by Joan Harvey

Let’s face it, I’m tired. A phrase completely knotted up in the rather damaged circuitry that is my brain with Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles who managed to out-Dietrich Dietrich while being her own amazing self (if you haven’t watched this in at least the past few days you probably should). But, for better or worse, unlike Kahn, my tiredness is not from thousands of lovers coming and going and going and coming and always too soon.

But I digress. Tiredness is a digression from normal life. Repeated rounds of tiredness have been one of the leftovers people have reported experiencing from Covid-19, and, as I looked into it, from other viruses as well. I doubt I had Covid-19, but I did get very ill after flying back from NYC in late January and I’ve been struggling with recovery ever since. The tricky thing, the thing that really sucks, is that whereas with most bouts of tiredness one can recover relatively quickly and start normal physical activity, with this post-viral business, even tiny amounts of exercise can deplete one so much that only days of total rest really help. And, though I have past experience with this, I’m still not particularly well trained for it. The bigger problem, for me as well as others with this type of fatigue, is that one can feel fine during exercise, and then afterward become, as I have been, completely exhausted and shaky for days. As a pamphlet describing post-viral fatigue puts it, “Doing too much on a good day will often lead to an exacerbation of fatigue and any other symptoms the following day. This characteristic delay in symptom exacerbation is known as post-exertional malaise (PEM).” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Callum Watts

I worry. Asking someone out, speaking in public, stepping onto a flight, for me these mundane moments percolate with anxiety. These are personal fears, inner battles of no real relevance to the wider world and disconnected from any broader social meaning. Over the past couple of years though, I have had two experiences of fear that were both personal and political. I was caught in a terrorist attack and was struck down with covid-19 during the global pandemic. In each case the fear of death echoed bone deep within me, and in each case that fear reverberated through the body politic and society. What interests me is the political aims for which that fear can be harnessed and the authenticity of the use of that fear. I don’t believe that we should be stoking fear for political ends, but we cannot escape the fact that our fears are already in the political arena, and so we must learn to live with them.

Picture a warm summer night in London’s bustling Borough Market. I’m enjoying one of those endless evenings of conversation, eating and drinking with my family. My sister has just left early to meet some friends, when all of a sudden running, scuffling and shouting can be heard. It’s difficult to explain why, but a certain franticness in the movement and a strident tone to the shouts make my blood run cold. My whole body freezes and a tension forms in my chest, like a knot being pulled tight. Then as screams and shouts mingle with gun fire and things smashing, the knot dissolves as adrenaline courses through me. I’m alert, focussed, prepared to take control and spring into action. Months later, that initial stab of fear would still occasionally manifeste and get my adrenaline pumping. This could be triggered by being in a public space or on public transport, a loud noise, or by the memory of someone bleeding out on the floor. These fears were mine, yet they quickly became absorbed into a wider debate. Read more »

Mother Writes to the ‘Lion of Kashmir,’ Long Deceased

February 2020
Dear Sheikh Sahib,

They tell me,
you are buried on the left bank of Naseem lake with views
of Hazratbal shrine, your tomb guarded by India’s troops.

I tell them,
this represents one of those paradoxes’ history keeps throwing
up: the same people who jailed you for many years now guard
your tomb and the same people whose ‘Lion’ you were are un-
happy with you for throwing their lot with the illiberal Pandit
Nehru who strung up Kashmir on the flagpole of secularism.

The world approved, but for decades the Congress Party
did to Kashmir by night what today the BJP is doing by light.

Sheikh Sahib, in your heart of hearts, you must have known
that we the Muslims of Kashmir struck at the core of Hindu
nationalist idea of Akhand Bharat, united, undivided India
from Afghanistan to Myanmar Thailand Cambodia and Laos. Read more »

by Joshua Wilbur 

There are times when I can’t look away from The Avenue at Middelharnis. 

Completed in 1689 by the Dutch Golden Age artist Meindert Hobbema, the painting has entranced viewers for centuries. The English landscapists of the Romantic period admired and emulated its unusual composition. A young Van Gogh saw The Avenue in London’s National Gallery in 1884. “Look out for the Hobbema,” he would later write in a letter to his brother Theo. René Magritte allegedly produced forgeries of Hobbema’s paintings, and his Empire of Light seems to me a surreal reinterpretation of the Dutch master’s masterwork. 

I say that I can’t look away from the painting because I set it as my computer’s background a few months ago. Artsy, I know. I see The Avenue a few times a day, usually in browser-obscured flashes. Sometimes I’ll push everything aside and just space out into it. 

The painting is a great example of an “open” work of art. As described by Umberto Eco, open works encourage multiple interpretations and respond to the viewer’s evershifting historical situation, stage in life, or mood. If closed creations communicate one thing, open works communicate many things. They meet us where we are. I should say something about where I am and where we are before going further down The Avenue.  Read more »

by Mindy Clegg

In our modern society, we are awash in a near constant barrage of information. It can be difficult for even the most critically-minded among us to sift through all of that information and vet it for truthfulness. It’s likely that we all are subject to some misinformation that we believe in the course of our daily engagement with mass media. Although it’s more pervasive and immediate in today’s interconnected world, this state of affairs has existed since the beginning of the industrial age, starting with publishing in the nineteenth century and then onto broadcasting media of the twentieth century. But, if the medium is the message as Marshall McLuhan argued, what do these generations of engagement with mass forms of broadcasting actually mean for us as a society? The content fades away into the background to some degree while the medium shapes our shared experiences. Broadcasting and social media have become a shared prism on world, with differing interpretations of events experienced in a similar way.

We rarely have public discussions on what a mass mediated society means for us, taking its existence for granted. Perhaps turning to a classic treatment of mass society might remind us of the historical and social constructedness of mass media. One such compelling work was the 1967 work by Situationist Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (published in English in 1970). Debord’s work has become a classic among philosophers, disaffected youth, and scholars attempting to come to grips with the role mass media plays in modern life. In this essay, I will argue that some of Debord’s assertions, such as his claim about the passivity encouraged by the spectacular industries, are incomplete. No form of mass medium was ever accepted passively. Rather, people as consumers often actively engaged with mass media, even if the goal was passive acceptance from the top down. I use the example of popular music to illustrate the point. Read more »

This alpine meadow near my house went through yellow, purple, and white phases before finally blooming with all three colors simultaneously in a “second wave” now. It probably does this every year but I had not noticed until the coronavirus lockdown got me into the habit of walking by this area daily for some exercise and I started paying closer attention to my surroundings.

by Mike O’Brien

It’s a bountiful feast for discriminating worriers like myself. Every day brings a tantalizing re-ordering of fears and dangers; the mutation of reliable sources of doom, the emergence of new wild-card contenders. Like an improbably long-lived heroin addict, the solution is not to stop. That’s no longer an option, if it ever was. It is, instead, to master and manage my obsessive consumption of hope-crushing information. I must become the Keith Richards of apocalyptic depression, perfecting the method and the dose.

Structure is important. Historical time-frames help. Covid is bad, and current, and a direct threat to me, but a once-a-century pandemic arriving right on time shouldn’t disrupt my worrying on a macro level. I’ve budgeted acute anxiety for just this kind of thing.

The protests in the US are full of promise, both for good and for ill, but the systemic problems whence they sprung are old news. The uprising should have happened decades ago. They may happen again, for the same reasons, decades hence. Waiting for the US to realize necessary and inevitable progress is a mug’s game.

I confess that I’m very Euro/America-centric in my socio-political doom-tracking. I really ought to give fair due to Indian ethno-nationalism, Russian counter-intelligence, African famine, Arab revolutions and South American neo-fascism. Sorry, I’m Canadian. After worrying about the US and the UK, there are barely any hours left in a day. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

Because I have a lot of experience with depression, I approached George Scialabba’s How to Be Depressed with an almost professional curiosity. Scialabba takes a creative approach to the depression memoir, blending personal essay, interview, and his own medical records, specifically, a selection of notes written by various therapists and psychiatrists who treated him for depression between 1970 and 2016. I don’t know if I could bear to see the records kept by those who have treated me for depression, assuming they still exist, and I wasn’t sure what it would be like to read another person’s medical history.

I found that the clinical notes, which are the core of the book, present a painfully accurate description of chronic depression and its treatment. Scialabba’s sense of being stuck is reflected in the way the same concerns come up repeatedly: procrastination, worries about being dependent, a sense of unrealized potential, feelings that he’s not accomplishing enough, especially compared to others, and concerns about whether his relationships will last. There’s not much sense of any concrete ways in which these concerns are addressed, or if they were ever successfully resolved.

This part of the book was sometimes difficult to read, but I’m glad it was written and published. It captures a certain airless circularity that I associate with my own struggles against depression. The book as a whole also reveals how the effects of depression are compounded with time. Chronic or recurring depression is qualitatively different from the experience of a single episode, and I don’t think this fact gets the attention it deserves. When Scialabba, in an interview later in the book, spoke of bitter memories, I could see why he used the word bitter. Read more »

by Peter Wells

Saving endangered languages is an activity the virtue of which seems to be beyond question among Western liberals. Endangered languages, as conventionally identified, are usually spoken by poor and vulnerable people in remote areas of developing countries, so our sympathies are engaged. The least we could do, it seems, to alleviate their misery and show solidarity with them, would be to preserve their language.

At the same time, it is also urged that the endangered languages are valuable in themselves. Followers of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (Linguistic Relativity) assert that each individual language can express concepts which no other language can express. Therefore, they insist that it is important not only to record these languages before they die, but also to keep the language communities alive so that they continue to use them.

I wish to suggest that this project, while well-meaning, is ill-conceived. It seems to employ an unscientific definition of the term ‘language’, and to rely upon a disputed theory about the nature of language. It is unrealistic in terms of what carrying it out would involve, and finally, and most importantly from the point of view of liberalism, it would tend to reduce, rather than increase, freedom. Read more »