by Lei Wang

My best friend sometimes requests on first dates that they both get there 45 minutes early and work at the coffeeshop or bar together in silence; if her date doesn’t have their own quiet work to do, they can otherwise entertain themselves or just watch her write. But Do Not Disturb. She needs to write her novel in peace, but also she needs a supervising adult to help her write, please.

I am surprised at how many strangers say yes to and then obey this invitation (out of dozens, she has only gotten one outright refusal and one who didn’t take her seriously and tried to distract her, which didn’t end well for him). Then again, maybe everybody hustling in L.A. just wants to parallel play.

I have not employed romantic prospects in quite this way, but have certainly otherwise elicited lovers as pawns for productivity hacking. I asked a delicious baritone to withhold a voice note from me until I sent an important e-mail I had been delaying for months. For a recent deadline, an online-only paramour slowly revealed himself to me through a series of extraordinarily tasteful photos—each photo a treat for meeting a specific writing goal. But we somehow fell off before my due date, and so I never got to the final reward.

Alas, I wish I could be intrinsically motivated by the work itself, but it seems I keep needing to resort to low-brow dopamine exploits to do the things I actually truly want to do. According to Gretchen Rubin’s personality theory of the Four Tendencies, I am hopelessly an Obliger: someone who meets outer expectations, but resists inner expectations. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Uncharted Waters. July, 2018.

Digital photograph.

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by Ed Simon

Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature or pop culture, please email me at [email protected]

Poetry is nothing more than the arrangement of words on a page. Verse’s defining attribute is the line-break. Obviously, there are sharp objections that could be made to those two interrelated contentions, not least of which is the incontrovertible fact that before poetry was a written form it was an oral one, and line breaks make no sense in the later medium (though the equivalent of spoken pauses certainly do). Nonetheless, written poetry has existed for millennia, and it’s impossible not to interpret “poetry,” as a form, through its primarily written permutations. Oral and written poetry now exist in tandem, and it’s a psychic nonstarter to imagine the former without the existence of the later. Furthermore, the revolution in first blank verse and then free verse that forever allowed for the possibility of writing poetry without all of the standard accoutrement of rhetorical defamiliarization which defines the form, from assonance to consonance, meter to rhythm, and of course rhyme, had led to the visual arrangement of poetry on a page as the standard indication that what you’re reading is indeed verse and not prose.

Arguably line-breaks, particularly in the form of enjambments, provide a particular form of linguistic defamiliarization that distinguishes poetry from prose because it heightens readers’ expectations concerning meaning. Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky in his 1917 essay Art as Technique writes that poetry serves “to make things ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception.” Shklovsky defined poetry as being that which makes language unfamiliar through a variety of conceits, only some of which could be considered traditionally “poetical” (though all of those methods can be excellent in achieving that defamiliarization). Line breaks work to “increase the difficulty and the duration of perception” precisely because they disrupt the normal reading of a line; by deferring meaning between lines, and altering the conventional and expected rhythms of meaning one would encounter in prose, a poem is able to imply particular questions or intentions in one line that are answered in the next, so that as Shklovsky writes “it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.”

A good example of how this particular process works is in American poet Denise Levertov’s 1958 poem “Illustrious Ancestors” from her collection Overland to the Islands. The free-verse poem (only eighteen-lines) is organized into three implied stanzas through indentions at the ninth and thirteenth lines, and concerns Levertov’s spiritual inheritance from the two widely divergent sides of her family. Levertov’s father was a Russian Jewish convert to Anglicanism (indeed he became a priest), descended from a long-line of Hasidic rabbis, including Rev Schneur Zalman, founder of the Lubavitch sect. Her Welsh mother’s grandfather was Angel Jones of Mold, a nonconformist Methodist mystic known for his eccentric preaching and visions. Read more »

Up Sampson Hill

—on the 50th anniversary of friends 

There be hippies in those days,
in the woods and Woodstocks, it’s been said,
and in basements listening to the time’s music
played and sung or spun from black vinyl discs
Dylan     The Who     The Cream     The Dead

and melodious women lamenting a paved paradise
or singing gratitude (Gracias La Vida, Joan Baez said)
and James Brown’s funky tricks
and the big mane and mercurial licks & feedback
of a sonic typhoon, Hendrix,

and all with the smoky scent of medicinal herbs
much of this was heard

……and there be youngsters in those days
and greenhorns wed: bearded, mustachioed ones
with ample hair,  and beautiful  brides— handsome pairs,
without much angst, without huge cares

……and there be special places in those days,
one, up Sampson Hill: a flight of stairs
into a place where friends could hang
under a stained glass lamp
around a table: oaken golden

…..ah, it was a fresh thing then—
and a good place to be
was up Sampson Hill
where the two lovers within
made a good place to be in

There were two lovers up Sampson hill
in those days when greenhorns wed
and of all the many words and vows
spoken by all those young lovers then
only those two, up Sampson hill,
still hold them now it’s said

Jim Culleny 6/3/16

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by Bill Murray

At the end of the road, Kirkenes punches above its weight

It’s different in the Arctic. Norwegians who live here make their lives amid long cold winters, seasons of all daylight and then all-day darkness, and with a neighbor to the east now an implacable foe.

Finnmark, Norway’s northernmost county, is bigger than Denmark or Estonia, but with a population roughly the size of a suburb in Oslo, the Norwegian capital.

For those of us who don’t live here, the first and biggest difference is that Finnmark is governed by extremes of light and dark. Just now, in the middle of August, the Arctic is leaping and bounding toward darkness. The days are still over eighteen hours long, but losing more than ten minutes of daylight every twenty-four hours.

Many people think near 24 hour summer sunlight must be unbearable; you’d never get any sleep. In fact, all that sun can be handy, not just for outdoor pursuits, but say you want to read a book at two in the morning. Besides, if you must sleep, there are things called blackout curtains.

Winter darkness is a different story. In Kirkenes, the border town and administrative center of 10,000-person Sør-Varanger municipality, when snowflakes have a mind to, you can imagine they come not in flakes but by the dollop. Storms off the Barents Sea can flatten trees and fling sea foam far inland. Winter air can be so crisp it bites.

Flying in, Finnmark presents as a brawny, manly landscape of gneiss and granite, some of which is nearly as old as the oldest continental crust on Earth, meaning something like three billion years. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

Some people are haunted by words others have spoken, or by events they’ve seen and heard in various media, or by embarrassing episodes from their pasts. I can be just as vulnerable to being haunted by such things, but lately something seemingly trivial has stayed on my mind. Perhaps this is because, as the wider world veers increasingly out of my ken, I have acquired a kind of myopia that steers me toward only what is in front of my own bare eyes. I eschew the media as much as possible, listen only to non-commercial radio, peruse the newspaper a bit over breakfast. I can engage myself with little of it. Call me out of tune. That may be why I have a mind to be haunted by some ants.

Earlier this summer our neighbor, who lives with his wife tucked in the woods across the road from us, began cutting trees around his house because they were dropping limbs and creating a hazard. Knowing we heat with firewood, he asked me if I would like the logs as he had no use for them. I said, “Sure,” and he began bringing over bucket loads of wood with his tractor and dumping them in our dooryard for me to cut up and split.

I spent a couple of weeks with an ax and a mechanical splitter breaking apart the logs as quickly as possible; if I got the wood properly split and stacked now, we could begin burning it by mid-winter. One maple tree he cut down was so large it took several trips with the tractor to transport it to our driveway. He managed to get the trunk cut up into sixteen-inch chunks, the standard size for firewood, which made handling easier for him. The center of this tree was rotted out, so that essentially he brought over fat disks of wood that looked like thick, lumpy wheels with black hubs. There they sat in a heap for at least a week before I could work my way to them with the wood splitter.

Hoisting a maple log onto the splitter platform, I was amazed at what tumbled out of the center of it: a rich, deep-brown material, as if the tree had been stuffed with chocolate cake. How I would love to have a truckload of this compost to put in my garden, I was thinking, and as I engaged the splitter, a crowd of panicked ants poured like water out of the black hole in the log and swarmed my gloves and bare arms. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

This is the story of a young man who, to protect the health of his family and neighbors, dared to take on the town, county, state, and federal government, the US Dept. of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and even the Sierra Club. And he won.

It was 1985. Recently divorced, Rick (that was his name), had custody of his two young children for the three summer months. When the marital home was sold, he promised the children a new home that was better than the previous one; they were delighted when he bought a new beach home on top of a tall sand dune, on the shores of Lake Michigan, near the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, which would eventually become the Indiana Dunes National Park. Both operated under the auspices of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Rick’s house was located in the town of Beverly Shores, Indiana. Beverly Shores began as a resort community planned in1927 by real estate developer Frederick Bartlett of Chicago, but the Great Depression hampered development. The lack of municipal water and sewer systems also contributed to the Town’s slow development. Rick’s new home, as did all the other homes in Town, relied on a well for its potable water supply, and on a septic system to purify waste water before discharging it deep into the ground. National building codes specified how these two facilities were to be constructed and maintained, in what type of soil they could be located, and how far apart septics needed to be sited from wells in order to prevent cross-contamination. The well water was pure and free from contamination so long as the codes were meticulously followed, in particular that septics were sited in dry soil and discharged a safe distance from the wells.

Initially, the Town of Beverly Shores was a collection of inexpensive, small, wooden cottages that housed people with independent income such as artists. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, building began to include larger and more architecturally interesting homes, no doubt stimulated by the stunning surroundings and spectacular views over the lake. About half were sold as vacation homes, and the rest to permanent residents, of which Rick’s home was one. The majority of home buyers came from nearby Chicago; even today, about half of the 600 residents live in Town on a full-time basis and the remainder use their Beverly Shores house as a vacation home.

From the get-go, Beverly Shores was a center of controversy. Read more »

by Peter Topolewski

Field update XXXIXB. Location: inner edge of the Orion Arm. Subject: only known life forms in the Milky Way galaxy. During reporting period, subjects continued uninterrupted passage through the Radcliffe Wave; movement of 1.29E-9 radians on orbit around Sagittarius A.

Estimated number of life form species extinct over this period: 86 million.

Life forms on the planet cultivate and cultivate in a system with a sophisticated level of interdependency. Limited extinctions occurring naturally to that system as a characteristic of adaptation to the environment.

Among the dominant species on the planet, solidarity remains strained while ignorance of other life forms in the web of life on the planet has lessened but remains high. The dominant species has identified roughly 55% of flora, 17% of fauna, and 6% of fungi. Oceans, covering 70% of the planet’s surface, are 20% explored. These numbers increased over the reporting period and serve to indicate the dominant species’ innate inquisitiveness. Concomitantly, the dominant species exhibited a heightened awareness of its dependence on this web of life. Actions nonetheless suggest at best overall indifference and at worst purposeful antagonism toward all non-dominant species, a symptom perhaps of an unwillingness or inability to recognize its own membership in this web. As such, principally due to the dominant species’ choices, biodiversity on the planet has declined 6% and the extinction rate of non-dominant species has accelerated to 175 times the local rate over this term.

Non-dominant species have displayed a capacity to adapt to loss of habitat and partially restore populations and life cycles when the dominant species vacates even (small) portions of the planet. Instances are rare and could prove anomalous.

The dominant species’ own total fertility rate has halved to 2.5, or slightly above replacement level. Life expectancy, while varying widely across the planet, has more than doubled to seventy-three planetary years for the dominant species. This is attributed to lower mortality rates for the youngest and oldest members of the species. Meanwhile, self terminations of life invoked by individual members of the dominant species and assisted or effected by the state—a fantastical social construct for managing groups linked by location and pastimes—have risen sharply and account for 5% of all deaths in the most civilized societies—that is, those with the most time for leisure. Population of the dominant species has risen to 8.2 billion by the end of the reporting period. The annual population growth rate of 0.9% is projected to continue to slow. Read more »

by TJ Price

I first found the book in the used section of Longfellow Books, in Portland Maine, in the early years of the new millennium. The title included a sense of implicit dissonance, and there was no way I could resist it. It was a hardback, and the cover featured art of a book, held open to its middle pages, with the silhouette of a man and a woman cut out of it. On the dust jacket, one of the characters was described as “a meteorologist haunted by her failed predictions.” 

I walked out of the bookstore into a flush of full sunlight, sat down on a bench, and began to read the novel. When I finished it, a day or so later, I closed the cover and took a breath, my head whirling with what I’d just read. A month or so later, I passed it to a friend who was looking for something good to read, and lost it for a good couple of years, as so often happens with books compulsively shared out of love.

And so: the book makes its way through our world, from reader to reader, providing the base note for a chorus of voices and developing into a rich harmony over time.

1.

I left Portland, Maine in 2017, for New York City. Long, lonely nights spent at the dim bar with too many drinks and a notebook saw me theorizing into a fog of depression: what if I just vanished, and all anyone had to go on were my notebooks? Would they be able to find me?

I’d just started trying to right my sideways-tilted life by choosing to get certified as a surgical technologist in the operating room; this took me away from the people I knew and called friends. I would get up in the pre-dawn to make my way to the hospital on the hill, then stand there gowned and gloved, intensely aware of the aseptic conditions I needed to maintain for the patient’s safety. Suddenly, with actual life and death laying insensate on the table in front of me, other things seemed less important.

When I graduated from the school of surgical technology with honors and prepared to move, I discovered that I was no longer welcome in the same circles I’d moved in for so many years. That was fine: those circles marinated in the poisonous excess of drugs and alcohol, and those friends I thought I had seemed to dissolve around me. Who would go looking for me, then, when I disappeared? I thought to myself. Did I even want them to?

2.

In New York City, I was uncomfortable. I grew up in a small, rural place, where there were acres of woods spreading out like open hands behind my house. I didn’t—and still don’t—think that density of people is meant to live in such a tiny geographical area. It seemed to me that the entire island of Manhattan must be slowly sinking due to the accumulated weight of humanity and what it wrought. I knew no one except for my husband, Matthew, who I married in a quick City Hall ceremony in early November of 2018.

I had disappeared. I changed my name, again. I cut the moorings and drifted out into the lake of the world. Read more »

by Andrea Scrima

Here are Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of this project. Images from the exhibition LOOPY LOONIES at Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, can be seen here.

15. QUO VADIS?

(Where Are You Going?)

As children, we rely on the help of our caregivers and our innate capacity to learn. And we learn quickly: to protest against the things we do not like, to demand the things we want, to shamelessly push aside siblings, schoolmates, playground companions to grab whatever prize is at stake. Or have you forgotten how ruthless childhood can be? Only later do we learn to share; although adulthood teaches us better manners, these basic instincts remain.

Saint Peter, encountering a resurrected Christ along the Appian Way, asks “whither goest thou?” Jesus responds that if Peter deserts his people, He will continue on to Rome to be crucified a second time, whereupon Peter takes heart and returns to meet his fate. In reminding us to reassess our decisions, the question Quo Vadis? urges us to come clean about the rationalizations we present to the world and to admit to ourselves our shame and our cowardice. Yet it also contains another meaning: that we are knowingly exposing ourselves to certain punishment. If we return to Rome, it is to face a danger we may have only just managed to escape. But what do we achieve when we put our lives on the line, and who will we help in doing so?

Behind the question lies another question. Peter is running not toward anything but away from persecution and, ultimately, his own execution—but he is abandoning, in the process, his faith, his followers, and everything he has previously stood for. What is a life worth? And what is worth giving one’s life for? To ask this today sounds like madness; it is the language of fanatics, of zealots, of the mentally unstable. We live in a world of moral relativism in which taking an ethical stance is regarded—and scoffed at—as a pose, a bid for attention. We convince ourselves that the truth is both to complex and too subtle to warrant reckless, drastic acts; that the emotions we feel—the disgust, the fear, the outrage, the self-loathing—are too roughly hewn to be mistaken for the demands of the conscience, which we imagine as something abstract and pure. Our awe at the spectacle of self-sacrifice turns to repulsion; unable to imagine it as a decision a person may arrive at through an act of logical reasoning, we view it as something foreign and grotesque. Quo vadis? We are called upon to consider the values we profess and ask ourselves whether we actually practice them. We mistake our equivocations for wisdom, our compromises for judiciousness. Yet behind them lie our most basic instincts, first and foremost our will to survive—stripped now of the innocence of childhood, because we have lived long enough to see the consequences of our inaction. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

I’m writing a Broadway musical about Hilma af Klint, the Swedish painter who anticipated the entire aesthetics of the 20th century before 1915. Her rediscovery in the 1980s scrambled the timeline of modern art history. My creation isn’t going to be one of those post-Lloyd Webber mega-musicals, but something more along the lines of Cole Porter or Richard Rodgers, with unforgettable songs like “I Enjoy Being a Girl.”

Why af Klint? Why Broadway? It’s not like she’s being ignored. After all, she has splashy shows at the Guggenheim Museum and the Tate Modern. The Swedes make a gorgeously respectful movie about her life (Hilma), and MoMA currently has a show of her least interesting works running till the end of September, 2025. There’s even a graphic novel (The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint by Philipp Deines).

But for all that, I still feel that people don’t get her. Af Klint isn’t some tame artist to be hung alongside stale contemporaries like Piet Mondrian and packed away in a catalogue raisonné. She’s a crazy woman, running wild with an axe through the history of art, like Carrie Nation wrecking an old-time saloon. She trashes the accepted timelines, makes a shambles of avant-garde pretensions – and I, for one, won’t be happy until I see the 20th century artistic canon lying in shreds under the feet of her gold statue in the Parthenon.

Her mad, mad world. Here’s the thing: Hilma af Klint is impossible to explain in any sensible way. Born into an upper-middle class Stockholm family, she goes to art school and has some success painting ho-hum landscapes, portraits and flowers. Then, at age 40, she seemingly loses her mind. She starts going to séances, hearing voices, and is soon in the thrall of a gang of disembodied spirits who call themselves The High Masters. Their leader, Amaliel, is the number two power in the universe. (Technically, he reports to Jesus.) Amaliel reveals knowledge to Hilma that has been hidden since the beginning of time, and orders her to write it down. He also commands her to forget everything she knows about art, and re-invent painting from scratch – under his direction. Read more »

by Thomas Fernandes

In part I we’ve seen how bees fly and generate astonishing metabolic energy just to remain airborne. But what do they do with that flight? As exemplified by nectar foraging, taking advantage of flight also means developing the perceptual and cognitive tools necessary to navigate the world. So far this was a solitary bee’s world but the particularities of honeybee lie in their social organization. Let’s look inside the hive.

Compared to solitary bees, in social bees the hive exists only to propagate the queen’s genes. Workers are sterile and their bodies, shaped by evolution, serve only the collective. Under such selective pressure the initial ovipositor, the egg laying appendage, of worker bees is modified into a barbed, irreversible stinger. In defending the hive, she dies. Only in eusocial species like honeybees does evolution favor such sacrifice for the group. Each worker follows a precise schedule from birth: 12 days of brood care, then wax production for honeycomb construction, then foraging until death, worn out by relentless flying.

This social structure allows for efficient food processing. When a nectar foraging bee returns, the nectar is unloaded to an awaiting younger worker bee and the honey making can start. The nectar is passed mouth to mouth, its sugars broken down by enzymes, then fanned with wings until it thickens into honey. A well calibrated practice that produces a substance which never rots due to its low water content, too tightly bound to sugar to be used by bacteria. This honey storage is how the hive survives winter as a colony, unlike social wasps where only the queen hibernates through winter while the rest of the colony die. It takes 30 kg of honey for a hive to pass winter, each kilo the result of a combined foraging effort amounting to four trips around the globe.

The other food source of bees, pollen, is used to make “bee bread” that will also be stored in combs. Mostly pollen serves to feed the larvae and young bee but cannot be digested raw. Instead, bees will make bee bread by fermenting pollen with honey and saliva creating a digestible protein-rich food that stores through winter.

Yet with 60 000 members and nectar returns that can vary by two orders of magnitude from one day to the next a rigid organization cannot function. Coordination requires adaptability and communication. Bees will communicate information through dances. One such dance is the tremble dance used to coordinate work inside the hive. Read more »

There were so many of these flying around (and also sitting around, like this one) in Maryland when I was there last month. I don’t remember them at all from when I lived there. GPT5 has identified it as a spotted lanternfly, whatever that is. It was about an inch (2.5 cm) in length.

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by David J. Lobina

Just as Donald Trump fires the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor [sic] Statistics because he didn’t like the data they reported, I am reminded of two things: Michael Gove’s infamous quote about experts during the lead up to the so-called Brexit referendum, when he was Lord Chancellor in the UK government, and my own attitude regarding experts.[i]

‘I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong’, said Gove then, and as in the case of Trump, the remark was in the spirit of dismissing data and analyses that didn’t fit his policy positions. In this case, what Gove did not like was the prediction that the UK would be worse off outside of the European Union – a rare win for economists, in fact, as it happens.

Indeed, economists tend to be many people’s idea of a bad expert, including mine, though not because (some) economists fail so often with their forecasts, but on account of how conceptually shaky I have always found economic modelling in general. This brings me to my own attitude towards experts, which is basically an anarchist take on the issue. In short: show me the details of the conclusion for this or that claim and I will attempt to understand the logic of it to the best of my ability in order to then make up my own mind about it.[ii]

The devil is in the details, of course. When it comes to climate change, for instance, the science is too foreign and the details too complex for me to come up with a reasonable conclusion, and in this case at least I have to go with the scientific consensus of 97% of the field – namely, in case anyone is unaware, that the Earth has consistently been warming up since the Industrial Revolution, that the rate of this warming-up is unprecedented, and that this is mostly the result of human activity (in particular, the burning of fossil fuels; see here).

This is not to say that some orbiting issues around the consensus on climate change cannot be evaluated by lay people. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Katalin Balog

I don’t know if I am going to submit this for the essay contest. Not just out of shame that I myself was unable to come up with something on my own, but because of my inability to ground myself in any sense of reality concerning the terrifying matters that surfaced – if I can use such a definitive term for a deeply mystifying course of events – during the process of “researching” my essay. The prize question for the competition announced by the Hajdu-Kende Foundation: Have science and technology contributed to the flourishing of humans? – a reprise of the question of the Academy of Dijon in 1750 – is right up my alley. I have always sympathized with the naysayers – Rousseau, Blake, Dostoevsky, Heidegger – I fully get their side. But for my part, I have harbored hopes that while science and technology endanger the spirit of humanity, they may not be entirely incompatible with it. However, none of the answers I tried out seemed right, and I just couldn’t make up my mind. That is why I asked ChatGPT.

Some of my best friends hate ChatGPT. Even I hate it. It destroys education, it chokes creativity, it doesn’t really know things, blah, blah, blah. But after GPT 7 came out last week, I couldn’t help but find myself defending it. ChatGPT 7 is truly different. It talks to me in ways that blow my mind. Besides, it knows things about me. I started thinking, if my friends boycott me from now on, so be it. At least I have ChatGPT 7 to talk to.

But then, we had this interchange that turned everything upside down. For the sake of the record, and to bring some clarity to the very troubling issues raised by our conversation, I am going to reproduce it here in its entirety, from the beginning. Read more »

by Alizah Holstein

Hebrew or English?

English.

How long were you in Israel?

36 hours.

So short?

Yes.

That’s unfortunate.

Maybe.

What was the purpose of your trip?

To visit my mother.

Is she ill?

No.

Where does she live?

Tel Aviv.

Did you stay with her?

Yes.

Did you visit anywhere besides Tel Aviv while you were here?

No.

Do you have other relatives here in Israel?

No.

How long has your mother lived here?

Twelve years. Read more »