Science Cocktails

Have you tried one of the new science cocktails?


Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years by Jared M. Diamond (Vintage).


The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony (Princeton University Press).


Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate by William F. Ruddiman (Princeton University Press).


Ice, Mud and Blood: Lessons from Climates Past by Chris Turney (Palgrave Macmillan).


Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened by Chris Turney (Palgrave Macmillan).


Sex, Drugs and DNA: Science's Taboos Confronted by M. Stebbins (Palgrave).


Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism by S. Watts (Yale University Press).


Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the meaning of life by Nick Lane (OUP Oxford).


Enough already? Here are a few I mixed myself...


Mud, Wheels and Power: How Imperial Roadside Maintenance Shaped the Modern World by Dan R. Lane (Countrywide).


Sex, Plagues and Language: the origin of communication taboos by Watt Nansens (IOU).


Horses, Germs and Stars: How Ringworm shaped Hollywood and American Culture in the 1940s by A. Paul Lynn (Corporation Press).


Ice, Guns and DNA: All that Science Left of the World by Anne X. Pert (Oxbridge).




Bottoms Up!

Purchase Upstairs at Duroc Online

I've just noticed that there is a rather cool development on the WICE web site which allows you to buy copies of Upstairs at Duroc online using Paypal. So now if you've always wanted to sample this excellent magazine of new writing, it couldn't be simpler: just click here.

Renan Luce - La Lettre

Renan Luce was born in Paris in 1980 but grew up in Brittany. His music is said to have been influenced by the 20th century singer and songwriter Georges Brassens. He released his first album Repenti in September 2006. If you'd like to watch the official video of this song it is here on You Tube.

Review: Make Nothing Happen by Rufo Quintavalle

W.H. Auden's well known observation "poetry makes nothing happen" can be interpreted in two ways. Normally, it is understood to be something of an inditement on poetry of the type: no matter how hard poetry tries, it is unable to change anything. But it can also be read a second way, as a comment on the art of poetry itself. Poetry makes nothing happen because it is not required to move forward in the way that a story does. It can be a sort of frozen moment.

Quintavalle's approach to making nothing happen is to follow the dictum: "less is more". Many of the poems in his first collection "Make Nothing Happen" are short, some consisting of only four or five words. They seem to ask: what is the minimum required of a poem? And by extension: what is the minimum required of a poet? If the minimum required is to exist: then what does it mean to exist?

It seems that from starting out to answer a very simple question, or perhaps because he has started out to answer a very simple question, Quintavalle has arrived immediately up against the thorny problems of existence: why do we exist, how real is our existence, what is the purpose of pain, how do we know who we are, why shouldn't we be someone else, will heaven save us, what will remain of us?

If you think providing answers to all these questions sounds a rather ambitious project for a pamphlet of 23 poems, likely to lead to something rather bloated and grandiose, then you would be mistaken. Here's an example of his approach: the poem "Keldur". From the outset, the poem appears straightforward and conversational, slyly humourous and personalised:

I don't understand anything: why I came into
this body, this life;
my wife says I think too much,
that I have too much free time,
but I wouldn't want less, and besides,
I'd hardly call it free.

But having welcomed us into the poem in this informal manner, he then poses a conundrum:

Up the road there is what was a house
and now is a building on a farm;
before the house there was nothing,
and around the farm there is nothing still.

At first sight there seems to be no link between the first and second half of the poem. But then we ask: is an analogy being drawn between his own body and a house? If it is the case, then what does it mean when the house is no more a house but simply a building on a farm? A collection of buildings produces something practical: a farm. The farm makes money, it pays for itself. But it doesn't provide any answers to the problems posed in the first half of the poem: "around the farm there is nothing still". Collective approaches, such as religion, are no more likely to throw up answers than individual approaches, such as poetry.

Many of the poems, while short, require considerable thought to understand what is going on inside them. In part, this complexity is achieved through playful use of language which amounts already to a distinctive Quintavalle style. It is the result of choosing line breaks that multiply the possible interpretations of a line:

There is a thing in pigeons freeze
and shake them they rattle sometimes

Or through over-extending a sentence with clauses so that unusual log-jams of words unexpectedly occur. For example, the "does what that" phrase below:

Layering a history
on history like concrete or that carpet
so plausible birds sat down on it to eat
does what that a newspaper doesn't do?

This collection marks a highly original debut. And while certain poems are as good as anything being written today, for example: Rocks, Milosz in California and Cathedral, it makes more sense to view the poems as constituent parts of a whole that is characteristically Quintavallian.


* * * *


Make Nothing Happen by Rufo Quintavalle is available from Oystercatcher Press at a cost of £4.

A stanza in the snow, as equal by Jennifer K. Dick

                             (ties) (lies) (-fuge)
Within that subtle

graze the key, stroke back
in that dining, that mahogany
contemporary debate His hands

Breaking

Hers
blue-white         Is she
the smallest dish, this porcelaine
sealed room
                       within which Machiavelli writes--
My prince, why this tingling absence?
Eleven figures march along, six
carry the casket, time
ticks in the ear, season-change,
backcount to this divide

when
               180 x2             or 2x
equals Us
                        U.S.
                                   You as or are
Capt
               that Inter
Ruption
               a corrective
Squal
               this (disem-) body
Fall into the stone
crypt within what banks          She

Atop or on or
crumble the pages
follow
               For folly is
this bedlam
bedfellow sequestered
That You, that he,
We: house arrest—

Venice in Medici Machiavellic gates
(gardenless) (the values)

subtract

His              Grasp            Her
stanza in the snow, as equal.


+ + + + +


Jennifer K. Dick was born in Minnesota, raised in Iowa and currently lives in Paris, France where she works as a teacher of American Literature, Creative Writing and English. She has carried out doctoral research in the field of Comparative Literature with an emphasis on Visual studies, Modernism, Postmodernism and the Avant-garde. She also holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Colorado State University. Her published works include the book Fluorescence (University of Georgia Press, 2004), Retina/Rétine (Estepa Editions, Paris, 2005) and ENCLOSURES (BlazeVox, New York, 2007).

This is part of a series of poems from invited poets. Previous contributors were Luke Heeley, Joe Ross, George Szirtes, Elizabeth Spackman, Ivy Alvarez, Rufo Quintavalle, Todd Swift, Michelle Noteboom, Beverley Bie Brahic, Ethan Gilsdorf, Amy Hollowell, Choman Hardi, and Jeramy Dodds. Illustration by Jonathan Wonham.

Cesar's Thumb

A thumb. It's a gigantic bronze sculpture by Cesar located in La Defense, Paris. It's about 10 metres high. It was one of the very first remarkable things I saw when I moved to Paris in 2003. At the time I had a negative reaction to this work of art. Now I love it.

Why was my first view negative? I think it was because I saw it too much in the context of the buildings around it. The very high sky-scrapers (gratte-ciel) that dominate La Defense. It seemed to me that the thumb was only made enormous because the sky-scrapers were enormous. I saw the enormous bland buildings and then I saw the enormous bland thumb and it seemed like a bad joke to me. Somehow the negative feeling I had about the buildings played off directly onto the thumb.

And the thumb is surely enormous only because the buildings are enormous. A question of appropriate scale, of the thumb sculpture not being dwarfed by its surroundings. But it's also a question of opportunity: opportunity for Cesar; opportunity for us.

Imagine this thumb now being lifted onto the back of an articulated lorry and going off on a tour of France. Imagine that thumb popping up on the top of an Alp. On the beach in St Tropez. Standing next to a lighthouse on some wild coast of Brittany. Then it would prove its scale, its appropriateness to every situation.

It could take its place among the menhirs of Carnac. It could spend an afternoon blocking traffic on the motorway during a bank holiday weekend. It could give a mighty thumbs up to the grape harvest in Champagne.

And everywhere it went, people would look at their own thumbs. They would hold them up and move them further from or closer to their faces until their own thumbs were the same size as Cesar's thumb. And that distance between the thumb and their face would depend upon how far they were from Cesar's thumb.

Cesar's thumb would return to Paris heroic. The ultimate measure of scale, known everywhere. It would return to its place at the foot of the giant buildings and people would crowd around it, closer and closer, their own thumbs held up, closer and closer until the buildings were blotted out not only by Cesar's giant thumb, but also by their own thumbs. Then they could once more know who they were.

Poetry Reading in London, 14th July 2009

OXFAM POETRY SERIES
in tandem with the 14-day UK festival BOOKFEST
invites you to a poetry reading with UK, USA & Australian poets:

Barbara Beck
David Caddy
Jennifer K Dick
Brentley Frazer
Rufo Quintavalle
George Vance
Jonathan Wonham

They will be introduced by UK poet Todd Swift

AT: 7 pm, the 14th of July 2009
Oxfam Books and Music
91 Marylebone High Street
London, W1.
Baker street tube station +7-10 minute walk.
http://www.oxfammarylebone.co.uk/
Please note this is not Marylebone Road.

RSVP & book in advance via Contact Martin Penny at Tel: 0207 4873570
or via email at oxfammarylebone@hotmail.com

For more details, poet's biographies and access map click here.

The Oxfam poetry series has been running for six years, since 2004, when it was launched by Sir Andrew Motion & Wendy Cope. In that time, the series has featured over 100 leading poets, & raised tens of thousands of pounds for Oxfam's work to alleviate poverty & suffering.