Saturday, May 25, 2019

THE WESTERN AND THE NOIR: HOW MOVIES SHAPED AMERICA; WHY GENERALS THOUGHT WW1 WOULD BE OVER IN A FEW MONTHS; KAFKA: GHOSTS; “YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU”; WORLD WITHOUT JOBS?

Cat in Hagia Sophia; photo: Eugene Halpern

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Passing in front of a small shop that sold
cheap and flimsy merchandise for workers,
he saw a face inside, a figure
that compelled him to go in, and he pretended
he wanted to look at some colored handkerchiefs.

He asked about the quality of the handkerchiefs
and how much they cost, his voice choking,
almost silenced by desire.
And the answers came back in the same mood,
distracted, the voice hushed,
offering hidden consent.

They kept on talking about the merchandise —
but the only purpose: that their hands might touch
over the handkerchiefs, that their faces, their lips
might move close together as though by chance —
a moment’s meeting of limb against limb.

Quickly, secretly, so the shop owner sitting at the back
wouldn’t realize what was going on.

~ Cavafy, He Asked about the Quality

Cavafy has a wonderful simplicity and concreteness. No explication is needed — the details say it all.

Thinking of the rotten sex scenes in the recent movies — this poem has more erotic tension than all those ridiculous movie quickies combined.

"The rainbow Black Madonna"; Elżbieta Podleska (who faces two years in prison for "offending religious feelings")

“Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.” ~ John Berger
 
Oriana:


Yes, poetry makes us more aware of what we have in common as human beings. It makes us feel less separate. For instance, one need not be gay to feel sympathy toward the two gay men in Cavafy’s poem — two strangers who steal a bit of closeness under the pretense of talking about business. Straight couples also use similar ploys, at least now and then. Eros, which means “yearning,” has its own privacy, or even secrecy. Moments such as “almost touching” can later become precious memories — even sacred memories. The poem reminded me of that universality.
 
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KAFKA: GHOSTS

“Obviously you’ve never spoken to a ghost. One never gets straight information from them. It’s just a hither and thither. These ghosts seem to be more dubious about their existence than we are, and no wonder, considering how frail they are.” ~ Kafka, Unhappiness

Please pardon my repeating the “double image” I've used not long ago. I think the main ghosts in our lives are our younger selves. Sometimes I am so surprised at my younger self that it's difficult to believe that really was me. My evidence is poems, but poems are unreliable narrators — very selective.

 
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YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU
 

Recently I watched “You Can’t Take It with You” (1938) on video. Alas, it doesn’t have a fraction of the depth and imaginative brilliance of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It’s still a very watchable movie with the kind of message we love, and it’s quite relevant today re: corporations versus the working people, and yes, the jail and courtroom scenes were pure joy, and the harmonica duet was a flash a genius, but . . . the eccentricity of the Sycamore family was overdone and repetitious, a few characters could be cut out and no one would miss them, etc.

I almost stopped watching 10 minutes into it, then 15, and so on — and yet, and yet . . . Finally the movie drew me in, and if “It’s a Wonderful Life” hadn’t set the bar so high, I’d probably give it a higher appraisal.

My favorite character was Mrs. Kirby. Yes, a stereotype, but the acting (Mary Forbes, who started out as a British stage actress) was such perfection that I enjoyed every minute she was on the screen. With the others, sometimes I felt like screaming, “Enough already!” — she left me hungry for more.

Comedy doesn’t age well. It’s a genre that becomes quickly dated — all the more quickly when culture changes at the amazing speed we are witnessing now. What was perhaps funny back in 1938 is rarely funny now. And yet certain things remain funny: the slapstick comedy of Oliver and Hardy has a universal quality about it, as does the best of Charlie Chaplin or Groucho Marx. And perhaps that’s just me, but comedy based on the affectations of the upper class, especially the British upper class, also has that timeless quality.

Perhaps you have to be British to play someone of the upper class. Only the British actors seem to hit the perfect note every time. They somehow make the stereotype even more stereotypical and still incredibly funny down to a twitch of an eyebrow or the mouth opening just a bit in a mute scream. It's magic. It's art.

 Mary Forbes as the immaculate Mrs. Kirby

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LOOKING AT FRACTALS REDUCES STRESS

~ “We’re finding that aesthetic images can induce staggering changes to the body, including radical reductions in the observer’s stress levels. Researchers are untangling just what makes particular works of art or natural scenes visually appealing and stress-relieving – and one crucial factor is the presence of the repetitive patterns called fractals.

My scientific curiosity was stirred when I learned that many of nature’s objects are fractal, featuring patterns that repeat at increasingly fine magnifications. For example, think of a tree. First you see the big branches growing out of the trunk. Then you see smaller versions growing out of each big branch. As you keep zooming in, finer and finer branches appear, all the way down to the smallest twigs. Other examples of nature’s fractals include clouds, rivers, coastlines and mountains.

The impact of nature’s aesthetics is surprisingly powerful. In the 1980s, architects found that patients recovered more quickly from surgery when given hospital rooms with windows looking out on nature. Other studies since then have demonstrated that just looking at pictures of natural scenes can change the way a person’s autonomic nervous system responds to stress.

Through exposure to nature’s fractal scenery, people’s visual systems have adapted to efficiently process fractals with ease. We found that this adaptation occurs at many stages of the visual system, from the way our eyes move to which regions of the brain get activated. This fluency puts us in a comfort zone and so we enjoy looking at fractals. Crucially, we used EEG to record the brain’s electrical activity and skin conductance techniques to show that this aesthetic experience is accompanied by stress reduction of 60 percent – a surprisingly large effect for a nonmedicinal treatment. This physiological change even accelerates post-surgical recovery rates.

Artists intuit the appeal of fractals


It’s therefore not surprising to learn that, as visual experts, artists have been embedding fractal patterns in their works through the centuries and across many cultures. Fractals can be found, for example, in Roman, Egyptian, Aztec, Incan and Mayan works. My favorite examples of fractal art from more recent times include da Vinci’s Turbulence (1500), Hokusai’s Great Wave (1830), M.C. Escher’s Circle Series (1950s) and, of course, Pollock’s poured paintings.

How artists create their fractals fuels the nature-versus-nurture debate in art: To what extent is aesthetics determined by automatic unconscious mechanisms inherent in the artist’s biology, as opposed to their intellectual and cultural concerns? In Pollock’s case, his fractal aesthetics resulted from an intriguing mixture of both. His fractal patterns originated from his body motions (specifically an automatic process related to balance known to be fractal). But he spent 10 years consciously refining his pouring technique to increase the visual complexity of these fractal patterns.

Pollock’s abstract expressionist colleague, Willem De Kooning, also painted fractals. When he was diagnosed with dementia, some art scholars called for his retirement amid concerns that that it would reduce the nurture component of his work. Yet, although they predicted a deterioration in his paintings, his later works conveyed a peacefulness missing from his earlier pieces. Recently, the fractal complexity of his paintings was shown to drop steadily as he slipped into dementia. The study focused on seven artists with different neurological conditions and highlighted the potential of using art works as a new tool for studying these diseases. To me, the most inspiring message is that, when fighting these diseases, artists can still create beautiful artworks.” ~

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/fractal-patterns-nature-and-art-are-aesthetically-pleasing-and-stress-reducing-180962738/?


Mary:

It is no wonder we find fractals soothing, and produce them ourselves in art, since they are everywhere in nature. And I think the basics — repetition, rhythm, variation, symmetry, are also grounded in the body, its shape, the rhythms of heartbeat and breathing, the movement of the body in space, (walking, dancing) the use of language, (talking, chanting, singing). All of these exist in heightened and deliberate form in our creations: music, visual and verbal art, architecture, dance, the shapes of the stories we tell, and everything we build, from gardens to machinery. It would be both surprising and rare to find exceptions...and if we did, I'm sure we would find these exceptions unappealing, out of sync with both the world and our experience.


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“Narratives are fractals; they connect, repeat, and expand. Inevitably there is symmetry.” ~ Erika Swyler


 

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Coma Berenices: Berenice's Hair. From Wiki: “Coma Berenices is one of the few constellations to owe its name to a historical figure, in this case Queen Berenice II of Egypt, wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes (fl. 246 BC–221 BC), the king under whom Alexandria became an important cultural center.

In 243 BC, during the Third Syrian War, Ptolemy undertook a dangerous expedition against the Seleucids, who had murdered his sister. His newlywed bride, Berenice, swore to the goddess Aphrodite to sacrifice her long, blonde hair, of which she was extremely proud, if her husband returned safely. He did, so she cut her hair and placed it in the goddess's temple. By the next morning the hair had disappeared. To appease the furious king the court astronomer, Conon, announced that the offering had so pleased the goddess that she had placed it in the sky. He indicated a cluster of stars that have since been called Berenice's Hair.”

Queen Berenice II of Egypt (also spelled “Berenike” — note the similarity to Veronika; the name means “bringer of victory” [Nike])

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THE WESTERN AND THE NOIR: HOW MOVIES SHAPED AMERICA



~ “Every story needs a space in which to unfold, of course, but the Western does more; it is in love with space; it foregrounds it, full-screen, whenever it can. The start of the cattle drive in Red River (1948): in two minutes, we get a static background (drovers and herd, at dawn, motionless against the landscape), a panoramic so powerful—this is our cattle, this is our land—not even a legendary continuity blunder can spoil it, a confident sense of direction (“Take them to Missouri, Matt”), and an explosion of joy. Beginnings are particularly good at evoking the immensity of this space: in The Man of the West (1958), a horseman appears on the horizon, looks at the empty expanse around him, and rides calmly off; in The Virginian (1929) and My Darling Clementine, a herd of cows disperses slowly in every direction; in Red River, The Man from Laramie (1955), and Rio Bravo (1959), it’s wagons that advance cautiously this way and that.

Cautiously, slowly, calmly: the initial tempo of the Western: Lento assai. The first ten minutes of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968): three men at a station, a fly buzzing, a wheel screeching, a drop of water hitting the rim of a hat. In no other form does waiting—for the train, the attack, the night, the stage, the cavalry . . . —play such a large role: a dilated sense of time, mirroring the enlargement of space. The Big Trail, The Big Sky, The Big Country. Big, and empty: in film after film, the first to “set eyes” on the land is a white man, who sees nothing but an uninhabited country. Native Americans—“Indians,” as the Western calls them—were of course already living in the West (and everywhere else in America, for that matter); but by routinely introducing them only after we have already become familiar with white characters, the Western makes them look like illegitimate intruders. In reality, they were there first; in fiction, they arrive always too late. Seldom has narrative lied so spectacularly about the history it claimed to narrate.

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“Cinema is the specifically epic art,” wrote André Bazin in a famous essay on American film, and “the migration to the West is our Odyssey.” Epic, yes; Odyssey, no. That there is no return is the founding act of the genre. Home is a vague hope, distant in space and in time; for now, all there is is a wagon; two or three generations, together, surrounded by hundreds of other families; all different, and all leading exactly the same life. Life in the open, on unsteadily undulating stoops, under everybody’s eyes; because what matters, in these films, is not the private sphere of the individual family—we never see the inside of a wagon, and the intimacy of a sentimental conversation, or of a good wash, are often met with rough collective humor—but the amalgamation of everybody into a community. Into a nation.

That there is no return is the founding act of the genre.

Dreaming . . . But this is more like an obsession. The march of the wagon train can never stop: a hasty prayer, and the dead are buried and left forever behind; a child is born, and hours later is already on the move. Everyday life is both implacably everyday—always brewing coffee, always mending socks and washing their only passable shirt—and frightfully unpredictable: a danger that comes less from human enemies (although the conflict with “Indians” is present in most films of migration), than from the hostility of nature: it’s always too hot, too cold, too dry, too windy . . . rain, dust, snow, mountains, rapids . . . So much friction, in these films: not a journey in which a wagon doesn’t get stuck in the mud; not a scene in which they go downhill, for a change.

Rarely do fictional characters work as hard as in early Westerns: keeping the animals together, cutting down trees, crossing rivers, digging passages, overcoming crazy obstacles. After all this, they deserve the West. They have been a stubborn, single-minded human herd; which is the reason Red River, with its supremely unpromising storyline (moving ten thousand cows from Texas to Missouri, imagine that), is the greatest of all epic Westerns. Those cattle are the settlers: and in the film’s terrifying stampede, caused by a man who wants to eat sugar in the middle of the night, the destructive potential of the great migration erupts for a moment, earthquake-like, into the open.

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Shadows: THE NOIR


Though just as haunted by death and killing as the Western, the linear geometry of the duel is unthinkable in film noir. The Lady from Shanghai places Rita Hayworth and Welles face to face, looking straight into each other’s eyes; a few seconds, and a third person emerges from his words (“I thought it was your husband you wanted to kill”), to be immediately multiplied by hers (“George was supposed to take care of Arthur, but he lost his silly head and shot Broome”). They are alone—but they are not; someone else is always between them. A few more seconds, and “Arthur” (Hayworth’s husband, played by Everett Sloane) shows up in person. Now it is he and Hayworth who face each other, guns in their hands; but in the “Magic Mirror Maze” where the scene is set, optics are deceptive: in a particularly baroque moment, Hayworth is aiming straight at the audience, Sloane diagonally, in the same general direction, but also—reflected as he is from several different angles—seemingly at himself: “You’d be foolish to fire that gun. With these mirrors it’s difficult to tell. You are aiming at me, aren’t you? I’m aiming at you, lover.”

As they start firing, and glass shatters everywhere, it’s impossible to say what is happening to whom (at a certain point, it even looks as if Welles is the one being hit); and even after Hayworth and Sloane die, we are left with the baffling memory of a shootout that adds a third person to the usual two. (The unlikeliness of this situation is the secret behind The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962.) But in fact, triangulation is as essential to the structure of the noir as the binary logic was to the Western. It’s the triangle of adultery, of course, as indeed in The Lady from Shanghai, or in George Macready’s toast “to the three of us”—himself; his wife, Hayworth (always her); and her secret ex-lover, Glenn Ford—in Gilda (1946). But beyond adultery, what emerges here is the fundamental figure of the social universe of the film noir: the Third.


The adulterous triangle is merely the starting point for an incessant proliferation of corpses.

https://lithub.com/western-vs-noir-how-two-genres-shaped-postwar-american-culture/?fbclid=IwAR0CUkOIssH8rfgeCvI4NrQS3RDJEEh9wve9qbGDXuH_gf3bOUBpf7YaZtI




Oriana:

Both genres are marked with intense, unapologetic violence. One interesting difference is that the Western is rural, while the noir tends to be urban. In a Western, we typically know who the good guys are; in the noir, things get “complicated.”

It’s interesting that love plots don’t play a central part in either genre. The Western is overwhelmingly male; the cowboy is in love with his horse. Women are important in the noir, but  these are not loving women. A woman who looks like an angel will likely turn out a betrayer, a femme fatale.

Both genres, however, are interested in the idea of justice. The happy ending is not really happy in the sense of cheerful, but rather it’s “justice”: the bad guys (and gals) either get killed or are arrested and will be duly punished soon. But even the hard-boiled private detective is not exactly the supernaturally brave sheriff; he is likely a hard drinker, a cynic about the human nature, a single man who may know lust and infatuation, but has never experienced deep and lasting love.

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WHY GENERALS THOUGHT THAT WWI WOULD BE OVER IN MONTHS

 
"We think of the First World War as having its causes in Europe, where the greatest bloodshed and destruction would take place. But several of the illusions that propelled the major powers so swiftly into war had their roots in far corners of the world.

The biggest illusion, of course, was that victory would be quick and easy. “You will be home,” Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany told his troops, “before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” The German campaign plan called for knocking France out of the war in 42 days. The Allies were not quite so arrogant, but were confident of triumph in months, not years.

A second illusion of those who marched proudly into battle in 1914 was that they would be shooting at the enemy, but that he would not be shooting back, or at least not effectively. How else to explain that most soldiers on both sides had no metal helmets? And that millions of French infantrymen, as well as the Austro-Hungarian cavalry, wore combat uniforms of brilliant red and blue? As the war began, troops from both sides advanced over open ground en masse, as if they were not facing repeating rifles and machine guns: bayonet charges by the French, and ranks of young Germans walking, arms linked, toward astonished British soldiers. The British would make plenty of similar suicidal advances of their own in the years ahead.

Where were these illusions born? They came from the way generals cherry-picked previous wars to learn from. A close look at the siege of Petersburg, Va., in the American Civil War, for instance, would have provided a lesson in trench warfare — and a sense of what it meant to be under fire from an early ancestor of the machine gun, the Gatling gun. A similar foretaste of both trench warfare and the power of the machine gun could be had by studying the siege of Port Arthur (now Dalian, China) in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5.

But the men who led Europe into the First World War found it more comforting to look elsewhere — at battles where victory was swift and the enemy had little firepower. In 1914 Europe had not had a major war in more than 40 years and, except for the Russians, almost all officers who had actually seen combat had done so in lopsided colonial wars in Africa and Asia.

Erich von Falkenhayn, for example, chief of the German General Staff for the first two years of the war, had been in the international force that suppressed the anti-Western Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. Another veteran of that campaign — and of military service in Indochina and Algeria — was Robert Nivelle, later the French commander on the Western Front and the leader of a 1917 offensive that left 120,000 French soldiers dead or wounded and sparked a mutiny. Joseph Joffre, Nivelle’s predecessor, had served in Indochina and Madagascar, and had led an expedition across the Sahara to conquer Timbuktu. Most of the British generals had served in the colonies; when war broke out, Britain had more troops on active duty in India alone than in the British Isles.

Colonial wars seldom lasted long because the German, French and British Armies had modern rifles, machine guns and small mobile artillery pieces, as well as steamboats and railroads that could move men and weapons as needed. The Africans and Asians usually had none of these things.

In 1898, for example, a whole panoply of British officers (including Winston Churchill) who would later fight in Europe were on hand for a battle at Omdurman, in Sudan. The 50,000 Sudanese they faced were armed only with spears, swords and antiquated rifles. In a few hours, the six Maxim machine guns of the far smaller Anglo-Egyptian force fired half a million bullets, leaving nearly 11,000 Sudanese dead and some 16,000 wounded, many fatally. The battle determined the outcome of a war in less than a day.

Yet another illusion on both sides in 1914 was that a key force would be the cavalry. After all, hadn’t cavalry service been a path to military glory for more than 2,000 years? At the Cavalry Club on London’s Piccadilly Circus and its counterparts in Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg and Vienna, officers eagerly anticipated more of the same. The initial German invasions of France and Belgium, for example, included eight cavalry divisions with more than 40,000 horses — the largest such body ever sent into battle in Western Europe. Tens of thousands of the unfortunate animals were laboriously shipped to the front over great distances: to the Middle East from New Zealand, to Belgium from Canada, to France from India.

Faith in the cavalry also sprang from colonial wars. British horsemen made a charge at Omdurman and did so far more spectacularly a year and a half later in another colonial conflict, the Boer War. Masked by an immense cloud of dust kicked up by thousands of galloping horses, the British successfully charged, almost unscathed, through Boer forces besieging the town of Kimberley, in present-day South Africa. “An epoch in the history of cavalry,” declared the London Times history of that war. “A staggering success,” read a German General Staff report on the battle.

None of the many military observers in the Boer War seemed to notice that one simple defensive measure could have stopped the great charge at Kimberley dead: barbed wire. On the Western Front in 1914, that, along with the machine gun, would spell doom for the cavalry and for the other illusions as well."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/opinion/adam-hochschild-why-world-war-i-was-such-a-blood-bath.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&module=inside-nyt-region&region=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region&_r=1


Mary:

Amazing that the Generals seem to be so far off the mark in their assumptions and strategies — to see that this had a credible base in Colonial experiences of combat, where the sides were so incredibly unevenly matched, rings true. Calvary and bright red uniforms against guns, explosives and poison gas, the replacement of drawn battle lines with trench warfare, hard learned lessons with enormous cost in human lives.

By WWII horses had been replaced with armored tanks, and aerial bombs were crucial . . . taking out greater and greater numbers of civilian lives and reducing cities to rubble — Dresden, then Nagasaki, Hiroshima. The definition of battlefield and enemy shifting and blurring not only with the increasing power and deadliness of weaponry, but with changes in the political environment — the struggle against colonialism and the rise of superpowers with their constant jockeying for place.

This lag in adaptation was again obvious in Vietnam.

Conventional warfare strategy fails when there is no "front," no "battleline," and, no distinction between populace and military. Guerrilla warfare is fairly unwinnable by conventional means. Of course, in the learning curve  for all those in command,  the burden of loss is paid by the soldiers and the general populace.

The current wars continue, with sophisticated weaponry that can be aimed and triggered remotely, like playing a video game, and with ground troops embroiled in urban guerrilla warfare.

Oriana:

~ “As early as 1929, Lieutenant Colonel J. L. Schley, of the Corps of Engineers wrote in The Military Engineer: “It has been said critically that there is a tendency in many armies to spend the peace time studying how to fight the last war,” a sentiment repeated by the Dallas Morning News in 1937: “There is a partly justified criticism that peacetime generals are always fighting the last war instead of the next one.”

Every war, whether physical or metaphorical, has produced its own backward-looking buffoonery disguised as institutional prudence. From the seizure of shampoo bottles at airports after 9/11, to the mistimed austerity that prematurely forced Europe into grinding economic depression, this classic, all-too-human and ubiquitous mistake is so common that it has spawned more cliches than your average cognitive foible. Whether we call it “closing the barn door after the horse has bolted” or something else, the desire to see the present and the future in terms of the recent past is often a form of collective delusion.” ~

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stop-preparing-for-war_b_2490775

There has been some success in using drones against insurgencies — but it has become obvious that the current wars are unwinnable. They don’t address the causes that make young men so susceptible to radical propaganda. And fighting a war using the model of playing a video game is precisely the opposite of trying to address the human side.

I’ll never understand the lack of interest in trying to understand the other side’s mentality. But I guess it’s an aspect of the racism that’s on display here — those guys are subhuman, bombs is the only language they understand.

I do remember reading about one general who broke away from that mentality and successfully defused local hostility precisely by working with the locals — talking with them, imagine!

The drones don’t unnerve me as much as what I witness at least once a week as I drive past the Navy stockyards in San Diego. The extremely expensive ships being built perhaps made sense decades ago, but do they now? Or the super-super-expensive manned bombers — who are they supposed to attack? The Chinese, who have wisely constrained their military spending in favor of developing their economy and extending their global influence? It was amazing watching a Chinese official lecture the US on “how about you invest in your infrastructure”?

Meanwhile in Syria the Russians are using low-flying planes that appear to be more successful at locating and blowing up a convoy than high-flying planes that rely on sophisticated equipment. This reminds me of NASA’s trying to develop a ballpoint pen that would work in zero gravity, while the Russian simply used pencils. To give a more serious example, in WW2 the Germans had their armies prepared to wage short, high-speed campaigns. At first it worked — then Hitler idiotically decided to invade Russia. The Russians did what they did time and time before — kept retreating until vast distances and the brutal climate did their work.

All this is wasted on the generals. Give toys to the generals, and they’ll want to use them. And they always demand more and more toys. And as they do so, they are trying to look like futurists. By now they are of course aware of the proverb that accuses them of “fighting the last war,” so they try to predict the future war — usually without success.

The only victory would be eliminating war. Every war is a defeat for humanity. 


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WORLD WITHOUT JOBS?

 
~ “Work is the master of the modern world. For most people, it is impossible to imagine society without it. It dominates and pervades everyday life – especially in Britain and the US – more completely than at any time in recent history. An obsession with employability runs through education. Tech companies persuade their employees that round-the-clock work is play. Gig economy companies claim that round-the-clock work is freedom. Workers commute further, strike less, retire later. Digital technology lets work invade leisure.

 
In all these mutually reinforcing ways, work increasingly forms our routines and psyches, and squeezes out other influences. As Joanna Biggs put it in her quietly disturbing 2015 book All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, “Work is … how we give our lives meaning when religion, party politics and community fall away.”

And yet work is not working, for ever more people, in ever more ways. We resist acknowledging these as more than isolated problems – such is work’s centrality to our belief systems – but the evidence of its failures is all around us.

As a source of social mobility and self-worth, work increasingly fails even the most educated people – supposedly the system’s winners. In 2017, half of recent UK graduates were officially classified as “working in a non-graduate role”. In the US, “belief in work is crumbling among people in their 20s and 30s”, says Benjamin Hunnicutt, a leading historian of work. “They are not looking to their job for satisfaction or social advancement.” (You can sense this every time a graduate with a faraway look makes you a latte.)

Work is increasingly precarious: more zero-hours or short-term contracts; more self-employed people with erratic incomes; more corporate “restructurings” for those still with actual jobs. As a source of sustainable consumer booms and mass home-ownership – for much of the 20th century, the main successes of mainstream western economic policy – work is discredited daily by our ongoing debt and housing crises. For many people, not just the very wealthy, work has become less important financially than inheriting money or owning a home.

Unsurprisingly, work is increasingly regarded as bad for your health: “Stress … an overwhelming ‘to-do’ list … [and] long hours sitting at a desk,” the Cass Business School professor Peter Fleming notes in his new book, The Death of Homo Economicus, are beginning to be seen by medical authorities as akin to smoking.

Work is badly distributed. People have too much, or too little, or both in the same month. And away from our unpredictable, all-consuming workplaces, vital human activities are increasingly neglected. Workers lack the time or energy to raise children attentively, or to look after elderly relations. “The crisis of work is also a crisis of home,” declared the social theorists Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek in a paper last year. This neglect will only get worse as the population grows and ages.

Like an empire that has expanded too far, work may be both more powerful and more vulnerable than ever before. We know work’s multiplying problems intimately, but it feels impossible to solve them all. Is it time to start thinking of an alternative?

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by the early 21st century, advances in technology would lead to an “age of leisure and abundance”, in which people might work 15 hours a week. In 1980, as robots began to depopulate factories, the French social and economic theorist André Gorz declared: “The abolition of work is a process already underway … The manner in which [it] is to be managed … constitutes the central political issue of the coming decades.”

 
For some of the [“post-work”] writers, this future must include a universal basic income (UBI) – currently post-work’s most high-profile and controversial idea – paid by the state to every working-age person, so that they can survive when the great automation comes. For others, the debate about the affordability and morality of a UBI is a distraction from even bigger issues.

Post-work may be a rather grey and academic-sounding phrase, but it offers enormous, alluring promises: that life with much less work, or no work at all, would be calmer, more equal, more communal, more pleasurable, more thoughtful, more politically engaged, more fulfilled – in short, that much of human experience would be transformed,

One of post-work’s best arguments is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the work ideology is neither natural nor very old. “Work as we know it is a recent construct,” says Hunnicutt. Like most historians, he identifies the main building blocks of our work culture as 16th-century Protestantism, which saw effortful labour as leading to a good afterlife; 19th-century industrial capitalism, which required disciplined workers and driven entrepreneurs; and the 20th-century desires for consumer goods and self-fulfillment.

The emergence of the modern work ethic from this chain of phenomena was “an accident of history,” Hunnicutt says. Before then, “All cultures thought of work as a means to an end, not an end in itself.” From urban ancient Greece to agrarian societies, work was either something to be outsourced to others – often slaves – or something to be done as quickly as possible so that the rest of life could happen.

By the end of the 70s, it was possible to believe that the relatively recent supremacy of work might be coming to an end in the more comfortable parts of the west. Instead, the work ideology was reimposed. During the 80s, the aggressively pro-business governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan strengthened the power of employers, and used welfare cuts and moralistic rhetoric to create a much harsher environment for people without jobs. David Graeber, who is an anarchist as well as an anthropologist, argues that these policies were motivated by a desire for social control. After the political turbulence of the 60s and 70s, he says, “Conservatives freaked out at the prospect of everyone becoming hippies and abandoning work. They thought: ‘What will become of the social order?’”

Hunnicutt, who has studied the ebb and flow of work in the west for almost 50 years, says Graeber has a point: “I do think there is a fear of freedom – a fear among the powerful that people might find something better to do than create profits for capitalism.”

The work culture has many more critics now. In the US, sharp recent books such as Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It) by the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, and No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by the historian James Livingston, have challenged the dictatorial powers and assumptions of modern employers; and also the deeply embedded American notion that the solution to any problem is working harder.

Post-work has the potential to appeal to conservatives. Some post-workists think work should not be abolished but redistributed, so that every adult labors for roughly the same satisfying but not exhausting number of hours. “We could say to people on the right: ‘You think work is good for people. So everyone should have this good thing,’” says James Smith, a post-workist whose day job is lecturing in 18th-century English literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. “Working less also ought to be attractive to conservatives who value the family.”

The post-workists argue that it is precisely their work-saturated lives – and their experience of the increasing precariousness of white-collar employment – that qualify them to demand a different world. Like many post-workists, Stronge has been employed for years on poorly paid, short-term academic contracts. “I’ve worked as a breakfast cook. I’ve been a Domino’s delivery driver,” he told me. “I once worked in an Indian restaurant while I was teaching. My students would come in to eat, and see me cooking, and say: ‘Hi, is that you, Will?’

Defenders of the work culture such as business leaders and mainstream politicians habitually question whether pent-up modern workers have the ability to enjoy, or even survive, the open vistas of time and freedom that post-work thinkers envisage for them. In 1989, two University of Chicago psychologists, Judith LeFevre and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, conducted a famous experiment that seemed to support this view. They recruited 78 people with manual, clerical and managerial jobs at local companies, and gave them electronic pagers. For a week, at frequent but random intervals, at work and at home, these employees were contacted and asked to fill in questionnaires about what they were doing and how they were feeling.

The experiment found that people reported “many more positive feelings at work than in leisure”. At work, they were regularly in a state the psychologists called “flow” – “enjoying the moment” by using their knowledge and abilities to the full, while also “learning new skills and increasing self-esteem”. Away from work, “flow” rarely occurred. The employees mainly chose “to watch TV, try to sleep, [and] in general vegetate, even though they [did] not enjoy doing these things”. US workers, the psychologists concluded, had an “inability to organize [their] psychic energy in unstructured free time”.

*

A vision of state-supported but liberated and productive citizens owes a lot to Ivan Illich, the half-forgotten Austrian social critic who was a leftwing guru during the 70s. In his intoxicating 1973 book Tools for Conviviality, Illich attacked the “serfdom” created by industrial machinery, and demanded: “Give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency … from power drills to mechanized pushcarts.” Illich wanted the public to rediscover what he saw as the freedom of the medieval artisan, while also embracing the latest technology.

The disappearance of the paid job could finally bring about one of the oldest goals of feminism: that housework and raising children are no longer accorded a lower status. With people having more time, and probably less money, private life could also become more communal, she suggests, with families sharing kitchens, domestic appliances, and larger facilities. “There have been examples of this before,” she says, “like ‘Red Vienna’ in the early 20th century, when the [social democratic] city government built housing estates with communal laundries, workshops, and shared living spaces that were quite luxurious.” Post-work is about the future, but it is also bursting with the past’s lost possibilities.

Despite being a Tory MP from the most pro-business wing of his party, Nick Boles accepts in his book that a future society “may redefine work to include child-rearing and taking care of elderly relatives, and finally start valuing these contributions properly”. Post-work is spreading feminist ideas to new places.

In some ways, we’re already in a post-work society. But it’s a dystopic one. Office employees constantly interrupting their long days with online distractions; gig-economy workers whose labor plays no part in their sense of identity; and all the people in depressed, post-industrial places who have quietly given up trying to earn – the specter of post-work runs through the hard, shiny culture of modern work like hidden rust.

Creating a more benign post-work world will be more difficult now than it would have been in the 70s. In today’s lower-wage economy, suggesting people do less work for less pay is a hard sell. As with free-market capitalism in general, the worse work gets, the harder it is to imagine actually escaping it, so enormous are the steps required.

But for those who think work will just carry on as it is, there is a warning from history. On 1 May 1979, one of the greatest champions of the modern work culture, Margaret Thatcher, made her final campaign speech before being elected prime minister. She reflected on the nature of change in politics and society. “The heresies of one period,” she said, always become “the orthodoxies of the next”. The end of work as we know it will seem unthinkable – until it has happened.” ~

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/post-work-the-radical-idea-of-a-world-without-jobs



John Guzlowski:

What would people do without jobs? I read somewhere recently that many people who are out of work and looking for a job spend about 50 hours a week watching TV. Work time has been replaced by TV time.


Oriana:

It is a problem, and the article does raise the issue that "post-work" is great for intellectuals and creatives, but leaves many others without a meaningful alternative. I was struck that the majority of people report being happier at work than at home. And some working mothers say, "Compared to home, the office is a piece of cake!" It's clean, structured, there's companionship . . .

John:

My mom always said that. Even when she worked on assembly lines.

 
Oriana:

Thanks for sharing this. Also, a sense of being useful is tremendously important to people. "I hope I can still be useful," I heard a checkout cashier say when a big retail store was closing. She was near tears -- and so was I, because she looked over fifty and I knew it would be difficult for her to find another job. But if the job situation is restructured, ideally nearly everyone would find  his or her “niche” of usefulness.

Matt:

It has been pointed out that primitive societies provided for their needs and still enjoyed more leisure than we do. One statistic we rarely see reported by the bureau of labor statistics is the death toll from work.

Oriana:

Many people go through a crisis when they retire. They either try to do too much, or can’t figure out what to do. But eventually they find a new routine. And some discover new places to socialize — like going to the Y practically every day. Or they make take up ballroom dancing or a craft workshop. Or put more time into cooking and gardening. Crisis at first — then being quite happy and surprisingly busy.

I imagine that the change to the post-work world would be gradual — nor would jobs disappear 100%.  And perhaps new jobs would arise in the field of trying to save the environment. 


*

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” ~ Henry David Thoreau


*


GOETHE ON WHO NEEDS RELIGION
 
He who possesses science and art also has religion;
but he who possesses neither, let him have religion.
~ Goethe

I think the broader underlying concept here is having a rich mental life. Rich mental life = no need for religion. I think it was late April when I left the church — I’d just turned fourteen, lilacs were coming into bloom — I can’t swear to the accuracy of that, but I do know that the world looked gorgeous when it happened, flowers all around me and clouds like giant flowers in the sky. And there were so many books! There were cinemas and theaters, there was ballet . . . This list could go on and on, but I think my point is clear: there was no vacuum, there was no gap that needed to be filled. I still enjoyed walking into a church between the services, to steep for a while in the dusk and quiet — but the negativity has fallen off, the insane babblings about sin and hell and the Crucifixion (“Every time you sin, you drive a nail into the flesh of Jesus”).

If some kind of disembodied intelligence exists in the universe (my mother would LOL at the idea of brain-free mind — in fact I did see that happen; she didn't mean to be impolite but just couldn't control herself), my guess is that it would prefer a happy atheist to a self-
flagellating Catholic any time.
 
*

“The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.” ~ Christopher Hitchens, Mortality


*
KETO DIET TO COMBAT CANCER? THE ANSWER: IT DEPENDS

 
~ “Last year, Siddhartha Mukherjee, the Columbia University researcher and author of The Emperor of All Maladies, and his colleagues found that at least one particular chemotherapy drug can be made more effective by combining its use with eating a low-sugar, protein-and-fat-heavy “ketogenic” diet. In a paper in Nature, the researchers suggest that the effect was related to decreasing the levels of insulin that the pancreas releases into the blood in response to eating.

Around the same time, an international team of researchers concluded in the journal Science Signaling that “only some cancer cells are acutely sensitive to glucose withdrawal, and the underlying mechanism of this selective sensitivity is unclear.” In other words, a low-sugar diet could help combat some cancers, but it’s certainly not as simple as Cancers eat sugar, so low sugar stops cancer.

While the sugar-and-insulin angle has shown promise, more of the research has focused on dietary protein—or, specifically, individual amino acids that make up that protein. Studies have shown that the restriction of the amino acids serine and glycine can modulate cancer outcomes. According to a 2018 study in Nature, the chemotherapy drug methotrexate is affected by the amino acid histidine. Another, asparagine, is involved in the progression of breast cancer metastasis.

The most interest has gone to methionine, which is found in high levels in eggs and red meat. In 2018, a review of existing evidence from the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey deemed restricting methionine “a promising anti-tumor strategy.” That promise has also shown itself in brain tumors and melanomas, as the UC San Diego surgeon Robert Hoffman detailed in February. Methionine is made in normal cells—out of homocysteine, folate, and vitamin B12. However, many types of cancer cells lack the enzyme that makes cellular manufacturing of methionine possible. So they require extra methionine from outside the body—via food we eat—for survival. Cut off that supply, and it should help to slow the tumor without starving the person.

This month, Locasale and his colleagues at Duke released findings showing that restricting methionine decreased tumor growth in mice and human subjects. Locasale’s particular area of research, known as metabolomics, uses enormous data sets to quantify metabolic activity. This allows the controversial field of nutrition research to operate with new levels of precision, where specific metabolic pathways can be monitored. Most nutrition research relies on self-reported data, in which people who say they eat almonds are found to have lower rates of some sort of cancer, and the best we can do is assume these two things are related. Locasale’s paper, by contrast, is full of complex statistical calculus involving “Euclidian distances” and “multidimensional scaling.”

What really complicates the picture for Locasale is that the closest thing to a methionine-restricted diet is, in practice, a vegan diet. This would seem to be at odds with the cancer-fighting effects reported by Mukherjee and colleagues involving a “ketogenic” diet. But contrary to the dietary wars that plague the pages of popular media, Mukherjee was supportive of Locasale’s investigation. “More evidence about the fascinating connection between diet and cancer,” he tweeted of the Duke study. “It’s not ‘starving’ the cancer, but rather finding precise vulnerabilities that make metabolic therapies feasible.”

And so now I have begun referring to food as metabolic therapy.

Because cancer is a term that encapsulates many different diseases—with different changes in different metabolic pathways in different cells in different parts of the body—no single metabolic therapy is right for every person. What makes one cancer grow more slowly could conceivably hasten another.

In 2017, I reported on a provocative study of vitamin B12 supplements, which can prevent anemia in people who don’t get enough through food. In excessive amounts, though, using these supplements was associated with higher rates of lung cancer. Again, this seemed to be by way of a metabolic pathway that fuels the tumor cells.

Nutrients or vitamins are not simply good or bad, cancer-causing or cancer-fighting. If a book or blog recommends a single “cancer diet”—or even a supplement that promises to fight cancer—beware. It could end up making things worse. Especially if there is a person on the cover in a white coat with arms folded, and with teeth that look like they have never been used.

Food is medicine—or metabolic therapy. And no metabolic therapy is good or bad for everyone in every condition.

 
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/food-cancer/589714/?utm_source=facebook&utm_term=2019-05-20T16%3A39%3A33&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&fbclid=IwAR3EazqOgJQAlmoeLfqN5eHClsUZAVRUYsGkzgFth63VhPo3SzS0TVQQGpU



from another source:

~ “We found that an ad libitum Keto Diet (8:1) with a fat content of 25% medium-chain triglycerides and 75% long-chain triglycerides produced a stronger anti-tumor effect compared to a KD (8:1) with all long-chain triglycerides, and was as efficacious against neuroblastoma as the above-described KD (2:1) combined with caloric restriction. These results stress the importance of an optimized KD composition to suppress tumor growth and to sensitize tumors to chemotherapy without requiring caloric restriction.” ~

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5842847/


Oriana:

We are barely beginning to learn the intricacies of which-diet-for-which-cancer — and which fats are the most effective in producing the anti-tumor effect. But one diet-related thing that’s just been discovered is that a compound called indole-3-carbinol (i-3-c), abundant in cruciform vegetables (don’t forget the humble cabbage! sauerkraut and kimchi have the additional benefit of improving the microbiome) seems to protect against cancer by restoring function to a cancer-fighting gene. 


Also, it’s worth noting that keto diet warns against excess protein, which is easily turned into glucose. It’s possible— though not easy — to do a methionine-restricted keto diet (oddly enough, egg yolk contains only half the amount of methionine found in egg white). And it’s certainly feasible to add healthy vegetable fats such as avocado, avocado oil, coconut oil, MCT (medium-chain triglycerides), extra-virgin olive oil and olives to a vegan diet. True, that’s not the “classic” vegan diet, but so what if your life is at stake.

Yet another solution would be to prepare a protein bar or drink that specifically excludes methionine — or asparagine — or whichever amino-acid a particular cancer requires.

But, as the article wisely warns, we still know too little about diet and various kinds of cancer to be able to give evidence-based advice. Eliminating junk food and other sources of fructose (including fruit-loaded smoothies — a lot of “health food” is actually bad for you) and adding cabbage-family veggies seems to improve health in general — always a good idea.


(For whatever it’s worth, the two countries with the highest cancer rates are Australia and New Zealand, followed by Ireland, Hungary, and the US. The countries with low cancer rates include Poland, Israel, Spain, Japan, Austria, Lebanon, and Bulgaria. https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer-frequency-country

(It’s also worth noting that while first-generation immigrants tend to have cancer rates reflecting their country of origin, the cancer rates of their descendants resemble those prevalent in the new country.)

ending on beauty:

 
And then I rose
in the dazzle of light, to the pine trees
plunging and righting themselves in a furious wind.

To have died and come back
raw, crackling,
and the numbness
stunned.

That clumsy
pushing and wheeling inside my chest, that ferocious
upturn —
I give myself to it. Why else
be in a body?

~ Chana Bloch (1940-2017), Afterlife


Photo: Susan Rogers

Saturday, May 18, 2019

RED JOAN: A PACIFIST SPY IN LOVE; SAUL BELLOW: HUMANIZING THE ENEMY; COGNITIVE THERAPY AND EASTERN WISDOM; GLUCOSAMINE MAY HELP CARDIOVASCULAR HEALTH

Swirls in Jupiter’s atmosphere (left) and swirls in Earth’s Baltic Sea (right); Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory. “This is all about fluids moving around on a rotating body.”

*
HOTEL AMERICA

I stand in the lobby of a grand hotel.
Someone passes through the false living room —

a slippery love sofa, a pretend fireplace —
someone passes and says, “America is

finished.” The faux marble floor is strewn
with wilted blooms. I begin to pick up

the withered flowers, the hotel as empty
as the city streets — only me, a stray housewife,

limp petals in my insufficient hands.
“Your dream of America is finished,”

says Lucrezia, before merely Donna,
pointing out the expensive

dead flowers, the mausoleum-like floor.
And Daisy, my former musical Danuta,

Daisy says, “America is a good place
to make money, but — real life

is over there.” How do we know
what we love? Saint Yakub’s church

in winter, the snow-crusted coats,
a fugue of steam like breath —

the smell of wet wool, the borrowed
animal human smell. Some part of us

ascended, not the soul perhaps,
but more real than the synthetic perfume

sprayed on the massive, stiff
centerpiece bouquets, though by now

Warsaw’s Hotel Europa may have
adopted these scents and ways,

incense against the backward years,
that animal touch and press —

no airy scallops of angels.
But on altars, flowers and candles

prayed in tongues, the wings
of the petals trembled, the tall glow

of flame mirrored in the chalices’
blaze of silver and gold. Pipe organ

shook the stone pillars. Roses, lilies,
peonies — what it must have cost,

in winter. Back then in the communal
breath, the church gave us splendor.

Now it’s finished, hellfire and flowers.

~ Oriana


Mary:

I like the poem very much. It talks about what's false, what 's lost, how the world is diminished, nothing as real or sumptuous as it was, or as it's remembered...and then there's that bit of redemption starting with "But on altars," redemption not by faith but by beauty. All the final lines beautifully remembering the wonderful splendor the Old church offered. And the final lines: even that gone, all gone, both the hellfire and the splendor.

So many of your poems are of memory and loss. You speak so truly of these.


Oriana:

I also hope that the reader picks up a bit of social and psychological commentary here. An American friend changes her very American name (Donna) to the exotic Lucrezia; a Polish friend Americanizes her beautiful name (Danuta — it’s actually Lithuanian, but quite popular in Poland) to Daisy. And of course “Real life is over there” is exactly the attitude of many immigrants who see their new new surroundings as false, fake, a betrayal of their dreams (which were false to start with, but that’s another issue). The feeling of falseness arises in part from a special kind of trauma related to the overwhelming loss of familiarity.

What, then, is real? In large part, that which we grew up with. Objectively, those things may have been unpleasant. The smell of wet woolen coats cannot be idealized away. Terrifying  children with descriptions of hell is surely a form of child abuse. And yet nostalgia makes it all the lost “real life” — the lost home and not the fake hotel.


*

“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.” ~ W.H. Auden

Smokers beware: W. H. Auden in his older years

*
SAUL BELLOW: “GUILTY OF HUMANIZING THE ENEMY”

 
~ “ . . . the attacks Bellow would receive for To Jerusalem and Back, a portrait of Israel drawn from reportage, memoir, and, in the spirit of the Committeee on Social Thought, a deep reading of philosophy, history, and literature, mixing his own observations with those of Stendhal and Sinyavsky and Sartre. “Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances is also to reach the heart of politics,” wrote Bellow, explaining his method. “Then human feelings, human experience, the human form and face, recover their proper place — the foreground.” He used the novelist’s devices of analogy, description, and deep questioning, always being careful to avoid the imperatives of activist writing. This enraged partisans and close observers of Israel.  The Jerusalem Post attacked him for mimicking “Arab and left-wing propaganda against the State of Israel”; for Noam Chomsky, [Bellow’s biographer, Zachary] Leader writes, “Bellow’s book might have been written by the Israeli Information Ministry.” Both camps held Bellow guilty of humanizing the enemy.” ~

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/03/21/saul-bellow-swiveling-man/


from the same source:

BELLOW WRITING IN THE FIFTIES ON RURAL AMERICA

 
“. . . the rural white poor, whom he held responsible for much of the nation’s racial animosity and violence. “Rural America has had a long history of overvaluation,” he wrote, thanks to the mistaken notion that

~ everyone was better and sounder on the farm, in the woods and hills, less anomic, more self-reliant, fairer, more American. This is simply not so. In provincial America, North no less than South, lives the most unhappy, troubled and alienated portion of the population . . . The glamor of Confederacy and insurrection, of “tradition” and “gentility” has been laid in poster colors over provincial pride, backwardness, xenophobia and rage. ~


Oriana:

By now there have been scores of articles saying the same thing, but to have said them in the nineteen fifties meant dissenting from the prevailing view of the rural idyll. 




also from the same source:

THE PRIVATE PERSON, NOT THE MOVEMENT

 
~ “He violated a major taboo on the right when he suggested in Ravelstein (2000), his fictionalized eulogy for Allan Bloom, that his late friend was a homosexual who had died of AIDS. Bloom’s friends had known of his homosexuality but kept it private out of fear that the revelation would destroy his reputation in the conservative circles. “I can understand that, because for them it’s not just a friend, it’s a movement,” Bellow told The Times.

“I couldn’t be both truthful and camouflaged.” Bellow meant true to the requirements of fiction, which demands that any believable character must be full of contradictions, secrets, regrets. For Ravelstein to succeed as fiction, it required “the elasticity provided by sin.” Absent disclosure of Bloom’s secret life, the character would be false — a two-dimensional public figure instead of the private person, who was the only one worth writing a novel about.” ~

Oriana:

I’ve read Ravelstein, and have certainly not found it boring. Bellow doesn’t just “suggest” homosexuality — it’s in plain view, the intellectual’s non-intellectual “pretty boy” lover being part of the scenery, so to speak. In some ways, he’s like an adoptive son — everyone knows he’s the one who’s going to inherit, and that’s probably the only reason he doesn’t leave the older man. 

Bellow at an older age

*


“I am not a conservative—neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook ... I just do not happen to be that animal.” ~ Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs

Bloom’s major idea: “the "openness" of relativism as leading paradoxically to the great “closing" ~ Wiki

“I came some time ago to think of despair and victimization as being at the service of the ruling class and the whole social edifice. it is the way in which imagination and intelligence eliminate themselves from the contest for power.” ~ Saul Bellow


*

LIFE AND FATE

~ “In 1964, Vassily Grossman, author of the epic and brilliant WWII novel modeled on War and Peace, died of stomach cancer, unknown to the point of non-existence. In 1960, he completed the manuscript of Life and Fate, submitted it for publication and waited, likely unaware of the intensity of his editors' panic at reading the novel, with its stark depiction not only of Nazi savagery but also of the sheer incompetence and extreme senseless cruelty of Stalin's regime.

On March 14, 1961, three senior KGB officers seized the manuscript of the novel from the apartments of Grossman and his typist, along with the carbons and the ribbons from the typewriter. The Soviet ideology czar, Savonarolaesque Mikhail Suslov, told Grossman the novel could not be published for at least 200 years. (Not 150 or 700 or 2000 years: 200. We will never be able to penetrate the mindset of the moral mutants like Suslov.)

In an act of providential foresight, Grossman had given another copy of the manuscript to a friend, and the latter brought it to his dacha and hid it there. It was later discovered and copied onto microfilm, apparently by Andrei Sakharov. The novelist Vladimir Voinovich smuggled the microfilm out of the Soviet Union into Switzerland, where Life and Fate was published in 1980, 16 years after its author's death. Robert Chandler’s translation into English was published in 1985, and New York Review of Books brought it out in paperback in 2006.” ~ M.Iossel




*

Suslov to Grossman: I have not read your novel but I have carefully read the reviews of your manuscript, responses to it, which contain many excerpts from your novel. Look how many quotes from them I have written down.... Why should we add your book to the atomic bombs that our enemies are preparing to launch against us?... Why should we publish your book and begin a public discussion as to whether anyone needs the Soviet Union or not?

Oriana:

My main reason for including this is Suslov’s startling question:  “Why should we publish your book and begin a public discussion as to whether anyone needs the Soviet Union or not?”

Well, once the Soviet Union collapsed, it turned out that the Soviet Union was not needed — not a topic anyone dared broach until then — that’s why Suslov’s question astonishes me. Even if it was meant as a rhetorical question, it does contain the phrase “or not” — raising the possibility that no, the artificial and oppressive entity was not needed . . . having grown up behind the Iron Curtain (though people said that the REAL Iron Curtain was between Poland and Russia) I find no words powerful enough to express my astonishment.

That Suslov was even able to state the question — well, that would be like a top-ranking cardinal asking whether anyone needs the Catholic Church. Wild! And yet after the Soviet Union collapsed, the answer became plain. And should be Catholic Church collapse, I suspect it will be the same thing.

(It reminds me of the time I asked a former Jesuit about the ordination of women. He replied, “Perhaps we should stop saying the mass for three years, and see if anyone misses it.”)

Vasily Grossman in Schwerin, Germany

WAR AS A SECULAR CRUSADE

 
“The idea that war is a secular crusade and involves the smiting of the wicked pervades how Americans discuss it. If you want to save your soul go to church. There is no holiness to be found on a battlefield and nations seek it at their own peril. War always amounts to a failure of normal ‘politics’ to resolve a contention, which is why it is ‘politics by other means.’ People are often willing to be cynical about normal politics but drop such skepticism when it comes to politics and organized violence, which is usually infinitely more ethically murky than normal politics often is.” ~ Adam Elkus


Life and Fate is actually Grossman’s second novel. His first novel could be called a “prequel.” Grossman wanted the title to be Stalingrad, but the censors changed it to “For a Just Cause.” In the U.S., it was published with Grossman's intended title. 
 
Oriana:

I think one of the factors that prevented the Cold War from becoming hot was that many Americans understood that Russians were people just like them — they were not their government. And the educated were familiar with great Russian literature, and Russian music (Swan Lake etc) and the enchanting folk songs, When you’re familiar with the Red Army chiefly through its choir singing Kalinka, it’s hard to imagine shooting the soloist, his stunning tenor surely an international cultural treasure. It's much harder to dehumanize the enemy if you are at least partly familiar with the attractive aspects of their culture.

“Familiar” may be the crucial word. Not that many non-Germans knew how beautiful Dresden was. Thanks to mass media (movies, TV, popular illustrated magazines like Life), even back in the fifties and sixties, Americans had an idea of how beautiful Moscow and St. Petersburg were. Now, of course, had the Soviet Union decided, in some suicidal delusion, to strike first . . . but the probability of that, after Stalin’s death, was zero.

P.S. Kyoto was high on the list of possible targets for the first A-bomb. It was allegedly saved by the Secretary of War Henry Stimson because of its beauty and cultural importance as the ancient Japanese capital. Stimson had visited Kyoto several times. He was an admirer of Japanese culture.

*

RED JOAN: DID THIS “GRANNY SPY” HELP PRESERVE WORLD PEACE?

If you like spy thrillers, go see another movie. This is mainly a romantic drama. Loyalty to one’s country versus one’s obligations to humanity and world peace (as the movie’s heroine comes to understand these obligations) — this would be a sufficiently large conflict, but more attention is given to virginal Joan’s helpless attraction to Leo, a Soviet agent who pretends to love her (though he never says so — his most tender utterance is “My little comrade”) and her later more mature love for her boss, Max, who does truly love her. Fake, deceptive love versus true love, with the building of the first nuclear weapons and espionage as background, almost part of the scenery along with the enchanting views of Cambridge, which seems to symbolize civilization itself the way Notre Dame did for Kenneth Clark.

Cambridge glows in its ageless gilded afternoon if we don’t get distracted by its sexism, and Notre Dame is of course so splendid that it would be in bad taste to bring up the Catholic Church’s trail of blood. But to be fair, sexism is portrayed in this movie, though its condescending ugliness is softened by the use made of it by the two women spies: “Nobody will suspect us — we are WOMEN!” Of course: women exchange cookie recipes, and not nuclear secrets. In fact one wonders how their tiny mentality can cope with something as complex as baking a cookie.

But Max, Joan’s boss, appreciates her mind from the start. His first words to her are “I'm so glad I told them to send me someone smart, and not just a pretty face.” He quickly tries to correct himself by adding, “Not that you’re not a pretty face.” Later he confesses that he fell in love with her precisely as me made the faux pas of saying “Not that you’re not a pretty face.” And he stands up for her against a flagrantly sexist colleague.

To be sure, the heroine is in fact a pretty face who sports marvelous hairdos and interesting little hats. And she’s certainly brave, and indeed smart — if we are to believe that she’s the one to come up with the idea of using a centrifuge for separating the various isotopes of uranium while the male physicists appear never to have thought of it. (A more convincing proof of her intelligence comes toward the end, when she manages to blackmail a high government official.)

Leo is meant to be charismatic — yet almost from the start he exudes sinister deceptiveness and dangerous extremism — he wouldn’t mind seeing Cambridge destroyed if it were to serve the building of a better world “from the ground up.” But even the hideously manipulative Leo is more sympathetic than his alleged cousin Sonia, the rather overstated bad woman in this movie, with obligatory femme-fatale cigarettes and red high heels; in case we still don’t get the message, she even steals Joan’s mink coat.

But even Sonia seems more human than the British intelligence investigators, whose stiff, cold, judgmental faces and emotional brutality make the viewers hate them — and possibly remember that the KGB, by contrast, gave their agents psychological training so they’d know how to play the nice guys and engage in much more subtle cat-and-mouse games.

Alas, this is not a subtle movie. Frankly, it’s not a good movie. It’s interesting in how it essentially exonerates the heroine by first presenting her as blinded by love, and then as a pacifist idealist ready to risk her life because she believes that if more countries have nuclear weapons, none will dare use it. Her son, in a rousing and tear-jerking finale, defends her as having done the right thing for world peace. But did she? The question remains unresolved.



HAS “MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION” SAVED THE WORLD?

 
SJM: The relative balance of nuclear power is essential to the logic of strategic nuclear deterrence. The security paradigm of the Cold War remained so stable because of the paradox of Mutually Assured Destruction – the state whereby opposing nuclear powers each possess the means to launch a decisive nuclear attack against the other, even after absorbing a first nuclear strike itself. By threatening to unleash on a decisive scale the very process it seeks to avoid – war – MAD ensures that the consequences of a strategic nuclear exchange are sufficiently terrifying to convince a would-be aggressor that the costs of war outweigh the benefits.

MC: Two factors (there are many others) are the destructiveness of major 20th-century wars, and luck. Even before the atomic age, there was considerable international concern that major interstate wars were becoming so destructive as to be untenable. The First and, most significantly, Second World Wars proved this point.

[In the case of] Cuba, luck – in the sense of the right person making the right decision at the right time – played a significant role in global nuclear war being averted. Soviet submarine officer Vasili Arkhipov could have agreed to the firing of a nuclear torpedo at US warships. US fighter pilots could have launched nuclear-tipped rockets at their Soviet counterparts. Sometimes, luck really is a factor.

BP: The two major military powers of the Cold War (the US and Soviet Union) were the first two to develop nuclear weapons, building 70,000 of them. That suggests that, at least for a time, possession of nuclear weapons in large numbers was a crucial feature of world power. However, those two countries possessed many other features of power. Also, Japan, Germany, South Korea and South Africa have explicitly built their strategy of emergence on the international stage on renunciation of nuclear weapons.

Members of groups such as the G7 to G20 [representatives from the banks and governments of the world’s leading economic nations] have increasingly included non-nuclear-armed states, and emerging states have rarely sought to acquire those weapons. It’s notable that India failed to acquire the status of permanent member of the UN Security Council after its nuclear weapons tests. Nuclear-weapon states have been attacked and lost wars against non-nuclear-weapon states (the US in Vietnam, for example, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan). So nuclear superiority has not been sufficient to guarantee either victory or war prevention. The record of coercion based on nuclear superiority is very limited. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, nuclear weapons use was avoided through luck. In that crucial case, nuclear balance was simply irrelevant.

BP: Deterrence theory claims that the destructive capability of nuclear weapons triggers fear, which in turn makes leaders cautious. However, recent scholarship shows that this relationship is far from automatic; classic works have also shown that threats intended to deter may have adverse effects, as can any other public policy. If one needs to constantly establish the credibility of a deterrent threat based on nuclear weapons, this will obviously lead to more risk-taking.

MC: One of the remarkable things about nuclear proliferation is that, despite consistently alarmist assessments of ‘tipping points’ and ‘cascades’, few countries have chosen to attain full nuclear capability. Nations such as Argentina, Sweden and South Korea all had at least partial nuclear programs at some point since the 1950s, but chose to abandon their ambitions. There were many reasons: internal politics, outside influence, leaders’ psychology, and so on. In some ways this tells us that the reasons not to go for full nuclearization are more popular than the reasons to do so.

However, nuclear weapons are an issue in the tension between India and Pakistan. Pakistan has ‘the bomb’ as a fundamental part of its strategy in the event of major war with India. Any potential battlefield use of tactical nuclear weapons could escalate a conflict to the strategic nuclear scale, with horrific regional and global consequences.

In some cases, nuclear capability matters not a jot. British governments have been heavily invested in the idea of a nuclear weapon state, but do those weapons deter potential enemies? Britain’s nuclear status did little to deter Argentina in 1982. Likewise, Al-Qaeda wasn’t deterred by the vast US nuclear arsenal. This leads to another question: what purpose do nuclear weapons serve in the 21st century?” ~

MC: Malcolm Craig; SJM: Simon J Moody; BP: Benoît Pelopidas

https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/have-nuclear-weapons-helped-to-maintain-global-peace/



HOW WW1 IS TAUGHT: US HISTORY VERSUS WORLD HISTORY

 
~ “In U.S. history, the content standards of all three states place World War I within the rise of the United States as a world power. In all three sets of state standards, students are expected to learn about World War I in relationship to American expansion into such places as Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Hawaii. The ways in which the war challenged a tradition of avoiding foreign entanglements is given attention in each set of standards.

By contrast, the world history standards of all three states place World War I under its own heading, asking students to examine the war’s causes and consequences. All three sets of state standards reference large-scale historical processes as the causes of the war, including nationalism, imperialism and militarism. Sometimes the U.S. is mentioned, and sometimes it’s not.

And so, students are learning about World War I in two very different ways. In the more nationalistic U.S. history curriculum, the United States is the defender of global order and democracy. In the world history context, the United States is mentioned hardly at all, and impersonal global forces take center stage.

Scholars today continue to debate the wisdom of President Wilson’s moral diplomacy – that is, the moral and altruistic language (like making the world “safe for democracy”) that justified U.S. involvement in World War I. At the same time, a recent poll by the Pew Research Center has shown that the American public has deep concerns about the policy of promoting democracy abroad.

In an age when protectionism, isolationism and nationalism are seemingly on the rise, our country as a whole is questioning the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.

History teachers are therefore left with a dilemma: teach toward national or global citizenship? Is world history something that happened “over there,” or is it something that happens “right here,” too?

In my own view, it seems incomplete to teach just one of these conflicting views of World War I. Instead, I would recommend to history teachers that they explore competing perspectives of the past with their students.

How do Hungarians, for example, generally remember World War I? Or how about Germans? How about the Irish? Armenians? How do these perspectives compare to American memories? Where is fact and where is fiction?

Such a history class would encourage students to examine how the present and the past are connected – and might satisfy both nationalists and globalists alike.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-should-world-war-i-be-taught-american-schools-180962761/#DXpLIjGKdf4bEvu0.99


 

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EASTERN MEDITATION COMPARED TO WESTERN PSYCHOTHERAPIES
 
~ “Can training the mind make us more attentive, altruistic, and serene? Can we learn to manage our disturbing emotions in an optimal way? What are the transformations that occur in the brain when we practice meditation? In a book titled Beyond the Self, two friends—Matthieu Ricard, who left a career as a molecular biologist to become a Buddhist monk in Nepal, and Wolf Singer, a distinguished neuroscientist—engage in an unusually well-matched conversation about meditation and the brain. Below is a condensed and edited excerpt.

Ricard: Buddhist contemplative science has many things in common with cognitive therapies, in particular with those using mindfulness as a foundation for remedying mental imbalance. As for psychoanalysis, it seems to encourage rumination and explore endlessly the details and intricacies of the clouds of mental confusion and self-centeredness that mask the most fundamental aspect of mind: luminous awareness.

Singer: So rumination would be the opposite of what you do during meditation?

Ricard: Totally opposite. It is also well known that constant rumination is one of the main symptoms of depression. What we need is to gain freedom from the mental chain reactions that rumination endlessly perpetuates. One should learn to let thoughts arise and be freed to go as soon as they arise, instead of letting them invade one’s mind. In the freshness of the present moment, the past is gone, the future is not yet born, and if one remains in pure mindfulness and freedom, potentially disturbing thoughts arise and go without leaving a trace.

Singer: What you have to learn then is to adopt a much more subtle approach to your internal emotional theater, to learn to identify with much higher resolution the various connotations of your feelings.

Ricard: That’s right. In the beginning, it is difficult to do it as soon as an emotion arises, but if you become increasingly familiar with such an approach, it becomes quite natural. Whenever anger is just showing its face, we recognize it right away and deal with it before it becomes too strong.

Singer: It is not unlike a scientific endeavor except that the analytical effort is directed toward the inner rather than the outer world. Science also attempts to understand reality by increasing the resolving power of instruments, training the mind to grasp complex relations, and decomposing systems into ever-smaller components.

Ricard: It is said in the Buddhist teachings that there is no task so difficult that it cannot be broken down into a series of small, easy tasks.
Singer: I have no difficulty in accepting that a learning process can change behavioral dispositions, even in adults. There is ample evidence of this from reeducation programs, where practice leads to small but incremental behavior modifications. There is also evidence for quite dramatic and sudden changes in cognition, emotional states, and coping strategies. In this case, the same mechanisms that support learning—distributed changes in the efficiency of synaptic connections—lead to drastic alterations of global brain states.

Ricard: You could also change the flow of neuron activity, as when the traffic on a road increases significantly.

Singer: Yes. What changes with learning and training in the adult is the flow of activity. The fixed hardware of anatomical connections is rather stable after age 20, but it is still possible to route activity flexibly from A to B or from A to C by adding certain signatures to the activity that ensure that a given activation pattern is not broadcast in a diffuse way to all connected brain regions but sent only to selected target areas.

Ricard: So far, the results of the studies conducted with trained meditators indicate that they have the faculty to generate clean, powerful, well-defined states of mind, and this faculty is associated with some specific brain patterns. Mental training enables one to generate those states at will and to modulate their intensity, even when confronted with disturbing circumstances, such as strong positive or negative emotional stimuli. Thus, one acquires the faculty to maintain an overall emotional balance that favors inner strength and peace.

Singer: So you have to use your cognitive abilities to identify more clearly and delineate more sharply the various emotional states, and to train your control systems, probably located in the frontal lobe, to increase or decrease selectively the activity of subsystems responsible for the generation of the various emotions.

In the naïve state, you are able to distinguish good and bad feelings only in a global way. With practice, these distinctions would become increasingly refined until you could distinguish more and more nuances. The taxonomy of mental states should thus become more differentiated. If this is the case, then cultures exploiting mental training as a source of knowledge should have a richer vocabulary for mental states than cultures that are more interested in investigating phenomena of the outer world.

Ricard: Buddhist taxonomy describes 58 main mental events and various subdivisions thereof. It is quite true that by conducting an in-depth investigation of mental events, one becomes able to distinguish increasingly more subtle nuances.

Another result of cultivating mental skills is that, after a while, you will no longer need to apply contrived efforts. You can deal with the arising of mental perturbations like the eagles I see from the window of my hermitage in the Himalayas. The crows often attack them, even though they are much smaller. They dive at the eagles from above trying to hit them with their beaks. However, instead of getting alarmed and moving around to avoid the crow, the eagle simply retracts one wing at the last moment, letting the diving crow pass by, and extends its wing back out. The whole thing requires minimal effort and is perfectly efficient. Being experienced in dealing with the sudden arising of emotions in the mind works in a similar way. When you are able to preserve a clear state of awareness, you see thoughts arise; you let them pass through your mind, without trying to block or encourage them; and they vanish without creating many waves.

Singer: This suggests that the neuronal codes become sparser, perhaps involving fewer but more specialized neurons, once skills become highly familiar and are executed with great expertise. To become a real expert seems to require then at least as much training as is required to become a world-class violin or piano player. With four hours of practice a day, it would take you 30 years of daily meditation to attain 44,000 hours. Remarkable!” ~

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/neuroscience-has-a-lot-to-learn-from-buddhism?utm_source=pocket-newtab


Mary:

Thinking of the connections between a Buddhist approach and cognitive therapy, I think both provide a practical and effective solution to breaking away from negative emotions. What is essential is that space, a step outside the rush of thought and feeling, that allows you to Observe, without bias,  emotion and behavior in that present moment. It is only that distance, that step back, that makes it possible to decide whether to continue in these feelings and behaviors, or simply, look at them and let them go.

What freedom!! What a release from senseless suffering and the endless repeating of harmful patterns. It is not necessary to dissect all the whys whens and hows that set up that pattern in order to be free of it. Sometimes that kind of archeological research of one's psyche and history can be a fruitless and endless life devouring task that can actually keep you stuck in the destructive patterns you have learned so well. First, step back, become the calm impartial Observor, that is what changes your position, what empowers, what will allow you to choose not to suffer, but to create and accept the possibility of happiness.

In some way in my own history, even when assaulted by positive tornadoes of destructive thoughts and feeling, suggesting dangerous behaviors, I always had that Observer standing in the background, dispassionate, rational, unconvinced. Even without my deliberate cooperation, the presence of that Observer,  I am certain, allowed me to resist my worst and most dangerous inclinations.(For instance, urges to suicide or self harm.) Actually practicing mindfulness would probably have released me much sooner from my life long habit of mental and emotional suffering, and have allowed me greater access to my creativity and productive energies.

Oriana:

How amazing! I also used the name OBSERVER for that part of me that never surrendered to irrationality and even downright delusional thinking that starts churning in deep depression. It was not a sweet and gentle voice, not a feminine voice — the closest that comes to mind is my engineer cousin (but that’s only an analogy). Dispassionate, yes, absolutely. Your description of your Observer sounds just like my Observer.

I hate to sound trite, but perhaps the “voice of reason” is really the best description. Or maybe the “voice of sanity” — the way that, aside from an acute psychotic episode, a schizophrenic has a dual consciousness, and a part of his or her psyche is completely normal. Still, whenever I heard that voice of reason, of sanity — the voice that seemed reserved for my most hysterical antics and depressive effluvia that tried to pass as insight — I called it the Observer.

The Observer never pitied me. I resented that somewhat, but then the Observer used the fewest possible words — just enough to cut through the b.s. and very quickly talk sense into me. It was naked reason, no emotion. At least there was no condemnation, just a kind of aloof dismissal with which I could not argue. “The voice with which there is no arguing” was another, more elaborate way I sometimes called it. Later I learned that in Buddhism the label for that part of psyche is called the Witness. It witnesses your latest crazy thought, but is not interested in any storyline. Feel it, think it, and then let it go.

Back in the years when I had the greatest need of the Observer, just knowing that the Observer was there, and would tolerate only so much, already had a certain power. I sensed something else in my psyche, almost the opposite of the Observer: what I’d called the Anti-Self. That was the perverse part of me that wanted me to fail, to suffer — that knew how to augment any sadness, any perceived insult from others, any memory of what went wrong — never mind that we’re talking about preschool here.

So happy that I'm able to use the past tense. Well, the Observer is still there, but hasn’t had to correct me in that curt way for a long while now. And I think I now hear yet another voice — warm and supportive. It typically says, “You’re fine. You’re doing fine.” Reading Louise Hay helped me develop that voice.

Sudden huge stress can drown out the good voices — but only temporarily.

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“Civilization begins with a rose. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. It continues with blooming and it fastens clearly upon excellent examples.” ~ Gertrude Stein, As Fine as Melanctha

Photo: Brenda Hammack

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CAN ANY LIFE BE MEANINGLESS? I think what existentialists were trying to say was: there is no externally imposed meaning of life — but they didn't deny creating a personal meaning in your life.


SUPERIONIC ICE

~ “Recently at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics in Brighton, New York, one of the world’s most powerful lasers blasted a droplet of water, creating a shock wave that raised the water’s pressure to millions of atmospheres and its temperature to thousands of degrees. X-rays that beamed through the droplet in the same fraction of a second offered humanity’s first glimpse of water under those extreme conditions.

The x-rays revealed that the water inside the shock wave didn’t become a superheated liquid or gas. Paradoxically—but just as physicists squinting at screens in an adjacent room had expected—the atoms froze solid, forming crystalline ice.

The findings, published this week in Nature, confirm the existence of “superionic ice,” a new phase of water with bizarre properties. Unlike the familiar ice found in your freezer or at the north pole, superionic ice is black and hot. A cube of it would weigh four times as much as a normal one. It was first theoretically predicted more than 30 years ago, and although it has never been seen until now, scientists think it might be among the most abundant forms of water in the universe.

Across the solar system, at least, more water probably exists as superionic ice—filling the interiors of Uranus and Neptune—than in any other phase, including the liquid form sloshing in oceans on Earth, Europa and Enceladus. The discovery of superionic ice potentially solves decades-old puzzles about the composition of these “ice giant” worlds.

Including the hexagonal arrangement of water molecules found in common ice, known as “ice Ih,” scientists had already discovered a bewildering 18 architectures of ice crystal. Across the solar system, at least, more water probably exists as superionic ice—filling the interiors of Uranus and Neptune—than in any other phase, including the liquid form sloshing in oceans on Earth, Europa and Enceladus. The discovery of superionic ice potentially solves decades-old puzzles about the composition of these “ice giant” worlds.

Including the hexagonal arrangement of water molecules found in common ice, known as “ice Ih,” scientists had already discovered a bewildering 18 architectures of ice crystal. Yes, there is an ice IX, but it exists only under contrived conditions, unlike the fictional doomsday substance in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle.

Superionic ice can now claim the mantle of ice XVIII. It’s a new crystal but with a twist. All the previously known water ices are made of intact water molecules, each with one oxygen atom linked to two hydrogen atoms. But superionic ice, the new measurements confirm, isn’t like that. It exists in a sort of surrealist limbo, part solid, part liquid. Individual water molecules break apart. The oxygen atoms form a cubic lattice, but the hydrogen atoms spill free, flowing like a liquid through the rigid cage of oxygens.

Depending on whom you ask, superionic ice is either another addition to water’s already cluttered array of avatars or something even stranger. Because its water molecules break apart, said physicist Livia Bove of France’s National Center for Scientific Research and Pierre and Marie Curie University, it’s not quite a new phase of water. “It’s really a new state of matter,” she said, “which is rather spectacular.”

Right around the time when the phase was first predicted, the probe Voyager 2 had sailed into the outer solar system, uncovering something strange about the magnetic fields of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune.

The fields around the solar system’s other planets seem to be made up of strongly defined north and south poles, without much other structure. It’s almost as if they have just bar magnets in their centers, aligned with their rotation axes. Planetary scientists chalk this up to “dynamos”: interior regions where conductive fluids rise and swirl as the planet rotates, sprouting massive magnetic fields.

By contrast, the magnetic fields emanating from Uranus and Neptune looked lumpier and more complex, with more than two poles. They also don’t align as closely to their planets’ rotation. One way to produce this would be to somehow confine the conducting fluid responsible for the dynamo into just a thin outer shell of the planet, instead of letting it reach down into the core.

But the idea that these planets might have solid cores, which are incapable of generating dynamos, didn’t seem realistic. If you drilled into these ice giants, you would expect to first encounter a layer of ionic water, which would flow, conduct currents and participate in a dynamo. Naively, it seems like even deeper material, at even hotter temperatures, would also be a fluid. “I used to always make jokes that there’s no way the interiors of Uranus and Neptune are actually solid,” said Sabine Stanley at Johns Hopkins University. “But now it turns out they might actually be.”

The new analyses also hint that although superionic ice does conduct some electricity, it’s a mushy solid. It would flow over time, but not truly churn. Inside Uranus and Neptune, then, fluid layers might stop about 8,000 kilometers down into the planet, where an enormous mantle of sluggish, superionic ice begins. That would limit most dynamo action to shallower depths, accounting for the planets’ unusual fields.

https://www.wired.com/story/a-bizarre-form-of-water-may-exist-all-over-the-universe/?utm_source=pocket-newtab


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A REVERSE BAR MITZVAH

“For a medieval farmer to enter a church with its icons, gargoyles and stained glass must have been something dazzling, like the circus before the circus. The church frowned on the circus. It didn't want the competition.

The circus was a more dizzying escape than the church, but paradoxically a more dizzying escape into fantastical reality, the wonders of earthly life and its great potential.

I remember the morning when I first escaped into the larger reality, the morning realized how big the world really was. I was nine. I suddenly understood that one could run away to the circus if one wanted. I didn't have to stay in my orthodox Jewish community. I could escape it.

It was 1965. I was eating a breakfast of red licorice and cold pizza with my dad in our Disneyland hotel room.

That unorthodox breakfast was my reverse bar mitzvah, not a ritual of commitment to my tribe but my liberation into the larger world and all the existential doubts that come with having to guess my place within it.

And I was at Disneyland, a descendant of the circus dazzling us with just how many things are possible.” ~ Jeremy Sherman

Albert Bloch: March of the Clowns
 
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“There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements?” ~ Joseph Heller, in “Catch 22”
Then there is the "kingship" of god, sitting on a throne (in Polish, a popular euphemism for sitting on the toilet). Such archaic images do less and less for us.
 
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GLUCOSAMINE MAY BENEFITS THE HEART

 
~ “A popular and widely used dietary supplement for joint pain could also be beneficial for your heart.

According to new research Trusted Source published in The BMJ, habitual use of the supplement glucosamine was found to be associated with a significantly lower risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and its more severe consequences like stroke.

New research that included nearly a half-million participants found that habitually taking glucosamine was associated with 15 percent lower overall risk of CVD events, compared to nonusers.

It was further associated with a 9 to 22 percent lower risk of CVD death, coronary heart disease, and stroke, compared to nonusers.

However, researchers point out that despite this association, their work doesn’t establish a causal link between glucosamine and better CVD outcomes.

“Our study suggests a potential new beneficial effect of glucosamine on cardiovascular health. The practical implication would be upon further evidence from future studies, such as clinical trials, that verify such effects as causal,” said Dr. Lu Qi, a professor in the department of epidemiology at Tulane University and one of the study’s authors.

Nonetheless, the data from the study is robust.

This isn’t the first study to take note of glucosamine’s beneficial relationship with CVD.

Its results are in line with an Australian study from 2012 Trusted Source of 266,848 adults 45 years and older. Researchers found a negative association between taking glucosamine, heart disease, and other cardiovascular conditions.

Still, there remains a large unknown: If glucosamine is in fact protective for the heart (and that’s still a big if), how does it work?

The answer just isn’t clear.

“The data on mechanisms are limited. Currently we know little about how glucosamine may affect cardiovascular health,” said Qi.

But, as Qi points out in the study, there are some theories.

Inflammation is common among heart disease and stroke patients, and it’s believed to play a role in cardiovascular disease. Glucosamine appears to have anti-inflammatory properties, which could therefore be preventive.

 
Another theory is that glucosamine supplementation may mimic certain biological effects of a low-carbohydrate diet that help lower risk of CVD.

Qi and his colleagues point out a 2014 animal study Trusted Source that found glucosamine extended the life span of aging mice as possible evidence of this.

Clinical trials would be a necessary next step to better understand whether glucosamine really benefits heart health.

Glucosamine is a naturally occurring substance found within the body that’s recognized for its role in maintaining the cartilage between joints.” ~

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/common-supplement-may-help-with-heart-health#The-bottom-line


Shellfish chitin can be a source of glucosamine
 
ending on beauty:

Little by little, the poverty
Of autumnal space becomes
A look, a few words spoken.

Each person completely touches us
With what he is and as he is,
In the stale grandeur of annihilation.

~ Wallace Stevens, Lebensweisheitspielerei

Bruce Dern in the movie Nebraska (superb)