Salting the Earth and the Vandalism of America

by Mark Harvey

Elon Musk

To tear something down is infinitely easier than building something of benefit or beauty. Constructing an elegant house that will last through the ages, can take years.  From a dream, to design, to approvals, to construction means gobs of money, skilled designers, and dedicated builders. When you see that handsome house perched just so on a hill, with its cedar siding, cased windows, and tidy balconies, know that dozens of men and women labored and strove to get it just right—hundreds of mornings planning, sawing, hammering, painting, plumbing and polishing.

But give me a forty-ton excavator and a couple of dump trucks, and I will demolish that house and clear the site in one day. To a person of evil intent and ill mind, tearing down so much effort in so little time will be a thrill.

That’s what makes vandalism so attractive to people with festering resentments. Destroying something precious to someone else in the dark of the night is the sort of sugar rush that thrills degenerates.

When the richest man in the world takes hammer and tongs to our government and delights in tearing down agencies central to our economy, farms, public health, environment, and foreign policy—when a man-child of his accidental consequence recklessly fires thousands of public employees without knowing the first thing about government, it’s time for anyone who does love this country to stand up and call out a flat NO!

Watching Elon Musk with his strange gothic uniforms of black jackets, t-shirts and ball caps, and reading his inane tweets sprinkled with juvenile humor, brings to mind a deeply insecure adolescent. And yet, that puffed-up adolescent is tearing apart the lives of thousands of Americans directly, and millions of people worldwide as a consequence. Read more »

What Becomes Of The Femboy?

by Mike Bendzela

In a kindergarten classroom in the mid-1960s, a kid named Mikey steered clear of the boys stacking large toy blocks on top of one another and knocking them down again–so obnoxiousand instead went and sat at the table of girls making beads out of salt dough and stringing them together on a thread. These girls were not averse to tasting the salt dough and smacking their lips in disgust. The teacher had wisely settled on salt dough because she knew it wouldn’t poison the students should they eat it. At least the girls were smart and funny and didn’t continually knock each other to the floor.

Mikey preferred these sober, artsy activities–making necklaces of salt dough beads, pressing hand prints into soft clay disks, tracing the profiles of silhouetted heads projected via lamp light onto sheets of construction paper–over the rough-and-tumble of block stacking, fat-ball tossing, and floor hockey, because–well, he just did. Thus developed the central themes of his boyhood–hates sports; likes art and language; hangs out with the girls.

Throughout grade school, gym class gave him a terrible knot in his stomach and he longed to be elsewhere, a disposition cemented into place by an incident during a game of “battle ball,” in which boys stood at opposite walls and hurled large pneumatic balls at each other for God knows what reason, and a ball smacked him square in the face and knocked his glasses off his head.

The glasses allowed him to read the teacher’s flowing, cursive handwriting on the chalkboard, reading which he was good at, and he forever yearned to be allowed to pick up a long piece of chalk and tap-scratch letters onto the board himself. This desire was at long last granted, and soon he was permitted whole boxes of colored chalks to use, and the teacher allowed him and some girl friends to cover the entire chalkboard with decorative chalk drawings. Read more »

Thursday, March 13, 2025

A Tale of Two Doges: An Uncertain History

by Alizah Holstein

Jean LeClerc, Doge Enrico Dandolo recruiting for the crusade
Jean LeClerc, Doge Enrico Dandolo recruiting for the crusade (1621)

When a statement was issued last November stipulating that a new U.S. government department known by the acronym DOGE was to be formed, the medievalist in me snapped to attention. To me, “doge” was a word with distinctly medieval meaning. But hardly anywhere was this meaning being explored in the context of DOGE.

For anyone who has been living in a glacial crevasse for the past few months, DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency. Two phenomena are purported to have inspired the DOGE acronym. One: the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. And two: the “doge” internet meme featuring photos of a Japanese Shiba Inu overwritten with pidgin English text that played on a misspelling of the word “dog.” Both were much beloved by Elon Musk, who has to all appearances been heading DOGE.

But there’s a third association worth exploring as we consider the implications of this (unofficial) government department. Stated simply, a doge was the chief magistrate of medieval Italian maritime republics. Venice had doges for over a thousand years, from 700 until 1797 when the Napoleonic Wars brought the republic to its end. Genoa, for a shorter time, had them as well, and Pisa, too, counts a single doge in its historical register. What in Italian is doge in Venetian is doxe, and both derive from dux, the Latin word for leader and a cognate of duke.

The possible association of DOGE with a medieval magistrate has not been widely explored, but I do think it matters. Why? Because medievalism feels peculiarly salient right now in culture and politics alike. Last month at London Fashion Week, models strutted in chain mail and armor, while one carried a decorative sword.[1] Castlecore, which offers “a nostalgic ideal of luxury and wealth,” is trending on social, and romantasy sells.[2] Medievalism has never been very far from the American imagination, but in this moment it feels top of mind. Read more »

Should AI Speak for the Dying?

by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

Everyone grieves in their own way. For me, it meant sifting through the tangible remnants of my father’s life—everything he had written or signed. I endeavored to collect every fragment of his writing, no matter profound or mundane – be it verses from the Quran or a simple grocery list. I wanted each text to be a reminder that I could revisit in future. Among this cache was the last document he ever signed: a do-not-resuscitate directive. I have often wondered how his wishes might have evolved over the course of his life—especially when he had a heart attack when I was only six years old. Had the decision rested upon us, his children, what path would we have chosen? I do not have definitive answers, but pondering on this dilemma has given me questions that I now have to revisit years later in the form of improving ethical decision making at the end-of-life scenarios. To illustrate, consider Alice, a fifty-year-old woman who had an accident and is incapacitated. The physicians need to decide whether to resuscitate her or not. Ideally there is an advance directive which is a legal document that outlines her preferences for medical care in situations where she is unable to communicate her decisions due to incapacity. Alternatively, there may be a proxy directive which usually designate another person, called a surrogate, to make medical decisions on behalf of the patient.

Given the severity of these questions, would it not be helpful if there was a way to inform or augment decisions with dispassionate agents who could weigh in competing pieces of information without emotions coming in the way? Artificial Intelligence may help or at least provide feedback that could be used as a moral crutch. It also has practical implications as only 20-30% percent of the general American population has some sort of advance directive. The idea behind AI surrogates is that given sufficiently detailed data about a person, an AI can act as a surrogate in case the person is incapacitated, making decisions that reflect what the person would have taken if they were not incapacitated. However, even setting aside the question of what data may be needed, data is not always a perfect reflection of reality. Ideally this data is meant to capture a person’s affordances, preferences, and more preferences, with the assumption that they are implicit in the data. This may not always be true, as people evolve, change their preferences, and update their worldviews. Consider a scenario where an individual provided an advance directive in 2015, yet later converted to Jehovah’s Witness—a faith that disavows medical procedures that involve blood transfusions. Despite this profound shift in beliefs, the existing directive would still reflect past preferences rather than current convictions. This dilemma extends to AI-trained models, often referred to as the problem of stale data. If conversational data from a patient is used to train an AI model, yet the patient’s beliefs evolve over time, data drift ensures that the AI’s knowledge becomes outdated, failing to reflect the individual’s current values and convictions.

Many of the challenges inherent in AI, such as bias, transparency, and explainability, are equally relevant in the development of AI surrogates. Read more »

Wednesday, March 12, 2025

The Limits of American Exceptionalism

by Bill Murray

I.

A hundred years ago two battered and beleaguered old men, one an Italian prisoner, the other taken to wandering Irish bogs, arrived at the same fateful truth: the world around them was collapsing.

Antonio Gramsci, Marxist theorist, imprisoned member of the Italian parliament, wrote from his cell that “the old world is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

William Butler Yeats, a sort of mystic horrified by violence and uncertainty across his Irish homeland, saw the same future. From a cottage in County Galway he wrote “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” What was worse, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

One a political theorist dissecting history’s brutal transitions, the other a poet divining the chaos of human nature, both foresaw the same truth—that societies don’t glide one era to the next. Sufficiently stressed they shatter, and from the wreckage, new orders struggle to emerge. A hundred years on, Gramsci and Yeats’s alarmed realizations read less like prophecy than real time commentary.

Today’s Americans grew up confident that they stood outside history’s cycles of rise and fall. Battered but buoyed by victory in World War II (and recognizing an opportunity), the United States built a powerful international system meant to foster global stability and economic growth while, naturally, serving its own interests. And, in a world laid waste by war, so it did.

For the longest time this system forestalled large-scale conflicts, allowing America and its allies to prosper.

That system has played itself out.

It was easy enough for the mighty and victorious United States to stamp its model on a war-exhausted world. Turns out, maintaining that system indefinitely in a restive world is challenging.

Gramsci speaks outside of time straight to this week that the old is dying. As a new alignment struggles to be born, just as he said: witness the morbid symptoms.

American legend still holds that the US is fundamentally different from and superior to other nations. We call it American Exceptionalism.

Exceptionalism thrived during the fleeting unipolar moment. With the Soviet collapse and the Cold War’s end, the U.S. bestrode the globe—for better and worse. But the hubris and mutations born of that era now blind us to our decline. Read more »

On Achieving Tennisosity

by Scott Samuelson

Though I’m at best a mediocre tennis player, I’ve achieved something in the sport that the pros achieve only at their finest, which I’ve taken to calling “tennisosity,” a hybrid of “tennis” and “virtuosity.” I coined the term several years ago, in the sweaty aftermath of a match in which my opponent and I had entered into its state. Among my friends and family, the ugly term tennisosity has stuck—I suspect because it describes something vitally yet elusively important, something with an ethical and an aesthetic dimension that can apply to any meaningful human activity.

This is NOT a picture of my backhand.

Tennisosity (in the realm of tennis) is when you and your opponent are so well-matched that the competition not only raises both of your play to a higher level but perfectly realizes the game of tennis. The way I put it to my exhausted opponent was, “We just played the 2008 Wimbledon Final”—the battle between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, sometimes called the greatest match ever, where Nadal won his first Wimbledon against the defending champ (Federer had won the previous five straight, including the last two against Nadal). Even though neither my opponent nor I could return the serve of your average high school varsity tennis player, our rallies were just as dramatic as Federer’s and Nadal’s, each of us got to just as many shots that the other didn’t think could be gotten to, our aces were just as glorious, and our double faults were just as tragic—at least within the context of our game.

I admit that my backhand isn’t at the level of Roger Federer’s! I’m giggling at even drawing the comparison. By the normal metrics and standards of excellence in tennis, everything about my game is junk. Also, there was no public recognition riding on my match—not even the chintzy trophy of a local tournament, much less the engraved silver of the most storied competition in tennis. In fact, nobody was watching.

And yet, had others been watching us, I believe that their aesthetic experience of our tennis match would have been similar in kind to the great Wimbledon Final—obviously not concerning our individual skillsets but concerning what the interactive combination of our skillsets involved. My opponent and I had to dig deep again and again. The same kind of grit and imagination Federer and Nadal had to draw on, we had to draw on. The glory of tennis was on display for all to see—even though nobody happened to be there to see it. If I remember right, one of us cried. Read more »

Tuesday, March 11, 2025

Touching Words: on Poetry in Memoir

by TJ Price

At a certain point, all memory is fiction. What we retain of the past is selective—our brain typically glosses over the finer details—even the substance of it is subject to change. Our past, much like our present and future, is fluid, constantly running, and not even Memory can step in that same river twice. The memoir, however, attempts to fix what is in flux, to render still the dynamic motions of the past. Often, I find that reading memoir comes with a sense of forced progression—a somber plod of narrative, marrying recollections of a life to the dramatic scaffolding of the Hero’s Journey—but lately, I have discovered a wholly new avenue of the telling, and in a surprising place: poetry.

I first heard of The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight, by Naomi Cohn (in a gorgeous paperback publication by Rose Metal Press) by way of a friend, currently researching altered sight for a thesis. Braille is, of course, the writing system of the blind, consisting of little raised dots in a matrix, each arrangement translating to a letter, or sometimes an entire word. What I didn’t know about it, however, as I learned from the excerpt that my friend posted, was that Louis Braille had been accidentally blinded at the tender age of three years old in his father’s workshop, with an awl. Cohn remarks on this, drawing a breathtaking association: “Is it an accident that my tool for making hand-punched braille is so much like an awl?”

It’s a curious book, not easily categorized. As the subtitle outlines, it is a collection of “brief essays,” arranged in the format of an imaginary encyclopedia, with each entry ranging from personal anecdote or recollection to etymology and jargon all the way to scientific fact and even Yiddish. These, more than anything, are poems—some of them are only a few lines, a paragraph—and each entry uses its title as a kind of homing beacon, returning back to it again and again to create a beautiful resonance underneath not only each “essay,” but layers of the same beneath the book in its entirety. The voice guiding the reader is frank, but also wry, and uniquely confessional. In so narrating the personal details and arranging them in this abecedarian manner, it overflows and touches far more stories than just its author’s own. The experiences belong to the writer, but the poetry used to convey them expands past this, and even beyond an inquiry of the visual sense itself, opening new avenues of thought via ontological questions of perceptions and perceiving, and even being perceived. Indeed, even the nature of reading (in all its many forms) is interrogated—how the endless permutations and combinatorics of language can transmogrify in the crucible of the mind.  Read more »

Carmina Baloney

by Steve Szilagyi

AI renders its impression of “O Fortuna”.

Those first eight thunderous notes—”Oh Fortuna, velut Luna”—delivered by a massive choir of a hundred voices, have become as instantly recognizable as Beethoven’s da-dah-dah-DUM or the opening of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra. Since John Boorman first deployed O Fortuna in his 1981 film Excalibur, this choral juggernaut has stampeded through many horror films, parodies, videos, and cartoons—always to soul-chilling effect.

There’s no denying O Fortuna’s raw power. The chanting choir, the pounding drums, the ascending shrillness of the voices: it creates the unsettling sensation that an army of insane monks is closing in on you from the dark corners of a satanic cathedral. It is the musical embodiment of the Burkean sublime: an encounter with vast, uncontrollable, and terrifying forces.

This two-minute masterpiece by German composer Carl Orff, which opens and closes his 1936 “scenic cantata” Carmina Burana, has made the entire 60-minute work into one of the more frequently performed pieces of classical music worldwide. Dozens of professional, academic, and community music groups across America will stage it this year—no small feat considering the orchestra size and number of singers required. For symphony orchestras and concert halls, Carmina Burana has become a reliable cash cow, more valuable than many other popular favorites because it attracts that rarest and most coveted entity in the classical music world: the under age-65 audience. Read more »

Monday, March 10, 2025

A Sort Of A Job

by Richard Farr

This is ChatGPT’s idea of my idea of me doing philosophy. It couldn’t get the boulder right and refused to make my physique more realistic.

As everyone knows, the word philosopher comes from two Greek words — philo, a rich, buttery pastry and by extension a person with a weakness for any self-indulgence, and sofa, a couch. Hence: a person who’d love to find a comfortable chair.

If you are a plumber or a tax attorney, or maybe an epidemiologist specializing in tropical blood diseases, most random strangers will understand in a broad way what you do for a living and why it is that someone else is prepared to pay you for doing it. Even if you work in a university and teach poetry, or the extinct fauna of the Oligocene, no great mystery. Even people who think it’s a complete waste of time will understand roughly why other people don’t.

Philosophy, on the other hand.

I was in my late twenties, Ph.D. still fresh-baked and steaming. Not yet accustomed to being addressed as Professor, I sat on the bus next to a complete stranger one day and had a conversation with him that went something like this: 

“A philosopher, eh? Really! So what’s your philosophy then?”

Uh-oh! How to begin? How to navigate the truly remarkable fact that in our culture it’s typical even for highly educated people to signal thus that they have never encountered this once-central thread in our civilization’s story? That they have literally no idea what the subject / field / discipline called “philosophy” is

I choose a poor way to begin. “I specialize mainly in modern political ideas. And ethics.”

“You teach politicians to be ethical?”

“No no! That would not be — well, I supposed it would be logically possible, even nomologically possible. But — anyway, no. That’s not it.”

“So tell me more about what you do.”

“I spend a lot of time on normative ethics.”

“Eh?” Read more »

The Loneliness of the Football Player

by David J. Lobina

It can be lonely being a football player, especially when the ball is rolling.

Football, not Gridiron.

I live on the wing, my natural habitat. As close to the touch line as possible, old-fashioned. No-one really understands me. I think my teammates live in a completely different world to my own. I can track the movements of the strikers and even anticipate what they’ll do with the ball when they get hold of it, but it is all foreign to me. I can track the central midfielders better and more closely, as these are the people who make sure the ball reaches me ever so often, but their general motivations are equally inscrutable. The goalkeeper and the defenders are even more of a mystery; I’m not sure throwing your body to the ground like they do is always necessary, but I am sure that I cannot do it quite like that myself. The other winger is the closest thing to having a twin, but one that is the exact opposite in every way. Every player is their own person here, with movements and motivations unlike those of the others. We are a team in name only; more like a collection of 11 inlets.

It always all starts in the midfield with the opening kick. I am on the wing and do not expect to see the ball for a good few minutes. The strikers get things going by kicking the ball backwards to the midfielders, and then mechanically field towards the goal without a worry, so eager are they to reach their own natural habitat – away from it, and they look lost. The midfielders start their routine of not wanting to have any kind of responsibility by getting rid of the ball as soon as they receive it, lest they make any mistake that might need the attention of the defenders or even the keeper. Defenders patiently wait for these mistakes; they would wish them into being from time to time if they could, in fact. Goalkeepers would wish defenders’ mistakes into being, in turn; the more the merrier, in fact. One striker tends to be more artistic than the other and ventures into the midfield on occasion in order to try out things for art’s sake and with only aesthetic objectives in mind, in a trial-and-error kind of fashion; success or fail matters not, it just needs to always look pretty. Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

Rapprochement:

Just wondering
if worlds seen from a distance
are really smaller than they are. . .
And could it be that when we sleep
the world we leave goes on without us?
..
Maybe you remember the old days too,
days when greenhorns multiplied their joys
and were thoughtless as a new moon.
Is it possible that from above
everything is seen through a rose window
bright as Venus, or is nothing left
to be seen between us?
..
Maybe you needed to spend some time
on your island being re-tuned.
Or maybe you were thinking I’d be
shoveling snow this morning
on the cusp of spring while you
relaxed on a breezy beach in sun.
..
But what I’d like to know is if
maybes still exist or if tomorrow
is so sure a thing.
..
So, are you still counting coup
on the enemies of the morning dew?But since I haven’t heard, I thought
I’d tell a newer tale— one of
thoughts we’ve never played,
thoughts naked as new babes
born today.

BTW, have you noticed something odd?
Nothing ever changes but the color
of the feather in the hat-band of God?

Could I
ask? Would you
reply?

What the
hell?

Could you ever say you caught a final
glimpse of the ghosts you fought?

You didn’t say, but I suspect
you’re still heaped in words,
a cornucopia of clever tangles
in our alphabet.

It’s possible this is one more mistake,
as if even God is not perfectly awake.

For what it’s worth, breakfast is the best meal of the day—
the sun’s a fresh egg, clouds are white albumin.
Ahead? —a pot with lots of room to stew in.

Guess I could just say something
to circumvent our broken
bridges of contention, and wrenched beams,
and frayed cables of suspension.If it’s not too much to ask,
how’s your weather? Mine is fine,
and yours I hope is
even better.

by Jim Culleny
3/22/13 Rev 3/9/25

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Sunday, March 9, 2025

Real Life: On Abbas Kiarostami’s “Close-Up”

by Derek Neal

Close-Up, a 1990 Iranian film directed by Abbas Kiarostami, is one of the rare films where the viewing experience is enhanced by knowing certain details beforehand.

The movie opens with a scene in a taxi. A journalist is in the front seat while two armed military police officers sit in the back. The journalist explains to the driver that they are on their way to arrest a man who has been impersonating the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. So far, so good. But what you don’t realize, unless you’re familiar with the film, is that most of these people are not actors. The journalist is a journalist and the police officers are police officers. So the director is going for realism, eschewing the use of professional actors in the manner of Bresson? Not quite. Makhmalbaf is a real Iranian director, and someone really did impersonate him—this is a true story, and many of the people in the film play themselves. The journalist is the real journalist who broke the story, which brought it to the attention of Kiarostami, leading him to make the movie. The officers are the real officers who arrested the impersonator. They are on their way to the real house of the family whom the impersonator conned, and the family as well as the impersonator play themselves, too. Everything in the film really happened—this is real life, close up. Or is it? Does filming something change it? Does a reenactment alter the original act? Can a copy replace the original? What is real and what is make believe, and can we cross back and forth between the two realms? Can one exist without the other? These are the questions the film presents to its viewers.

In the taxi on the way to the Ahankhah residence, where the impersonator will be arrested, the journalist asks the taxi driver if he knows the director Makhmalbaf, to which he responds, “I don’t have time for movies. I’m too busy with life!” Later, when Kiarostami tells the judge who will preside over the case that he would like to film the trial, the judge tells him, “I took a look at this case, and I don’t see anything worth filming.” The judge and the taxi driver insist on the difference between movies and real life, or more broadly, art and reality. Kiarostami seems to have something else in mind.

In the former scene, the scene in the taxi, the journalist Farazmand is playing himself whereas the taxi driver is portrayed by an actor (at least, he’s not listed as playing himself in the opening credits). This conversation, then, may not have really occurred, although the drive to the Ahankhah residence certainly did. Kiarostami has presumably inserted this dialogue to make the viewer question what is presented on the screen. Is it a movie, or is it life? The scene with the judge is also a reenactment, although this time all the characters play themselves. The judge is the real judge and Kiarostami, off camera, asks him questions. We are inclined to believe that this dialogue did take place, that the judge did question the worth of filming such a simple trial. But did he? There’s no way to know, and attempting to find out the truth only leads to more questions, as I discovered while researching the movie.

The film itself, contrary to the opinion of the taxi driver or the judge, proposes that something becomes worth filming when it is filmed; in other words, the act of representation itself makes its subject worthy of representation. No external explanation is needed other than the resulting piece of art, which, once it has been created, becomes a part of real life. Read more »

Barcelona’s Revolutionary Requiem Asserts Enlightenment Values

by Dick Edelstein

Photo: David Ruano

Following the opening night performance of Mozart’s Requiem in Barcelona last month, I left the Gran Teatre del Liceu harboring the thought that this revolutionary setting was a slick riposte to the existential challenge of malevolent Trumpian ideology, a notion that could have motivated theatre director Romeo Castellucci’s approach to staging Mozart’s much beloved and final work in his Liceu debut. Castellucci is already well known to Barcelona theatre audiences, and he is planning to return to the Liceu in the near future with his own opera project.

This staged production of the Requiem premiered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Although it is a mass for the dead, the Requiem, like much of Mozart’s music, expresses an irrepressible joie de vivre and is more about celebrating the cycle of life than mourning a death. Here we enter into the labyrinth of ambiguities and controversies that surround this work. Mozart’s views on the Church, society, Masonic beliefs, and enlightenment values molded his attitude towards life and death. This tension of ideas is manifest in the interplay between the text, music, and dramatic symbolism in Castellucci’s highly kinetic, fully-staged setting that includes folk dancing, gestural movement, choreography, set decoration, and multimedia support.

The opening scene evokes a tragic mood as an elderly woman sits in a bare bedroom placidly staring at a small mid-century tv set until the scene changes to depict her death and burial. Throughout the work, the chorus performs movements, gestures and folk dances in scenes that represent community activity and folk rituals. Although the Requiem usually takes an hour to perform, the inclusion of five additional short devotional pieces by Mozart has resulted in a 90-minute running time that works well for musical theatre. Castellucci has previously staged innovative performances of devotional music, always managing to surprise his audience, and he seems to prefer these works to Italian melodrama. In this case, the Requiem provides a sound foundation for a theatrical setting, and the narrative that emerges is only partly rooted in 18th century customs and beliefs since it resonates with our own times as well.

The program notes make the extraordinary claim that Mozart’s immensely popular work “is not just the culmination of a late stage of Mozart’s oeuvre, but the pinnacle of musical history…”  That’s a pretty bold claim, but let’s have a look at a snippet of this work that shows some of the qualities of the piece as a whole. Read more »

Friday, March 7, 2025

The Pharisees’ Fence: Misplaced Concreteness And Liminal Unease

by Jochen Szangolies

Image credit: Randy Fath on Unsplash

When asked about the foundational technologies of human civilization, most people will probably point to the wheel, or fire, or maybe the lever. Perhaps the atlatl as arguably humanity’s first machine might make the cut. Few, I think, would point to the humble fence: rather than being a construct, fences often seem to us merely a recognition of divides already present, and thus, hardly a separate technology on their own. The land is divided according to ownership, and the fences erected upon it merely mark this preexisting reality.

In truth, fences, both physical and metaphorical, fulfill an important role in the transition from a natural, unmodified, technology-free world to a reality structured according to human design. Their prevalence in metaphor is evidence of this: you can sit on them, tear them down, they are in our heads, the grass is greener on their far side, good ones allegedly make good neighbors, you can mend them, or swing for them in an attempt to achieve your most far-out performance.

The primary role of the fence is that of demarcation. Put on an originally pristine plain, it divides it into a ‘here’ and a ‘there’. Interpreting each side in terms of possession, it distinguishes between ‘mine’ and ‘theirs’; in terms of identity, it separates ‘us’ from ‘them’. It takes a continuum of possibilities and replaces it with a sharp distinction. As such, it is the original digital technology.

(Parenthetically, fences are also the original capitalist technology: not just in defining the notion of ownership, but through the concept of enclosure, the appropriation of common land that was worked by all, to be rented back to its original cultivators.)

Fences are the ultimate expression of the human tendency to categorize, to parcel off, to structure. They are a quintessentially lobsterian creation: as its hard carapace rigidly shields its vulnerable interior from a dangerous environment, so does the fence protect the shepherd’s flock from the roaming wolf. As the lobster’s analytic claw dissects whatever catches its attention, so do fences slice the land into discrete plots.

There is no question of the usefulness of fences. But the impulse to dissect, to rein in, and to replace vague continua with clear boundaries can all too easily result in a misplaced concreteness where real ambiguity exists, and in hard dichotomies where the reality is one of continuity across perceived differences. Read more »

Welcome To The Family Floyd

by Eric Schenck

It’s Christmas of 2013. In my family we usually have some kind of white elephant gift exchange, and this year the theme is “Bizarre of the Bazaar.” The weirder the better.

All the presents lay stacked on a table, ready to be unwrapped. We play with dice and booze. Around and around they go, and I end up with a miniature treasure chest. 

I don’t know what’s inside, but it’s my turn to open it up. I unlock the chest, and there, staring back at me, in all his glory…

Is an 18-inch long clown. His face is white, his cheeks and nose cherry red. He wears an eternal smile.

The game proceeds, but I’m drawn to him. I know which present I want. 20 minutes later, after countless laughs and a few stiff drinks, the clown is mine.

We sit around the table and brainstorm names. His happiness seems to hide something. This clown looks jolly, but to us, he knows more than he lets on. There is a certain sense of melancholy. He looks at you, and as you look back, you realize just how much those little eyes have seen.

It takes a while, but we finally settle on what to call him. A name to match the melancholy. Something that says “I’ll laugh at your jokes, but the pointless nature of existence is always in the back of my mind.”

We have a new member of the family…

And his name is Floyd.

*

To call this “weird” doesn’t do it justice. Adding an 18-inch clown to our family tree is strange. So much so, that I dare not share it with anybody outside of my immediate family.

Is it abnormal? Yes. But somehow, it fits. Some families have secrets they can’t possibly share. Some families have dark boxes they’d rather not open.

We have Floyd. Read more »

Thursday, March 6, 2025

This Time It’s Different

by Barry Goldman

I was 20-something and fresh out of law school in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected. Like the rest of my demographic, I was morbidly depressed about it. So it was meaningful for me when I saw the Weavers’ movie Wasn’t That a Time and heard the great Lee Hays say:

We have a thought for the year. We’ve been around long enough to tell you: Be of good cheer. This too will pass. I’ve had kidney stones and I know.

The Weavers had been hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted by the industry. Hays was an alcoholic, a diabetic double amputee, and he would die within months. Kids like me were all bent out of shape about the Reagan ascendency. But old hands like Hays had seen far worse. He wasn’t going to let a simple-minded B-actor like Reagan freak him out. I aspired to that kind of equanimity.

Around the same time, I sat in on a political science lecture by a professor who had been a foreign service officer. He must have been significantly younger than I am now, but he seemed grizzled to me at the time. He said all revolutionary movements are essentially utopian. The central idea is that there is a madman at the wheel. If we could just knock out the madman and grab the wheel, we could steer to safety. He said, sadly, this is a juvenile fantasy. The bitter truth, he told us, is there is no madman. And there is no wheel.

The world is much more complicated than the slogans of the revolutionaries would have it. There are no simple solutions. There are not even any simple problems.

Worse, the idea that there are simple solutions leads inevitably to fanaticism. The notion that there is a simple truth, we know it, and that guy over there is preventing us from reaching it, leads us to excuse pushing that guy out of the way. Read more »