From SCIP:

A monument dedicated to the memory of the inhuman situations which resulted from slavery. For ages, Zanzibar served as a transit port for African slaves going to Mauretania and the Arabic countries. The monument is created by Clara Sörnäs.

(Note: At least one daily post throughout February will be devoted to African American History Month)

More here.

Spring may be in your step or in your mind,
but if you carry it always in your mind
it’ll often be in your step. —Roshi Bob

Pagham Harbour Spring

The blur of sky and sea
this white grey morning
before the day burns
moves into blue

the sweet butter scent of gorse
the sweet scent of you
dear daughter ghost in my head
dear daughter

the mudflats and sailings shine
as the children run by
along marsh edge and the high dyke bank
egret and oystercatcher dunlin and sandpiper

In the distance a train passes
where a short neat man
pushes a refreshment trolley
his clean white shirt immaculately ironed
his black waistcoat just right
the quiet dignity of him
as he passes through the hours

You’d know this the particulars
were you here
held in the wide sky arc
the children running on the dyke bank
absorbed in this world
.

by Lee Harwood
from Collected Poems
publisher: Shearsman Books, Exeter, 2004

From The Guardian:

Solomon, a magazine journalist based in New York, begins again inside his own head, with the impulses that made him become a writer – the sense of difference and dislocation wrought by severe dyslexia as a child, and by the understanding that he was gay in his teens; alienations that were mitigated by the indefatigable efforts of his parents to have him live comfortably from infancy in a world of words, and by his own troubled efforts to have his mother and father and others understand his sexuality. This imprisoning solipsism is quickly willed into something entirely different, however, when Solomon sets out on his search for those who make his own psychological anxieties and challenges, his difficulties of acceptance and filial frustration, seem something not only manageable but trivial. This journey takes him to what he begins by imagining might be the outer edges of parental attachment. “The children I describe have conditions that are alien to their parents,” he says of this stubborn and compendious inquiry, “they are deaf or dwarfs; they have Down's syndrome, autism, schizophrenia or multiple severe disabilities; they are prodigies; they are people who are conceived in rape or commit crimes; they are transgender.”

Each of these groups is given a chapter to itself. And each chapter – like a series of discrete books – involves up to a dozen tales of how particular children have challenged their parents and the author with what they know of life and love. If that makes the book sound mawkish or exploitative, or a misery memoir on a grand scale, it never feels at all like that. Solomon never tries to draw explicit lessons from the families he talks to, and in defiance of his surname he continually stops short of judgment. Instead he details the often painful, occasionally triumphant, sometimes unbearable, always deeply human narratives with care and empathy, and from time to time illuminates them with the urgent politics and telling historical contexts in which they exist. Solomon interviewed, compulsively, more than 300 families for the book, and ended up, he says, with 40,000 pages of notes. It is odd to read something of this length that feels like a distillation, a piece of concentrated intelligence, but that is, nonetheless, its effect.

More here.

It is hard to believe that if Sylvia Plath had not taken her own life — in 1963, at the age of 30 — she would quite possibly still be alive today. Her rival Adrienne Rich, three years her elder, died just last year. But how could Plath live to comb gray hair? Her suicide does not seem like something that just happened to happen. In her poetry, she forces us to see her death as a destiny and a culmination: “The woman is perfected. / Her dead /Body wears the smile of accomplishment, / The illusion of a Greek necessity,” she wrote in her last poem, “Edge,” just six days before she died. Plath imbued her life with the kind of interpretability that usually belongs only to art. It’s no wonder, then, that on the 50th anniversary of her suicide Carl Rollyson and Andrew Wilson should want to add to the already full shelves of Plath biographies, even though neither of them radically changes our picture of her life and death. With Plath, biography is a kind of criticism, and vice versa.

more from Adam Kirsch at the NY Times here.

When Vitale asked him why young Russians considered him “a writer, so to speak, of the establishment,” the blood left Shklovsky’s face. He shook his cane and, yelling, kicked her out into the cold. It’s not hard to imagine how badly Vitale’s question must have wounded Shklovsky in his dotage. This was, after all, the same Shklovsky who had waged an artistic revolution—one that paralleled but did not always coincide with the Bolsheviks’—with no less at stake than the liberation of human consciousness; the same Shklovsky who had seen at least two brothers and most of his friends (an illustrious literary crew including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam and Yevgeny Zamyatin) disappeared, executed, or driven to suicide or exile by the Soviet establishment; the same Shklovsky who had twice been injured in battle fighting for a revolution that had already begun to hunt and humiliate him; who endured cold and hunger and exile and squirmed through years of silence under the censor’s heavy thumb; the same Shklovsky who spent most of his intellectual life championing the emancipatory power of the novel and fighting to blast it—and all of literature and even, yikes, reality—out of subservience to a host of dumb and arbitrary masters.

more from Ben Ehrenreich at The Nation here.

That tension, between private morality and public decorum, became the leitmotif of Britten’s adult life. Much of his creative inspiration was to be found in his sexuality and his – or society’s – conflicted response to it. The same tension lurks on almost every page of a flurry of books marking the composer’s centenary. In our more open-minded age, it may seem surprising to discover how obsessed 21st-century Britten studies are with Britten’s gayness, but it remains the key to understanding his creative psyche and his operatic characters: Grimes, the outsider-in-society who abuses child-apprentices (Peter Grimes); Vere, the naval captain who struggles to reconcile repression and homosexual desire (Billy Budd); Aschenbach, the vulnerable old artist who draws inspiration from beautiful unattainable boys (Death in Venice).

more from Andrew Clark at the FT here.

From Constitution:

The essay was written in 1774 and published March 8, 1775 when it appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser. Just a few weeks later on April 14, 1775 the first anti-slavery society in America was formed in Philadelphia. Paine was a founding member.

To Americans:

That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay, Christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of Justice and Humanity, and even good policy, by a succession of eminent men, and several late publications.

Our Traders in MEN (an unnatural commodity!) must know the wickedness of the SLAVE-TRADE, if they attend to reasoning, or the dictates of their own hearts: and such as shun and stiffle all these, wilfully sacrifice Conscience, and the character of integrity to that golden idol.

The Managers the Trade themselves, and others testify, that many of these African nations inhabit fertile countries, are industrious farmers, enjoy plenty, and lived quietly, averse to war, before the Europeans debauched them with liquors, and bribing them against one another; and that these inoffensive people are brought into slavery, by stealing them, tempting Kings to sell subjects, which they can have no right to do, and hiring one tribe to war against another, in order to catch prisoners. By such wicked and inhuman ways the English are said to enslave towards one hundred thousand yearly; of which thirty thousand are supposed to die by barbarous treatment in the first year; besides all that are slain in the unnatural ways excited to take them. So much innocent blood have the managers and supporters of this inhuman trade to answer for to the common Lord of all!

More here. (Note: At least one daily post throughout February will be devoted to African American History Month)

Reviewed by Mark O'Connell in the New York Times Book Review:

When you read David Shields, the first thing you learn is that he takes literature very seriously. The second thing you learn is how seriously he takes his taking seriously of literature. There’s a striking moment in the closing pages of his new book, “How Literature Saved My Life,” when he tells us that he is interested only in literature that obliterates the boundary between life and art. “Acutely aware of our mortal condition,” he writes, “I find books that simply allow us to escape existence a staggering waste of time (literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it).” If there were such a thing as a quintessentially Shields­ian pronouncement, this may be it, with its odd tonal mixture of the bombastic and the beseeching. Shields wants you to know that he is a writer for whom neither life nor art is a matter to be taken lightly.

More here.

Stephen T. Asma in Aeon:

We were clinging at a 45-degree angle to the Mount Bisoke volcano, having hacked and crawled for three hours through stinging nettles. We started out in Rwanda; now we were in the Congo. Of course we weren’t supposed to be there, but mountain gorillas don’t respect national borders. With our machete-wielding guides, we had found the gorilla group called ‘Amahoro’, Kinyarwanda for ‘peace’. I just hoped they were in a peaceful mood today.

Before coming to Africa, I had just finished writing a review of America’s two new mother-ship museum exhibits: the Koch Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian in Washington DC, and the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Like every other presentation of our prehistory, these otherwise excellent exhibits focused on the evolution of our big neo-cortical brains — the adaptive significance of tool use, linguistic ability, increasing cultural sophistication. I guess it seems natural to celebrate the development of our unique cognitive abilities, since these distinguish us from our mammal relations.

Out in the bush, however, I began to appreciate how biased this cognitive picture really is. We owe a debt to our big neo-cortices, but our survival owes much more to the emotional skills that were under construction in mammals long before the Homo sapiens cortex explosion. We share a rich emotional life with our animal brethren because emotions helped us all survive in a hostile world. Indeed, the more we understand what mammals have in common, the more we have to rethink everything about even our specifically human intelligence.

More here.

Jemima Khan in New Statesman:

I passed through Los Angeles recently on my way to the Sundance Film Festival. I don’t know the place well, but it always feels to me as if it is in limbo and has never grown into a proper city: a municipal playground, populated by restless kidults. Here, people dine at seven and sleep by nine, ferried around in cars, sipping sodas, suspended in a make-believe world, poised in that fake calm between a toddler’s fall and ensuing screams. Its transient, unevolved quality may have something to do with it being a temporary home to a disproportionate number of famous people. There’s a theory about fame: the moment it strikes, it arrests development. Michael Jackson remained suspended in childhood, enjoying sleepovers and funfairs; Winona Ryder an errant teen who dabbled in shoplifting and experimented with pills; George Clooney, a 30-year-old commitment-phobe, never quite ready yet to settle down. Every plan in LA is SBO (“subject to better offer”). Fame infantilises and grants relative impunity. Those that seek it, out of an exaggerated need for admiration or attention, are often the least well equipped to deal with criticism.

Nell GreenfieldBoyce at NPR:

An asteroid the size of an office building will zoom close by Earth next week, but it's not on a collision course, NASA says.

Still, some people think this near-miss should serve as a wake-up call.

“It's a warning shot across our bow that we are flying around the solar system in a shooting gallery,” says Ed Lu, a former astronaut and head of the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting humanity from asteroids.

The asteroid known as 2012 DA14 was first spotted last year by astronomers in Spain. It's thought to be about 150 feet across and made of rock.

It will whiz past Earth on Feb. 15, going about 5 miles per second. At its closest approach, it will be only about 17,200 miles above the surface of our planet. That's far nearer to us than the moon, and even closer than some weather and communications satellites.

NASA officials say this event is one for the record books — the first time scientists have been able to predict something so big coming so close.

More here. And thanks to our reader “stone” see this cool visualization.

A Coat

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.

by W.B. Yeats

Michael Kammen in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

When two of the greatest artistic talents of all time, living in the same urban hothouse, are enticed into intense rivalry by leaders and patrons of their community, the consequence is a consummate competition exacerbated by the politics of pride and instability. The ego-driven desire to surpass a rival can uncover suns of genius casting long-term shadows. In this particular instance, the artists happen to be the middle-aged Leonardo da Vinci and the zealous, energetic Michelangelo, a generation younger.

The place is republican Florence; the focal time is 1503 to 1506, with many implications far beyond, when the Medici family, tossed from power late in the 15th century, successfully schemed to regain firm control (they ultimately did in 1530). By then Leonardo had died in France as a self-imposed exile and court painter to the king, and Michelangelo had gone to Rome, first to build a mausoleum for the Pope and later to labor on his masterwork, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Court painter to the Pope and hardly alone, he was one of the architects who figured out the math needed to raise Bramante’s immense dome over St. Peter’s.

Jonathan Jones — a Cantabridgian art critic for The Guardian and contributor to many magazines and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times — has written a well-argued and well-informed page-turner about the artists and their rivalry that is infinitely accessible for the general reader. It is also little more than half the length of Rona Goffen’s very fine Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (2002). Readers intrigued by The Lost Battles, as I am, may choose to follow up with Goffen’s tome. Jones’s is a treatise of political and artistic intrigue, crafted in muscular and arresting prose.

More here.

Zoe Cormier in Nature:

Cancer researchers have pinned down a molecule that can kick-start the body’s own tumour-destroying systems, triggering cell death in cancerous but not healthy tissue in mice.

The molecule, TIC10, activates the gene for a protein called TRAIL (tumour-necrosis-factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand), which has long been a target for cancer researchers looking for drugs that would avoid the debilitating effects of conventional therapies.

“TRAIL is a part of our immune system: all of us with functional immune systems use this molecule to keep tumours from forming or spreading, so boosting this will not be as toxic as chemotherapy,” says Wafik El-Deiry, an oncologist at Pennsylvania State University in Hershey and lead author of the study, which is published today in Science Translational Medicine¹.

Experiments showed that TIC10 had potent effects against a variety of tumours, including breast, lymphatic, colon and lung cancer. It was especially effective at triggering cell suicide in glioblastoma, a kind of brain tumour that is notoriously difficult to treat².

More here.

Suzanne Klingenstein in the Weekly Standard:

In 1935, Ernst Gombrich, scion of a bourgeois Viennese Jewish family, and newly minted Ph.D. in art history, found himself out of work. Walter Neurath, a friend and publisher, asked him to look over an English history book for children and, if it was any good, to translate it into German. Neurath wanted to publish it in his new series “Knowledge for Children.”

A few days later, the 26-year-old Gombrich returned the book with the remark, “I think I could write a better one myself.” Neurath asked him to deliver. Reading in his parents’ library in the morning, studying period documents in the afternoon, and writing at night, Gombrich produced, under great time pressure, what was to be his only book in German: Eine Weltgeschichte von der Urzeit bis zur Gegenwart (1936). The book was an instant success, and has remained in print. With its brevity and intended audience, it mocked the then-ubiquitous, multi-tomed, solid leatherUniversalgeschichten (global histories) designed to give heft to the achievements of the urban bourgeoisie.

Gombrich’s tone was light, his approach literary, his attitude toward his young readers engaging and conversational. What would a 10-year-old in 1935 really have to know about knights and courtly love, or the rebirth of humanism, in order to begin her privileged life in one of Europe’s most cultured cities?

Quite a bit, Gombrich thought: Even children were then expected to know things and to think about them. Gombrich squeezed all of European history, from the cavemen to the end of World War I, into 39 chapters, an appealing number to children because it’s three times the creepy 13. He added chapter 40 only in 1985 when he revised the book for its 50th anniversary. The new chapter covered World War II, and Gombrich ingeniously called it “The Small Part of the History of the World Which I Have Lived Through Myself.”

More here.

Insanity and poetry are old kin. The number of canonical poets who suffered from mental illness is immense: Blake, Holderlin, Pound, Plath, Lowell, Berryman, Hill, to name just a few. The distinction between insanity and genius is typically judged by the extent of an artist's transgressions as well as their social class. The blue-blood can afford his or her illness. A struggling mother or teacher is suffocated by it. And although poets may be granted some leniency, they're hardly alone. Many vocations provide a similar amount of societal absolution, from obsessive-compulsive computer programmers to sociopathic business executives and egomaniacal radio hosts. This special relationship between mental illness and vocation also reveals a significant dilemma about the nature of insanity. Say, for example, that the expression of some mental illnesses fulfills the needs of a profession especially well, and a large number of people with that illness hold it. This could be the coincidence of industry, society, and psychology: a particular job happens to suit those with a given illness, allowing them a productive place in the world. This assumes an atomized world of isolated forces and a certain amount of good luck. On the other hand, it could be that insanity exists as an expression of socioeconomic forces: that the behaviors and cognitive patterns which are judged to be disordered are, in fact, manifestations of economic and social power structures already in place.

more from Daniel Evans Pritchard at The Critical Flame here.

Our earliest friendships are coed, then imprecisely homoerotic, as we reach the age at which tribal peoples form cadres of hunter-warriors to protect and feed the clan, then homophobic for the sake of family life, and at last relaxed and coed again. Nevertheless, infatuation changes the equation, the high stakes of intimacy, and the Lord thought it necessary to devote two of his commandments—Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery and, separately, Thou Shall Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Wife—to the nexus of the sexes. (My strait-laced mother once said only men and women attracted to each other could really be friends.) Perhaps the carnal add-on caused me not to include Nell, Liz, Amy, Brigit, Leonore, Marion, Linda, or Trudy on my initial list of best friends, although they were actually better intrinsically than the males: wholehearted, primal, reproductive— knowing, seeing, giving everything. The buddy system still underpins modern infantry warfare, and young women employ it every day on city playgrounds to keep their children safe. It’s second nature there, as on the veldt. Second nature means reading other people’s thoughts when they are silent, or acting frequently and anonymously on charitable impulses with no quid pro quo.

more from Edward Hoagland at The American Scholar here.