Piggy was right: we must have rules and that is not just to be applied to the English. This morning I buzzed my cell door and it didn’t open as the man at the desk had decided that too many people were taking advantage of his good nature and breaking the rules, so he was letting those out who belonged out: one by one.
And the big rules are not created by us but in some way we must try to formulate what they are and map out our behaviour, so as to conform to these rules.
This non conformity to the rules became painfully obvious to those of us who built on the response of Rachell Carsons’ Silent Spring and created the environmental movement from whole cloth curing the late 60s.
The 1st Earth Day in the spring of 1970 and the subsequent enactment into law of the EPA was the culmination of this first wave of serious environmental work.
From that period, environmentalism became an integral part of my life, but I soon realized that Capitalism would not yield to anything but revolution or collapse and that revolution was a pipedream and collapse, which we are now facing, and what the Revenge of Gaia deals with, would be recognized after it was too late to do anything about, which is the primary message of James Lovelock’s concise book about his conception: Gaia.
Having been fortunate enough to live down the road from this very wise man, for 3 1/2 years, I can deeply feel his sense of loss as the country is desecrated for the sake of ‘filthy lucre’.
I could not visit Lovelock – we have mutual friends – as I was living underground.
The part of Devon – South Hampshire – that I inhabited was a snapshot of the past preserved into the present.
I followed those 3 ½ years with 9 ½ years in a relatively untouched area of South West France, the Charente. Those years in the surroundings wherein nature had not become an aspect of manufacturing food or a theme park became even more poignant in retrospect as I read Lovelock’s elegy for a planet that he feels is headed for a future relatively free of human beings, with a sharply reduced populating living around the poles under the aegis of brutal war.
Steven Mithen, one of our great experts in human prehistory expressed similar sentiments in a recent NYROB review. “The human story is so far without an end, but is probably heading for inevitable global catastrophe.” (October 23, 2009, p. 44)
It is based on a deeper understanding of the ecological context in which we live and a long view, based on scientific data, that is deeply aware of what we are doing to our protective surround. It is a view I share.
It is the main reason I began to move beyond ecology as a primary focus, though I kept my hand in enough to lecture on the environment throughout the 70s and served as the director of the Philadelphia Sun Day Celebration in 1977.
But the crash course in concentrated reading and interacting with ecologists that I did from 1967-1971 made me aware that we could not sustain the energy expenditure that capitalism was slowly making de rigueur, through advertising and deeper study, 1974-6, of development theory only reinforced.
Systems theory made it obvious that the entire biosphere was interconnected and essentially a singly system, thus the concept of Gaia gave me no problem and global warming as human created had been a concern, if expressed in a different way, before the bells began ringing.
The systemic destruction of Gaia that Lovelock is bemoaning has been obvious to me for a long while and when large systems break, the results are not linear.
What that means are many events that we can’t even begin to imagine, most if not all of them negative.
Destruction that will dwarf New Orleans and render our best efforts null and void.
Lovelock’s short book is full of sadness and anger for what we have done to Gaia.
He does not harp upon the massive die off he sees coming, but he is evidently heartbroken about what he sees and the envisioned result of what he sees. So ami, yet I can’t mourn for the going of the shallowness I see everyplace I look and the abject triviality that popular TV culture reflects.
We deserve better.
Perhaps life at the poles will open our eyes to the beauty of this blue earth and trach us to preserve it.
Let the remnant do so.

To come to any understanding of the time we lie in the study of stress is essential. It is one of the key factors that must be included in any deep analysis of our increasing hectic and uncertain modern world now everywhere due to cell phones, Twitter and the other great interrupters which now define our life.
There is no escape as many wedding or funeral attendees have found out when U.S. bombs have turned a solemn ceremony into a bloody mess.
As the now deceased Norman Mailer said about fifty years ago: “we live in a time that interrupts the mood of everything alive.”
He thought that interruption was cancerous – an intuitive leap that has turned out to be true, but perhaps ultimately more important are those regulators of mood: our hormones, and the endocrine system that our evolutionary history has created to regulate them.
They help create the internal context in which we live, breathe and act out our daily ritual of living that is now under threat from a global climate change that is partially of our own creation, due to the profligacy of our energy rich life style; a change that some say has gone beyond the point of our ability to stop the catastrophe that massive climate change implies, for the food that sustains us is deeply constrained by the need for the climate it has evolved with.
Bottom line: the provisions that maintain our existence are deeply threatened by the uncertainty introduced into their growing seasons by the climate change now underway.
We have also introduced into our environment endocrine disrupters whose action upon us in the foetal state – a time when millions of biochemical reactions must occur with clocklike precision if a healthy organism, which can reproduce, is to be born and live out an adequate life.
These disrupters, in minute amounts that cause no apparent harm to the adult organism can produce an entire range of problems in the foetus which manifest years later in ADHD, lowered sperm count, breast cancer and a whole host of other problems that “could change the character of human societies.”
The scientific and social process that leads to the awareness of the dangers to our very survival is the theme of Sheldon Krimsky’s book.
In 5 crystal clear chapters he describes the process that lead to public recognition of the threat posed by the unthinking use of chemicals. Chemicals which have been integral to our body and threatening to both our moods and our future.
It would be interesting to know about the body states, with reference to chemical impact discussed in this book, of those who participated in and watched a long gang rape in Oakland during the last week.
Such impulsive, unthinking, uncaring behaviour is indicative of the changes that are “changing the character of human societies” wherein people kill women and children, through the use of suicide bombs or drone propelled missiles as if they were in a computer game.
Our freedom is progressively abused in the name of national security in spite of electing a constitutional lawyer as president.
The dreams of many for a just humane society are bowing in the wind.

Science proceeds by minute particulars. Every statement must be backed up by a citation. If one is to earn the right to make a radical statement, as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy does at the end of her excellent book on the reproductive success of the human ape, it is necessary to base it on hundreds of pages of cited material/
The research is thorough and up to date as far as a general amateur can tell.
The tonus is that of a caring wise old soul who sees something precious slipping away, just as its value is being recognized.
The focus of scholar is contextual – the function of most early anthropology was to reinforce the patriarchal forces that now are seen to be a product of a particular historical shift away from an economy of hunter/gathering that was use directed and egalitarian in nature with plenty of leisure, to a hierarchical society of acquisition and protection of those acquisitions that generated social forms to protect those acquisitions. That required certainty regarding conception – that son is really my son – heirs and a form of generational transfer that protected the acquisitions.
The patriarchal remnants of these patterns were reinforced by those early anthropologists and later shifted towards historical explanation that reinforced such patterns of control. Hunters were predominant as was the idea of a killer ape.
Most of this is now history as the entrance of women into the academic professions that collect archaeological, anthropological, neurological and bio-chemical data, just to mention a few of the disciplines, that are consulted to write a book such as “Mothers and Others”, that are now replete with new eyes: those of women who as Justice Sotomayor said correctly will see things in a different way.
“But the data”, another voice may say.
Data depends upon categories which are both arbitrary and limited by the context and perceptual history of the collector.
Do not collect information on post-menopausal apes (humans fit into this category) and they can’t figure in the theory based upon facts. Thus a great deal of what Blaffer Hrdy is trying to tell us just didn’t exist until researcher reviewed past data with new eyes and began to include grandmothers and other older women in their thinking.
A new category can often be a strange attractor around which all the old data suddenly coalesce into a new theory.
I must repeat this: perception is transactional and contextual. We perceive and consequently categorise what our history and context conditions us to see. Anyone who spends a bit of time studying the 20th century can immediately see the failure of patriarchal forms and our recent economic mess would add capitalism to the junk heap.
Thus, whether the actual theory and temporal framework that Blaffer Hrdy puts forth is totally correct is not that important.
What is important is the tendency that her work represents: a shift towards a deeper understanding of empathy, altruism and other generous emotions, not as supreme, but as a balance, a dialectical opposition to the selfishness that has guided our theories and actions.
Those who can do this have something missing: a father is led into a torture chamber. A naked adolescent girl is hanging from a hook in the ceiling. She had been brutally flogged. Her face was distorted by swelling and bleeding. She had been slashed again and again by a razor. She is revived by a bucket of water. She is whipped savagely for several minutes. Then raped in front of her father. She was raped again and again in the next cell throughout the night as her father listened to her cries and moans.

They have not been fully inducted into the human family by adequate nurturing and the attachment that flows from such nurturing.
Something has not taken and Blaffer Hrdy is now suggesting that we are creating a world in which the majority will be nurtured this way.
It is another catastrophe to add to the list of indicators that what is upon us is a great transition, perhaps one that will erase us from the earth or perhaps one that will produce a new species by turning on genes that are now inactive and putting our extreme plasticity to good use.

The elevation of physics during the course of the 20th century to a position of great eminence – as evidenced by the billions spent on devices that allow us to both peer back in time and deep within the atomic nucleus – is due to the creation of two theories: relativity and quantum mechanics brought to birth by mainly German thinkers.
The creator of relativity, Albert Einstein, was deeply involved in the discussion that evolved in connection with the problems related to the creation and interpretation of quantum mechanics (Q.M.) as Einstein was never convinced that Q.M. produced an adequate or complete picture of the atomic world.
His decades long debate with Neils Bohr the father of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Q.M. is the most fascinating argument in modern physics. It is one that is well documented, forming the core of Louisa Gilder’s sparkling book on the problem of entanglement – the apparent influence of one particle on another, during an act of measurement that appears to transcend all material limitation, thus producing an instantaneous effect, irrespective of distance.
She traces this ‘spooky action at a distance’ – from a small barely heard leitmotiv to full-blown center stage focus in an aria whose end and un-standing is nowhere in sight.
She does it in a manner of great empathy by using primary and secondary documents to take you inside the lives of those who were involved in the over 80 years long debate that is key to our physical understanding of the world that surrounds us.
The Age of Entanglement is a delicious read for anyone who enjoys intellectual challenge and can savor just how strange the world is now seen to be by those struggling to understand the edge of physical thinking in the 21st century.

A good place to start is with a word wealth book.
Get a notebook and a decent dictionary in addition to a word wealth book.
Use the notebook and the dictionary to write down the new words and use them in sentences.
Expand the practice when the daily habit becomes part of your life by going to the library and taking out a classic.
Read the classic slowly. New things take time.
Patience is the basis of all learning and success in life.
Read each day until you find 5 new words.
Copy those 5 new words out into your notebook and look them up in your dictionary and use them in a sentence.
A small practice that should teach you some patience and inculcate (look it up) in a you a first possible step out of the prison rut of TV, sleeping too much, and mindless block-out activities.
Discipline, patience, daily practice.
A way out of the rut of incarceration as a lifetime activity.

Written for young offenders re: a request

Dear Mr. Einhorn:

I was a friend of the late author William Styron. In helping Styron’s widow to gather his letters for publication, I’ve come across a remarkable letter you wrote to him in 1962 about his novel Set This House on Fire. I feel certain that Styron would have responded to your letter (especially considering the hostile treatment his book elicited from mainstream critics), so I’m writing to ask if you have any recollection of his reply or any notion of whether it still exists – and if so, where?
I’m somewhat familiar with your case and am aware of the confiscation of your private diaries (and other papers?) by the authorities, so I realize this is a shot in the ark and that it’s unlikely you either have Styron’s letter or can help me to obtain a copy. But there’s always a chance, and no harm trying. I’d be willing to sort through evidence files if that would be permitted.
Your letter to Styron is among his papers at Duke. I enclose a copy, restoring at least this tiny portion of your writings to you.

February 2, 1962

Dear Mr. Styron,

A short note of thanks for the beauty that you have created in Set This House on Fire! Rarely have I been so overwhelmed by any experience as that provided by your powerful novel. The time that you spent in writing is obvious on every page, for the precision which you obtain is rare in modern writing; but more important, to me, is the message – a message which only a man who has gone through the hell of self-discovery is agile to convey.
The tears which instantaneously flooded my eyes, along with the shock which traversed my entire body, as I read the words of Luigi describing this prison called life came from deep within as I realized that Cass would not be allowed to end his pilgrimage as the hero of Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano (a haunting novel which your book, especially the ramblings of Cass, brought to mind) in suicide (symbolical in the case of Cass); but would be forced to face the task of creating his own existence in full knowledge of the nothingness of anything but what he created as you so perfectly state through him at the end of the novel. He can’t fall back upon repentance (in an external sense) like Raskolnikoff but rather must impose his own restrictions on the freedom which being conveys upon us. No external means can provide us with satisfaction or salvation for the self is all we possess. To throw off the illusion of the necessary casual relation between his crime (so called) and his supposed external-imposed repentance is to throw off the fetters of conventions which prevents us from seeing the difference between morality and moral justice is fickle along with everything else that man has created. To know this is to advance in the game of life.
Your plight, to be misunderstood by all the reviewers who read with their eyes instead of their hearts, shared by William Gaddis who wrote The Recognitions (a man whom I feel, along with yourself, is capable of making a lasting contribution to the American novel) is not to be assuaged by my meagre word of thanks, but I hope your patience lasts, for six years is will worth the waiting for a work of such stature as Set This House on Fire.
The Long March which I also recently read is masterful, for as the French translator of your books has said: not a word can be left out. Incantation is the only word to describe your writing – please continue.

I constantly wrote letters to those whose books I read in a large number of disciplines, particularly to those that I thought were not adequately received by their peers.
It often led to a correspondence or a friendship: Thomas S. Kuhn, John Cage, Norman O. Brown, Stafford Beer, Andrija Puharich are five prominent examples among many.
I am now being contacted about those letters, see the recent letter from a friend of Bill Styron as example and my letter. His name is withheld for reasons of privacy and should serve only as an example.
All of my papers were taken in March of 1979 during an illegal search of my apartment. The DA refused to return them. They have no legal argument for keeping them, but the law in Pennsylvania is now so hypocritical, along with many other aspects of America life (what the bankers are getting away with for example) that people should be in the streets waving red, white and blue scarves rather than watching the Iranians waving green scarves on TV.
It is time to wake up to the growing irreality of American life, in spite of the election of a wonderful president.
A paradoxical statement, perhaps, but it is from paradox that we learn.

Eifelheim by Michael Flynn was an unusual science fiction book as it created a depth of character that is rare in science fiction which is often long on ideas but deeply lacking in depth of character, depending on stick figures to convey its ideas.
The novel is set in medieval Germany in a small hill village not far from the Black Forest.
For over 300 pages I was transported back and forth between a medieval German world that felt as real as an created by more conventional historical novels and a rather pedestrian present that felt disemplaced in contrast to the richness of Dasein communicated by a parish priest on the run, the lord of the castle, the folk who lived in the village and the aliens who crash-landed onto the wrong planet.
The gradual integration of the aliens into a medieval village, the conveyance of Christianity as a lived presence and the ability to depict alien personalities without destroying their diffence (they were in essence large grasshoppers with advanced technology) was a continual pleasure to read, irrespective of the feeling that the plot machinery, that took us from time to time back to some now wherein what we were reading was being researched and a new physics was being developed, just didn’t work well.
In spite of those interruptions, and a new physics that can be thrown on a pile with all the rest that can’t quite produce a new cosmos, I read every page with great avidity.
Eifelheim is a book that is suffused with humanity and a spirit of rare openness.
It is a delight to read.
I will read more of Michael Flynn and respond when the response is apt.
Days after I closed the book, I could still feel the village and its inhabitants under total siege from the plague.
I also felt strongly that the author is a fine novelist and should perhaps have a go at a conventional novel as his gift for conveyance of character and place is rare.