Weekly Reads, Poetry, and Art for 27 February 2015

This week we’ve got art by Caravaggio, news stories about satire and breakfast cereal, a sentence by John Irving, and more. Enjoy!

Of Rats, Gerbils, and Men – – “Rising temperatures may already be contributing to the spread of some diseases, like chikungunya, a mosquito-borne virus that, not long ago, was confined to Africa and Asia. (The name of the virus, from Kimakonde, a language spoken in Tanzania and Mozambique, means “to become contorted,” which is what happens to the virus’s victims, who experience severe joint pain.) In recent years, cases have shown up in Italy and the Caribbean, and, just last year, in Florida. While the recent spread of chikungunya probably has more to do with global trade and travel than with climate change, the mosquito that transmits the virus seems to be able to survive in more and more places as the globe warms.” The New Yorker

How We Learned to Kill – “The voice on the other end of the radio said: “There are two people digging by the side of the road. Can we shoot them?” It was the middle of the night during my first week in Afghanistan in 2010, on the northern edge of American operations in Helmand Province, and they were directing the question to me. Were the men in their sights irrigating their farmland or planting a roadside bomb? The Marines reported seeing them digging and what appeared to be packages in their possession. Farmers in the valley work from sunrise to sundown, and seeing anyone out after dark was largely unheard-of.” New York Times

Aminatta Forna: don’t judge a book by its author | Books | – “The work of creating a canon of English literature is mainly credited to one man, the critic FR Leavis – a zealot or a genius, depending on your view. Leavis’s seminal work, The Great Tradition, published in 1948, traced the origins of the English novel, identifying those works he considered exemplars of the form. Since the 1960s the canon has been added to, fought over, debated. It has been the butt of fierce criticism on the grounds of race, gender and class, dismissed as a compendium of books by “dead, white men”. But through it all the defenders of the canon have largely stood their ground.” The Guardian

Why Satire Matters – The Chronicle Review – – “Mark Twain is complicit in the genocide, but he is no Andrew Jackson or Hernán Cortés. His role in the world is different. He is the genocide’s resident humorist, as Charles Darwin is the Beagle’s resident naturalist. When Twain tells the stories of the men with the arrowheads beneath their skin, his aim is not to stoke more hatred of Native Americans, nor to defend or to damn the Euro-American appropriation of their land, but to make us laugh. Why, though, is this funny? Because it reminds us that we are all hanging by a thread, that life is precarious.” The Chronicle of Higher Education

Music to Shoot You By: Taking Beethoven on a Ride-Along in First-Person-Shooter Games – – “That’s right. The grandiloquent sounds of the 19th century are still alive in the new millennium … but only when someone is getting bludgeoned, bloodied, blown-up, or decimated with automatic weapons. Give those German composers credit! They didn’t have any video screens back then, but they somehow concocted the perfect formula for on-screen carnage.” The Daily Beast

For Kellogg, Cereal Sales Recovery May Be Lost Hope – – “And Kellogg faces a more ominous trend at the table. As Americans become more health-conscious, they’re shying away from the kind of processed food baked in Kellogg’s four U.S. cereal factories. They tend to be averse to carbohydrates, which is a problem for a company selling cereal derived from corn, oats, and rice. “They basically have a carb-heavy portfolio,” says Robert Dickerson, senior packaged-food analyst at Consumer Edge. “ Bloomberg Business

Sentence of the Week

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice — not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God.”– John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

Poem of the Week: A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
“Now his breath goes,” and some say, “No.”

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;

But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, ’cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
–John Donne

Art of the Week

Judith Beheading Holofernes is a work by Caravaggio, painted in 1598-99. The widow Judith first charms the Assyrian general Holofernes, then decapitates him in his tent. The Book of Judith tells how Judith saved her people by seducing and killing Holofernes, the Assyrian general. Judith gets Holofernes drunk, then seizes his sword and decapitates him.