accommodate.

More here.

Sarah Longwell in Persuasion:

The crop of Republican candidates running in the midterms has taken immorality to a whole new level. Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has refused to say she’ll accept the results of her race if she loses. Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz has a scandal about animal abuse related to his medical research. And Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia, allegedly paid for an abortion—despite his own stated pro-life position that makes no exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother. His actions also include holding a gun to his wife’s head, lying about graduating from college, lying about a career in the military and law enforcement, and lying about three secret children.

What was the response from GOP leaders and media figures? In essence: “LOL, nothing matters.”

It didn’t used to be like this.

More here.

Miguel Ohnesorge at APS:

Newton began his quantitative derivation of Earth’s figure in 1686, after learning about work by the French physicist Jean Richer. In 1671, Richer had traveled to Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana in South America, and experimented with a pendulum clock. Richer found that the clock, calibrated to Parisian astronomical time (48°40’ latitude), lost an average of 2.5 minutes per day in Cayenne (5° latitude). This was surprising, but it could be explained by the theory of centrifugal motion, recently developed by Christian Huygens: The theory suggested that the centrifugal effect is strongest at the equator, so the net effective surface gravity would decrease as you moved from Paris to Cayenne[1].

Newton accepted Huygens’s theory but realized it meant something strange: If Earth is a sphere and its centrifugal effect is strongest at the equator, gravity would vary across Earth’s surface, and the ocean would bulge up at the equator — a proposition that Newton considered absurd.

To resolve this, he proposed that the solid Earth had behaved like a fluid throughout its formation, gradually bulging up at the equator because of the centrifugal effect. He proposed modeling planets as rotating fluids in equilibrium, where the planet’s shape is stable while the force generated by its rotational motion, and the gravitational attraction between its particles, acts on it[2].

More here.

Nojang Khatami in the Boston Review:

From street demonstrations to song, dance, film, and poetry, women are advancing a long legacy of struggle against authoritarianism in Iran.

A powerful wave of protests in Iran has shown the world, again, the resilience of a people fighting against authoritarian government, economic inequality, and gendered violence.

The uprisings have continued for over a month and grown to encompass student demonstrations and workers’ strikes, but women have been at the forefront of the movement since the beginning. Triggered by the killing of Mahsa (Jina) Amini at the hands of the Islamic Republic’s morality police (the gasht-e ershad, or “guidance patrol”) in September, the movement soon mobilized under the chant of zan, zendegi, azadi—“women, life, liberty”—and has used social media posts alongside street demonstrations to critique the government’s violent apparatuses of control over women’s bodies and life choices.

More here.

More on John Allen Paulos’s new book here.

Before and After the Iranian Revolution

In the early eighties the shipment
was denied entry onto our land.
The dildos likely still buoy bloated
on the gray sea, greasy with the surplus
of embargoed oil, choking the long-inflamed
passage through the strait neck of Hormuz
like a midnight belch. They turned away
many goods and bright colors, our men,
barely managing, fumbling to keep
our confounding thighs, our unruly hair
out of view, and rule the country
with the other fist, without foreign
aid, trade, or hair spray.

The fifties and sixties ushered in the Tango,
Twist arrived in cassette tapes packed
with overlap miniskirts. In the late seventies,
after the revolution, our Sony players still sucked
the Hollywood VHS in place, coached us
in the new Occidental moves, we clapped
to each other’s jig, our belly-dancing hips
swinging easy in the warmth of kerosene heaters.

Late eighties though, it was then that
the definition of Dirty Dancing grew broad
to embrace our lashes, lips and other indecencies.
We were urged to keep still, not fiddle
with our faces. It was then that stoning came
back in vogue. Most of us missed out entirely
on Swayze’s steps and those who played
the clandestine soundtrack past earshot
got ninety-nine lashes, one for every name
of God. Virgins took it the hardest, a Coca Cola
bottle inserted in the rectum and a torn vagina
sealed their outcast state— flapping that wide
they couldn’t leave their cells, their splayed souls
would never fit through Heaven’s narrow gate,
nor contain its pleasures.

Still today we’re not to be trusted
with a casual glance, a dildo,
though we can’t help
but sit with our hair by the window,
and enjoy the Persian rose,
the scent wafting in,
out and in,
freely.

by Rooja Mohassessy
from The Rumpus Magazine

Tanjil Rashid at The Spectator:

Everyone has a type they can’t resist. For the writer Kazuo Ishiguro, it’s old men. Old men secretly worried they’ve spent entire lives on the wrong side of history. Old men born in a world of certainty, transplanted to a different, more dubious one. Old men asking themselves, as so many of us will do (if we haven’t already): ‘What was it all for?’

But as I wait at the offices of a West End PR firm to interview Sir Kazuo about his new film with Bill Nighy, Living, I can’t help but wonder what unlikely preoccupations these are for arguably the nation’s greatest living literary talent. Those of us with humdrum lives may daydream about winning a Nobel Prize. But in Ishiguro we have a Nobel laureate who, perversely, can’t stop fantasising about a life of mediocrity or failure. In his Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day (1989), it is the English butler Stevens (memorably portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in Merchant and Ivory’s film version) who looks back on a life of service only to be nagged, after the second world war, by the feeling that he had all along served the wrong master – a Nazi collaborator.

more here.

Jonathan Lethem at The Believer:

I have a suggestion: Forget London. Forget, for now, the nineteenth century, forget the whole assertion that the value of the “late” or “mature,” Dickens—a construction whose first evidence is usually located by commentators here, in Dombey and Son—rests on his placement of his sentimental melodramas and grotesques in an increasingly deliberate and nuanced social portrait of his times, of his city. Forget institutions, forget reform. Please indulge me, and forget for the moment any questions of psycho-biographical excavation, of self-portraiture, despite Dombey’s being the book which preceded that great dam-bursting of the autobiographical impulse, David Copperfield (and, in fact, Dombey contains a tiny leak in that dam in the form of Mrs. Pipchin, the first character avowed by Dickens to have been drawn from a figure from his life). Forget Where’s Charles Dickens in all this fabulous contradictory stew of story and rhetoric? What does the guy want from us? What does he really think and believe? Forget it all, and then forgive what will surely seem a diminishing suggestion from me, which is that you abandon all context, ye who enter here, and read Dombey and Son as though it were a book about animals.

more here.

David Shaywitz in The Wall Street Journal:

In 1665, the British polymath Robert Hooke published an unexpectedly popular picture book, “Micrographia.” It featured drawings of household objects and inhabitants that were normally barely visible—pests in particular. But they were presented at enormous magnification, having been detected by means of the cutting-edge technology of the day: a compound, two-lens microscope.

Somewhere between page-size images of ants, fleas and lice was an innocuous rendering of a magnified piece of cork. It contained, Hooke observed, “a great many little boxes,” which he called “cells.” (They were actually the encircling walls that plant cells had built.) Over the next three centuries, cells would move from a tiny architectural curiosity to the center of the biomedical universe, embodying the fundamental unit of life. Cells are the origin-point of disease and the target of medical therapy. Increasingly, they constitute the treatment vehicle itself.

More here.

Elie Dolgin in Nature:

For years, if you asked a scientist how they pictured the inner workings of a cell, they might have spoken of a highly organized factory, with different departments each performing specialized tasks in delineated assembly lines. Ask now, and they might be more inclined to compare the cell to a chaotic open-plan office, with hot-desking zones where different types of cellular matter gather to complete a task and then scatter to other regions.

Everywhere scientists look in cells, throngs of proteins and RNA seem to be sticking together, coalescing into pearl-like droplets distinct from their surrounding environment. These dynamic compartments allow cells to perform essential functions, ranging from gene control and DNA repair to waste disposal and stress responses. They are often fleeting, and are unhindered by an enclosing membrane — unlike many other cellular components, such as mitochondria, which are membrane-bound. When a droplet is no longer needed, it vanishes.

More here.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recorded 15,592 Ukraine civilian casualties between February 24, 2022 and October 09, 2022 . . . During the period, . . . A total of 9,371were injured, including . . . 1,441 women, 199 girls, and 277 boys, as well as 238 children . . .” and 5,256 adults whose sex is unknown —Globaldata.com

An Act of Creation

……..—to Cesar Chaves

They keep rounding them up
through the centuries, killing
the innocent so easily—

the babies, the children,
the screaming mothers—
the men who do not beg

for mercy, Yes, yes, they
keep rounding up the victims,
again and again—their only

heirloom, possession: poverty.
When I was a young mother, I
didn’t fully realize this—
in my stupidity, I thought

the children were spared.

And when I thought of wolves
and lambs, I thought of
one or the other. A wolf.
A lamb. One bloodthirsty, eating
raw, red meat. One gentle, nibbling

grass. Now, twenty years later, they
still round up the innocent, or
corral them as in (South Africa),
slowly starving their flesh and
spirit to death. They enemy

kills the enemy’s children.

A stubborn man fasts for
the farm workers—their children
are not born whole, and ours
will not be born whole. That

is an act of creation.

Like painting a mural, a
watercolor, like composing
a symphony, like writing
a story, a poem.

That is when the lamb
and the wolf lie down,
together, and make extraordinary,
exquisite, ecstatic. Love.

Until the next roundup.

Or, until we learn better—
that without the lamb, the
wolf starves, and without the
wolf, the lamb grows fat
and stupid. Yes, I understand

why the stubborn man
does not eat, pretending
to be a lamb, inviting
the wolves to feast
upon his sweet, brown

flesh. His spirit.

by Alma Luz Villanueva
from Paper Dance
Persea Books, 1995

Bina Gogineni at Salmagundi:

Rather than repel or frighten him as it might a conventional English gentleman travel-writer, this “atmosphere of entire strangeness” calls to Fermor, pulling him into the fray. Not only does he foray into the local market before even reaching his hotel, but soon afterward he investigates all things Créole—the language, the population, and the dress. Within a mere two days—and despite the fact that Guadeloupe ends up his least inspiring destination—he has so thoroughly immersed himself in the very things whose strangeness had captured his attention that he can bandy Créole patois terms with ease and has decoded the amorous messages indicated by the number of spikes into which the older women tie their silk Madras turbans. What is striking is the thoroughness of his inquiry and his capacity to explain the exotic without eviscerating its alluring quality of otherness.

Fermor’s sustained immersion in the complexities of the exotic in these early expositions adumbrate the ethos that will become ever more striking throughout the travelogue: he is always in the service of the exotic, dutifully pursuing his every resource to learn and render it in all its complexity.

more here.

Isaac Butler at The New Yorker:

The Criterion Channel is hosting a retrospective of films featuring the late John Garfield, a superstar of the nineteen-forties whose body of work has long gone under-recognized. In the course of a career that stretched from the height of the studio system to the depths of the Red Scare, Garfield pioneered a new, naturalistic approach to acting for the camera, one rooted in the same techniques that would soon be called the Method. Garfield died in 1952, his performances overshadowed by the actors who followed him—particularly Marlon Brando, who rose to fame playing Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” a role that Garfield turned down. Brando, despite his protestations to the contrary, was often credited as the first Method movie star, the one who inspired generations of young men to move to New York and learn the Method at its high temple, the Actors Studio. It’s tempting to see Garfield, who worked as the doorman for the first session of the Actors Studio, in 1947, as also holding the door of acting history open for Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Ben Gazzara, Paul Newman, and others to walk through. But Garfield is much more than a footnote.

more here.

Liam Freeman in Vogue:

At the dawn of the third millennium, the American novelist Annie Proulx was living in Wyoming and saw a perfect but terrible storm brewing. Extended droughts and warmer winters were providing the optimal conditions for the mountain pine beetle to thrive, and its ongoing infestation—as well as wildfires continuing to ravage the state’s old dense forests, including those of Yellowstone National Park—was turning towering lodgepole pines into ashen tombstones. “That was the first moment when it really sank in that something momentous is going on,” Proulx, who is 87, recently told me over the phone. “I’m a great believer in keeping notes on what you see from year to year. Repetitive observation is my idea of the way to live. This is not a once-in-a-lifetime chance, but a once-in-a-species existence, to observe these huge changes.”

And so began her transition from fiction to writing about ecological issues. In her latest book Fen, Bog and Swamp (Scribner), Proulx delves into the history of peatland destruction and its role in the climate crisis.

More here.

Helen Scales in The Guardian:

Growing between the tides around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean, are clusters of what look like tiny, green mushrooms. In fact, this is a type of seaweed, or algae – each one made from a single, gigantic cell.

In 2021, scientists named them Acetabularia jalakanyakae, also known as the “mermaid’s wineglass”, because of its umbrella-shaped cap.

Prof Felix Bast, a phycologist from the Central University of Punjab, was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s classic tale, The Little Mermaid, to give this new species a mythical twist. “I first thought to name it syreni, which is Latin for mermaid,” says Bast. “Then I changed my mind. Why go with Latin? This is from India, and I am Indian.” So he landed instead on the Sanskrit word for mermaid, jalakanyakae.

More here.