Is literature becoming irrelevant?

 kw: book reviews, collections, short stories, poems, sketches

I am a little less than halfway through reading Pushcart Prize XLVII: Best of the Small Presses (2023), edited by Bill Henderson and others.

The series used a few logos in early years, and then settled on this one, presented in various background hues ranging from yellow through earth tones to red.

When I encountered the 2014 edition I liked it rather well and posted a positive review. I was still positive a couple of years later. This time, not so much (so far). Of the 28 pieces I have read (or passed over) so far, only one made me react, "I'm glad I read this": "Dear Friends" by Mary Rueful, originally published in Sewanee Review. I call it an annotated list of friends, a series of vignettes that explore numerous dimensions of friendship.

I almost rejected the entire volume based on the first half-dozen lines of text in the first piece, which I decline to name. Sadly, I read too fast to have stopped earlier, because it almost immediately takes the reader into a realm no person of conscience willingly visits, with an image that is hard to forget. It is a sad fact of the human condition that a vicious, corrupted mind such as the author's can even exist.

A goodly number of the pieces are "poems". So far, what I have seen (and skimmed through) have neither rhyme nor rhythm. They consist of slightly evocative prose broken into lines. If the language were more poetic I might call such a piece a poem, but they are junk.

Many of the pieces are aimless stream-of-consciousness bits of one or a few pages, that start and end nowhere, with nothing learned along the way.

One imaginative piece, "Mantis" by Gina Chung, tells of love almost found and then lost, in the character were a praying mantis, who is accustomed to devouring suitors during copulation. The "one that got away" is her only regret. It's a useful allegory of a certain kind of relationship…

A number of pieces portray gay men or women, closeted or out. "The Kiss" by Kate Osana Simonian treats of a relationship between two lesbians who attend a religious school; one is fully out, the other so closeted that her orientation is unknown, even to her best friend. A drama production enwraps their drama. The writing is overdone, with attempts to build tension in a Hitchcockian way that is more annoying than useful.

"Back" by Banzelman Guret is moderately dystopian science fiction, exploring an extreme development of gig work while the protagonist is dealing with his father's OCD and institutionalization.

These few out of 28? If these are "the best", literature is coming on hard times. Maybe in the next few days I'll find another story or two that make me glad I found them.

Let's learn from nature while we still have it

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, technology, nature, innovation

This is a Crystal Jellyfish. Crystal jellies the original source of green fluorescent protein (GFP), which has become an important diagnostic tool.

Curiously, when Osamu Shimomura, a survivor of the atomic attack on Nagasaki, first isolated the luminescent compound in these jellyfish, it glowed a deep blue. Further work led to another compound, a protein, that fluoresced a brilliant green, stimulated by the light from the blue compound. That protein can now be synthesized (no more need to blenderize jellyfish). GFP has so many uses I can only mention a few: tagging genes to elucidate their expression or localization profiles, acting as a biosensor or cell marker, studying protein-protein interactions, and visualizing promoter activity. Dr. Shimomura received a Nobel Prize in 2008.

For microscopic viewing, versions of the protein have been developed that fluoresce in different colors. I remember the old dyes I learned to use to stain biological samples, such as eosin or carmine. Now a simpler process can be used to attach different fluorescent dyes to different tissues or organelles: when illuminated with UV, they glow in surreal colors on a black background. The WOW factor is enormous! Witness:

The eosin-stained cells are from scraping a spoon inside someone's cheek. They are the easiest animal cells to harvest without pain or bloodshed. Those on the right are somewhat smaller cells at higher magnification, from elsewhere in the body. I don't know the source (literally millions of such photos appear online, many without attribution). In the image on the right it is worth noting the targeting: GFP was attached to a molecule that homes in on the microtubules that enable cell movement; the blue version was targeted to the DNA in the nuclei; and the red version has been attached to mitochondria. In the image at left, the mitochondria are barely visible as a kind of "grit" in the cells, surrounding the nuclei, which are darkly stained.

This is just one application of a natural material to perform numerous technical tasks. Dozens of others are described in Nature's Wild Ideas: How the Natural World is Inspiring Scientific Innovation by Kristy Hamilton. The chapters number a baker's dozen, but with multiple ideas per chapter, we see an amazing plethora of nature-inspired materials and mechanisms. In her Acknowledgement the author notes that another book (or a few) could be written from other material she gathered. She had to be quite selective to produce "only" one book!

How do we organize three or four robots (perhaps a search-and-rescue team)? Central management can probably do the trick. What if the "team" numbers a thousand, or 10,000? Robot swarms. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise," wrote Solomon in Proverbs 6:6. So some scientists did just that, to learn how tiny, apparently mindless creatures can self-organize in ways that would defeat a supercomputer (this from Chapter 4). What they learned is being used throughout robotics.

You can't put a band-aid on a wet finger. But mussels can glue their little byssus threads to shells and stones while under water, and corals can cement themselves to the substrate with a different underwater glue (Chapters 6&7). Their chemical tricks are being used to develop glues to hold together the edges of wounds in spite of the blood.

We can't see UV light, unless it's bright enough to do damage. Many birds can see it, at least a little. Scientists are still disputing over whether they see the UV reflected from spider webs, and so avoid flying through them. But a UV-reflective pattern on glass seems to deter most birds from flying into window panes (Chapter 12). At the natural history museum where I work part time, most of the dead birds brought in by people in the area are from window strikes.

In one evocative portion the author tells of the pervasive destruction wrought by humanity on the rest of nature. When a species becomes extinct, all the genes and traits that characterize it, the product of 4 billion years of evolution, vanish forever. No creature, it seems, is without something to give us or to teach us. Nature is an immense library of "what worked to keep us going for billennia." She quotes one medical researcher, "We are burning down the library faster than we can read it."

Read this bit of the global library, a volume that has been gleaned from a thousand thousand stories.

Wisdom of Deuteronomy by an heir of its promises

 kw: book reviews, commentaries, bible, deuteronomy

The third volume in the Rational Bible series by Dennis Prager is The Rational Bible: Deuteronomy: God, Blessing and Curses. This is no ordinary book, and I did not read it in an ordinary way. I took it slowly, thoughtfully, and made a number of highlighted bookmarks. I will base my (sparse) comments primarily on the highlighted texts.

Dr. Prager affirms that the Bible, in particular the Torah (the 5 books of Moses), is composed by God. In the first two volumes he delineates a number of reasons for his belief, which I summarized in my reviews posted in 2020 (in April and May). One further statement of note appears on the first page:

If Jews believed the Torah was man-made, there would be no Jews today.

For that matter, there would be no Torah either. Hebrews would not have persisted upon Earth long enough to become a kingdom under Saul or David, or to produce the Scriptures.

Deuteronomy is a series of long speeches by Moses to the new generation, mostly born in the wilderness of Sinai, on the eve of their entrance into Canaan. They had defeated the eastern Amorites, primarily the kingdoms of Sihon and Og. Except for some older ones who were born in Egypt but were taken into the wilderness during the Exodus as children, the children of Israel did not know Egypt and had not witnessed the miracles of their deliverance. Everyone under the age of forty had eaten only manna (and on one occasion, quails), and had experienced the daily miracles of maintenance, as Moses told them: "Your clothing did not wear out from upon you, nor did your sandal wear out from upon your foot." (Deut. 29:5). Now Moses, knowing that he was soon to die at the Lord's command, repeats the key elements of God's words to them.

Moses frequently exhorted them to remember, in such a way as if they had personally experienced the Exodus and the mighty acts of the Lord God. As noted on p. 87, 

WHEN NATIONS FORGET THEIR PAST, THEY CEASE TO EXIST (capitals by the author)

In his speeches, recorded Fireside Chats, and other works, Dr. Prager repeats this maxim, pointing out that during the past few decades in America certain political leaders have been laboring to erase our nation's past, and thus destroy the one country on Earth where "the experiment of Freedom" has had its greatest success.

The same political leaders wish to make Christians and Jews forget the true past of their faiths, claiming that the Jews practiced genocide and that the Crusaders followed suit. In an essay on Deuteronomy 4:19-20, Dr. Prager wrote on p. 92,

These verses are further proof that the Torah never even hints that Israelites, or the Jewish people later, have any right, let alone obligation, to make war on pagans or “infidels.”

The command to "exterminate" certain people is rare, and focused. While the Canaanite tribes were indeed to be "dispossessed", there was no command of their genocide as there had been for the Amorites. Further, 

The justification for war against the Canaanites was their evil actions, most especially their practice of child sacrifice—not their worship of false gods.

This also relates to another common theme, that in the Torah, actions are judged, not theology or thoughts or feelings.

In chapter 5 we find a repetition of the Ten Commandments. Dr. Prager has said frequently that Commandments 1 through 4 are founded on #5, "Honor your mother and father", for the Commandments related to our relationship to God is based on honoring hierarchy as set up by God; and that Commandments 6 through 9 are founded on #10, "Do not covet…", because coveting (desiring others' things or reputation so strongly as to be willing to do something about it) is the root of the evils that damage our relationships with one another. In particular, on p. 146 commenting on Commandment 10:

No advanced civilization developed that did not honor private property.

Indeed, we see before our eyes a truly incredible violation of private property, from the goods and the lands of citizens to their very right to claim citizenship as a distinction, in the "open borders" policy of those same politicians who are struggling to erase America's past and distinctiveness. 

After Moses presented the Commandments and urged the Israelites to keep them, God said (5:26), "May they always be of such mind, to revere Me and follow My commandments, that it may go well with them and their children forever." This is a surprising statement, not a "command" but a wish ("may they"), and as the author writes on p. 148,

God has dominion over the world, but He does not control whether human beings act in accordance with His will. In the words of the Talmud, "All is in the hands of Heaven except whether one fears Heaven."

This brings to mind the proverb I use in reply to fools who try to pose a paradox: "If God is all-powerful, is he able to create a rock so heavy he can't lift it?" I reply, "He has already done so, when He created humans with a free will." (Some Calvinists will cringe at this statement, but it is more true than the soulless view John Calvin espoused.)

Although Dr. Prager strongly affirms an afterlife (for example, because not all wrongs are righted in this life, and further because the righteous were taken "to their people" upon death), he also points out that the thrust of Chapter 7 is that God does reward the good, adding "and that's a good thing!". Further, he writes, on p. 181,

Doesn’t reward for good and punishment for bad mean there is justice in the world? And who doesn’t want to live in a just world? Only the unjust.

As we go on, we see a view of God higher than the common attitude that He is a "divine butler" or "sugar daddy". God has warned the rich in particular not to think their own expertise is solely responsible for success. And we read on p. 198,

…it is destructive of faith to see God primarily as a provider of things.

 But I have observed in life that many, certainly not most, extremely wealthy individuals are geniuses in one area (acquiring wealth) and foolish in others.

It is a tragedy that so many accomplished people come to believe that they are equally accomplished in many areas in which they are actually quite inexperienced, even naïve. In a prior essay (p. 197) we find a statement that seems to me better as a successor to the above,

What God does provide is moral order, ultimate meaning, wisdom, an afterlife, and an enduring source of love. And the richest person in the world needs those things as much as the poorest person does.

Chapter 11 is full of rewards promised to Israel if they will follow God and His Word. In an essay titled, "Are these rewards that God promises believable?," the author concludes,

God considers the behavior of those living in Canaan of such great importance that He may be prepared to interfere with the natural order there.

The order of the world in general is "feast/famine". Our technology may have lessened the impact of the variability of climate and seasons, but the events of the past few years have showed how incapable we are to "subdue the Earth". If, as many "climate scientists" (a designation that hardly existed before 1980 and didn't have its current meaning until early this Century) claim, we are pushing the atmosphere of Earth into an overheated regime, that hardly qualifies as "subduing the Earth". It is more like abusing it until it strikes back. If we could truly "subdue the Earth", as God commanded Adam—and it could only be carried out by co-laboring with God—the climate would be quite controllable. In Deuteronomy 11, however, we find the promise of a more equable climate, and greater general health of livestock, than the Israelites or any other people would naturally expect…at least locally.

As noted above, I have space only to touch on matters that struck me with sufficient force that I made a highlight and bookmark. So I skip over numerous matters (please get the book to read Dr. Prager's take on it all!), and we come to Chapter 17, about righteous judges. This chapter was much dwelt upon by America's founding fathers, and John Adams wrote, as quoted on p. 323,

"Without Religion this World would be Something not fit to be mentioned in polite Company, I mean Hell." and also, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Look around you. Those who subscribe to what is called "Woke" fall in the category of "other", in John Adams' words, and thus shall the American people become ungovernable if we permit it to continue.

Chapter 18 introduces that Prophet, who would be the Messiah. Moses declared that this One would be "like me", that is, dealing with God face to face. No other prophet, from Samuel to John the Baptist, rose to this level. But we must not suppose that the work of a prophet is primarily to predict the future. First, a word from Dr. Prager, on p. 334,

If we could divine the future from Tarot cards, or the entrails of animals, or from consulting ghosts, it would mean the future is fixed, and humans therefore do not have free will.

A prophet does not somehow peer into the future as a deterministic calculating machine. Firstly, a prophet tells us God's opinion about what is going on, and warns us of the consequences of what we are doing or planning. The prophet's predictions are about what God will do, not about the machinery of nature. Even the great prophecy by Daniel of the 70 weeks (in the book The Coming Prince by Sir Robert Anderson, written in 1894, the 69-week period from the emperor's order to Nehemiah to rebuild the city, until Jesus was publicly proclaimed Messiah on Palm Sunday, is shown to be a fulfillment of that 483-year period, to the day) does not depend on natural events for its working out, but depends on the sovereignty of God to so order specific events to bring it about.

Then in Chapter 20 we find a rehearsal of the order to expel the Canaanites. People have a problem with this. Yet in history, expulsions of one group by another were practically routine. In recent times, the tragic irony of the Lakota Sioux calling the Black Hills of South Dakota their "Vatican" and "Historic homeland" hides the true history, that at the time Custer arrived in South Dakota in 1873, the Lakota had just finished driving other tribes, including the Crows, out of the Black Hills to Montana. So why do we think the Biblical stories are somehow different? Here is why:

The most intellectually honest way to look at our having a moral problem with orders to kill and/or expel the Canaanites is this: the reason these directives disturb us is because the Bible itself rendered them disturbing.

Without the Bible, we would have no problem with genocide.

So if God is so good, why aren't we more happy? Numerous times, God even commands us to be happy, sort of indirectly, with phrases such as "You will rejoice in the land the Lord God gives to you." This longer comment says it better than any summary I could write (we're in Chapter 26 now):

I once asked a deeply religious man if he considered himself a truly pious person. He responded that while he aspired to be one, he fell short in two areas. One of those areas, he said, was his not being a happy enough person to be considered truly pious. His point was that unhappy religious people reflect poorly on their religion and on their Creator. He was right: In fact, unhappy religious people pose a real challenge to faith. If their faith is so impressive, why aren’t these devoted adherents happy? There are only two possible reasons: Either they are not practicing their faith correctly, or they are practicing their faith correctly and the religion itself is not conducive to happiness. Most outsiders assume the latter reason. Unhappy religious people should therefore think about how important being happy is—if not for themselves, then for the sake of their religion. Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do the arguments of atheists.

I am reminded of a New Testament story, in Acts 8, of Philip and the Ethiopian officer. After their conversation, the officer's conversion, and his baptism, the officer "went his way rejoicing." Faith ought to result in rejoicing.

I had a few other bookmarks but these are sufficient for now. I cannot do justice to the wisdom of Dr. Prager's work anyway. Reading it slowly as I did, over a period of months, I learned a lot. I recommend The Rational Bible to anyone, believer or nonbeliever, and regardless of what kind of believer one may be. It is not intended to convert anyone to Judaism, but to provide reasoned understanding of the Biblical text, and hopefully trigger reasoned discourse among those who take the Bible seriously, and perhaps add to their number.

Dinosaurs: the known unknowns

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, paleontology, dinosaurs

This is the femur of a Titanosaur (Patagotitan mayorum) found not too long ago in Patagonia, the "largest dinosaur ever found" (so far!). The discoverers note that this animal was not yet full grown…

A picture similar to this (but with poorer lighting) graces the color plates section of How Fast Did T. rex Run: Unsolved Questions from the Frontiers of Dinosaur Science by David Hone.

How big was the whole animal? In elephants, the tibia is about 2/3 the length of the femur, and this femur is about 8 feet long, so the tibia might be about 5 to 5.5 feet long. Put that on top of a foot the size of a love seat, perhaps 1.5 feet high, and we have a hip socket roughly 15 feet up there. David Hone's book notes that the weight of this animal was between 50 and 100 tons, putting it in the same league as blue whales.

Guess what question never gets answered? How fast Tyrannosaurus rex could run, or whether it could run at all. Of course, the length of its legs and the general physics of inverted pendulums indicates that its walking speed was 3 miles per hour when "moseying along", and in the range of 15-25 mph when walking briskly. I tend to favor a maximum of 15 mph, just from proportion. Humans mosey in the 1-1.5 mph range, with a steady pace of 3 mph when going somewhere, and "power walking" in the 4-5 mph range. It is not (yet) known whether T. rex could run at all, and if so, how fast. However, it is pretty certain that they could not jump. Elephants cannot, and probably neither can rhinos (one website I found claims that some rhinos can jump). Moving a 6-8 ton mass upward fast enough to stay aloft long enough to raise one's legs off the ground? No way.

How Fast is not about what we know, but about what we don't, with suggestions for finding out more. We'll never learn it all, but that is what science is for: expanding knowledge into an infinite realm. The 16 chapters discuss numerous kinds of knowledge we know only in part, or hardly at all. For example, what color or colors were dinosaurs? We could look at big lizards and crocodilians (especially caimans like this one).

For decades, illustrations of Mesozoic landscapes have depicted the animals as mostly "elephant colored". But in Chapter 11, "Appearance", we learn of rare finds that include melanosomes (color packets) that can still be characterized. They show that some dinosaurs were spotted or striped, and give us a hint as to colors. Many seem to have been countershaded (darker on top, lighter beneath), which makes an animal harder to spot.

The chapter following, "Reproduction", points out that we know nothing so far, except the fact that it had to have happened, or there would be no eggs, no young, no dinosaurs, period. There are some apparent mega-nests that have been found, where for several yards all around you are walking on dinosaur eggs. It's hard to imagine tyrannosaurs or brontosaurs coupling, but fertilization of eggs has to take place inside the female's reproductive tract (no milt-spraying on already-laid eggs such as we see for many fish).

I was also quite taken with this illustration of representatives of the three major clades of dinosaurs: theropods, sauropodomorphs, and ornithischians. I added the gray bars for clarity. This drawing is on p. 58 in Chapter 4, "Diversity".

A close look will reveal that the ornithischians have the greatest in-clade diversity. While theropods are mostly variations on the tyrannosaur scheme—though they include the birds—and sauropodomorphs are mostly variations on the Brontosaurus/Brachiosaurus body plan, the ornithischians include ceratopsians, ankylosaurs, stegosaurs and hadrosaurs. The ornithischians are united in having hips that resemble bird hips, while the other two clades have hips more like those of lizards. It's a quirk of evolution that certain lizard-hipped theropods evolved into birds, re-developing the bird pelvis. As usual, scientists await fossils that will show how this process came about.

We find that the number of species of Mesozoic dinosaurs is less than 2,000, while about 10,000 modern species of bird (today's dinosaurs) have been described so far. No doubt there are thousands of dinosaur species yet to be discovered. 

Reading How Did was great fun. Dr. Hone's knowledge is comprehensive, and he has been to many of the key exposures at which dinosaur fossils are found, including those in China that have yielded numerous extremely-well-preserved feathered dinosaur fossils. A full size T. rex may not have sported many feathers, but the young ones, and smaller species, certainly did. Thirty years ago we had no unambiguous fossils with clearly-preserved feathers. New finds lead to new science. That is a key message of this book.