by Claire Chambers

In these dying days of summer, as I steel myself for the onslaught of an uncertain term ahead, I’ve been reading J. A. Mensah’s Castles from Cobwebs (Saraband, 2021). By way of a disclaimer I must note that J. A. – Juliana – is my colleague. However, she took up her creative writing lectureship during the pandemic, so we’ve never actually met. As preparation for getting to know each other properly I wanted to read this, her prize-winning debut novel. Castles from Cobwebs did not disappoint. I found myself devouring the book twice in quick succession, noticing different flavours with each consumption. 

Castles from Cobwebs is set in three locations – northern England, Ghana, and the United States of America. Similarly, the novel’s tripartite structure to some extent reflects the three corners of the triangular trade. Indeed, characters discuss this vicious trade as they visit a ‘castle’ in Ghana, the site in fact having been used as a fort for the imprisonment of slaves. Not only that, but the blood-soaked contours of the Black Atlantic continue to shape the lives of Mensah’s contemporary characters. 

The novel’s first part, ‘Sunsum’ (loosely translated as ‘spirit’), is set in northern England. Mensah’s is a saltspray-soaked, sodden vision of Northumbria. While reading the whole novel, I regularly felt immersed in water. Seas, rivers, floods, and storms abound, probably because the triangulated locations are positioned on assorted coastlines. From first-person present tense focalization by protagonist Imani, whom we watch grow from a six-year-old girl into a young woman, we learn that one of her ways of self-identifying is as a strong swimmer. What is more, Imani has a fascination with local heroine Grace Darling. This lighthouse keeper’s daughter had saved shipwrecked people near the Farne Islands in the early nineteenth century.  Read more »

Too Thin to Spawn an Echo

from here the atmosphere is space so vast
its depth’s enough to spawn an echo, but

seen from the moon imagine
a somewhat fat elastic band
stretched round a blue ball,
or slim mist of sweat evaporating
from the crown of a head still
clear enough to spawn an echo,

imagine an aura of oxygen
held by gauze of gravity but
with weave so slight so ephemeral yet
substantial enough to spawn an echo,

try to envision something absolutely
essential but, in perfect condition, invisible,
containing the essence of life, but

now see it thick with carbon,
a saturated scarf girdling a globe
at equatorial noon muffling billions
of small voices crying, Now we see! but
too late too weak too spent too thin
to spawn even an echo

Jim Culleny
9/4/21

by Adele A Wilby

The Italian author Sandro Veronesi’s latest novel, his ninth, The Hummingbird, is a clever book that offers the reader both literary pleasure and serious thought. The novel is essentially a family saga, and like all family histories and stories it has a complexity of interpersonal relationships and human emotions all woven into the story. It sounds so typical of life and the reader might begin to think that the novel is a family saga that could be tedious, but that is far from the truth. Veronesi has skilfully used structure to fracture any complacency or perception of the characters and the story, and his novel is a superb piece of skilled writing with unexpected twists and turns.

From the outset, the reader gets a real sense that this is a very modern novel. Veronesi introduces his characters in such a way that the reader is not bogged down in trying to fathom who is who as the story unfolds. The time frame spans the decades from the 1960s and projects into the 2030s. But it is Veronesi’s use of different documents: telephone calls, emails, social media, epigrams, poetry, and other language devices to dip in and out of time that all work together to create a constant unfolding of freshness: just as the story hints at the mundane, Veronesi intervenes and changes direction and takes the reader on a surprising path.

In this ‘tale of many’ the central character around which all these emotions and experience revolve is Marco Carrera, an ophthalmologist. He is married to Marina, an unfaithful wife with mental health issues. He too is an unfaithful husband with Luisa, the two caught up in ‘an impossible love story’ and delude themselves of their faithfulness to their partners by taking a ‘vow of chastity’. Marco falls out with his brother Giacomo. The reasons for the estrangement we learn later in the novel, when it is all too late.  Marco’s older sister Irene is of a different calibre; a sensitive young woman she brings grief to the family. And of course, a family saga would not be complete without the parents in an incompatible marriage. Read more »

Andrea Chung. From the series Vex, 2020.

Collage on paper.

More here, here, and here.

by A. Minh Nguyen

On the morning of July 29, 2021, I woke up to the news that Minnesota native Sunisa Lee, also known as Suni, had become the 2020 Olympic individual all-around champion in women’s gymnastics, the first Asian of any nationality to achieve this distinction. How much does Suni Lee’s Olympic gold medal victory mean for an Asian American father such as myself? A lot — although before the Summer Olympics in Tokyo I had no idea who she was. I didn’t even know who Simone Biles was. Two days before, Lee was a member of the squad that won silver in women’s team all-around, and three days after her gold medal performance, she won bronze in uneven bars.

Like other Americans, I was overjoyed by Lee’s multi-medal win at the Tokyo Olympics, especially because she did it in the face of adversity. She overcame so many obstacles: her father’s fall off a ladder in 2019 that paralyzed him from the waist down, the deaths of her aunt and uncle from COVID-19 in 2020, and her own leg and foot injury that sidelined her for two months last year.

The fact that Lee was the first Hmong American Olympian, let alone the first Hmong American Olympic multi-medalist, was extra special for me. Like her parents, Houa John Lee and Yeev Thoj, refugees who immigrated to the United States from Laos via Thailand as children, I was a minor — an unaccompanied minor — from communist Vietnam who spent 17 months in two refugee camps in Indonesia. So was my wife Nhi even though she and her family reached the U.S. by way of a refugee camp in the Philippines. As a fellow child refugee from Southeast Asia, I could imagine Lee’s parents’ struggles. I could imagine their dreams.

Asian Americans are lauded as the model minority. We are praised as exemplars of unproblematic assimilation, upward mobility, and traditional family values. Our aptitudes and attitudes inspire positive thoughts and feelings. Yet this comforting cliché masks a more complicated reality. Wealth, income, education, occupation, and other measures of socioeconomic status vary drastically among Asian Americans both within and across communities of different ethnic backgrounds and national origins. Those variations depend on a number of factors such as geographical location within the U.S. and histories of migration. However you slice it, there is no way that Southeast Asian Americans — in particular Hmong Americans, nearly 60 percent of whom are low-income and more than 25 percent of whom live below the poverty line[1] — sit comfortably within the gauzy dream of a fictitious model minority. Read more »

by David Oates

The day I began writing this essay, Portland Oregon braced for yet another round of uncharacteristic heat. Over several months of preparation, as I had been reading and pondering Kim Stanley Robinson’s big, detailed, hyper-realistic science-fiction book The Ministry for the Future, our normally cool northwest town had found itself repeatedly facing drought and high temperatures. Now we were about to be  trapped  under a “heat dome” of  115 degrees Fahrenheit (46° C) – Las Vegas temperatures, Abu-Dhabi temperatures – for days on end.

Salmon poached in their streams and fledgling birds leapt to their deaths from too-hot nests. Vulnerable people died in their apartments or on the streets. Eventually we went back to our Northwest summer normally so mild by day, so cool overnight. I continued writing. But within a few weeks, more Saharan temperatures. And in time, another heat dome began to form.

It’s no merely local problem. Sicily has just achieved Europe’s hottest temperature in history: 119.8° F (48.8° C). And the latest (sixth) IPPC report from the UN has confirmed it with a dreadful, deep-researched authority: as the Washington Post put it, “On the current emissions trajectory, global temperatures are likely to rise by 2.1 to 3.5 degrees Celsius, blowing past the 1.5 degree threshold scientists warn humanity should not breach.”

Our reality is bending, melting, reshaping in deeply disturbing ways. News stories have started to sound like fiction.

So perhaps fiction is needed to guide us into new ways of thinking about it – thinking that isn’t just panic and despair. But it would have to be fiction grounded on reality, fiction that grapples with the facts we face. That is, fiction that is at least half non-fiction. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Thomas Larson

At breakfast my father asked me what I thought we should do if, in Grandma and Grandpa’s safety deposit box, we found the document identifying his real parents. The year was 1967, and he and I were in Evanston, Illinois, arranging a funeral for his adoptive mother, Elizabeth, who had died suddenly of a stroke. That he was given up at birth he had not learned until his 35th year, when Elizabeth sprang the news on him one Easter. Around the dinner table they were remembering her father, Sam Hill, descendant of a Revolutionary War general, who had often wondered aloud why Elizabeth’s child looked nothing like his parents. Dad had wondered, too.

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” Dad said to his mother that day, “to discover that I —”

“John, as a matter of fact, you were adopted,” she blurted out, vexing his remaining years with an insoluble conflict, namely, whether he should track down his real parents or let them be. Now that we were burying his mother and packing his 86-year-old dad into a retirement home, this bank-vault visit would be his last chance at a birthright.

He’d been up a while, ferrying trash down the back stairs to the cans. Dressed in a freshly laundered shirt, he’d rolled up the sleeves three turns. His gold watch squeezed his wrist, and the dark hair of his arms like a field of evenly charred grass reminded me that his real mother, the Czech servant girl, had given his skin a tannish color. (With the father’s Swedish ethnicity, that’s all we ever knew about his real parents.) My Scandinavian white certainly belied his half-Bohemian origins. Read more »

We drove through this long and very brightly lit tunnel just north of Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, the night before last.

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Even though I arrived at Economics with the aim of interpreting history, it soon gave me a more general perspective. First, it showed me the value of precision and empirical testing in thinking about socially important issues. This immediately appealed to me, as two of the first courses I liked in college were on Deductive and Inductive Logic. More importantly, Economics gave me a deeper understanding of the incentive mechanisms that sustain social institutions. It made me think why some of the glib solutions suggested by my leftist friends were difficult to sustain in the real world, unless based on motivations/norms and constraints of people in that world. Why are cooperatives and nationalized industries, suggested as substitutes for private enterprise, often (not always) dysfunctional? Economics asks the question: if there is a social problem, why does it not get resolved by the people on their own, and if your answer is that it is the ‘system’ that is to blame—which was the main message of many leftist stories I read and plays/movies I watched—Economics teaches us to go beyond and look into the underlying mechanism through which that ‘system’ is perpetuated or occasionally broken.

Fortunately for me in Presidency College those days Economics was combined with Political Science, as I have always looked at the two subjects as intertwined. I found that classical economists of the 18^th and 19^th century looked at economics as political-economy, and analyzed some of the major questions of distributive politics.

Aristotle in his book Politics (which was one of our textbooks) describes man as a ‘political animal’. In some sense I have been a political animal ever since childhood. My mother told me that by age five I was a regular newspaper-reader; now-a-days I read about ten newspapers (including news websites) of different countries every day. Read more »

by S. Abbas Raza

Note: This is a true story about something that happened 17 years ago but I am publishing it here this week, which marks the 20th anniversary of the attacks of 9/11/01, to give an indication of the many ways that life changed for people in the wake of that horrific day.

Recently I came upon this photo of my friend Eric, me, and his father, tucked into a book that I was trying to place in the correct place on my shelves as a part of a recent book-organizing effort and it made me think about one of the scarier events in my life. It was 2004. It was also only a couple of years after 9/11 and by then the Patriot Act was in full effect and I personally knew completely innocent people who had been caught up in the “bad Muslim” dragnet and had been detained, deported from America, etc. It was in this atmosphere that I was invited to attend my good friend Eric’s wedding on a lake in Michigan. I found the cheapest ticket possible which would involve a stopover in Pittsburgh on the way to Detroit from NYC and a stop in Philadelphia on the way back. I also reserved a rental car at the Detroit airport to get to the rural lake where the wedding was going to be.

So, on Eric’s wedding weekend, I braved the always-horrible M60 bus from the upper west side to Laguardia airport and, after going through the terrible post-9/11 security, got on my plane to Pittsburgh. All went fine.

Once in Pittsburgh, I wandered about the terminal looking at shops and tried to while away the time until my next flight and at the same time tried to ignore my nicotine cravings (I used to smoke two packs of Marlboro Red every day at that time) but in the end I couldn’t do it and decided to just go outside for a smoke, even though that meant I would have to again stand in the security line to get back to my gate for the flight to Detroit.

So there I was, sitting on a bench just outside the terminal, quickly smoking the second of my cigarettes within 15 minutes, and frequently glancing at my watch to make sure I still had enough time to get through security and onto my flight to Detroit, when I was startled by a man (African-American, in his late 30s most likely, dressed neatly in civilian clothes) who said to me in a tone which canceled all the politeness of his words, “Sir, excuse me, I am a Federal Marshal and I would like to speak to you.” Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

Philosophers are prone to define knowledge as having reasoned one’s way to some true beliefs. The obvious kicker in any such definition is truth; for how am I supposed to determine whether a belief is true? If I already know what is true, why should I bother with some philosopher’s definition of knowledge? What’s the use of this stupid definition anyway? “Hey, I’m just doing my job,” replies the philosopher. “You wanted to know what knowledge is, and I told you. If you want to know how to get it, that’s another story — and for that you’ll have to pay extra!”

If we think of true beliefs as getting things right — really right, like if you asked God about it they would say, “Yep, that’s what I figure too” — then it is indeed difficult to see how we could ever know the truth, and not just because friendly chats with God are so exceedingly rare, but also because we don’t really know what we mean when we say “really right” instead of just saying “right”. The “really” is supposed to add some special oomph to the knowledge, an oomph we by definition can never experience or access: it is the knowledge of what is going on in the world when no one is knowing it, which is like trying to see what your face looks like when no one is looking at you. “Really”, in this context, just means: at a level that is impossible to attain. Trying to get something really right means never knowing for sure whether you in fact have it right.

Where does that leave us with regard to knowledge? Well, we could be pure-souled skeptics and insist that knowledge, real knowledge, is strictly impossible ever to attain. Or, being slightly more careful, we could at least insist that we can never know when we have it. Maybe God or other metaphysical chimeras are able to confidently pronounce whether this or that mortal attains knowledge, but these or those mortals can never know when they know. In that case, if this is the route we choose, we should simply strike the word “knowledge” from our vocabularies, as it is never going to come into any practical use. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

After running through “a linguistic update” of the study of nationalism and outlining some of the psychological underpinnings of the nationalist world-view that such an update suggests, it is now time to take stock. It is time, that is, to consider some of the repercussions of this general take on things.

Three interconnected corollaries come to mind, which I shall rank, and present, from the more general of consequences to the narrower and more significant. I should add that this is probably the sort of stuff that overzealous referees of academic journals dismiss outright, without giving it much thought (I know from experience), but do humour me anyway.

The first corollary has to do with the study of nationalism itself; or more properly, with what may well be termed “the origins of nationalism” – i.e., the genesis of nationalist beliefs.

There has been plenty of discussion on this issue in the relevant literature, with various proposals on offer, each espousing a whole paradigm. Some of the better-known accounts come under the names of perennialism, primordialism or ethno-symbolism, while the consensus on the study of nationalism I myself outlined is based on the so-called modernist paradigm, perhaps the most prominent of them all. Though a well-trodden topic, I think some of the material I presented in what I am now calling Parts 1 (the update) and 2 (the psychology) of this series on nationalism offers some novelty. As argued in Part 2, after all, it is by teasing out “the building blocks” of nationalism that we can obtain a better view of the overall phenomenon, and it may well be by drawing attention to the psychological underpinnings of nationalist beliefs that it might be possible to make sense of where nationalism as an idea comes from.[i] Read more »

Sughra Raza. Karachi Afternoon Sun, 2010.

Digital photograph.

by Robyn Repko Waller

In the United States these days, it’s difficult to find a person not profoundly angry about something. Headlines scream of the vaccinated America tired, frustrated, and angry at the vaccine-hesitant and anti-vaxxers. And unvaccinated America in turn, outraged at the local jurisdiction and vaccinated for the increasing restrictions they face in attending school, dining indoors, and enjoying the gym and theater without conceding to a COVID jab. Angry parents are expressing exhausted outrage at school boards for mask policies. Outrage at mask mandates. Outrage at a lack thereof. 

The anger isn’t confined to the pandemic. Our social and political landscape is bubbling with anger. Anger at politicians, left and right. Outrage in the form of cancelling. Responding anger at the ‘Cancel Culture.’ Anger about the Afghanistan withdrawal and the tragic humanitarian aftermath. Anger at continued social injustice stateside and abroad. Conversely for some, anger directed at social justice activists. Outrage for the teaching of Critical Race Theory. Anger — but perhaps not enough — that climate change, disrupting and catastrophically reshaping our Earth and its populace, remains largely unaddressed. So much anger. 

Americans are angry. But is all of this anger really warranted? And even if it’s warranted, does it do us any good? With the amount of negative appraisal emoted as of late, it seems like a fitting time to step back and explore these concerns. 

This is especially so, as political polarization is no longer a novel phenomenon in the US. Whereas once one might take such claims of political shifts to be hype, recent electoral and public health crises stand out as manifest expressions of polarizing views and self-contained communities. Divided towns, divided co-workers, even deeply divided families. Anger at a perceived other is a prominent feature of our current standing. Moreover, clashing moral views plausibly underpin this growing schism in society.  Read more »