Reveille for Two Poets
George De Gregorio

Wake up, Walt Whitman!
you’ve got a message:
America is still singing your songs,
you’re on the top 20 list
with the rappers and the throngs.
Lilacs still bloom in the dooryard in the spring
and the Song of Myself still holds.

Wake up William Carlos Williams!
a telegram for you sir.
Paterson is still alive and teeming
as Latinos and Blacks and others
yearn to breathe free.
Your Catholic bells are still ringing
and the Red Wheel Barrow
is still catching water.
Your little old sleepy hometown
is breaking out the glad-rags to celebrate you 125^th
with a symposium of your songs — ad infinitum.

Don’t laugh Walt! Don’t laugh Carlos!
Your poetic clout still keeps America singing.
Together, you bridged three centuries
to this historic moment:
Obama, a black man,
and Hillary, a woman, together
are the first of their kind
to trade gibes in pursuit of a nomination
for President of the United States.

In the bank the other day
your songs were on full display.
The young teller was a beautiful Thai girl.
Her nameplate told it all:
she had become Mrs. Harrington, USA.

Get the pitch, Walt? What do you say Carlos?
America is still singing your triumphant songs.
Your songs of prophecy have lasted longer
than you had hoped.

Your songs have spawned an epidemic
which has infected 300 million;
there’s no telling what changes they will bring:
a calm or a whirlwind.

From Wikipedia:

The first recorded Africans in British North America (including most of the future United States) arrived in 1619 as indentured servants who settled in Jamestown, Virginia. As English settlers died from harsh conditions more and more Africans were brought to work as laborers. They for many years were similar in legal position to poor English indenturees, who traded several years labor in exchange for passage to America.^[7] Africans could legally raise crops and cattle to purchase their freedom.^[8] They raised families, marrying other Africans and sometimes intermarrying with Native Americans or English settlers.^[9] By the 1640s and 1650s, several African families owned farms around Jamestown and some became wealthy by colonial standards. The popular conception of a race-based slave system did not fully develop until the 1700s. The first black congregations and churches were organized before 1800 in both northern and southern cities following the Great Awakening. During the 1770s Africans, both enslaved and free, helped rebellious English colonists secure American Independence by defeating the British in the American Revolution.^[10] Africans and Englishmen fought side by side and were fully integrated.^[11] James Armistead, an African American, played a large part in making possible the 1781 Yorktown victory that established the United States as an independent nation.^[12] Other prominent African Americans were Prince Whipple and Oliver Cromwell, who are both depicted in the front of the boat in George Washington's famous 1776 Crossing the Delaware portrait.

Picture: An artist's conception of Crispus Attucks, the first “martyr” of the American Revolution.

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John Tierny in The New York Times:

Why, since President Obama promised to “restore science to its rightful place” in Washington, do some things feel not quite right? First there was Steven Chu, the physicist and new energy secretary, warning The Los Angeles Times that climate change could make water so scarce by century’s end that “there’s no more agriculture in California” and no way to keep the state’s cities going, either. Then there was the hearing in the Senate to confirm another physicist, John Holdren, to be the president’s science adviser. Dr. Holdren was asked about some of his gloomy neo-Malthusian warnings in the past, like his calculation in the 1980s that famines due to climate change could leave a billion people dead by 2020. Did he still believe that?

“I think it is unlikely to happen,” Dr. Holdren told the senators, but he insisted that it was still “a possibility” that “we should work energetically to avoid.” Well, I suppose it never hurts to go on the record in opposition to a billion imaginary deaths. But I have a more immediate concern: Will Mr. Obama’s scientific counselors give him realistic plans for dealing with global warming and other threats? To borrow a term from Roger Pielke Jr.: Can these scientists be honest brokers? Dr. Pielke, a professor in the environmental studies program at the University of Colorado, is the author of “The Honest Broker,” a book arguing that most scientists are fundamentally mistaken about their role in political debates. As a result, he says, they’re jeopardizing their credibility while impeding solutions to problems like global warming.

More here.

Images from the Civil Rights Movement.
Selma, Alabama.1964.

More here and here.

In this powerful speech, the great author explains his controversial decision to accept a literary prize in Israel and why we need to fight the System.

Haruki Murakami in Salon:

I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing.

Please do allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:

“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.”

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

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#443: I tie my Hat— I crease my Shawl
Emily Dickinson

I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—
Life's little duties do—precisely—
As the very least
Were infinite—to me—

I put new Blossoms in the Glass—
And throw the old—away—
I push a petal from my Gown
That anchored there—I weigh
The time 'twill be till six o'clock
I have so much to do—
And yet—Existence—some way back—
Stopped—struck—my ticking—through—
We cannot put Ourself away
As a completed Man
Or Woman—When the Errand's done
We came to Flesh—upon—
There may be—Miles on Miles of Nought—
Of Action—sicker far—
To simulate—is stinging work—
To cover what we are
From Science—and from Surgery—
Too Telescopic Eyes
To bear on us unshaded—
For their—sake—not for Ours—
'Twould start them—
We—could tremble—
But since we got a Bomb—
And held it in our Bosom—
Nay—Hold it—it is calm—

Therefore—we do life's labor—
Though life's Reward—be done—
With scrupulous exactness—
To hold our Senses—on—

Jon Mooallem in the New York Times Magazine:

It was the first Friday in December, 23 degrees at dawn and nearly windless. Everyone was looking up.

Operation Migration’s four ultralight planes floated into view over some oak and maple trees, then passed over the small, white chapel. An ultralight is powered by a massive rear propeller. In the sky, it looks like a scaled-down Formula 1 car dangling under the wing of a hang glider. Because the little planes taxi on three wheels, pilots call them trikes. At 200 feet, the first pilot, Chris Gullikson, was perfectly visible in his trike’s open cockpit. He was wearing his whooping-crane costume, a white hooded helmet and white gown that looked like a cross between a beekeeping suit and a Ku Klux Klan get-up. Gullikson and the other trike pilots were going to pick up the 14 juvenile whooping cranes that they were, little by little, leading south for the winter. Traditionally, and for many millenniums, cranes learned to migrate by following other cranes. But traditions have changed. Outside the church, a plucky, silver-haired woman named Liz Condie was explaining to the spectators why, exactly, her team has had to dress up and step in.

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Christopher Hart in The Times:

For all the achievements of science during the 20th century, its great heroic age, there remains a surprising number of absolutely fundamental questions still to be answered. Questions as basic as What Is Life? and Why Do We Die?

In this fascinating, bang-up-to-date report from the outer limits of scientific knowledge today, New Scientist writer Michael Brooks examines 13 of the most urgent scientific mysteries in turn.

One of the great discoveries of 20th-century science was that our universe is expanding. The discovery, however, led straight to another puzzle. The puzzle is, there's nowhere near enough matter to prevent the expanding universe from blowing apart completely into a vast, sterile infinity of lifeless interstellar dust. So how come we live in a lumpy universe, one of the lumps being the planet on which we live? There must be more matter than we can see: the famous dark matter and, to go with it, something even more mysterious – dark energy.

To date, however, there's not a shred of evidence for either, even though teams of scientists have been looking for years.

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From mije.org:

They could be called the integrationists, the young African American men and women who pushed open the doors of mainstream media and paved the way for journalists of color. Young journalists such as Nancy Maynard, Ed Bradley, Earl Caldwell, Charlayne Hunter Gault, Claude Lewis and Wallace Terry reported, organized, mentored and raised the bar for generations to come.

Ed Bradley

One could say that Ed Bradley in part owes his career to a popular Philadelphia radio DJ. Georgie Woods, after all, was the one who came to Bradley's college and gave a talk that inspired Bradley to become a DJ. Cheyney State was a teacher's college and Woods was there to talk to the senior class about using community resources to reach out to kids. Bradley, however, was more interested in Woods' work in the studio. Woods invited the young teacher to WDAS and as Bradley toured the station his life's mission became clearer.

“I just knew when I walked out there that night that I was put on this earth to be on radio,” he says.

Bradley spent everyday at the station, turning his attention to music, sports and some news. When he graduated from Cheyney and began teaching, he went to the station in the evenings. His friend and mentor Del Sheilds, the station's jazz DJ, always encouraged him to focus on news. That, Sheilds told him, was where the opportunities were.

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From The Washington Post:

Because of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Rohinton Mistry, to mention just a few of the most prominent authors, American readers have long been able to enjoy one terrific Indian novel after another. But Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is likely to be the first widely read book by a Pakistani writer. Mueenuddin spent his early childhood in Pakistan, then lived in the United States — he attended Dartmouth and Yale — and has since returned to his father's homeland, where he and his wife now manage a farm in Khanpur. These connected stories show us what life is like for both the rich and the desperately poor in Mueenuddin's country, and the result is a kind of miniaturized Pakistani “human comedy.”

In the original Comédie humaine, Balzac had the ingenious notion of tying his various novels together by using recurrent characters. Eugène de Rastignac is the protagonist of Le Père Goriot but is subsequently glimpsed in passing or sometimes just referred to in several other books. In like fashion, Mueenuddin interlaces eight stories, while also linking them to the household of a wealthy and self-satisfied landowner named K.K. Harouni. In “Saleema,” for instance, Harouni's elderly valet, Rafik, falls into a heartbreaking affair with a young maidservant, and we remember this, with a catch in our throat, when in another story we see him bring in two glasses of whiskey on a silver tray. In “Our Lady of Paris,” we discover that Harouni's nephew is madly in love with a young American woman named Helen; later on, we discover that he is married — to an American named Sonya.

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How did India’s Huey Long become its Jack Welch?

Graeme Wood in The American:

In his boyhood, long before Lalu Yadav became India’s most unlikely management guru, he sometimes strayed from his cows and scampered barefoot to the railroad tracks. Dodging crowds and porters, he made his way to the first-class cars and, for a few glorious moments, basked in the air conditioning that blasted from the open door. Then the police would spot him and shoo him away, into the moist trackside cowflap where he belonged.

The boy has grown up, but when I meet him in his New Delhi office, he’s still barefoot, and a headache for train conductors everywhere. Lalu Yadav, 61, is now the boss of all 2.4 million Indian Railways employees. When he wants air conditioning, he nods, and a railway employee hops up to twist the dial. As minister of railways, he rules India’s largest employer—one with annual revenues in the tens of billions—from a fine leather sofa, his sandals and a silver spittoon on the floor nearby and a clump of tobacco in his cheek.

Lalu is a happy man: happy to have risen to become rich, beloved, and reviled all over India; happy that a grateful nation credits him with whipping its beleaguered rail system into profitability; and happy that he’s managed to do all this and somehow stay out of jail.

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Marco Evers in Der Spiegel:

But now a new movement is taking shape worldwide in opposition to the misuse of artificial light. Stargazers, environmentalists, light engineers, cultural anthropologists and doctors specializing in the treatment of sleep disorders all want to put an end to the dictatorship of eternal light. Light pollution is a rapidly growing environmental problem, but it is also one that could be solved relatively easily. In many cases, all it takes is goodwill and a few little tricks.

Some countries have already passed laws and regulations to control light pollution. Slovenia is a pioneer in Europe. There, cities and towns are now required to reduce their light emissions. In addition, artificial lights must shine in such a way that their light beams do not rise above the horizon. This spells the end of the “skybeam” searchlights much loved by nightclub operators.

Germany has been less active on the photon front, although German scientists did recently embark on the battle against light pollution. Under the leadership of the Berlin-based Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), more than two dozen scientists from various disciplines will study the effects of light pollution on plants, animals and human beings, as well as what to do about it.

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Ziauddin Sardar in The Times:

When Baghdad opened its gates as the new capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, the prime site in the city was occupied by the royal library. Both the city and the library, completed around 765, were built by Caliph al-Mansur, who devised a method for measuring the circumference of the Earth and was second in a long line of Abbasid caliphs who valued thought and learning above all else. The Abbasids created, shaped and developed one of the most rich and fertile periods of science in human history.

The library was officially called “the House of Wisdom”. It was a monumental structure, accommodating translators, copyists, scholars, scientists, librarians and the swelling volumes of Persian, Sanskrit and Greek texts that flooded into Baghdad. Not surprisingly, it became a magnet for seekers of knowledge from across the Muslim empire.

Jonathan Lyons tells the story of the House of Wisdom, the caliphs who suppor-ted it and the people who worked there, at a riveting, breakneck pace. In quick succession we meet scholars such as al-Khwarizimi, the illustrious Muslim mathematician and founder of algebra, the geographer al-Masudi, who described major sea routes to Persia, Cambodia and as far as the Malay peninsula in The Book of Roads and Kingdoms, and al-Kindi, the first Arab philosopher. But Lyons is more concerned with how what was happening in Baghdad and other Muslim cities was transferred to Europe. So he focuses on a string of colourful translators and scholars who travelled to the Muslim world and took its knowledge and discoveries back with them.

Adelard of Bath, for example, travelled to Antioch and Sicily in his dogged pursuit of what he called studia Arabum, the learning of the Arabs.

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