https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFwOV13Jjiw&t=873s

Nicholas Lezard at The Guardian:

Mary Ann Lund’s book serves as an introduction not just to Burton’s magnum opus but to contemporary and historical conceptions of melancholy. Do not make the mistake of confusing “melancholy” with what we now call depression. Her brief is not so much to say why or how Burton’s style is so delightful but to give us a learned, broad and readable picture of Renaissance medicine, using Burton’s book as a starting point. Melancholy, in the early modern world, could present itself in bizarre ways. Think “Embarrassing Early Modern European Bodies”. She tells, for instance, the story of the classical scholar Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), whose “postmortem revealed that his bladder was malformed and that the supplementary bladder was nearly six times as large as the main chamber”. The apparent reason was that he had regularly ignored the call of nature while being absorbed in his work. (That George Eliot chose the name for the dry-as-dust obsessive in Middlemarch is no coincidence; but I am not sure she knew about the bladder. Burton, whom she would have read, doesn’t mention it, but does cite Casaubon a couple of times.)

more here.

Christine Leigh Heyrman at the NYT:

Although they inspired many imitators, the Fox sisters did not number among those mediums who subsequently developed Spiritualism as an organized movement in both the United States and Britain. Their ranks included Emma Hardinge Britten, who wrote its history and traveled the public lecture circuit as a trance medium in the late 1850s, delivering opinions about the issues of the day as dictated by the spirits. By contrast, Victoria Woodhull had cut her ties to Spiritualist groups when her claim to clairvoyant powers persuaded the tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt to back her in founding the first female brokerage firm on Wall Street. But shortly thereafter she managed to recruit both Spiritualist and women’s rights organizations to support her bid for the presidency in 1872. Meanwhile in Britain, Georgina Weldon — not a medium herself but a stage-struck Spiritualist — fought the efforts of her husband and his squad of doctors to commit her to an asylum. She challenged Britain’s lunacy laws with more than a decade of agitation, which included parading sandwich-board men as pickets, scattering leaflets from a hot-air balloon, giving theatrical performances and offering antic testimony in court.

more here.

Nilo Tabrizy in Guernica:

For the past year, I’ve been researching and studying the works of Hafez, one of Iran’s most beloved and influential poets. More than 600 years after his death, his work is still invoked regularly, quoted by Iranian politicians to skewer their rivals and by everyday Iranians in casual conversations over dinner. Normally, this is the part where I would share a verse of his work, or tell you how complex and beautiful his words are. I would to tell you how Iranians use his poems as a form of divination, like a tarot card reading of sorts. Instead, I am consumed with trying to understand why I’ve been devoting so much time to studying the verses of a poet from the fourteenth century right now, when my country is going through every imaginable version of pain. Wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on current national security issues instead of diving into the art of our past?

Recently I interviewed Afshon Ostovar, a renowned Iran expert who focuses on the IRGC. I was talking to him about the Qods Force, the unit that was commanded by Qassim Soleimani, the general killed by the United States in a drone strike in January. He told me he had noticed some recent tweets of mine about Persian poetry, and said he found it sweet to read something like that while both of our professional fields were dealing with an onslaught of depressing news.

After our interview, I kept thinking about what Ostovar said. Why am I always drawn to poetry, even in times when more pressing headlines should capture my attention?

Certainly, poetry is central to Iranian identity. The Shahnameh, an epic poem by Persian poet Ferdowsi, cemented this connection. Ferdowsi began writing this narrative of more than 50,000 couplets in 977 AD and completed the endeavor forty-three years later in 1010. The poem tells the mythical tale of the history of ancient Iran, a story stretching back from the creation of the world to the seventh century, when the Arabs conquered Iran. When Ferdowsi was writing, the Arab invasion imposed a new language and religion on the people of Iran. With Shahnameh, Ferdowsi preserved our language and history at a time when it was in danger of being lost forever.

More here.

Beautiful Empty Pages

What kind of work
Can I do in this world?

Who would be kind enough
To hire an old holy Bum,

One with a great reputation
For loving the charms
Of the lawless
And the wild artists and the lewd?

Maybe I could become a poet.

Maybe the Beloved
Will make my love so Pure

That He will come to sit upon
All my beautiful empty pages.
And when you come to look at them,

He might kick you
With His Beautiful Divine Foot.

by Hafiz
from I Heard God Laughing
renderings of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky

Michelle Orange in The New York Times:

Early this spring, wary and disoriented despite the vaccine at work in my system, I sought a book to help me navigate the strange, bardo-like moment in which disaster and its aftermath begin to overlap. “To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf’s 1927 masterpiece, was the one that kept coming to mind — specifically its experimental middle section, “Time Passes.” Parsed into 10 “chapters,” with its swirling rhythms, involuted structure and flights into abstraction, “Time Passes” presents an especial challenge to the pre-post-pandemic brain. I hoped to find in Woolf’s evocation of grief as a disruption of one’s sense of time not a solution but the solace of a riddle’s key connections laid bare.

Nine years after the end of World War I, which left 40 million people dead or wounded, and seven since a global flu pandemic killed at least that many, Woolf sought to mark the unmaking of the world as she knew it, and, with her depiction of the Ramsay family and the various artists and scholars in their midst, tell a new kind of story about grief and restoration. She envisioned the structure with a line drawing: two blocks, the before and after, connected by a thin corridor. “I am making up ‘To the Lighthouse’ — the sea is to be heard all through it,” Woolf wrote in her diary. “I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel.’ A new — by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?” Dislodging elegy from its poetic traditions and long history of men memorializing other men, Woolf set out to explore its terms within a more expansive, narrative form.

More here.

David Byrne in Reasons to be Cheerful:

Stockton, California has gotten a lot of press for its experiment in providing a basic income to its residents, but it wasn’t until a recent study looked at the first year of results that we saw proven evidence of what impacts the experimental program was having.

Besides feeling less pain and anxiety about their lives and their financial situations, a surprising percentage of the program’s recipients got jobs. By the end of the first year of the study (2019, before the pandemic began) full-time employment in the recipient group had risen from 28 percent to 40 percent — double the increase found among folks who didn’t receive the money.

This runs counter to some conventional wisdom, which says that free money disincentivizes work. Rather, the report, along with anecdotal evidence, seems to say the opposite: it is the uncertainty that low-income folks live with that makes it harder for them to find the jobs they desire. Providing this modest monetary cushion allows folks to realize their potential, which benefits the entire community.

More here.

John Hewitt in Medical Xpress:

“The First Cell” is the title of a revolutionary book written in 2019 by oncologist Azra Raza from the Columbia University Medical Center. In it, she calls for a radical shift in cancer funding away from its current predominant focus on late stage treatments, and towards early detection of what she calls “the first cells.”

Shortly thereafter, a group of noted dignitaries in the field collectively called The Oncology Think Tank convened to begin hashing out this new imperative, and then bring it to fruition. In the popular magazine Scientific American, the group recently published their vision for a future when no cancer will be detected too late to treat. The logical entry point into this path begins with the most important resource now available—extant cancer survivors.

I recently spoke with Azra about her plans to establish The First Cell Center for Cancer Survivors (FICCCS), and asked her to provide a summary for us of how it might work.

More here.

Esmat Elhalaby in the Boston Review:

On February 2, 1977, Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein died in his New York apartment. Hussein had been born forty-one years earlier in Musmus, a town not far from Nazareth. Politics for Hussein, Edward Said remembered, “lost its impersonality and its cruel demagogic spirit.” Hussein, Said wrote of his dear friend, “simply asked that you remember the search for real answers, and never give it up, never be seduced by mere arrangements.” Sharply critical of his own society and its rulers—he had a map of the Middle East on his wall with “thought forbidden here” scrawled across it in Arabic—Hussein was also a partisan of the Third World. “I am from Asia,” he pronounced in an early poem, “The land of fire / Forging furnace of freedom-fighters.”

Another of Hussein’s friends, Pakistani political scientist Eqbal Ahmad, wrote that he lived in “New York City as though it were a Palestinian town.” Born in 1936, Hussein was nearly the same age as Said. Had the dislocations of his life not burdened his soul so heavily—he died alone in his apartment, a lit cigarette setting fire to the mattress as he slept—Hussein may very well have lived alongside Said in Manhattan for a few decades more.

More here.

Madeleine Seidel at Hyperallergic:

Alice Rohrwacher’s most recent full-length feature, Happy as Lazaro, won the award for best screenplay at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Her latest short film, Four Roads, is a gorgeously composed meditation on community in the time of COVID. Shot in the rural Italian countryside in April 2020, during the early days of quarantine, the short follows Rohrwacher as she discovers an old camera and some expired film. She decides to see if she can connect with her neighbors through the “magic eye” of the camera, which allows her to interact with them while keeping a safe distance.

The director observes her neighbors — an elderly woman and her dog, a man tending to a secret garden, a large family on a farm — and the picturesque landscape they all share with a dreamlike sense of reverie, narrating the small everyday moments she captures. What makes Four Roads an incredibly special short is the true admiration Rohrwacher shows for these people.

more here.

George Scialabba at The Baffler:

One of The Free World’s larger themes is the replacement of Paris by New York as “the capital of the modern.” For nearly a century, Menand writes, “Paris was where advanced Western culture—especially painting, sculpture, literature, dance, film, and photography, but also fashion, cuisine, and sexual mores—was . . . created, accredited, and transmitted.” It was not the Nazi occupation that changed things; Paris got off lightly compared with other occupied capitals. (Though it would have been burned to the ground if the German commandant had not ignored Hitler’s orders.) And immediately after the Liberation in 1944, there was a cultural efflorescence. Existentialism was in vogue everywhere; its three main exponents—Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir—were international celebrities. But the compass needle was turning: as Sartre acknowledged, “the greatest literary development in France between 1929 and 1939 was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Caldwell, Steinbeck.” American leadership in painting was even more pronounced in the 1940s and 50s. Paris would always retain its aura, particularly for Black American writers and musicians, though not only for them—Paris would play a large part in liberating Susan Sontag, for example. But American global primacy was so complete in the fifties and sixties that the cultural primacy of its capital city could not be gainsaid.

more here.

[Prepositions]

……………………………. I

In on around about
over through among

beside

under against
over again

out

after

backwards

……………………………. II

Throughout
furthermore

Moreover and
Nevertheless

……………………………. III

Beyond
.

by Lew Welsh
from Ring of Bone
Grey Fox Press, 1960

Kathryn Hymes in The Atlantic:

I celebrated my second pandemic birthday recently. Many things were weird about it: opening presents on Zoom, my phone’s insistent photo reminders from “one year ago today” that could be mistaken for last month, my partner brightly wishing me “iki domuz,” a Turkish phrase that literally means “two pigs.” Well, that last one is actually quite normal in our house. Long ago, I took my first steps into adult language lessons and tried to impress my Turkish American boyfriend on his special day. My younger self nervously bungled through new vocabulary—The numbers! The animals! The months!—to wish him “iki domuz” instead of “happy birthday” (İyi ki doğdun) while we drank like pigs in his tiny apartment outside of UCLA. Now, more than a decade later, that slipup is immortalized as our own peculiar greeting to each other twice a year.

Many of us have a secret language, the private lexicon of our home life. Perhaps you have a nickname from a parent that followed you into adulthood. Maybe you have an old joke or a shared reference to a song. Sometimes known as familects, these invented words, pet names, in-jokes, and personal memes swirl and emerge from the mess of lives spent in close quarters. During the pandemic, we’ve spent dramatically more time in those quarters, and our in-group slang has changed accordingly.

…We speak differently in different settings—this is no surprise—depending on whom we’re talking to and what the purpose is. Whether the formalities of a work presentation for colleagues or awkward small talk on a first date, our language shifts as the context and audience change. Familects are a part of the intimate register of language, the way we talk “backstage” with the people we are closest to. They’re our home slang, if you will, where we can be our nonpublic selves in all their weird glory. Familects can emerge from any type of family: big, small, chosen, or your “quaranteam,” as a friend calls it. Over time, these terms may become sticky in your inner circle.

More here.

George Dardess in Close Reading:

“I started writing this book while living in Antwerp,” Meis says, in the first sentence of the Preface. Fine. What I’d expect. Peter Paul Rubens lived and worked in Antwerp, so of course Meis would go there to research and write about his topic. All’s well. I get a cup of tea and start to get settled in.

But then, instead of continuing along the well-worn path of conscientious academic table-setting, Meis drops his diction and starts gabbing about being in Antwerp only to keep his wife company because she, at least, had a serious project (film) there. He, by contrast, was doing the dishes—though he was in possession of some grant money to “write on art and what-not”

OK, so lots of time and change on his hands, right? Gotta fill it up somehow, right? And so:

Suddenly, or so it seems to me now, I remembered that Antwerp was among other things Peter Paul Rubens’ town. This thought annoyed me, as I had no interest in Rubens. I didn’t even care about him enough to dislike him. My next thought was, “I’ll write a book about him.”

See what I mean? Surprise, also cheekiness, maybe even arrogance. Or maybe insanity? Maybe all of the above. But in any case, as a reader, I’m on my back foot. I can’t imagine how anything resembling a book on Rubens or whomever else could come out of such flaunted ignorance and brazenness.

And so of course I read on, out of curiosity, even eagerness to see this clown fall completely on his face—and right away it’s I who am falling, into to the heart of the matter.

More here.

From Phys.org:

Climate change, a pandemic or the coordinated activity of neurons in the brain: In all of these examples, a transition takes place at a certain point from the base state to a new state. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have discovered a universal mathematical structure at these so-called tipping points. It creates the basis for a better understanding of the behavior of networked systems.

It is an essential question for scientists in every field: How can we predict and influence changes in a networked system? “In biology, one example is the modeling of coordinated neuron activity,” says Christian Kühn, professor of multiscale and stochastic dynamics at TUM. Models of this kind are also used in other disciplines, for example when studying the spread of diseases or climate change.

All critical changes in networked systems have one thing in common: a tipping point where the system makes a transition from a base state to a new state. This may be a smooth shift, where the system can easily return to the base state. Or it can be a sharp, difficult-to-reverse transition where the system state can change abruptly or “explosively.” Transitions of this kind also occur in climate change, for example with the melting of the polar ice caps.

More here.

Peter Beinart in the New York Times:

Why has the impending eviction of six Palestinian families in East Jerusalem drawn Israelis and Palestinians into a conflict that appears to be spiraling toward yet another war? Because of a word that in the American Jewish community remains largely taboo: the Nakba.

The Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, need not refer only to the more than 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled or fled in terror during Israel’s founding. It can also evoke the many expulsions that have occurred since: the about 300,000 Palestinians whom Israel displaced when it conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967; the roughly 250,000 Palestinians who could not return to the West Bank and Gaza after Israel revoked their residency rights between 1967 and 1994; the hundreds of Palestinians whose homes Israel demolished in 2020 alone. The East Jerusalem evictions are so combustible because they continue a pattern of expulsion that is as old as Israel itself.

More here.