A paper reporting the creation of sperm-like cells from human embryonic stem cells has been retracted by the editor of the journal Stem Cells and Development. The work had garnered headlines worldwide after being published three weeks ago …
The journal’s editor-in-chief Graham Parker says he took the radical step on 27 July because two paragraphs in the introduction of the paper, entitled ‘In Vitro Derivation of Human Sperm from Embryonic Stem Cells’, had been plagiarised from a 2007 review published in another journal, Biology of Reproduction.
He had been alerted to the plagiarism on 10 July — three days after the article had been published online — by the editors of Biology of Reproduction. Parker says that the corresponding author, Karim Nayernia of the North East England Stem Cell Institute in Newcastle, UK, and the University of Newcastle, had failed to provide convincing evidence that the two paragraphs had been included in the submitted version of the manuscript by mistake…
Nature News
… a scholar of Russia whose glorious prose style and deep aesthetic, social, and historical understandings created essays like this one — it introduces his edition of the Edmund Wilson / Vladimir Nabokov letters — has died.
A couple of excerpts:
While some in the West could mourn for Nicholas and Alexandra and romanticize all Russian émigrés as genteel aristocrats who had lost their fortunes, and others could acclaim Stalin’s U.S.S.R. as “the first truly human culture” and a triumph of true Marxist socialism, there was simply no place in the Western view of Russia and Russians for a liberal faction that was opposed both to tsarist regime before the Revolution (and had, in fact, brought about its downfall), and to the theocratic police state founded by Lenin.
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Wilson’s assertion in his reply to Nakobov’s critique of his portrait of Lenin that he had steered clear of official biographies and had based his view on “family memoirs, Trotsky’s writings, Lenin’s own works, and the memoirs of people like Gorky and Clara Zetkin,” who were all “trying to tell the truth,” makes one think of a historian of Christianity who is sure that his account is factual because all his information comes straight from the Vatican.
… of the Senate hearing on Continuing Medical Education. It should be starting about now…
Oh. Here it is!
Senator Kohl, specs low on nose, summarizes the problem — “Crux of today’s hearing… Do they instead market the industry’s latest products? Greater transparency, stronger firewalls, need to be considered… I’m disappointed that the AMA has not yet updated their ethical guidelines on this… “
Martinez: “Accounts of ethical lapses on the part of some doctors and pharmaceutical companies are troubling… Sometimes the line between promotion and education can be blurred… ”
Franken: “How are patients affected by COI? … Unlimited and far from impartial interactions between industry and providers… This often has a negative influence on outcomes… Drives up prices to patients… Medical schools are over-reliant on industry funds… CME is another example of the same thing… ”
HHS/Inspector General guy: A little stiff, nervous. “An honest tale speaks best being plainly told – Shakespeare.” As opposed to glitzy biased CME tales. Wants full prohibition of industry support of CME. Wants firewalls – money yes, but independent grant organizations to disperse the money. Or doctors can pay for their own education. This might make for higher quality if they’re doing the paying. Growing concern about the quality of CME — shift cost to physicians.
Steven Nissen: “CME has grown into an enormous industry with extraordinary influence on the practice of medicine… CME has become an insidious vehicle for the aggressive promotion of drugs and devices. This now dominates the education of physicians. Marketing cleverly disguised as education…. With a wink and a nod the communication company selects speakers they know will please the industry. I can almost always guess who the speakers will be… Who is guarding the integrity of the process? I’ve written to the CME certifying agency with many complaints about bias – my letters were never even acknowledged.”
Next speaker: “It is impossible to find any aspect of medicine in which industry does not have significant control… Industry funding creates bias… Need to be free of industry influence… Stronger measures are required… Current situation unacceptable.”
Jack Rusley, med student, AMSA: He’s wearing his white doctor suit! “Medical research must serve the public and not physician lifestyles… Why do students care so much about these issues? … Not yet tinged with the streak of cynicism… My computer’s shutting down… Sorry… I’ll continue speaking off the cuff… Med students used to be docile in regard to authority… Not anymore… After pressure from Senator Grassley, the press, and students, Harvard has reviewed its COI policy and now has a passing grade on the AMSA scorecard.”
********************
Question session. Martinez, a lawyer, is shocked because continuing ed in the law is not sponsored by any industry. No money involved.
The bias was so terrible at a recent CME session Nissen wandered into that “I had to walk out.”
Another speaker: “Physicians are accruing the education capital here — They should pay for it themselves.”
Franken asks about the accreditation organization for CME. Nissen: “I can assure you that a considerable amount of CME … is marketing. It is not restricted in any way. It is highly biased. We therefore need a new system of certification. We need this organization to go away altogether. There’s no will to police this.”
[I’m sure I’m getting some names wrong, etc. Will correct later. This is live-blogging.]
Franken: “Is there anything good to say about CME, besides better hotels and shrimp?”
Nissen: “There are a few good CMEs. But most are subtly or not so subtly organized to get people to buy a product.”
Another speaker: “CME hugely drives high costs in health care in this country. We spend ninety billion dollars a year more than we should be spending. This machine for getting doctors to prescribe the most expensive medications is one of the big reasons for the problem…. It drives me crazy to hear all this talk that we can’t afford health care reform! We can. We need to make these changes.”
Enough. The second panel’s here. They’re the pro-COI guys. I’ll let one of their fans live-blog that.
Tell it to Richard Joel, the president of your university.
He still hasn’t faced the fact that Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin held among the highest positions of authority at your university for years, and that no one ever questioned that. Only when criminal investigations proceeded against these men did your university respond, and it responded by erasing them from its web pages and pretending they didn’t exist.
Nor has Joel faced the fact that a number of the remaining Yeshiva trustees — all male, of course, wouldn’t want to pollute things with a woman (see the post directly below this one)– at your university seem still to be involved in financial conflicts of interest with one another.
Really, Professor Asch. Begin at home. Start by looking around you.
… a great dorm for next year, her sophomore year at George Washington University, where her mother works.
It’s Ivory Tower, and she’ll be sharing the apartment with friends.
According to this Georgetown University blog, GW’s becoming known not merely for its rabidly political student body, but also for its newer dorms, like Ivory Tower:
[I]t’s hard not to get a little crosstown envy. George Washington University was ranked first for most politically active students, second for best college town, and eighth for best dorms…
… Assholes.
As in — Where’s the Frank Zappa statue? I wrote about it – and my adoration of Zappa – around this time last year. What’s up?
It’s been more than a year since the city accepted a statue of eccentric composer and Baltimore native Frank Zappa, and city officials are still not sure exactly where to put it.
The statue, valued at roughly $50,000, was a gift from a Lithuanian Zappa fan club. And officials are looking to place it in Fells Point.
Fells Point community groups approved a location at Fleet Street and South Broadway, according to Tracy Baskerville, director of communications for the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts. But the location is being reconsidered, she said.
“We’re looking for a place where people will congregate,” said Baskerville.
HUH?
I don’t mean to hound Baskerville, but PEOPLE WILL CONGREGATE WHEREVER A STATUE OF FRANK ZAPPA EXISTS.
FOOLS!
The same blue food dye found in M&Ms and Gatorade could be used to reduce damage caused by spine injuries, offering a better chance of recovery, according to new research.
Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center found that when they injected the compound Brilliant Blue G (BBG) into rats suffering spinal cord injuries, the rodents were able to walk again, albeit with a limp.
The only side effect was that the treated [rats] temporarily turned blue.
Two more Weldon Kees poems this morning (I looked at an earlier pair here).
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Covering Two Years
This nothingness that feeds upon itself:
Pencils that turn to water in the hand,
Parts of a sentence, hanging in the air,
Thoughts breaking in the mind like glass,
Blank sheets of paper that reflect the world
Whitened the world that I was silenced by.
There were two years of that. Slowly,
Whatever splits, dissevers, cuts, cracks, ravels, or divides
To bring me to that diet of corrosion, burned
And flickered to its terminal.–Now in an older hand
I write my name. Now with a voice grown unfamiliar,
I speak to silences of altered rooms,
Shaken by knowledge of recurrence and return.
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If you read my earlier post about Kees, and looked at the two earlier poems, you’re not much surprised by this tightly compacted depression narrative.
Two years, two stanzas; two chapters, Before and After.
The first stanza describes the automatic self-feeding machine of classic melancholia, in which the self, without agency, becomes, in a weird paradox, both a nothingness, and a thing that somehow sustains itself on nothingness. The speaker is a writer, so his despair takes the form of writer’s block: pencils that don’t write, sentences that don’t form, thoughts that shatter into fragments.
And the whiteness of writing paper now is only whiteness, not a whiteness on which we write things that “reflect the world,” but a whiteness that stands as a symbol of a world whited out, a whited sepulcher, sky “white as clay with no sun.” (People see resemblances between Philip Larkin and Weldon Kees. I mean, I see them too; but Kees has more blood in his veins.)
This was “the world that I was silenced by.” Awkward, at first, to end on by; yet the next line – the first line of the second stanza – will create continuity through rhyming with by (Slowly); and in any case the awkwardness both demonstrates, in a way, his faltered writing style under conditions of depression, and hands agency to the world: Not the world that silenced ME; but the world I was silenced BY.
Note too how in the first stanza, as in the second, the poet will somehow find a dignity of line, a fitting length and meter, an emotionally open and yet controlled form of self-expression.
Surely he accomplishes this through, first of all, a combination of metaphors that ennoble one person’s raw and particular feeling, lift it into a social and historical world the reader shares (we have encountered this anomie before; we have encountered poets who’ve encountered it before; these are not bizarre and novel metaphors, but rather figures that take their place among similar figures in poetic history).
And the writer accomplishes it, too, by making this language dance, by taking despair out for a spin. This is what Jay Robinson, I think, means when he describes Kees “injecting his own personal darkness into villanelles, sonnets and sestinas.” (I began my earlier Kees post with this quotation, and with a similar statement about Kees by Dana Gioia.) To have enough distance from your misery to aestheticize it — that’s impressive in itself. Though if Ted Hughes is right, a certain sort of poet is absolutely compelled in this direction:
Almost all art is an attempt by someone unusually badly hit (but almost everybody is badly hit), who is also unusually ill-equipped to defend themselves internally against the wound, to improvise some sort of modus vivendi… in other words, all art is trying to become an anaesthetic and at the same time a healing session. [Poetry is] nothing more than a facility… for expressing that complicated process in which we locate, and attempt to heal, affliction… [T]he physical body, so to speak, of poetry is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.
So here’s its reconciliation: There were two years of depression; then, who knows why, “Whatever splits, dissevers, cuts, cracks, ravels, or divides / To bring me to that diet of corrosion, burned / And flickered to its terminal.” Whatever forces divided me from the world, made the world white and me silent, ended (note how carefully Kees sustains his eating metaphor: feeds upon itself; diet of corrosion).
We now jump to the present by means of a mere dash — .
Now. Now I can write. In an older hand. In altered rooms. (As with the first two Kees poems we looked at, note how yet again this is an aftermath poem, evoking what was, and now, in an ashen hereafter, what is.) In a voice grown unfamiliar. I don’t know myself. I’m shaken by knowledge of recurrence and return.
Nice Nietzschean note there… Chastened. I’ve been through it. And I’m scared now, because although I’m back from nothingness, nothingness can return.
See how he’s slipped rhyme into these seemingly blank verses? It’s all over the place, if you look — it’s not obvious, because obvious rhyme is for song, for worlds of rhyme and reason. Here we’re still pretty shattered, pretty shaky, but in the second, sort-of-recovery, stanza, the poet tentatively picks up his toolbox again: Repetition with words from the earlier stanza (hand/hand), rhyme (turn/burned/return), consonance (break, blank, crack, flicker, shaken)…
A great poet like this one shows you, in real time, the wound, and the slow, compromised emergence of healing. It’s quite an amazing thing.
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And now, to end our Kees seminar, something a little lighter. Some light verse. A piffle, really. The poet chats with his cat. Cute!
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Colloquy
In the broken light, in owl weather,
Webs on the lawn where the leaves end,
I took the thin moon and the sky for cover
To pick the cat’s brains and descend
A weedy hill. I found him groveling
Inside the summerhouse, a shadowed bulge,
Furred and somnolent.—”I bring,”
I said, “besides this dish of liver, and an edge
Of cheese, the customary torments,
And the usual wonder why we live
At all, and why the world thins out and perishes
As it has done for me, sieved
As I am toward silences. Where
Are we now? Do we know anything?”
—Now, on another night, his look endures.
“Give me the dish,” he said.
I had his answer, wise as yours.
Dana Gioia tries to get at it.
The stark and searing poetry viewed against the doomed and nihilistic life that produced it.
Jay Robinson tries to get at it.
Injecting his own personal darkness into villanelles, sonnets and sestinas.
The many contemporary poets who revere Weldon Kees try to get at why they revere him. Why his poetry is beautiful and thrilling and inspirational.
And nihilistic.
Kees died, age 45, in 1955. He jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. No one much knew about him when he died, and no one much knows about him now, except for a lot of poets who recognize his artistic greatness and who therefore study his verses with care.
Let’s consider a few of his verses and see what we can see.
Start with two that are kind of similar.
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Late Evening Song
For a while
Let it be enough:
The responsive smile,
Though effort goes into it.
Across the warm room
Shared in candlelight,
This look beyond shame,
Possible now, at night,
Goes out to yours.
Hidden by day
And shaped by fires
Grown dead, gone gray,
That burned in other rooms I knew
Too long ago to mark,
It forms again. I look at you
Across those fires and the dark.
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A strange love song, yes? The poet looks at his lover, maybe in bed, more likely (“across the warm room”) in the living room. He responds – with effort – to her smile, a shameless sexual smile in a sensual warm candle-lit room… This is a let’s fuck face – or a we just fucked and we both enjoyed it face… the sort of face only possible, says the poet, at night, alone with one’s lover. And it should be quite a pleasant thing, quite an easy thing — even maybe a smug thing, making this face.
But here there’s effort involved; it’s not natural or automatic for the poet to make the face. Those pulled-back, weary, minimalist lines, stabs in the dark, convey repression and reluctance. For the poet, that face has a long history, and a bitter one, and the poet at this late date very consciously makes the face in the hope that it will “be enough.”
Be enough? Is this about avoiding sex with one’s lover, and hoping that an enthusiastic smutty sort of mug will do to keep her happy? Or is this about a now-cynical man, wounded or wounding in past fervent love affairs, hoping against hope that the passion he’s rigged up with this latest lover might be authentic?
In any case there are bright fires, and there is the dark, and this terse poem plays them, bright and dark, against one another in a very tight balance, with very close or exact rhymes. Though a sad one, this is a song.
There is past and present passion, past passion and the present effortful gesture toward passion, and that’d be the fire (the word flame suggests itself somehow in the word shame, and in the warmth and the candles of the setting). Fires of past passion “grown dead, grown gray” would be the darkness, and the poet mainly resides in darkness, for effort goes into his smile. He looks at his lover through both of these things, the fire and the dark, through what’s left of the fire of passion in him, and through, mainly, the darkness that’s settled in him like ash as those earlier passions flamed out.
************************************
The Smiles Of The Bathers
The smiles of the bathers fade as they leave the water,
And the lover feels sadness fall as it ends, as he leaves his love.
The scholar, closing his book as the midnight clock strikes, is hollow and old:
The pilot’s relief on landing is no release.
These perfect and private things, walling us in, have imperfect and public endings–
Water and wind and flight, remembered words and the act of love
Are but interruptions. And the world, like a beast, impatient and quick,
Waits only for those who are dead. No death for you. You are involved.
*************************
The ecstasy of unearthly selflessness — afloat, or in the throes of sexual passion, or lost in thought or flight –is transient, a brief interruption of our corporeal, bestial, life in the world. Not coitus but post-coital tristesse; not the silent glorious swim but the chilly dripping aftermath as you regain your embodied self and the selves of others… It’s the same aftermathy feel the first poem has — the late-stage smile, the smile gotten up with difficulty long after perfect and private smiles have faded.
Without the great writing, this poem would, thinks UD, be an immature, whiny sort of expression. Why was I cast out of Eden sort of thing… Bitter late-Romantic… A cliché like that guy Richard in the Joni Mitchell song. But what’s great about the writing, as in the earlier poem, is its stoical control, the way the aesthetic intelligence keeps things steady and observant and true rather than emotional. No death for you. You are involved, in the world, in the belly of the beast, as long as you are alive, and the world has its claims on you, its claws in you. The best you can hope for, so long as you are alive, is, let’s say, the small death, la petite mort, of orgasmic experience.
*****************************************
Hold on. I’ll look at two other Kees poems in a bit.
La Kid, already far more sophisticated,
due to many trips to New York City,
than her ‘thesdacentric mother, gets
her photo taken with the famous
Naked Cowboy.
(That’s her friend Julia, also enjoying the
Naked Cowboy’s armpit.)
He has a political science degree from the
University of Cincinnati. He’s running for
mayor.
… inspired some great writing.
Here we go.
Author, David Rothkopf.
Yeah so there’s a few typos. So what? Fuggedaboutit.
The dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham has died, age 90. He had one of the longest, most artistically rich, lives on record.
This piece about him, marking a lecture he gave at Stanford, evokes that richness.
An excerpt:
In 1966, Cunningham collaborated with filmmaker Stan Van Der Beek to produce Variations V, the first of its kind “dance film.” What must have excited Cunningham about this venture was how the camera could work as a creative instrument, framing and structuring the look and feel of dance in a way that differed tremendously from viewing a performance in a concert hall. Variations V is also intriguing as an early and consummate example of the collage-like effect of multimedia. The dancers perform in a dark space broken up by vertical antennae, photoelectric devices, and a plant-like object. Multiple projection screens, with moving images from film and television, displayed both the sublime (man’s walk on the moon) and the mundane (a man coming home to his house in suburbia). As the dancers advance near the antennae, or cut through beams of photoelectric light, they trip sensors that emit the electronic bleeps and blips of John Cage’s musical score. Ambient sound, an occasional piano solo, and the auditory snow that one hears between radio stations contributed to the complexity of Cage’s soundscape. Movement ranges from elaborate ensembles, with dancers rolling, spinning, and somersaulting on the floor to unusual solos (Cunningham pulls off the leaves of the plant-like object, only to replace them later; a female dancer, sporting a 1960s dress fit for a go-go club, stands on her head). The hypersensory event is completed with the projection of bright spotlights and spiral patterns on the stage that are sometimes superimposed on the dancers’ bodies.
University of New Mexico police say 52-year-old Joseph Gutierrez had been stealing bikes on the university’s campus for at least a year and a half. He now sits in jail, and bikes on the UNM campus are a little more safe.
… [A] student … witnessed his bike being stolen by Gutierrez and saw him set down a coffee cup. Police used that cup to link Gutierrez through DNA…
Ah oui. Especially since they’re the poor white trash of education.
You know. On-line university courses. Most of them stink, for obvious reasons.
But one thing about them — because they don’t use up classrooms and equipment and campus time in the way of courses where you see and hear other human beings, they’re cheaper, that’s for sure…