by Claire Chambers

As I step, bleary-eyed, out of my PIA aeroplane from Manchester, UK, I notice a door sign warning of the danger of falling personnel. Partly amused, partly disconcerted, I head for the luggage carousel at Karachi's Jinnah International Airport.

In the car on our way to my hotel, we follow a man in a shalwar kameez the colour of lapis lazuli, one leg hitched over the tailgate of a Toyota Hilux, caressing the shaft of his gun. Our security guard occasionally uses his walkie-talkie to give a number and a crisp 'Roger' to a disembodied voice at the other end, which responds with another number and a 'Roger'. There must be some logic to it, but amidst my jet-lag pea-souper I can't see what.

A wall darkly proclaims: PREPARE ANY STRENGTH YOU CAN MUSTER AGAINST THEM. Countercultural stencils sunnily protest this authoritarianism with such slogans as 'I Am Karachi — United for Peace'. Banksy-style balloons brighten one Maersk Sealand container, and a lotus painted using truck-art techniques adorns a grim underpass. American sociologist Anita Weiss has regularly spent time in Pakistan since the 1970s. She is currently researching wall art, and calls the I Am Karachi group a 'guerrilla art movement', especially when it comes to the challenge they are sending out to sectarianism.

On the main road we see Land Cruisers rather than the Pajero jeeps I remember from 1990s Pakistan. Men hang off buses, and my eyes are assailed by a dizzying array of hoardings. KK Rehabilitation Centre. Handi Inn. Baithak Peshwari. On dusty slip roads, I notice a family eating their dinner under bedraggled trees on the pavement near the glittering Park Towers. Four men on the pavement are smiling, perspiring and conspiring. Yameen Chicken. Mutton and Beef Centre. WalkEaze. A school advertises its 'salient features' in businesslike bullet points. A beggar pleads at our car window on his bachche's behalf, exposing the lack of government capacity to deal with the country's grinding poverty.

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by Brooks Riley

by Dwight Furrow

It is natural to invoke beauty as the aesthetic ideal that winemakers strive to achieve and wine lovers seek to discover. Throughout much of the history of aesthetics beauty has named the highest form of aesthetic order. As Elaine Scarry writes, beauty is:

Sacred, lifesaving, having as precedent only those things which are themselves unprecedented, beauty has a fourth feature: it invites deliberation….Beauty almost without any effort of our own acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labour, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction – to locate what is true. (Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 26-31)

For wine lovers scouring the globe for a glimpse of vinous perfection, Scarry's account of what beauty does surely rings true. However, although we toss the word beauty around quite freely, in the aesthetics of art it has fallen on hard times since early in the 20^th Century. With the display of Duchamp's upside down urinal in a New York art studio in 1917 and the mass atrocities of WW1 and the Holocaust haunting artistic production throughout the rest of the century, the idea of beauty no longer seemed to capture what the art world was selling. The problem was that by the 20^th Century beauty had been assimilated to what was "pretty", "charming", and easily accessible and had thus lost its power to enthrall or represent the more difficult aspects of human existence. Thus, the art world dumped beauty and embraced the sublime. Art became abstract, difficult, and for most of the public, inaccessible.

There are interesting parallels and cross-currents to this story about art that are beginning to unfold in the wine world today. In the past, prior to the 1980's, great wines were tough when first bottled taking years to develop in the cellar at which time they often developed aromas such as cigar box, old shoes and barnyard. Vintage variation was enormous especially in the storied vineyards of central France where unpredictable weather from the Atlantic Ocean inhibited the consistent ripening of grapes. In some years even great vineyards could produce only thin, weedy wines with harsh acidity and aggressive, under-ripe tannins prompting the addition of sugar to make the wine palatable. Furthermore, the presence of bacteria and the unpredictability of fermentations produced off flavors in the wine that contributed to a wine's character but also to a sense of adventure when opening a bottle. That was the good stuff. Vin ordinaire performed a plausible rendition of battery acid.

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I’m listening to something.
I don’t know what it’s called but it’s Chopin.
It’s something Alexa pulled
from the high capacity byte magazine
of her small black canister
which sits under a lamp upon a table
against the wall (where most of us have spent
at least a little time, sweating)
it’s power umbilical plugged to an outlet,
its invisible wireless thread stretched taut to a router
it’s bluesy halo perfectly apropos—
but whatever it is, it is necessarily of the moment
and I had asked for classical after all,
so I’m thinking Alexa must know more than I
of what this now must consist

Of what it partially consists are bell sounds
—not bells really but the closest thing
Chopin could come up with
to be played on an instrument
that sounds bell-like but which again
I admit: I haven’t a clue.
Despite having a poet’s surfeit of words
you’d think I’d not have come up short
before committing to a page, but it
is spontaneous magic as I sit here
among Chopin’s frequencies listening,
applying Chopin to the day’s doing,
wondering why, suddenly! Alexa has
shuffled Ahmad Jamal into the mix
and left me mulling what Ahmad’s
poignant jazz has to do with
what this now is
.

Jim Culleny
3/16/18

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

When I first moved into an apartment onto campus to take up my current job as faculty at one of the most prestigious institutes in India, I knocked at my neighbour's door to introduce myself, only to be asked, "What department is Sir in?" Highly amused, I responded, that actually only madam would take up residence and work here; madam, of course, being myself. What would otherwise have raised my feminist hackles, to this day amuses me, perhaps because I was able to take pleasure in overturning a kind of misrecognition, no matter to how small a degree. Gender, age and body are easy and frequent stages for misrecognition—one is seen, heard, and assumed to be of a certain age, gender, and life stage. "You don't look your age!" is a form of misrecognition that can offer pleasure or otherwise depending on whether such looking is over- or under-determined.

In the social sciences, such misrecognition informs identity. In other words, across literatures, it is only through agreeing, refusing, conforming, partly conforming, and co-opting available labels and modes of being does one gain identity. We all therefore, exist, by misrecognizing ourselves and others for there is either no core self, outside of such temporary and sometimes sedimented forms of knowing, or the possibility of gaining any authentic self is always already lost. In this short essay, this is what concerns my exploration of pleasure. For other theorists like Nancy Fraser, misrecognition refers to the denigration and refusal of common humanity in others; in other words, a literal refusal to recognize. While there are clearly pleasures to the latter, I do not take it up in this piece. However, where the first and the second come together is in reading Pierre Bourdieu, for who misrecognition resides in the everyday where things, people, and processes get attributed to available realms of meaning and thereby misrecognized as such, making no room available for the uncommon, the changing, and the different.

These days, I walk around utterly confused as to who to be. I am a thoroughly misrecognized entity; seen as woman even though I do not know how to behave in an adequately womanly fashion; considered responsible even though only I know how often I misplace my keys; accorded the privilege of teaching despite my own frequent misgivings and surrender to the "imposter" syndrome; and the most egregious burden of all, considered an adult, even though I, like most others, fake it.

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Alicja Kwade. Light Transfer of Nature, 2015.

More here, here, and here.

by Max Sirak

(Look…er…Listen! It's a free audio version for all you on-the-go…)

Conversations are like sex. There's a safe and unsafe way to go about them. Today I'm going to share with you a way to protect yourself against unwanted communicational repercussions. But, before we get there, I'd like to take a moment to pay homage to the lineage of thought which led me to this prophylactic presentation. Ideas evolve. Not always, but sometimes. If a concept is sticky enough, it hangs around, lying in wait, and resurfaces. Each exposure granting more nuance to the original idea until eventually a fresh concept emerges, related and traceable to the first, but individual in its own right.

Which is how conversational contraception was born.

"Free Movies!"

A college professor of mine would yell this, arms waving, at least once each class. Appealing to the broke nature of students, due to soaring expenses of tuition, Professor Terrill was very passionate (and demonstrative) in his attempts to steer us. Energy and enthusiasm aside, it never worked. At least not on my friends and me. We were too immersed in the other "recreational" options collegiate life had to offer. So it goes.

But that doesn't diminish the impact Prof. Terrill and his class had on me. Even now, 16 years after I was but one anonymous face in the tessellated sea of his lecture hall, I find myself thinking about ideas he taught. They were so foreign and new.

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by Brooks Riley

by Christopher Bacas

On Flatbush Avenue,
the dollar vans squawk and beep,
threading through traffic.

City buses stream
rectangles of blue-white light
across the storefronts.

From dim upper floors,
blinds drawn, shadowed, comes music:
brass band with coro.

Tuba burps madly:
a bullfrog virtuoso
looking for lovers.

Beneath an awning,
they sit by a glowing grill,
rain sizzling its lid.

A thick woman prods
the charred corn, whole or sectioned,
smoke twists around her.

In the entrance way,
on a cart, plates, condiments:
mayonnaise and cheese.

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One Evening in 1907 On The Banks Of The River Neckar, Heidelberg

by Mohammed Iqbal

The Silver moon is silent

Branches are silent as well

Valley birds that sell their songs are silent

Mountains cloaked in green are silent

Neckar flows regal under the spell of silence

Embraced by the night a world is silent

Be still, heart. Sing the blues.

Translated from the original Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit

by Liam Heneghan

A writer’s path is paved with the flagstones of their unread essays. Years ago I wrote an essay entitled “Soil and Myself” for the collection Irish Spirit (Wolfhound, 2001). I was attempting there to come to grips with my youthful loss of religious faith and my growing enchantment with the earth as a source of inspiration and solace. This spiritual crisis occurred in the early eighties, an era when the dimensions of our global environmental problems were becoming apparent. I fell in love with a damaged world.

My turning to nature was a physical one to be sure, but my late teen years were also a time of reverie inspired by those Irish writers that cared about both people and wild landscapes: Liam O’Flaherty, W.B. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, for example, and by all the earthy shenanigans recorded in the Irish mythological cycles. An apposite ratio of nature hikes and of literary contemplation provided me a foundation for optimistic living.

“Soil and Myself” was published, the world turned, and I moved along as writers are wont to do. Several years later, I got a letter from a reader—perhaps the essay's only one—who remarked on how the piece had moved her. She was getting on, she wrote, and was latterly attempting to draw consolation from the same sources I had. As a codicil, she noted that she had elected not to have children because of her worry about nuclear armageddon. Why bring a child into this damned world? She concluded wistfully that had she had a child that child would be my age now. By the time I got that letter I had survived nearly four decades without facing down any real calamities.

This small but arresting exchange came to mind on encountering several discussions that assume a bleak environmental future. For example, a recent Onion headline quips dolefully “Sighing, Resigned Climate Scientists Say to Just Enjoy Next 20 Years As Much As You Can.” Less drolly, the “Climate Change and Life Events” app allows users map their future against projections of future global temperatures. The future will not look like the past. The New York Times reports on some couples’ deliberations about their reproductive future in the light of such realities: “No Children Because Of Climate Change? Some People Are Considering It” (New York Times, Feb 5, 2018). A new generation considers the prospects of raising children in perilous times. Unlike nuclear annihilation, which, so far, has failed to materialize, the bombs of climate change, so to speak, have already left their bunkers, though there is some uncertainty about their yield. Facing an uncertain environmental future, and occupying a planet that horrifyingly may be unable to sustain its burgeoning human population, determining to have, or not have, a child is a fraught decision.

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I and I
One says to the other, no man sees my face and lives —Bob Dylan

When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. Neighborless and seamless, he is You and fills the firmament.….—Martin Buber
____________________________________________________

Luminous Debris

…… through the debris of ages
…… too deep to grasp I spin
but you are with me in this thing so vast
that distances lose meaning
and time is neither slow nor fast

…… some spend years slicing its flesh
thin as shaved salmon into membranes
so fine the fabric of universes pass
without tangling warp or woof
……(though certainty snaps
….. with the slightest look)

…… others count and rout particles that nest
without rest:
………………….atomic bábushka–Matryoshkas
of prosaic electricity
in ghost orbits
…………………… being like us,
both here and there in bodymind
ensconced

……………… while others
fire duet lasers to catch ageless hints
of enormous pebbles that once dropped
into a ballooning lake of spacetime
stalking gravity waves of bygone quakes
like Greeks on a hill hailing Helios,
marking arrivals, noting,
watching his horse and chariot
drop with precision
blazing into a wine-dark sea
leaving a jetblack wake

…… but you are with me
in this vast shadow

i and thou among receding sparks

luminous debris
…… under eternal sky
…… you and me
…… i and i
.

Jim Culleny
3/9/18

by Samir Chopra

A couple of years ago, I participated in a radio discussion on ‘Male Intimacy,’ hosted by Natasha Mitchell on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s show Life Matters. Natasha had invited me on to offer the ‘alternative perspective’ of an immigrant who had lived in India, the US, and briefly, in Australia. (Audio is available; I go on at the 20 minute mark; the whole show is worth a listen.)

While on air, when speaking about the cross-cultural differences in male intimacy I had experienced in my three ‘homes,’ I noted that growing up in India meant being socialized in a domain of relationships with men where physical contact was relatively unproblematic: I put my arms around my male friends’ shoulders, did not rigorously negotiate inter-personal physical space, and demonstrated affection and companionship through a variety of physical gestures—including hugs. (Avuncular affection almost always took these forms.) As the time approached for my move to the US, I was warned—by those Indians who had preceded me and were now already resident in the US—to not expect such ‘intimate’ contact when I crossed the waters, to desist from such overt displays of friendship and affection in my relationships with American men. Those warnings spoke to a culture that set much store by the careful maintenance of a physical and emotional space between its male members; ‘keep your distance’ applied to many dimensions of social interactions. I took these warnings to heart. There was no reason to disbelieve them; moreover, I was keen to ‘fit in,’ to not ‘stick out,’ to not take the risk of being called a ‘homo’ or a ‘fag’—as seemed to be the fate of those who transgressed in this domain. This was the 1980s; America seemed—from a distance—to be suffering a national crisis of masculine insecurity. I suffered from my own variant of it.

So the manner of my relationships with men changed once I moved to the US; besides the obvious psychosocial distance pertaining to matters of familial and filial structure, and political and cultural tastes and inclinations, I found men in my new home structured and conducted their relationships and friendships with each other quite differently. American men were not physically demonstrative in their claims of friendship; they did not hug their male friends; they did not put arms around male friends; they carefully established the requisite physical space between themselves and their friends. Immigration induced many changes in the qualitative and quantitative nature of my personal and social relationships with men and women alike; the parameters of male relationships in my new home denied me a very particular—and much desired when missed—kind of emotional sustenance.

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by Chris Knight

Noam Chomsky is the world’s most prominent anti-militarist campaigner and, wearing a different hat, the acknowledged founder of modern scientific linguistics. Any attempt to understand Chomsky’s huge influence on modern thought must appreciate the connection between these two roles. And to do this we must begin with a paradoxical fact: Chomsky has spent his career in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working in what was originally a military lab. As he himself says about MIT in the 1960s:

[It] was about 90 per cent Pentagon funded at that time. And I personally was right in the middle of it. I was in a military lab. If you take a look at my early publications, they all say something about Air Force, Navy, and so on, because I was in a military lab, the Research Lab for Electronics [RLE].

The Pentagon showed a keen interested in linguistics during this period. Colonel Gaines of the US Air Force recalled why during an interview in 1971. Having referred to the military’s computerised systems of command and control, both for defense against nuclear missiles and for use in Vietnam, he complained about the difficulties of teaching computer languages to military personnel. “We sponsored linguistic research”, he explained, “in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.”

If Chomsky’s linguistics was being funded for this purpose, it seems all the more remarkable that Chomsky ended up publicly opposing the Vietnam War and denouncing the very military institutions that were sponsoring his research.

Modestly, Chomsky has always downplayed any moral dilemmas, suggesting that the military had no interest in his work. But I have recently come across restricted-access documents which refer to Chomsky as a “consultant” to a project funded by the Air Force in order “to establish natural language as an operational language for command and control.”

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William Pope. L. William Pope. L: Trinket, 2015.

More here, here and here.

by Emrys Westacott

A virtue is a quality that people consider valuable, admirable, or desirable. Human beings exhibit various kinds of virtues, many of which are specific to particular roles or activities. A strong throwing arm is a virtue in a baseball player. A good memory is a virtue in a stage actor. Some qualities, however, such as courage, kindness, or generosity, are typically viewed as moral virtues.

It isn't easy to specify just what makes a virtue a moral virtue. Like certain talents, qualities such as empathy or cheerfulness may be gifts of nature or ingrained by a certain upbringing, and they can also be deliberately cultivated. So the difference between moral and non-moral virtues doesn't lie in their origin, or in the degree to which one is responsible for possessing them.

Moral virtues do tend to be qualities that it is thought good for everyone to have; but that is also true of such things as intelligence or physical fitness. In general, though, we think of particular skills as valuable for some people who engage in particular tasks, while moral virtues are qualities that it is good for anyone and everyone to have. They are those excellences that help one to be a good human being (rather than just a good x) and to live a good life. Something like this underlies the way Socrates talks about virtue in Plato's dialogues.

These days, we tend to think of moral virtues as traits that directly affect our dealings with others; they are traits that make someone a more valuable colleague, neighbor, friend, companion, or compatriot, or fellow citizen. If we adopt Peter Singer's notion of expanding the circle of moral concern, we will also count among "others" humanity as a whole, and at least some non-human animals. But philosophers, like Aristotle, the Epicureans, and the Stoics conceive of moral virtues more broadly still, as including traits that have to do with how fulfilling a life one leads. Thoreau, for instance, who could reasonably be described as a modern stoic, views curiosity about the natural world, or an ability to appreciate beauty, as moral virtues in this sense.

Can a moral virtue become outdated? However one conceives of the moral virtues, this is an interesting question to ponder.

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by Thomas R. Wells

The statistics are shocking. A Russian troll farm created false anti-Clinton stories and distributed them on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. As many as 126 million Facebook users may have encountered at least one piece of Russian propaganda; Russian tweets received as many as 288 million views. The Russians, just like Trump’s campaign itself, leveraged the adtech infrastructure developed by social media companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to identify and target those most receptive to their lies and provocations.

What is going on? Is this something new? Does it matter?

I. Do People Believe Fake News?

One popular interpretation of what is going on is that social media and its associated adtech have isolated us in filter bubbles and made us newly vulnerable to politically or commercially motivated lies. The bubble is a controlled information environment based on what we want to hear and what adbuyers want people like us to believe. Organisations that know how to use this – whether a Russian troll farm or the company hired by the Brexit campaign – can exercise enormous power over the information we are exposed to and thus our beliefs about the world.

I disagree. I think very few people actually believe fake news. Rather, they indulge in believing that they believe it. People’s relationship to such beliefs is much more like the way they relate to icecream than the enlightenment idea of respecting objective truth. Consider Pizzagate, a recent very famous example of fake news.

At the end of October 2016 an anti-Clinton conspiracy theory started circulating on fringe rightist social media and fake news websites like Infowars. Russian troll accounts seem to have been among those helping the story spread. Over the next month, millions of Americans heard or read that top members of the Democratic Party were running a child sexual slavery ring from the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC.

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