by Evert Cilliers

Hitler and Mussolini came to power because they were freely elected by their people, with the complicity of many in the established political class.

Can the same thing happen in America with the freely elected President Trump, who is being coddled by our established political class in the GOP?

After all, in true authoritarian fashion, Trump attacks the free press, attacks our courts, attacks the FBI and the Justice Department, and tells half a dozen lies a day.

Never before has so much crap been dropped from the piehole of an American president.

It's something we've never seen in all of our history.

Unprecedented. Bizarro. Weird beyond weird.

We now have a presidential moron who, in between his intake of junk food and junk news, spends his days shitting on our democracy.

Ezra Klein wrote at Vox:

"This was a year in which Trump undermined the press, fired the director of the FBI, cozied up to Russia, baselessly alleged he was wiretapped, threatened to jail his political opponents, publicly humiliated his attorney general for recusing himself from an investigation, repeatedly claimed massive voter fraud against him, appointed a raft of unqualified and occasionally ridiculous candidates to key positions, mishandled the aftermath of the Puerto Rico hurricane, and threatened to use antitrust and libel laws against his enemies."

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by Bill Benzon

Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.
–Samuel Delany

New York 2140, as many of you know, is Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, a hefty doorstop of a book at a few pages over 600. The title tells the tale, well not all of it by any means, heck, not much of it at all, but it tips you to the central premise: this is a story set in New York City in the year 2140. After the flood. Actually, it’s after two floods, called pulses in the book, a term suggesting that they’re but inflections in the global climate system, though Robinson clearly believes that human activity ramped them up. Consequently, the sea in 2140 is much higher than it is now, fifty feet higher. Manhattan below 50th Street is under water, but most of the buildings remain. People live and work in them and get around by boat and by skybridges. And it’s like that all over the world. Coastal cities have flooded, but people remain.

It’s called the intertidal, this vast worldwide coastal boondocks. It’s not fully wild, but it’s no longer fully civilized, whatever that means. It’s legally ambiguous, lots of off-grid activity, lots of informal mutual-aid living.

The two pulses have weakened nation-states in favor of private institutions and the world remains split into a large sprawling 99+% and a much smaller (fraction of) 1%, who rule over everything by speculating in real estate and financial instruments. New York 2140 is about how a small handful of 99 percenters living in one building in lower Manhattan manage to put a monkey wrench into the whole shebang and bring it to its knees. It is thus a comedy, in the literary sense of the word (e.g. Dante’s Divine Comedy), with an optimistic outlook.

I’m going to take a longish passage from about two-thirds of the way through and use it as a prism – or a Leibnizian monad – to examine the whole. At this point three of our central characters are spinning out a scheme to save the building where they live and do a few other things as well.

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by Misha Lepetic

"It is not humiliating to be unhappy."
~ Camus

It was only a few days ago that I heard about Joe Frank's recent passing, which was an odd feeling, because I'd thought he was already dead. Further reflection made me realize that I based this opinion on no evidence whatsoever, but if you know about Joe Frank, you'll agree that an abiding belief in his demise would have been entirely appropriate, and that he would have likely even approved of such a confusion. If you don't know Frank, though, I envy you the experience of hearing him for the first time. To me, he was the greatest radio ever committed to the airwaves. But, regrettably, the best way to hear Frank's work is to have no idea that it's him at all. In that sense, I apologize for blowing it with this modest appreciation, and take comfort from knowing that Frank would be amused by such ambivalence.

Any fan will remember exactly where they were when they first heard one of Joe Frank's broadcasts. For me, it was back in high school, in 1980s central New Jersey. One of my friends was Nadim, a burly Pakistani guy who lived in the tonier part of my neighborhood. Nadim always tramped around in big black combat boots and teased out his long hair with liberal amounts of hairspray to signal his devotion to The Cure. He also played guitar in a few bands, and was the first person to pass me a joint. His parents were wealthy enough that they gave him a red Trans Am for some birthday or other, and we would cruise down the farm lanes of central Jersey late at night, smoking, listening to Joy Division, The Smiths, Bauhaus, Hüsker Dü or Big Black, and remonstrating against life as only teenagers could.

On one of these bone cruises I was fiddling with the radio when I came across a husky, grieving voice intoning over a short loop of a Jewish cantor singing. Frank's voice is unforgettable in its immediacy. He spoke so closely into the microphone that you could feel the humidity of his breath. Although he had many guests on his shows (both intentional and unintentional) his was the only voice that sounded as if it were coming from inside your head. On the occasion of discovering him, it's difficult to remember what he was talking about; his surrealist's take on life was obscured further by the fact that we'd just parachuted into the middle of one of his stories, and immediately, in the words of Conrad at the start of Heart Of Darkness, "we knew we were fated…to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive experiences." But while Marlow's listeners were mildly irritated at being a captive audience, Nadim and I were hooked. We kept driving, and Joe Frank kept talking. It felt as if we'd made a pact with the radio.

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Slaying of the Suitors

—thoughts on finishing Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey

Ancient Cinema

Book 22 of The Odyssey plays like a scene of The Punisher
so we know that men have been bloodthirsty since the Greeks sacked Troy
(at least) and that Homer rivals Hensleigh in imagery of hacked limbs
and scarlet springs. Almost 3000 years have not dulled our thirst
for an aesthetic of pain. We can imagine Homer yakking with Tarantino
of techniques depicting dread death and cruel dispatch over cups of sea-dark wine
imagining clueless suitors mocking an 800 BC ISIS collapsed into the form
of one Odysseus disguised by Athena as an old mendicant, a beggar envisioning
his tormentors' imminent decapitations, amputations, punctures, skewers,
unconcerned of R ratings, happily scripting till bloody-fingered dawn rolls in
with crime scene cleaners to make the place respectable for the almost-civilized
who’ve slapped down good money for tickets to clean, screen brutality
and spent small fortunes on popcorn and coke

Jim Culleny
1/26/18
.

by Jonathan Kujawa

If you have a sibling you are familiar with the problem of dividing up something desirable between selfish people. For some things, like ice cream or money, your only preference is to get as much as you can. If you divide it equally, then at least nobody will be envious of anyone else. My parents used the trick of letting one of us make the divisions, but in the knowledge that the other kids would get first pick. NASA can only dream of the atomic scale cuts made by me and my siblings [1]!

But what happens if the item in question isn't all the same? If it's a cake, a corner piece with roses made of frosting might be more desirable than a piece from the center. In an inheritance, a taxidermy collection and jewelry are hardly the same. Worse, each person might have very different preferences! My brother has a huge sweet tooth. He loves frosting while I'd definitely steer clear of corner pieces. One person's mounted deer head is another person's diamond earrings.

Delicious Baked Alaska

You might guess math has useful things to say about dividing things. But we'll soon see that there are more than a few surprises, too. The first question you might ask is if it is even possible to always divide something into two equal pieces with a single straight cut. It's not too hard to see if you have a single uniform object (say a plain cake), then no matter its shape, a single, well-chosen slice with a Samurai sword will split it into two equal sized pieces.

But what if your cake is a Baked Alaska? Surely you can't make a single cut which equally splits the cake and the ice cream and the chocolate drizzled on top? The Ham Sandwich Theorem is a remarkable result which says that no matter how elaborately intertwined three objects are, it is always possible to make a single cut which separates each of the three into two equal sized pieces!

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William Klein, Gerard Ifert, Wojciech Zamecznik. 1950s-1960s

"… In the post-war years, these three photographers managed to revolutionize photography, despite its young history in the arts. Through photomontages, formal abstractions, they became predecessors and influences of the Bauhaus, a school that promotes the alliance between the fine arts and the applied arts. The artist takes center stage and is in charge. The photographer becomes a painter, the camera, his pencil. To draw with light, as most would define photography."

"Photographisme" at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, through January 29, 2018.

More here and here.

by Arjun Appadurai

Dear Professor Appadurai,

We are writing with great trepidation to invite you to the Jaipur Literary Festival this year. You have never been invited to this Festival over its many years of star-studded glory, unbridled creativity and collaborative celebrity, because we have hesitated to include someone with your fame, stature and credentials to our humble (yet magnificent) event. It is also the case that we do not generally support serious books with too many footnotes. Unless they are published by one of our already established cognoscenti, who sometimes dabble in scholarship of various kinds.

But we digress. We want you to give a plenary talk, during which all other panels, promotional events, political processions, private parties or sexual interactions will be strictly prohibited. This can be at a location and time of your choosing. We suggest the Taj Rambagh Palace lawns at sunset, with a special rendition of Raag Yaman will be performed by a global orchestra conducted by A.K. Rahman.

We are aware, of course, that Rajasthan is a slightly controversial setting, where bride-burnings, film censorship, mob lynching, beef bans, cow protection militias and murders of Dalits, sometimes upset the royal serenity of our palaces, forts, villages and luxury hotels. But we assure you that we guarantee your security, comfort and peace of mind, unless you say something that could hurt the feelings of the sponsors, the Rajasthan government or the Karni Sena, though these are all composed of individuals who are usually entirely free of feelings.

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by Dwight Furrow

If you are one of the billions of people on this planet who avoid the wine press you might never have heard of "natural wines". Yet, they are the source of great controversy in the wine world, dividing brother from brother and tearing at the delicate fabric of overwrought sensibilities. It's not quite civil war but it's serious enough to generate plenty of creative insults. To select one example, a Newsweek article was entitled "Why Natural Wine Tastes Worse than Putrid Cider" which, as you might imagine, caused natural wine proponents to launch diatribes against smug, snobbish, closed-minded apologists for "frankenwines". That's the tenor of the debate.

What is this debate about?

Natural wines are wines made without cultured yeast, minimal (or no) use of the preservative sulfur dioxide, no modern winemaking technology such as reverse osmosis or micro-oxygenation, no additives such as mega purple, enzymes, or additional acid, no filtration, and using only grapes grown organically and/or sustainably. Natural wine producers often advertise an aspiration to make wine the way it was made 120 years ago.

So what is wrong with modern winemaking technology? Well, environmental issues such as soil depletion and potentially harmful chemicals to start with, but natural wine enthusiasts also claim modern industrial winemaking destroys flavor, creates generic wines that lack freshness and complexity, and that no longer reflect the unique characteristics of the grapes' origins.

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by Brooks Riley

by Gerald Dworkin

In October, 1961, I was sitting in The Jazz Workshop, a San Francisco nightclub, listening to Lenny Bruce doing his infamous routine Are there any Niggers here tonight?

It begins with asking that question and proceeds to make comments using racial slurs for every racial group he could–kikes, guineas, wops, spics, polacks, sheenies, etc. His point, as he explains in the routine, was to routinize the words, so that they lost their shocking impact and obtained the status, as he says, of "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" He was arrested that night not for the racial slurs but for obscenity—his "to is a preposition, come is a verb" routine.

Bruce spent most of his professional life being arrested and prosecuted by the police in various jurisdictions—always for obscenity. He was convicted in New York State, died during the appeals process, and in 2003 given a posthumous pardon by Governor Pataki.

I was therefore both amused and shocked to see in recent weeks that Bruce was under attack again. This time by some angry students and faculty of Brandeis University. An alumnus of the University had written a play about Bruce and it was scheduled to be performed on campus.

Some members of the theatre department raised objections and felt that more time was needed to produce the play "appropriately" and some students objected that the portrayal of its black characters was "ridiculous and vicious." The playwright decided to take the play elsewhere for its premiere.

This was one of the calmer instances of an attack on expression. In recent months student protests have led to cancellation of speaker talks, to disruption of invited speakers, to violence and destruction on campus. The names of Charles Murray, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, Richard Spencer and the campuses of Evergreen State College, Middlebury, University of Michigan, UC Berkeley, University of Florida, Yale, University of Missouri, are known to many. For a view of what one such protest looks, and sounds, like, click here.

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Fang Zhaoling. Flowering Branches on Cliffs, 1978.

Ink and color on paper.

More here and here.

by Brooks Riley

“They are shape, form, waiting to emerge. They present the plastic possibilities of life,” Albrecht Dürer said this of the pillows in various states of rumpled use that he drew on the back of a piece of paper he had been using to draw hands, wasting no surface to explore the ‘plastic possibilities‘ of everything. I see him wake up in the morning and look down at the pillow where his head had been, punching it a few times, contemplating the mutability of its form, and arriving at that morning epiphany about art itself.

The impression of a tousled head still lurking in the pillow’s shadowed indentation conjures a ghost whose presence can be felt if not seen, with an imagined long single golden strand of hair left behind within its folds. A hint of Dürer’s personality emerges from this fantasy, of a man who found wonder in all things—a pillow, a weeded piece of turf, a hare, a deformed pig, a rhinoceros, an iris, a beached whale. He would spend a lifetime exploring the elusive secrets of beauty and mathematics in nature, and nature and beauty in mathematics.

Personality is like ether, it hovers in the atmosphere long after death. Decades, even centuries later, long after the end of memories, traces of it move through the air like a fleet aroma caught at just the right odd moment. Where did that come from? It is elusive, and cannot be captured or bottled or even explained. Such is the personality of Dürer. It rises like a mist from a certain landscape seen from the train. It lurks in the amusing portraits of friends like Stefan Paumgartner as St. George, or Willibald Pirckheimer imbibing at the baths, or the selfie pointing to the pain in his spleen. It rages in two haunting, nude sketches of himself. Or radiates in that iconic self-portrait from 1500, which hung in his atelier, never for sale but as constant reminder of the perfection he would strive for with his self-proclaimed ‘diligence‘, that most German of virtues—a quasi-blasphemous Christ-like pose that sanctified his art through his person. Thomas Hoving once called it ‘the single most arrogant, annoying and gorgeous portrait ever created,‘ missing the point—or perhaps not. It was so life-like, Dürer’s dog ran over to it and started licking it before the paint was quite dry. Of the plethora of explanations for this work, I like to think he painted it in case the Apocalypse predicted for 1500 really happened. I will survive, it says. And he did.

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Doctor Qureshi Dares My Mother

“Maryam Jaan,” he says, “You must be proud
of your son Farouk, his wealth —praise Allah—
how he has made himself great in America.”

The doctor’s white hair is unruly like mine,
his bi-focals tipsy, his elbows rest
on the mahogany table hand-crafted

in Mexico for Ethan Allen,
classic Yankee firm Farouk reinvented
over the past 30 years over and over again

to help those who need help to make their homes
beautiful. He sits as usual at the head, his dark hair
slicked back, eyebrows arched at the dare.

Waitaminute, how unfair of the doctor
who goads my ami to choose favorites between
two sons, her betas, a Chairman of the Board

bankroller of Ami’s pricey healthcare,
and a dim bulb in the six light trumpet
chandelier bouncing of the buffed grain.

Dear doctor, faithful friend, first Pakistani champ
of the Scarsdale Bridge Club—mashallah—keep on
injecting Ami with B12, her weekly fix,

hear her heart beat, hold her gnarled hands as she
begs you use your wealth of healing savvy,
even declare martial law to please stop

voices, only voices always in her head,
but don’t provoke her as she sits up on
a Chippendale, sips saffron-infused Kashmiri

kahva from a china cup gold-rimmed hem
dupatta slips to her shoulders, “Doctor
Qureshi sahib,” she says, meeting his gaze

across the wide expanse of burnished veneer,
more geography than physiology on her face,
“I am proud of all my children.” Soaring

along the shoreline of Long Island Sound,
I’m as far from New Rochelle
as America is from a crescent zoon.

Urdu/English: jaan/my life; mashallah/praise allah; dupatta/veil
Kashmiri/English: zoon / moon

by Rafiq Kathwari, for Ejaz Qureshi

by Claire Chambers

At a Sheikh Zayed Book Award event in 2017, Marina Warner told the audience that the Arabic root word for water and story is the same. Both nouns, she claimed, relate to the verb 'to transfer', rawin being one way to say 'storyteller', while rawiya is 'to drink one's fill' or 'to be irrigated'. If the link between liquidity and storytelling is less immediately apparent in Urdu and other South Asian languages than it is in Arabic, nonetheless in the eleventh century Somadeva collected together Indian myths as the Kathā Sarit Sāgara ('Ocean of the Streams of Stories'), suggesting a similar understanding of the link between words and watery worlds.

All this resonates with my new book, Rivers of Ink: Selected Essays, which was published by Oxford University Press last month. I eventually chose Rivers of Ink as my title when I realized how many words I'd written in my journalistic outpourings for this fine blog 3 Quarks Daily, as well as for Dawn and other outlets, over the course of five years. The phrase comes from the Spanish idiom verter ríos de tinta meaning to pour rivers of ink, corresponding to the English saying, 'much ink has been spilt'. If even a fraction of the ink cartridges I drained over the last half-decade were in service of equality, anti-racism, and internationalism, or (re)introduced readers to a confident and diverse body of texts, I will be happy.

Coincidentally, Rivers of Ink recalls the titles of two influential subcontinental novels: Qurratulain Hyder's Aag ka darya (River of Fire), which deals, amongst other subjects, with Partition and the post-Second World War South Asian diaspora; and River of Smoke, in which the nineteenth-century Opium Wars enable Amitav Ghosh to impart wisdom on present-day globalization and the political grounds of free trade arguments.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

I have come to the beach to drown out the heartbreak and listlessness and senselessness of life in the moment. I look at these waves that swallow everything. Tishani Doshi writes in "What the Sea Brought In", of a laundry list of things suddenly seen:

"Brooms, brassieres, empty bottles

of booze. The tip of my brother's

missing forefinger. Bulbs, toothpaste

caps,

instruments for grooming. Chestnuts,

carcass of coconut, crows, crabs.

Three dying fish, four dead

grandparents.

Slippers of every stripe: rubber, leather,

Rexine, felt."

I stare at the sea, and draw my own list of things to send back. Twenty seven photographs, two concert ticket stubs, three new years' parties, two hundred and eight measures of gin and tonic, a body, three sets of new sheets, five coffee mugs, three wine glasses (one broken), a foot board, three dogs (one disappeared), a rash vest, a pack of cards, a seventh grade mark sheet, a polka dotted dress, my first résumé, a coffee machine, two home videos, one voice recording, too many words to count, fifty seven lines of control, five long weeks of silence. I am tired.

Like Aragorn, I look left, right, east, west, something, and at just the opportune moment, I espy fireworks, orange, fuschia, and dazzlingly green; I am momentarily light.

Perhaps, this is why that moment in "The Two Towers", when awash in golden light, Gandalf and the Rohirrim arrive in deus ex machina fashion is on my top ten list of movie-manipulated affects. When younger, I loved myself some death and glory. Now older, I look for hope and redemption.

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by Brooks Riley