Mother's Home Ritual for Quenching Fires

Unwind your garden hose……..Lady bird, lady bird
……….lay it across the insatiable lawn
………………..do not turn it on

Drink wine from a jar
……….shake the dregs
………………..into your palm
……………………………………..fly away home

Bathe in a tub without water
……….walk into the kitchen with your eyes closed
………………..stare at the horizon
……………………………………..your house is on fire

Build towers of ash on the walk
……….the vacant swings
………………..the back seat of your car
……………………………………..your children are gone

Borrow sugar from a neighbor
……….let it melt in the driveway
………………..give away your matches
……………………………………..all except one

Write the fire on your laundry list
……….set it aflame
………………..watch the name curl into ash
……………………………………..and that's Little Anne

Dine with firefighters
……….wear a sundress with nothing underneath
………………..say a prayer to St. Barabara
……………………………………..for she has crept under your warming pan

Steady your hand above a basin or water……….Lady bird, lady bird
………pretend to read your fortune there
………………..pretend you are not thirsty.

by M.L. Brown
from Blackbird; Vol 8. No. 2

From BBC News:

Just five minutes of exercise in a “green space” such as a park can boost mental health, researchers claim.

There is growing evidence that combining activities such as walking or cycling with nature boosts well-being. In the latest analysis, UK researchers looked at evidence from 1,250 people in 10 studies and found fast improvements in mood and self-esteem. The study in the Environmental Science and Technology journal suggested the strongest impact was on young people. The research looked at many different outdoor activities including walking, gardening, cycling, fishing, boating, horse-riding and farming in locations such as a park, garden or nature trail.

The biggest effect was seen within just five minutes. With longer periods of time exercising in a green environment, the positive effects were clearly apparent but were of a smaller magnitude, the study found. Looking at men and women of different ages, the researchers found the health changes – physical and mental – were particularly strong in the young and the mentally-ill.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

If a campaign volunteer shows up at your door, urging you to vote in an upcoming election, you are 10 percent more likely to go to the polls—and others in your household are 6 percent more likely to vote. When you try to recall an unfamiliar word, the likelihood you’ll remember it depends partly on its position in a network of words that sound similar. And when a cell in your body develops a cancerous mutation, its daughter cells will carry that mutation; whether you get cancer depends largely on that cell’s position in the network of cellular reproduction.

However unrelated these phenomena may seem, a single scholarly field has helped illuminate all of them. The study of networks can illustrate how viruses, opinions, and news spread from person to person—and can make it possible to track the spread of obesity, suicide, and back pain. Network science points toward tools for predicting stock-price trends, designing transportation systems, and detecting cancer. It used to be that sociologists studied networks of people, while physicists and computer scientists studied different kinds of networks in their own fields. But as social scientists sought to understand larger, more sophisticated networks, they looked to physics for methods suited to this complexity. And it is a two-way street: network science “is one of the rare areas where you see physicists and molecular biologists respectfully citing the work of social scientists and borrowing their ideas,” says Nicholas Christakis, a physician and medical sociologist and coauthor of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (2009).

More here.

Via Andrew Sullivan:

Has steampunk jumped Captain Nemo’s clockwork shark yet? The genre — succinctly described as a mix of archaic tech (either real or fanciful), the supernatural, and postmodern metafictional tricksterism, set in the consensus historical past or alternate timelines — was first christened in 1987, a lifetime ago as cultural and literary fads are measured, in a letter to Locus magazine from the writer K.W. Jeter. Of course, the actual roots of the form extend back even further, perhaps as early as 1965, when a certain television show named “The Wild, Wild West” debuted. Some literary styles and tropes wane with their cultural moment, but others have proved exceedingly long-lived, with writers continually discovering unexplored narrative possibilities within elastic bounds. Perhaps the best example is the Gothic, still with us today, and flourishing, despite being a couple of centuries old. But steampunk has exfoliated beyond the merely literary, into the daily lives of its fans.

more from Paul Di Filippo at Salon here.

Cosima Wagner had about as interesting a life as anyone who didn’t found a religion or personally lead an invasion of a foreign empire. It’s perhaps surprising, since her whole existence was just as an appendage to her husband, Richard, the great composer. Before she met him, everything in her circumstances seemed to be preparing her for the momentous marriage. After he died, she devoted the rest of her long life – she died 47 years after him, in 1930 – to perpetuating his memory and sustaining the festival of his works at Bayreuth. By the time she died, Wagner’s reputation was in an aesthetic aspic, and at the forefront of a terrible political dynamism: antique stagings of his works were presented to audiences of Brownshirts. For that, Cosima Wagner was as much to blame as anyone. She was the daughter of Franz Liszt and his aristocratic mistress, Marie d’Agoult. Though they had three children together, they maintained rather a loose connection – Marie once wrote to Liszt, on tour, to ask his permission to commit adultery with an English diplomat. Cosima and her siblings were abandoned to the casual care of elderly women – Liszt’s mother Anna, then the governess of Liszt’s new mistress, the legendarily bonkers Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein.

more from Philip Hensher at The Telegraph here.

I confess, dear reader: I’ve always had a problem with William T. Vollmann. I can’t fail to admire his tender heart and wide-awake conscience, and it’s hard not to appreciate his energy, his intensity, his unstoppable curiosity about the world and everything in it — women, violence, death, war zones, the night. Who else would give us a subtitle, as in his new book, that spills over and over, and begin a work of 504 pages, complete with bibliography, glossary, chronology and five appendixes, with a modest disclaimer about his “short book”? Actually, it is short when compared with his seven-volume 2003 treatise on violence, “Rising Up and Rising Down,” and the 811-page novel, “Europe Central,” that won the National Book Award in 2005. It’s now been all of 10 months since the 1,306-page Vollmann opus “Imperial” appeared, serving up every­thing you’d thought to ask about the Mexico-California border, and much you probably hadn’t. In the age of Twitter and 24-frame-per-second attention spans, such almost demented obsessiveness is itself an exhilaration. My problem has been that paragraphs that seem to last as long as other writers’ chapters can suggest a kind of deafness and self-enclosure, or suit­cases into which you push every scrap you’ve ever collected, underwear and index cards spilling out the sides. These go a little oddly with a 24-page chapter (as in “Kissing the Mask”) on “What Is Grace?” Whenever I read about another of Vollmann’s earnest attempts to rescue a prostitute from the life she’s possibly chosen, I applaud his romantic hopefulness as much as I worry about his Quiet Americanism. And if any place would seem profoundly ill-suited to his hyper-wordy, over-the-top, madly indulgent approach — his love of gaucherie, uninflectedness and analytical filler — you’d think it would be the land of haiku and Noh plays. As they say around Kyoto, there’s a reason humans were given two ears and only one mouth. Reader, I was wrong — in part.

more from Pico Iyer at the NYT here.

Powwow Ghazal

Can you hear the drums? Can you hear the drums?
Tonight, the reservation is aflame with drums.

Who's that drum group? They're good, but they're kids.
They have no idea how their lives will change with drums.

And what about those drummers? O, they're old school.
They're everybody's elders. They've gone gray with drums.

O, listen to that singer! He's equal parts joy and hurt.
His hands and vocal cords are bloodstained with drums.

Damn, look at that fancy dancer spin in circles.
She's weeping! The girl is going insane with drums.

Who's the head man dancer? He's been sober for ten years.
Now he only gets drunk, stoned, and dazed with drums.

Who's the head woman dancer? That's a grandmother.
She speaks in sermons. She offers us grace with drums.

That jingle dancer, ah, she's a reservation beauty.
Talk to her, cousin, because you can get laid with drums.

That nostalgic Indian is wearing blue suede shoes.
He's the Indian Elvis, mixing his pomade with drums.

Hey, look at that tribal cop with a shiny badge and gun.
She wants to solve a crime. She's Sam Spade with drums.

But don't forget that powwows can be dangerous too.
You better duck or get punched in the face with drums.

Do you have a question? It can be answered here.
There is nothing that can't be explained with drums.

No, I'm lying. Indians are glorious deceivers.
We love to obscure, obfuscate, and exaggerate with drums.

During powwow, even God wants to sing and dance.
So God makes thunder, lightning, and rain with drums.

Nobody has gone to bed yet. We've been awake for days.
I sometimes think that every Indian is made with drums.

by Sherman Alexie
from Blackbird; Vol.8 No.2; Fall 2009

From Salon:

The timing of Robert Whitaker’s “Anatomy of an Epidemic,” a comprehensive and highly readable history of psychiatry in the United States, couldn’t be better. An acclaimed mental health journalist and winner of a George Polk Award for his reporting on the psychiatric field, Whitaker draws on 50 years of literature and in-person interviews with patients to answer a simple question: If “wonder drugs” like Prozac are really helping people, why has the number of Americans on government disability due to mental illness skyrocketed from 1.25 million in 1987 to over 4 million today?

“Anatomy of an Epidemic” is the first book to investigate the long-term outcomes of patients treated with psychiatric drugs, and Whitaker finds that, overall, the drugs may be doing more harm than good. Adhering to studies published in prominent medical journals, he argues that, over time, patients with schizophrenia do better off medication than on it. Children who take stimulants for ADHD, he writes, are more likely to suffer from mania and bipolar disorder than those who go unmedicated. Intended to challenge the conventional wisdom about psychiatric drugs, “Anatomy” is sure to provoke a hot-tempered response, especially from those inside the psychiatric community.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Researchers at Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine (GSDM) link tooth loss and periodontal disease to cognitive decline in one of the largest and longest prospective studies on the topic to date, released in this month’s issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. Dr. Elizabeth Krall Kaye looked for patterns in dental records from 1970 to 1973 to determine if periodontal disease and tooth loss predicted whether people did well or poorly on cognitive tests. She found that for each tooth lost per decade, the risk of doing poorly increased approximately eight to 10 percent.

More cavities usually meant lower cognition too. People with no tooth loss tended to do better on the tests. Dr. Kaye says inflammation is a possible cause, noting that other studies found higher levels of inflammation markers in people with Alzheimer’s. “Periodontal disease and caries are infectious diseases that introduce inflammatory proteins into the blood,” she says. “There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that inflammation raises your risk of cognitive decline and it could be that gum inflammation is one of the sources.”

More here.

Richard Dawkins answers the question in the Washington Post:

No. As the College of Cardinals must have recognized when they elected him, he is perfectly – ideally – qualified to lead the Roman Catholic Church. A leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds; a man who believes he is infallible and acts the part; a man whose preaching of scientific falsehood is responsible for the deaths of countless AIDS victims in Africa; a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence: in short, exactly the right man for the job. He should not resign, moreover, because he is perfectly positioned to accelerate the downfall of the evil, corrupt organization whose character he fits like a glove, and of which he is the absolute and historically appropriate monarch.

No, Pope Ratzinger should not resign. He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice – the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution – while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears.

More here.

Christine Smallwood in The Nation:

In October historian Tony Judt gave a lecture at New York University, where he is a professor and director of the Remarque Institute, on the fate of Western social democracy. The talk was remarkable not only for what was said but for how. Judt–who has advanced amyoptrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease, and is paralyzed from the neck down–had memorized his talk, which he delivered from his wheelchair, his face partially obscured behind the breathing apparatus he calls his “facial Tupperware.” Several months later he published a version of the talk in The New York Review of Books, and when that caught fire he expanded the talk into a short book. Ill Fares the Land (Penguin Press; $25.95) traces the history of the postwar state in the United States and Europe, showing how rampant privatization, an excess of individualism and the worship of the market have produced unacceptable levels of inequality. Disparaging both extreme left- and right-wing solutions, Judt makes a case for social democracy, advocating a new conversation about our collective responsibilities as citizens, humanists and human beings. –Christine Smallwood

You write that Ill Fares the Land is for young people. When you were young, was there a book that did for you what you want this book to do for others?

It was a very different world. I was born in 1948, so I'm a '60s kid, and in the '60s everyone talked all the time, endlessly, about socialism versus capitalism, about political choices, ideology, Marxism, revolution, “the system” and so on. I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception. So when I think of books that really influenced me, they were books that went against the grain of those times. They were, for example, Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Or Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Or the book edited by Richard Crossman called The God That Failed, which was a collection of six essays, all by ex-communists, all by guys who were still on the left, by and large, people like Koestler, or Ignazio Silone in Italy, or Richard Wright, who were disillusioned communists but still committed leftists in one respect or another. Those are the kinds of books that influenced me, and it was because they were written by people with a very strong voice who were not necessarily simply opposing everything that existed. They were neither conservative nor revolutionary, but autonomous voices. What I'm trying to do in Ill Fares the Land is to write not from an ideological or political position but against the grain of current thought.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Discover:

The qualities that set a great athlete apart from the rest of us lie not just in the muscles and the lungs but also between the ears. That’s because athletes need to make complicated decisions in a flash. One of the most spectacular examples of the athletic brain operating at top speed came in 2001, when the Yankees were in an American League playoff game with the Oakland Athletics. Shortstop Derek Jeter managed to grab an errant throw coming in from right field and then gently tossed the ball to catcher Jorge Posada, who tagged the base runner at home plate. Jeter’s quick decision saved the game—and the series—for the Yankees. To make the play, Jeter had to master both conscious decisions, such as whether to intercept the throw, and unconscious ones. These are the kinds of unthinking thoughts he must make in every second of every game: how much weight to put on a foot, how fast to rotate his wrist as he releases a ball, and so on.

In recent years neuroscientists have begun to catalog some fascinating differences between average brains and the brains of great athletes. By understanding what goes on in athletic heads, researchers hope to understand more about the workings of all brains—those of sports legends and couch potatoes alike.

More here.

Ejaz Haider provides a nice summary of recent developments in Indian Express:

Social science has recorded, and tried to understand, the incidence of transformative processes, including revolutions; scholars have sought to nuance the idea and differentiate between political and social revolutions. If the current high tide of judicialisation of politics in Pakistan is anything to go by, we might have to add another category to the literature on transformative processes — judicial revolution.

But let’s start with some facts.

After the February 2008 elections, there was an overall demand from all political parties to revisit the Constitution and cleanse it of the toxics put in it by military dictators. A committee was formed with representatives from almost all political parties. The debate was intensive, spanned some nine months and reviewed over 100 clauses of the Constitution. The result: the Eighteenth Amendment.

More here.

Abbas Milani in The New Republic:

The last few months have seen a disquieting lull in news of political dissent from Iran. On the surface, at least, Ahmadinejad’s government seems to have outlasted the furor that erupted in the wake of last June’s election. Does this mean that the Green Movement is dead?

Not necessarily. Given the sheer number of people who have been arrested and tortured (political inmates at Iran’s most notorious prison just sent an incredible letter to several grand ayatollahs, detailing sexual, physical, and mental torture), it would be understandable if the Green Movement’s leaders had fallen completely silent. But they have continued to speak out. Mir Hossein Mousavi, for one, has evinced no signs of buckling under to the regime. Ten days ago, he met with other Green Movement leaders and said that while the “path to victory” would be “long and arduous,” he encouraged everyone to persevere. Then, this past Sunday, while meeting with veterans of the Iran-Iraq war, he said that the country’s current rulers were in breach of both the constitution and the tenets of Islam. And he blasted those in the regime who dismiss all critics as lackeys of Zionism.

Meanwhile, Mousavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, has recently become increasingly unabashed in her criticisms of the regime.

More here.

The Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg was named for the Empress Maria Alexandrovna, wife of Alexander II, and held its first performance in 1860. It was around this time that Fyodor Dostoevsky was hitting his stride. In 1864, his novel Notes from Underground was published; it is narrated by an unnamed retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. Dostoevsky had noted the influence of the West on Russian culture: “Why, everything, unquestionably almost everything that we have — of development, science, art, civic-mindedness, humanity, everything, everything comes from there — from that same land of holy wonders!” Dostoevsky was worried that the Russian soul was being displaced by foreign content. His narrator is a spiteful bureaucrat who shares this view and warns that we can’t trust him to tell the truth; he doesn’t even trust himself. Notes from Underground has been called the first existential novel (by Sartre, no less), and it could serve as a guide to the several competitions to build a new Mariinsky Theatre.

more from Don Gillmor at The Walrus here.

But what if we were to venture a different, more literal interpretation of this cultural symptom, which is after all only one of many signs that we are currently witnessing a zombie renaissance? Perhaps the zombie attack on Austen’s novel is telling us that the novel is neither alive nor dead but undead. We are living in a time when what counts as “life” is in significant scientific dispute, and in the heyday of zombie computers and zombie banks, zombie this and zombie that. Why wouldn’t we also be living in a time of zombie literary forms? Whatever their specific emphases and intricacies, all these zombies represent a plague of suspended agency, a sense that the human world is no longer (if it ever was) commanded by individuals making rational decisions. Instead we are witnessing a slow, compulsive, collective movement toward Malthusian self-destruction. Of course all monsters are projections of human fears, but only zombies make this fundamentally social and self-accusatory charge: we the people are the problem we cannot solve. We outnumber ourselves.

more from Mark McGurl at n+1 here.

Orbit

I think about joining the Seven Sisters
when I make
peanut butter and jelly
again.

Tying shoes I wonder
how this
planet doesn't stop spinning.

Dust bunnies are molecular chambers and
laundry is a colorful list of historical moments.

Standing around with other Moms
At preschool
they seem content,
to stare at each other as they
discuss what was on television or
survival of children's phases
or avoiding cellulite and crow's feet.

I never saw any of them look up
so I hardly ever
spoke up.

The children rotate around these stars,
manicured and yoga calm.
I once said something about
having only one child, suddenly
this black hole developed
and the conversation formed
a vacuum.

As if I was to be avoided or
studied from afar.
Maybe that's all I can give—
one supernova explosion
noted and charted in a
hospital on the outer nexus,
giving birth to a son.
Soon after I was noted
to collapse in on myself,
and the study of me
stoped with a note
of “high risk.”

The question is, was I capable
all along to give new bodies
to the cosmos,
but I waited too long?
I will test my theories and
write grant letters until
I die.

by Jen D. Clark
from Astropoetica, 2010