Month: July 2019

Tuesday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Tear It Down

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of racoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within the body.

by Jack Gilbert
from The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992
Alfred A. Knopf, 2001

Charles Mills’s Effort To Save Liberal Political Philosophy From Itself

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Christopher Lebron at The Nation:

Charles Mills’s Black Rights/White Wrongs represents the culmination of more than two decades of work on the philosophy of race and social justice. Mills received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1985, working with the left-wing philosophers Frank Cunningham and Daniel Goldstick on the concept of ideology in Marx and Engels. In the following years, liberal political philosophy would be strongly challenged. A growing number of feminists argued that liberal normative theorists were engaged in a form of selective historical imagination, erasing everyone but white males from the story of political society’s origins.

Already fluent in Marxist thought and politics, Mills was strongly influenced by these arguments, particularly as they were delivered in Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract; and in his first book, The Racial Contract, Mills initiated a searing critique of modern liberal theory. Despite its progressive intonations, he argued, the tradition had consistently obscured the history of racism and white supremacy in liberal societies, thereby turning a blind eye to racial inequality while embracing Enlightenment values without qualification.

more here.

The Aesthetic Beauty of Math

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Karen Olsson at The Paris Review:

Many ideas on a blackboard

Trying to explain my work to a non-mathematician, he wrote, would be like trying to explain a symphony to someone who can’t hear. Later he would rely on another metaphor, calling math “art in a hard material.”

Mathematics is an artistic endeavor, his words suggest. Yet Simone was skeptical. What kind of art? What is the material? Even poets have language, but your work seems to rely on sheer abstraction, she wrote her brother.

That math is an art, that one of its signature qualities is its beauty—these are ideas that continue to be articulated by mathematicians, even as non-mathematicians may wonder, as Simone did, what that could possibly mean. I myself become wary when a mathematician or scientist speaks about the beauty of her discipline, since it can seem vague and high-handed, if not wrong.

more here.

On the Vernacular Modernism of I.M. Pei (1917–2019)

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Thomas de Monchaux at n+1:

Pei’s stature among architects is hard to convey. However visually entertaining their work, the likely legacies of other American so-called starchitects shrink—some to triviality—beside the decades of modern design that Ieoh Ming Pei produced, from his earliest built work in 1948 to his last project sixty years later. By the time he co-designed the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha in 2008, he was among the last practicing students of a teacher from the Bauhaus. Walter Gropius taught, and later taught beside, Pei at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Gropius had arrived there in 1937. Pei, the scion of a Suzhou banking family who left Shanghai in 1935 for undergraduate study at Penn and MIT, arrived at Harvard in 1942. His classmates included Paul Rudolph and Philip Johnson.

Modernism in design was not conceived as a style but a refutation of the historicist stylistic revivals that had defined the previous four centuries of architecture in the developing West, forts and factories notwithstanding. Early modern buildings valued user experience over signifying appearance, which enabled them to apply new efficiencies in industrial engineering and standardized manufacturing.

more here.

We Went to the Moon. Why Can’t We Solve Climate Change?

Posted on by Azra Raza

John Schwartz in The New York Times:

Climate change is certainly an urgent challenge. Rising levels of greenhouse gases are raising temperatures worldwide, leading to shifting weather patterns that are only expected to get worse, with increased flooding and heat waves, and drought and wildfiresafflicting millions. The task of reversing that accumulation of greenhouse gases is vast, and progress is painfully slow. The idea of a moon shot for climate has been gaining supporters. Beto O’Rourke and Kirsten Gillibrand use the idea in their presidential campaigns, as did Michael Bloomberg in unveiling his recently announced $500 million Beyond Carbon campaign. In a commencement speech this year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he said, “It is time for all of us to accept that climate change is the challenge of our time.” He concluded, “It may be a moon shot — but it’s the only shot we’ve got.”

Does the enduring metaphor fit the task of countering the grinding destructiveness of a warming planet?

Climate presents more complicated issues than getting to the moon did, said John M. Logsdon, historian of the space program and founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. In 1970, Dr. Logsdon wrote a book, “The Decision to Go to the Moon,” that laid out four conditions that made Apollo possible. In the case of the space program, the stimulus was the first human spaceflight of the Russian cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin, which filled Americans with dread of losing the space race. In an interview, Dr. Logsdon said it has to be “a singular act that would force action, that you couldn’t ignore.” Other moon shot prerequisites, he said, include leaders in a position to direct the resources necessary to meet the goal on “a warlike basis,” with very deep national pockets — people like President Kennedy, who began the program, and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, who brought it to fruition. Finally, Dr. Logsdon said, “the objective has to be technically feasible.” Scientists and engineers had told Mr. Kennedy that “there were no technical show stoppers in sending humans to the moon — it would just take a hell of a lot of engineering.”

More here.

How Trump’s arch-hawk lured Britain into a dangerous trap to punish Iran

Posted on by Azra Raza

Simon Tisdall in The Guardian:

John Bolton, White House national security adviser and notorious Iraq-era hawk, is a man on a mission. Given broad latitude over policy by Donald Trump, he is widely held to be driving the US confrontation with Iran. And in his passionate bid to tame Tehran, Bolton cares little who gets hurt – even if collateral damage includes a close ally such as Britain. So when Bolton heard British Royal Marines had seized an Iranian oil tanker off Gibraltar on America’s Independence Day, his joy was unconfined. “Excellent news: UK has detained the supertanker Grace I laden with Iranian oil bound for Syria in violation of EU sanctions,” he exulted on Twitter. Bolton’s delighted reaction suggested the seizure was a surprise. But accumulating evidence suggests the opposite is true, and that Bolton’s national security team was directly involved in manufacturing the Gibraltar incident. The suspicion is that Conservative politicians, distracted by picking a new prime minister, jockeying for power, and preoccupied with Brexit, stumbled into an American trap.

In short, it seems, Britain was set up.

As a result, Britain has been plunged into the middle of an international crisis it is ill-prepared to deal with. The timing could hardly be worse. An untested prime minister, presumably Boris Johnson, will enter Downing Street this week. Britain is on the brink of a disorderly exit from the EU, alienating its closest European partners. And its relationship with Trump’s America is uniquely strained. Much of this angst could have been avoided. Britain opposed Trump’s decision to quit the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the trigger for today’s crisis. It has watched with alarm as the Trump-Bolton policy of “maximum pressure”, involving punitive sanctions and an oil embargo, has radicalised the most moderate Iranians.

More here.

Suicide, Strictly Speaking

Posted on by Gerald Dworkin

by Gerald Dworkin

The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787), depicting Socrates prepared to drink hemlock, following his conviction for corrupting the youth of Athens.

In 1998 I was a co-author of a book called Euthanasia and Physician-assisted Suicide: For and Against. I was for; Sissela Bok was against. The point to note here is that the title used the concepts of euthanasia and assisted suicide. Euthanasia is no longer invoked by proponents of medically-assisted dying (hereafter abbreviated as AD) as all such measures explicitly prohibit the physician from administering the drug which causes death. Assisted-suicide is currently banned from their vocabulary by all groups advocating for AD.  

I have been an advocate, and an activist, for passing legislation implementing AD in California (successful) and Illinois (on the political agenda). But I have some problems with the idea that AD should be excluded from the category of suicide. This is my topic today.

Advocates of AD have two reasons for their  linguistic avoidance. 

The first is a purely tactical matter. We are trying to get a social policy enacted and many people who might be won over have personal and religious objections to the very idea of suicide. They may believe that our lives belong to God. They may believe that there is a social stigma attached to suicide no matter how justified, in some cases, it may be. They may feel that the many cases in which suicide is committed by persons who are clearly psychologically disturbed and not capable of making rational decisions will be , mistakenly, extended to what they think are reasonable cases. They may fear that the idea that all suicides are sinful or irrational or cowardly will be applied to their loved ones if they commit suicide.

Since all these, in my view mistaken, attitudes will make it harder to get political support for legalising AD, I see this linguistic choice as a reasonable tactical proposal. Read more »

Learning to Laze

Posted on by Eric Weiner

by Eric J. Weiner

From Saint Pélagie Prison in 1883, Paul Lafargue wrote The Right to Be Lazy, an anti-capitalist polemic that challenged the hegemony of the “right to work” discourse. The focus of his outrage was the liberal elite as well as the proletarians. His central argument is summed up in this quote:

Capitalist ethics, a pitiful parody on Christian ethics, strikes with its anathema the flesh of the laborer; its ideal is to reduce the producer to the smallest number of needs, to suppress his joys and his passions and to condemn him to play the part of a machine turning out work without respite and without thanks.

Quite a bit has changed since he wrote his polemic, yet I think there are some important insights that still resonate in the 21st century. Unlike the industrialism that informed Lafargue’s critique of the bourgeoisie’s work fetish, time at work in the 21st century is no longer primarily experienced in the factory or small brick-and-mortar business. In today’s knowledge economy, we celebrate a form of “uber” work where workers “enjoy” the flexible benefits of constant connectivity, borderless geographies of work/time, and schedules unconstrained by days-of-week or time-of-day. Workdays blend into work-nights which slide into work-mornings without beginning or end. Not unlike techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that leverage the power of time to (dis)orient, in our current historical juncture time is erased leaving workers without a sense of place; there is nothing to distinguish Wednesday from Sunday, Monday from Friday. In this new timeless workscape, the old adage TGIF is meaningless, an artifact as quaint as the vinyl record or paper road maps. Within this environment, workers struggle to adapt to this new model. For example, people still claim to need more time, yet in the 21st century postmodern workscape, time no longer has a meaningful referent. It simply floats above labor signaling neither a beginning nor end. Clocks likewise have become a quaint, antiquated technology of a mechanical era, yet they are still ubiquitous in most work-spaces. In this new workscape, clocks don’t measure time in order to determine the value of one’s labor on an hourly, weekly, or annual calendar. For uber-workers, the clock never gets punched because it doesn’t really exist in the context of their flexible workscapes. At most, they can orient workers to meet up for lunch or for that rare occasion when a body-to-body meeting is desired (it rarely is). They also, in the form of a wrist watch, can represent a kind of retro-cool, a form of cultural capital, especially when the watch is an “automatic”!

Uber workers are “free” to take a break yet no one can or actually does because “taking a break” requires one to be at work somewhere, anywhere. Today’s uber-workforce has no indigenous location, no point of reference in time and space and therefore no recognizable beginning or end. Without this geography of labor, workers are always “on,” and never “off.” This constant state of work is then described as a form of freedom. Read more »

Replacement therapy: on some recent developments in and about “France”

Posted on by Rafaël Newman

by Rafaël Newman

“GALERIE VOLTAIRE”, photograph by the author, Toronto 2018

Herta Müller, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009, was born and raised in a traditionally German-speaking region of Romania. When she moved to what was then the German Federal Republic in 1987, she was eagerly asked by strangers hearing a Latinate inflection in her German whether she was French. When she told them that she was in fact Romanian, she recounts, she would watch as the expectant glow faded from their eyes.

There is a similar case of mistaken identity in Greta, a new film by Neil Jordan, in which the phenomenon is a deliberate plot point: apparent French nationality masks a lowlier, positively sinister Eastern European provenance. Jordan also made The Crying Game in 1992, a film notorious for a certain gasp-provoking reveal, whereby gender ambiguity and assumed identity serve as an allegory of the Anglo-Irish relations that are on the political periphery of what is otherwise a picaresque romantic comedy. In Greta, an assumed French identity is merely one of several burlesque symptoms of mental illness, as the film out-camps serial-killer forebears like Psycho and The Vanishing to produce a solid genre flick. But the certainty with which Jordan deploys presumed Frenchness as a lure and a lull to an Occidental sensibility on guard against the Iron-Curtained Orient is a reminder of the role France and French culture have long played in the Western imaginary: that of a reliable signifier of elegance, glamour, and sophistication, and an apotropaic talisman wielded against the less presentable elements of the Europe family.

This last propensity of Frenchness was a source of confusion for me when, a prepubescent visiting Paris in the early 1970s, I attempted to assimilate the evident grandeur of the métropole, and the globally intimidating power of its culture, with the French world I had been familiar with to date, namely the Montreal of my birth: a city divided on linguistic lines, whose francophone majority seemed to me edentulous and impoverished, quietly wracked with resentment at anglophone overlords who had long since forfeited bragging rights won two centuries earlier on the Plains of Abraham and were in the process of being outnumbered by an ascendant starving class still practicing a “revanche des berceaux”, or revenge of the cradle, initiated in the 18th century. Read more »

SCOTUS Says No To Politics

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

The Supreme Court doesn’t play politics.

In what was destined to be an inevitable ruling, by an inevitable 5-4 vote, inevitably written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court decided, in Rucho v. Common Cause, that it couldn’t decide how much “partisan” gerrymandering was too much partisan gerrymandering. So it wouldn’t. Case closed.

Rucho is an extraordinary decision, with the potential, over the next 10 years, to change fundamentally the way we experience democracy. That may seem to be a radical statement, but it is absolutely true: Political parties now have a virtually free hand, once they obtain control over a state government, to redistrict as they see fit in order to retain that control. The Supreme Court is not completely out of the game—Roberts did acknowledge that they might still review gerrymandering based on race, or on “one-person, one-vote” grounds, but, by order of the Chief Justice, the Courts will be closed for a permanent federal holiday if the gerrymandering was done for the purpose of political gain.

This is an earthquake, which will, no doubt, lead to a further arms race between the parties. As Republicans control more states (Kyle Kondik, writing for Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, cites research indicating that Republicans control redistricting for 179 Congressional Districts, Democrats only 49), the advantage will be theirs. Many critics on the Left are suggesting that the conservative majority on the Court chose this path for precisely this reason. I prefer not to be cynical. Rather, I just want to point out the obvious: The real losers will be the center of the electorate; mainstream, moderate voters who find their concerns completely ignored because the more “safe seats” there are, the more influence primary voters (who tend to be far more doctrinaire) will have. This will inevitably lead to more radicalized government answerable to fewer and fewer people, and even more alienation. Read more »

Among the Godly

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Several co-workers, all of whom have Ph.D.s. An old friend who’s a physicist. Scads of family members of both blue and white collar variety. Numerous neighbors. And of course the well dressed, kindly old women who occasionally show up at my door uninvited, pamphlets in hand.

One can point to general trends about the powerless, the vulnerable, and the less-educated as likelier to believe in God than those full of book learnin’ or living the good life. But But when the vast, vast majority believe, the believers represent a thorough cross-section of society. And so my daily existence, and that of many if not most atheists, involves sharing interactions and ideas with all sorts of people, wealthy and poor, old and young, male and female, well educated and not, who embrace magical thinking to one degree or another. Who believe either quite vividly or a bit vaguely in a supreme, celestial being or force with at least some degree of sentience and even an agenda. A god who sees and hears us. And perhaps a soul or spirit within in us that lives on after our bodies have given out, some ethereal expression of immortality, some mechanism of continuity after this go-around is done, some medium of transcendence into a heavenly (or hellish) destiny, or perhaps into another corpus, whether animal or human yet unborn, and from there a fresh start.

We, the atheists, the ones who, if you are anything like me, cannot believe even if we desperately want to because we find it patently unbelievable, are a small minority around the world. Here in the Untied States we number a scant 3%.  All around us, a great majority run the gamut: agnostics (only 4%) who may one day end up like us; a growing number of people who just don’t think about it all that much until they end up in some proverbial foxhole; conscious believers, such as my friend the physicist, who might be like us in countless other ways; hardier believers hungrily gulping up the magic; and ever up the scale eventually peaking with a small number of badly broken and certifiably insane people who think they themselves are this or that saint or such and such deity. Read more »

Gender-Bending Rock Stars: Counter-Tenors, Castrati and the Wild and Crazy Baroque

Posted on by Leanne Ogasawara

by Leanne Ogasawara

One God, One Farinelli…

Stepping onto the stage, the singer draws in a long breath as he gazes out across the audience. For a moment, he is blinded by the light of innumerable candles. So lavishly lit, it is a miracle that the theater didn’t burn down more than it did over the years. Over a hundred boxes rise up in six tiers in front of him; each box with a mirror affixed on the front reflecting the twinkling light of the two candles placed on either side. The singer can just make out the bejeweled king and queen sitting in their royal box with its gigantic gold crown hovering above. This was the Teatro di San Carlo in the Kingdom of Naples, considered during the 18th century to be the greatest opera house in the world. And on this night, people had come from far and wide to hear Farinelli sing— Farinelli, the famed castrati singer, who drew great crowds and commanded princely sums wherever he performed.

But what a price he had paid to stand on this stage.

The deplorable practice of mutilating young boys to preserve their adolescent voices began in Italy as early as the 12th century. But castrati voices are something we associate most closely with 17th-18th century Baroque music.  At that time, women were not allowed to sing in church or on stage in the Papal States, and so the practice began of seeing men singing the roles of women. But this was not like in Japan in Kabuki theater, where you still see men exclusively performing the roles of women; for in Italy these were not men dressed up as women –but rather were those who had undergone castration as children. The church alone cannot explain the huge popularity of their voices throughout Europe. In Naples or London, for example, women had never been banned from appearing on stage, and yet castrati regularly appeared alongside female sopranos.And they were wildly popular. Rock stars, is how we would describe them today. Read more »

Portland’s Street Battles & The Purity Problem

Posted on by Robert Fay

by Robert Fay

A scene from the 1990 film version of the novel “The Sheltering Sky.”

Kit Moresby, the enigmatic heroine of Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky sits in a café in a French colonial city in North Africa. It’s 1949 (or thereabouts) and on the terrace Arab men wearing fezzes drink mineral water and swat flies. Kit and her American companions have just arrived by freighter and they sip Pernod and discuss their initial impressions. They are planning on traveling into the Bled, the vast interior, where they hope to find lands and people untouched by the war and the contaminates of European civilization.

These three are the opposite of the “ugly American” stereotype of the post-war era. They are pessimistic, worldly and bored with America. If anything, their Americanness is revealed in their unwillingness to accept that life and suffering could possibly be synonymous. They are world-weary Bohemians who recognize the America of the 1950s will be a consumer-orientated project. These characters are, in a certain sense, proto-Beats, and in fact the actual Beat writers, men like William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac admired Bowles and eventually befriended him.

“It seems as though there might be some place in the world they could have left alone,” Kit says. She is a woman of omens. A person of great strength, yet because of the restraints of the era, must admit “other people rule my life.” She wants to truly live, to push aside the veil separating her from raw experiences, but she is fearful and superstitious. “The people of each country get more like the people of every other country,” she says. “They have no character, no beauty, no ideals, no culture—nothing, nothing.” Read more »

Two kinds of psychophysical reduction, part 2: physical

Posted on by Dave Maier

by Dave Maier

Ted Chiang’s (very) short story “What’s Expected of Us” (collected in his recent Exhalation) tells of an unusual device called a Predictor:

Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.

Most people say that when they first try it, it feels like they are playing a strange game, one where the goal is to press the button after seeing the flash, and it’s easy to play. But when you try to break the rules, you find that you can’t. If you try to press the button without seeing a flash, the flash immediately appears, and no matter how fast you move, you never push the button until a second has elapsed. If you wait for the flash, intending to keep from pressing the button afterward, the flash never appears. No matter what you do, the light always precedes the button press. There’s no way to fool a Predictor.

This is because the device sends a signal back in time, flashing at time t if and only if you press the button at time t + 1 second. Your push causes the flash, even though the flash appears first. No guesswork necessary; that’s how the device works.

In the story, many people, including the narrator himself, take the Predictor to be a demonstration of the unfortunate fact that they have no free will, and that, as the narrator puts it, “their choices don’t matter.” I can see why they think this, but I’d like to try to undermine that intuition here if I can, since it underlies much of the non-science-fictional debate about free will and physical reduction that we started last time. (Note: we will not be solving the free will problem here today, nor do I claim originality for this line of thought; on the other hand, all infelicities in the exposition are my own.) Read more »

How I Became a Drug Dealer

Posted on by Richard Passov

by R. Passov

Johnny spoke softly in a voice just past the threshold of manhood. His smile, mistaken for charm, was longing. I could see the pentimento of the child still in him.

One day I watched a conversation that confirmed my suspicions. Johnny had returned from somewhere Big Greg had sent him. He danced as he spoke, swinging a long arm up over his head, around and down.

“The dude’s wife’s right there. I grab his guitar and bust it all up. Broke that shit right in front of em. Yeah, I said, this is what I mean.”

He had tried to be violent but in the retelling I could see his heart wasn’t in it. “Davy doesn’t play guitar,” Big Greg said. “Where the hell did you go?”

To the wrong house.

He was tall but thin. Black, but feline. Not black like the men he hosted when he had his apartment. Men who turned the living room into a weight room, sitting on benches all day doing curls, out of prison but still in. Johnny wasn’t like that.

Though I didn’t know of Lou Reed, didn’t have a radio, or a stereo or even a record, Johnny belonged in a Lou Reed song. He wanted to be a colored girl.

I know that now. Then I spied his gentleness, his out of place-ness, his role playing, that he lived between lives. Someone with you and somewhere else at the same time. Something children see but not adults.

He and Big Greg wore their green shirts, sleeves cut off, Alexander and Diles marked in black over their hearts. I decided to believe their experience in war freed them of law. Read more »

An Improviser is Born

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by Bill Benzon

I was improvising before I’d learned the word, but I wasn’t systematic about it until years later. I suppose for a time the word had a bit of a mystique about it, as it does for many. After all, the norm in Western musical practice has been to read music that someone else, the composer, had written. The composer is the authority; you are a mere conduit; and improvising, where you (shudder) make it up yourself, that’s VERY mysterious.

* * * * *

You mean, no notes in front of you. Just make it up?

Yes.

And it comes out OK?

Sometimes, sometimes not. It depends.

Isn’t that very brave and dangerous?

No. Do you speak from a script?

No.

Well then, there you have it. Don’t need a script for music either.

* * * * *      

I started taking music lessons when I was ten years old. My earliest teachers taught me to read music, and only to read music. So that’s what I did. But at some point, I forget just when, I decided I wanted to play simple tunes that weren’t in lessons. I decided, well, I’ll just have to figure out how to do it. I do remember that, when I was in sixth grade, I was particularly taken with the theme song to a series that played on Walt Disney’s Sunday night TV show. I forget the name of the series, but it was about mountain men and the song had wistful lyrics about living in the mountains. Read more »