by Rafaël Newman

On Thursday this week I will join two of my colleagues—the mezzo Annina Haug and the pianist Edward Rushton—to present a program of poems by French authors to a private audience. We are staging our concert in Zurich, at the home of a descendant of one of those authors, the renowned Swiss-French clown and musician Grock. In fact, Edward, the founder of Besuch der Lieder, our home-concert association, will be playing on Grock’s own piano, accompanying Annina as she sings individual chansons and song cycles by Erik Satie, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Albert Roussel, as well as “La femme est un jardin d’amour,” a jaunty number penned by Grock himself. Edward will also perform short instrumental works by Mel Bonis, Satie, and Honegger, all on the poet-clown’s vintage Gaveau, and I will recite poems by various authors, written in France and Germany during the interwar period.

The poets whose works, both declaimed and set to music, we will be showcasing all worked for the most part in the first half of the 20th century, and the texts we are featuring come mainly from the 1920s, as do the musical works we will be playing, to a mostly Germanophone audience—hence the (bilingual) title of our program: “Les années folles: Paris um 1927.” These poets include such renowned and lesser-known literary lights as Léon-Paul Fargue, Lucien Daudet, Mimi Godebska, René Chalupt, and Guillaume Apollinaire—the last of whom, however, had already succumbed to injury and illness in 1918, although his influence on contemporary literary developments was to continue for some time.

As it happens, April 23—the date of our concert—is also World Book Day. The commemorative day, alternatively known as “World Book and Copyright Day” or “International Day of the Book,” was organized by UNESCO and first celebrated in 1995; but its roots are older, in early 20th-century Spain. The date was initially chosen to honor Cervantes, who was believed to have died on April 23, 1616—the very same day on which Shakespeare was also believed to have died, a coincidence that subsequently reinforced the significance of that date. In fact, though, since Spain and England were still using two different calendars in the 17th century, this is not really true—instead, according to UNESCO, April 23 is a “symbolic date of world literature” which “coincides with that of the disappearance of the writers William Shakespeare [and] Miguel de Cervantes.”

World Book Day, in other words, is actually Dead Poets Day. Read more »

The dandelions are back. I like them.

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by Brooks Riley

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Sughra Raza. Microforest, March 2022.

Digital photograph.

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by William Benzon

If I had been born as an Australian Aborigine, or an American Indian, I’d probably have been a shaman. If I’d been born in ancient India, Greece, Israel, or medieval Europe, I might well have been a priest. If I’d been born in colonial America, I might have been a clergyman; Harvard, Yale and Princeton were started to train clergymen.

As it is I was born in 1947 in a hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, steel country. I spent the first four years of my life in coal country, Ellsworth, Pa. The family then moved to Johnstown, Pa., as much coal as steel country. Though she had been raised as an Episcopalian, my mother took me and my sister to Sunday school in a nearby Lutheran church. My father stayed home. But he did attend services on Christmas Eve.

The Baby Jesus

I couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old when I had my first cosmological idea. By that time I was attending Sunday school at a Lutheran Church in the neighborhood where we lived. The teachers told us marvelous stories from books with colorful illustrations. I figured out that the world was a movie God created for the entertainment and enjoyment of the Baby Jesus. One thing puzzled me, though. Movies are flat, but our world is round. I never figured that one out. Perhaps I’m still working on it.

My sister is four years younger than I am. I don’t know what she thought about the Baby Jesus. Early in the 21^st century she would convert to Shinnyo-en Buddhism, an esoteric sect founded in Japan in the first half of the 20^th century. Back in 2013 she invited me to attend a lovely interfaith Celebration of the Equinox Shinnyo-en held in St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan.

Bertrand Russell and Madeline Murray

Sometime during my early teens I was rummaging in boxes of paperback books my father kept in the basement. I found, and read, George Orwell’s 1984, which had a lurid pulp-style cover depicting a shapely woman in tight blue overalls wearing a button for the “Women’s Anti-Sex League.” I forget what the cover of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World looked like, but I read it too. Theodore Reik’s Listening with the Third Ear introduced me to psychoanalysis. And then there was Bertrand Russell’s collection of essays, Why I Am Not a Christian, devastating and witty. Read more »

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by Ken MacVey

It has become harder to be a judge, especially when it comes to politically controversial cases handled by federal judges. President Trump, his cabinet members, and White House spokespersons have relentlessly shot off barrages of nasty, personal attacks on judges for making decisions Trump disapproves. One stand – out is Trump’s  comment that Supreme Court justices who ruled against his tariff program are “an embarrassment to their families.” He  has called judges “rogues,” “criminals,” “unpatriotic,” “lapdogs,” “crooked,” and “radical left lunatics.” These comments cannot be dismissed as hyperbolic rhetoric any more than Trump’s invitation to his supporters to come to  Washington DC on January 6, 2021 (“it will be wild”) can be dismissed as friendly “chit chat.”

Death threats against judges have increased astronomically. Judges are being “doxxed.” Last month, Chief Justice  Roberts in an interview declared it is fair game to criticize  judge’s decisions but not fair game to go after a judge with personal attacks. He said it’s dangerous and  “it has to stop.”

Judges judge. That’s true by definition. What is not tautological is that judges are also judged. Despite Chief Justice Roberts’ well justified alarm about the escalation of  personal attacks on judges and courts— judges and courts still must be judged. This is particularly true in these unprecedented and challenging legal times. Speaking up for judicial independence is essential. Speaking up about judges’ decisions that undercut the rule of law is essential too. Judges, especially federal judges and Supreme Court justices, will face in the next months the gravest challenges judges have had to face perhaps in the history of the American republic. How they fare will be judged by the American people and history. If judges flinch in doing their duty in upholding the rule of law and standing up to a president’s attempts to shred the Constitution, they must be judged. That absolutely does not include personal, angry attacks. But it does not mean being silent either when the rule of law is being undermined. Read more »

by Steve Gimbel and Tom Wilk

Comedian Druski’s impersonation of Erika Kirk has generated a predictable mixture of clicks, outrage, and threats of legal action. Kirk argued that the bit was immoral because it involved whiteface, and for many people that seems to settle the matter: race-crossing performance is race-crossing performance. If blackface is wrong, whiteface must be wrong too.

Not so quick. The moral question is not whether Druski crossed an identity line. He did. The question is what that crossing meant: how costly the joke was, what history it invoked, and whether he had the standing to make it. Humor is always morally risky. Jokes can wound, demean, reinforce ugly stereotypes, and normalize bad ways of seeing other people. But the ethics of humor does not depend only on the content of a joke. Who tells it matters. Context and history matter.

A useful way to think about this is through what in our book In on the Joke we called joke capital. Jokes have moral costs. Some are cheap and mild; others are expensive because they are cruel, degrading, or entangled with histories of domination. A joke teller’s social position, relationship to the target, and place within that history all affect whether they have the standing to cover those costs. This is why we give people more leeway when they joke about their own communities than when outsiders do. Shared membership does not make every joke acceptable, but it changes how the joke is heard.

So: how morally costly was the joke?

If all we knew was that a Black comedian put on whiteface to mock a white woman, we might expect something nasty or dehumanizing. But that is not what made this bit work. The humor came from accuracy, exaggeration, and performance. Druski crossed racial and gender lines while brilliantly capturing Kirk’s mannerisms. The joke was not built around reducing white people to a degrading caricature. It did not rely on stock features meant to present its target as subhuman or grotesque. Could he have taken it too far? Of course. But ethical judgment requires attending to the joke actually told, not the more offensive one critics imagine in advance.

The second question is what history the bit invoked. Here is where the blackface comparison breaks down entirely. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

A new word brings an old memory and starts me thinking – biblichor. The chor comes from petrichor, that wonderful earth smell after rain. Bibli, of course comes books as in bibliography. It reminded me of a piece I used a couple of years ago, and from that, as well you readers know, thought makes its way from thing to thing. It’s like crossing a stream on rocks.

From The Paris Review:

“The bookstore, and especially the used bookstore, is vanishing from New York City. Today there are a few, but there used to be a multitude of them, crammed between kitchen appliance shops and Laundromats and thrift stores. They all had temperamental cats prowling their aisles and they all smelled wonderfully of what a team of chemists in London has called “a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.” I miss terribly this stimulating fragrance, and the books that produce it, when it’s washed from the city for good.”

This “combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness” is one of the world’s great smells. I fear it is on its way into “The Land of the Lost,” though my grandson told me of the strange smell at Shakespeare and Co in Paris which he visited a couple of weeks ago. That bookstore may be soon an Ishmael, alone left “to tell the tale.”

I wish there were a way to keep smells, a museum of lost smells. I thought of this while reading a bit of a memoir my brother and I wrote together years ago. He sent a bunch of do you remembers for my 70th birthday and I responded. My response to his note is in italics.

(Do you remember he asked) The smell of the cigar, pipe and cigarette tobacco at the Newspaper store where we always bought the Sunday Newspapers? The store was run by two brothers, both a little handicapped, both with a limp. One might have been slow, but able to handle the details of running the store. This is where I had my first taste of Coca-Cola on a Sunday going to get the papers with Dad, the big ice chest, red, a hot day, Dad got one and gave me a swig. I thought it was a magical. We would get The Journal American, The New York Daily News, and The NY Times. I’m not sure how much the Times got read, though we got it. Do you remember Mayor LaGuardia reading the funnies over the radio when there was a strike I think by the printers and no papers were printed? The Comics were a serious business in those days.

Reading this, I remembered the smell of tobacco stores. Read more »

by Christopher Hall

The “literary thought experiment” is not a particularly well-explored genre. Ursula K. LeGuin’s short story is of course a famous one; we might say that other examples include Swift’s A Modest Proposal and stories by Borges and Ted Chiang. Like thought experiments in philosophy and physics, these challenge us to see how otherwise abstract ideas would function in a context understandable in terms of the “real world.” But the literary element here means that we can’t simply take the thought out of the language in which it is expressed. LeGuin’s story isn’t merely a vehicle for asking readers “Would you stay within a utopia if a single child had to be tortured to maintain it?” Trying to treat LeGuin’s story as a kind of Trolley Problem-with-extra-steps does a disservice to the care and craft with which she has created the statement of the problem itself.

That doesn’t seem to stop people, though. John Smith is concerned that the Ones Who Walk Away might be virtue signalers:

The walkers are not heroes. They are, at best, people who have chosen to feel better about themselves at the cost of doing anything useful. At worst, they are moral narcissists who would rather preserve the purity of their own conscience than remain in the one place where they might be able to justify their flourishing. And the near-universal instinct to lionize them reveals an unflattering truth about how most people think about ethics: we worship the gesture of moral refusal and almost never ask whether it accomplishes anything at all.

“Moral maturity,” in Smith’s view, comes from accepting the presence of suffering in the world. After all, he notes, we already live in a world which, despite not being anywhere close to a utopia, is built on the pain of others, both in the past and present. We are not only bound to live in a world where, as Smith notes, mass suffering only gives us a mediocre mode of life. It is also “philosophically empty” to reject a world based on anyone’s suffering, so long as the level of suffering there is minimized and happiness maximized:

This is the point that almost everyone skips past. The question is not “Would you build a utopia on the torture of one child?” The question is “You already live in a civilization built on the torture of millions of children. Is the utopia you’re being offered in exchange at least better than what you’ve got?”

And the answer is obviously yes.

(I’m not familiar enough with John Smith’s writing to know if there’s an element of satire here or not – I’ll treat it as if there wasn’t.) Not mentioned in his discussion, but obviously implied, is a by-now familiar conservative caution against any ambition to make the world completely pain-free. The effort to eliminate suffering will only result in more suffering, and we have only to look at the results of every attempt at utopian social engineering to confirm this. Read more »

by Lei Wang

I used to be one of those people who used science to try to explain everything. The poetic part of me suspected science wasn’t the only ultimate truth, but I resisted my own knowing. I really did believe at one point that dopamine and oxytocin were the causes and conditions of love, and not just what love happens to imperfectly look like under a scanner for mammals.

Years ago, I argued with an ex-Orthodox Jew about God. Though to all extents and purposes he had left the religion and its practical edicts, he had not stopped studying the scriptures. He was adamant that it was impossible for humans to know God, and I said it was—to the extent that it was humanly possible. (Clearly, though, it was a matter of temporal lobes, right vs. left hemispheres, etc.) Otherwise, were all the mystics lying or deluded?

I wasn’t sure then (or even now, despite everything) if I believed in God as entity or object, however abstract or non-corporeal, but I believe in God as experience. I believe in the sense of God, the way I believe in the sense of love, even if it’s subjective and immeasurable and irreproducible in the lab, the opposite of science yet indisputably real.

The anthropologist and religious scholar T.M. Luhrmann, author of How God Becomes Real, concludes after decades of research that faith is really hard work. “The most important question to ask about religion is not why but how,” she writes. “‘Why’ is a skeptic’s question—a puzzle around the seemingly absurd ideas (a talking snake, a virgin birth) that we find in religions. If we start not with the puzzle of belief, but with the question of whether the effort people invest in their faith helps them to feel that their gods and spirits are real, we are forced to focus on what people do when they worship gods and spirits, and on how those practices themselves might change those who do them.” Read more »

This guy was just walking calmly on the sidewalk. Presumably he could fly to wherever he’s going but he prefers to have a bit of a stroll, I guess. And here is ChatGPT’s comment: “That appears to be a scarlet tiger moth or a very close relative in the tiger moth family (Arctiinae). Looks like it escaped from a particularly stylish lava lamp.”

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by Jim Hanas

I remember the rush the first time I entered Manhattan via cab from one of the airports—I don’t remember which one—and felt the density and the pressure. I recognized the blue scaffolding of the city’s endless refurbishments, as seen on Law & Order, and felt that I was home. (I moved here a few months later.) I was staying with a friend on West 17th Street and within minutes I saw my first celebrity. It was Wallace Shawn. I remember him toddling north on Seventh Avenue, paunchy and—can this be true?—wearing clogs. At the time, only Woody Allen would have been a better sighting, and now—well—I’m glad it was Wallace Shawn. The year was 2000 and I was thirty. He would have been fifty-six, the age I am now.

I had seen My Dinner with André (1981) for the first time less than ten years before, with a college friend, shortly after (or before?) we graduated. It was one of those movies I had avoided—though it was around—because what it was wasn’t legible to me. It seemed like old people stuff, with a sad, late-’70s taint to it. I still can’t watch The Bob Newhart Show—the first one, funny though it may be—without feeling depressed. With its wan colors and necrotic leisure suits, it feels like TV from another, possibly socialist country. (Only M*A*S*H survives that era for me. Military fashions never go out of style.)

But the movie finally caught up with me, circuitously, via Jonathan Demme. From Stop Making Sense (1984) to Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia (1987), I found myself accidentally stumbling around “downtown”—with no sense of what that was as a scene or a  neighborhood from my childhood home in suburban Cincinnati—which led to My Dinner with André. Prior to that, Shawn appeared as a waiter in Atlantic City (1980)—his first of four Louis Malle films, André being the second—and in Manhattan (1979), as Jeremiah, Diane Keaton’s previous ultra-virile lover whom Woody Allen is shocked to find out is, well, Wallace Shawn.

My Dinner with André is best suited to a certain stage of life, and better suited to some eras than others. I was pleased to see it make it as a mid-life meme for millennials (above), though not surprised. André is an autofiction on the theme of how a person should be, to paraphrase the title of Sheila Heti’s genre-defying turned genre-defining 2013 novel. Read more »