Brian Teare in The Boston Review:

In Arthur W. Frank’s foundational text for narrative medicine, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (1995), the ill, Frank suggests, need “to tell their stories, in order to construct new maps and new perceptions of their relationships to the world.” Frank posits three common narrative structures for the experience of illness: restitution, chaos, and quest. In restitution narratives, the healthy person becomes sick and then they become healthy again, a quick, clean plot that reifies health in ways too naïve to be meaningful. This, of course, is the arc popular culture prefers.

In chaos narratives, the unlucky ill suffer without plot, their nonnarratives untouched by restitution or even just movement toward suffering in a more agentive way. Frank seems genuinely freaked out by so-called chaos. In his account, chaos strains the limits of caregiver empathy and institutional capacity because the chaotic body is nonnarrative—which, for Frank, is in effect to be a non-self, one who cannot effectively communicate or connect with others.

In quest narratives, the plot Frank prefers, the ill person finds the strength and agency to turn their experience of illness into allegory, a journey of insight gained from suffering. As opposed to the pro forma performances of restitution and the nonnarratives of chaos, quest narratives feature a “communicative body” that models for others that patients can “accept illness and seek to use it.” So central is this narrative structure to Frank’s conception of illness that he claims, “Becoming seriously ill is a call for stories.”

Is it, though? What if serious illness doesn’t or can’t call for anything? Or if it can, it’s only the body’s call for the restoration of equilibrium?

More here.

Judith Thurman in The New Yorker:

In 1763, the young James Boswell finished his “London Journal,” one of the frankest accounts of high and low life in the eighteenth century. The following year, he embarked on a Grand Tour. In a Berlin tavern, he encountered a certain Neuhaus. This voluble personage of thirty-nine, unusually tall, with a dark complexion and affected manners, was an Italian who “wanted to shine as a great philosopher,” Boswell wrote, “and accordingly doubted of his own existence and everything else. I thought him a blockhead.”

The “blockhead” had also been travelling around Europe, although not on a patrician’s leisurely inspection of art and ruins. Giacomo Casanova, whose surname means “new house,” practiced many trades—violinist, gambler, spy, Kabbalist, soldier, man of letters—but his main line of work, he later admitted, was deceiving fools. Many of them were gulls at a card table, though he had recently convinced an elderly marquise, a widow with a vast fortune and an obsession with the occult, that he could arrange for her rebirth as her own son. How would this work? Casanova’s mystically enabled sperm would impregnate her with a male fetus endowed with her soul. A casket of jewels was involved, along with a comely young accomplice posing as a naked water nymph. When his ardor flagged, the nymph’s task was to rekindle it.

Casanova had a sideline, of course, which has earned him eponymous immortality; most of us, I’d venture to say, have met “a real Casanova.” But his conquests in the boudoir, not to mention those in carriages, in bathhouses, or behind park shrubbery, have eclipsed his accomplishments while fully dressed. He translated the Iliad into Italian; he published a utopian novel; he grappled with problems in classical geometry; he traded bons mots with Voltaire. He even charmed his way into the French court, posing as a financier, and sold Louis XV on the concept of a national lottery.

More here.

Genesis. Around the Eighth Chapter

on the ark noah lodges stegosaurs tyrannosaurs plesiosaurs
brontosaurs archaeopteryxes iguanodons diplodocuses triceratops
they are small and smiley-faced
they will all fit
everyone will sail off peacefully

it’s a long journey

a snow-white pterodactyl
flies out of the ark
and returns bearing a green branch in its mouth
so the banks of hollywood must be nearby
so everyone’s been saved for some reason

god hanging on to the branch for dear life
squeaks like a toy in the jaws of a puppy

by Andrej Sen-Senkov
from International Poetry Web

Anthony Domestico at Commonweal:

We’ll start with a pair of shoes. In 1944, a young Italian woman named Emilia “Ilia” Terzulli marries an older English soldier named Esmond Warner. They’re an unlikely couple. Nicknamed “La Giraffa,” Ilia is tall, poor, gorgeous, and untraveled. Esmond is balding, bespectacled, and worldly. She’s not just Italian but southern Italian; he’s not just English but English English, his family’s wealth faded but not their lordly idiosyncrasies. (His mum goes by Mother Rat; his father, a former professional cricketer, by Plum; his childhood pet rat by Scoot.) And so, to make his Bari-born wife feel at home in South Kensington, Esmond buys Ilia a pair of shoes. More specifically, he buys her “bespoke brogues”: sturdy, plain-ish, yet expensive shoes that mark Ilia’s “formal enrolment in the world of the squirearchy, hunting, going to the point-to-point, the harriers, the beagles, the open-gardens scheme, the charity fête.”

We read about these brogues in Marina Warner’s Esmond and Ilia: An Unreliable Memoir (New York Review Books, 432 pp., $19.95).

more here.

Lucy Scholes at The Paris Review:

One hundred and seventy-six years ago today, on the evening of Monday, June 22, 1846, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon—sixty years old and facing imminent financial ruin—locked himself in his studio in his house on Burwood Place, just off London’s Edgware Road. The month had been the hottest anyone could remember: that day, thermometers in the city stood at ninety degrees in the shade. Despite the heat, that morning Haydon had walked to a gunmaker’s on nearby Oxford Street and purchased a pistol. He spent the rest of the day at home, composing letters and writing a comprehensive, nineteen-clause will.

That evening, only a few streets away in Marylebone, Elizabeth Barrett penned a letter to her fiancé, Robert Browning. The poets’ courtship was still a secret, but they wrote each other constantly, sometimes twice a day. Like everyone else, Elizabeth was exhausted by the weather; earlier in the month she had complained to Browning that she could do nothing but lie on her sofa, drink lemonade, and read Monte Cristo.

more here.

Malcolm Harris in The Nation:

Stewart Brand is not a scientist. He’s not an artist, an engineer, or a programmer. Nor is he much of a writer or editor, though as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, that’s what he’s best known for. Brand, 83, is a huckster—one of the great hucksters in a time and place full of them. Over the course of his long life, Brand’s salesmanship has been so outstanding that scholars of the American 20th century have secured his place as a historical figure, picking out the blond son of Stanford from among his peers and seating him with inventors, activists, and politicians at the table of men to be remembered. But remembered for what, exactly?

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand is the first full biographical consideration of a man who has already provided useful fodder for writers seeking to characterize the various social and intellectual movements that came out of California in the final third of the 20th century.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

All of us construct models of the world, and update them on the basis of evidence brought to us by our senses. Scientists try to be more rigorous about it, but we all do it. It’s natural that this process will depend on what form that sensory input takes. We know that animals, for example, are typically better or worse than humans at sight, hearing, and so on. And as Ed Yong points out in his new book, it goes far beyond that, as many animals use completely different sensory modalities, from echolocation to direct sensing of electric fields. We talk about what those different capabilities might mean for the animal’s-eye (and -ear, etc.) view of the world.

More here.

Alan Jacobs in The Hedgehog Review:

Near the end of his brilliant memoir Tristes Tropiques, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss describes his visits to various rum distilleries in the Caribbean:

In Martinique, I had visited rustic and neglected rum-distilleries where the equipment and the methods used had not changed since the eighteenth century. In Puerto Rico, on the other hand, in the factories of the company which enjoys a virtual monopoly over the whole of the sugar production, I was faced by a display of white enamel tanks and chromium piping. Yet the various kinds of Martinique rum, as I tasted them in front of ancient wooden vats thickly encrusted with waste matter, were mellow and scented, whereas those of Puerto Rico are coarse and harsh.

Meditation on this contrast leads Levi-Strauss to a more general insight:

We may suppose, then, that the subtlety of the Martinique rums is dependent on impurities the continuance of which is encouraged by the archaic method of production. To me, this contrast illustrates the paradox of civilization: Its charms are due essentially to the various residues it carries along with it, although this does not absolve us of the obligation to purify the stream. By being doubly in the right, we are admitting our mistake. We are right to be rational and to try to increase our production and so keep manufacturing costs down. But we are also right to cherish those very imperfections we are endeavouring to eliminate. Social life consists in destroying that which gives it its savour.

A melancholy reflection, to be sure—but perhaps not an inevitable one.

More here.

Ron Charles in The Washington Post:

Bobby Allyn at NPR:

Can artificial intelligence come alive?

That question is at the center of a debate raging in Silicon Valley after a Google computer scientist claimed over the weekend that the company’s AI appears to have consciousness. Inside Google, engineer Blake Lemoine was tasked with a tricky job: Figure out if the company’s artificial intelligence showed prejudice in how it interacted with humans. So he posed questions to the company’s AI chatbot, LaMDA, to see if its answers revealed any bias against, say, certain religions. This is where Lemoine, who says he is also a Christian mystic priest, became intrigued. “I had follow-up conversations with it just for my own personal edification. I wanted to see what it would say on certain religious topics,” he told NPR. “And then one day it told me it had a soul.”

more here.

Cal Flyn at Literary Review:

Yoga, an exhilarating new work of autofiction by Emmanuel Carrère, opens in early 2015 as the French literary superstar prepares to participate in a ten-day silent retreat in rural France. This is far from Carrère’s first foray into the spiritual realm: for decades he has engaged in various forms of mystic navel-gazing and recently it seems to have been paying off.

If, as he suspects, he is an inherently melancholic and self-destructive individual, he has managed to suppress these instincts for a golden decade in which he has maintained a happy marriage and attained an unprecedented level of professional success. The book began life as an almost hubristic celebration of this breakthrough: ‘an upbeat, subtle little book about yoga’ that might serve as a chirpy guide to achieving happiness and clarity.

more here.

From Phys.Org:

Microscopic mites that live in human pores and mate on our faces at night are becoming such simplified organisms, due to their unusual lifestyles, that they may soon become one with humans, new research has found.

The mites are passed on during birth and are carried by almost every human, with numbers peaking in adults as the pores grow bigger. They measure around 0.3 mm long, are found in the hair follicles on the face and nipples, including the eyelashes, and eat the sebum naturally released by cells in the pores. They become active at night and move between follicles looking to mate. The first ever genome sequencing study of the D. folliculorum mite found that their isolated existence and resulting inbreeding is causing them to shed unnecessary genes and cells and move towards a transition from external parasites to internal symbionts. Dr. Alejandra Perotti, Associate Professor in Invertebrate Biology at the University of Reading, who co-led the research, said, “We found these mites have a different arrangement of body part genes to other similar species due to them adapting to a sheltered life inside pores. These changes to their DNA have resulted in some unusual body features and behaviors.”

More here.

O, Western Democracy!

I praise you,

who takes us to Gleneagles
in a warm coach,
so we can stage our protest
against the butcher of Ethiopia.

You drop us by an empty field
two miles from the hotel,
so even though the Butcher cannot hear,
we are free to hurl our slogans
into the wind:

“Political plurality!” we shout

“Human Rights!” we cry

The sun is low and it is rather cold.
Policemen stamp their boots.
Some crows hear what we say
and look surprised, they undertake

to carry messages into your conference
where every beak laps up
the sweetness of your words,
jabbing at your shortbread promises.
So in the dark I praise you,

for your glistening motorways
of free expression,
your empty fields and willing crows,
for the dry biscuits you feed to monsters.

by Alemu Tebeje 
from: Songs We Learn From Trees
Carcanet Classics, Manchester, 2020
© Translation: 2020, Chris Beckett and Alemu Tebeje

Roy Foster at Princeton University Press:

When he first began to publish poems, Seamus Heaney’s chosen pseudonym was ‘Incertus’, meaning ‘not sure of himself’. Characteristically, this was a subtle irony. While he referred in later years to a ‘residual Incertus’ inside himself, his early prominence was based on a sure-footed sense of his own direction, an energetic ambition, and his own formidable poetic strengths. It was also based on a respect for his readers which won their trust. ‘Poetry’s special status among the literary arts’, he suggested in a celebrated lecture, ‘derives from the audience’s readiness to . . . credit the poet with a power to open unexpected and unedited communications between our nature and the nature of the reality we inhabit’. Like T. S. Eliot, a constant if oblique presence in his writing life, he prized gaining access to ‘the auditory imagination’ and what it opened up: ‘a feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the levels of conscious thought and feeling, invigorating every word’. His readers felt they shared in this.

More here.

Ed Yong in the New York Times:

Nature shows have always prized the dramatic: David Attenborough himself once told me, after filming a series on reptiles and amphibians, frogs “really don’t do very much until they breed, and snakes don’t do very much until they kill.” Such thinking has now become all-consuming, and nature’s dramas have become melodramas. The result is a subtle form of anthropomorphism, in which animals are of interest only if they satisfy familiar human tropes of violence, sex, companionship and perseverance. They’re worth viewing only when we’re secretly viewing a reflection of ourselves.

We could, instead, try to view them through their own eyes. In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality.

More here.

Nathan Gardels in Noema Magazine:

“Move fast and break things,” the digital dictum of today’s Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, could have been penned by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his fellow Italian Futurists. Their famous manifesto in 1909 glorified the velocity of all things industrially muscular, from cars to airplanes, that disrupted the time and space of stodgy old traditional societies. Like today’s radical technologists, they too envisioned a new transhumanism that would fuse man and machine.

I was struck by this parallel when visiting an exhibit of futurist art at the Palazzo Maffei last week in Verona. In their enthusiasm to smash the past, what the futurists didn’t see was how the broken social pieces would seek shelter from the storm by re-forming through identity politics that ended up in the fascist movements that fomented world war. That is something to ponder in our own fraught time of fragmentation.

As in Marinetti’s day, prodigious leaps in technology, science and productive capacity today herald a future humanity has only dreamt of in the past. Yet these great transformations seem to have triggered in their wake a great reaction among the multitude they have bypassed or threatened to uproot.

More here.