Stone

De piedra, sangre

I make my own heaven. I drag it out of the streets, and inhospitable terrains.
I mixed “tabique”, brick, mortar with my hands, kneading,

I need, to make my own heaven.
It is clandestine, in broad daylight.

It’s microwave popcorn, from Costco, because Costco can cross the border
as many times as it wants and it has never been asked to go back to where it came from.

Not in this kitchen, scrubbed so clean, with bleach, that the roaches have to ask permission to scatter out onto the floor.

Sulema and I, don’t flinch. She has figured me out. We know we have lived some shit and now, it takes more than a cockroach to keep us from moving, forward.

Fuck the roaches, the military, the long nights and even longer days. There is popcorn to be made, a courtyard of children waiting for it.

Baby girl walks in to check on our progress. She is waiting impatiently for popcorn, the smell of butter making its way around the shelter, La Casa.
The house is built on a solid foundation of Goodyear tires, and unpacked, repacked, suitcases, unpacked, repacked plans.

Today, there is popcorn.
All that matters is today.
For my sake, not Sulema’s

The flowerbeds, and the upside-down Christmas trees, drying out in the sun are beautiful.

I will remember them, when I am warm by a campfire, watching my children for signs of a chill.
I will remember them, determined, uneven steps, protruding out of a hillside, going wherever they need to go.

Wherever they need to go.
There is no going back.
Sulema and I both know this, standing in the hot kitchen of the TJ shelter, it is obvious.
It is a beautiful truth, it takes hesitation and beats it down, into the floor.

We danced on it.

by Aideed Medina
from Split This Rock

Jackson Arn in The Hedgehog Review:

When critics write at length about the critics they admire, look out for self-portraiture. In a 2008 New Yorker essay, the critic and intellectual historian Louis Menand explored Lionel Trilling’s influence on the postwar era, during which Trilling was America’s preeminent literary critic and among its weightiest public intellectuals. One of the few aspects of Trilling’s career about which Menand had major reservations was the unfinished second novel Trilling began shortly after publishing his first, The Middle of the Journey, but abandoned about a third of the way through. This work, Menand found, “doesn’t have much literary interest, but it does have a lot of biographical interest, because it lets us see Trilling imagining his own world—the world of ambitious young critics, resentful middle-aged professors, pompous publishers and compromised foundation heads, intellectual femmes fatales, and the megalomaniacal editors of little magazines—as a nineteenth-century novel.”

Thirteen years later, Menand himself has finished writing such a book: a loose, baggy monster, set in a great Western metropolis and populated by an army’s worth of heroes, heroines, and grotesques.

More here.

Areeba Merriam in Cantor’s Paradise:

Einstein completed his Ph.D. thesis in 1905 with Professor Alfred Kleiner, who was an experimental physicist at the University of Zürich. He was awarded a doctorate degree with the dissertation entitled “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions.’’ It was not the same institute from where Einstein completed his previous degree, it was ETH, and ETH was not allowed to award PhDs at that time. Until 1909, their students were authorized to submit their dissertations to the University of Zürich.

The year 1905 was known to be the annus mirabilis means “marvelous year” of Albert Einstein’s life. That year he successfully published four groundbreaking research papers that reshaped the scope of the subject. One of them was on the photoelectric effect which made him achieve the Nobel prize in physics in 1921. The others were on Brownian motion, special relativity, and the one in which he introduced equivalence of mass and energy i.e E=mc².

All of his efforts provided him with the attention of academic society at such a young age. Moreover, his fifth paper became his Ph.D. thesis. The first four research papers attained widespread attention but unfortunately, his doctoral thesis was not considerably appreciated in the early years. So I decided to write about it to have a bit of insight into it today.

More here.

Andre Schmid in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Not too many 38-years-olds deserve their own biography, let alone two. But ever since Kim Jong Un became the third ruler of North Korea in 2011, he has fascinated the American media. A Seth Rogen movie, The New Yorker covers, and South Park cartoons have all made Kim — and his haircut — the target of much lampooning. And in one of the strangest twists in recent international diplomacy, Donald Trump caused a sensation by announcing the two “fell in love” with each other. All this publicity has ultimately resulted in a cartoonish version of Kim, which, however good for a chuckle, obscures how this enigmatic dictator and his family have ruled over the course of three generations.

Kim is no easy subject for biography. The CIA classifies North Korea as the hardest intelligence target in the world. And any biographer needs to cut through the flowery rhetoric, the loving photographs, and the fabricated histories produced daily by North Korean state media.

Thankfully, in taking this challenge on, a pair of biographies escape pop culture versions of Kim to ponder the question that has fixated Pyongyang-watchers: how much time does the guy have left?

More here.

David Bentley Hart at Commonweal:

There is also a kind of ostentatious world-weariness in his writings that can be oddly enchanting. In one sense, his thought is burdened by that deep historical consciousness that seems to be the peculiar vocation of continental philosophy in its long post-Hegelian twilight. As a result, he possesses too keen a hermeneutical awareness of the fluidity, ambiguity, and cultural contingency of philosophy’s terms and concepts to mistake them for invariable properties that can be absorbed into some timeless propositional calculus in the way so much of Anglo-American philosophy imagines it can. But, in another sense, it is precisely this “burden” of historical consciousness that imparts a paradoxical levity to his project. Many of his books feel like expeditions in search of secrets from the past: forgotten cultural ancestries, effaced spiritual monuments, occult currents within the flow of social evolution. Whether one admires or deplores his thought—or has a distinctly mixed opinion of it, as I do—no one could plausibly claim that it is dull.

more here.

Agnes Callard at The Point:

Weil’s essential contribution to the theory of complaint comes by way of her distinction between ordinary suffering and something she calls “affliction.” Suffering is pain one can bear, pain that does not imprint itself on the soul. Sometimes, we even choose suffering, as in strenuous exercise, unmedicated childbirth or getting one’s ears pierced. Getting beat up in an alleyway by strangers is not like any of those forms of suffering. A violent attack, even one that does minimum physical damage, hurts in a distinctive way—in a way that, as Weil would put it, raises a question.

“The same event may plunge one human being into affliction and not another,” writes Weil. Her view is that the kind of suffering that makes a mark on the soul is incomprehensible suffering. Even as great an evil as religious persecution doesn’t necessarily entail affliction; Weil says that the persecuted “only fall into a state of affliction if suffering or fear fills the soul to the point of making it forget the cause of the persecution.”

more here.

Paul Bloom in The New Yorker:

The duration of felt experience is between two and three seconds—about as long as it takes, the psychologist Marc Wittmann points out, for Paul McCartney to sing the words “Hey Jude.” Everything before belongs to memory; everything after is anticipation. It’s a strange, barely fathomable fact that our lives are lived through this small, moving window. Practitioners of mindfulness meditation often strive to rest their consciousness within it. The rest of us might encounter something similar during certain present-tense moments—perhaps while rock climbing, improvising music, making love. Being in the moment is said to be a perk of sadomasochism; as a devotee of B.D.S.M. once explained, “A whip is a great way to get someone to be here now. They can’t look away from it, and they can’t think about anything else!”

In 1971, the book “Be Here Now,” by the spiritual leader Ram Dass, helped introduce yoga to the West. Much of the time, we are elsewhere. In 2010, the psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert published a study in which they used an iPhone app to ask volunteers, at random points throughout the day, what they were doing, what they were thinking, and how happy they were. The researchers found that, in about half of their samples, people’s minds were wandering, often remembering the past or contemplating the future. These periods were, on average, less pleasant than ones spent being in the moment. Thoughts of the future are often associated with anxiety and dread, and thoughts of the past can be colored by regret, embarrassment, and shame.

Still, mental time travel is essential. In one of Aesop’s fables, ants chastise a grasshopper for not collecting food for the winter; the grasshopper, who lives in the moment, admits, “I was so busy singing that I hadn’t the time.” It’s important to find a proper balance between being in the moment and stepping out of it. We all know people who live too much in the past or worry too much about the future. At the end of their lives, people often regret most their failures to act, stemming from unrealistic worries about consequences. Others, indifferent to the future or disdainful of the past, become unwise risk-takers or jerks. Any functioning person has to live, to some extent, out of the moment. We might also think that it’s right for our consciousnesses to shift to other times—such inner mobility is part of a rich and meaningful life.

On a group level, too, we struggle to strike a balance.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Visiting the Oracle

It’s dark on purpose
so just listen.

Maybe I inhabit a jar, maybe a pot,
maybe nothing. Only this
loose end of a voice
rising to meet you.
It sounds like water.
Don’t think about that.

Let your servants climb back down the mountain
by themselves. I’ll listen.
I’ll tell you everything
I discover, but I can’t
say what it means.

Someone will always
assure you of the best of fortunes,
but you know better.

And keep this in mind: The answer
reveals itself in time
like the clue that fits
perfectly and explains everything
after the crime has been solved.

Then you will say: I should have known.
It was there all along
and never even concealed,
like the story of the letter
overlooked by the thief because
it had not been hidden.
That’s the trick, of course.

You don’t need me.

by Lawrence Raab
from The Collector of Cold Weather
MacMillan, 1973

Hasan Altaf in The Paris Review:

After her first novel, The God of Small Things (1997), Arundhati Roy did not publish another for twenty years, when The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was released in 2017. The intervening decades were nonetheless filled with writing: essays on dams, displacement, and democracy, which appeared in newspapers and magazines such as Outlook, Frontline, and the Guardian, and were collected in volumes that quickly came to outnumber the novels. Most of these essays were compiled in 2019 in My Seditious Heart, which, with footnotes, comes to nearly a thousand pages; less than a year later she published nine new essays in Azadi.

To see that two-decade period as a gap, or the nonfiction as separate from the fiction, would be to misunderstand Roy’s project; when finding herself described as “what is known in twenty-first-century vernacular as a ‘writer-activist,’ ” she confessed that term made her flinch (and feel “like a sofa-bed”). The essays exist between the novels not as a wall but as a bridge. Roy’s subject and obsession is, throughout, power: who has it (and why), how it is used (and abused), the ways in which those with little power turn on those with less—and, importantly, how to find beauty and joy amid these struggles.

More here.

Scott K. Johnson in Ars Technica:

The last week of June saw shocking temperatures in Oregon, Washington state, and British Columbia. Differentiating a forecast in Canada from a forecast in Phoenix is usually a breeze, but not in June. All-time high-temperature records—not just daily records—were smashed across the region. Portland International Airport broke its all-time record of 41.7°C (107°F) by a whopping 5°C (9°F). The small town of Lytton set a new record high for the entire country of Canada at 49.6°C (121.3°F) on June 29. In the days that followed, most of the town burned in a wildfire.

Folks in this region are not accustomed to such extreme heat, with something like half of homes having air conditioners. The number of heat-related deaths is not yet fully known.

As with other extreme weather events, the World Weather Attribution team has generated a rapid analysis of this heat wave in the context of climate change.

More here.

Yanis Varoufakis in Project Syndicate:

This is how capitalism ends: not with a revolutionary bang, but with an evolutionary whimper. Just as it displaced feudalism gradually, surreptitiously, until one day the bulk of human relations were market-based and feudalism was swept away, so capitalism today is being toppled by a new economic mode: techno-feudalism.

This is a large claim that comes on the heels of many premature forecasts of capitalism’s demise, especially from the left. But this time it may well be true.

The clues have been visible for a while. Bond and share prices, which should be moving in sharply opposite directions, have been skyrocketing in unison, occasionally falling but always in lockstep. Similarly, the cost of capital (the return demanded to own a security) should be falling with volatility; instead, it has been rising as future returns become more uncertain.

Perhaps the clearest sign that something serious is afoot appeared on August 12 last year.

More here.

Jen Pelly at Pitchfork:

Taja Cheek is walking through time. Facing the bustling intersection of Saint Marks and Nostrand Avenues in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, she points towards the former location of the Continental jazz club, which her grandfather owned in the 1950s. It’s walking distance from the apartment where Cheek has lived for the better part of a decade, and where she once booked her own basement shows, featuring the likes of TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone and NYC noise fixture Dreamcrusher. And it’s not far from where Cheek grew up further down Eastern Parkway, practicing Debussy on piano when she wasn’t taking in the city’s sounds—jazz on the radio, Carribean music on the streets, and ’90s rap and R&B in the air. “That’s such a big part of the music I know and that matters to me: the music I absorbed just from being around it,” she says. “I have all these memories of playing Double Dutch on the street and hearing music playing from cars.”

more here.

Julian Baggini at Literary Review:

This is just the most egregious example of what the Financial Times’s chief features writer, Henry Mance, describes as ‘the meat paradox’: a state of affairs where ‘people who care about animals manage not to care about farm animals’. It’s not just omnivores who are in denial. Vegetarians are arguably just as self-deceived. The life of a typical dairy cow is worse than that of one destined to end up as steaks. In the United States, up to half of dairy cows suffer lameness, a problem also rife in the United Kingdom. Vegetarians can’t even claim that at least they are not responsible for the slaughter of cows, since the economics of the dairy industry means that most male calves are killed at birth, once they have served their only purpose as catalysts of lactation. ‘If you are really concerned about animal welfare,’ says Mance, ‘you should almost certainly stop eating dairy before you stop eating beef.’

more here.

Leave It Lay Where Jesus Flung It

What a colossal wrong fall she took—that mastodon caught
several stories down in underwater muck thought:

fuck. & wanted banjo—not this: fretted plunge towards fossil—
sun’s gold tone-ring diminishing. All summer archeologists

in wetsuits scope out ribs in the spring & miss the postmortem
marvel: silver fingerpicks dart bone sockets, grow gills

in her sawgrass wrapped cranium. That’s how bad she wanted
banjo—while sinking, archaeopteryx varmints circling

the surface. Small moon on which she strummed what would
evolve without her: Sparrow, savior, galax licks—air

bubbles blowing out her trunk. No not her trumpet—What
a Wonderful World’s—bright brass belongs to Satchmo &

she’d die anonymous as pearl inlay or those heroines drowned
in murder ballads. For all eternity’s a chorus of rogue

villains slipping roofies in your swamp when you’re a mastodon
clawhammering a busted clavicle past the watery brink

of boomalacka while Cro Magnons carve spears from the bank
& a butterfly sails past the alligator’s teeth. All the world’s

a neck drawn out the spring’s belly where docked glass-bottom
boats rock & research teams mark the dig site with yellow

tape—a crime scene to beached yokels, sweating August for the
long dismembering. Soldout little snackshop & the diving

platform’s closed. Leave her bones I want to say to the craneman
angling for a coccyx. What mastodon worth her salt would

want this climate controlled museum where she’s headed, Muzak
streaming out the artificial cave? But the hook falls in with

a twang. Think you know what’s possible? Each misstep unearths
a miracle: Where the mastodon’s still double thumbing away

her last mistake—algid currents whorl a bridge from her left tusk.

by Jane Springer
from Plume Magazine

Arthur C. Brooks in The Atlantic:

The 2021 academy award for Best Picture—covering the prior year, when many of us were stuck at home—was awarded, ironically, to Nomadland, a film about a woman who has no permanent home. The movie follows Fern (Frances McDormand), a 60-something widow who lives in her van, working itinerantly and resisting invitations to settle down with family or friends. Many critics interpreted Nomadland as an “indictment of America”; an article in this magazine lauded its treatment of “the wreckage of American promise.”

My reaction to the movie, however, was different. In Fern, I saw not merely the victim of a broken culture and economy, but also a version of the fabled “rugged individualist”: the cowboy; the pioneer; the immigrant. She insists on self-reliance, lives by her wits without self-pity, and sees the welfare of others as a kind of prison.

This is an American ideal, or perhaps a cliché. Some see it as not just a character type, but rather a source of deep life satisfaction. Ralph Waldo Emerson best articulated this view in his 1841 essay, “Self-Reliance.” “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,” he wrote. “Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.” An excess of individualism can obviously lead one to become an isolated loner or act with great selfishness. But we reject Emerson’s panegyric to our detriment. Done right, individualism has tremendous benefits for our senses of competence, effectiveness, and life direction.

More here.