From The Telegraph:

Human Chain is stranger – and much greater – than a cursory glance would suggest. Though here, as expected, are exquisitely turned poems about rural events and childhood incidents, the collection also revisits (and sometimes redirects) earlier work, and there is a chilly, other-worldly aura hanging over the whole enterprise. “Chanson d’Aventure” describes the mild stroke Heaney suffered in 2006, and how he and his wife were “careered at speed” in an ambulance through “Dungloe, / Glendoan, our gaze ecstatic and bisected / By a hooked-up drip-feed to the cannula.” The book, as Eliot said of Webster, is much possessed by death.

The opening poem, “Had I not been awake”, replays the stroke in allegory, setting a new unfamiliar tenor of uncertainty and precariousness. A sudden wind whips sycamore leaves up onto the roof in a moment that “came and went so unexpectedly / And almost it seemed dangerously, / Returning like an animal to the house” resulting in “the whole of me a-patter”. Dominant motifs of Heaney’s work such as balance, steadiness and endurance are infused with a new awareness of instability, even in retrospect. And there is gratitude for this newly earned knowledge. In “A Herbal”, after Guillevic, about the plants that thrive in graveyards, Heaney writes: “The wind // Has me well rehearsed / In the ways of the world. // Unstable is good.” A new lexicon of tremor has entered the poems; as a boy he is “a-fluster” when an eel takes his fishing bait; his grandfather’s voice is “a-waver”; when the funeral bell tolls, the grass is “all a-tremble”; a riverbank field is “twilit and a-hover / With midge-drifts”; the words “giddiness”, “giddy” and “lightheadedness” occur and sometimes reoccur.

The poems are preoccupied with connection and separation.

Morehere.

One Season

That was the summer my best friend
called me a faggot on the telephone,
hung up, and vanished from the earth,

a normal occurance in this country
where we change our lives
with the swiftness of hysterical finality

of dividing cells. That month
the rain refused to fall,
and fire engines streaked back and forth crosstown

towards smoke-filled residential zones
where people stood around outside, drank beer
and watched their neighbors houses burn.

Read more »

Theodore Dalrymple in The City Journal:

It is an unenviable fate for an author to be remembered, if at all, for a devastating review of his principal work by a much greater writer; but such was the fate that befell Soame Jenyns at the pen of Doctor Johnson. The book that occasioned Johnson’s scorn was A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, which Jenyns first published anonymously in 1756. Johnson’s review brings to mind Truman Capote’s famous remark about Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical novel, On the Road: that it was not writing, it was typing. For Johnson said of Jenyns: “When this [author] finds himself prompted to another performance, let him consider, whether he is about to disburden his mind, or employ his fingers; and, if I might venture to offer him a subject, I should wish, that he would solve this question: Why he, that has nothing to write, should desire to be a writer?”

In this case, however, the criticism was rather unfair; and Jenyns, by all accounts an amiable man, was mortified and harbored a deep but concealed resentment against Johnson for the rest of his life. After Johnson died, Jenyns published some vengefully scurrilous verses about the great man:

Here lies poor Johnson. Reader, have a care,
Tread lightly, lest you rouse a sleeping bear;
Religious, moral, generous, and humane
He was—but self-sufficient, rude, and vain;
Ill-bred and over-bearing in dispute,
A scholar and a Christian—yet a brute.

Morehere.

Hello,

The voting round of our philosophy prize (details here) is over. A total of 497 votes were cast for the 36 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

Carla Goller has designed a “trophy” logo that our top twenty vote-getters may choose to display on their own sites. So here they are, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. Playtonic Dialogues: Musicians Debate Methods Of Political Dissent
2. Guardian Science Blog: Is quantum mechanics messing with your memory?
3. Experimental Philosophy: Further Experimental Work on the Bank Cases
4. P.A.P.-Blog: Why and How Do We Separate State and Church? And What Are the Consequences for Religious Liberty?
5. Minds and Brains: The Myth of Sensory Immediacy – Why Berkeley Was Wrong
6. Philotropes: Do folks think that consciousness matters for moral responsibility?
7. Underverse: We Just Live In It
8. Experimental Philosophy: Is the Armchair Sexist?
9. Brian Leiter's Nietzsche Blog: Katsafanas on “Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology”
10. PEA Soup: Am I a Consequentialist?
11. Specter of Reason: Ryle On Rules And Creativity
12. Justin Eric Halldor Smith: More on Non-Western Philosophy (the Very Idea)
13. The View from Hell: The Patriarchy, the Gynocracy, and Other Comforting Myths of Struggle
14. 3 Quarks Daily: Raising Neanderthals: Metaphysics at the Limits of Science
15. TTahko: Counterfactuals and Modal Epistemology
16. Vis Viva: On Handwaving
17. Flickers of Freedom: Can There be Partial (as opposed to impartial) Desert?
18. Tomkow: The Retributive Theory of Property
19. Flickers of Freedom: Does Consciousness Matter?
20. The Philosophy of Poetry: The Leap

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Akeel Bilgrami on September 11. We will also post the list of finalists here on that date.

Good luck!

Abbas

The past decade has been a vivid tutorial in the truth of Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, “the medium is the message”. The rise of 24/7 TV and the concomitant decline of traditional network news has fragmented the old collective audience. Today disparate groups receive the same facts, filtered through a different angle of the political prism. Web commentary has split these primary colours into a thousand graded hues. The residual virtue of mainstream critics is that they still discriminate on behalf of whole communities; they bind readers together, not slice them into ever smaller coteries. Also, in a world characterised by a hyper-abundance of media, where bandwidths are filled with a ceaseless flow of chatter and governments drown real information in large-scale data dumps, it is the sceptical, nimble-minded, old-fashioned literary critic, trained to thresh narrative grain from word chaff, who is best situated to gather something like truth from the digital realm.

more from Georgie Williamson at the ALR here.

There is nothing odd about Byrne’s growing inclination toward Christian mysticism. What is odd is that the doctrine she propounds has no room for it, just as “The Secret” had no room for the story of Hicks-as-Abraham. Byrne must be one of the most influential religious writers in the world, and yet she seems to consider her own evolving religious beliefs to be unmentionable. The creed promulgated by “The Secret” and “The Power” is finally noteworthy not for its audacity—many religions promise more—but for its modesty, its thinness. In distilling a spiritual message that claims to be compatible with all religious traditions, Byrne has had to bracket all possible points of disagreement, discarding anything that might seem, as Winfrey put it, “weird.” The result is a pair of religious books curiously devoid of ancient lore and esoteric beliefs, history and holiness—curiously devoid of religion itself. Byrne’s hope is that this minimalist creed will be enough for her readers. But surely some of them will notice that it doesn’t seem to be enough for her.

more from Kelefa Sanneh at The New Yorker here.

Once upon a time there were two brothers who, at the turn of the twentieth century, settled in the small town of Berkhamsted, at the end of the commuter line in Hertfordshire. They each had six children and it is because of one of these children that the above sentence must immediately evoke in most readers over a certain age a sense of ungraspable melancholy, of secret childhood pleasures on a common, of bored and blighted lives redeemed or partially redeemed by a secret adherence to an ideology, Catholic or Communist. Few writers have made more and better art out of their guilt and childhood unhappiness than Graham Greene, or conveyed more powerfully, in stories, novels and memoirs, the feel of the place where he grew up. Graham’s father was a conventional public-school headmaster, his younger brother a coffee merchant newly returned from Brazil with his German wife and large brood.

more from Gabriel Josipovici at the TLS here.

From the website of the Poetry Society of America:

I think of something Naomi Shihab Nye wrote, in 1999, in her response to the question “What's American About American Poetry?” Nye said, “When I was working overseas on various occasions, poets in other countries would remark that we American poets have a luxury they do not have: we are free to write about tiny “insignificances” any time we want to…We write about personal lives, minor idiosyncrasies, familial details, tomatoes—not feeling burdened to explore larger collective issues all the time, which is something writers elsewhere often consider part of their endless responsibility.”

There is a way in which all American life, American writing and poetry included, participates in the historical (and geographical!) amnesia inherent in the concept of “America.” What is the responsibility of the writer? When you look one place, there is another place you are not looking. We will have to think for a long time to figure out where we are and who are and what we are doing in this place, thought to be ours from “sea to shining sea,” ours by some form of “manifest destiny,” some form of “American exceptionalism.”

More here.

Harriet Hall in Science-Based Medicine:

From January through June of 2010 I wrote a column entitled “The Health Inspector” in O, The Oprah Magazine. Now, apparently, I have been fired; although they have not had the common courtesy to tell me so. The whole thing has been a bizarre, frustrating experience.

It started last fall, when I got an e-mail from Tyler Graham. He introduced himself as the new health editor for O, The Oprah Magazine, saying he had only been on the job for 2 weeks. He had read my work in Skeptic magazine and wanted me to write a column for O. I thought long and hard before accepting. I told Mr. Graham my opinion of Oprah and of her chosen medical expert Dr. Oz and why I was hesitant to associate my name with theirs, and he seemed to understand. Oprah has been widely criticized recently, even in the pages of Newsweek, for endorsing pseudoscientific and non-scientific health advice on her TV show. As for Dr. Oz, while he mostly gives good medical advice, he has appalling lapses into non-science-based practices like Reiki, and he has even invited energy healers into his OR to assist in open-heart surgery cases by waving their hands over the patients. I foolishly assumed Mr.Graham was trying to improve Oprah’s image by introducing more science and skepticism to the magazine.

More here.

George Monbiot in The Guardian:

This will not be an easy column to write. I am about to put down 1,200 words in support of a book that starts by attacking me and often returns to this sport. But it has persuaded me that I was wrong. More to the point, it has opened my eyes to some fascinating complexities in what seemed to be a black and white case.

In the Guardian in 2002 I discussed the sharp rise in the number of the world's livestock, and the connection between their consumption of grain and human malnutrition. After reviewing the figures, I concluded that veganism “is the only ethical response to what is arguably the world's most urgent social justice issue”. I still believe that the diversion of ever wider tracts of arable land from feeding people to feeding livestock is iniquitous and grotesque. So does the book I'm about to discuss. I no longer believe that the only ethical response is to stop eating meat.

In Meat: A Benign Extravagance, Simon Fairlie pays handsome tribute to vegans for opening up the debate. He then subjects their case to the first treatment I've read that is both objective and forensic. His book is an abattoir for misleading claims and dodgy figures, on both sides of the argument.

There's no doubt that the livestock system has gone horribly wrong.

More here. [Thanks to Pablo Policzer.]

David Sloan Wilson in Evolution For Everyone:

The evolutionary community is as active as an alarmed beehive over the critique of inclusive fitness theory recently published in the journal Nature by Martin Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, and E.O. Wilson. I do not agree with them in every respect but I'm glad that they have aroused the evolutionary community from its stupor. The general public and majority of evolutionary biologists have a pre-1975 understanding that hasn't even kept pace with modern inclusive fitness theory, not to speak of the debates that will be taking place among the cognoscenti. This is an opportunity for everyone to take stock of the core issues at stake.

It is important to realize that numerous issues are at stake that must be examined one by one. It doesn't help that Richard Dawkins continues to issue boneheaded statements about group selection, as I recount in my previous post. Inclusive fitness theorists should be joining me in pointing out the errors of these statements, just as I intend to join them in pointing out some errors in the Nowak et al. critique.

In this post I want to focus on a statement that Nowak et al. make in the caption to figure 3 that “inclusive fitness theory…is an alternative accounting method, but one that works only in a very limited domain.”

What does it mean for a theory to function as an accounting method?

More here.

Lust, violence, feuds, corruption, intrigue and romance – all the ingredients of any respectable blockbuster jostle for attention in a new film portraying the rags-to-riches story of a destitute young woman who rises to the very highest echelons of power and glory. But this heroine is no ordinary tycoon or gold-digger. She’s the Pope. Die Päpstin tells the story of a young woman from a poor clerical family who disguises herself as a man, pursues her studies in a monastery and ends up in Rome where she’s finally elected Pope. Only when she gives birth in the street while in a procession in full papal regalia is her true identity revealed. So far, the film has only been shown in Germany, where it was made, and in Italy where this summer it reached the top ten, just behind Robin Hood and Sex and the City 2.

more from Sally Feldman at Eurozine here.

Here are two well-known descriptions of what a poem is, and does, one by Wordsworth, one by Stevens: type a: Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. type b: The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully. These two assertions, though not opposed, place distinctly different emphases on the function of poetry. The first description, Wordsworth’s, suggests that poetry is a means of gaining perspective on primary experience: powerful emotions can be gathered, then dynamically relived, translated, and digested in the controlled laboratory of the poem—by proxy, such a poem also constructs perspective for the reader. In contrast, Stevens’s description implies that the poem and the reader engage in a sort of muscular struggle with each other—that struggle is how they become intimate, how they really “know” each other. Stevens suggests that a good poem, as part of its process, resists, twists, and enmeshes the reader (and perhaps the poet as well), an engagement in which perspective is challenged, and by no means guaranteed.

more from Tony Hoagland at Poetry here.

Never trust a Laura Newman vertical. It might be the edge of a house, the tilt of a glass plane, or a door handle; it might indicate a painting within a painting, or a skeletal tree trunk that grew in from somewhere, and, oh, by the way, it also doubles as the cord of a wrecking ball and a stray power line. Newman’s verticals and orthogonals function like unreliable narrators: they fool the eye and throw basic spatial frameworks into question. In her work, closeness looks far away, flat planes might be cut-outs, transparent windows open out to nothingness, clouds act as people, wisps of breeze arise from nowhere, and whole pictures are tilted off-kilter by triangular shims lurking in eccentric corners. Technically speaking, the parallax view is the apparent displacement or difference in the position of an object when it is viewed along the two different lines of sight. Newman pictures the world as a correspondingly parallax place. Newman never settles for a monocular kind of vision or a singular kind of meaning. If you scan your eye down any of her sightlines, you will find recurrent jump cuts and double entendres all along the way.

more from Amy Sillman at artcritical here.

From Salon:

In her new book, “Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference,” Cordelia Fine, a research associate and the author of “A Mind of Its Own” (also about brain science), discovers that, far from supporting the existence of vastly different male and female brains, much of the research on the topic is not only deeply flawed, but dangerously misleading. Women aren't worse at math (as Fine proves in the book, bad neurological research is one of the reasons women are still struggling to catch up in the field), and girls' preference for girlish toys probably has more to do with social expectations than what's in their skulls. Fine's book is a remarkably researched and dense work that, even while tackling highly complex subject manner, retains a light, breezy touch.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Psychologists have identified the key male dance movements that most arouse female interest — and all are to do with central body motions which send out primal signals of health, vigour and strength. A team led by Nick Neave of Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, northeastern England, filmed 19 men aged 18-35 in a lab as they danced to a standard disco beat. The men, none of whom was a professional dancer, wore reflective markers that studded their body and were filmed by a battery of 12 3D cameras. The footage was used to create a dancing avatar, or animated figure, that was faceless and genderless. Thirty-seven young heterosexual women were then shown 15-second clips of the avatars and were asked to judge which dance movements were the most attractive. Eight “movement variables” emerged which distinguished the trolls from the Travoltas. “Good” dancers did wider and bigger movements of the head, neck and torso, and did faster bending and twisting movements of their right knee (greater movements of the right knee rather than the left were to be expected, as 80 percent of the dancers favoured their right leg). In contrast, “bad” dancers tended to be stiff and plod — and throwing their arms around was no substitute for fast, variable movement of the central body region.

“Men all over the world will be interested to know what moves they can throw to attract women,” said Neave. “We now know which area of the body females are looking at when they are making a judgement about male dance attractiveness. If a man knows what the key moves are, he can get some training and improve his chances of attracting a female through his dance style.”

More here.

Eighty-Five

As I grow older, I feel younger
more eager, more full of love.
More alive the closer I move to death.
More whole the closer I move into blight.
The sweeter life grows as fervent
clamors of youth pass.
Passions of old age take deeper
flavor, ripened, more nuanced.
More easily words and affections
flow when the self-conscious gaucherie
of youth has passed.

Wholeness suddenly is mine;
ragged edges of fear hemmed.

Mirrors say Look. Do not
be afraid. You are what you are.

by Betty Lockwood
from A Matriach's Song
Peter Randall Publisher, 2001

Robert Fisk in The Independent:

It is a tragedy, a horror, a crime against humanity. The details of the murders – of the women beheaded, burned to death, stoned to death, stabbed, electrocuted, strangled and buried alive for the “honour” of their families – are as barbaric as they are shameful. Many women's groups in the Middle East and South-west Asia suspect the victims are at least four times the United Nations' latest world figure of around 5,000 deaths a year. Most of the victims are young, many are teenagers, slaughtered under a vile tradition that goes back hundreds of years but which now spans half the globe.

A 10-month investigation by The Independent in Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt, Gaza and the West Bank has unearthed terrifying details of murder most foul. Men are also killed for “honour” and, despite its identification by journalists as a largely Muslim practice, Christian and Hindu communities have stooped to the same crimes. Indeed, the “honour” (or ird) of families, communities and tribes transcends religion and human mercy. But voluntary women's groups, human rights organisations, Amnesty International and news archives suggest that the slaughter of the innocent for “dishonouring” their families is increasing by the year.

Iraqi Kurds, Palestinians in Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey appear to be the worst offenders but media freedoms in these countries may over-compensate for the secrecy which surrounds “honour” killings in Egypt – which untruthfully claims there are none – and other Middle East nations in the Gulf and the Levant. But honour crimes long ago spread to Britain, Belgium, Russia and Canada and many other nations. Security authorities and courts across much of the Middle East have connived in reducing or abrogating prison sentences for the family murder of women, often classifying them as suicides to prevent prosecutions.

It is difficult to remain unemotional at the vast and detailed catalogue of these crimes. How should one react to a man – this has happened in both Jordan and Egypt – who rapes his own daughter and then, when she becomes pregnant, kills her to save the “honour” of his family? Or the Turkish father and grandfather of a 16-year-old girl, Medine Mehmi, in the province of Adiyaman, who was buried alive beneath a chicken coop in February for “befriending boys”? Her body was found 40 days later, in a sitting position and with her hands tied.