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Welcome to Pakistan Arizona

How much further comment does this really need? "TUCSON — Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and at least 17 others were shot Saturday morning when a gunman opened fire outside a supermarket where Ms. Giffords was meeting with constituents. Six of the victims died, among them John M. Roll, the chief judge for the United States District Court for Arizona, and a 9-year-old girl, the Pima County sheriff, Clarence W. Dupnik, said." (In Attack’s Wake, Political Repercussions, Marc Lacey and David M. Herszenhorn, NYT 08 January 2011).
First of all, my thoughts are with the victims (at this writing Giffords is still alive but in critical condition with a bullet wound to the head, while the dead include her director of community outreach, Gabriel Zimmerman, 30; a nine-year old girl identified as Christina Green; John M. Roll, 63, the chief judge for the United States District Court for Arizona; Dorothy Morris, 76; Dorwin Stoddard, 76; and Phyllis Schneck, 79) and their families.
What's wrong with this picture? Only last Tuesday, Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, was assassinated by one of his own bodyguards, who by his subsequent statements implied that this act was justified by Taseer's campaign to have Pakistan's anti-blasphemy laws amended. Doubtless many of us, if we noticed the event at all, took the occasion to reflect on what a savage country Pakistan must be, where the course of history appears hostage to conspiring conservative politicians and fundamentalist religious lunatics.
Lucky for us, we don't live in such a place! But maybe we can get there yet. On the one hand, as many have already noted, there is growing in the US, especially since runup to the 2008 Presidential election and afterwards, a palpable atmosphere of "Violence-laced political rhetoric" promoted by right wing politicians, pundits, and bloggers. Thus the main intended victim, Congresswoman Giffords, was a Democrat squarely in the cross-hairs of right wing incitement. On the other hand, I have seen numerous comments suggesting that the captured gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, is actually a Liberal. Some of his classmates suggested as much. What is readily apparent is that he is a lunatic; but whose lunatic is he? Listed among Loughner's favorite books are Mein Kampf, We the Living, Plato's Republic, and the Communist Manifesto. The last, it has been suggested, is evidence for his Liberal fanaticism. Of course the author of Mein Kampf was also a well known Liberal (I've read explicit comparisons to President Obama, I suppose by people who don't know their left from their right), but what to make of We the Living, Ayn Rand's semi-autobiographical, anti-communist first novel? Does that make Loughner an Objectivist assassin?
Further evidence I've seen put forward for Loughner's supposed lefty associations: Giffords is a centrist, a Blue Dog Democrat, not a strong supporter of gun-control nor of open borders; and Judge Roll was a 1991 GHW Bush appointee. But how does that stack up against Giffords' 100% positive rating by NARAL and her strong support for renewable energy? Loughner apparently has no known Tea Party or other organized right-wing associations; fair enough, he's not that kind of crazy, just one more psychopath who brought his paranoid delusions to a deadly end with a 9mm Glock pistol carrying 30 rounds in the magazine. Maybe it's arguable whether or not the climate of violent rhetoric somehow provided a facilitating or suggestive atmosphere for Loughner's acts (personally I wouldn't shrink from arguing the pro side of that question); however, there's a bigger issue than eliminationist rhetoric at stake here, something much more fundamental and long-standing: why is it so easy for these crazy fuckers to get guns?
posted by Steven Levery at 5:18 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

Saturday, January 01, 2011

52 Books In 52 Weeks

Last 01 January, mindful of how few books I've read in recent years, I made a New Year's resolution: to average a book a week throughout 2010. As it happens, I actually read 53. For what it's worth, my list follows, in reverse chronological order:
Tariq Ali, The Protocols of the Elders of Sodom and Other Essays
William Kennedy, Ironweed
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem
David Shields, Dead Languages
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
Carolyn Forché, Gathering the Tribes (Yale Series of Younger Poets)Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty-Seventh City
Nathalie Sarraute, The Use of Speech
David Albahari, Götz and Meyer
Claude Simon, The World About Us
Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & ClayAlan Furst, Blood of Victory
Charles Simic, Night Picnic: Poems
Lawrence L. Langer, Editor, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
Roland Huntford, Scott and Amundsen
Claude Lévi-Strauss, TotemismFanny Howe, Selected Poems (New California Poetry, 3)
James Tate, Worshipful Company of Fletchers
Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas
Charles Simic, A Wedding in Hell
Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude: A MemoirHoward Goldowsky, Editor, Masters of Technique
Jacobo Timerman, Chile: Death in South
Stephen Jay Gould, Urchin in the Storm: Essays About Books and Ideas
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's SoulHans C. Ohanian, Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius
Susan Sontag, On Photography
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
Jacobo Timerman, Cuba: A Journey
James Tate, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee
Jo Walton, Farthing (Small Change, #1)Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (revised 1985 edition in 3 volumes)
Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle
Russell Edson, The Tunnel: Selected Poems of Russell EdsonCharles Simic, Orphan Factory: Essays and Memoirs
Roberto Bolaño, Amulet
Roberto Bolaño, By Night in ChilePhilip Roth, The Humbling
Kim Addonizio, Lucifer at the Starlite: Poems
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove (Remembrance of Things Past, No. 2, Vintage)
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New ScienceFumiko Enchi, Masks
André Malraux, The Royal Way
Amos Oz, To Know a Woman
James Tate, Riven Doggeries (American Poetry Series; V. 18)
Lawrence D. Kritzman, Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and "the Jewish Question" in France
Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (Sprawl Trilogy, #3)
James Edward Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation
This the first resolution I've ever successfully met. So I'm going to renew it for 2011.
posted by Steven Levery at 8:08 PM 2 Comments Links to this post

Friday, December 31, 2010

Published: Just in time for the New Year

A new flash story of mine, "Fear" just went up at the website "Litsnack" (if you follow the latter link to the Litsnack home page, you can reach the story through the "Fiction" link). It will be the top story there for about a week, then move down as new stories are published.
"New" is a bit of a misnomer, since it took 4 years for me to find a home for it. Actually a "classic" case where a change of point of view (from first to third person) seemed to have finally done the trick. It's only 455 words, so there's no excuse, y'all better read it! And if you like it, please leave a comment there so the editor will see for sure he didn't make a mistake.
posted by Steven Levery at 1:43 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

Monday, December 27, 2010

More Snow

Holed up in Gloucester, MA, after the blizzard; still snowing actually. This was my first attempt ever to blog directly from my primitive three year old mobile phone, which took this photo of Good Harbor Beach from my room at the Vista Motel. Because I didn't bring my real camera. Well, okay, done....
posted by Steven Levery at 9:35 AM 1 Comments Links to this post

Sunday, December 19, 2010

R.I.P. Captain Beefheart

Saddened by the news that Don van Vliet, AKA Captain Beefheart, passed away on Friday, of complications from multiple sclerosis. He was 69.

He was a true original. I was fortunate to have discovered him relatively early, acquiring "Trout Mask Replica" not long after it came out in 1969; to see him twice in live performances with incarnations of The Magic Band, and to see him one final time with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention on their joint 1975 "Bongo Fury" tour. I still listen regularly to "Trout Mask Replica", "The Spotlight Kid" (1971) "Clear Spot" (1972), and the joint Zappa/Beefheart/Mothers "Bongo Fury" (1975). It's not for me to recount his whole biography here (Wikipedia does a pretty decent job, with appraisals of all his albums and numerous references); real fans know what he's been up to since his retirement, and I've been blessed with friends who are also fans and know enough send me stories and links when they come across them. A number of us can still recite from memory long stretches of the strange, compelling poetry in those albums.
My master's thesis (Northeastern University, Chemistry, 1976) contains the following epigraph taken from the back of The Spotlight Kid:
The stars are matter
We're matter
But it doesn't matter
- Don Van Vliet
It was reported to me a couple of months after my defense that this quotation had the professors in the Chemistry Department exchanging puzzled looks ("Who is Don van Vliet?" "Captain Beefheart." "Who? Who the hell is that?"), which I took at the time as a clear indication of its absolute rightness. Aside from stretching the possibilities of rock and blues, Beefheart spoke my language--before I really knew what that language was. But that's about me, and I'd rather leave you with these lyrics from "Steal Softly Thru Snow" (Trout Mask Replica"):
The black paper between a mirror breaks my heart
The moon frayed through dark velvet lightly apart
Steal softly through sunshine, steal softly through snow
The wild goose flies from winter, breaks my heart that I can't go
Energy flies thru a field 'n the sun softly melts a nothing wheel
Steal softly through sunshine, steal softly through snow
The black paper between a mirror breaks my heart that I can't go
The swan their feathers don't grow - they're spun
They live two hundred years of love - they're one
Breaks my heart to see them cross the sun
Grain grows rainbows up straw hill
Breaks my heart to see the highway cross the hill
Man lived a million years 'n still he kills
The black paper between a mirror breaks my heart that I can't go
Steal softly through sunshine, steal softly through snow
- Don van Vliet
posted by Steven Levery at 1:18 PM 2 Comments Links to this post

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Chaos (A Belated Review)

Finally got around to reading James Gleick’s book Chaos, which has sat on my shelf in a succession of houses and apartments I’ve inhabited since I bought the book in 1988, about a year after it came out. [1]
Don’t ask me why I waited so long, but it’s a terrific book. Gleick has a great facility for making abstruse scientific ideas understandable, for putting the evolution of concepts into a coherent continuum of historical and logical development, and for providing insightful glimpses of the social and intellectual context in which science actually advances: the variegated and colorful personalities of scientists, their inner thoughts (covering the wide range from deeply penetrating or utterly mistaken), and the many ways they interact with each other. In addition, I really appreciate his ability to interweave examples from art and science where they can provide mutual illumination of a difficult topic. A particularly delightful example brought Wallace Stevens into a discussion of the work of the French physicist Albert Libchaber, who was performing fundamental studies on the onset of disordered flow (turbulence) inside an elegant experimental system consisting of liquid helium trapped in a rectangular stainless steel convection cell, “about the size of a lemon seed.” Early in this chapter, Gleick invokes Stevens to make a scientific point about the nature of “the abstract, ill-defined, ghostly thing called flow.” [1]

“The universality of shapes, the similarities across scales, the recursive power of flows within flows—all sat just beyond reach of the standard differential-calculus approach to equations of change. But that was not easy to see. Scientific problems are expressed in the available scientific language. So far, the twentieth century’s best expression of Libchaber’s intuition about flow needed the language of poetry. Wallace Stevens, for example, asserted a feeling about the world that stepped ahead of the knowledge available to physicists. He had an uncanny suspicion about flow, how it repeated itself while changing:

‘The flecked river
Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing
Through many places, as if it stood still in one.’

Stevens’ poetry often imparts a vision of tumult in atmosphere and water. It also conveys a faith about the invisible forms that order takes in nature, a belief

‘that, in the shadowless atmosphere,
The knowledge of things lay round but unperceived.’ ” [2]

Later in this passage, about “These experimenters, the ones who pursued chaos most relentlessly, succeeded by refusing to accept any reality that could be frozen motionless.” Gleick continues, “Even Libchaber would not have gone so far as to express it in such terms, but their conception came close to what Stevens felt as an ‘insolid billowing of the solid’:

‘The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,

Either in distance, change or nothingness,
The visible transformations of summer night,

An argentine abstraction approaching form,
And suddenly denying itself away.’ ” [3]

It’s not difficult to figure out why discussions of chaos theory and practice readily evoke affinities and analogies with the visual, sonic, and literary arts; much about the creative process has to do with alternately submitting to and organizing chaos; finding patterns in apparent disorder; observing and analyzing nature (or one’s own thoughts), and discerning previously unsuspected relationships (and inventing new ways to describe them). The relationship between music and mathematics, which underpins the fields of physics and chaos, is well known; nor is it surprising that Mandelbrot patterns are appealing, that depictions of turbulence are staples of the visual arts, or that writers learn to travel knowingly along the contiguous territories of chance and purpose. “Chance seems to us then a good and useful thing, for we discern in it as it were rudiments of organization, of an attempt to arrange our life….” [4]

If you have a decent background in elementary physics and mathematics, and aren’t already acquainted with such terms as “Mandelbrot set”, “fractional dimensions”, and “strange attractors”, but they sound like things you really would like to know about; or if you are a layperson just wanting a glimpse (the pictures are cool!) into the world of “non-linear behavior”, “boundaries of infinite complexity”, and “organized chaos”, this book, even more than two decades since its appearance, is still a good place to start. [5]

[1] James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), pp.195-196. See also footnote [5].

[2] Gleick quoting Wallace Stevens, “This Solitude of Cataracts,” The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1972), p. 321.

[3] Gleick quoting Wallace Stevens, “Reality Is an Activity in the Most August Imagination,” The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1972), p. 396.

[4] Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove (C. K. Scott Moncrieff, translator), Remembrance of Things Past [À la Récherche du Temps Perdue/In Search of Lost Time] Volume II (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), p. 293.

[5] Note that there is a more recent edition of the book out since 2008: James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science—20th Anniversary Edition (New York: Penguin Books, 2008). ISBN: 0143113453.
posted by Steven Levery at 9:06 AM 6 Comments Links to this post

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Denmark Day 745

København's Søerne ("The Lakes") have been frozen solid for weeks, now, but I haven't had a chance to pay much attention, camera-wise, since I've had some more important things to worry about, like where I was going to live after 31 January. That problem's been solved for the moment, so here goes:
Sortedams Sø and Sunday morning traffic on Øster Søgade.
Taken from my 3rd floor room in a University gæsteobolig (guest home). The lakes are pretty shallow, so there's no doubt they're frozen solid all the way to the bottom; basically they've been turned into a giant ice tray, with a layer of snow on top. Only under a couple of the bridges is there any unfrozen water remaining.

Buildings on Søtorvet.
Taken from somewhere on Sortedams Sø.

Sectional couch, island on Sortedams Sø.
I'm sure this little island has a local name, which I don't know, but the key thing is that this happens to be one of those years when it's accessible on foot. The couch looks kinda comfy.
Statues on Dronning Louises Bro.
That's Peblinge Sø behind them, with Søpavillionen in the far background. I'm sure she's saying something like "Damn, it's frickin' cold out! Why are we sitting here without our coats on?"
All photos taken 14 February 2010.
posted by Steven Levery at 12:17 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

Monday, February 08, 2010

Denmark Day 739

This photo (not mine) says it all about biking around in Copenhagen in the dead of winter, which has been colder than usual this year.

(Photo and quote credit: Hebster. "Alone. Or as alone as it is possible to be on Fredensbro on a sunday afternoon. Shot on a shit-cold second sunday in [February] 2010.")
Late evening the same Sunday this picture was taken, it's around -10 C (14 F), and I'm walking SE over the very same Fredensbro (this is one of the bridges over the Søerne—the lakes that form the western border of downtown København). Mildish 10 mph headwinds, not very challenging if you're just walking around (and your last place of residence was New Hampshire), but the air is, after all, coming off a frozen lake. When I'm about halfway across, I hear a young woman exclaim in accented English to her friend as they cycle past on my left, "This is NOT very wonderful...I'm killing my bike NOW!"
And IMRISL (rolling in the snow laughing).
posted by Steven Levery at 1:02 PM 1 Comments Links to this post

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Haiti....

As usual, I'm about 48 hours behind the news curve, but what does it matter? The point is that they will need a lot of aid now and over the next few weeks, and the only question is which organization can make the best use of whatever one can donate. A good idea is to go with organizations that are already set up, have a good record with % of donations that actually goes to those who need it, and are already on the ground in the disaster area. I went on-line with the Danish Medicins Sans Frontieres/Læger Uden Grænser (www.msf.dk) Haiti Emergency Fund. If anyone wants, the corresponding Doctors Without Borders site is here.
posted by Steven Levery at 9:40 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
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