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).
unlikely thing
shaped like a dish
saucer moonspan wide in nightsky
laden with milk for a cat
still and perfectly crisp
who’s ever less than that
and ever more than this
sun up moon scats
have you noticed that in a miraculous way
fully backed by science, truth, even in the dark,
will always stare you down regardless
of how you may hate a fact?
Jim Culleny
4/1/15
by N. Gabriel Martin
Is it still possible today, in the age of widespread and outlandish conspiracy theories, algorithmically induced filter-bubbles, and bullshitting demagogues, a generation after the US Republican party adopted a strategy of unprincipled obstructionism to anything that their democratic counterparts proposed, to believe that reason has a place in politics? When we are so polarised that finding any relevant common ground with our opponents at all is a far-fetched notion, it seems naive to think that it is still possible to move politics by making good arguments. If that were true, then there would be nothing more to politics than might making right. However, pessimism about political reason is only partially justified. While our ability to resolve political disagreements using reason is in crisis, other aspects of public debate are more vital than they have been in generations.
In the aftermath of the breakdown of the political consensus that dominated the broadcast era and persisted for a while into the internet age it is hard to be credulous about resolving disagreement by appealing to opponents’ reason. It’s not possible today, as it once was, to appeal to a common ground of faith in political and cultural institutions in order to bring opponents over to one’s side. The fragmentation and polarisation of the media landscape, contests over the validity of governmental institutions (such as the courts or elections) previously widely considered neutral, and denial of the credibility of experts have left us without much common ground. That’s true, even though we still share many beliefs and values. Politicians and commentators from across the political spectrum talk about the same values, such as democracy, freedom, and life, but on their own, without shared institutions to provide a common understanding of what threatens and what nurtures those values, shared values themselves are too hollow to help us resolve conflicts. The current battle over the legitimacy of the election shows how defence of a grand and nebulous value like democracy can be claimed by either side. Without trust in the expertise and neutrality of institutions, it is impossible for most of us to determine which purported threats to democracy are real and which are fake. Read more »
by Charlie Huenemann
H. G. Wells’ novella, The Time Machine, traces the evolutionary results of a severely unequal society. The Traveller journeys not just to the year 2000 or 5000, but all the way to the year 802,701, where he witnesses the long-term evolutionary consequences of Victorian inequality.
The human race has evolved into two distinct species. The first one we encounter is the Eloi, a population of large-eyed and fair-haired children who are loving and gentle, but otherwise pretty much useless. They flit from distraction to distraction and feed upon juicy fruits that fall from the trees. “I never met people more indolent or more easily fatigued,” observes the Traveller. “A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was their lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of astonishment, like children, but, like children they would soon stop examining me, and wander away after some other toy.”
The Traveller is an adventurous explorer in the mold of Richard Francis Burton or Henry Walter Bates, so he is eager to begin theorizing about how the Eloi came to such a state. He is struck by the fact that the Eloi are nearly androgynous, and he thinks that both this fact and their docility must have resulted from a life in which there is no need for struggle. Read more »
by Peter Wells
“A man has been arrested in connection with the toppling of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston. A bronze memorial to the 17th Century slave merchant was torn down in Bristol during a Black Lives Matter protest on 7 June and was dumped in the harbour” (BBC, 1 July 2020).
Here is a poem by the current Poet Laureate of the UK, Simon Armitage. It takes the form of a ‘eulogy’ upon an imaginary man of a previous generation. As in a funeral, it lists the ‘achievements’ of the deceased, but includes, unlike a normal funeral oration, his failures:
And if it snowed and snow covered the drive
he took a spade and tossed it to one side.
And always tucked his daughter up at night
And slippered* her the one time that she lied. [hit her with a slipper]
And every week he tipped up* half his wage. [handed over]
And what he didn’t spend each week he saved.
And praised his wife for every meal she made.
And once, for laughing, punched her in the face.
And for his mum he hired a private nurse.
And every Sunday taxied her to church.
And he blubbed* when she went from bad to worse. [sobbed]
And twice he lifted ten quid* from her purse. [stole £10]
Here’s how they rated* him when they looked back: [evaluated]
sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.
To summarise, for most of his life this nameless man was a model householder, father, husband and son, but he erred at least four times – once by spanking his daughter, once by punching his wife, and twice by stealing from his mother. In English lessons for 16-year-olds in the 90s this poem created an interesting polarisation. Half the class (mainly the boys) thought the man was basically OK, whereas the other half (mainly the girls) thought he was a monster – for, after all, he was a child-abuser, a wife-beater, and a thief (and all his victims were female).
In other words, all the students (not just the girls) fell into the trap set by Armitage, by allowing one side of the man’s story to trump the other. The boys (wrongly) insisted that his misdeeds were minor and irrelevant, considering his generally blameless life, whereas the girls, equally wrongly, thought that the four bad actions nullified all his good deeds. This clever little poem neatly illustrates the difficulty of judging (‘rating’) people, even when they are fictitious. We should not ‘judge’ people, not just because Jesus is said to have forbidden it (Matthew 7.1), but because it is wrong in principle and impossible in practice.
We can only judge actions. Read more »
by Brooks Riley
by Thomas O’Dwyer
The Nobel Prize season is almost upon us and writers who cover the events are poised as usual to see if the awards ride in on any juicy scandals. In particular, we’re watching you, Peace and Literature. This pandemic year’s winners will have no glitter to adorn their prizes, no lavish dinners, no rubbing shoulders with royalty. Of all the Nobel Prizes, Literature has been the most battered in the 120 years of their existence. The very first prize in 1901 was roundly criticised. It went to a now-forgotten French poet, Sully Prudhomme, instead of to the literary world’s favourite candidate, Leo Tolstoy. And so it has continued, with annual winners variously denounced as too Swedish (seven of them), too obscure, too European, too male (only 15 women out of 101 awards), too white, too unworthy, too shallow (sorry, Bob Dylan). The Nobel Committee itself collapsed in 2018 and awarded no prize after an internal sex and finance scandal. The list of controversies over ignored worthy authors is itself book-length — among them were Henrik Ibsen, Émile Zola, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Graham Green, Robert Graves.
One of the more offensive rejections by the Nobel Committee was in 1962 when Lawrence Durrell was dismissed in favour of John Steinbeck. This was “one of the Academy’s biggest mistakes” wrote one Swedish newspaper. On the day of the award, a critic asked Steinbeck if he deserved it. He replied, “Frankly, no.” Swedish journalist Kaj Schueler in 2013 revealed that Durrell was not chosen because “they did not think that The Alexandria Quartet was enough, so they decided to keep him under observation for the future”. Read more »
by Andrea Scrima
The stories in Seiobo There Below, if they can be called stories, begin with a bird, a snow-white heron that stands motionless in the shallow waters of the Kamo River in Kyoto with the world whirling noisily around it. Like the center of a vortex, the eye in a storm of unceasing, clamorous activity, it holds its curved neck still, impervious to the cars and buses and bicycles rushing past on the surrounding banks, an embodiment of grace and fortitude of concentration as it spies the water below and waits for its prey. We’ve only just begun reading this collection, and already László Krasznahorkai’s haunting prose has submerged us in the great panta rhei of life—Heraclitus’s aphorism that everything flows in a state of continuous change.
But the chapters of Seiobo There Below are not really independent stories; rather, they form a precisely composed sequence of illuminated moments that are interconnected in many complex ways. Of these, “Kamo-Hunter” is the only one that does not describe a process of artistic creation, but a bird’s (and by implication the narrator’s) power of focus, the heightened state of awareness necessary to stem itself against the wind and resist the pull of the current to remain perfectly still until the moment arrives to snatch up its prey. And suddenly it’s less a matter of the ceaseless movement of all things, but of absolute composure, a deepest possible being in the present tense, a kind of timelessness in which the moment and eternity conjoin to create a brief flash of transcendence. It is about “one time, immeasurable in its passing, and yet beyond all doubt extant, one time proceeding neither forward nor backwards, but just swirling and moving nowhere.” This, in short, is the nature of the concentration required to create art—and what makes “Kamo-Hunter” such a cogent opening to this novel. Read more »
The two photos show rows of the same apple orchard in the hills above Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. The top photo showing the apple blossoms was taken in late April, 2020, while the bottom one is from late September. The apples will be picked any day now.
by Callum Watts
Do identity politics and intersectionality clash with the idea of universal principles? There seems to be a rift emerging in left wing politics around precisely this point. On the one hand various organised identity groups are making it increasingly difficult to ignore the real effects of institutionalised prejudice on their lives. It seems like it’s only through the elevation of particular identities that these interests will be protected, and certain progressive goals reached. These movements reproach, often correctly in my view, the champions of universal rights and freedom as being coded as white, cis, able bodied and male. On the other hand there is a real concern that the elevation of particular identities prevents solidarity between different groups who have otherwise shared interests. This seems to be happening top down as politicians seek to exacerbate these identity markers to consolidate their supporters, and also bottom up as individuals see solidarity as being limited to others who belong to their own perceived identity groups.
It’s worth noting that these two views do not logically contradict each other. It is possible that identity based organising is key to raising the visibility of and guaranteeing rights for certain groups, whilst it also being true that doing this can inflame tensions between different groups and obscure shared interests. Whilst this is to be expected in the broader culture war between left and right, in progressive left circles this division is causing both soul searching, and increasingly, acrimony. There appears to be a reaction against identity politics coming from both the far left and the centre left. If we can ignore the concern trolling (of which there is undoubtedly a lot), the centre left seems to worry about losing the centre ground to a right wing movement that is co-opting the language of universal rights. From the far left we see the worry that identity politics undermines the possibility of a class politics which aims at redistribution. Read more »
by Carol A Westbrook
The smoke of a thousand campfires… That’s what you’d find 600 years ago in the Wyoming Valley of Northeastern Pennsylvania, now the site of Wilkes-Barre and a couple of dozen smaller cities and towns. At the time Columbus visited America, the First People were comfortably settled in this area, which was a permanent home for many tribes, and a winter home for others. The name of this beautiful valley, Wyoming, comes from the Lenape name meaning “at the big flat river.” The big flat river referred to was the Susquehanna, which itself is named for the Susquehannock Indians, who lived along its banks. The Susquehanna is the longest non-navigable river in the US, providing little in the way of commerce and transportation for anything but small boats and canoes.
Don’t get the idea that it was all peace and harmony in the valley. There was friction among the various tribes of Indians, as incoming colonists of the 1700’s competed for resources, while displaced East Coast tribes who were moving in to the area threatened others. The migrating East Coast tribes were primarily Algonquin: Lenape, Delaware, Mahican, Shawnee, and Mohican; they, in turn, displaced the Susquehannock and Nanticoke Indians, peaceful tribes who lived quietly along the river.
And it wasn’t just the native tribes who were threatened. There was also conflict between settlers, as those from Connecticut (Yankees) fought those from Pennsylvania (Pennamites) for land each felt belonged to them, having been included in each colony’s original charter, due to oversight and inadequate surveying. These little-known conflicts, known as the Yankee-Pennamite Wars, were easily as bloody as any of the Indian battles. Fighting continued into the Revolution, though surprisingly both sides agreed to a truce so they could unite to fight the British. Even more surprising is that the conflicts were resolved after the resolution in the courts of law in the new United States of America, without a further drop of bloodshed. Among the few historic markers I found were two markers along the Susquehanna River marking the sites of the Connecticut and Pennsylvania fort, and they are only one quarter of a mile apart! Read more »
by Rafiq Kathwari
“Battle of Algiers”, a classic 1966 film directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, seized my imagination and of my classmates as well when it was shown three years later at the Palladium in Srinagar. A teenager wearing bell-bottoms, dancing the twist, I was a Senior at Sri Pratap College, named after Maharajah Pratap Singh, a Hindu Dogra ruler of Muslim majority Kashmir.
Would I fight to make Kashmir free? A classmate asked few days later when we met at the Premier Coffee House on Residency Road, the film fresh on our minds. Of course, I said, my heart leaping. He unfolded a poster:
‘Bear Arms Against a Sea of Troubles’
“This is our manifesto,” he said. I read on
‘Aims & Objectives: Demolish Bunkers * Occupy the Radio Station * Disrupt the Telephone Exchange *Ambush Convoys * Create a Pyramid of Freedom Fighters’
I had questions: how many boys in the group, who was our leader, where would we get arms, when will we act? “Don’t ask,” my classmate said, raising his arms. “Man proposes. Allah disposes.” I read on:
‘Our cause is freedom. India promised us a plebiscite to determine our own future, but broke her promise. She has jailed our leader, the “Lion of Kashmir,” because he roared for freedom. To the extent India denies us our birthright to that extent India subverts its own democracy.’
This was fantastic stuff. I was impressionable. If the Algerians could do it so could Kashmiris.
I signed the poster with a flourish. The coffee tasted sweeter than usual.
A week later, my teenage flirtation landed me in Central Jail where I met seven classmates who had also signed the manifesto. We later learnt that one poster had been brought to the office of the college principal, who had his own sword to sharpen, and he rang the police. Read more »
by Alexander C. Kafka
The Canadian Cronenbergs are body-horror royalty, and while father David has veered toward more straightforward dramatic fare, his earlier career is echoed uncannily by son Brandon.
No one should screen a Cronenberg film expecting to be merely entertained but rather provoked, intrigued, seduced, disgusted, and possibly outraged, occasionally all at the same time. With two features to his credit, Brandon, in his early 40s, is an interesting study in influence. He tackles societal and scientific concepts redolent of his father’s mid-career work but with the blood lust of Dad’s early films.
Consider Brandon’s first feature, 2012’s Antiviral, in which die-hard fans seek to be injected with the viruses afflicting the celebrities they worship. On one hand, the mechanics of that premise hark back to David’s parasitic Shivers (1975) and viral Rabid (1977), but the concept and pacing also nod to 1996’s celebrity-gore Crash.
Both writer-directors uneasily balance an almost gleeful shock-scoring sadism with a futuristic empathy, but Brandon’s equation so far still leans heavily toward the sadistic, and it will be interesting to see whether age counters or at least shades that aesthetic, as in David’s case, or whether it will crystallize it into a more polished heartlessness. Read more »
by Joseph Shieber
I remember as a child watching the made-for-tv movie Gideon’s Trumpet, based on the Anthony Lewis book of the same name about the Gideon v. Wainright (1963) Supreme Court decision that cemented the right to legal representation for criminal defendants. At the time, I was inspired by the idea that the Supreme Court was an arena that meted out justice as a reward for the rightness of one’s arguments — even if the person making those arguments was an untutored prison inmate.
That made-for-tv movie appeared in 1980. Within just a few years, that sort of adulatory attention to the Supreme Court and its role in guaranteeing civil liberties would seem quaint.
In a recent piece in The Bulwark, Adam J. White gives a representative account of the Republican perspective on what happened next:
Over three decades, Democratic Senators ratcheted up the stakes at every turn, with Republicans almost always playing catch-up. In 1987, barely one year after the Senate confirmed Antonin Scalia’s appointment to the Court with a 98-0 vote, Senator Kennedy and his colleagues blindsided the Reagan administration with an unprecedented declaration of total war against Robert Bork. Even after Bork, and the failed war on Clarence Thomas, Senate Republicans did not react in kind: they joined Senate Democrats in confirming Ruth Bader Ginsburg 96–3, and Stephen Breyer 87–9. Senate Republicans would not begin to return fire on Democratic nominations to the Supreme Court until 2009, after the heated Roberts and Alito hearings.
Whether White’s account is the result of ignorance or selective memory for rhetorical effect, the only way that the recent lack of comity over presidential Supreme Court nominations could even conceivably be charged to the Democrats is if we limit our historical survey to the past three decades.
God gave names to all the animals,
in the beginning, in the beginning
…………………….….. —Bob Dylan
to be called anything,
to be called, Jim, for instance,
is to be tagged for life
unless you choose otherwise
and pull a new name from a hat;
a new you —say, Ed, which would amount
to a tangle of official undoing
as bureaucrats mined reams of documents
to remake an identity with digital white-out
in a shitstorm of confusion to fashion a new you
when it would be more direct,
though sweatingly more difficult
(wrenching perhaps, perhaps
impossible) to turn your heart and head
inside out and scour what is feckless,
cramped, and sour into gleaming radiance
as when you slid new into the world
so that a new name would be redundant
and need never to be said —or
start young
Jim Culleny
9/16/20
by Emrys Westacott
Whether or not a certain line of work is shameful or honorable is culturally relative, varying greatly between places and over time. Farmers, soldiers, actors, dentists, prostitutes, pirates and priests have all been respected or despised in some society or other. There are numerous reasons why certain kinds of work have been looked down on. Subjecting oneself to the will of another; doing tasks that are considered inappropriate given one’s sex, race, age, or class; doing work that is unpopular (tax collector); or deemed immoral (prostitution), or viewed as worthless (what David Graeber labelled “bullshit jobs”), or which are just very poorly paid–all these could be reasons why a kind of work is despised, even by those who do it. One of the oldest prejudices though, at least among the upper classes in many societies, is against manual labour.
The word “manual” derives from manus, Latin for “hand,” and even in English the linguistic connection between physical labor and “hand” persists: we still speak of “farmhands” or “factory hands.” But the concept of manual labor extends to any kind of work that requires bodily strength, or where the physical aspect of the activity is thought to greatly outweigh the cerebral. This sort of work has been looked down on by social elites in many societies from time immemorial. Some reasons for this are fairly obvious. Manual labor is often dirty, unhealthy, exhausting and unpleasant; much of it is also unskilled, tedious, and poorly paid. These are all seen as good reasons for avoiding it if possible, at least as a way to make a living. So it is generally assumed (at least by the privileged few who don’t have to do it) that those who spend their days engaged in work of this kind probably have little choice: they must be either slaves, or serfs, or people of limited ability who are unable to find a better way to put food on the table. And even if they start out with a capacity for “higher things”–like delicate feelings, or moral virtue– long hours of menial drudgery will crush it out of them. Read more »
by Jochen Szangolies
Aristotle characterized humans as zoon logon echon, the rational animal. In general, we like to believe that our opinions are formed through reason—that we have arrived at them by means of a process of weighing the alternatives, selecting that which we deem most appropriate. This implies a certain mutual intelligibility—I might not share your opinion, but I should be able to appreciate why you hold it.
Yet, with—it seems—increasing frequency, we find ourselves baffled by others’ opinions. Who could, in this day and age, earnestly believe that the Earth is flat? How can a president hold a nearly steady approval rating of over 40%, despite an unprecedented record of lies, scandals, and incompetence?
One might thus conclude that Aristotle somewhat overstated his case. But the issue is more complex: those holding odd beliefs are not typically less intelligent. An answer may be found in the way modern communication media have restructured society, leading to the process of opinion-formation no longer chiefly taking place at the individual, but at the collective level, largely unmoored from concerns of factuality and appropriateness. This is best understood by studying the physics of phase transitions. Read more »
by Jackson Arn
You are waiting for me to do something.
I can tell because your eyes have the look cheap mirrors get
when the edges rust and curl and there is nothing
to do but throw them out. You’re powerless,
yes, but at least not alone, if that makes
it better. In fact your rusted tilt
is kind of sexy in the stray antlered way
I’d thought improper, but I need to think more.
As soon as I can hear my voice I’ll use it
to make a paragraph, a soft one
to rest on, or a shield. That is my
defense, like spitting or a blowfish-ball—
can you blame me? The house was an oven
that night. Guests were planted
around each vase, yellow jackets for yellow flowers.
I thought I saw your eyes reply, so I pushed
until you heard the scenery collapse, and me.
And finding you here now,
the delay is tasteful and not too ironic.
Regret is for people who haven’t found a place
for everything—did you take me
for one of them? Me? My thighs are swollen
with the hibernation, my back is a red
canyon of dust and grooves
remembered to the ground that nursed me, and still
we repel daintily, like ruined magnets
whose squirming is a kind of family.
Even when you go away you follow me.
Your going’s written upside-down on me,
predictably, which is a type of comfort. I will stagger
through roped-off run-down hallways
I’ll bluff my way through mirrors
and find graffiti-less brick walls,
and enjoy the possibilities: number one,
somewhere you’re seeing the same
and building something clever with it,
or plain in the gruff Shaker way
I never understood—building, anyway,
with the same junk I’ve got. And two,
you never went back, never climbed through
the frame, never remembered anything, or remembered
you’d forgotten a thing that weighed something,
and are still waiting for me to do something.
by Eric Miller
1.
My grandmother’s last dwelling smelled especially of aerosol hairspray and black currant preserves, a pair of odours that could epitomize, in a pinch, the domestic fragrance of provincial Ontario in the twentieth century. Toward the end of her independent life, she lived in a little box, a suburban tract house, and there I often sat plying a pencil on newsprint sheets cheap enough they threatened to flake and almost to burn up under my hands, so responsive was their yellow to the acidifying suggestion of time. Bending at her table, holding a ruler in hands revealed by this act to be minutely tremulous, I drew legions of little boxes—myself shut, the whole while, inside her own mere carton of a house. My diagrams, however, were simpler far than the design of her bungalow, for—remotely affected by some concept of modern architecture—I was going through a siege of trying to draw cubes and other parallelepipeds. I aimed for perspectival accuracy, exercised persuasively from many vantages on an attractive visual problem: the hexahedron. It happened the paper tore under the stiff pink frustration of an ageing eraser, or (after I had pared my implement’s tip) the lance-like point of sharpened graphite poked right through and broke on the grain of the tabletop. Now and then, a tear smudged my straight lines: a humble mammal dab, expressed helpless from brim glands to blur the incorruptible angles.
2.
In labouring thus over these basic solids, I must have had in mind the precedent of a particular architect. Although at last my grandmother’s house and my ideal drawings embodied the same repertoire of forms, I sought after a great elegance missing from her address. It was surely Mies van der Rohe, evangel of glass and the perpendicular, who inspired me, since his structures, for all their glistening giganticism, stood within range of even my representational ability. In fact, the new Toronto-Dominion Centre, downtown, provided a model. Fifty-six storeys tall! Just think, what is a Mies van der Rohe building?
It is a box.
A box of what?
Of windows, and therefore of light.
But does the box contain anything else?
According to its herald and conceiver, it is supposed to exemplify, not to contain, the truth. Read more »
by Brooks Riley
