by Brooks Riley
Category: Monday Magazine
Though we are an aggregator blog (providing links to content elsewhere) on all other days, on Mondays we have only original writing by our editors and guest columnists. Each of us writes on any subject we wish, and the length of articles generally varies between 1000 and 2500 words. Our writers are free to express their own opinions and we do not censor them in any way. Sometimes we agree with them and sometimes we don’t.Below you will find links to all our past Monday columns, in alphabetical order by last name of the author. Within each columnist’s listing, the entries are mostly in reverse-chronological order (most recent first).
What Edward Said
by Claire Chambers
Few twentieth-century books witnessed Silver Jubilee celebrations but, 25 years after the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), the monograph was commemorated in this way at his faculty in Columbia University, New York. Just a few months later, in September 2003, the Palestinian-American literary critic and theorist would die at 67 after protracted dealings with leukaemia. (This was the same group of cancers that had caused the quick and untimely death of one of his anticolonial forebears, Frantz Fanon, in 1961.) Said’s volume is routinely hailed in lists of the world’s most influential books. It also continues to shape the discipline of postcolonial studies which his work kickstarted. The Golden Jubilee in 2028 should be a grand affair.
Orientalism’s groundbreaking importance lies in the connections Said makes between culture and empire-building. He draws on Michel Foucault’s theories about the inextricable coexistence of power and knowledge, as well as Antonio Gramsci’s emphasis on the importance of culture in securing the consent of the dominated. In doing so, Said argues that colonization is not only about material acquisition. In addition to physically occupying other countries, colonizers seek to convey that their occupation is universally advantageous. It is absurd to watch the intellectual gymnastics they undertake in arguing that empire is good for both rulers and ruled. Read more »
George Saunders and Buddhist Literary Criticism
by Varun Gauri
For many of us, reading and writing literature is a spiritual endeavor. What does that mean?
In his book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders describes the benefits of reading and writing short stories using concepts familiar to Buddhists. In what follows, I list the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and explore their relationship to literature, leaning heavily on Saunders’ account. Whereas my previous piece explored the implications of Saunders’ book for public narratives, here I focus on personal spiritual journeys. I close by raising questions about the evidentiary basis for these arguments.
Dissatisfaction, or suffering, is a basic fact of life
Buddhists often enumerate three types of suffering in our lives: the kind that comes from old age, sickness, physical pain, and death; the suffering that accompanies change, that sense that we can’t hold onto anything that we love, not permanently; and all-pervasive suffering, the background of fear and anxiety always with us, the sense that even our own existence is questionable, and that our relationships and personal lives will never live up to our hopes.
Saunders is especially interested in the last form of suffering — pervasive dissatisfaction. His account of the spiritual potential of literature focuses on its power to cause “an incremental change in the state of mind” in which, for a little while anyway, we become more alert to our lives and the presence of other beings — and less existentially dissatisfied. For Saunders, a crucial cause of this third type of suffering is miscommunication: We are egocentric and constantly talk past each other; as a result, we feel lonely and misunderstood. Egocentrism has an evolutionary origin— we are primed, for personal survival, to think that everything that is good for us is also good for everyone else. Tragically, that survival mechanism contributes to isolation and suffering. Read more »
Monday Photo
One can judge the depth of this otherwise very clear pond only by looking at the shadow of this bit of floating green algae. The upper part of the photo is also under water, there is just a reflection of a mountain there (rather than the reflection of bluish sky in the rest of the photo) so one sees the bottom even more clearly. Photo taken in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, last week.
The International Patriot
by Chris Horner
How should people on the ‘progressive’ side of politics view patriotism? That question continues to vex those who would connect with what they suppose are the feelings of the bulk of the population. The answer will vary a good deal according to which country we are considering – the French left, for instance, has a very different relationship to la patrie to that of the US or the UK. In the case of the former, the side cast as traitors has historically been seen as the right. In the USA, at least in the second half of the 20th century it has been very different: those who protested against the Vietnam war were cast as the anti patriots. And today, we still hear that the left ‘hates our country’. The accusation is a damaging one, and has been wielded with glee by conservatives whenever they have the chance. So there is a tricky task for the left, it seems: to be seen as with and not against the mass of people in their identification with the nation and its history, without abandoning an internationalist perspective that rises above the narrow nationalism of the conservative.
I want to suggest here that we need to see that there is a problem with both the approach that seeks to inhabit the abstraction of simplistic universalism and the one that would rush into the warm embrace of parochial particularism (‘my country, right or wrong’ at its extreme). Instead, we need to see that the universal is something emergent, in and through the particular struggles and questions with which we are confronted. It is a concrete universal. Read more »
The Soul-Haunted War Poet Wilfred Owen
by Thomas Larson
Among the youngest and most soul-haunted poets who endured trench warfare during the First World War was Wilfred Owen—a British lieutenant, who died in France in 1918, one week before the Armistice. He was twenty-five. Owen was raised by an evangelical Anglican mother with whom he was abnormally close. She placed her provincial son into the service of a vicar—visiting the poor and sick, which Owen loathed—until he escaped and went to France in 1913. There, his faith began to unravel, declaring to her that “I have murdered my false creed.” War afoot, he returned to England and enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles, a British military order, rising quickly to officer. His fighting ability was tragically competent.
In April 1917, assigned a squad at the front, a shell exploded two yards from his head and he was severely concussed. Sent home, confused and shaky, he recuperated by writing. As his biographers note, the war was good for his poetry. His front-forged verse found its edge. He wrote brutal elegies for the lads he commanded and saw shot and with whom, as spirits, he communed. Dozens of men dead, their “unburiable bodies” lay as “expressionless lumps.” Freed from the horrors of gas and bombardment, “their spirit drags no pack, / Their old wounds, save with cold, cannot more ache.”
Such men were, in part, entranced by a three-hundred-year tradition of English Poetry, from Spenser to Sassoon, in which British boys were enchanted by the Romantic concept of the soul—whose life and death was given to love, honor, faith, courage, even the finicky rewards of verse. Read more »
Monday, May 10, 2021
What is living and what is dead in the Enlightenment?
by Charlie Huenemann
Talking about “The Enlightenment”, when understood as something like “an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries” (thanks, Wikipedia), is like talking about Batman: do you mean classically heroic comic Batman? or the delightfully campy Adam West Batman? or the Batman of the movies, or of the gloomy Dark Knight era? The Batman one selects will determine what further questions need to be settled, and what scales of evaluation should be used.
Similarly, the Enlightenment can be seen as a cluster of philosophical values (placed upon individual liberty, human equality, political and scientific progress, and independence from religion), or the ways in which those values helped to form economic institutions (slavery of various forms, global capitalism, and free markets), or as a stand-in term for whatever deep injustice people think has become dominant over the last three centuries (global economic inequalities, political states favoring the wealthy, and enduring white privilege). It is often thought that the Enlightenment is somehow a single thing behind all these things, in the way some of us think there can be a steady “Batman” character behind his various depths and flavors.
These various flavors of “Enlightenment” are not wholly disconnected. For example, John Locke formulated a system of rights, contracts, and obligations that justified slavery on at least some occasions. The notion of actual human equality was interpreted by colonizers to mean potential human equality, which licensed the brutal process of more civilized nations forcing benighted savages into “more advanced conditions”. Scientific progress seemed to demand that we regard the natural world as a resource to be controlled and consumed, and soon our air became unbreathable. Freedom from religion came to mean that the only considerations that belong in the public sphere are measurements of material loss and gain; so “sin” and “virtue” need not apply.
And so, the criticism goes, the core ideals of Enlightenment lead to an alien and inhuman operating system that maximizes material well being for some, while annihilating any local traditions and values that are not readily uploaded into the system. Read more »
Of Mice and Moderna
by Mike O’Brien
I recently booked an appointment to be vaccinated. The provincial government here in Québec has opened up vaccine eligibility to people under 45 in 5-year tranches. 40-to-44-year-olds were able to log in to the health ministry’s web portal and book an appointment in a few minutes. A few days later, 35-to-39-year-olds were eligible, and few days after that, 30-to-34-year-olds, and so on and so on (to quote Zizek). I didn’t do much thinking about this decision. Within minutes of the portal opening I received two messages from friends, alerting me to hop on and register. The only consideration, besides getting the earliest booking possible, was which vaccine would be provided at which venues, and even that was a minor point.
Absent from my thinking was any question of whether or not I would get vaccinated at all. There is a growing concern about vaccine “hesitancy”, but this is still thankfully low in Canada relative to our (conservatively) 30% insane neighbours to the south. I have enough background in basic science and medicine to sort out the usual innumerate nonsense that underlies most resistance to vaccination. And while I do believe that there are nefarious, power-hungry cabals of conspirators perverting the workings of government, industry and public discourse, I don’t think that their schemes include putting mind-control chips into syringes. Why go to all that bother just to control people’s minds? That’s what media monopolies are for.
In a few years, we may discover that the vaccines have worrying side-effects. Or they may unexpectedly result in whiter teeth and clearer skin. From the limited vantage of the present moment, however, vaccination is an undeniably better bet for continued good health on the individual level, and so obviously beneficial to collective health that many sober minds might countenance making it obligatory. (I am on the fence about this. For context, note that I am also ambivalent about dispersing anti-mask protests with grapeshot. Happy 200th, Monsieur Bonaparte).
The lack of equivocation and hesitation in this decision bears a curious contrast with how I think about other areas of my health. Read more »
Perceptions
Sughra Raza. Untitled, April 2021.
Digital photograph.
Goodbye Covid, Hello Climate
by Thomas O’Dwyer
Complicated international agreements on managing the planet’s many human and natural resources may seem essentially modern, a consequence of the interdependence between nations that has been growing since the 19th century. Such accords are as necessary as sewage pipes that underpin healthy societies and just as boring. However, we possess copies of the first known international agreement signed in human affairs — and it is 3,300 years old. This treaty for peace and economic cooperation ended conflicts between the Egyptian and Hittite empires. Archaeologists found a copy of the treaty from each side, one in Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1828 and the other in Hittite cuneiform text in 1908. The treaty itself, signed by Pharaoh Ramses II and King Hattusilis, became a model of endurance in the fractious Middle East of the 13th century BCE (plus ça change). The formerly warring states remained friends and allies for nearly 100 years until Assyria invaded and destroyed the Hittite kingdom.
And now we move from possibly the first international agreement in human history to maybe the last — if it doesn’t work, and fast. In November, Scotland will host the most prominent international conference ever seen in Britain, a memorable event with an eminently forgettable title, the 26th Conference of the Parties — COP26. (The United Nations is well known for the tedium of its terminology). A conference of the parties is the supreme governing body of any international convention and includes representatives of all the states involved plus any observers. In UN-speak, a COP aims “to review the implementation of the convention and any other legal instruments that the COP adopts.” The COP descending on Glasgow in six months has the task of saving humanity, no less, for it has to advance the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Most will have been unaware that this conference of the parties has met (almost) every year since the first in 1995 in Berlin. The “parties” are 197 states and territories that signed on to the Climate Change Convention. And what, you may well ask, have these vast gatherings of blathering heads achieved since 1995? The answer, in good British slang, would be “Bugger all!” Read more »
America’s Stolen Sisters
by Mark Harvey
Three years ago while filling my truck with gas in western New Mexico on a cold fall evening, a young woman, barefoot and wearing nothing but a sundress, came up to me and asked if she could get a ride into the town of Gallup. Her bare feet and summer clothing in the biting air made me suspicious so I asked her a few questions. She told me she was traveling home to Taos after spending some time in the Pacific Northwest and that she had no money and had been hitchhiking for days. She was a little disheveled, startlingly beautiful, and her story didn’t make much sense. But she looked cold so I agreed to take her to Gallup, thinking I might be of some small help.
We got in my truck and started down the highway when she said, “Do you mind if we go back and get my boots?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“My boots, I left them on the road a little before the gas station.”
So we turned around and drove back a few hundred yards and sure enough, there was a pair of pink cowboy boots neatly placed on the side of the road. At that point—as if the signs weren’t strong enough already–I realized the woman might be suffering some psychological trauma and that her thinking was foggy. I asked her if she had some family to call in Taos, but she said she couldn’t get in touch with them.
I had just been shopping for groceries and the woman asked if she could have something to eat. I told her to eat anything she wanted from the bag. She devoured a bag of almonds and a couple of apples as if she hadn’t eaten for days. As we approached Gallup, I asked her again if there was someone she could call for help. She said there was no one and that she would be fine. Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
Dubravka Ugrešić’s FOX
by Andrea Scrima
“If the spirit of the fox enters a person, then that person’s tribe is accursed.”
1.
In his 1953 essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which postulates two quintessential moral dispositions at the heart of history’s main opposing ideologies, Isaiah Berlin divides the world’s influential writers into two categories of thought. Elaborating on Berlin’s dichotomy in her latest book Fox, which came out the spring of 2018 in English translation, Dubravka Ugrešić distinguishes between “those who write, engage, and think with recourse to a single idea (hedgehogs), and those who merge manifold heterogeneous experiences and ideas (foxes).” Clearly, the fox sounds more enticing; Berlin equates the hedgehog with authoritarianism and totalitarianism, while the fox is deemed liberal and tolerant. The only problem is the questionable reputation it’s earned among the world’s oldest mythologies, fairytales, and legends: whatever it might have going for it in the way of “pluralistic moral values,” the fox has long been accused of “cunning, betrayal, wile, sycophancy, deceit, mendacity, hypocrisy, duplicity, selfishness, sneakiness, arrogance, avarice, corruption, carnality, vindictiveness, and reclusiveness.” That’s quite an indictment—and all the more reason for Ugrešić to select the wily animal as patron saint of her new book.
Fox is subtle, virtuosic, and jarring; it’s also mordantly funny. In light-footed, deceptively playful detours and digressions, the book skips from Stalinist Russia to an American road trip with the Nabokovs, academic conferences and literary festivals to the largely untold story of the Far-East diaspora of persecuted Russian intellectuals on the eve of World War II. Fox is a novel, but its formal structure poses a challenge; some chapters read as essays, some as autonomous short stories, and while many recurrent threads reveal themselves upon closer inspection and reflection, it requires attention to unravel the author’s narrative strategy. Read more »
Is Tesla the Future of the Auto Industry?
by Fabio Tollon
Elon Musk. Either you love him or you love to hate him. He is glorified by some as a demi-god who will lead humanity to the stars (because if it’s one thing we need is more planets to plunder) and vilified by others as a Silicon Valley hack who is as hypocritical as he is wealthy (very). When one is confronted by such contradictory and binary views the natural intuition is to take a step back and assess the available evidence. Usually this leads to a more nuanced understanding of the subject matter, often resulting in a less binary, and somewhat more coherent narrative. Usually.
The idea to write something about Musk was the result of the reality bending adventure that was Edward Niedermeyer’s Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors.
Let us take a look at the basics. Musk is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made a fortune by helping to found PayPal. Using the capital gained from this venture, he invested $30 million into Tesla Motors, and became chairmen of its board of directors in 2004. He also eventually ousted the founders of the company Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. He is currently CEO of Tesla, Inc. (the name was officially changed from Tesla Motors to Tesla in 2017) and is in regular competition with human rights champion Jeff Bezos for the glamorous title of “world’s most successful hoarder of capital”. I don’t want to spend too much time on the psychology of Elon Musk, as Nathan Robinson has already done a fine job in this regard. Rather, I want to focus on how Tesla is not the market disrupting company many think it is. Here I will be concerned with the mismatch between Silicon Valley’s software driven innovation versus the kind of innovation that exists in the auto industry. Read more »
Poetry in Translation
Son, I Again Dreamt About You Last Night
A version after Iqbal
I couldn’t find the road in the dark,
my every hair bristled
but I dared myself and walked on,
saw boys swaying in single file,
each holding a Diya lamp in his hand,
their clothes glowed like emeralds—
God only knew where they were going. . .
I saw you at the end of the line,
your Diya unlit. “Heartbeat of my heart,”
I said, “where are you going after abandoning
me? All day I thread my tears into a necklace.
“Don’t weep for me,” you said, “don’t yearn
for me there is no gain in it for me —”
then you fell silent for a moment
looked at your Diya again, and spoke
“Mother,
do you know what happened? Your tears
of sorrow dowsed it.”
***
By Rafiq Kathwari. His new collection of poems “My Mother’s Scribe” (Yoda Press) is available here and here.
My Briefest of Musical Careers
by Philip Graham
I am a writer, not a musician. I play no instrument, and I confine my singing to the
car when driving alone. Yet my momentary career as a musical performer—exceedingly brief as it may have been—enjoyed a spotlight rarely offered to others.
Public acclaim is simply the last step in a long fraught journey. Many years ago a friend, whose first novel had begun climbing the bestseller lists, privately complained to me that book reviewers and journalists had dubbed her an “overnight success.” As she rightly pointed out, there is nothing “overnight” about writing a novel.
My unlikely musical debut was the end result of a long and circuitous path, a path that closely tracked with my love of minimalist music. While there are many possible ways to tell this story, a good place to start would be my days as an eager undergraduate, and my attendance at an early performance of Steve Reich’s Four Organs at New York’s Shakespeare Public Theater in the fall of 1971. Read more »
Monday Photo
Bought a friend a birthday drink this past Friday at an outdoor café at the Domplatz in Brixen, South Tyrol. I thought it looked nice in the late-afternoon sun. You can probably use your Eratosthenes-like skills to figure out exactly what time it was.
Summers with my transistor
by Carol A Westbrook
In the summer of 1961, my dad gave me a little transistor radio. My older sister, Lynn, showed me how to tune it to WLS and WCFL, the stations that played music that all the teens listened to. They had the best Chicago DJ’s: Dick Biondi and Larry Lujack, who wise-cracked and took calls. And she showed me how to listen to it under the pillow at night. (Click on the song names to listen to the music.)
One night I heard a song, “The Mountains High” that stuck with me all my life. As a top 40s hit, it was played a lot, until its ratings fell and it disappeared from the air. It’s about a couple who are separated by an impassible mountain. “Don’t you give up, don’t you cry, don’t you give up ‘till you reach the other side…” they sang. This song captured all the angst of a preteen, longing for travel, adventure, and especially love. And love was so unattainable to a 7th grade girl, for the simple reason that the 7th grade boys didn’t care much about girls–yet.
That was the summer of 1961. I was about to enter 7th grade, and I was growing up fast. I was no longer “just a kid down the block.” I was a young woman. My brother threw me off his sandlot baseball team because they had a “no dames” policy, and they finally noticed I was a girl. But I didn’t mind; I had other things to do. I hung with my girlfriends. We talked about boys. We read teen magazines to see the latest styles. We tried on makeup and new hairstyles. We had pajama parties, where we stayed up all night, listening to the top 40 hits on late-night radio. We watched American Bandstand, where a few lucky teenagers got to be on television, dancing to the latest songs played by Dick Clark, the DJ. There was always a popular band playing their top hit, too. How we envied those kids! We paid careful attention to their clothes, hair and their dancing, trying to emulate it. Read more »
Monday, May 3, 2021
The Projected Mind: What Is It Like To Be Hubert?
by Jochen Szangolies
Meet Hubert. For going on ten years now, Hubert has shared a living space with my wife and me. He’s a generally cheerful fellow, optimistic to a fault, occasionally prone to a little mischief; in fact, my wife, upon seeing the picture, remarked that he looked inordinately well-behaved. He’s fond of chocolate and watching TV, which may be the reason why his chief dwelling place is our couch, where most of the TV-watching and chocolate-eating transpires. He also likes to dance, is curious, but sometimes gets overwhelmed by his own enthusiasm.
Of course, you might want to object: Hubert is neither of these things. He doesn’t genuinely like anything, he doesn’t have any desire for chocolate, he can’t dance, much less enjoy doing so. Hubert, indeed, is afflicted by a grave handicap: he isn’t real. He can only like what I claim he likes; he only dances if I (or my wife) animate him; he can’t really eat chocolate, or watch TV. But Hubert is an intrepid, indomitable spirit: he won’t let such a minor setback as his own non-existence stop him from having a good time.
And indeed, the matter, once considered, is not necessarily that simple. Hubert’s beliefs and desires are not my beliefs and desires: I don’t always like the same shows, and I’m not much for dancing (although I confess we’re well-aligned in our fondness of chocolate). The question is, then, whom these beliefs and desires belong to. Are they pretend-beliefs, beliefs falsely attributed? Are they beliefs without a believer? Or, for a more radical option, does the existence of these beliefs imply the existence of some entity holding them? Read more »
Surveillance Capitalism: How Big Tech went Rogue
by Martin Butler
Shoshona Zuboff’s “The age of Surveillance Capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of Power” gives an impressive and comprehensive account of how the big tech companies gained their economic dominance, and why this is a problem.[1] We hear much about how these companies fail to pay their fair share of taxes, how they have become monopolies, and how they enable online abuse.[2] Zuboff’s concerns, however, are with a less obvious problem but one that is perhaps more insidious.
The main companies she has in mind are Google and Facebook, although the methods they have discovered are, she claims, spreading throughout the capitalist economy and giving rise to a new form of capitalism altogether, which she identifies as surveillance capitalism. This, she argues, is something so different from anything we have experienced before that we are completely unprepared to deal with it, and it has arisen so quickly and come to dominate so much about our lives that we are still like rabbits caught in the head-lights. Zuboff reminds us of a pivotal truth, easily forgotten, that despite the disingenuously user-friendly message they assiduously promote, these two companies are in essence platforms for advertising and this more than anything else determines what they do. Read more »