Ezra Pound’s Proposition

Beauty is sexual, and sexuality
Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility
Of the earth is economics. Though he is no recommendation
For poets on the subject of finance,
I thought of him in the thick heat
Of the Bangkok night. Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you
Outside the Shangri-la Hotel
And says, in plausible English,
“How about a party, big guy?”

Here is more or less how it works:
The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam
Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way
To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,
And the dam’s great turbines, beautifully tooled
In Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed
By Lazeres Freres in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York,
Enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Francisco
Or Halliburton of Houston to the local political elite,
Spun by the force of rushing water,
Have become hives of shimmering silver
And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light
Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.

by Robert Haas
from Time and Materials
Ecco Press, 2007

John McWhorter in The Atlantic:

I must admit that I had not gotten around to actually reading Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility until recently. But it was time to jump in. DiAngelo is an education professor and—most prominently today—a diversity consultant who argues that whites in America must face the racist bias implanted in them by a racist society. Their resistance to acknowledging this, she maintains, constitutes a “white fragility” that they must overcome in order for meaningful progress on both interpersonal and societal racism to happen.

White Fragility was published in 2018 but jumped to the top of the New York Times best-seller list amid the protests following the death of George Floyd and the ensuing national reckoning about racism. DiAngelo has convinced university administrators, corporate human-resources offices, and no small part of the reading public that white Americans must embark on a self-critical project of looking inward to examine and work against racist biases that many have barely known they had.

I am not convinced. Rather, I have learned that one of America’s favorite advice books of the moment is actually a racist tract. Despite the sincere intentions of its author, the book diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying us. This is unintentional, of course, like the racism DiAngelo sees in all whites. Still, the book is pernicious because of the authority that its author has been granted over the way innocent readers think.

More here.

Michael Schulson in Undark:

GIVEN THAT SHE infects ant colonies with deadly pathogens and then studies how they respond, one might say that Nathalie Stroeymeyt, a senior lecturer in the school of biological sciences at the University of Bristol in the U.K., specializes in miniature pandemics. The tables turned on her, however, in March: Covid-19 swept through Britain, and Stroeymeyt was shut out of her ant epidemiology lab. The high-performance computers she uses to track ant behavior sat idle, and only a lab technician — deemed an essential worker — was permitted to tend to the lab’s hundreds of black garden ant colonies, each housed in its own plastic tub.

With governments across the world now encouraging people to maintain space between one another to prevent the spread of the virus, Stroeymeyt drew parallels with her insect subjects. The current guidance on social distancing “rung familiar,” Stroeymeyt said, “because I’ve been seeing it among the ants.”

Such insights are at the heart of a burgeoning field of insect research that some scientists say could help humans imagine a more pandemic-resilient society. As with humans, fending off disease can be a tall order for social insects — a category that includes termites, ants, and many species of bees and wasps. Insect workers swap fluids and share close quarters. In most species, there is heavy traffic into and out of the nest. Some ant colonies are as populous as New York City.

More here.

Jess Row at Bookforum:

In any case, for me—like many Buddhists, past and present—the most frightening part of karma isn’t a vision of torments in the next life, but the idea that my suffering in this life isn’t altogether random or circumstantial; it carries the trace of some previous action along with it. There’s something unbearable about causality when we think about it in the strictest terms: A virus, for example, can be transmitted through the simplest unconscious act, like scratching your nose with the same finger that was just wrapped around a subway pole. In contemporary physics, the limits of causality are explored in the field known as “quantum entanglement,” or what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”: that is, the ability of distant entities to influence one another with no apparent force (like gravity) connecting them. Physicists know quantum entanglement happens, but how it works, and what power it exerts over everyday objects, is a subject of much debate.

more here.

Frances Stonor Saunders at the LRB:

Of course, I had seen, next to the Gentleman’s Relish, the box of finely dusted Turkish delight, the halva, the packets of rosti; I had been with him to his birthplace in Romania and seen the places of his childhood, not once but twice; together with Alexander, I had been in the ancient forests with him, had picked wild raspberries and cracked open hazelnuts with a stone. I had helped him fill the box of Christmas gifts for our cousins stuck behind the Iron Curtain: chocolate, vitamins, medicine, Marmite, jam, tinned sardines, winter gloves and hats, stockings. But these things had featured only in the margin of my map of my father. At least, until that day when my friend asked: ‘Where’s your father from?’ More than thirty years have passed, and still I hover in the same state of postponed understanding, like the delayed response after the turning of a ship’s wheel or the pulling of a bell rope. Where was he from? Why do I need to know? Will I feel better if I do?

more here.

Tia Olivia Serves Wallace Stevens a Cuban Egg

The ration books voided, there was little to eat,
so Tía Olivia ruffled four hens to serve Stevens
a fresh criollo egg. The singular image lay limp,
floating in a circle of miniature roses and vines
etched around the edges of the rough dish.
The saffron, inhuman soul staring at Stevens
who asks what yolk is this, so odd a yellow?

Tell me Señora, if you know, he petitions,
what exactly is the color of this temptation:
I can see a sun, but it is not the color of suns
nor of sunflowers, nor the yellows of Van Gogh,
it is neither corn nor school pencil, as it is,
so few things are yellow, this, even more precise.

He shakes some salt, eye to eye hypothesizing:
a carnival of hues under the gossamer membrane,
a liqueur of convoluted colors, quarter-part orange,
imbued shadows, watercolors running a song
down the spine of praying stems, but what, then,
of the color of the stems, what green for the leaves,
what color the flowers; what of order for our eyes
if I can not name this elusive yellow, Señora?

Intolerant, Tía Olivia bursts open Stevens’s yolk,
plunging into it with a sharp piece of Cuban toast:
It is yellow, she says, amarillo y nada más, bien?
The unleashed pigments begin to fill the plate,
overflow onto the embroidered place mats,
stream down the table and through the living room
setting all the rocking chairs in motion then
over the mill tracks cutting through cane fields,
a viscous mass downing palm trees and shacks.

In its frothy wake whole choirs of church ladies
clutch their rosary beads and sing out in Latin,
exhausted macheteros wade in the stream,
holding glinting machetes overhead with one arm;
cafeteras, ’57 Chevys, uniforms and empty bottles,
mangy dogs and fattened pigs saved from slaughter,
Soviet jeeps, Bohemia magazines, park benches,
all carried in the egg lava carving the molested valley
and emptying into the sea. Yellow, Stevens relents,
Yes. But then what the color of the sea, Señora?

by Richard Blanco
from City of a Hundred Fires
University of Pittsburg Press, 1998

Nikhat Sattar in Dawn:

In 2019, 62 worshippers performing Friday prayers were killed by a bomb blast in Nan­g­arhar. Back in 2002, a fire broke out at a girl’s school in Makkah. Fifteen young girls died and 50 injured, allegedly because they were beaten back to go inside: they had not cove­red their heads. In 1987, more than 400 unarm­ed pilgrims, mostly Iranians, were killed in Makkah during a protest. The list goes on. One fact stands out: most of the outpouring of anger, sympathy and concern came from non-Muslim organisations, people and countries. Muslims were, by and large, silent. Even as the world seems to have come closer, with a more formalised structure of human rights, it has regressed into increasing hatred and acts of violence against the ‘other’, whoever it might be. It took the Christians six centuries of religiously supported wars and torture against Muslims and Jews to decide that they could safely replace religion with science. They colonised, ridiculed Muslims, spread false rumours, destroyed traditions of Muslim scholarship and weakened Muslim societies through carefully orchestrated pro­p­a­ganda. Islamophobia has increased since 9/11 with Muslims being held in Guantanamo Bay prison and tortured. Very few Muslim governments stood up to help them.

Muslims did more than their share of bringing themselves down, spiritually, intellectually, economically and scientifically. From being pioneers of science, logic and rational thought, their contribution to world science literature is now meagre. Forty-six Muslim countries contribute 1.17pc to science literature as compared to 1.66pc by India and 1.48pc by Spain. Where their schools were centres of learning for all, regardless of religious or ethnic background, they are now sectarian, often teaching tunnel-vision versions of their faith. By and large, Muslims have turned away from progress; destroyed their own institutions, and refused to self-analyse.

The Sharia was a path towards divine guidance, lighting up minds, providing opportunities for knowledge seekers from all over the world, opening hearts to mercy, compassion, kindness, graciousness and all that is beautiful in God’s world. The Sharia, along with human thought, was the core of ethics. Instead, it is now often trivialised, used mostly for matters regarding women and sex segregation and enforcing marital subservience of wives. Islamic classical tradition assumed a condition of isma or inviolability of human life, based on the Quran and the Prophet’s (PBUH) sayings.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Javed Jabbar)

David Remnick in The New Yorker:

From Science Daily:

Melanie Rutkowski, PhD, of UVA’s Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology, found that disrupting the microbiome of mice caused hormone receptor-positive breast cancer to become more aggressive. Altering the microbiome, the collection of microorganisms that live in the gut and elsewhere, had dramatic effects in the body, priming the cancer to spread. “When we disrupted the microbiome’s equilibrium in mice by chronically treating them antibiotics, it resulted in inflammation systemically and within the mammary tissue,” she said. “In this inflamed environment, tumor cells were much more able to disseminate from the tissue into the blood and to the lungs, which is a major site for hormone receptor-positive breast cancer to metastasize.”

Most breast cancers — 65 percent or more — are hormone receptor positive. That means their growth is fueled by a hormone, either estrogen or progesterone. The good news is that these types of cancers are likely to respond well to hormone therapy. Predicting whether such cancers will spread beyond the breast to other parts of the body (a process called metastasis) is a major challenge within the field, and is primarily driven by clinical characteristics at the time of diagnosis. Early metastasis is affected by a variety of factors, Rutkowski explained. “One of them is having a high level of [immune] cells called macrophages present within the tissue,” she said. “There have also been studies that have demonstrated that increased amounts of the structural protein collagen in the tissue and tumor also lead to increased breast cancer metastasis.”

Having an unhealthy microbiome prior to breast cancer increased both, and the effect was powerful and sustained.

More here.

John McWhorter in the New York Times:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg grew up with a solid old-school Brooklyn accent. She displays no trace of it in recordings of her work as a young litigator, but today, one can hear shades of it in her speech on and off the court. Why?

Black English is often reviled as an indication of lower intelligence, and yet ever more, advertisers seek out voice-over artists with an identifiably “Black” sound. Why?

Things like this do not surprise linguists who specialize in the intersection of language and sociology. For example, they have found that people of the lower middle class, in settings where their speech is being evaluated, tend to speak more “correctly” than even upper-middle-class or wealthy people do. Justice Ginsburg’s suppression of Brooklyn vowels was a perfect example, as is the fact that having moved into a different class since, she subconsciously feels she has less to “prove.”

Meanwhile, the Black English issue can best be explained through an experiment carried out in Montreal in the 1960s at a time when English was considered much more prestigious than French.

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica:

There’s a pivotal scene in the 2012 film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey when Gandalf, Bilbo Baggins, and a company of dwarves are chased by orcs through a classic New Zealand landscape. For Northwestern University neuroscientist and engineer Malcolm MacIver, the scene is an excellent example of the kind of patchy landscape—dotted with trees, bushes, boxers, and rolling knolls—that may have shaped the evolution of higher intelligence in humans, compared to their aquatic ancestors. Specifically, it falls within a “Goldilocks zone”—not too sparse, and not too dense—that favors strategic thinking and planning ahead, leading to the development of “planning” circuitry in the human brain, according to MacIver’s most recent paper, published in Nature Communications.

This latest paper builds on earlier research. Back in 2017, MacIver and several colleagues published a paper advancing an unusual hypothesis: those ancient creatures who first crawled out of the water onto land may have done so because they figured out there was an “informational benefit” from seeing through air, as opposed to water. Eyes can see much farther in air, and that increased visual range could lead them to food sources near the shore. MacIver and his primary co-author, paleontologist Lars Schmitz of the Claremont Colleges, argued that this in turn drove the evolutionary selection of rudimentary limbs, enabling the first animals to move from the water onto land.

More here.

Bradley Campbell in Quillette:

When moral visions clash, it’s common for people to assume their opponents have bad motives rather than different perspectives. And it’s usually wrong. If you advocate some policy you believe will save lives, whether it’s a plan for fighting COVID-19, increasing health-care coverage, or reducing homicide, your opponents probably don’t oppose your plan because they want more people to die. They may think their own plan will save lives, or they may be concerned about other values entirely. You may very well have fundamental moral disagreements with them, but the thing you hate most about their position probably isn’t what’s driving them.

We see this in the current debates over the new social justice movement. The critics of social justice activists sometimes talk as if what’s driving the activists is a kind of oversensitivity, as if they’re the equivalent of small children having tantrums to get attention. In 2016, for example, an Iowa state legislator introduced the “Suck It up, Buttercup” bill, which would have fined universities offering counseling and “cry rooms” to students upset about the 2016 presidential election. And in 2018 then-US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a speech about threats to free speech on college campuses, warned that schools were creating a generation of “sanctimonious, sensitive, supercilious snowflakes.”

The social justice activists aren’t snowflakes, though; they’re not people who just haven’t learned to suck it up. Sessions and others may perceive them that way—that is, the sensitivity the activists often display may be what they object to—but surely the activists themselves and those inspired by them are driven by moral concerns, by a vision of how to improve the world. Failing to understand that leads the activists’ critics to underestimate them.

More here.

Lyn Hejinian at Cabinet:

Cyan (pronounced SIGH-ann) is the color that emanates from a calm sea not far offshore on a clear day as the blue of the sky is reflected in salt water awash over yellow sand. You can see it for yourself in postcards mailed from coastal resorts or, if you are at a resort, from a vantage point somewhere above the beach—from a cliff, say, or lacking cliffs, from atop a palm tree. Various shades of cyan form the background to the ad for Swarovski (whatever that is) on page 13 of the April 2005 issue of Gourmet magazine. To create a highly saturated cyan on your own, you might pour 1/4 cup of Arm & Hammer’s Powerfully Clean Naturally Fresh Clean Burst laundry detergent onto the whites in your next load of wash (presumably Arm & Hammer adds the pigment to its product in order to provoke association with what we imagine to be the pristine purity of tropical seas). Also, you might search for “cyan” at wikipedia.org, where a resplendent rectangle of the color is on display, along with a succinct definition: “Cyan is a pure spectral color, but the same hue can also be generated by mixing equal amounts of green and blue light. As such, cyan is the complement of red: cyan pigments absorb red light. Cyan is sometimes called blue-green or turquoise and often goes undistinguished from light blue.”

more here.

David Kordahl at The New Atlantis:

Two new books on quantum theory could not, at first glance, seem more different. The first, Something Deeply Hidden, is by Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, who writes, “As far as we currently know, quantum mechanics isn’t just an approximation of the truth; it is the truth.” The second, Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, is by Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, who insists that “the conceptual problems and raging disagreements that have bedeviled quantum mechanics since its inception are unsolved and unsolvable, for the simple reason that the theory is wrong.”

Given this contrast, one might expect Carroll and Smolin to emphasize very different things in their books. Yet the books mirror each other, down to chapters that present the same quantum demonstrations and the same quantum parables. Carroll and Smolin both agree on the facts of quantum theory, and both gesture toward the same historical signposts. Both consider themselves realists, in the tradition of Albert Einstein.

more here.

Steve Donoghue in The Christian Science Monitor:

Even though the year is only a little more than halfway gone, 2020 has understandably been filled with talk about the “solace” of reading. More so than in any previous year in living memory, readers have been diving into books in order to escape the harsh realities of the outside world. In her new book “Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels,” award-winning author Rachel Cohen writes of exactly this kind of solace-seeking. While dealing with her father’s death and the birth of her daughter, Cohen found herself in a readerly relationship with the novels of Jane Austen that was more fixed, almost more compulsory, than anything she’d previously imagined for herself. In the opening pages, she muses that “if you had told me that years were coming when I would hardly pick up another serious writer with any real concentration, that the doings of a few English families would come to define almost the entire territory of my reading imagination, and that I would reach a point of such familiarity that I would simply let Austen’s books fall open and read a sentence or two as people in other times and places might use an almanac to soothe and predict, I would have been appalled.”

Her readers will be more forgiving on that point. Many of them have likely experienced the same degree of beneficial concentration in times of stress or sorrow, whether it’s Austen or the Brontë sisters or Shakespeare. But they also won’t find anything appalling in these pages. Cohen has taken her fascination with – and personal dependence on – one great author and transmutes it into something any reader in the world will find downright marvelous.

More here.

Shawna Williams in The Scientist:

When Greg Poore was a freshman in college, he lost his grandmother to pancreatic cancer. “She . . . essentially had 33 days from diagnosis to death,” he recalls. “No one could explain why they hadn’t detected the cancer before.” Three years later, in 2016, as an MD/PhD student in Rob Knight’s lab at the University of California, San Diego, Poore began investigating microbial inhabitants of tumors—and eventually, whether he could find traces of those microbes in the blood that might be used to diagnose patients earlier.

Poore and his colleagues used machine learning to mine microbial genome and transcriptome information from a database of blood and tissue samples from more than 10,000 cancer patients as well as data the team collected on healthy controls. There were indeed distinct microbial mixes in the cancerous versus healthy tissue of individuals with cancer, the researchers found, and in the blood of healthy people compared with those with cancer. In addition, the machine learning models were able to distinguish cancers of various types—and for some cancers, different stages—using microbial DNA and RNA in tumors and DNA in the blood. The data were taken at a single point in time for each patient and don’t establish cause and effect, says Poore, but the microbial signatures could have diagnostic value.

More here.

The muses are ghosts, and sometimes
they come uninvited.― Stephen King

On Ghosts

Blame it on the quartz.
Call it coffin candle,

foolish fire.  A surgery
in Gettysburgh beckons:

Limbs stacked as ricks
at a window.

Call it the staring past.
Call it schism.

Burn the wedding dress.
Call it Chinese grievance.

In Poland, ignus faatua,
“traveller’s lights,” believed

to be spirits of dead
mapmakers.  Eat your cabbage

or else they’ll draw “here”
out of sight.
.

by Lea Graham
from This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch
Apt. 9 Press, 2016; also published in Ditchpoetry.com.