Grass and Water

The geese have their heaven and I have mine,
though both are made of grass and water and both
have sudden and subtle bridges where the carved stone
changes color under the presumptive arches,
and it is microcosmic and symbolic
so I could be there lying under the stars,
if it is one of the hazy afternoons,
and even mistake the birdlime for the Milky Way
or one drop of water in the sunlight
for one of the late afternoons, though nothing I know
will save them even though their eggs are like steel,
even though their guards are wise; whereas I
still am struggling, I with the soft egg, I
with the infantile presidents. You should see me
explaining things to them, below the bridge
this side of the river, not for one good second
ridiculing them. I still am reading and thinking;
I still am comparing; and I am spending my time
like one or two others in understanding, that is
a type of heaven too, at least for me it is,
holding on to the stabbed uprooted sycamore.
.

by Gerald Stern
from American Sonnets
W.W. Norton, 2002

Massimo Mazzotti in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Art forgeries have long been the stuff of thrillers, with fake da Vincis or Vermeers fooling connoisseurs, roiling the art world, and moving millions of dollars. We don’t think of ancient books driving such grand forgery, intrigue, and schadenfreude. This is changing thanks in part to a clever forgery of Galileo’s landmark book Sidereus Nuncius, published in Venice in 1610. Arguably one of the most extraordinary scientific publications of all times, Sidereus Nuncius turned Galileo into the brightest new star of Western science. Four centuries later, a faked copy of this book has disarmed a generation of Galileo experts, and raised a host of intriguing questions about the social nature of scholarly authentication, the precariousness of truth, and the revelatory power of fakes.

The story begins in 1609, when Galileo was a professor at the University of Padua, then under the rule of the Republic of Venice. The 45-year-old Galileo was on his way to toppling Ptolemaic and Aristotelian conceits, revolutionizing the principles of motion, and redefining what physics was and meant. He was also struggling with financial problems, saddled with supporting a lover and three children, with the dowry for a sister’s marriage, and with a hapless brother. With little hope for a salary increase, he borrowed money, gave private lessons, and made instruments to sell.

In July 1609, he heard about a spyglass being made in Holland. Quickly, he figured out the requisite shape and combination of lenses needed to go from two or three orders of magnification to eight. Just one month later he presented his invention to the Senate of Venice as a new military technology; it would, he told the Senate, make it possible to spot enemy ships at sea a full two hours before a naked-eye observer. There was no such thing as our notion of a patent in those days, so Galileo needed to be strategic in order to benefit from his inventions and discoveries. To this end, he offered the telescope as a “gift” to the Senate. It worked. He was rewarded in the form of tenure and a doubling of his salary.

More here.

From World Pulse:

Have you yourself faced obstacles to embracing a different view of masculinity?

There is a stigma that exists today in the United States. I think it exists in all countries, but we’ll talk about the US. It’s a very subtle stigma regarding men working on “women’s issues” or being associated with women’s issues. I remember when the book The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen came out. Oprah Winfrey selected it as one of her Oprah’s Book Club books. Mr. Franzen declined the offer, and I heard him imply on NPR that his concern was that Oprah’s selections are “women’s books.” This is one example of the mentality I am talking about. I admit myself that when I first started the Harpswell Foundation, I initially placed most of the emphasis on helping Cambodia develop. At a subtle level, I myself was resisting the idea of working for women’s empowerment. I was both a victim and a culprit of this mentality. It took me a couple of years to get comfortable with the fact that the empowerment of women was, in fact, a central thrust of what I was doing.

I’ve always believed that women are equal to men, but I still had to erase this attitude in myself that was resisting the idea of aligning myself with women’s empowerment. I am a case study in the problem. But of course now I fully embrace this role.

More here.

From Scroll:

Honorable ladies and gentlemen!

I've been asked to explain how I write stories.
This “how” is problematic. What can I tell you about how I write stories?

It is a very convoluted matter. With this “how” before me I could say I sit on the sofa in my room, take out paper and pen, utter bismillah, and start writing, while all three of my daughters keep making a lot of noise around me. I talk to them as I write, settle their quarrels, make salad for myself, and, if someone drops by for a visit, I show him hospitality. During all this, I don’t stop writing my story.

If I must answer how I write, I would say my manner of writing is no different from my manner of eating, taking a bath, smoking cigarettes, or wasting time.

Now, if one asked why I write short stories, well, I have an answer for that. Here it goes:

I write because I’m addicted to writing, just as I’m addicted to wine. For if I don't write a story, I feel as if I'm not wearing any clothes, I haven't bathed, or I haven’t had my wine.

More here.

Wilfred M. McClay at Hedgehog Review:

Do we imagine that complete control over our biological fates will necessarily make us happier? Perhaps it will. But one can as easily imagine that there might be little room for uninhibited joy or exuberance in such a world. More likely it will be a tightly wound world, saturated with bitterness and anxiety and mutual suspicion, in which life and health will be guarded with all the ferocity of Ebenezer Scrooge guarding his money. Growing mastery means growing responsibility, and the need to assign blame, since nothing happens by chance. Some of the blame will be directed at the parents, politicians, doctors, and celebrities who make plausible villains, or conspiracy theories that explain why someone else is always at fault. But much of the blame will devolve upon ourselves, since in being set free to choose so much about our lives, we will have no one else to blame when we make a complete mess of things.

No, there is good reason to fear that the more our lives are prolonged and powers extended, and the more death becomes seen as an avoidable evil whose precise moment should be “chosen,” rather than an inherent feature of human life, the more common it will be to encounter people who live imprisoned by their fear of all risk, since the possible consequences of any risk will seem too vast, too horrible, and too fully avoidable, to be contemplated.

more here.

Michael Wood at Lapham's Quarterly:

While Sentimental Education provides the requisite arcs and twists of a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel, and a story of a Young Man from the Provinces, it also questions the assumptions of each, asking if any of these stories quite leads to where it is supposed to go. This is to say that we are invited to explore the realm of what Balzac calls illusions and Flaubert calls sentiments, where ambition and fantasy are rampant and sometimes fulfilled, where cynical advice passes as sagacity. It is the realm of what we think we know—what some of us are sure we know—but where none of us is always right. In other words, the world we enter in adolescence and rarely ever leave. The trouble with the place is that although it provides unheard-of opportunities, it offers no guarantee in individual cases. This is as true for bad news as it is for good. If so many European novels seem to know that things will not end well, they know this for sure only because they are novels, because the choice of endings belongs to the author, not to chance or history. What the novels and the authors know beneath their plots, or inside of them, is that almost anything can happen; that the difference between a successful plan and an aberrant fantasy can’t be told until the game is completely over.

more here.

David Trotter at The London Review of Books:

According to elevator legend, it all began with a stunt. In the summer of 1854, at the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in New York, an engineer called Elisha Graves Otis gave regular demonstrations of his new safety device. Otis had himself hoisted into the air on a platform secured on either side by guide-rails and – at a suitably dramatic height – cut the cable. Instead of plummeting to the ground fifty feet below, the platform stopped dead after a couple of inches. ‘All safe, gentlemen, all safe,’ Otis would bellow at the expectant crowd. The device was simple enough: a flat-leaf cart spring above the platform splayed out to its full extent as soon as the cable was cut, engaging notches in the guide-rails. Has any mode of transport ever been safer? After 1854, malfunctioning (or non-existent) doors were the only direct risk still attached to travelling by lift. Safety first was not so much a motto as a premise. No wonder that the closest high-end TV drama has come to Sartrean nausea is the moment in Mad Menwhen a pair of elevator doors mysteriously parts in front of troubled genius Don Draper, who is left peering in astonishment down into a mechanical abyss. The cables coiling and uncoiling in the shaft stand in for the root of Roquentin’s chestnut tree.

more here.

William Sitwell in The Telegraph:

Britain’s restaurateurs are scratching their heads. An Indian establishment has clinched the number one spot in the National Restaurant Awards. And it’s knocked the man of the moment off the top spot. Tom Kerridge, whose Hand and Flowers pub was last year’s winner, will not be the only one wondering today exactly how the cuisine of naan breads, chicken tikka masala, pints of lager and chutney could have pulled it off.

Except that Gymkhana, the Mayfair eaterie that won the coveted award, isn’t exactly your average curry house. It opened in September 2013 and was inspired by the Raj era of Indian gymkhana clubs. Fans, hanging from the dark lacquered oak ceilings, whirl softly; wall lamps are made from Jaipur cut-glass; there are hunting trophies from the Maharaja of Jodhpur. Oak booths host tables of marble, the banquettes are of bitter chocolate leather. The rooms are divided by mottled glass screens, the walls are hung with old Punch sketches and Indian sporting prints. The menu, meanwhile, features dishes such as duck egg and white crab bhurji, Chettinad duck, achari roe deer chops, mustard mooli, lamb nalli barra and Gilafi buffalo seekh kebab. Desserts include Jaggery caramel custard and rosewater kulfi falooda. Among the cocktails is the Ooty town gimlet, made with Hendricks gin and crystalised rose petals. Yes, there is a lassi, only it’s made with Butterfly Boston absinthe, cucumber and dill.

More here.

Tanya Lewis in Scientific American:

Could reading a cheerful or depressing post on Facebook influence your own mood? Apparently so, according to a new study conducted by the social networking company. When Facebook removed positive posts from the news feeds of more than 680,000 users, those users made fewer positive posts and more negative ones. Similarly, when negative posts were removed, the opposite occurred. The findings provide experimental evidence that emotions can be contagious, even without direct interaction or nonverbal cues, the researchers say. [The Top 10 Golden Rules of Facebook] “These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions,” the authors wrote in the study published June 17 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The idea that emotional states can spread among people without their awareness, known as emotional contagion, has been shown before in laboratory experiments. One study found that lasting moods such as depression and happiness can be transferred via a real-world social network, but the findings have been controversial because it was based on correlational evidence and could not rule out other potential variables. Facebook researchers decided to look for evidence of emotional contagion among users of its online social networking site. Facebook users often express emotions on the site, which their friends can view in their personal news feed.

More here.

The Magic Carpet
.

Because I am the greatest in his realm
your husband sent for me, left me alone with you in the inner palace

where, on pain of death, no man may tread.
My commission was to render your face

in silks and thread of gold, the most delicate of textiles.
Of course the inevitable happened (for the rumours

of your beauty weren’t greatly exaggerated) and I set out to make your portrait
unfinishable. Every night I heard the women and eunuchs murmur

in the corridors: “Hush, hush, the master is working!”
when every night my work was withering,

stitch by ripped stitch, in my own hands. How long can I explain the delay,
my doings and undoings, this penelopian dithering?

Your face shimmers on the floor beneath me.
I cannot insert the final threads of vermilion, jade and blue

for fear that we have lift off before I can even step aside
and it carries me away from you.
.

by Billy Ramsell
from Complicated Pleasures
publisher Dedalus, Dublin, 2007

Zia Haider Rahman’s first novel, In the Light of What We Know, is already the literary event of the year (reviewed in Open, ‘A Groundbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’, 23 June 2014). Born in Bangladesh and educated at Oxford, Cambridge and Yale, Rahman has worked as an investment banker and human rights lawyer.

S Prasannarajan in Open:

As a writer, you hold the world in your palm and play with it. Are you drawn to the novel as a form because of the freedom that it alone gives you?

There are few venues that offer the scope to explore the phenomena of experience and consciousness afforded by the art of the novel. I believe that the novel remains the pre-eminent form for a certain kind of enquiry.

Ideas, from philosophy to politics to mathematics, replace action in this novel, seldom seen in novels from the East. Am I right?

I wouldn’t presume to comment on what is (or isn’t) seldom seen in novels from the East. But to take your substantive point, I understand what you’re getting at though I would have to reframe it slightly. There’s a lot of action in this novel, ranging from walks in the leafy squares of Bloomsbury in London and boat rides off Manhattan island to train crashes in Sylhet and bomb explosions in Kabul. But what you’re noting is that there’s also a lot that is discussed, in the way that two men—both approaching middle-age, both of a certain education, both at pivotal moments in their lives— might discuss things if freed from quotidian claims. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, of soundbites and the frenetically simplifying accounts of an ever more complex social environment, these two men have been granted a space in which to slow down.

Consider an American president’s decision to take his country to war. What the media will slant us towards is the action of the battlefield, which is where the images are. But think of the drama that took place in the lead-up to the decision. The state department at loggerheads with the defense department; junior analysts at the CIA resigning noisily over the willful blindness of their superiors. All action is predicated on a drama, sometimes a struggle in itself, played out in thoughts and ideas, in the things we think we know.

Many of the novels that have left an enduring mark on me have not shied away from exploring the life of the mind, directly or indirectly. Sebald’s novels are an obvious example, but there are many other works too, not so readily detectable in similarities of style but whose influence has been, I think, on my perception of what fiction is capable of doing. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus combines ‘action,’ as you put it, with ideas, or the actions of the mind. Our beliefs are what animate us and without them we would be lifeless.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

I have often talked about the Many-Worlds or Everett approach to quantum mechanics — here’s an explanatory video, an excerpt from From Eternity to Here, and slides from a talk. But I don’t think I’ve ever explained as persuasively as possible why I think it’s the right approach. So that’s what I’m going to try to do here. Although to be honest right off the bat, I’m actually going to tackle a slightly easier problem: explaining why the many-worlds approach is not completely insane, and indeed quite natural. The harder part is explaining why it actually works, which I’ll get to in another post.

Any discussion of Everettian quantum mechanics (“EQM”) comes with the baggage of pre-conceived notions. People have heard of it before, and have instinctive reactions to it, in a way that they don’t have to (for example) effective field theory. Hell, there is even an app, universe splitter, that lets you create new universes from your iPhone. (Seriously.) So we need to start by separating the silly objections to EQM from the serious worries.

The basic silly objection is that EQM postulates too many universes. In quantum mechanics, we can’t deterministically predict the outcomes of measurements. In EQM, that is dealt with by saying that every measurement outcome “happens,” but each in a different “universe” or “world.” Say we think of Schrödinger’s Cat: a sealed box inside of which we have a cat in a quantum superposition of “awake” and “asleep.” (No reason to kill the cat unnecessarily.) Textbook quantum mechanics says that opening the box and observing the cat “collapses the wave function” into one of two possible measurement outcomes, awake or asleep. Everett, by contrast, says that the universe splits in two: in one the cat is awake, and in the other the cat is asleep. Once split, the universes go their own ways, never to interact with each other again.

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Wired:

For nearly a century, “reality” has been a murky concept. The laws of quantum physics seem to suggest that particles spend much of their time in a ghostly state, lacking even basic properties such as a definite location and instead existing everywhere and nowhere at once. Only when a particle is measured does it suddenly materialize, appearing to pick its position as if by a roll of the dice.

This idea that nature is inherently probabilistic — that particles have no hard properties, only likelihoods, until they are observed — is directly implied by the standard equations of quantum mechanics. But now a set of surprising experiments with fluids has revived old skepticism about that worldview. The bizarre results are fueling interest in an almost forgotten version of quantum mechanics, one that never gave up the idea of a single, concrete reality.

The experiments involve an oil droplet that bounces along the surface of a liquid. The droplet gently sloshes the liquid with every bounce. At the same time, ripples from past bounces affect its course. The droplet’s interaction with its own ripples, which form what’s known as a pilot wave, causes it to exhibit behaviors previously thought to be peculiar to elementary particles — including behaviors seen as evidence that these particles are spread through space like waves, without any specific location, until they are measured.

More here.

Todd Cronan at nonsite:

For admirers of the work of Walter Benjamin, a translation of Paul Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel is a major event. Benjamin continually lauded Lesabéndio throughout his life, most decisively in his famous vision of architectural politics, “Experience and Poverty” of 1933. Benjamin’s interest in Scheerbart spans the whole of his career, from Gershom Scholem’s gifting him the book at his wedding to an essay on Scheerbart written near the end of his life. Most significantly, Benjamin intended to write an extensive essay on the book that was meant as a fulfillment of the claims set out in “The Destructive Character” and was to be provocatively entitled “The True Politician.” As the Benjamin literature grows, so does Scheerbart’s reputation. Since 2007 there has been a dramatic rise in the stature of Scheerbart’s writings, including the translation of four books and a range of essays and artistic projects related to his work. At the center of Scheerbart’s current reputation is the identification of technology (glass and steel) and politics. As Josiah McElheny, the artist whose work has revolved around Scheerbart’s example in recent years, recently put it, the “most important aspect of Scheerbart’s thinking” is to see how his “world of fantasy was in fact his attempt to discuss politics by other means.”

Scheerbart’s 1913 sci-fi novel—undoubtedly his most significant literary achievement—provides another in a series of wildly ambitious architecturally-based explorations of utopia.

more here.

Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker:

In January, 1975, the musician Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt released a set of flash cards they called “Oblique Strategies.” Friends since meeting at art school, in the late sixties, they had long shared guidelines that could pry apart an intellectual logjam, providing options when they couldn’t figure out how to move forward. The first edition consisted of a hundred and fifteen cards. They were black on one side with an aphorism or an instruction printed on the reverse. Eno’s first rule was “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” Others included “Use non-musicians” and “Tape your mouth.” In “Brian Eno: Visual Music,” a monograph of his musical projects and visual art, Eno, who still uses the rules, says, “ ‘Oblique Strategies’ evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation—particularly in studios—tended to make me quickly forget that there were other ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach.”

Eno is widely known for coining the term “ambient music,” and he produced a clutch of critically revered albums in the nineteen-seventies and eighties—by the Talking Heads, David Bowie, and U2, among others—but if I had to choose his greatest contribution to popular music it would be the idea that musicians do their best work when they have no idea what they’re doing.

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John Feehan at Dublin Review of Books:

It is difficult for anybody who looks dispassionately at the statistics that echo our depletion of the Earth’s resources, and illustrate how wounded is the world of nature, not to be profoundly disheartened at times. The human population has increased four-fold over the last hundred years, and doubled in our lifetime, but our use of water resources has grown nine-fold in that time, climate emissions have increased seventeen-fold, overfishing by a multiple of thirty-five. The rainforests that harbour most terrestrial biodiversity have dwindled: Madagascar has lost ninety-three per cent of its forest, ninety-nine per cent of the Atlantic coast forest of Brazil is gone, the island forests of Polynesia and the Caribbean have disappeared altogether. At the current rate of extinction, thirty per cent of species will be gone by 2050.

The growing concern among ecologists about the rate of species extinction, and the urgent need to do something more focused about halting or reversing it, resulted in the formation of the Society for Ecological Restoration in 1987 and the establishment of the journal Restoration Ecology. There is now a flood of scientific papers in this and other publications documenting the theory and practice of our attempts to try to patch a few of the holes in the unravelling fabric of biological and ecological diversity in every quarter of the Earth.

more here.

Wayne Koestenbaum in Bookforum:

In a somber essay I wrote in 1989 and haven’t reread in twenty-five years, a piece whose heavyhearted title was “Speaking in the Shadow of AIDS,” I concluded: “The motive behind this brief inquiry into AIDS and language has been an attempt, perhaps immodest, to mold words into something stainless. AIDS has made me watch my speech, as if my words were a second, more easily monitored body, less liable than the first to the whimsy of a virus. . . . Bodies have always wanted only one thing, to be aimless: or so I say, knowing that bodies, and always, and aimless, are among the most seductive, and the most outdated, of the several rhetorics I must soon discard.” I still haven’t discarded those rhetorics. When I wrote these words, I hadn’t yet heard of Hervé Guibert, the French novelist, memoirist, critic, and photographer who would die of AIDS in 1991, at the age of thirty-six. I regret my ignorance. Now, after reading his posthumously published journals, finally translated into English by the esteemed Nathanaël and published by Nightboat Books (a press notable for having given us the collected poems of Tim Dlugos), Guibert’s lifework looms before me not merely as what Keats called (describing the Elgin Marbles) the “shadow of a magnitude,” but as the magnitude itself, sans shadow.

I might as well mention some impediments. I can’t write about Guibert without mentioning his beautiful face: His literary greatness is tied, Laocoön style, to his attractiveness. I can’t write about Guibert without noting the historical coincidence that he’s dead and I’m not: He was born only three years before me. And I can’t objectively evaluate the work of a writer I take personally and envy, though I can’t entirely wish to trade places with a man—however much he qualifies as an idealizable hyacinth—who died so young.

More here.

Maggie Koreth-Baker in The New York Times:

This past winter was the coldest Detroit had experienced in 36 years. Across the upper Midwest, cities shivered, and more than 90 percent of the surface area of the Great Lakes froze solid. It seemed like ideal weather to kill an unwanted insect. But it did little to stop the emerald ash borer, an invasive Asian beetle that is devastating ash trees from Minnesota to New York. “We didn’t find a single dead larva,” said Deborah G. McCullough, a professor of entomology and forestry at Michigan State, who led a study of ash trees in Lower Michigan over the winter. Even before the severe winter, Dr. McCullough and other scientists had come to the glum conclusion that they were going to lose the decade-long battle against the ash borer. Now they are assessing the cascade of consequences for Midwestern and Northeastern forests, both urban and wild. The effects will go far beyond what you see on a hike or how you feel about the loss of a tree on your property. They will ripple through forest ecosystems, affecting other plants, animals and water supplies.

Emerald ash borers do their damage as larvae, eating into the bark and burrowing deep into the trunk to insulate themselves against the cold. In the process, they cut off access to the nutrients and water that the tree needs to survive; it is like severing a human’s network of veins and arteries. After surviving the unusually cold winter, the beetles emerged in spring as adults. Now they are mating and laying eggs, leaving the next generation of larvae to tunnel through the trees’ internal organs. They can kill an ash tree in as little as two years.

More here.