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[principleofplenitude]

The sun had just gone out and I was walking three miles to get home. I wanted to die. I couldn’t think of words and I had no future and I was coming down hard on everything. My walk was terrible. I didn’t seem to have a heart at all and my whole past seemed filled up. So I started answering all the questions regardless of consequence: Yes I hate dark. No I love light. Yes I won’t speak. No I will write. Yes I will breed. No I won’t love. Yes I will bless. No I won’t close. Yes I won’t give. Love is on the other side of the lake. It is painful because the dark makes you hear the water more. I accept all that. And that we are not allowed romance but only its distance. Having finished with it all, now I am not listening. I wait for the silence to resume.

—Linda Gregg, "New York Address"

[principleofplenitude]

Heim’s passionate interventions in the world of Swiss cartography are less well-known. In 1927, the then 78-year-old geologist denounced Switzerland’s two official map series – the Dufour Map and the Siegfried Map – as he believed they contained a “lie” that “flew in the face of nature”. The bone of contention was the fact that the imaginary light source that created light and shade on relief maps, therefore lending them a three-dimensional effect, came from the northwest in both map series.

Albert Heim was an avowed opponent of the ‘northwest illumination’ of maps, which had become increasingly established throughout the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. The geologist believed that it contradicted reality as in Switzerland the sun usually shines from the south.

Albert Heim therefore saw northwest illumination as a “mistake of the past” that needed to be corrected. He believed that maps should reflect the natural conditions and called on the producer of official maps of Switzerland, the Federal Office of Topography (now swisstopo), to transition to southern illumination and take “the major step from mistaken convention to nature”.

—"Casting light on relief map shading" from Swiss National Museum

[principleofplenitude]

Even though it’s well-meaning, there’s nothing more disempowering -- and ultimately depressing -- then getting a stipend and being treated like someone who can’t do things. Every single human being I’ve known who lives this way has been hobbled by it, because they never learned how to take responsibility for the big picture of their lives, balancing work choices with income, lifestyle, savings, everything. TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE BIG PICTURE OF YOUR LIFE IS A SOURCE OF JOY. Ask anyone! It feels great to live in a squalid hut and make art out of beach glass, when you know why you’re suffering and why you’re creating and you believe in where you are and what you’re doing. And maybe for others it feels good to work a soul-sucking but high paying job and rent a beautiful place and eat amazing food, if you view most jobs as meaningless but looooove to eat and travel and dress well, plus you give a lot to charity. The point is, you build your life around your values, principles, and priorities. And when something feels bad, you look closely at it and ask which compromises or adjustments are needed to make life feel better. —Ask Polly

[principleofplenitude]

Belgian Art Nouveau, as the U.C.L.A. art historian Debora Silverman put it in an incisive lecture at CIVA, was “created from raw materials from the Congo and inspired by Congo motifs.” Even more striking, she has suggested that Art Nouveau was the specific means by which the violence carried out in Leopold’s name in Congo snapped back and found its way, in abstracted or semi-abstracted form, into Belgian culture—allowing that small and geographically squeezed nation, its nineteenth-century ambitions largely thwarted at home, to indulge, through its art and architecture, in “a fantasy of domination.” Silverman sees not just natural and animal forms “embodied” in Art Nouveau’s curves; she also sees the leather whips that Belgian forces used to bloody Congolese laborers. —"How to Decolonize the City" from New Yorker

[principleofplenitude]

Many composers who wrote thorny music before and after Schoenberg have suffered this fate. In addition, the difficulty level of musical works—and the requirement for a comparably high number of rehearsals and practice sessions to master them—impacts the repertoire choices of performing artists upon which the composer depends for a lifeline to reach the audience. While Schoenberg was not one to compromise or relinquish control, he did adjust the difficulty level and instrumental groupings to address this challenge in his later works. Sachs brings this reality to the discussion. He describes many of the instrumentation and compositional choices, as well as some of Schoenberg’s innovations designed to address these specific challenges. Indeed, while Schoenberg descended musically from the orchestral enormity of Wagner, Strauss, and Mahler, the programming of a massive orchestral work by an unknown young composer would be untenable for budgetary reasons. This concern undoubtedly contributed to the reduction in ensemble size for Schoenberg in some works. —"Misunderstood Musical Genius: On Harvey Sachs' 'Schoenberg'" from Los Angeles Review of Books

[principleofplenitude]

His company, meanwhile, was in a state of mutiny. The jealousy, envy, and finally rage among his youngest and most talented dancers at his seeming disregard of them was reaching a boiling point. The women, but also the men, felt deserted, as if by a lover, they said, and they let out a collective cry: what about me? [...] Fearful that the company would collapse, senior dancers such as Melissa Hayden and Arthur Mitchell pulled Suzanne aside: "Things are falling apart, why don't you just sleep with him?"

—Jennifer Homans, from Mr. B (2022)

[principleofplenitude]

On January 31, 1969, seventeen years after he and Tanny had wed, Balanchine traveled alone to El Paso, Texas, and crossed the border to get a Mexican divorce. He called Tanny in tears of pain and guilt to tell her. Echoing the range of her cynicism and despair, she just said "nice"—and hung up the phone and called Jerry.

—Jennifer Homans, from Mr. B (2022)

[principleofplenitude]

Today, the so-called asset-light model of franchising allows brands to grow their reach with the added benefit of eliminating real-estate and overhead costs. “That’s where the money is,” Greg Hanis, a veteran hotel consultant, told me. “When I’m a franchiser, whether that franchisee is performing well or not, I get a royalty fee on those rooms that sell.”

Initially, franchisers provided detailed instructions—like those in Howard Johnson’s “bible”—on every aspect of a franchisee’s operation, including safety. This, in turn, opened up companies to lawsuits when employees or customers were hurt or harmed at a franchised property. In 1983, for example, a guest at a Chicago Travelodge was injured after jumping from a second-floor window to escape a burglar who had entered his room. The customer sued the franchiser, Travelodge International, arguing that prior inspections of the property had identified safety problems and its franchise agreement required properties to maintain a “clean, safe, and orderly operation.” As lawsuits mounted, franchisers learned to limit their liability by removing overt security requirements from agreements and operations manuals. Instead, corporate brands have come to focus their contracts and policies on maintaining material consistency. As a result, the type of coffee served in the lobby and the thickness of the towels in the bathroom are closely policed, but decisions regarding crime prevention are not.

—"Should Hotel Chains Be Held Liable for Human Trafficking?" from the New Yorker

[principleofplenitude]

In a 2017 study Ravid Straussman, a cancer biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel and his team showed that some bacteria living inside human pancreatic cancers can protect the tumours by inactivating a common chemotherapy drug. They found that one particular class of bacteria, known as Gammaproteobacteria, could break down gemcitabine: a drug used to treat a number of cancers including those found in the bladder, breast and pancreas. This helped the tumours become resistant to the drug. When the team injected mice with colon cancer with the bacteria, the mice's cancers also became resistant to the drug. But when the researchers gave the mice an antibiotic alongside the chemotherapy drug, the resistance disappeared.

Further to these findings, research published in 2019 by a team at Tohoku University in Japan looked retrospectively at patients suffering from advanced cancers who were treated with either a chemotherapeutic drug alone and those who also received an antibiotic in addition to the chemotherapy in an attempt to prevent or treat an existing infection. They found that patients who were given an antibiotic had a better response to treatment. Although the study did not examine the amount of bacteria present in the cancer tissue of these patients, the researchers speculated that the antibiotics might have eliminated tumour-associated bacteria, which may have been interfering with the cancer treatment.

The studies offer a tantalising hint of what might be going on within tumours.

—"The mystery of microbes that live inside tumours" from BBC Future

[principleofplenitude]

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex, or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express: and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquillity," is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not "recollected," and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is "tranquil" only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.  —T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

[principleofplenitude]

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her. But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. —Robert Haas, "Meditation at Lagunitas"