The study of planetary habitability is partly based upon extrapolation from knowledge of the Earth‘s conditions, as the Earth is the only planet currently known to harbour life (The Blue Marble, 1972 Apollo 17 photograph)

“The Gaia hypothesis/ˈɡaɪ.ə/, also known as the Gaia theory, Gaia paradigm, or the Gaia principle, proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. The hypothesis was formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. Lovelock named the idea after Gaia, the primordial goddess who personified the Earth in Greek mythology. In 2006, the Geological Society of London awarded Lovelock the Wollaston Medal in part for his…

“Fellini Satyricon, or simply Satyricon, is a 1969 Italian fantasydrama film written and directed by Federico Fellini and loosely based on Petronius‘s work Satyricon, written during the reign of Emperor Nero and set in imperial Rome. The film is divided into nine episodes, following Encolpius and his friend Ascyltus as they try to win the heart of a young boy named Gitón within a surreal and dream-like Roman landscape. The film opens on a graffiti-covered wall with Encolpius lamenting the loss of his lover Gitón to Ascyltus. Vowing to win him back, he learns at the Thermae that Ascyltus sold Gitón to the actor Vernacchio. At the theatre, he discovers Vernacchio and Gitón performing in a lewd play called the ’emperor’s miracle’: a slave’s hand is axed off and replaced with a gold one. Encolpius storms the stage and reclaims Gitón. On their return…

Judith Duffett, Cynthia Funk and Joyce Miller at a NYRW meeting.

Nov. 2017: “In the fall of 1967, a small gang of women began meeting regularly in cramped apartments across the Lower East Side. At the time, the Civil Rights Movement was shifting toward Black Power, while resistance to the Vietnam War continued to escalate. These women, mostly in their 20s, had caught the scent of revolution in the air. Their group, New York Radical Women, disintegrated within a few years, but during its short, fractious life, it helped define the burgeoning women’s movement and pioneered crucial elements of modern feminism. It arose out of a savagely polarized political moment, much like our current one, in which the frustrations and injustices of life as a woman suddenly exploded into eloquent rage. These radical women coined concepts and slogans like consciousness-raising, ‘sisterhood is powerful,’ and ‘the personal is political.’…

Inmates at Attica shouted their demands during a negotiating session with state corrections officials in September 1971.

“The Attica Prison Rebellion, also known as the Attica Prison Massacre, Attica Uprising or Attica Prison Riot, was the bloodiest prison riot in United States history and is one of the best-known and most significant flashpoints of the prisoners’ rights movement. The revolt was based upon prisoners’ demands for better living conditions and political rights. On September 9, 1971, 1,281 out of the approximately 2,200 men incarcerated in the Attica Correctional Facility rioted and took control of the prison, taking 42 staff hostage. During the following four days of negotiations, authorities agreed to 28 of the prisoners’ demands, but would not agree to demands for complete amnesty from criminal prosecution for the prison takeover or for the removal of Attica’s superintendent. By the order of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, state…

“How exciting to learn that Simone de Beauvoir, grandmother of second-wave feminism, had written a novel that had never been published! In French it was called Les inséparables and was said by the journal Les libraires to be a story that ‘follows with emotion and clarity the passionate friendship between two rebellious young women.’ Of course I wanted to read it, but then I was asked to write an introduction to the English translation. My initial reaction was panic. This was a throwback: as a young person, I was terrified of Simone de Beauvoir. I went to university at the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s, when, among the black-turtleneck-wearing, heavily eyelinered cognoscenti—admittedly not numerous in the Toronto of those days—the French Existentialists were worshipped as minor gods. Camus, how revered! How eagerly we read his grim novels! Beckett, how adored! His plays, especially Waiting for…

“This past July, after thousands upon thousands of protestors flooded the streets of Puerto Rico calling for the ouster of former governor Ricardo Rosselló because of his administration’s offensive chat messages and a pattern of money laundering, conspiracy, and wire fraud, they succeeded. Roselló resigned on August 2. However, the saga of compromised and unsure political leadership continued after this resignation with two more governors being inaugurated in succession within a week. Still, in terms of their political leadership, the protestors refused to accept that what they had been served on their plates was what they had to eat. I have some reservations about protest wielded as a tool for compelling changes in public or administrative policy. I find that there is a tendency to valorize large public demonstrations rather than the difficult work of negotiating compromises. But in Puerto Rico, the organizers and demonstrators absolutely had a righteous…

March 14, 1968: Selling the underground press on Haight and Clayton.

“By 1971 the original 1967 ambivalence among one element of hippie culture with the urban setting manifested itself in what I call the Long March to Tennessee, led by Steve Gaskin. Steve Gaskin was a philosopher-guru who held meetings at the beach and was associated with Family Dog Production Company, the producer for many of the early rock and roll bands in the Haight Ashbury. Gaskin and his followers, which grew to several thousand people, increasingly found it impossible to pursue their version of spirituality in an urban setting and developed an ideology of the countryside. In a dramatic event, they formed a caravan of buses and vehicles of all sizes and shapes and drove to Tennessee, leaving the urban hippie in the Haight Ashbury. This was a period of great disease in the Haight, overlapping with the heroin…

New York State mandated mask-wearing in school. Six students arrived at school in Islip without masks. They were directed to a separate room. Their parents showed up promptly and called the police. This is a story that is repeated, in various ways, in districts across the nation, as parents debate and fight over whether their children should follow public health guidelines.

This is the question: why don’t these parents object too vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, polio, smallpox, and other contagious diseases?

On Thursday morning, six Islip Middle School students came to school without masks. When staff asked them to put masks on, as required by current New York State health rules, the students refused. They were escorted to a room with a security guard when, according to the Suffolk County Police Department, a parent of one of the students called police, who arrived at 9:50 a.m…

Islip Superintendent Dennis…

Jess, The Enamord Mage: Translation #6, 1965.

“Jess and Robert Duncan pursued separate artistic paths—the former as a visual artist, the latter as a poet, though each experimented with the other’s chosen medium. Jess, who had a lifelong interest in the play inherent in language, wrote poetry and prose, and Duncan, who was drawn to the open form and movement he perceived in abstract expressionism, painted and drew. Yet neither approached the facility with which the other engaged his own field, and the benefits of these excursions into the other’s territory lay more in the insights brought back than in any contribution made on foreign ground. They collaborated rarely, which may seem surprising given the intensity of their shared worldview and the length of their relationship, some 37 years. But they did have one lasting collaboration: the joint labor of maintaining the household. Despite their different temperaments and commitments…