Reviews and News:

Czeslaw Milosz lived through two world wars, aided the Polish resistance, and endured post-WWII Polish communism before defecting in 1951. Living in Paris, separated from his wife and children and slandered by Polish émigrés and Polish communists alike, he contemplated suicide. Thirty years later, he'd win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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60 classic animated Japanese films, created between 1917 and 1941, are now available online.

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Larry Eigner's Black Mountain Bar Mitzvah poems: "Mystery and skepticism, spirit and philosophy, science, lyricism, and the vernacular all coalesce within this two-liner. Like thousands of Larry Eigner's other works, this poem was typed on a Royal typewriter—a bar mitzvah gift—that throughout Eigner's life remained a preferred mode of composition. Born with severe cerebral palsy, Eigner had very limited control over much of his body and typed with his right index finger while using the thumb for the space bar. In the breakthrough collection Calligraphy Typewriters : The Selected Poems of Larry Eigner, editors Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier closely replicated the author's original typewritten text."

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The inventor of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, which transformed contemporary music, has died: "The impact of 808 was loud and lasting. Roland claims it is heard on more hit records than any other drum machine, including tracks by Michael Jackson, Prince, Marvin Gaye — whose 1982 song 'Sexual Healing' was largely constructed with an 808 — and Kanye West, whose album '808s and Heartbreak' was named after it. Beyoncé, Madonna and Eminem, among many others, have mentioned the 808 in lyrics."

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Holly Tucker reviews City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris.

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Joseph Bottum steals time: "In the fall of 1977—40 years ago now, when we were freshmen at Georgetown—four of us climbed up to steal the hands off the clock on the tower of Healy Hall, 150 feet or so above the quad."

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Essay of the Day:

All organisms move and grow with clear internal teleology. They do things for a reason. Strangely, "despite this emphatic recognition of the purposive organism," Stephen L. Talbott writes in The New Atlantis, evolutionary biologists rarely mention it. Why?

"The idea of teleological behavior within a world of meaning is rather uncomfortable for scientists committed — as contemporary biologists overwhelmingly are — to what they call 'materialism' or 'naturalism.' The discomfort has to do with the apparent inward aspect of the goal-directed behavior described above — behavior that depends upon the apprehension of a meaningful world and that is easily associated with our own conscious and apparently immaterial perceptions, reasonings, and motivations to act.

"But, as we saw with the chaffinch and flatworm, the issues extend beyond our own sort of conscious, intentional behavior. All biological activity, even at the molecular level, can be characterized as purposive and goal-directed. As a cell grows and divides, it marshals its molecular and structural resources with a remarkably skillful 'wisdom.' It also demonstrates a well-directed, 'willful' persistence in adjusting to disturbances. Everything leads toward fulfillment of the organism's evident 'purposes.'

"Teasing out the meaning of these scare quotes may be the most urgent task for biologists today. As the Chilean neuroscientist and philosopher of biology Francisco Varela wrote: 'The answer to the question of what status teleology should have in biology decides about the character of our whole theory of animate nature.

"My own sense of the matter is that the question has yet to be fairly taken up within the core disciplines of biology. What appears certain is that as yet we have no secure answer to it. Even more important is what seems least recognized: to the degree that we lack understanding of the organism's purposive life we also lack a respectable foundation for evolutionary theory."

Read the rest.

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Photo: Hallstatt

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Poem: Timothy Murphy, "Disenchantment Bay"

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