George Herbert: “Love (III)”

Hannah Brooks-Motl at Poetry Magazine:

Published shortly after his death in 1633, George Herbert’s The Temple is an example of a kind of poetry-project, the exact meaning of which has been debated almost since its first appearance. Because it is composed of poems with titles like “The Altar” and “The Windows,” some critics have believed Herbert was attempting to recreate the elements of a church in the structure of his book; others thought he was mapping the liturgical year through poems such as “Whitsunday,” “Lent,” and “Christmas.” Some, such as Helen Vendler, note that the book models new kinds of friendship and lyric address, even anticipating, in Herbert’s painstaking dissections of his own weakness and his many dialogues with God, “the modern notion of the ideal therapist.” Still others, notably Stanley Fish, think about The Temple’s project in the terms Herbert himself set out, in a chapter on catechizing in his prose work The Life of a Country Parson: “at Sermons, and Prayers, men may sleep or wander;” Herbert wrote, “but when one is asked a question, he must discover what he is.” Herbert’s project, in this reading, is a kind of “catechism” intent on leading the reader to discover “what he is” for himself. “What is crucial,” Fish notes, “is not the dialogue in the poem, but the dialogue the poem is in.” Herbert wasn’t just writing about his own relationship with God, he was writing to alter his readers’ sense of their own. But despite, or because of, such varying interpretations, what has never been disputed is the “project-ness” of The Temple: “We cannot judge Herbert, or savour fully his genius and his art, by any selection to be found in an anthology,” T.S. Eliot wrote in his seminal study of the poet. “We must study The Temple as a whole.”

more here.

Martin Buber’s Path to a Believing Humanism

Patrick Jordan at Commonweal:

“I am unfortunately a complicated and difficult subject.” With these words of Martin Buber, Paul Mendes-Flohr lays down the challenge for his meticulous biography of the distinguished Jewish scholar, humanist, and author of I and Thou. “Complicated,” to be sure, and “difficult,” certainly; that goes with the territory of Buber’s at times maze-like philosophical explorations and heavily Germanic articulation. And one may add to these challenges the fact that—to quote this biographer—Buber was a “contested figure who evoked passionate, conflicting opinions about his person and his thought.” Yet these obstacles are by no means insurmountable, thanks to Mendes-Flohr’s philosophical acumen and gift for succinct expression. Indeed, in his capable hands Buber’s life makes for an engrossing, instructive tale, and an exemplary contribution to Yale’s “Jewish Lives Series.”

more here.

Tuesday Poem

Song of the Taste

Eating the living germs of grasses
Eating the ova of large birds

the fleshy sweetness packed
around the sperm of swaying trees

The muscles of the flanks and thighs of
soft-voiced cows
the bounce in the lamb’s leap
the swish in the ox’s tail

Eating roots grown swoll
inside the soil

Drawing on life of living
clustered points of light spun
out of space
hidden in the grape.

Eating each other’s seed
eating
ah, each other.

Kissing the lover in the mouth of bread:
lip to lip.

by Gary Snyder
from Regarding Wave
New Directions, 1970

Universities will never be the same after the coronavirus crisis

Alexandra Witze in Nature:

As universities face major changes, their financial outlook is becoming dire. Revenues are plummeting as students (particularly international ones) remain home or rethink future plans, and endowment funds implode as stock markets drop.

The universities that are likely to fare best are those that are rich and powerful. But even those face challenges. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge has been putting courses online for free since 2002, but most academics who were teaching in the current semester still had to scramble to work out how to move their materials online when the pandemic hit, says Sanjay Sarma, the university’s vice-president for open learning. More broadly, many institutions are learning the hard way that simply delivering course materials through digital platforms is not the best way to teach students. “Zoom university isn’t proper online learning,” he says.

Sarma hopes that when universities resume in-person classes, the experience will be radically different — with instructors distributing video lectures early, and focusing in-person time on interacting with students to ensure that they understand the concepts being taught. “We don’t want to waste our proximity on one-way stuff,” he says. “It has to be two-way learning.” Some educators expect the pandemic will lead to more and better online teaching than before — in both wealthy countries and those with lower incomes. When universities in Pakistan closed in March, many instructors didn’t have the tools to teach online and many students lacked reliable Internet access at home, says Tariq Banuri, chairman of Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission in Islamabad. But the commission has been working to standardize online teaching and to get telecommunication companies to offer students cheaper mobile-broadband packages.

More here.

With Trump we’ve reached the ‘mad emperor’ stage

Richard Wolffe in The Guardian:

Writing from a Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King Jr famously told his anxious fellow clergymen that his non-violent protests would force those in power to negotiate for racial justice. “The time is always ripe to do right,” he wrote. On an early summer evening, two generations later, Donald Trump walked out of the White House, where he’d been hiding in a bunker. Military police had just fired teargas and flash grenades at peaceful protesters to clear his path, so that he could wave a bible in front of a boarded church. For Trump, the time is always ripe to throw kerosene on his own dumpster fire. In the week since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers, Trump has watched and tweeted helplessly as the nation he pretends to lead has reached its breaking point. After decades of supposedly legal police beatings and murders, the protests have swept America’s cities more quickly than even coronavirus. This is no coincidence of timing. In other crises, in other eras, there have been presidents who understood their most basic duty: to calm the violence and protect the people. In this crisis, however, we have a president who built his entire political career as a gold-painted tower to incite violence.

We were told, by Trump’s supporters four years ago, that we should have taken him seriously but not literally. As it happened, it was entirely appropriate to take him literally, as a serious threat to the rule of law. During his 2016 campaign, he encouraged his supporters to assault protesters. “Knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, OK,” he said on the day of the Iowa caucuses. “I promise you I will pay for the legal fees.” Later in Las Vegas, he said the security guards were too gentle with another protester. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” he said. Sure enough, a protester was sucker-punched on his way out of a rally the following month. No wonder Trump was sued for incitement to riot by three protesters who were assaulted as they left one of his rallies in Kentucky. The case ultimately failed, but only after a judge ruled that Trump recklessly incited violence against an African-American woman by a crowd that included known members of hate groups.

So when he stood, as president, and told a crowd of police officers to be violent with arrested citizens, it wasn’t some weird joke or misstatement, no matter what his aides claimed afterwards. “When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see ’em thrown in, rough, I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’

More here.

The lucky ones–even in a pandemic

by Emrys Westacott

When I feel myself becoming irritable, disheartened, or just plain fed-up with life during the pandemic, I find it helpful to conduct a thought-experiment familiar to the ancient Stoics. I reflect on how much I have to be grateful for, and how things could be so much worse. That prompts the more general question: Who are the fortunate, and who are the unfortunate at this time?

Let’s consider the unfortunate first. These include:

  • the dead, the dying, the seriously ill, and those who suffer the loss of family and friends;
  • the desperate: undocumented immigrants without access to social services; refugees; migrants; and the already destitute;
  • the endangered: people with pre-existing conditions that make covid 19 especially dangerous; those residing or working in nursing homes, hospitals, prisons, meatpacking factories, and other places where the contagion spreads easily;
  • the fearful: this includes millions who face serious financial insecurity as their income suddenly no longer covers their expenses: workers who have lost their jobs or been furloughed; the self-employed whose revenues have dried up; business owners who no longer have sufficient customers;
  • the domestically stressed: all those whose domestic situation is unhappy or unhealthy due to loneliness, incapacity, overcrowding, dysfunctional relationships, or just the lack of opportunities to relax, exercise, or experience a refreshing change of scene;
  • the disappointed: students in schools and colleges whose whole experience, both educational and social, has been diminished; all those on career paths whose prospects appear suddenly blighted;
  • the bored.

As for the fortunate, these include:

  • those who avoid death, serious sickness, or the loss of loved ones;
  • those who are relatively free from financial anxiety as their jobs or income from other sources are reasonably secure;
  • those who are in satisfactory domestic circumstances, living with people they get along with, or at least able to communicate regularly with family and friends;
  • those who are not bored.

It is the last category in each of these groups that I want to talk about. Read more »

How the Long Shadow of Jim Crow Still Darkens the American Landscape

by Ruchira Paul

In New York City there lived a Nickel Boy who went by the name of Elwood Curtis…

When they found the secret graveyard, he knew he’d have to return. The clutch of cedars over the TV reporter’s shoulder brought back the heat on his skin, the screech of dry flies. It wasn’t far off at all. Never will be.

Colson Whitehead won his second Pulitzer Prize for The Nickel Boys in 2020, joining the ranks of three other writers recognized for the rare honor. His first was for another historical fiction The Underground Railroad in 2017. What are the odds of winning the Pulitzer for two books that deal with the same subject – the troubled race relations in America? Pretty good, I would say, if your second book is as brilliant as The Nickel Boys.

The Nickel Boys is a searing account of life in a boys’ reform school, the Nickel Academy, in Jim Crow era Florida where the book’s protagonist Elwood Curtis spent some time in the early 1960s. Based on a real life institution, the Dozier School for Boys (now closed) where an unmarked graveyard was unearthed in 2012, the book begins with a reference to that gruesome discovery. The skeletons and bone fragments of young adolescent boys that emerged pointed to violent deaths due to broken bones, caved in skulls, bullet wounds and severe malnutrition. Whitehead’s novel takes us on a journey beginning with Elwood’s early days of a mostly happy, placid and hardscrabble life under his grandmother’s watchful loving care. (His parents had abandoned him when they decided to escape the oppressive racism of Florida to seek a brighter future in California). A bookish, earnest and ambitious boy, he spent his days studying diligently in school and his spare time reading whatever books, magazines and newspapers he could lay his hands on. As a teenager he eschewed the pranks and pastimes of his peers and held down a part time job in a cigar shop owned by a kindly Italian American man whom he impressed with his meticulous work ethics.

When he was not reading, working or doing household chores, Elwood listened to a scratched up LP of MLK Jr’s speeches – “Martin Luther King At Zion Hill,” whose contents both inspired and mesmerized.  Around him the great ferment of the civil rights movement was unfolding and he hoped to be a part of it. Read more »

Feet

by Abigail Akavia

Edgar Degas, Dancer Looking at the Sole of her Right Foot (Tate)

“I was surprised you didn’t start with Philoctetes,” my advisor tells me after my dissertation defense. In our institution, in the crowning moment of a student’s academic career, she is expected not only to publicly display sufficient knowledge in her research field, but also to narrate the ‘making of’ the dissertation topic. Indeed, Sophocles’ Philoctetes could be considered the play that brought me to graduate school to begin with. The dynamics of compassion, suffering, and language in this play are paradigmatic to the questions that shaped my research; a few years out of school, I still can’t (nor want to) get away from this play (and I even wrote about it here once before).

And yet, when presenting the retrospectively made-up timeline of how my research came together, the point where I claimed “it all started” was not Philoctetes, but Sophocles’ most famous play, Oedipus Tyrannus. I did so because I had the opportunity, while in grad school, to direct the play (we’ll call it OT henceforth), an experience that was quite unlike anything else I did as a student, and which was crucial for shaping my academic project. I knew I was interested in the Sophoclean chorus, but only through having to solve for myself the dramaturgical and choreographic ‘problem’ of putting a bunch of seemingly extra bodies onstage who lament Oedipus’ fate did I truly realize how dramatically pregnant this community of vocal witness-bearers is. Working on transforming the script into a performance was a turning point in my engagement with Sophocles, coalescing what I’d learned about his plays and my own interests and hunches about them into a tangible, clear perspective. I came to view the exploration of people’s (in)capacity to be with another person’s pain—or, in other terms, the community’s involvement and reaction to an individual’s tragedy—as one of the driving forces of Sophoclean drama. Read more »

The emptiness at the core of conspiracist thinking

by Joseph Shieber

Recently I was reading one of Scott Alexander’s posts about fake news and conspiracist thinking. In that post he introduces what he dubs the “North Dakota Constant”.

Alexander references a survey conducted by researchers at Chapman University, and mentioned a “control question” that the researchers included in the survey.

Here’s how the pollsters at Chapman describe that question and the responses it prompted:

Perhaps most indicative of the conspiratorial nature of Americans is the …one which, to our knowledge, we created.

Respondents to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears were asked if “The government is concealing what they know about…the North Dakota crash.” A third of Americans (33%) think the government is concealing information about this invented event.

Were the North Dakota crash added to the ranked list of conspiracies (see above), this invention would rank as number six, just under plans for a one world government.

What Alexander concludes from this is that there is a large minority of the country — the 33% willing to buy in to a conspiracy about a “North Dakota crash” that never existed — who are disposed to believe in ANY conspiracy.

Alexander suggests that the existence of the “North Dakota Constant” should make us more cautious in overemphasizing the role of “fake news” in causing conspiracist thinking. His idea is that if there is a floor of over 30% of the population disposed to believe in a made-up conspiracy, the fact that 30% of the public believe that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States is not in fact evidence of a very strong “fake news” effect. That is because, if the “North Dakota Constant” is compelling, we would expect around 30% of the public to believe ANY conspiracy about which pollsters questioned them. Read more »

The Joke’s on us: Conspiracy Theory in the Rise of Postmodern White Supremacy

by Mindy Clegg

Mulder’s iconic poster from the 90s sci-fi series the X-Files.

The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless. (Alan Moore in The Mindscape of Alan Moore 2003)

The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth. (See Garry Kasparov tweet.)

In 2001, filmmaker Richard Linklater released a dreamy follow up to his 1990 film Slacker. Waking Life followed a similar format to Slacker, disconnected vignettes but with an animated overlay. In one scene, Alex Jones makes an appearance. At the time, Jones was not the nationally known influence on a President he is today. He began his career on Austin public access TV, but has since become a popular figure on the far right. At the time, Linklater just saw him as an entertaining and harmless political ranter and gave him two minutes in his meandering film. Read more »

In the Name of George Floyd

by Katie Poore

It feels impossible this week not to talk about George Floyd, and yet it feels as if talk has become egregiously cheap, less a mechanism for change than a means of resting in paralyses of complacency, disbelief, or comfort. When rage, grief, frustration, and loss take over communities, states, and entire countries as they have this week, words feel at once like our most important tool and a frantic means of filling what could otherwise be a devastating silence. How do we address a racism so deeply ingrained in society that it feels woven into every fiber of our country’s foundation—and, indeed, was there at the United States’ genesis, when black bodies bolstered a white economy at the expense of their lives, health, and humanity, and in the process built what we so misguidedly call the land of the free, the world’s first great democracy?

The United States is a country built on the willful acceptance of and blindness toward the paradoxes and hypocrisies that constitute our beginnings, a society rife with beautiful buzzwords that serve more as ornamentation than gospel: Justice. Equality. Freedom. Opportunity. The People. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Deaths like George Floyd’s—unprovoked, delivered by a police officer with his knee on a defenseless man’s neck and his hands in his pockets—fly in the face of this American mythology. We are not a country of justice if black people fear always for their lives, and if black words go largely ignored, disregarded, rendered impotent in the face of white disbelief, or white denial. We are not a country of equality if some lives matter more than others. We are not a country of opportunity if opportunity’s promise only applies to those who have grown up with a wealth of it already. We are not a country run by and for the People until all people can walk safely down a sidewalk, can feel heard by and advocated for by their political leaders and communities. Read more »

Outer Harbour — A Memoir

by Eric Miller

My father had an immensely fat friend whom I often glimpsed filling a plate alone at the buffet table of the King Eddie’s restaurant as I walked past that grand hotel. This man himself had a father even then in those days a nonagenarian, whom he saw daily, devotedly, taking him to the pool for a swim. It turned out that, obesity or no obesity, the friend would outlive my own father by twenty years. Because I liked the man very much, his longevity does not strike me as an injustice. He had a snuffling voice, small but piercing eyes, a gigantic nose and a fund of forgiving affection, the kind dispensed even in the awareness that what was being forgiven might have been awful. He preferred not to know, though his ignorance was (if I may venture a paradox) well informed. My mother played matchmaker for decades in his behalf, possibly because she found him appealing. Her stratagems did not avail. His marvellous acquitting heart remained unpaired.

He was a developer though quite what he developed I never learned, except, I think, in the case of an undistinguished mall that replaced something approximately as without distinction. He partook of the spirit of Toronto, bulldozing the forgettable in order to raise aloft the unmemorable. He might have knocked down the old himself—never very old—just by walking forward with his characteristic look of merciless mercifulness. I praise him because of his energy. The moment in which I see him most vital is when he stands in the lot, in the wind-raked interval between demolition and construction. Lord of the pit and of the mullein that flowers for a time in the gash. Sometimes—despite his size and his wobbly ankles and his nice shoes—he would go on hikes with my father and my siblings out to the end of the Outer Harbour, this in the days before the spit was subject to manicuring and division among interested parties, the boaters and the sports enthusiasts and the rest, all eager to spoil what agreed with us, a total wasteland, entire dereliction. It may have pleased him to fancy that the debris of his excavations had contributed to the desert spaces where we all plodded in a wind that prevented conversation by grabbing words and dashing them out of reach like a shovel. Trucks may have tipped some of the rubbish of his enterprises into Lake Ontario, which would have stepped back in ambivalent recoil from the heavy donor, his heavier gift. Here was perpetuated on a colossal scale the pause after the jaws of the machinery have had their fill and before the logistics of raising a scaffold or pouring a foundation. All southwestern Ontario’s rejects, quisquiliae, scraps, reached into the midst of drastic cold waves that darkened by the winter minute. Read more »