David Mason at First Things:

Les Murray, who died at age 80 on April 29, has been called Australia’s greatest poet, but such an encomium meant little to him.

Murray grew up in dire poverty on a farm with no electricity or running water, and always felt exiled from the privileged classes. Largely self-educated, at university he was so poor he ate the scraps he found on plates in the cafeteria. Profoundly asocial, he once called himself “a bit of a stranger to the human race.” He also suffered at times from debilitating depression, and was bullied in school for being bookish and fat. Yet he transformed his sense of personal injury to a poetic voice of rigor and flexibility, humor and empathy, and enormous formal range. He was a generous anthologist and editor as well as an essayist, poet, and verse novelist. “It was a very great epiphany for me,” he once said, “to realize that poetry is inexhaustible, that I would never get to the end of its reserves.”

more here.

Kate Aronoff at Bookforum:

Wallace-Wells stresses that these scenarios are the signs not of a new normal, but of a world in which “normal” ceases to be a useful framework for understanding an environment that is constantly changing, and almost always for the worse. “By 2040, the summer of 2018 will likely seem normal,” he writes. “But extreme weather is not a matter of ‘normal’; it is what roars back at us from the ever-worsening fringe of climate events. This is among the scariest features of rapid climate change: not that it changes the everyday experience of the world, though it does that, and dramatically; but that it makes once-unthinkable outlier events much more common, and ushers whole new categories of disaster into the realm of the possible.”

The biggest “known unknown” (a phrase Wallace-Wells cribs from Donald Rumsfeld) is how quickly humans will choose to acknowledge and address what’s coming. Whether we like it or not, the author points out, we are bound up with nature and what happens to it. The era in which a small subset of humanity has sought to dominate the earth and its resources is a blip in the history of this planet.

more here.

Freya Johnston at the LRB:

To read his life in his work – to see that work as bearing the imprint of an existence that was, in Johnson’s words, ‘radically wretched’ as well as triumphant – is to attempt the kind of biographical criticism at which Johnson himself excelled, which he might indeed be said to have invented in the Lives of the Poets. He might also be said, posthumously, to have suffered from it, since the grip of Boswell’s vivid and brilliantly idiosyncratic account of his friend on readers’ imaginations was so immediate and so tenacious that it quickly came to seem bigger and more compelling than the work itself. The astonishing range of that work is fairly represented in David Womersley’s selection: poetry (in Latin and English), fiction, sermons, lectures, journalism, literary criticism, political pamphlets, a fairy tale, a travelogue, biographies, an edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and the dictionary. By giving each of them due weight, this superb new edition – a slab of a book – suggests a way of putting Johnson’s life and his writing back together again. In the first few pages, we find four schoolboy translations of Horace put alongside an early poem called ‘Festina Lente’, thirty lines of verse on the doomed hopes of ‘The Young Author’, and one of the little prose memorials he occasionally composed to soothe himself, this one recording his mother’s ‘difficult and dangerous labour’. Womersley’s positioning of these texts, based on attested dates of composition rather than publication, possesses biographical and critical coherence, providing the reader with a sense of Johnson’s exceptional versatility in public and private life.

more here.

Richard Conniff in Scientific American:

It is one of the great dilemmas of climate change: We take such comfort from air conditioning that worldwide energy consumption for that purpose has already tripled since 1990. It is on track to grow even faster through mid-century—and assuming fossil-fuel–fired power plants provide the electricity, that could cause enough carbon dioxide emissions to warm the planet by another deadly half-degree Celsius. A paper published Tuesday in the Nature Communications proposes a partial remedy:  Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (or HVAC) systems move a lot of air. They can replace the entire air volume in an office building five or 10 times an hour.  Machines that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a developing fix for climate change—also depend on moving large volumes of air.  So why not save energy by tacking the carbon capture machine onto the air conditioner?

This futuristic proposal, from a team led by chemical engineer Roland Dittmeyer at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, goes even further. The researchers imagine a system of modular components, powered by renewable energy, that would not just extract carbon dioxide and water from the air. It would also convert them into hydrogen, and then use a multistep chemical process to transform that hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbon fuels.  The result: “Personalized, localized and distributed, synthetic oil wells” in buildings or neighborhoods, the authors write. “The envisioned model of ‘crowd oil’ from solar refineries, akin to ‘crowd electricity’ from solar panels,” would enable people “to take control and collectively manage global warming and climate change, rather than depending on the fossil power industrial behemoths.”

More here.

Gratitude to Old Teachers

When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake,
We place our feet where they have never been.
We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy.
Who is down there but our old teachers?

Water that once could take no human weight—
We were students then— holds up our feet,
And goes on ahead of us for a mile.
Beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness.

by Robert Bly
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

Cecilia Heyes in Aeon:

The idea that humans have cognitive instincts is a cornerstone of evolutionary psychology, pioneered by Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and Steven Pinker in the 1990s. ‘[O]ur modern skulls house a Stone Age mind,’ wrote Cosmides and Tooby in 1997. On this view, the cognitive processes or ‘organs of thought’ with which we tackle contemporary life have been shaped by genetic evolution to meet the needs of small, nomadic bands of people – people who devoted most of their energy to digging up plants and hunting animals. It’s unsurprising, then, that today our Stone Age instincts often deliver clumsy or distasteful solutions, but there’s not a whole lot we can do about it. We’re simply in thrall to our thinking genes.

This all seems plausible and intuitive, doesn’t it? The trouble is, the evidence behind it is dubious. In fact, if we look closely, it’s apparent that evolutionary psychology is due for an overhaul. Rather than hard-wired cognitive instincts, our heads are much more likely to be populated by cognitive gadgets, tinkered and toyed with over successive generations. Culture is responsible not just for the grist of the mind – what we do and make – but for fabricating its mills, the very way the mind works.

More here.

John Lanchester in the New York Times:

Climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has collectively faced. That challenge is, to put it mildly, practical; but it also poses a problem to the imagination. Our politics, our societies, are arranged around individual and group interests. These interests have to do with class, or ethnicity, or gender, or economics — make your own list. By asserting these interests, we call out to each other so that as a collective we see and hear one another. From that beginning, we construct the three overlapping, interacting R’s of recognition, representation and rights.

The problem with climate change, as an existential challenge to humanity, is that the interest-based model of society and politics doesn’t work. Most of the people in whose interest we are demanding action aren’t here. They haven’t been born yet. And because the areas first and most affected by climate change are the poorest regions of earth, we are talking about the least seen, least represented group on our planet. We have to imagine these people into being, and then grant them rights, and then take unprecedented, society-wide action on that basis.

More here.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

It should be mentioned that Backyard is a huge C-Print (91 X 150 inches) mounted on plexiglass and without any frame. The mundanity of the image is therefore partially offset by its commanding presence. Looking at the large, high resolution image, one can study the details of the scene. A few minutes of such study generally creates a sense of unease in the viewer. Something is wrong here. The problem is not so much in the overall content of the scene, or in its composition. Rather, many of the details in the picture just don’t look right. There are, for instance, several small pieces of dirt and refuse on the concrete steps that lead up to the door of the house on the right of the picture. But the bits of dirt do not look like real dirt. The dirt just isn’t dirty enough to be real dirt. Nor, at second glance, is the concrete rough and heavy enough in its appearance to be real concrete. And the light – the illumination on the steps doesn’t seem at all consistent with the overcast sky, just beyond those blossoming trees.

The secret is that Backyard is not a photograph of a real backyard at all. It is a photograph of a “fake” backyard, a life-sized model of a backyard made by Demand out of paper and cardboard. Even the beautifully flowering trees in the background are paper models. The plastic is not plastic, it is colored cardboard. Every single object in the picture has been constructed by Demand (and his assistants), which he then photographed. After the photograph was taken, the cardboard and paper model was destroyed. So, the photograph is the only documentation of the existence of this backyard.

More here.

Joseph E. Stiglitz in the New York Times:

Despite the lowest unemployment rates since the late 1960s, the American economy is failing its citizens. Some 90 percent have seen their incomes stagnate or decline in the past 30 years. This is not surprising, given that the United States has the highest level of inequality among the advanced countries and one of the lowest levels of opportunity — with the fortunes of young Americans more dependent on the income and education of their parents than elsewhere.

But things don’t have to be that way. There is an alternative: progressive capitalism. Progressive capitalism is not an oxymoron; we can indeed channel the power of the market to serve society.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s regulatory “reforms,” which reduced the ability of government to curb the excesses of the market, were sold as great energizers of the economy. But just the opposite happened: Growth slowed, and weirder still, this happened in the innovation capital of the world.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

When we talk about the mind, we are constantly talking about consciousness and cognition. Antonio Damasio wants us to talk about our feelings. But it’s not in an effort to be more touchy-feely; Damasio, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, believes that feelings generated by the body are a crucial part of how we achieve and maintain homeostasis, which in turn is a key driver in understanding who we are. His most recent book, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, is an ambitious attempt to trace the role of feelings and our biological impulses in the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, and our flourishing as social, cultural beings.

More here.

Falko Ernst at the website of the International Crisis Group (a few months ago):

It’s 7pm on a Sunday, and night is falling in this Michoacán town. The heat of the day is past, and there’s a pleasant breeze. The first visitors to the park have left for dinner, but many hang around.

Around the park’s outer edges, teenagers stroll in two circular currents.

The boys walk with their friends, in teams of two, three or four. The girls do the same, but in the opposite direction. So the circles intersect, inescapably, again and again. Boys and girls trade shy, longing glances. The lucky few get to hold hands or share a bench, words of affection and maybe a kiss. It’s a teenage ritual, here and in countless municipal parks across Mexico.

Not for Grillo, though. Not for The Cricket. He’s eligible to participate, for he’s hardly older than a teen, but he isn’t here to flirt.

Grillo is here to kill.

More here.  [Thanks to Wolf Böwig.]

Tuesday 9:00 AM

A man standing at the bus stop
reading the newspaper is on fire
Flames are peeking out
from beneath his collar and cuffs
His shoes have begun to melt

The woman next to him
wants to mention it to him
that he is burning
but she is drowning
Water is everywhere
in her mouth and ears
in her eyes
A stream of water runs
steadily from her blouse

Another woman stands at the bus stop
freezing to death
She tries to stand near the man
who is on fire
to try to melt the icicles
that have formed on her eyelashes
and on her nostrils
to stop her teeth long enough
from chattering to say something
to the woman who is drowning
but the woman who is freezing to death
has trouble moving
with blocks of ice on her feet

It takes the three some time
to board the bus
what with the flames
and water and ice
But when they finally climb the stairs
and take their seats
the driver doesn’t even notice
that none of them has paid
because he is tortured
by visions and is wondering
if the man who got off at the last stop
was really being mauled to death
by wild dogs.

by Denver Butson
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

David Graham in The Atlantic:

The weekend of August 12, 2017, may well have been a turning point in recent American history, but it’s not entirely clear which way things turned. That weekend was when neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. Marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us” and employed other anti-Semitic slogans. There were multiple violent clashes, and one woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when James Alex Fields Jr., one of the marchers, drove his car into a crowd. And President Donald Trump infamously equivocated about the incident. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” and then vacillated over the course of several days, declining to mount a sincere and forceful condemnation of the march.

By any objective standard, the incident was one of the lowest points of an administration defined by its nadirs, and the immediate reaction showed that public opinion concurred. Americans condemned Trump’s response, and his approval hit a record low. Yet almost two years later, the political effects of the violence remain unpredictable, as the past week showed. Former Vice President Joe Biden looked to Charlottesville as a focus for his presidential-campaign announcement, and found it to be more slippery than he had intended. Trump, meanwhile, showed no squeamishness in defending himself over his response. And a shooting at a synagogue in suburban San Diego, California, showed how anti-Semitic attacks have become a horrifyingly familiar part of contemporary American life.

More here.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff in The New York Times:

Foresters began noticing the patches of dying pines and denuded oaks, and grew concerned. Warmer winters and drier summers had sent invasive insects and diseases marching northward, killing the trees. If the dieback continued, some woodlands could become shrub land. Most trees can migrate only as fast as their seeds disperse — and if current warming trends hold, the climate this century will change 10 times faster than many tree species can move, according to one estimate. Rhode Island is already seeing more heat and drought, shifting precipitation and the intensification of plagues such as the red pine scale, a nearly invisible insect carried by wind that can kill a tree in just a few years.

The dark synergy of extreme weather and emboldened pests could imperil vast stretches of woodland.

So foresters in Rhode Island and elsewhere have launched ambitious experiments to test how people can help forests adapt, something that might take decades to occur naturally. One controversial idea, known as assisted migration, involves deliberately moving trees northward. But trees can live centuries, and environments are changing so fast in some places that species planted today may be ill-suited to conditions in 50 years, let alone 100. No one knows the best way to make forests more resilient to climatic upheaval.

These great uncertainties can prompt “analysis paralysis,” said Maria Janowiak, deputy director of the Forest Service’s Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science, or N.I.A.C.S. But, she added, “We can’t keep waiting until we know everything.”In Rhode Island, the state’s largest water utility is experimenting with importing trees from hundreds of miles to the south to maintain forests that help purify water for 600,000 people. In Minnesota, a lumber businessman is trying to diversify the forest on his land with a “300-year plan” he hopes will benefit his grandchildren. And in five places around the country, the United States Forest Service is running a major experiment to answer a basic question: What’s the best way to actually help forests at risk?

More here.

Sughra Raza. Hong Kong Harbor. January 2018. Digital photograph.

Vivek Menezes in Hindustan Times:

Alongside cryptic epigraphs from F Scott Fitzgerald and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the only-partially-reformed slam poet HM Naqvi began his debut novel Home Boy with a couplet from that most writerly act of old-school rap, Eric B & Rakim.

“This is how it should be done/ This style is identical to none” applied impeccably to that 2010 best-seller with its vivid, cascading prose recalling exactly what it felt like to be desi in the New York City environs before, during and immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that turned our times topsy-turvy. Naqvi deservedly won the inaugural DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for it. But those lines from I Know You Got Soul remain perfectly apt for the 44-year-old author’s hugely enjoyable follow-up The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack. Part-farce, part-lament, at turns scholarly and satirical, nothing quite like this novel has emerged from the subcontinent since Salman Rushdie set about demolishing the colonialist façade of Indo-Anglian writing nearly 40 years ago.

More here.

Liam James in The Independent:

Design submissions for the restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral include a proposal for a glasshouse to be built in place of the old, wooden roof.

Parts of the original structure were destroyed in a fire earlier in April, prompting the French prime minister, Eduoard Phillipe, to invite architects to design a replacement that is “adapted to the techniques and challenges of our era”.

In response, Paris based architects Studio NAB submitted a design that is adapted to perhaps the greatest challenge of our era: climate change.

The proposed roof would be built of glass and its exterior would follow the shape of the previous one. However where there was once a tangle of wooden support beams inside, there would be rows of trees and flowers.

The spire too would be replaced with a green alternative. Inspired by the three beehives that survived the fire, the new spire would serve as an apiary, housing dozens of hives.

More here.

Stanly Johny in The Hindu:

In early 1933, in the final days of the Weimar Republic, Eric Hobsbawm was in Berlin. He had lost his parents, and his uncle and aunt had taken him to Berlin where he joined his younger sister. As a teenaged student, Hobsbawm saw Germany falling into the hands of the Nazis. Hitler’s Brownshirts were unleashing widespread violence on the streets of Berlin. The country’s economy was in a shambles. Political instability was at its peak and the Nazi party was growing in popularity. Those were the formative years of the political Hobsbawm. “In this highly politicised atmosphere, it was perhaps hardly surprising that Eric soon became interested in the communist cause,” writes Richard J. Evans in Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, a biography of one of the most renowned historians of the 20th century.

Evans, himself a historian, and a friend and admirer of Hobsbawm, has done extensive research, got hold of his personal files as well as the documents prepared by the British secret service on him and interviewed friends, students and family members to reconstruct the life of the historian, who was born in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and died in 2012, when the global economy was struggling to weather the heavy winds of the Great Recession.

More here.