Glioblastoma: Starlight

—for Adam

Astrocytes in the brain seem as numerous
and shapely as stars in the universe,
but when the stars in your brain go awry,
they behave like dark energy, changing
the shape of time.
You see time’s boundaries. Constraints
get into your blood and bones,
a double-barreled two years of choices
to make on days you are able make them.
You’re un-glued and re-glued in an instant,
and everything’s palliative after.
That cloak of care is another kind
of starlight, and it’s all surgery and radiation
by which you discern what’s what.
What had been an idea of happiness
by which you tried
to live becomes this moment
and the next and the need to nap
and weep, the want of words, the memory
of magic that each friend
bequeaths in your mind, however
small, the need
to father finitely and
to love for all the time in the world.

by Anna Leahy
from Contrary Magazine

Rick Moody interviews Chris Forsyth at Salmagundi:

If rock and roll has, in fact, become an invalidated form, a “niche product,” encrusted with its political difficulties, and, perhaps, exhausted as a way of thinking about popular music, one of the chief problems, perhaps, is that it has failed to find new ways to use the guitar. Since the high period of guitar innovation—the period in which we had Sonic Youth and their tunings, James “Blood” Ulmer and his unison strings, and the pieces for a hundred guitars of Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca—there just hasn’t been as much innovation in the guitar as in the years prior (rare exceptions: left-field employment of guitar synthesizers in, e.g., the work of Robert Fripp, or: the beautiful jazz-flavored modulations of Marc Ribot, or: almost everything played by Nels Cline). So it’s striking and, well, thrilling, when a contemporary player appears, rises up from out of the surface noise, and seems to have his ears fixed mightily on the history of the guitar, and with it the potential for rock and roll to speak anew to an audience. Chris Forsyth is one such contemporary player. His point of origin is (arguably) New York punk of the Dolls, Television, Patti Smith group variety, but he also mixes in a kind of jam-oriented approach that would have been somewhat verboten in the orthodox punk days.

more here.

Phil Christman at Commonweal:

What, exactly, is David Bentley Hart’s deal? One asks the question in awe. How does he produce so many books—as of this writing, eighteen of them, spanning theology, cultural criticism, and fiction, not counting his translation of the New Testament, his co-translation with John R. Betz of Erich Przywara’s Analogia Entis, his uncollected articles (there must still be a few) and his Substack posts? When did he have time to learn so many languages, that he can refer familiarly to the literatures of Europe, China, Japan, India, and the Americas, and to fine details of theological controversy in several faiths? Where does he find a moment to floss, to do housework, to keep up with his beloved Baltimore Orioles?

But the question What is David Bentley Hart’s deal? might be asked less admiringly. Must he bluster so? In his nonfiction writing, is he, perhaps, sometimes just a little hasty in his generalizations, a bit lavish with his use of the “No serious scholar of X would ever think of denying Y” formula?

more here.

Raaza Jamshed in Guernica:

My house is isolated, up on the tip of a hill overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, but daybreak sounds rise and reach my window, where I sit reading your book. Someone heckles from a road below to someone else, whom I imagine is trudging uphill. I recognize the Arabic words individually, but strung together, they are senseless to me. I write them down, a small digitalized scribble, on the concluding page of your book, and I mouth them repeatedly, as I do with any new word or phrase in this place, which is also new to me, to cast them in memory. Later, I’ll find someone kind enough to attempt a translation. You would know, Noor, that street calls show for nothing in the online Arabic-to-English dictionary — and that there is a particular kind of angst, a wanting and waiting, at the periphery of a language.

I have long known that languages house worlds unique to them. I was born and raised in Pakistan. English, the language of the colonizers, was drilled into me along with Urdu, my mother tongue.

More here.

From Radiolab:

It all started when the rockstar David Byrne did a Freaky-Friday-like body-swap with a Barbie Doll. That’s what inspired him — along with his collaborator Mala Gaonkar — to transform a 15,000 square-foot warehouse in Denver, Colorado into a brainy funhouse known as the Theater of the Mind.

This episode, co-Host Latif Nasser moderates a live conversation between Byrne and Neuroscientist Thalia Wheatley at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. The trio talk about how we don’t see what we think we see, don’t hear what we think we hear, and don’t know what we think we know, but also how all that… might actually be a good thing.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Recently, after a week in which 2,789 Americans died of COVID-19, President Joe Biden proclaimed that “the pandemic is over.” Anthony Fauci described the controversy around the proclamation as a matter of “semantics,” but the facts we are living with can speak for themselves. COVID still kills roughly as many Americans every week as died on 9/11. It is on track to kill at least 100,000 a year—triple the typical toll of the flu. Despite gross undercounting, more than 50,000 infections are being recorded every day. The CDC estimates that 19 million adults have long COVID. Things have undoubtedly improved since the peak of the crisis, but calling the pandemic “over” is like calling a fight “finished” because your opponent is punching you in the ribs instead of the face.

More here.

Vanessa Romo on NPR:

Thousands of Egyptians are demanding the repatriation of the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum back to its home country. The iconic artifact, which helped scientists finally decode Egyptian hieroglyphs almost exactly 200 years ago, has been in English hands since Napoleon gave it up – as well as 16 other artifacts – as part of the Treaty of Alexandria in 1801. The latest campaign to reclaim the antiquities has gathered more than 2,500 signatures in an online petition launched by a group of prominent archeologists.

Together, these archeologists urge Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly to “work through diplomatic and legal means” to retrieve the antiquities. According to the group and those who have signed on, the objects are integral to Egypt’s national heritage, and their continued display in European institutions deliberately ignores a history of colonialist looting and exploitation. Given changing attitudes toward the ethical acquisition of items, as well as an evolving sense of moral responsibility, the organizers say British authorities would be amenable to the return.

More here.

Elena Renken in Nautilus:

The brain’s lifeline, its network of blood vessels, is like a tree, says Mathieu Pernot, deputy director of the Physics for Medicine Paris Lab. The trunk begins in the neck with the carotid arteries, a pair of broad channels that then split into branches that climb into the various lobes of the brain. These channels fork endlessly into a web of tiny vessels that form a kind of canopy. The narrowest of these vessels are only wide enough for a single red blood cell to pass through, and in one important sense these vessels are akin to the tree’s leaves.

“When you want to look at pathology, usually you don’t see the sickness in the tree, but in the leaves,” Pernot says. (You can identify Dutch Elm Disease when the tree’s leaves yellow and wilt.) Just like leaves, the tiniest blood vessels in the brain often register changes in neuron and synapse activity first, including illness, such as new growth in a cancerous brain tumor.^{1, 2} But only in the past decade or so have we developed the technology to detect these microscopic changes in blood flow: It’s called ultrafast ultrasound.

More here.

“Go back to what?”

(Jennifer Atkinson)

Go back to storm warning and rain delay.
Go back to parchment, papyrus, vellum.
Go back to land line and gravel driveway.
Go back to blent, unbent light, pre-prism.
Go back to samekh, yodh, zayin, aleph,
great auk, ivory-billed, passenger pigeon.
Go back to cave painting and petroglyph.
Go back to mask, to God from the machine.
Go back to compacted cosmos, the size
of a penguin’s egg, steadied by webbed feet,
stayed from snow, against God’s belly feathers.
Go back to left hand does know what the right.
Go back to stage fright, recurring nightmare,
back to Houston, we’ve had a problem here.

by H. L. Hix
from Numéro Cinq Magazine

Allison Hussey at Pitchfork:

Loretta Lynn never called herself a feminist but, as women tend to do, she got it done anyway. Through her sharp, insightful songs, Lynn transformed country music into a place where people like her could speak plainly and for themselves. Across a music career that spanned more than six decades, she cut a new lane for women making their own way without apologizing for it.

Lynn’s most enduring songs are frank and ferocious, where she excoriates double standards and sexist assumptions with a smile. Many years before the Chicks were making conservatives clutch their pearls, Lynn was locking horns with country radio stations that refused to play “The Pill,” her 1975 ode to birth control that offered a woman’s view on reproductive freedom. When Lynn sang about scrapping in her rowdy 1968 hit “Fist City,” she sounded like she could absolutely beat your ass and wouldn’t even think twice about it. She wore a broad grin as she sang about cheaters, sluts, and the banalities of domesticity, demonstrating how women were in fact tough as nails.

more here.

Adam Kirsch at The Nation:

By the 1950s, when Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish fiction was beginning to win acclaim in English translation, the future of the Yiddish language looked bleak. Its homeland in Eastern Europe had been destroyed in the Holocaust, and the largest remaining Jewish populations were now being raised to speak different languages: English in the United States, Russian in the Soviet Union, and Hebrew in Israel. The readers Singer had addressed for decades in The Forward, New York’s leading Yiddish daily paper, represented a significant share of the world’s surviving Yiddish speakers. Few of them were younger than him, and their numbers were shrinking.

Singer and his Yiddish readers shared the uncanny experience of being the last bearers of a disappearing culture. For Jewish and non-Jewish readers who encountered him in translation, however, those common religious, political, and personal reference points were obscured. To that larger public, Singer appeared not as a participant in a broader Yiddish culture but as a synecdoche for Yiddish as such, perhaps even a medium with the power to resurrect it.

more here.

Andrea Brady in Berfrois:

“Remember / you can have what you ask for, ask for / everything.” In these, probably the most famous lines from Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima echoes Frank O’Hara’s assertion in his “Ode to Joy” that “We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying.” Like her friend Frank, di Prima is writing about joy, “which will remake the world.”

Di Prima’s poetry channels her grandfather’s anarchist speeches of the 1930s, which emphasised love and solidarity as the weapons of working-class people against fascism. Domenico Mallozzi was an Italian immigrant, tailor and trade unionist, who would bring home “entire squalling families of would-be union organizers,” and Antoinette, di Prima’s grandmother, would entertain them “with her welcoming frugal abundance.”

More here.

Daniel Kriegman in Quillette:

Altruistic behavior toward one’s offspring or other kin is not terribly puzzling since they are genetically related. More puzzling was the development of altruistic behavior toward unrelated others, which does appear to be antithetical to the basic, self-serving fitness interest that underlies evolutionary theory. However, Robert Trivers, in what quickly came to be considered a classic paper, developed the concept of “reciprocal altruism” which sought to explain the adaptive advantage of altruistic behavior toward unrelated others. He was even able to explain altruistic acts between members of different species which, of course, is an extreme example of a lack of genetic relatedness.

Trivers’s concept of reciprocal altruism is based on the notion that an altruistic act can at some point be returned.

More here.

Sophia Goodfriend in the Boston Review:

These days automated systems have replaced secret agents. The protagonists of state-sanctioned surveillance are cybersecurity experts hacking into smart phones’ operating systems from a suburban office park, Microsoft engineers refining a biometric camera’s algorithm from their home office, and plain-clothes soldiers parsing through geolocation data for someone else to carry out a drone strike. Most of the people involved are not called agents or spies. They are product managers, engineers, data analysts, or “intelligence researchers.” Often their work feels so ordinary they might forget they are in the business of espionage. Sometimes they might not even realize it to begin with.

Two recent books—Brian Hochman’s The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States and Roberto González’s War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future—join a cascade of new titles on the genealogy, impact, and future of contemporary surveillance regimes.

More here.

A Reporter from New York Asks Edith Mae Chapman,
Age Nine, What Her daddy Tells her about the Strike

We ain’t to go in the company store, mooning
over peppermint sticks, shaming ourselves like a dog
begging under the table. They cut off our account
but we ain’t no-account. We ain’t to go to school
so’s the company teacher can tell us we are.
The ain’t going to meeting and bow our heads
for the company preacher, who claims it is the meek
will inherit the coal fields, instead of telling
how the mountains will crumble and rocks
rain down like fire upon the heads
of the operators, like it says in the Bible.
We ain’t to talk to no dirtscum scabs
and we ain’t to talk to God. My daddy
is very upset with the Lord.

by Diane Gilliam
from Kettle Bottom
Perguia Press, 2004

Editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine:

For more than two decades, colonoscopy has been recommended as one of several available options for colorectal cancer screening, and it has been the predominant form of screening for colorectal cancer used in the United States. However, the best evidence to support its use has been limited to data from cohort studies, which have estimated that this type of screening has been associated with a 40 to 69% decrease in the incidence of colorectal cancer and a 29 to 88% decrease in the risk of death from this disease.¹ Unlike randomized, controlled trials, which have provided support for fecal occult blood testing and sigmoidoscopy,² cohort studies probably overestimate the real-world effectiveness of colonoscopy because of the inability to adjust for important factors such as incomplete adherence to testing and the tendency of healthier persons to seek preventive care.

This evidence gap is addressed by the landmark Nordic-European Initiative on Colorectal Cancer (NordICC) trial, the results of which are now reported in the Journal by Bretthauer et al.³ This pragmatic trial involved nearly 85,000 men and women who were randomly assigned either to receive an invitation to undergo screening colonoscopy or to receive usual care (i.e., no screening). In the intention-to-screen analysis, colonoscopy was found to reduce the risk of colorectal cancer over a period of 10 years by 18% (risk ratio, 0.82; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.70 to 0.93). However, the reduction in the risk of death from colorectal cancer was not significant (risk ratio, 0.90; 95% CI, 0.64 to 1.16).

More here.