Book Review: G.C. Waldrep

Poetry Collections by W. S. Merwin, G. C. Waldrep, Angie Estes and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain - Review - NYTimes.com

ARCHICEMBALO
Poems.
By G. C. Waldrep.
Tupelo, paper, $16.95.

Steven Burt

Waldrep’s title denotes an antique keyboard instrument with 24, or many more, keys per octave. Notoriously hard to play, such instruments made subtle and challenging music, with notes a conventional score could not include. Waldrep’s sometimes bewildering, often exciting prose poems make their own unconventional music, replete with slippages, repetitions, suggestions: “Every sound is tropical, every sound is perishable,” he writes. “My aunt sends one wrapped in butcher paper & string.” Most poems take quizzical titles from musical terms (“What Is a Threnody,” “What Is a Motet”), and most take rhetorical gifts from Gertrude Stein; yet Waldrep’s poems, far more than Stein’s, revel in the variety of their subjects. Some include clear scenes and characters, as when the poet helps a boy cross a cold road: “we walked slowly, because he was not yet done with being five.” The poet also leavens his intricate compositions with self-consciously playful asides: “Nothing is what it appears to be, I say. To which you reply, yes it is.” Waldrep (who studied the labor movement for his Ph.D. in American history) attends to the meaning of work, to the hardships of lives unlike his own: “Who Was Scheherazade” begins “My job was to pick rocks.” Yet his great triumphs combine such outward sympathies with self-conscious attention to inward oddities, to fleeting thoughts, to the vectors of energy in abstract words: “If I subtract sacrifice from appetite from what fierce attention do I then compromise a strict union, have I faltered, have I made an argument for grace.”

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Prize Rooster

accidental mysteries: Poultry in Motion

19th century cabinet card of the prize rooster, standing very still for his official portrait.

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Recession Fallout: Secret Sales

High-End Retailers Offering More Discounts, but Discreetly - NYTimes.com

Scott Stuart was at the Bloomingdale’s store in Manhattan when a salesman sidled up to him, said a private sale was under way and offered him a discount on the slacks he was inspecting.

That was last autumn, and in the months since, he has been inundated with similar discount offers. If a salesman does not make one, he has learned to ask.

“In another market, I would have found it very inappropriate” to ask for a discount, said Mr. Stuart, a bankruptcy lawyer who works in New York and Chicago. “In this market, I’m finding it incredibly appropriate.”

Mr. Stuart is among the many consumers in this economy to reap the benefits of secret sales — whispered discounts and discreet price negotiations between customers and sales staff in the aisles of upscale chains. A time-worn strategy typically reserved for a store’s best customers, it has become more democratized as the recession drags on and retailers struggle to turn browsers into buyers.

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Emil Schildt, Photographer

emil schildt main

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Rudolph Kurz: Poet

Phantasmaphile: Rudolf Kurz

Rudolf Kurz "Poet"

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Hummingbird Display

Hummingbird Display Case, detail; London Museum of Natural

Morbid Anatomy

A Bouquet of (Maybe) Tulips: Gates Makes Nice

Gates sends flowers to woman who called the police - Local News Updates - The Boston Globe

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. has sent a bouquet of flowers and a note to the woman whose 911 call led to his arrest earlier this month.

Wendy Murphy, lawyer and spokeswoman for Lucia Whalen, said today that Gates had sent her client a bouquet of flowers as an "expression of gratitude.'' Murphy said she believed it was a bouquet of tulips. The flowers came with a note from Gates, the contents of which Murphy would not disclose.

"[Whalen] said that she really appreciated it,'' Murphy said. "She's been getting a lot of apologies and people have been saying nice things."

Crocs on a Plane: Nobody's Reptile

A foot-long baby crocodile wriggled out of a passenger's hand luggage and caused panic on a flight departing from the United Arab Emirates, an official at Cairo airport said today.

A crew member on the EgyptAir flight from Abu Dhabi rounded up the wayward reptile and calmed passengers.

The airport security official says the animal was seized and given to the Cairo Zoo. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

Transporting exotic animals in and out of the Egypt is illegal, and none of the passengers on Friday's flight claimed ownership of the baby crocodile.

link: Baby crocodile found in hand luggage on flight | World news | guardian.co.uk

"Tsunami of Red Ink"--Financial Disaster in Alabama

Shaila Dewan writes:

In every part of Jefferson County — Alabama’s most populous county and its main economic engine — government managers have been scrambling to prepare for Saturday, when two-thirds of county employees eligible for layoffs — up to 1,400 — will be lost in an effort to stave off financial ruin.

“Outside of the city of Detroit,” said Robert A. Kurrter, a managing director with Moody’s Investors Service, “it’s fair to say we haven’t seen any place in America with the severity of problems that they’re experiencing in Jefferson County.” Moody’s rates Jefferson County’s credit lower than any other municipality in the country.

In July, the county asked Gov. Bob Riley, a Republican, to declare a state of emergency. Mr. Riley declined, delicately explaining that his authority extended to tornadoes but not to tsunamis of red ink.

link: Alabama County Faces Major Layoffs - NYTimes.com

Need Deferred: High-Speed Rail

Despite his support of the idea of high-speed rail, President Obama has put off dealing with the national transportation bill for another 18 months. That is a delayed opportunity to move forward on an important new national transportation plan to expand public transit in much the way the Federal-Aid Highway Act did for roads more than 50 years ago.

Until Mr. Obama and members of Congress can enact a comprehensive new transit agenda, both have an obligation to make a down payment on high-speed-rail corridors across the nation.

link: America’s Not-So-Fast Trains - Editorial - NYTimes.com

Remnants of a City's Defense

Joseph Berger writes:

Those who savor lobster in the seafood restaurants on City Island would be surprised to know that a small windswept island they can glimpse just across the water — Hart Island — once concealed missiles intended to stop a nuclear attack.

Hart Island has served many purposes, as a prison camp, a drug-rehabilitation center and, most famously, as the city’s potter’s field — the burial ground for the unclaimed and the penniless. But from 1955 to 1960, its northern end was one of the nation’s 200 Nike missile sites.

Twenty Ajax missiles, a type of Nike, were hidden there in underground concrete bunkers; the radar systems that guided them were two miles away on Davids Island, just off New Rochelle. Today the base is a relic, although its rusted and brush-covered concrete and steel can still be picked out by a trained eye.

There were 21 missile sites in the region that protected New York City in the Cold War, but the only other one in the city was in Fort Tilden, on the Rockaway peninsula.

link: Hart Island Once Housed a Battery of Missiles to Defend New York City - NYTimes.com

Book Review: Essays on Polish Poetry

Jaroslaw Anders's Between Fire and Sleep, a collection of essays that first appeared in American periodicals, especially The New Republic, when Eastern Europe was digging out from under the wreckage of Communism, is the best book of its kind available in English and, quite likely, any other language.

continue reading at the link: Cures for the Common Cold War: Postwar Polish Poetry

Obama Reappoints Ousted Federal Judge

Today, President Obama nominated four individuals to serve as U.S. attorneys — most notably Daniel Bogden in Nevada. “These fine men and women have demonstrated the extensive knowledge of the law and deep commitment to public service Americans deserve from their United States Attorneys,” said Obama in a statement. Bogden has actually already served as a U.S. attorney, but he was ousted in the Bush administration’s political purge. Even Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) said that the case had been “completely mishandled” by then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has been pushing the White House to bring back Bogden.

link: Think Progress » Fired U.S. attorney Daniel Bogden is re-nominated by Obama for his former position.

Ex Libris

but does it float

Mississippi Fred McDowell

Lee Friedlander & William Eggleston

link: adski_kafeteri: Lee Friedlander&William Eggleston (Mississippi Fred McDowell)

Witness of the Lens: Executed Communards, 1871

Communards executed during the Semaine Sanglante (Bloody Week), when the Paris Commune was suppressed, 1871. Approximately 20,000 were killed in this one week.

link: CONSTANT SIEGE - Communards executed during the Semaine Sanglante...

Look Out For That--Cow?

The image of cows as placid, gentle creatures is a city slicker’s fantasy, judging from an article published on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reports that about 20 people a year are killed by cows in the United States. In some cases, the cows actually attack humans—ramming them, knocking them down, goring them, trampling them and kicking them in the head—resulting in fatal injuries to the head and chest.

Mother cows, like other animals, can be fiercely protective of their young, and dairy bulls, the report notes, are “especially possessive of their herd and occasionally disrupt feeding, cleaning, and milking routines.”

link: Dangerous Cows - TierneyLab Blog - NYTimes.com

Light-To-Matter Communication Network

TYWKIWDBI writes:

Lene Hau has already shaken scientists' beliefs about the nature of things... in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic...

Two years later, she brought light to a complete halt in a cloud of ultracold atoms... In the experiment, a light pulse was slowed to bicycle speed by beaming it into a cold cloud of atoms. The light made a "fingerprint" of itself in the atoms before the experimenters turned it off. Then Hau and her assistants guided that fingerprint into a second clump of cold atoms. And get this - the clumps were not touching and no light passed between them.

"The two atom clouds were separated and had never seen each other before," Hau notes. They were eight-thousandths of an inch apart, a relatively huge distance on the scale of atoms.

The experimenters then nudged the second cloud of atoms with a laser beam, and the atomic imprint was revived as a light pulse. The revived light had all the characteristics present when it entered the first cloud of atomic matter, the same shape and wavelength. The restored light exited the cloud slowly then quickly sped up to its normal 186,000 miles a second...

She is coolly confident that light-to-matter communication networks, codes, clocks, and guidance systems can be made part of daily life. If you doubt her, remember she is the person who stopped light, converted it to matter, carried it around, and transformed it back to light.

link: TYWKIWDBI: Light converted into matter - and back into light!

Physics of a Supernova

Snapshots from inside an exploding star

Physicists at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago have used the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer to model the extreme physics of a supernova explosion

link: Gallery - Snapshots from inside an exploding star - Image 1 - New Scientist

Metamaterials Allow Long-Range Steering of Light

Ed Hayward writes:

Using a composite metamaterial to deliver a complex set of instructions to a beam of light, Boston College physicists have created a device to guide electromagnetic waves around objects such as the corner of a building or the profile of the eastern seaboard.

As directed by the researchers' novel device, these beams continue to behave as if traveling in a straight line. In one computer simulation, Assistant Professor of Physics Willie J. Padilla and researcher Nathan Landy revealed the device could steer a beam of light along the boundary of the US, stretching from Michigan to Maine, down the seaboard, around Florida and into the Louisiana bayou, according to research published in the research journal Optics Express.

The researchers accomplished their feat by developing a much more precise set of instructions, which create a grid-like roadmap capable of twisting and turning a beam of light around objects or space. Their discovery is an extension of earlier metamaterial "cloaking" techniques, which have conjured up images of the Harry Potter character disappearing beneath his invisibility cloak.

link: The guiding of light: A new metamaterial device steers beams along complex pathways

GOP Health Plan "Health Insurance Industry Dream"

Jed Lewison writes:

Yesterday, with little fanfare, Republicans finally introduced legislation putting down on paper exactly what they think health care reform should look like.

The GOP's "Empower Patients First Act," sponsored by Republican House Study Committee Chairman Tom Price, is a $700 billion giveaway to the health insurance industry and its introduction creates a huge opening for the White House and congressional Democrats in the health reform debate. It has three main elements:

1. Health insurance deregulation. The bill would deregulate the insurance market, dismantling state-level consumer protections and allowing insurance giants to sell their plans nationwide without fear of oversight. (Edit, 9:41AM: The problem here is that the GOP plan creates an unregulated national market, unlike the Democratic proposal for a national insurance exchange, which would create a national market, but with consumer protections.)

2. Subsidizing private health insurance. The bill would give private health insurance subsidies to lower-income individuals and families. This sounds good at first, but subsidies in the absence of other reforms will simply increase the cost of health insurance for everybody else, leading to another inflationary spiral in health care.

3. No comprehensive plan to pay for plan. In order to fund subsidies, the bill calls for a 1% annual cut in Federal discretionary spending each year for the next decade, yielding about $120 billion. Although this would result in major across-the-board cuts in federal spending, it still leaves nearly $600 billion unfunded. Republicans say they can find "efficiencies" in the health care system to cover that $600 billion shortfall, including malpractice reform, but fail to offer specifics, suggesting the legislation would dramatically increase the deficit.

In sum, the Republican health bill would be a disaster for ordinary Americans, but it's the health insurance industry's dream. It slashes consumer-protection regulations, it increases health care costs by subsidizing private insurance while simultaneously deregulating it, and it would create another explosion of federal debt.

link: Google Reader (934)

Aerial Photos Discover Lost Roman City

Aerial photographs have revealed the streetplan of a lost Roman city called Altinum, which some scholars regard as a forerunner of Venice.

The images reveal the remains of city walls, the street network, dwellings, theatres and other structures.

They also show a complex network of rivers and canals, revealing how the people mastered the marshy environment in what is now the lagoon of Venice.

Details of the research have been published in the journal Science.

link: BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Maps reveal Venice 'forerunner'

Sucked In: The Vacuum Cleaner Museum

Atlas Obscura writes:

Tucked away in a not-so-dusty corner of Stark's Vacuum Cleaner Sales & Service in downtown Portland is a collection that would make any prop master, house wife, or history buff slobber with excitement. Stark's is home to a small but very comprehensive Vacuum Cleaner Museum. The walls of their rear showroom are lined with over 300 different models of vacuums, from their oldest, a two person hand pumped wood and steel number, to "futuristic" dustbusters from the 1960's and even a few upright wands that look like they were meant to smoke out bees, not suck up dirt.

link: The Vacuum Cleaner Museum | Atlas Obscura

Dept. of "There's a Myth for Everything": The Toothworm

Mudwerks writes:

The first and most enduring explanation for what causes tooth decay was the tooth worm, first noted by the Sumerians around 5000 BC. The hypothesis was that tooth decay was the result of a tooth worm boring into and decimating the teeth. This is logical, as the holes created by cavities are somewhat similar to those bored by worms into wood.

The ivory sculptures above depict the havoc wrought by these wicked worms.

The idea of the tooth worm has been found in the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers and poets, as well as those of the ancient Indian, Japanense, Egyptian, and Chinese cultures. It endured as late as the 1300s, when French surgeon Guy de Chauliac promoted it as the cause of tooth decay.

link: How To Disappear Completely.

Aluminum Alchemy

Jesus Diaz writes:

Scientists at the FLASH free-electron, high intensity laser facility in Hamburg, Germany, have created a completely new state of matter, transforming aluminum into something "that nobody has seen before," an exotic material which is transparent to ultraviolet radiation.

According to Professor Justin Wark—from the Oxford University's Department of Physics—the discovery is "almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light!" They achieved this alchemical miracle by knocking down a "core electron from every aluminium atom," but without disrupting the metal structure with the laser bombing.

link: Scientist Turn Aluminum Into Strange, Completely New Matter State - Flash - Gizmodo