Category: Archives

The Heart of Conrad

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Toibin_1-022218Colm Tóibín at the NYRB:

Joseph Conrad’s heroes were often alone, and close to hostility and danger. Sometimes, when Conrad’s imagination was at its most fertile and his command of English at its most precise, the danger came darkly from within the self. At other times, however, it came from what could not be named. Conrad sought then to evoke rather than delineate, using something close to the language of prayer. While his imagination was content at times with the tiny, vivid, perfectly observed detail, it was also nourished by the need to suggest and symbolize. Like a poet, he often left the space in between strangely, alluringly vacant.

His own vague terms—words like “ineffable,” “infinite,” “mysterious,” “unknowable”—were as close as he could come to a sense of our fate in the world or the essence of the universe, a sense that reached beyond the time he described and beyond his characters’ circumstances. This idea of “beyond” satisfied something in his imagination. He worked as though between the intricate systems of a ship and the vague horizon of a vast sea.

more here.



What are we feeling when we are feeling joy?

Posted on by Morgan Meis

WIMAN-600x315Christian Wiman at The American Scholar:

The definition of  joy in the passages by Wordsworth and MacCaig, though both are tethered tightly to the natural world, remains pretty abstract. Even “Small Moth,” clear as it is on the elements of one woman’s happiness, is elusive about that moment of joy. This may be inevitable, though maybe all poems of joy—maybe all poems, period—are aimed against whatever glitch in us or whim of God has made our most transcendent moments resistant to description. (A “revenge of a mortal hand,” is how the Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska defines the joy of writing.) The great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai once wondered why it is that we have such various and discriminating language for our pains but become such hapless generalizers for our joys. “I want to describe,” his poem “The Precision of Pain” concludes, “with a sharp pain’s precision, happiness / and blurry joy. I learned to speak among the pains.”

“Among the pains” is where we all learned to speak. The instant the link between word and world appears, so does the rift between them. (I met a Czech scholar once, a man of immense learning and multiple languages, who told me that he didn’t speak a word until he was five years old. “Everything was okay until then,” he said with a shrug.) This link/loss aspect of speech seems true no matter one’s metaphysical dispensations.

more here.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Mine Own Neruda

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

William Archila in AGNI:

W-archilaI was ten and my father was gone, already living here in the States, when my mother woke me up in the middle of the night to listen to a strange voice coming out of the transistor radio. It was Pablo Neruda reciting his love poems while violins and guitars played in the background. For two years I fell asleep to the voice of Neruda rising and falling like waves in the distance, like seagulls swooping down, my head filling with poetry.

The broadcast was interrupted in November, 1980, when I fled El Salvador and the war that was tearing my country apart. I was twelve years old. I arrived in Los Angeles, California, with many questions unanswered, conversations unfinished and years of my young life unfulfilled. I gave up much of my national culture and Spanish language to learn a new culture and language. My English was full of street vernacular and strong raw accents—my words squashed, shredded, forced to dance a Shakespearian rag. I became part of the growing immigrant community, speaking ghetto Spanish. “Go back to your country” echoed throughout these years. Ahead a long road stretched into darkness.

In high school I began writing long before I read any poetry that excited me. My writings were fragments—verses and scribbles not meant to be taken seriously or shared. I pursued this calling in secret, writing only for myself. In college I tried to read the masters of the English language: Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, but none of them spoke to me—or maybe I wasn’t ready to listen. It wasn’t until I read Ginsberg’s “Howl” that I was amazed to discover I was not the only young man who saw the best minds of his generation destroyed.

More here.

Our Tribes and Tribulations

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Jaspreet Gill in Quillette:

MaxPixel.freegreatpicture.com-Strategy-Chess-Play-Chessboard-Game-Figure-Board-1215079Disagreement has made disagreeable individuals of us all. News channels are littered with platitudes masquerading as thoughtful discussions. Individuals, convinced that the volume of their speech corresponds to the correctness of their arguments, contribute to the cacophony of tirades. The print media publish headlines assassinating opponents’ characters rather than their ideas. Swipes and scrolls lead us to trivial online quarrels which bleed into our personal conversations. Research from the Pew Research Centre suggests that 91 percent of Republicans and 86 percent of Democrats hold unfavourable views of the other. It would be unfair but tempting to lay the blame at the feet of politicians, public intellectuals, and journalists. But we, the people, are also complicit in this potentially slippery slope.

Gathering by the campfire in our ideological tribes, we bask in the warm glow of unchallenged beliefs. We caricature arguments that do not fit neatly into our canonical jigsaw. Foregoing uncomfortable rumination in favour of rhetoric, we have helped to create and perpetuate a climate in which dissent is tolerated only for as long as it is a heresy we find palatable. And because the sacred cow revered by one tribe could be butchered by another, both worship and slaughter are seen as barbaric. Our immune system, fearful the body may contract moral anaemia by merely engaging with opposing viewpoints, triggers a defensive response that renders us allergic (and deaf) to opinions outside our personalised Overton windows. The ultra-networked age leaves us distant and disconnected and facilitates the rapid transmission of viral partisanship.

More here.

Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

ExistenceIn our everyday lives, it makes sense to ask “why” this or that event occurs, but such questions have answers only because they are embedded in a larger explanatory context. In particular, because the world of our everyday experience is an emergent approximation with an extremely strong arrow of time, such that we can safely associate “causes” with subsequent “effects.” The universe, considered as all of reality (i.e. let’s include the multiverse, if any), isn’t like that. The right question to ask isn’t “Why did this happen?”, but “Could this have happened in accordance with the laws of physics?” As far as the universe and our current knowledge of the laws of physics is concerned, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” The demand for something more — a reason why the universe exists at all — is a relic piece of metaphysical baggage we would be better off to discard.

This perspective gets pushback from two different sides.

More here.

A Dissenter’s Legacy: How to Win Without Violence

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times:

ScreenHunter_2965 Feb. 13 19.48Gene Sharp died last week. What Sun Tzu and Clausewitz were to war, Sharp, who was 90, was to nonviolent struggle — strategist, philosopher, guru. An American academic who worked from his modest Boston home, Sharp studied and cataloged examples of nonviolent resistance, looking at why they succeeded or failed.

His most influential work was “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a pamphlet written for Burma’s opposition in 1993. It has been translated into dozens of languages — often clandestinely — and became a handbook for civic resistance movements around the world. (Much of Sharp’s writing is available free on the website of his organization, the Albert Einstein Institute.)

Sharp is best known as a strategist for movements in the most dire circumstances — those trying to create political change when there is no institutional path. But his ideas have shaped civic protest movements in the United States and other democracies, and they contain some surprising advice for the resistance to President Trump.

First, here’s a brief summary of what Sharp taught the world…

More here.

Tuesday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

If You Go and Look at a Hen For an Hour or Two, You’ll Find in the End
That the Mystery Has Not Diminished but Rather Increased

Its feet yellow and strong.

Its walking rhythm with that kind of ludicrous efficiency,
halting from time to scrabble in the dirt.

Its compact structure in bright feathers, black,
nearly blue when the sun strikes.

Crowned in red, with its beak
exactly the same yellow as its feet,
eyes quick.

As it moves forward on the ground, it scrapes and pecks,
it lifts its head every so often, moving it a bit:
an inexorable atavism
for spotting potential predators.

And now it stretches, flapping vigorously in place.

To perk up, maybe,
to get its circulation going, or something of the sort.
.

by Alejandro Crotto
from Asymptote Journal
Oct. 2017
translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers
.

Monday, February 12, 2018

Asma Jahangir (1952 – 2018): A Life of Fearless Fortitude

Posted on by Ali Minai

by Ali Minai

Asma-jehangir-1600x500A light went out in the world yesterday. Asma Jahangir — Pakistan’s icon of human rights and liberal values — passed away. In her short 66 years, she lived the length — and made the impact — of many lifetimes. If a person’s character is known by the enemies they make, her credentials are impeccable. Every dictator, every autocrat, every paternalistic preacher, every friend of the powerful hated her — and she welcomed their hatred as a badge of honor. Even in death, the barbs of her enemies ennoble her further for posterity.
There are also many who disliked her because of her political views, her liberalism, or her uncompromising positions. As with all those who act only on principle, she sometimes faced difficult dilemmas and found herself taking unpopular positions — including some that were branded “unpatriotic”, as though Patriotism can ever be a higher value than Justice. She may sometimes have ended up on what many thought was the “wrong” side of the line, but she was always there for the right reasons. When all other champions of truth were silent in the face of diktat, she stood up against the oppression of women and minorities, against the lack of due process, and against inhuman laws imposed in the name of God and country. Sometimes she won, and often she did not, but she never wavered.
Many friends have already paid tribute to Asma Jahangir and lamented her passing, and I debated whether I should say anything — especially since it will surely invite controversial comments. But then I thought of my daughters, and what a fearless woman like Asma Jahangir truly signifies for them — and that is why I needed to write this. So Anosha and Afreen, if you ever wonder what sort of person you should aim to be, or how to stand up for justice against all odds, or what a full life of fearless fortitude is like, look to this Pakistani lawyer who packed all the furies of righteousness in her slight body and lived her life like a flame that the winds simply could not extinguish. Now a greater extinguisher has taken her, but the flame will stay alive in the hearts and minds of those who share her values. And even those who do not — or perhaps their future generations — will benefit from the sparks she has sown, because even the unjust want justice when they find themselves oppressed.
* * *
Editor’s Note: Asma Jahangir’s Wikipedia page is here. You can also read obituaries in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Dawn, the Express Tribune, Time, and many others.

Monday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

In the Middle of Hosanna

snow’s piled against the generator Hosanna
smooth white talus
at the foot of sheer thought in
arctic regions of mind

through glass the near tangle
of bare forsythia beneath draped wires
pole to pole is a snap of unchecked ruminations
that fold upon themselves in crazy chiaroscuro
a dispensation of light expected in a skull of whims
while further right the barrel arc of a stone wall
familiar now as arrays of spots on the back of a hand
is as solid as the conviction of crystals in a cool savanna
between here and the neighbor’s shed in the middle of
hosanna!
.

Jim Culleny
2/12/17

Freedom, private property, and public access

Posted on by Emrys Westacott

by Emrys Westacott

Unknown-1The concept of individual freedom has been central to political philosophy since the time of John Locke, who published his groundbreaking Two Treatises on Civil Government in 1689. Before then, other values were paramount—for example: conformity to God's will, the cultivation of moral virtue in the population, social stability, national power, material prosperity, the quality of the culture, or the glory of the sovereign. These are criteria by which a society might be judged and compared to other societies. The happiness of the population can also be added to this list, although this is usually assumed to be a direct consequence of some of those other goods.

But the modern liberal tradition, which begins in the 17th century with thinkers like Locke, is virtually defined by the central importance given to individual freedom and individual rights. And these come to be viewed as deal-breakers. It doesn't matter how stable the society, or how materially prosperous, or how happy the population; the fundamental rights and liberties of individuals should not be sacrificed just to secure these other goods.

Of course, who should count as an individual endowed with sacrosanct rights has, from the outset, been a topic of controversy. Even now, when no respectable thinker would defend the denial of equal rights on grounds of sex, race, or religion, there are still controversies over the rights of immigrants, children, prisoners, convicted felons, and animals.

The exact meaning of freedom has also never been agreed upon. John Stuart Mill's "harm principle" provides a basic starting point: each person should be free to do as they please so long as they do no harm to anyone else. But specifying what constitutes "harm" is difficult. Am I harming my neighbors if I erect a hideous sculpture on my front lawn? Am I harming you if I say something that offends you? Am I harming society, or a section of it, if I advocate racial segregation or deny the Holocaust?

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FIVE STARS FOR US! A REVIEW OF STEVEN SPIELBERG’S “THE POST”

Posted on by Richard King

by Richard King

The-Post-character-posters-2-600x876I was just four months old when the Pentagon Papers were published in 1971, but I remember very distinctly the mixed emotions that ran through my mind when I first clapped eyes on that historic edition of the New York Times in my local library. For here was everything I loathed and loved in one incredible revelation! On the one hand, imperialism, war and corruption. On the other, the First Amendment and the Fourth Estate. "Mother," I said, as she swiped the paper from the hands of a startled pensioner, "Mother, darling – mark this day! For though a dark cloud in the progress of our species, it has about it a silver lining that in future years will be as a beacon to good men and women of the press the world over! Dry your eyes, mother mine. Here, use my handkerchief." I was a precocious child.

It would be nice, would it not, to rewrite history in a way that made ourselves central to the story, and that made us appear more relevant and prescient and brilliant than we actually are. It would be ludicrous as well, of course, though that doesn't stop some people doing it, especially those who write for a living. I've grumbled before that the "media culpa" following the 2016 US election disguised a deep strain of self-congratulation, as the dead-tree press and major stations affected to glorify themselves with faint praise. ("If only we'd had our game-face on, this tragedy might never have happened!") Now I must return to the subject, one Steven Spielberg having entered the field with a film that polishes the MSM's image to a high and self-reflecting shine. The Post is rather good, as it happens; but it's also very, very bad.

The key points in the narrative are a matter of historical record, so I imagine we can dispense with the spoiler alerts. In 1969 military analyst Daniel Ellsberg made photocopies of ‘the Pentagon Papers', aka United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense. The documents revealed, inter alia, that the US government had lied "systematically" about the ongoing war in Vietnam and that it had secretly spread the war to Cambodia and Laos. Ellsberg passed the documents to Neil Sheehan, a reporter for the New York Times, and on June 13, 1971, the Times published the first of nine excerpts from the Papers, together with editorial commentaries. On June 15, the Nixon administration sought, and was granted, a court injunction preventing further publication, so Ellsberg passed copies of the documents to Ben Bagdikian at the Washington Post. After much agonising and internal argument, and in defiance of the Attorney General, the Post began running its own series of articles on the Papers on June 18. On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the New York Times, putting the Post (and other papers) in the clear.

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Dialethic Dialectic

Posted on by Carl Pierer

by Carl Pierer

HegelHistorically, formal logic and Hegel's philosophy's relation has been dominated by antipathy. Classical logic, developing from Aristotelian logic to the Frege/Russell logic of the 20th century, has largely rejected Hegel because of his overt embrace of contradictions. Hegel, vice-versa, has not been too charitable to the formal logic of his day. In the second half of the 20th century, however, formal logic has developed massively and in various directions. One of these, paraconsistent logics, have attempted to accommodate contradictions. Classical logic is anathema to contradictions, due to the explosion principle, a.k.a. ex falso quodlibet. A sketch of this principle is the following: since the classical or is non-exclusive, if we start with a true proposition A, the disjunct A or B is true for any proposition B. So, if we have A&~A, we get that A is true and hence A or B is true. But since ~A is true, too, from A or B we get that B must be true. Hence anything follows from a contradiction, or so the classical (and subsequently the Frege/Russell logic) claims. So contradictions seem to be a rather bad thing.

Now, paraconsistent logics deny this explosion principle. There are different ways of doing this, but we will stick with Priest's way in his (Priest, 1989). His is a dialethic interpretation, meaning that he thinks there are sentences that are both true and false. This has some interesting consequences. Note, first of all, that this does not mean that all sentences are true and false. Most importantly, most classical notions are indeed preserve. So, we have, for propositions A and B:

  • ~A is true implies A is false
  • A is true implies ~A is false
  • A&B is true only if A is true and B is true
  • A&B is false only if at least one of A or B is false

These are quite orthodox. Now, of course, on the dialethic point of view, A could be both true and false, and suppose B is true. Then A&B is both true and false. Next, we need the notion of logical consequence, which Priest defines also quite classically:

A is a logical truth just if A is (at least) true under all assignments of values.

A is a logical consequence of B just if every assignment of values that make B (at least) true makes A (at least) true.(Priest, 1989)

What does this mean exactly?

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Cautionary Fables for Darwin’s Birthday

Posted on by Mike Bendzela

by Mike Bendzela

ScreenHunter_2964 Feb. 12 16.19Tribes

In the great class of mammalian vertebrates, antagonism arose between the egg-laying monotremes and the marsupials. Neither side could see the other on its own terms, each insisting it was the True Mammal.

An opossum (Didelphis) complained, “The platypus is a shameful pretender! It won’t admit that it is a failed duck, a builder of nests and hatcher of puggles, unable to fly!”

For its part, the platypus (Ornithorhynchus) sought revenge on the marsupials by sowing doubt about their child-rearing abilities: “We’ve seen the opossum abandon its newborn babies at birth! The poor things are doomed to forage for a nipple and live in a pocket!”

Moral: Steady misrepresentation is the chief hazard of tribal membership.

Monitor Lizard versus Cobra

Some monitor lizards (Varanus) that were opposed to the increasing presence of cobras (Ophiophagus) in their midst, held a public meeting to air their concerns. One outspoken lizard said to those gathered, “Fellow Lizards! The cobras intend to surround us, defeat us, and take our land. But they won’t stop there; we all know how snakes are. If we don’t do something quickly, they will swallow all our young!” Inflamed by this speech, the lizards quickly mobilized. They sought out the snakes, surrounded them, and defeated them. But for reasons no one has been able to fathom, the triumphant lizards then devoured every snake egg they could find.

Moral: The most depraved acts may be committed in the name of preventing depravity.

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Sunday, February 11, 2018

Fake news and the gatekeepers of truth

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

Lyonel-feininger-newspaper-readersBefore Facebook, there was the coffee house. In the 17th-century, panic gripped British royal circles that these newly established drinking salons had become forums for political dissent. In 1672, Charles II issued a proclamation ‘to restrain the Spreading of False News’ that was helping ‘to nourish an universal Jealousie and Dissatisfaction in the minds of all His Majesties good subjects’.

Now, 350 years on, legislators across the world are seeking to do the same. Last week, the House of Commons digital culture, media and sport committee flew to Washington DC to grill representatives of big tech companies, including Facebook, Twitter and Google. The title of their session echoed Charles II: ‘How can social media platforms help stop the spread of fake news?’

If there is a long history to fears about fake news, there is a long history to fake news, too. In 1924, four days before a general election, the Daily Mail published the forged Zinoviev letter, a supposed directive from Moscow to British communists to mobilise ‘sympathetic forces’ in the Labour party; Labour lost the election by a landslide.

In the wake of the Broadwater Farm riot of 1985, in which a policeman, PC Keith Blakelock, was hacked to death, the police and the press organised a lurid campaign against the key suspect, Winston Silcott, depicting him as the ‘Beast of Broadwater Farm’. Convicted on the basis of virtually no evidence, he was released three years later after it was shown that the police had forged their interview notes.

More here.

Plagiarism Software Unveils a New Source for 11 of Shakespeare’s Plays

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Michael Blanding in the New York Times:

Shakespeare-bookcover-blog427For years scholars have debated what inspired William Shakespeare’s writings. Now, with the help of software typically used by professors to nab cheating students, two writers have discovered an unpublished manuscript they believe the Bard of Avon consulted to write “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Richard III,” “Henry V” and seven other plays.

The news has caused Shakespeareans to sit up and take notice.

“If it proves to be what they say it is, it is a once-in-a-generation — or several generations — find,” said Michael Witmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.

The findings were made by Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter, who describe them in a book to be published next week by the academic press D. S. Brewer and the British Library. The authors are not suggesting that Shakespeare plagiarized but rather that he read and was inspired by a manuscript titled “A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels,” written in the late 1500s by George North, a minor figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth, who served as an ambassador to Sweden.

“It’s a source that he keeps coming back to,” said Mr. McCarthy, a self-taught Shakespeare scholar, during a recent interview at his home in North Hampton, N.H. “It affects the language, it shapes the scenes and it, to a certain extent, really even influences the philosophy of the plays.”

More here. [Thanks to Laura Claridge.]