https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eqr0ZmgmDr4

Chase Kuesel at Music and Literature:

On July 7, 2013, Keith Jarrett bracingly took to the stage at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy. The momentousness of the occasion was not lost on anyone: just six years earlier, Jarrett had become the first artist to ever be banned from the festival by director Carlo Pagnotta, for delivering a profanity-ridden condemnation of photographers in the audience. Seeking to avoid a similar incident this time around, Pagnotta issued a preemptive plea to the crowd to put their cameras away and to greet Jarrett with a standing ovation.

As the audience stood and complied, Jarrett finally appeared, flanked once again by his longtime trio-mates Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. The atmosphere of camaraderie did not last long, as Jarrett examined the audience for just a few seconds before hastily declaring, “See you later” and walking offstage. There was momentary confusion: surely this could not be a repeat of the 2007 performance, where Jarrett issued his diatribe against the audience before even playing a note. But there was Stephen Cloud, Jarrett’s manager, walking on stage to beg for appropriate behavior once again: apparently Jarrett had seen some people in the audience flashing their cameras.

more here.

Thomas W Laqeur at Literary Review:

No emotion stands nearer to the foundational myths of the human social order than shame. In the beginning, Adam and Eve stood together ‘both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed’. And then they ate of the tree of knowledge; their eyes opened; they knew they were naked; they covered themselves with fig leaves. Their shame was what told God they had fallen and become humans of our sort. Protagoras tells Socrates that after Prometheus had distinguished humans from other animals by giving them fire, Zeus gave them both shame and justice so that they could live together in harmony.

Shame is the emotion that signals to us that we have done something wrong or dishonourable; it is also what leaves us vulnerable to being made to feel dishonoured, degraded, disgraced or ashamed by the actions of others – that is, to be humiliated.

more here.

Matt Hanson in The Baffler:

IN A TELEGRAM SENT from the South of France in March of 1925 to the Scribner office in New York, F. Scott Fitzgerald shouted the new inspiration for his third novel from across the Atlantic: “CRAZY ABOUT TITLE UNDER THE RED WHITE AND BLUE STOP WHART WOULD DELAY BE.” Luckily, his publisher was either too busy printing The Great Gatsby to make any changes or was too tactful to tell the excitable author he had a dumb idea. The phrase works better as the title for a new study of the novel’s legacy by renowned cultural critic Greil Marcus. The Great Gatsby lives on almost a century after its anticlimactic publication, Marcus argues, because it works as both a symbol of and a critique of different aspects of the American Dream—patriotism, wealth, disenchantment, the pursuit of happiness.

In Under the Red White and Blue, Marcus dusts off a collection of cultural products and finds Gatsby’s fingerprints all over them. He finds traces of Gatsby (sometimes more convincingly than others) in songs by Lana Del Rey and Jelly Roll Morton; in novels by Chandler, Roth, and Ross Macdonald; in an epic stage play that features a live reading of the entire text; in one of Andy Kaufman’s standup routines; and, of course, in the book’s various film adaptations. Marcus gets more out of director Baz Luhrmann’s flashy 2013 version than it probably deserves—that one was the fourth attempt, not counting the 1926 silent movie version, and like the others it fell short of its potential. Gatsby is also invoked in the nicknames of Korean pop stars and in advertisements for swanky New York luxury hotels that offer “the full Gatsby experience,” blood-stained swimming pools not included.

More here.

Cath Pound in BBC:

Dreams have fascinated philosophers and artists for centuries. They have been seen as divine messages, a way of unleashing creativity and, since the advent of psychoanalysis in the 19th Century, the key to understanding our unconscious. As so many of us have been experiencing unusually vivid dreams in recent weeks, it seems an opportune moment to explore the way in which they have been understood and depicted throughout the centuries. In doing so we may even find some intriguing parallels with our own experiences. But why are we dreaming so vividly now? “We’re in a new situation so there’s new emotions to process,” says psychotherapist Philippa Perry, who was inundated with replies when she recently asked her followers to send her their dreams on Twitter. We make up narratives to make sense of those feelings that in dream manifest themselves “not straightforwardly but in metaphors”, she explains.

Albrecht Dürer’s Dream Vision (1525) is the first known depiction in Western art of an artist’s personal dream. The watercolour, seemingly hastily produced on waking, shows a deluge of water descending from the sky to engulf him. “I awoke trembling in every limb and it took a long time for me to recover,” he noted. Perry says that although her training taught her there was no such thing as a dream dictionary, decades of practice have shown her that “certain objects usually stand for a certain thing”, and “if somebody dreams about water that is usually about feelings”.  To her, it sounds as if Dürer was “drowning in feelings”, and although of course she cannot be sure what those feelings were, “most of us, whether we admit it or not, or are ignorant of it when awake, fear annihilation and oblivion”, she says. Perhaps it is unsurprising that many of the dreams Perry was sent on Twitter also involved people being engulfed with water, although the woman who dreamt she was surfing on a tsunami was clearly dealing with her emotions better than Dürer.

More here.

Sherbet

The problem here is that
This isn’t pretty, the
Sort of thing that

Can easily be dealt with
With words. After
All it’s

A horror story to sit,
A black man with
A white wife in

The middle of a hot
Sunday afternoon in
The Jefferson Hotel in

Richmond, Va., and wait
Like a criminal for service
From a young white waitress

Who has decided that
This looks like something
She doesn’t want

To be a part of. What poetry
Could describe the
Perfect angle of

This woman’s back as
She walks, just so,
Mapping the room off

Read more »

Uri Alon, Ron Milo and Eran Yashiv in the New York Times:

The Leupold Scope

With a 40X60mm spotting scope
I traverse the Halabjah skyline,
scanning rooftops two thousand meters out
to find a woman in sparkling green, standing
among antennas and satellite dishes,
hanging laundry on an invisible line.

She is dressing the dead, clothing them
as they wait in silence, the pigeons circling
as fumestacks billow a noxious black smoke.
She is welcoming them back to the dry earth,
giving them dresses in tangerine and teal,
woven cotton shirts dyed blue.

She waits for them to lean forward
into the breeze, for the wind’s breath
to return the bodies they once had,
women with breasts swollen by milk,
men with shepherd-thin bodies, children
running hard into the horizon’s curving lens.

by Brian Turner
from Here, Bullet
Alice James Books, 2005

Crispin Sartwell in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

ROBERT BRANDOM IS one of the few living philosophers who can, without exaggeration, be compared to the philosophical giants who once bestrode the earth, or at least loomed large in the study, from the 17th through the 19th centuries: Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Hegel — system-builders who intended to explain all of reality, and ourselves, to ourselves, insofar as we and it were explicable (a matter about which they disagreed). Brandom’s long-awaited book A Spirit of Trust is an achievement in that classical vein, and quite a surprising one in this period of punctilious specialists.

Many streams run together in Brandom’s philosophy, which emerges from the American pragmatism of C. S. Peirce and John Dewey; from many strands of analytic philosophy, including those emanating from Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and W. V. Quine; from the “Pittsburgh School” of Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell (Brandom himself has spent his entire career at the University of Pittsburgh); and, it turns out, from G. W. F. Hegel.

But this book, and Brandom’s now-vast oeuvre as a whole, is much more than synthetic: A Spirit of Trust amounts to a comprehensive, coherent, original philosophical system extending across philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of history, ethics, and even political philosophy.

More here.

Patrick Barkham in The Guardian:

It is a challenging time to be 16 and, like his peers, Dara McAnulty must currently endure a form of house arrest that means no seeing friends, no GCSEs. Unlike other locked-down teens, McAnulty is also dealing with the harsh mischance of having his first book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, published during the coronavirus crisis. He was supposed to be touring festivals but every date is cancelled. “I feel like my being is suffering from a slow puncture,” McAnulty tweeted in March. “I honestly feel like my world is falling apart right now.”

When we meet via a video call a month later, his mood has lifted. Lockdown is tough. His mum, Róisín – who McAnulty likes to have by his side, discreetly, during interviews – contracted coronavirus quite severely; meanwhile, he feels “trapped” and is “bouncing around the house like a ping pong ball”. Mercifully, over the road from their modern housing estate is a wood where he takes his daily exercise. “If I didn’t have it, I would be utterly insane,” he says. “The ground there is alive with peacock butterflies”, and that morning, he saw a red squirrel “so that makes the day”, he grins.

There is a genuine buzz around his debut, a combination of nature book and memoir, a warm portrait of a close-knit family and a coming-of-age story.

More here.

Stephen Wood in McSweeney’s:

I know what you’re thinking: “Sir, we dip into 5 percent of the endowment per year to cover operating costs, so why don’t we just go up to, like, 7 or 8 percent instead of leaving our employees to twist in the wind?” Let me personally assure you that I hear what you’re saying, and it’s horseshit. Under no circumstances may we touch the endowment. We would sooner take Henry Kissinger’s name off our Center for the Study of Human Rights than take another penny out of the endowment.

To be frank, I don’t even know how to dip into the endowment. Just after I was appointed president, in one of the most memorable luncheons of my academic career, the Board of Governors sat me down and forced me to sign a document promising to never ask them about the endowment.

More here.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

The people of the Middle East are quite used to the many attempts over decades to reconcile Jews and Arabs. Yet nothing has been tried on such a mass scale as a drama series being shown on one of the Arab world’s most popular TV channels during this year’s month of Ramadan. Since the series began to air in April over the Saudi-backed MBC station, it has dominated viewership ratings at a time when Arab families gather around a television in the evening. The drama “Um Haroun,” or “Mother of Aaron,” centers on a Jewish nurse living in an Arabian Gulf country in the 1940s. She and other Jews live peacefully in a village with Muslims and Christians as she lovingly brings health care to all. While the show has plenty of village intrigue, it depicts interreligious harmony before the 1948 creation of modern Israel and the later rise of intolerant Islamic groups such as Al Qaeda.

While the drama was filmed before the COVID-19 outbreak, its producers note its timely message: “Today, the world’s sentiment is no longer ‘us vs. them,’ but more ‘we are all in this together.’” Its popularity among Arab viewers coincides with current trends in the region that signal a desire to overcome the sectarian divides that have driven wars, corruption, and poverty. Last year’s youthful protests in Iraq and Lebanon, for example, were driven by calls to end government systems in which power is divvied up by religious groups. A survey of opinion in both countries revealed nearly three-quarters of people resent the use of religion for political advantage.

More here.

Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic:

If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street. You could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings. You know that they are powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Donald Trump stands between you and a damned and ravaged world. You see plague and pestilence sweeping the planet, and understand that they are part of the plan. You know that a clash between good and evil cannot be avoided, and you yearn for the Great Awakening that is coming. And so you must be on guard at all times. You must shield your ears from the scorn of the ignorant. You must find those who are like you. And you must be prepared to fight.

You know all this because you believe in Q.

From Phys.Org:

Scientists at the University of South Carolina and Columbia University have developed a faster way to design and make gas-filtering membranes that could cut greenhouse gas emissions and reduce pollution. Their new method, published today in Science Advances, mixes machine learning with synthetic chemistry to design and develop new gas-separation membranes more quickly. Recent experiments applying this approach resulted in new materials that separate gases better than any other known filtering membranes. The discovery could revolutionize the way new materials are designed and created, Brian Benicewicz, the University of South Carolina SmartState chemistry professor, said. “It removes the guesswork and the old trial-and-error work, which is very ineffective,” Benicewicz said. “You don’t have to make hundreds of different materials and test them. Now you’re letting the machine learn. It can narrow your search.”

Plastic films or membranes are often used to filter gases. Benicewicz explained that these membranes suffer from a tradeoff between selectivity and permeability—a material that lets one gas through is unlikely to stop a molecule of another gas. “We’re talking about some really small molecules,” Benicewicz said. “The size difference is almost imperceptible. If you want a lot of permeability, you’re not going to get a lot of selectivity.” Benicewicz and his collaborators at Columbia University wanted to see if big data could design a more effective membrane. The team at Columbia University created a machine learning algorithm that analyzed the chemical structure and effectiveness of existing membranes used for separating carbon dioxide from methane. Once the algorithm could accurately predict the effectiveness of a given membrane, they turned the question around: What chemical structure would make the ideal gas separation membrane?

Sanat K. Kumar, the Bykhovsky Professor of Chemical Engineering at Columbia, compared it to Netflix’s method for recommending movies. By examining what a viewer has watched and liked before, Netflix determines features that the viewer enjoys and then finds videos to recommend. His algorithm analyzed the chemical structures of existing membranes and determined which structures would be more effective. The computer produced a list of 100 hypothetical materials that might surpass current limits.

More here.

Lyndsey Stonebridge in New Statesman:

According to the government, we are now supposed to be getting back to work. But what does “work” mean in the time of Covid-19? Amid the debates about how we might return to work, what is being forgotten is that work is a crucial part of what the 20th-century political philosopher Hannah Arendt called the human condition. The government’s Covid-19 recovery strategy, published on 11 May, states that people will be “eased back into work” as into a dentist chair: carefully, and with face masks.

The reason they need to be coaxed is, of course, the economy. At one point in the document, it reads as though it is the economy, not people, that has been sick: “The longer the virus affects the economy, the greater the risks of longterm scarring.” The economy needs ventilating, and people are its oxygen. Arendt would not have been surprised by this commonplace personification. From the moral and political thought of John Locke and Adam Smith in the 17th and 18th centuries respectively, to Karl Marx in the 19th century, left, liberal, and right have all seen man as a labouring being, toiling away at getting machines, services, cash and liquid capital working. The economy “works” while we “labour”. In her 1958 book, The Human Condition, Arendt suggested we think again. It is not enough to imagine that we graft away, striving for some point at which we might be free of labour: in future automation or artificial intelligence, for example, or in the venal fantasies of super-richness, in socialist utopias of common ownership that might liberate us from toil, or, if you are a Greek philosopher, in a life of the mind. For Arendt, it was the active life, the vita activa, that we need to attend to, the lives we live together with others, now and in the future.

More here.