by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

One remarkable redeeming feature of my dingy neighborhood in Kolkata was that within half a mile or so there was my historically distinctive school, and across the street from there was Presidency College, one of the very best undergraduate colleges in India at that time (my school and that College were actually part of the same institution for the first 37 years until 1854), adjacent was an intellectually vibrant coffeehouse, and the whole surrounding area had the largest book district of India—and as I grew up I made full use of all of these.

College life was a big and refreshing change for me in many ways. There was a lot of independence and opportunity to think in new ways and participate in a great deal of vigorous discussion in a whole range of discourse, including radical thoughts and risqué topics. Interaction with so many bright young minds all around was scintillating. Also, the proximity of so many women (this was my first experience of a co-educational institution) added to the excitement. There was, of course, a lot of one-upmanship, intellectual pretensions, and showing-off. But in general the discussion both in college, and in the coffeehouse (which was really an extension of the college) usually rose above all that. There were invidious class distinctions among students, many of them coming from far richer households than mine, thus with more access to not just material goods—they were much less shabbily dressed than I was–but cultural artifacts and networks and the inevitable name-dropping. But soon I figured out that I was not any less well-read and politically less aware or informed than some of the rich or culturally snobbish students, and that, to my giddy delight, even some women were prepared to listen to what I had to say. Slowly I developed an intellectual confidence to overcome some, though clearly not all, of the class barriers. Read more »

by Omar Baig 

On October 23rd 2020, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum reopened their flagship, Frank Lloyd Wright designed building on NYC’s iconic Museum Mile at 25% capacity and expanded to 50% by April 27th, 2021. Associate Curator, Ashley James selected pieces from Guggenheim’s permanent collection: by 13 contemporary artists, like Carrie Mae Weems, Carlos Motto, and Sable Elyse Smith, for Off The Record (Apr 2—Sept 27, 2021). This exhibition investigates “the power dynamics obscured by official documentation” and playfully resists the so-called objectivity of official records that preserve “truth” by what remains excluded or “off” the record. Off The Record marks James’ first group exhibition since guest curating Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (Sept 14–Feb 3, 2019) for the Brooklyn Museum.

Unlike her previous exhibit, James chose not to explicitly market Off The Record as a collection show of African American (or female) artists; despite 9 out of its 13 artists identifying as Black (and 10 as women). Glenn Ligon’s Prisoner of Love #1-3 (1991) series, in particular, epitomizes Off The Record’s point of view on race: by repeatedly stenciling the binary statement “We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.” French writer Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love (1986) introduced the phrase, which Ligon adapted and increasingly overlapped across three, 6.5 by 2.5 feet, linen canvases. The black text on white-canvas, its wall text states, “serve as a clear, though not an exclusive, reference to race and other constructs; yet the blurring of the words effectively relieves these polarities of their impact.”  Read more »

Weathering of sign at the Brixen train station in the South Tyrol inadvertently shows the mountain skyline views surrounding the city. A fast train passes by in the background. Photo taken in May of this year.

by Michael Liss

It entered the bloodstream somewhere in Asia in the 1340s, killing ruthlessly and abundantly there—in India, Asia Minor, Persia, Syria, and Egypt. Trading routes, including the legendary Silk Road, were its primary arteries.

In 1347, it penetrated Europe on 12 ships from the Black Sea, destination Messina in Sicily. The flotilla brought goods, vermin, and hundreds of dead and dying sailors, all in gruesome condition.

The local authorities, realizing this was beyond the control of human hands, ordered the ships to leave, but this first instinctive public health measure was too little, too late. The ship’s deadly cargo “unloaded itself” and relentlessly found more victims.

Soon, horrifying stories came from other ports, first Marseilles and Tunis, then other major trading cities. Florence and Rome, Paris and Lyon, and then, by 1348, hopping the Channel to London. From Italy, it also crossed the Alps into Switzerland and crept into Hungary. A year later, it spread to Picardy, Flanders, and Belgium. From England, it headed North to Scotland and Ireland. Eventually, almost all of Europe was engulfed, with the Black Death killing indiscriminately, if erratically.

There was an almost mystical nature to all this. The enemy could not be seen, yet was hiding in plain sight. What we know now is that the bacillus that causes the Black Death is carried in rats and fleas, and in other humans. But rats and fleas were everywhere people lived, and they were particularly prevalent on ships, where supplies (human and otherwise) offered a consistent food source.

The easy person-to-person transmissibility added both danger and tremendous sadness. Trying to sooth a tortured loved one in the last throes was often a self-imposed death sentence. Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

There are few people who spend as much time writing, thinking, and talking about the value of the work they do than intellectuals. Even as some noted intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Thomas Sowell bristle at the term intellectual to describe who they are and what they do, they among many other self-described or self-denied intellectuals have taken up significant time and space writing and talking about the roles and responsibilities of intellectuals. The bibliography of work about the roles and responsibilities of intellectuals by intellectuals is impressive and too long to review here. Suffice it to say that from the dissident side of the intellectual coin, the work of Antonio Gramsci, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, Henry Giroux, James Baldwin, C. Wright Mills, Doug Kellner, Stanley Aronowitz, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Michel Foucault, Ellen Willis, Eddie Glaude, and Cornel West represent some of the best and most provocative ideas and examples to date about the roles and responsibilities of intellectuals in modern times. Out of these conversations comes more exacting representations of the intellectual based on the kind of work she or he does. From Pierre Bourdieu comes the idea of the Collective Intellectual. From Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux we get the Transformative, Critical, and Accommodating Intellectual. Doug Kellner gives us the Postmodern Intellectual. Most famously, Antonio Gramsci offered up the Organic, Traditional and Hegemonic Intellectual. From Noam Chomsky, we get a simple dichotomy between Dissident Intellectuals vs. Commissar Intellectuals. Michel Foucault identified Specific Intellectuals. And then there is the beloved Public Intellectual. There is also a significant body of work specific to the role of Black Intellectuals.

From the hegemonic side of the intellectual coin, the work of Richard Hofstadter, David Horowitz, Bill Bennett, Thomas Sowell, William F. Buckley, and Heather Mac Donald represent the work of intellectuals who, not surprisingly, deny or minimize the importance of their role in manufacturing a form of common sense that rationalizes the status quo of culture, power and knowledge. Their attacks on dissident intellectuals distracts from their own role as hegemonic intellectuals. Their attacks are not on intellectual work per se but on dissident intellectual work that exposes how various ideologies of official power naturalize oppression, violence, poverty, sexual harassment, white supremacy, and other social modalities of brutality and injustice. The primary project of hegemonic intellectuals, in addition to producing intellectual work in the service of established ideological, cultural, educational, and/or military power, is to attack dissident intellectual work and the intellectuals that produce it. Read more »

Sacrificial Goat

everything unknown snaps to light
upon awakening

in bed, supine, sun-given day ignites a fire,
blankets burn, mind’s the filament of a lamp
upon awakening

stupidity tumbles down a sheer of chance,
small thoughts plunge, they start an avalanche,
the ground gives way beneath our feet
upon awakening

light ricochets from every wall, blind see, deaf hear,
motion stills, minutiae interlock
upon awakening

east and west do not collide, they mesh
upon awakening

bias stands upon its head draining deadliness,
its river Cocytus circles a sewer
upon awakening

states recede, decline, abjure,
the babble of all the contradictory words of God unite
upon awakening

they steep in a cauldron of love, the clock’s a joke
upon awakening

doors swing wide though no one knocks,
each ajar as each unlocks
upon awakening

windows blast from jambs
upon awakening

lions lie with lambs, every noise becomes a glory note
upon awakening

every weight begins to float, even cacophony’s in tune
upon awakening

nothing’s ever learned again by rote
upon awakening

every thing becomes the sacrificial goat

Jim Culleny
8/21/14

by Michael Abraham-Fiallos

I sit across from my husband at a Chinese restaurant downtown. We sit outside, in one of those wooden outhouses that Covid has made into a mainstay of New York dining. It is his lunch break, and I have come downtown to meet him, to talk things out. Frankness and care sit with us at the table; they mediate the space between us, between my cabbage and dumpling soup and his shrimp in egg sauce with white rice. 

“Why must you bring our past traumas into every argument?” he asks. His voice is steady as he asks it. The question is a question, not an accusation. In his face, I see the desire to understand. “It’s a question I ask myself, too.”

The question strikes a chord, rings a bell deep inside me, sets off alarms I did not know were there. I sit with it a moment. “I don’t know,” I say. “Or,” I continue, “I know, but—”

He finishes the thought for me: “But you don’t know why you can’t just let that tendency go.”

I nod. He nods. We understand what we’ve said and what it means, if not what it means we ought to do. We finish our lunch, and we part with smiles and jokes. We are well. As I walk uptown toward the train, however, I turn the question over and over in my mind. Why must you bring our past traumas into every argument?

*

Fletching is a word we don’t really use anymore because we live in a world of guns. It simply means to affix feathered vanes to arrows in order to make them fly. Fletching is a painstaking labor, a labor performed, one imagines, in days long gone by, only by those with the nimblest and swiftest of fingers. It is beautiful in my imagination, this work—full of colors and textures and needle-like precision. In reality, it was probably arduous and tedious, probably bent the back and wore out the eyes. But, of course, it was necessary, for in a world without guns, what is life without arrows?  Read more »

by Danielle Spencer

When I was 12 my parents fought, and I stared at the blue lunar map on the wall of my room listening to Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away” while their muffled shouts rose up the stairs. As I peered closely at the vast flat paper moon—Ocean Of Storms, Sea of Crises, Bay of Roughness—it swam, through my tears, into what I knew to be my future, one where I alone would be exiled to a cold new planet. But in fact it was just an argument, and my parents still live together—more or less happily—in that same house where I was raised.

Some years ago I began dating a man whose marriage had broken up just a few months beforehand. Sam’s two sons Marco and Carl were 12 and 15, climbing the craggy precipice between childhood and adolescence, unsuspecting and devastated by the news. He assured them that he loved them very much and that he could explain more about the reasons for what he’d done when they grew older, if they wanted to know.

Both boys were playing a lot of Xbox Call of Duty, the online interactive WWII game, and Sam reasoned that if he played with them it was a way to do something together—in this case shoot Nazis—on nights they weren’t staying with him. Marco and Carl were more or less infinitely better at it than he was, though, and he wanted to become skilled enough to play on their team. Sam is a surgeon, researcher and inventor, possessed of tireless will and determination. And so he resolved to practice until he mastered the game. Read more »

Didier William. Ezili Toujours Konnen, 2015.

Ink and collage on panel.

More here, here, and here.

by Jeroen Bouterse

“I am by nature too dull to comprehend the subtleties of the ancients; I cannot rely on my memory to retain for long what I have learned; and my style betrays its own lack of polish.”[1] Among the benefits that reading the twelfth-century philosopher John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon has brought me were the pleasure of finding a witty and humane voice to introduce me to the new and faraway world of 12^th-century learning (of which voice I intend to give plenty of examples below), and the fact that he helped me quit Twitter (again, more to follow). Apart from those, however, a major one was certainly the consolation of seeing an unquestionably capable thinker express his intellectual limitations in terms that seem genuine, going further than what perfunctory modesty would have required.

There have surely been thinkers who were more emphatic about their natural flaws, but there is a fine line between the comforting and the disturbing. When the 20^th-century Dutch philosopher Leo Polak dreaded his approaching inaugural address, he wrote in his diary: “I came to nothing […] I have been of no value, for my family or for other people, or even simply done my duty. My pathological lack of memory my only excuse, but it is also partly laziness and sloppiness (no card system) and having whiled away my time, having flattered myself with undeserved success.”[2] That, too, resonates, but not in the uplifting way that John’s confessions do.

John has already implicitly abstracted from his own feelings of inadequacy, and has learned to look kindly upon them; he feels his lack of powers acutely, but he asks and thereby gives sympathy. “Would it not be unjust”, at his age and with all the distractions of his responsibilities, “to expect of me the mental spryness of youth, the quick comprehension of glowing natural talent, and an exact memory, always sure of itself?”[3] John makes himself small, but by connecting his own stature to the universal human condition, he also shows us how to feel small without self-hatred. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rafaël Newman

…the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence…This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

For Asa Weinstein, on his birthday

On August 17, 1977, I stopped in as usual at our neighbors’ house, to while away the summer day with my younger brother and sister until our mother’s return home from the university. Our friends – two sets of twins and one singleton – were home-schooled by their mother, and we were all having a summer staycation in any case, so there was always somebody at their house, and a reliably lively time to be had. What met me when I walked into the kitchen that morning, however, was an unaccustomed stillness. All five young people were hovering around the door to the living room while their mother sat at the kitchen table, hunched over a newspaper. “Elvis is dead,” whispered the singleton. Presley had died the day before, in Memphis, in the early afternoon of August 16; but the headlines, and President Carter’s address, would be that day’s news, on the outskirts of Vancouver as elsewhere around the world.

I was thirteen years old and freshly returned from an ersatz bar mitzvah trip to Israel with my professor father. My psychologist mother’s musical taste – and thus mine, for the moment – ran to Mozart and The Beatles, with admixtures of Joni Mitchell and bel canto. Elvis was a yokel and a hillbilly, I had been given to understand at home: a pioneer of perfidiously whitewashed Black culture and a bridgehead of American imperialism on a Canadian West Coast swarming with counterculture “draft dodgers”. So on that day, in that mourning household, in an access of hubris and pubescent provocation, I made a disrespectful remark; in fact, I may have done nothing more than clutch my brow melodramatically and feign a heartbroken sigh.

“Get the fuck out of my house.”

Our friends’ mother, a Pennsylvanian expat as renowned for her discipline as for her volubility and salty vocabulary, had raised her baleful head to deliver my sentence of temporary exile. Her eyes were red; she had clearly been weeping. The mixture of grief and anger was palpable, alienating, and uncanny: I was still young enough to be shocked by the spectacle of a mother’s tears. Something epochal had obviously occurred, to so shake the foundations of parental placidity. I had clearly misjudged the significance of Elvis Presley. Read more »

Hydrangea flower bed in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in late July of this year.

by Sarah Firisen

My eldest daughter has a new boyfriend. I met him the other day, and he seems to be a very nice young man. When I told her I liked him, she replied, “He makes me so happy. Happier than I’ve ever been.” The first blush of love is wonderful. Young love perhaps even more so because it’s so unencumbered by the cares of adult life.

The phrase, “Happier than I’ve ever been,” has been stuck in my head. Perhaps that’s because the last year and a half or so seem to have been, somewhat perversely, a time when at least some people have been happier than they’ve ever been. Or at least happier than they’ve been for a long time. Yes, Covid is scary. Having people around us get very sick, get hospitalized, die has been awful. And lockdown brought a loss of so many of the things that we enjoyed: eating out, listening to live music, travel, gathering with friends. But for many people, it was also a time for forced quiet. And in that quiet, there was the opportunity for reflection.

Arthur C. Brooks, who writes extensively on the topic of happiness, wrote this piece in The Atlantic, A Once-in-a-Lifetime Chance to Start Over. It’s time to prepare for a new and better normal than your pre-pandemic life. In it, he tells the story of a young woman who suffered from amnesia due to a traumatic head injury. Even once she recovered, she was never the same again, “Her parents always attributed these major character changes to her “bump on the head.” But she told me no—the injury had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was the recovery time, away from ordinary routines, that created a punctuation mark in the long sentence of her life. She had a unique opportunity to assess her priorities. She vowed to take nothing in her former life as given. She tore her beliefs and values down to the studs, and rebuilt them. And in so doing, she said, she became happy for the first time in her life.” Brooks likens lockdown, for many people, to this young woman’s experience. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

The gully cricket I played in my neighborhood also had a tournament, where different neighborhoods of north Kolkata competed. I once played in such a tournament which was being held in the far north of the city, some distance from my own neighborhood. I don’t now remember the game, but I met there a savvy boy, somewhat older than me, who opened my eyes about Kolkata politics. When he asked me which locality I was from, he stopped me when I started answering with a geographic description. He was really interested in knowing which particular mafia leader my neighborhood fell under. Finding me rather ignorant, he went on to an elaborate explanation of how the whole city is divided up in different mafia fiefdoms, and their hierarchical network and different specialization in different income-earning sources, and their nexus with the hierarchy of political leaders as patrons at different levels. After he figured out the coordinates of my locality he told me which particular mafia don my neighborhood hoodlums (the local term is mastan) paid allegiance to. I recognized the name, this man’s family had a meat shop in the area.

Since that day my whole outlook to local politics changed, and soon after I saw a newspaper photo where this mafia don was sharing the dais in a political rally with the chief minister. This was the beginning of my academic interest in gangster politics and its role in the power relationships in different parts of the world. Later when I read Mario Puzo’s Godfather (before the movies based on it came out) I realized that this was a feature of metropolitan politics in rich countries as well. Now, of course, there is a whole industry on this, in literature and TV (in India, more on the Mumbai underworld, less on Kolkata’s).

I started closely observing the methods of operation of the local mastans, how they work out their demarcation of the business of extortion (sometimes the system broke down, and violent turf wars took place, like when we heard loud boom-boom noise of explosions coming from the street where the brothels were), how they mesh their organization with that of the political and cultural mobilization by the local politicians. Two of their characteristics immediately struck me as a young observer. Read more »