Copernicus

You are always in the middle of the poem
even at the end.
More and more you are tied by ropes,
foliage, and as you move
the bindings grow around your knees, your feet.
Again and again you pass
your own footprints on the grass, on floors,
once more you have tracked mud into the house.
Have tracked a house into the mud. Outside the poem
are sirens, fires, ocean hitting
pier. Say to yourself: does not cohere
but is subsumed
and must not, must not. Outside the poem
a little vein clicks in the forehead of a financier,
a cue called, an oboe,
truncheons, pigeons, rain
mineralizes a colonnade.
A chorale stands up, taller than a building,
false in sense, numerically true.
You despise these techniques.
You have not got to the truth yet.
A truck downshifts on the freeway,
a shift whistle blows,
someone else’s emergency makes the poem hold.
At night, like notes pushed under doors,
sounds come in—
flypaper in an open window,
your mother rubbing lotion on her hands.
All this is with you, is you,
runs after you into the dark
like those men after Copernicus,
like a planet chased by telescopes into space.

by Timmy Straw
from Academy of American Poets, 8/5/21
Copyright © 2021

Shaan Sachdev over at the LA Review of Books:

A FEW YEARS AGO, I trekked, biked, and rode trains and buses through Weimar, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Stuttgart, Freiburg, Todtnauberg, Basel, and, finally, Sils Maria. I was in Germany and Switzerland, with a servile sort of eros, to gape and touch and stroll through the universities and apartments at which some of our grandest modern philosophers had once lived: Goethe, Hegel, Husserl, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Jaspers, and Arendt. Locals and students expressed little surprise when they learned I was poking around the Hegel Haus or peeking inside classrooms at Freiburg where Edmund Husserl taught phenomenology. The manager of a prim restaurant inside Todtnauberg’s nicest hotel excitedly interrupted my dinner of white fish and potatoes to show me the photographs on his office walls of his father together with Martin Heidegger; then he poured me a few glasses of Spätburgunder on the house.

Curiously, the only name of the lot that elicited more confusion than ratification — also the only woman and the only one to have persistently rebuffed the ascription of “philosopher” — was Hannah Arendt. There was less consensus about her legacy and allure. “Why her?” asked a young woman at the University of Freiburg who had spiritedly agreed to sneak me into Kollegiengebäude I, which hosted the philology, theology, and philosophy departments. “Was she one of the greats?”

More here.

In a podcast over at the Financial Times:

Adam Tooze, economic historian and author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, joins the FT’s Brendan Greeley and Brown University’s Mark Blyth to discuss how our politics got us to where we are today, why our ideas about how the economy works may not be fit for purpose, and the key role that China played during the Great Recession and continues to play today. They also discuss the central importance of global capital flows for understanding our world and why global liquidity may be much more fragile than we like to think.

Branko Milanovic over at his substack:

“When China Rules the World” (no question mark or conditional tense) by Martin Jacques is a large, somewhat repetitive, volume of 700 pages that tries to answer a number of questions that many people in the world are asking themselves: Will China’s growth continue? Will China become a multi-party democracy? And what might Pax Sinica look like?

On the first question, Jacques entertains no doubt: China will successfully move (actually, it is already moving; the edition of the book that I read was published In 2012) to high value-added and high tech production and growth will, for the foreseeable future, remain high.

On the second question, Jacques is more circumspect:  China might become a multi-party democracy but it is likely, if Communist Party manages to control the process, to look like a cross between Singapore, a de facto single-party state, and Japan where factional struggles within Liberal Party often matter more than inter-party politics.

He is scathing of the view, often heard in the West, that higher education levels and higher incomes will, quasi-automatically, lead to demands for democracy. (Although he allows that in twenty years “and likely more” Chinese Communist Party will no longer be ruling.) Jacques believes that China, because of Confucian tradition of “virtuous” government that puts the emphasis on quality of governance and not on the way the rulers are selected, is different. Perhaps he is right…or perhaps not : nobody can tell. Here Jacques’ book also illustrates the hazards of prediction.

More here.

Kim Phillips-Fein in The New Republic:

In 1950, the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote about the Tennessee Valley Authority, the New Deal agency that brought electricity and economic development to seven states in the rural South. It was, he said, no less than “the greatest peacetime achievement of twentieth-century America,” a triumphant alliance of “science and politics.” Speaking with an absolute confidence that is hard to imagine in the present day, Commager asserted that the history of the TVA demonstrated beyond a doubt that “public intelligence can operate most effectively through government and that government can be more efficient than business.”

What accounts for the retreat of postwar liberalism? Why did Commager’s enthusiastic praise of government initiative decline into the “reinventing government” of the Clinton years? Much of the scholarship on the rightward shift of the late twentieth century has focused on the growing power of the conservative mobilization. The radicalism of the New Left, the civil rights and Black power movements, the gay and lesbian rights movement, and feminism all alienated the older white working class, driving it away from the Democratic Party and into Reagan’s waiting arms. Meanwhile, the business antagonists to organized labor and the expanded federal government had been patiently organizing, awaiting their moment. They were joined by suburban conservatives in California and in the New South, who sought ways to preserve their property and their affluence. The activist foot soldiers of the right joined with the intellectual and think-tank leaders, who in turn worked with the Chamber of Commerce and a new generation of conservative politicians to win political power during the troubled 1970s, when the political economy that had underwritten liberal idealism foundered and economic growth slowed.

In this earlier telling, the fragile entities of government and labor could not help but give way before the relentless onslaught of the right. Newer work does not let liberalism off the hook so easily. The decline of the liberal order, historian Paul Sabin argues in his new book, Public Citizens, reflected a serious intellectual and moral critique, focused on the capture of government agencies by private corporations, the ossification of labor and the state, and the complicity of the Democratic Party in channeling money and power to the business class. What is surprising is that these political ideas and arguments emerged not in conservative circles, but among liberals themselves, and they were popularized by a new kind of political organization that was developed over the course of the 1970s: the public-interest research group and law firm, which sought to advance political change through lawsuits and consumer representation, not mass mobilization.

More here.

Peter Conrad at The Guardian:

Three heteronyms in particular enabled Pessoa to work through the history of poetry. Impersonating a simple shepherd called Alberto Caeiro, he wrote naive pastoral lyrics; as the refined classicist Ricardo Reis, he composed Latinate homages to the gods; giving voice to the futurist Álvaro de Campos, supposedly an engineer by trade, he celebrated mechanised urban modernity. Commuting between these aliases was like metempsychosis or perhaps, as Pessoa confessed to a critic, like changing sex. His alter egos had extra-literary uses too. To extricate himself from a flirtation with a clingy young woman, Pessoa made Campos write a letter warning her off and when she telephoned in the hope of making a date he answered the call as Reis and informed her that Fernando was not available.

more here.

Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:

The title of Rebecca Donner’s astonishing new book is a line by Goethe, from a volume of his poems that had been smuggled into the cell of Mildred Harnack — an American woman who was shackled in a Berlin prison, awaiting her death sentence by the Nazi regime. On Feb. 16, 1943, the day she would be taken to the execution shed and beheaded, a chaplain found Mildred hunched over the poems, scribbling in the margins. The heavy gothic font of the German original was accompanied by the ghostly script of her English translation, written with a pencil stub.

Donner includes an image of that page in “All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days,” a book about Harnack’s life and death that turns out to be wilder and more expansive than a standard-issue biography.

more here.

Nicholas Pompella in Nationsl Review:

This month, A Game of Thrones by acclaimed fantasy author George R. R. Martin turns 25. While Martin’s book series — collectively titled A Song of Ice and Fire — is inseparable from the more popular HBO adaptation, the books were what originally spurred a massive tonal shift in fantasy literature that the show simply imitated. While HBO created what may be modernity’s last instance of shared popular culture (nothing will reach Sopranos-like ratings ever again, as the later seasons of Game of Thrones managed), much of the show’s best stuff was lifted straight from the books. The characters lost within political labyrinths, often of their own making; the sense of mystery and impending doom that lingers over the Night King and his army of White Walkers; even the racy, sex-crazed parts of the show (artifacts from the last years in which Americans could be scandalized by media) — all are present in Martin’s original.

The character of Tyrion Lannister provides one of the most compelling examples of this “one-for-one” quality between the book and the show. Tyrion is a variant of the slacker-genius archetype, granted a perfect combination of wit and political instinct, along with Martin’s down-to-earth depiction of how such a troubled-yet-brilliant tactician might think and act. The character himself is not that revolutionary — someone with even basic cultural literacy in movies and books has seen many slacker-geniuses — but Martin’s uncanny prose style contains a detailed realism that brings Tyrion to life on the page.

More here.

Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian:

One Friday in April 2016, as that year’s polarising US presidential race intensified, and more than 30 armed conflicts raged around the globe, approximately 3 million people spent part of their day watching two reporters from BuzzFeed wrap rubber bands around a watermelon. Gradually, over the course of 43 agonising minutes, the pressure ramped up – the psychological kind and the physical force on the watermelon – until, at minute 44, the 686th rubber band was applied. What happened next won’t amaze you: the watermelon exploded, messily. The reporters high-fived, wiped the splatters from their reflective goggles, then ate some of the fruit. The broadcast ended. Earth continued its orbit around the sun.

I’m not mentioning this story to suggest there’s anything especially shameful about spending 44 minutes of your life staring at a watermelon on the internet. But it’s a vivid illustration of one central obstacle we encounter when it comes to our efforts to use time well: distraction. After all, it hardly matters how committed you are to making the best use of your limited time if, day after day, your attention gets wrenched away by things you never wanted to focus on. It’s a safe bet that none of those 3 million people woke up that morning with the intention of using a portion of their lives to watch a watermelon burst; nor, when the moment arrived, did they necessarily feel as though they were freely choosing to do so. “I want to stop watching so bad but I’m already committed,” read one typically rueful comment on Facebook. “I’ve been watching you guys put rubber bands around a watermelon for 40 minutes,” wrote someone else. “What am I doing with my life?”

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. Here’s one way of putting things in perspective: the first modern humans appeared on the plains of Africa at least 200,000 years ago, and scientists estimate that life, in some form, will persist for another 1.5bn years or more, until the intensifying heat of the sun condemns the last organism to death. But you? Assuming you live to be 80, you’ll have had about 4,000 weeks.

More here.

Copernicus

You are always in the middle of the poem
even at the end.
More and more you are tied by ropes,
foliage, and as you move
the bindings grow around your knees, your feet.
Again and again you pass
your own footprints on the grass, on floors,
once more you have tracked mud into the house.
Have tracked a house into the mud. Outside the poem
are sirens, fires, ocean hitting
pier. Say to yourself: does not cohere
but is subsumed
and must not, must not. Outside the poem
a little vein clicks in the forehead of a financier,
a cue called, an oboe,
truncheons, pigeons, rain
mineralizes a colonnade.
A chorale stands up, taller than a building,
false in sense, numerically true.
You despise these techniques.
You have not got to the truth yet.
A truck downshifts on the freeway,
a shift whistle blows,
someone else’s emergency makes the poem hold.
At night, like notes pushed under doors,
sounds come in—
flypaper in an open window,
your mother rubbing lotion on her hands.
All this is with you, is you,
runs after you into the dark
like those men after Copernicus,
like a planet chased by telescopes into space.

by Timmy Straw
from Academy of American Poets, 8/5/21
Copyright © 2021

Katia Grubisic in The Walrus:

The better machines become at transferring equivalent words and even almost correct syntax and grammatical structures from one language to another, the more the mechanics of translation matter less, and the more we are aware of inflections and innuendoes; what we don’t know what to call, we call beauty.

Translation is everywhere: I’m at a beach in South America. The grainy exuberance of a megaphone begins to blast indecipherably. Something about menopause. Seriously? It’s a little putt-putt plane, tooting advertisements. A billboard I spot later as I bounce along in the back of a truck provides the rest of the story: it’s not that Argentina’s especially empathetic to the woes of the older late-summer crowd, there’s a local theatre show about menopause. Fallait le savoir.

Below the sky, hordes of birds perch and circle, hoping for the bounty of the sea or some morsel of human garbage: gaviota, not gull. How dull the English equivalent is, how doltish. Gaviota captures the awkward, insistent shriek. There’s that guttural opening g and an echo of the French gaver. The translator’s undoing is the multiplicity of languages, each with its own best words.

More here.

Bill Gates in his blog:

Vaclav Smil is my favorite author, but I sometimes hesitate to recommend his books to other people. His writing, while brilliant, is often too detailed or obscure for a general audience. (Deep dives on Japanese dining habits or natural gas can be a tough sell for even the smartest, most thoughtful readers.) Still, I’m a big enough fan to keep telling my friends and colleagues about his books, even though I know most of them won’t take me up on my recommendations.

That’s why I was thrilled when Vaclav released his most accessible book yet. Numbers Don’t Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World, which came out last fall, takes everything that makes his writing great and boils it down into an easy-to-read format. I unabashedly recommend this book to anyone who loves learning.

More here.

Vali Nasr and Maria Fantappie in Foreign Affairs:

The shift in Washington is undeniable: the Middle East is no longer a top priority for the United States. The U.S. withdrawal from the broader region is evident in the departure of troops from Afghanistan and reductions in U.S. military commitments to Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, alongside a heightened focus on China and Russia. There are good reasons for this shift in strategy, especially given the woeful recent history of U.S. involvement in the region, but it also brings risks of its own. The United States’ precipitous departure from Iraq in 2011, for example, paved the way for the rise of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) and the expansion of Iran’s regional footprint. To avert similar damage this time, Washington must find a way to pair reductions in military commitments with gains in regional stability. One of the best opportunities for achieving those gains lies in emerging talks between the region’s two most consequential antagonists: Iran and Saudi Arabia.

More here.  [Free registration required.]

Peter LaSalle at The American Scholar:

Pessoa has a telling line in his sequence of poems “Slanting Rain” that provides a good way of approaching this: “I don’t know who I dream I am.” Zenith doesn’t reference it, yet I’ve always thought the quotation succinctly gets at the impetus behind Pessoa’s use of heteronyms, among them his three principal and stylistically distinct poetry-writing pseudoselves: Alvaro de Campos (a naval engineer by trade with a lyrical bent), Alberto Caeiro (a rustic and believer in the essence of nature), and Ricardo Reis (a doctor who produced philosophical Horatian odes). And, true, in the poetry there is often the dreamlike element of being “the other,” a ghostly, untethered feeling marked by searingly honest searching.

Pessoa possessed the longing of an experimenter aspiring to metaphysical insight. His impulse sprang not from any religious sensibility but from an awareness of the diaphanousness of reality around him—maybe a seascape or Lisbon street scene. He used poetry to tune in on something larger, akin to a Blakean or Borgesian understanding, beyond words.

more here.

Charif Majdalani at The Paris Review:

The economic machine is breaking down, retail businesses are almost bankrupt, and yet the city has been seized by a frenzy of activity since this morning, just like in the glory days of its suddenly vanished opulence. The gridlock is no worse than it was back then, even though the traffic lights are out because of the electricity shortages. And where the lights are actually working, police officers are controlling traffic and encouraging drivers to ignore them, directing everyone to move at the same time with grand, raging gestures, as if they were vengefully making a point of reminding us that order no longer reigns, so why should anyone even bother respecting these last damned surviving traffic lights. The drivers are astonished. Some, like me, resist, under the officers’ resentful eyes. They seem aware and ashamed that they have become representatives of the general chaos and the failure of the state, and are going above and beyond what’s actually necessary, as if they were furiously smashing a prized object to pieces to punish themselves for having carelessly chipped it. I talked to my wife about this when I got home, she didn’t seem to care about the feelings I was ascribing to the traffic officers. She doesn’t like them and even before the economic crisis she thought that they actually tend to be the cause of the gridlock rather than anything else, that they always complicate any situation they are in, that city traffic is like a natural process, it always ends up regulating itself, and that human intervention only disturbs it and makes it more complicated.

more here.

Nocturne II

August arrives in the dark
we are not even asleep and it is here
with a gust of rain rustling before it
how can it be so late all at once
somewhere the Perseids are falling
toward us already at a speed that would
burn us alive if we could believe it
but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
one at a time from the tips of the leaves
into the night and I lie in the dark
listening to what I remember
while the night flies on with us into itself

W.S. Merwin

Dan Falk in Scientific American:

Steven Weinberg, who died last week at the age of 88, was not only a Nobel laureate physicist but also one of the most eloquent science writers of the last half century. His most famous (or perhaps infamous) statement can be found on the second-to-last page of his first popular book, The First Three Minutes, published in 1977. Having told the story of how our universe came into being with the big bang some 13.8 billion years ago, and how it may end untold billions of years in the future, he concludes that whatever the universe is about, it sure as heck isn’t about us. “The more the universe seems comprehensible,” he wrote, “the more it also seems pointless.”

For thousands of years, people had assumed just the opposite. Our ancestors gazed at the world around us—the people and animals, the mountains and seas, the sun, moon and stars—and saw the divine. As the 19th Psalm puts it: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork.” Even Isaac Newton saw a universe filled with purpose. In his masterwork, the Principia, he wrote: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”

Science advanced by leaps and bounds in the centuries following Newton, and scientists dialed back much of the God-talk. Many thinkers suggested that the universe runs like a mighty clockwork. Perhaps a creator was needed at the very beginning, to set it going, but surely it now runs on its own. Einstein, who often spoke of God metaphorically, took a different tack. He rejected a personal deity, but saw a kind of pantheism—roughly, the identification of God with nature—as plausible.

More here.