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.

Jim Davies in Nautilus:

In “All Eyes on Me,” a song from his new Netflix special Inside, the musician-comedian Bo Burnham pauses to ask, “You want to hear a funny story?” He tells us that, five years ago, he quit performing live because, while on stage, he’d experience severe panic attacks. He spent that time trying to improve himself mentally instead. “And you know what? I did,” Burnham says. He got better. “So much better, in fact, that in January of 2020, I thought, ‘You know what, I should start performing again.’” He’d been a kind of recluse. It was time to rectify that, he says. “And then, the funniest thing happened…”

Which was, of course, the pandemic. Inside—the whole of which is shot in a single room—is partly a commentary on how lockdowns and life online affected his emotional wellbeing. Interestingly, though, the global health emergency goes unmentioned. Burnham, here and there, only vaguely alludes to it. Yet he’s clear—or at least, the character he plays is clear—that the point of producing Inside was to keep busy, to stave off feelings of depression and thoughts of suicide, a struggle he hardly endured alone. A recent longitudinal study of an international group of participants found that, from April to September 2020 depressive symptoms, as well as suicidal thoughts and behaviors, rose significantly (though acute stress went down).

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

The painting is known as Woman in Grey Reclining. It was painted in 1879. It depicts a woman in a lovely dress reclining on a couch. Does she have a white flower on the left strap of her dress? Maybe. Probably. We cannot be completely sure. That’s because much of the detail in the painting is only hinted at by the brushwork. A few dabs of white paint here. A few daubs of grey over there. A stroke of black across the neck, giving us the sense of a choker. We’ve come to call this kind of painting impressionist. The term was originally meant as an insult. But it stuck and became a moniker of pride, as often happens with insults.

I’m interested in a very specific part of this painting. It’s an area of paint in the middle right side of the painting (from the viewer’s perspective), the smudgy area of white and grey over the top of the couch just beyond the woman’s arm. Do you see it? What is that smear doing there? It’s not part of the couch. And it’s not part of the woman’s dress. Nor does it belong to the wall. It’s quite disconcerting when you really focus on it.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Religion is an important part of the lives of billions of people around the world, but what religious belief actually amounts to can vary considerably from person to person. Some believe in an anthropomorphic, judgmental God; others conceive of God as more transcendent and conceptual; some are animists who attribute spiritual essence to creatures and objects; and many more. I talk with writer and religious scholar Reza Aslan about his view of religion as a vocabulary constructed by human beings to express a connection with something beyond the physical world — why one might think that, and what it implies about how we should go about living our lives.

More here.

Jason Diamond in Literary Hub:

I’m suburban; I’m of the suburbs. I’ve spent my entire adulthood in cities, but I still get nostalgic when I smell freshly cut grass. It brings me back to the malls of my youth, to the food court at Town Center at Boca Raton, the mall we used to go to whenever I visited my grandparents in South Florida, or the old tobacco store in some forgotten shopping center in the middle of the country. I love grilling meat on a Weber grill I spent an hour trying to light, and by God, I miss not having a never-ending stream of cars honking outside my window.

It took me a long time to admit any of that. I was, at best, ambivalent about where I come from, but filled with pure hate is more like it. Whenever somebody asked, I always told them I was from Chicago. That’s the way most people do it, right? If you’re from Round Rock, Texas, you’ll say you’re from Austin. If you grew up in Fountain in a house with four bedrooms, a two-car garage, and a big backyard, you just tell people “Colorado,” because they won’t know your hometown.

More here.

Rosita Sweetman at the Dublin Review of Books:

Burning Man, a new biography of Lawrence stuffed with fascinating research – his battleground of a childhood, his “raid” on literary London, life in Cornwall with Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, lifelong denials of, and battles with, tuberculosis, referred to by him as “the bronchials”, his first meeting with Frieda von Richthofen, his “destiny” and life partner, fights between them, their penniless travels on foot, donkey and ferry throughout Europe, in Florence with Norman Douglas, the pilgrimage to New Mexico and Mabel Dodge, her quest to “save” the Pueblo Indians, his novels, poems and literary criticisms ‑ is wonderful in many ways; but here’s my caveat: can a new biography of Lawrence really ignore Kate Millet’s critique of his work, declaring him one of the subtlest propagators of sexist, patriarchal propaganda? Can his novels, seen by Millet as laying the groundwork for today’s pornography, really stand unquestioned?

more here.

Jackson Arn at Art in America:

It’s terrifying how optimistic that era’s pessimism now seems. In Adventures in Paradise’s view of the future, we’re all fucked, to be sure, but at least we get to go to Mars, hang out with sentient robots, expand, accelerate, etc. The last four decades seems to have brought something like a great lowering of expectations, which David Graeber described like so: “A timid, bureaucratic spirit suffuses every aspect of cultural life. It comes festooned in a language of creativity, initiative, and entrepreneurialism. But the language is meaningless. . . . The greatest and most powerful nation that has ever existed has spent the last decades telling its citizens they can no longer contemplate fantastic collective enterprises.” Graeber singled out scientists and politicians for their contracting imaginations, but the creative class isn’t exempt— just look at the extraordinary success of Marvel Studios, the company whose fizzling pyrotechnics and brand-management-disguised-as-entertainment are a shadow of the American comic-book tradition to which Gary Panter has added so much.

more here.

Sophie McBain in New Statesman:

It is no coincidence that caffeine and the minute-hand on clocks arrived at around the same historical moment, the acclaimed food and nature writer Michael Pollan argues in his latest book, This is Your Mind on Plants. Both spread across Europe as labourers began leaving the fields, where work is organised around the sun, for the factories, where shift-workers could no longer adhere to their natural patterns of sleep and wakefulness. Would capitalism even have been possible without caffeine?

The introduction of caffeine to Europe in the early 17th century coincided with the waning of the mystical medieval mindset and the rise of the cool-headed rationalism of the Enlightenment. Before the arrival of tea and coffee, alcohol was the safest thing to drink – or at least, safer than most water – so perhaps it is little wonder that the permanently sozzled intellectuals of the Middle Ages were prone to magical thinking. In contrast, caffeine can intensify “spotlight consciousness”, which illuminates a single point of attention, enhancing our reasoning skills. Voltaire had such faith in coffee’s power to sharpen his mind that he is said to have drunk up to 72 cups a day. Balzac sometimes dispensed with drinking coffee altogether and instead ate the grounds for a more powerful hit.

In the Nineties, scientists at Nasa fed a variety of psychoactive substances to spiders to observe the effect on their web-making. The spider given caffeine spun a completely useless web, with no symmetry or centre, and holes large enough for a bird to get through. The web was much more dysfunctional than those spun by spiders high on cannabis or LSD. It’s unclear from the book (and from my subsequent Google searches) whether the spider was given the arachnid equivalent of a single cappuccino or a more Balzacian dose, which makes the comparison with other drugs less helpful, but Pollan’s point is that caffeine changes us more than we realise. Anyone who has accidentally overdosed on coffee and found themselves too jittery to function will identify with the caffeinated spider, who was extremely busy being unproductive. Perhaps the spider could even serve as a symbol for low-paid workers under present-day, hyper-caffeinated capitalism, for whom hard work yields so few personal rewards.

More here.

Shi En Kim in Smithsonian:

Biologist Teruhiko Wakayama envisions that one day, humans could populate other planets and seed new civilizations with animal sperm and egg cells they bring from Earth. Expanding humanity’s footprint into deep space will necessitate that humans ship out “Noah’s Arks” of this genetic material, each batch of cells a delegate of Earth’s biodiversity.

But before Wakayama’s vision becomes reality, first comes the task of verifying that reproductive cells can survive long journeys through space. Outside of Earth’s magnetic shield, radiation is 50 to several thousand times higher than back on Earth, and it can potentially damage cellular DNA. Now, Wakayama’s latest research, published this June in Science Advances, has made a promising inroad into prepping genetic material for interstellar transport: His team has found that mice sperm can indeed stay viable in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for up to six years—if they are freeze-dried beforehand

“It’s a very interesting paper,” says Ulrike Luderer, a reproductive toxicologist at University of California, Irvine who wasn’t involved in the study. “It’s the first time that any form of mammalian sperm have been in space for that length of time—nearly six years, the longest exposure.”  To carry out the freeze-drying process, the researchers froze sperm from 65 mice with liquid nitrogen at a temperature of negative 320 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, they exposed their frozen cells to a vacuum environment to quickly remove all water. “The sperm became powder [resembling] instant coffee,” writes Wakayama, who researches at Japan’s University of Yamanashi.

More here.