Karl Kirchwey in the New York Times Book Review:

More than almost any other contemporary poet, Derek Walcott might seem to be fulfilling T. S. Eliot’s program for poetry. He has distinguished himself in all of what Eliot described as the “three voices of poetry”: the lyric, the narrative or epic, and the dramatic. Since at least his 1984 book “Midsummer,” Walcott has been publishing what might be described as concatenated lyrics, individual poems numbered consecutively and intended to form a conceptual whole. His long 1990 poem “Omeros” would be called canonical were that word not so problematic these days. And, like Eliot, Walcott is also a playwright. Through his long connection with the Trinidad Theater Workshop, he has amassed an impressive body of dramatic works, both in prose and in that tricky form called verse drama.

But the kinship with Eliot, for Walcott, extends beyond genre. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot opined that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” Walcott has deliberately avoided the confessional path pioneered by his early friend and supporter Robert Lowell, choosing instead a post-Romantic voice, closely allied with landscape, in which the particulars of a life are incidental to a larger poetic vision, one in which the self is not the overt subject.

All the more striking, then, is Walcott’s new book, “White Egrets” — for it is both visionary, in the best sense of that word, and intensely personal, even autobiographical. It is an old man’s book, craving one more day of light and warmth; and it is a book of stoic reckoning.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The Nano, made by Indian car manufacturer Tata, is billed as “the people's car.” We've seen this sort of thing before. The first time was in Europe — Germany to be precise. The car was the Volkswagen, which means, quite literally, “The People's Car.” It was Hitler's idea, more or less. He wanted to build a car for the common man. “A car for the people, an affordable Volkswagen, would bring great joy to the masses and the problems of building such a car must be faced with courage,” he proclaimed at the 1934 Berlin Auto Show. It would be of simple design and able to carry two adults and three children at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour. Hitler asked Dr. Ferdinand Porsche to take up the job and he did. Hitler and Porsche started up a little company called Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH (Society for the Preparation of the German People's Car Co. Ltd.) Thus, Volkswagen was born, and you can still buy one today, though it no longer functions as a cheap and basic car affordable to all.

The VW was the result of mass production techniques from the age of the masses, the early 20th century. Really, it isn't so surprising that the Third Reich would be involved in the development of such a car. The whole idea of the VW was that centralized modes of production could provide the general population with cheap goods. And this was essentially the relationship between industry, the state, and the populace imagined by National Socialism. The people provide their “people-like goodness,” and the state provides for those people, who then provide more people for the state, which then supports the people in being the pure and good people that they are, and so on for 3,000 years at least. Nobody was more committed to the idea of “the people,” properly defined, than the Nazis. In the modern mass society of the 1930s as the Nazi state envisioned it, one of the things “the people” needed to do was to get around (attending, no doubt, mass rallies where they would better learn how to be “the people”). They needed to do so relatively cheaply.

The problem, from a design perspective, was how to make a car for next to nothing.

More here.

From Salon:

Is there such a thing as wisdom — a thing, stuff, an abstract entity — or are there only wise individuals and wise actions and attitudes, these latter not exclusively the possession of the individuals in question given that even fools can sometimes be wise?

This question is a significant one, because it bears on the enterprise of “wisdom studies,” a parallel endeavour to the “happiness studies” now big in the neuropsychologically informed social sciences. (And there too the question has to be: Is there such a thing as happiness, or only happy individuals and happy times and experiences, the latter not the exclusive property of the individuals in question, given that even the gloomiest of us can occasionally be happy?) If you aim to study wisdom, or happiness, presumably in the hope of finding out how we can all be wiser and happier, you had better be clear about the object of study; and, as Stephen S. Hall's “Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience” shows, that is hard to do.

More here.

From Scientific American:

An asteroid circling the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter has for the first time been shown to harbor water ice and organic compounds. Those traits had been associated with comets, which spring from colder, more distant reservoirs in the outer solar system, but not their asteroidal cousins. The finding supports the notion that asteroids could have provided early Earth with water for its oceans as well as some of the prebiotic compounds that allowed life to develop.

Two teams of researchers report complementary observations of the 200-kilometer-wide asteroid, known as 24 Themis, in the April 29 issue of Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Both analyses are based on spectroscopic observations from the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which show absorption features that indicate the presence of water and unidentified organic compounds. The ice appears to coat the entire asteroid as a thin layer of frost. The evidence for water on 24 Themis had been presented at conferences by the two groups in 2008 and 2009 but is only now appearing in a peer-reviewed journal.

More here.

Sean Axmaker over at his blog:

In an age where Holocaust dramas and fictional recreations of the concentration camp experience are perhaps too plentiful—how could a mere movie come close to communicating the inhumanity of such an event, even in microcosm?—Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1959 Kapò (Criterion: Essential Art House) is something of a revelation. It’s not the earliest concentration camp drama, though they were rare in the era (Alain Resnais’ discreet, poetic and haunting nonfiction meditation Night and Fog was only a few years earlier), but it is the earliest I’ve seen. Was the history still a fresh wound that needed time to, if not heal, at least scar over before gingerly exploring the tender area? Or was the horror just too great to even comprehend?

Gillo Pontecorvo, an Italian Jew with a commitment to tackling politically volatile issues head on, took the challenge with this harrowing drama of a teenage Parisian Jew (American actress Susan Strasberg) who is literally swept up off the streets and sent to Auschwitz within minutes of the opening. Pontecorvo doesn’t give us time to settle into the situation and it’s only as when we see SS uniforms on the street that we notice the yellow star on her coat. Edith is just a kid, a fourteen-year-old girl who hasn’t the self-preservation to run when she watches her parents herded into a truck outside her building. Even when separated in the camp, all she can think to do is look for her parents and look for a way out, a futile gesture that ultimately save her life. While the rest of the youngsters wait patiently, unaware that they are marked for the gas chambers, she sees the reality of the camp where prisoners are stacked in bunks and the bodies of the dead are stacked like cordwood everywhere else. She’s ushered out of the cold by a mercenary survivor (an uncharacteristically generous gesture on her part, but perhaps there’s a jab of maternal protectiveness in her) and into the office of the camp doctor, who takes her coat (with the Star of David brand of death) and gives her the identity of recently deceased thief. “You’re lucky,” he says. “If no one had died tonight, I wouldn’t be able to help you.” That’s what counts for luck here.

Stephen Hawking suggests that if aliens do exist there are good reasons to avoid contact. “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” Dan Drezner considers the question:

Hmmm… this is undeniably true, but dare I say that Hawking is being a bit simplistic? Oh, hell, who am I kidding, I'm a blogger. Of course I'll say that Hawking is being simplistic.

Critics might accuse me of being soft in the Theoretical War Against Aliens, embracing the mushy-headed liberalism of Contact over the hard-headed realpolitik of, say, Independence Day. And the risk-averse approach suggested by Hawking is certainly a viable policy option. But let's dig a bit deeper and consider four five thought-provoking questions from an interplanetary security perspective.

1) In space, does anybody understand the security dilemma? In international relations, there is at least full information about who the other actors are and where they are located. Clearly, we lack this kind of information about the known universe.

What Hawking is suggesting, however, is that efforts to collect such information would in and of themselves be dangerous, because they would announce our presence to others. He might be right. But shoiuldn't that risk be weighed against the cost of possessing a less robust early warning system? Isn't it in Earth's interests to enhance its intelligence-gathering activities?

2) Carried to its logical extreme, isn't Hawking making an argument for rapidly exhausting our natural resources? If Hawking is correct, then the sooner we run out of whatever might be valuable to aliens, the less interest we are to them. Of course, this does beg the question of which resources aliens would consider to be valuable. If aliens crave either sea water or bulls**t, then the human race as we know it is seriously screwed.

Stephen Walt on the issue here.

The posthuman worldview goes a step beyond demoting human begins in the hierarchy of value. It promotes other species, proposing that animals are more rational than we knew. We are forced to ask: If rationality is not our Imago Dei, what is? Will you say next that we don’t have souls? Well, unfortunately, yes. Not only does Wolfe say we need to move beyond anthropocentrism (thinking that humans are the center of the universe) and speciesism (prejudice based on our species – differences from “nonhuman animals”); his entire theory is anti-ontological, and also assumes we all gave up metaphysics a long time ago. It is thoroughly materialistic, the heir to a long line of thought that traces itself back through cybernetics and systems theory to Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, then to Darwin, and thence to the most anti-religious minds of the Enlightenment. Although it resists reduction and terse definition, one major premise of Wolfe’s book is that the nature of thought must change (xvi): human beings are, in his construction, thinking themselves out of existence. One possible Christian reaction to posthumanism, then, might be vigorous and total rejection. We are certainly not about to think ourselves out of existence, nor out of our Lord’s care and regard. Nor are we about to share our place in the plan of salvation with spotted newts and thorny hedgehogs.

more from Sørina Higgins at Curator Magazine here.

In November, 1969, a group of radical young Dutch musicians ran amok at the Concertgebouw, the fabled Amsterdam concert hall. At the start of a performance by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the troublemakers, who included the composers Louis Andriessen and Reinbert de Leeuw, began making noise with nutcrackers, rattles, bicycle horns, and other devices. They also distributed leaflets denouncing the orchestra as a “status symbol of the ruling élite.” The Netherlands being both a tradition-minded and a tolerant land, the Nutcracker Action, as it was called, elicited an ambivalent response: the provocateurs were summarily ejected from the hall, but their ideas prompted much serious discussion. Forty years on, the Nutcrackers have become eminences: Andriessen is the most influential of Dutch composers, and de Leeuw, who has focussed on conducting, has held posts from Tanglewood to Sydney. Yet they haven’t quite sold out. Although Andriessen occupies the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall—the kind of big-money post that his younger self might have mocked—Carnegie’s recent survey of Andriessen’s work and that of his colleagues and protégés, de Leeuw among them, has revealed an undiminished capacity for making mischief. The composer still resists Romantic trappings, favoring what he has called a “terrifying twenty-first-century orchestra” of electric guitar, keyboards and Hammond organ, saxophones, bongos, and other non-Wagnerian instruments. He likes amplified, pop-style voices better than pure-toned, vibrato-heavy ones. His pantheon of idols has Bach and Stravinsky at the center, but also makes room for Count Basie, Charlie Parker, and the Motown greats.

more from Alex Ross at The New Yorker here.

Train 2000

You are the train that leaves at zero hour
of the new year.
Again the same compartments, illuminated,
like smoke in the vast night.

The same passengers —masks on their faces,
loved, dear ones.
And vigorously clasped in the hand,
traveling glasses.

You are the train that will pour
burning wine on the skin,
so that it will blaze
madly.

So that among pillows and shelves,
slander and deception,
intrusive flocks of night romances
will come flying.

…You are the train, the murderer and the target,
the weakness of time;
the two thousandth railway abhorrence
of an old God.

But even in the pre-cancer fog,
in the foam of a stroke—
the soul, as if it was a candle on the table,
stands in a beam of light.

From The Guardian:

The freeing of women from Taliban rule became a belated war aim for US‑led troops in Afghanistan; this, despite western bolstering of the Taliban's precursors, the mujahideen, in their resistance to Soviet occupation during the cold war. The latest novel by writer and filmmaker Atiq Rahimi imagines what such liberation might entail, for both women and men. It also hints at how relations between the sexes in his country of birth have been deformed, not just by residual tradition, but by the political interventions of recent history. Women were off-stage in Earth and Ashes, Rahimi's powerful debut novella set after the Soviet invasion of 1979, which traced an almost mythic cycle of vengeance among generations of men. It was written in Dari (a form of Persian) in 1999, years after the author had fled the Soviet occupation to asylum in France. His film version won a prize at Cannes in 2004. The Patience Stone, awarded the prix Goncourt in 2008, is his first novel written in French. Like his previous novel, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, it adopts the viewpoint of women, for whom war can bring both suffering and a curious freedom.

Set “somewhere in Afghanistan or elsewhere” in the near-present, the action is confined to a room where a woman tends her comatose husband, shot weeks before in a trivial brawl over honour. War intrudes sporadically, with black-turbaned fighters and the acrid smoke of explosions, as she hides her patient from patrols and looters. Whereas Earth and Ashes revealed a clash between Soviet-trained workers and US-backed mujahideen, here the conflict has descended into meaningless fratricide, the woman's urban neighbourhood marked out as the next frontline between squabbling factions. As she tells her husband, his father “was proud of you when you were fighting for freedom . . . It was after freedom came that he started to hate you – you, and also your brothers, now that you were all fighting for nothing but power.” Though the couple have been married for 10 years – the first three while he was away fighting – only his enforced silence frees her to speak. “Your breath hangs on the telling of my secrets,” she says, savouring a reversal of power. “I can talk to you about anything, without being interrupted, or blamed!” The supine object of her dramatic monologue becomes her sang-e sabur, the patience stone of Persian lore to which “you confess everything in your heart, everything you don't dare tell anyone”. The magic stone “listens, absorbing all your words, all your secrets, until one fine day it explodes . . . And on that day you are set free from all your pain, all your suffering.”

Her unburdening grows into an outspoken riff on all that is wrong between the sexes, and the codes or prejudices that bar true intimacy. She has never understood “why, for you men, pride is so much linked to blood”, or the myriad hypocrisies of virginity and virility, virtue and honour, pure and impure blood. Singled out for scorn is the new-found religious zealotry, commanded by mullahs she considers cowardly and sanctimonious. The husband she now tends was wont to order her to cover up by shouting, “hide your meat”.

More here.

From Science:

Approximately 50 million years ago, some Amazonian ant species discovered that raising fungi could provide a more stable food source than just foraging on the rainforest floor. Thus, they became farmers. Now, more than 200 species of New World ants cultivate crops, fastidiously fertilizing, cleaning, and weeding delicate white fungal filaments in their underground lairs. And, like human farmers who exchanged ancient emmer wheat for modern varieties, these ants have updated the crops they grow over time, according to new research.

In an attempt to reconstruct the ant's and fungi’s evolutionary history, evolutionary biologist Alexander Mikheyev of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan and colleagues looked at molecular clocks—accumulations of mutations in short stretches of DNA that reveal when a species diverged from its ancestors—for both organisms. The team found that the fungi were evolving at vastly different times than the ants. For instance, leaf-cutter ants diverged from their ancestors 12 million years ago, but the fungus that they cultivate arose only 2 million to 3 million years ago. Rather than evolving in step, the ants must have domesticated a new fungal strain, which spread through the ants’ range and eliminated any trace of the previous cultivar, the researchers report in the June issue of The American Naturalist

More here.

Noam Chomsky in TomDispatch.com:

The fact that the Israel-Palestine conflict grinds on without resolution might appear to be rather strange. For many of the world's conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement. In this case, it is not only possible, but there is near universal agreement on its basic contours: a two-state settlement along the internationally recognized (pre-June 1967) borders — with “minor and mutual modifications,” to adopt official U.S. terminology before Washington departed from the international community in the mid-1970s.

The basic principles have been accepted by virtually the entire world, including the Arab states (who go on to call for full normalization of relations), the Organization of Islamic States (including Iran), and relevant non-state actors (including Hamas). A settlement along these lines was first proposed at the U.N. Security Council in January 1976 by the major Arab states. Israel refused to attend the session. The U.S. vetoed the resolution, and did so again in 1980. The record at the General Assembly since is similar.

There was one important and revealing break in U.S.-Israeli rejectionism. After the failed Camp David agreements in 2000, President Clinton recognized that the terms he and Israel had proposed were unacceptable to any Palestinians. That December, he proposed his “parameters”: imprecise, but more forthcoming. He then stated that both sides had accepted the parameters, while expressing reservations.

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met in Taba, Egypt, in January 2001 to resolve the differences and were making considerable progress. In their final press conference, they reported that, with a little more time, they could probably have reached full agreement. Israel called off the negotiations prematurely, however, and official progress then terminated, though informal discussions at a high level continued leading to the Geneva Accord, rejected by Israel and ignored by the U.S.

A good deal has happened since, but a settlement along those lines is still not out of reach — if, of course, Washington is once again willing to accept it. Unfortunately, there is little sign of that.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his eponymous blog:

For a classic example of misplaced journalistic balance, read this New York Times article on the immigration 'debate' in Arizona. See how level-headed and concerned the supporters of the bill are! They don't hate Mexicans, see, it's just that they don't want them to be there illegally.

The problem with this is that the American West was only able to appear as Anglo territory, for a spell, as a result of a relatively recent (late 19th century) and concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing. It is astounding to me that people have to be reminded of the historical fact that in order for the American West to become white, other people had to be displaced. To the extent that Americans recognize this at all, they tend to remember the displacement as targeting Native Americans, in contrast with 'Hispanics'. But what this distinction misses is that the population of Mexico is somewhere between 60 and 80% Mestizo, and that for them the line drawn by the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 reflects no natural or deep-seated historical boundary.

Consider this map of the pre-contact distribution of the Uto-Aztecan languages: the colored parts on the US side correspond roughly to that region of the US with a significant Latino population today.

More here.

Charles Simic in the New York Review of Books:

It never crossed my mind that I would become the poet laureate of the United States. The day I received the call from the Library of Congress, I was carrying a bag of groceries from the car to the house when the phone rang. They didn’t beat around the bush, but told me straight out that this was an honor and not a job they were offering to me. Of course, I was stunned, and without letting the groceries out of my hand, told them that I needed to think about it for a while and that I would call them back tomorrow. My first thought was, who needs this?

I’d heard about the endless reading tours of previous laureates, the elaborate projects they had devised and administered to make poetry more popular in United States, and none of it appealed to me very much. There’s a good reason why I have lived in a small village in New Hampshire for the last thirty-seven years. I like to hear roosters crow in the morning and dogs bark at night. “No way,” I told my wife. I was going to call them back and politely decline. But to my surprise, speaking to my children, I changed my mind. My son and daughter told me, separately, that if I refused this great honor I would come to regret my decision some day. I knew right away that they were right. I thought some more about it, but I kept going back to what they said. So, I accepted.

More here.

Return with me now to the lusty days of yore, when engagé public intellectuals battled it out over Trotskyism, anarcho-syndicalism, and just who betrayed whom in the bloody streets of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War—and later in the savage pages of The Partisan Review, where those battles were refought. Sometimes the intense seriousness of the intellectual combat can sound overstrained in retrospect (cf. the Woody Allen joke about Commentary and Dissent merging to form Dysentery). But in fact these were foundational postwar arguments, waged by some of the sharpest thinkers in print as they clashed over urgent questions about the future of totalitarianism and democracy. The Flight of the Intellectuals, Paul Berman’s new 300-page polemic (to be published this spring), recalls these heady days in a book that is likely to provoke an intense controversy among public intellectuals. The most contentious assertion in Berman’s book is that some of the most prominent of these—people who rushed to the defense of Salman Rushdie when he was threatened with death for a novel deemed blasphemously irreverent to Islam—have failed to offer wholehearted support to Muslim dissidents today, people such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born author and Muslim apostate, whose lives are similarly threatened. This failure, this “flight of the intellectuals,” Berman argues, represents a deeply troubling abandonment of Enlightenment values in the face of recurrent threats to freedom of expression.

more from Ron Rosenbaum at Slate here.

i’m sad

Starfruit

If we could eat light, she says,
do you think it would all be spoiled by now?
Billions of years to reach us.
I squint into the night sky.
The stars could be blossoms,
unripe, white, months from harvest.
I know the ones that fall scatter pieces like petals,
but each piece is hard as seed.
What do you suppose they'd be
if they bloomed, she asks,
cherry or peach, death or immortality.
She snorts when I say, starfruit.
She's bloomed, my sister, lovely as lotus
floating on the water.
I dip my oar and push,
lift and try to read her future
in the pattern of salt and pyrite on wood.
It's not hard when we are all the people in the world,
two women on a slow boat to the end of time.
If you are what you eat, I say to make her smile,
would light make us stars?
Her eyes shine when she laughs,
more bracing than sea wind.
Here, she says, this one's ripe.
She reach up her hand to Venus,
plucks something from the sky.
She opens her fingers, petals around light,
offers me the first bite.
We share as sisters do,
death, immortality.

by J.C. Runolfson
from Astropoetica;
Volume 8.1, Spring 2010

From MSNBC:

From holding deathbed vigils to comforting the dying, chimpanzees face death in humanlike ways that indicate their awareness of death is probably much more developed than previously thought, suggest two new studies. The papers, both published in the journal Current Biology, provide rare, intimate glimpses of chimpanzees dealing with death. For the first study, scientists observed how three adult chimpanzees reacted when an elderly female, named Pansy, gradually passed away in an indoor enclosure at Blair Drummond Safari Park in Stirling, Scotland. The over 50-year-old Pansy had grown increasingly lethargic before lying down on the floor one day after eating.

“In the days before Pansy died, the others were notably attentive towards her, and they even altered their routine sleeping arrangements to remain by her, by sleeping on the floor in a room where they don't usually sleep,” lead author James Anderson told Discovery News. Blossom, another elderly female, and Pansy's daughter, Rosie, both stroked and groomed the dying Pansy, and sometimes just sat, subdued, beside the elderly female. Blossom's son Chippy checked to see if Pansy was alive by manipulating her arms and trying to open her mouth.

All of the chimps tossed and turned at night, much more than normal, during the dying female's final few days.

More here.