by Charlie Huenemann
What would it be for life to have a “meaning”? What does it mean when people say life is meaningful? I’m not sure, so let’s start with smaller, more obviously meaningful things. Better yet, let’s start with some meaningless things. When Bob sits down to polish the steel junk he’s about to haul to the scrap heap, we can say his activity is meaningless: there’s no point to it. Similarly, when my students sit down to prepare for an exam that I have decided to cancel, their work is pointless and meaningless. When Sally writes a memo about the futility of writing memos, crafting her prose to limpid perfection, with the aim of deleting her anti-memo memo before anyone reads it, we should feel some degree of concern for her mental well-being. Meaningless things have no point to them – nothing is achieved, no purpose can be fathomed, and the work we dedicate to them is entirely wasted. Meaningful things, let’s presume, are just the opposite.
So, how about life as a whole – your whole life, and the lives of everyone? If we believe in a Grand Scheme of Things, some cosmic contest with an unambiguous finish line, then we might then see lives as meaningful. The history of philosophy is crammed full of such Grand Schemes, but we might call upon Leibniz to present one of the greatest ones. This world, said Leibniz, is the best of all possible worlds, the very best world a just and omniscient being could call into existence, and it is made the best by all of the things people do, when taken as a whole. All finite things strive toward greater and greater perfections of being, and the world over time turns into something that is worthy of divine selection. If we embrace the Leibnizian scheme, we feel the pressure of bringing all our actions and thoughts to the highest reaches of moral and metaphysical perfection. Everything is meaningful, because everything contributes to the end God set for creation.
This is one thrillingly grand notion of cosmic meaningfulness – but hardly anyone now believes it. Most of us accept that the universe has not come about for the purpose of achieving anything. Cosmologists tell us that it’s something of a puzzle why there should be anything at all, and many of them are driven to the conclusion that there must be an infinity of possible universes, most of them boring beyond any description, and a scant few of them including such noteworthy features as matter. They come to this conclusion precisely to avoid the conclusion our universe has anything to brag about. Our universe is the way it is because some universe had to be, and it’s consequently no surprise that we – as evolved, intelligent beings – would find ourselves in one of those rare universes in which something relatively interesting has happened.
What does our universe try to achieve? Well, if anything, it seems to enjoy growing entropy – that is, it tries to shed itself of any order. Our universe would love nothing more than to become a thin, bland soup, and verdicts seem to go back and forth about whether it’s likely to succeed in this modest goal. The more fundamental point, of course, is that the universe itself does not really care one way or another about its own success. It just does whatever its laws tell it to do, and the laws, so far as we comprehend them, do not aim toward any special, purposeful end.
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by Gautam Pemmaraju
A month or so ago, at a dinner party, my ears locked into a conversation between two men from a reasonable distance away. Drinks and hors d'oeuvres were still being served; glasses clinked in cheering, and the chinaware made all sorts of bright, transient sounds as they were picked up, put down, or met with cutlery. There was soft, unobtrusive music serving as a unifying background, festooned ever so often by exclamations, polite laughter, and other speech. On occasion a chair would be moved— possibly the only abrasive sound to this genteel soundscape. Ice cubes were dropped gingerly into my drink, not enough though for to not make the slightest of sounds (or did I imagine that?). As snatches of sentences reached me from various sources, I was able to telescopically isolate the conversation that I had quite unintentionally, unwittingly, chosen to eavesdrop upon. They spoke of a fairly prominent public figure and his current whereabouts. Perhaps it was his name that had drawn my attention. His libertine ways, peccadilloes so to speak, were the topic of conversation; in particular, there was mention of some frolicking in a bathtub filled with champagne that had apparently made quite a, well, splash. Some boisterous laughter ensued, filling the room with its force. And just like that, the sonic space had changed, and as I gathered my wits, my ears shifted focus seamlessly to a friend who sat down next to me. “Cheers!” she exclaimed and we clinked glasses. It seems now to me a sensory rupture of sorts—my eavesdropping was barely a minute, and yet, it seemed oddly long. That it was a relatively ‘hi-fi' party—marked by a more favourable signal to noise ratio—helped matters for it was easier to pick out individual, pellucid sounds that may have otherwise been masked in a different setting, In hindsight though, it all seems now a trick of the mind, a temporal illusion experienced by a disembodied double and flagged by auditory cues. Much like cinema.
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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy
Somewhere in Japan, on offer for the throwaway price of a thousand yen, is a good night's cuddle. Somewhere in Seattle and elsewhere in Oregon, the price of an expensive meal will offer you the benefits of touch; hugging, cuddling, and spooning. Somewhere on a street corner, someone is standing around with a board that says “Free Hugs”.
Intimacy, otherwise sparse, is now available, sometimes freely and sometimes not. Theorists of the 21st century speak of the phenomenon called affective labor wherein even emotion is brought under the purview of capitalist modes of valuation and exchange. This is a matter of both lament and orientation. One is nostalgic for her grandmother who offered food and love in abundant measure, while being aware that all of it was provided through backbreaking, undervalued and underpaid, gendered labor.
Having lived in the US for close to a decade, I am intensely familiar with the enunciations of such affective labor. Cashiers who ask you how you are doing with such abundant cheer, even as they do not necessarily care to hear the answer, are part of this labor complex. Also inhabiting this phenomenon are bartenders; men and women, who must both produce unique personalities, as well as subsume them in the service of listening to your life story. In return, one plays the game. One declares to the cashier that life could be better, but isn't bad, and one produces for the bartender, a confession hopefully more interesting than the last. In turn is generated the counter effect of a hermetic sealing off from affective atmospheres. Modes of survival seem to depend upon avoiding all but the most perfunctory forms of structured intimacy, thereby retaining all control. In such a milieu, the form of loneliness produced is piercing, and singular. It creates an appreciation and tolerance for being alone, along with an inability to be anything but, compounded by a deep desire for the one true companion that will dispel this state of being. The myth that therefore sustains this affective dissonance and deprivation is that of the love story.
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by Hari Balasubramanian
This piece is framed as a 'conversation' but it is really a conversation or debate between two voices/perspectives in my own head (here's a similar piece from last year).
__
“There's a lot of talk these days about 'staying in the present moment', 'being mindful', etc. I find it all quite puzzling. Because it doesn't matter what is going on or what I am thinking, I am always in the present – isn't that the case?”
“Well, I find myself usually thinking of the past or projecting future scenarios…”
“Sure – that's true for me too. But isn't it true that thinking of the past or the future also happens the present? A memory of the past is somehow retrieved now in our mental space and we say we are thinking of the past. The screen on which the past unfolds or the future is projected is always the present.”
“You can get very technical about it if you like. The idea of being present is simply to clear your mind of unnecessary and – on many occasions – troublesome thoughts which keep taking you on needless mental journeys.”
“Okay – then what remains when your mind is clear of thoughts?”
“I guess you experience sensory stimuli going on right now – you feel how cold the wind is, or how red that piece of cloth is, how bitter the coffee is and so on.”
“And why are these sensory perceptions more special than thoughts of the past or future? Isn't the feeling that the coffee is bitter a kind of thought too – you taste the coffee and something in your mind, some kind of past knowledge or memory, learned or ingrained, but which is still thought, informs you that it is bitter.”
“At least it is more immediate…”
“Yes, but the present is already the past by the time you label something. Thought is always one step behind whatever is unfolding…”
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by Sarah Firisen
The week before last I changed the sheets on my bed. Stripped the fitted sheet, the pillow cases, bundled it all up in my arms and threw it in the washing machine and turned it on (I’m lucky enough to have a washer/dryer in my apartment in NYC). About 3 minutes went by, maybe 4. I suddenly felt that something was wrong, something was missing, I looked on the kitchen counter, on the coffee table, ran into the bedroom and looked on my bedside table, but the sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach told me what I already knew; I ran to the washer, opened up the top, reached inside, felt around and there it was, my iPhone. The sheets weren’t soaked, but they were pretty wet, a decent amount of water was already in the washer. I knew the drill from when my daughter had dropped her phone in the toilet, but in the panic of the moment there were steps I forgot or overlooked. Luckily I had bulked ordered Arborio rice (I like risotto) and so quickly dumped 3 bags worth into a bowl. Took the phone out of its case, which in this circumstance had probably done more harm than good, trapping the water nicely. Put the phone in the rice, put the bowl in a warm dry spot as dictated by the various guides to such things I found on the internet, which luckily I could still access via my laptop and prayed. My daughter scolded me – “and you know, you have to wait at least 72 hours!!” Her concern was hardly selfless; the plan was that when I was eligible to upgrade in just over 6 weeks, she’d get my old phone to replace her almost totally defunct iPhone 5.
Those 72 hours were hell. I have no house phone, so no way to call anyone and even if I did, I don’t know anyone’s phone numbers except my aunt and uncle in England because they’ve had the same phone number since I was 7 and my ex-husband who’s had his mobile number at least 10 years.
I do everything on my phone: banking, airline check-ins (I fly a lot) and boarding passes, pay my rent, stay in touch with loved ones, read the New York Times and the New Yorker, read books, and listen to music. Without it, I’m ashamed to say I was bereft. I couldn’t work out because I really need to listen to music to motivate me and I had no way to do that. Could only communicate with friends and family through email and Facebook from my laptop which left me rather housebound. And there are some personal details at the intersection of personal hygiene and technology that I can’t even bring myself to report with greater clarity. Suffice it to say, I was lost. It was a very long 3 days. Actually more like 2 ½ because I cracked around 11am Monday morning, took it out of the rice and tried to turn it on.
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by Sue Hubbard
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”
― T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land and Other Poems
From the young painter who, in July 1948, sold his canvases from the pavement in the LCC ‘Open-Air Exhibition' on the Embankment Gardens, Frank Auerbach has become one of the most important and challenging painters on the British landscape. Despite his great friendship with the priapic and party loving Freud, Auerbach has, by comparison, lead the life of an aesthete; a monk to his chosen calling. He hardly socialises, preferring the company of those he knows well. He drinks moderately, wears his clothes till they fall apart and paints 365 days a year.
Though he rarely gives interviews and does not like to talk about his work, he has said of painting: “The whole thing is about struggle”. As Alberto Giacometti contended it is “analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness”…”the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it”.
It is out of this creative darkness, this complexity and unknowability of the world and the self that Auerbach has conjured his series of extraordinary heads, nudes and landscapes. Whilst the past for him may be a foreign country where they do things differently, one that he doesn't choose to revisit – “I think I [do] this thing which psychiatrists frown on: I am in total denial” – it's hard to walk around this current exhibition at Tate Britain and not feel that his dramatic early years had a profound influence on his work.
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by Akim Reinhardt
Last month, my second academic book was published by the University of Nebraska Press. It is entitled Welcome to the Oglala Nation: A Documentary Reader in Oglala Lakota Political History.
The publisher's website for the book is here.
The book reconsiders the history of the Oglala Lakota people, the largest branch of an Indigenous nation commonly known as the Sioux.
The word “Sioux” is a French corruption of a 17th century Anishinaabe (Chippewa or Ojibwa) name for the people who call themselves either Dakotas or Lakotas. Whether one says “Dakota” or “Lakota” depends on which dialect of that language one is speaking or associated with; one of the main differences between the Dakota and Lakota dialects is the pronunciation of the letter D, which Lakota speakers pronounce as an L.
Of the seven Lakota-speaking groups, the largest are the Oglalas. From among the ranks of 19th century Oglala political leaders are some of the most famous Indigenous names in American history, including Tašuŋka Witko (Crazy Horse) and Maĥpia Luta (Red Cloud).
Pine Ridge Reservation, in the southwestern corner of South Dakota, has been home to the Oglala Oyate (nation) since the 1870s; prior to that the Lakota empire spread over much of the northern Great Plains. Pine Ridge Reservation It is also where Ĉaŋkpe Opi (Wounded Knee) is located, site of both a brutal U.S. Army massacre of approximately 200 Indigenous people in 1890 and an occupation by Oglalas and their supporters from the American Indian Movement (AIM) which was laid siege to by the federal government in 1973.
My first academic book, published in 2007, was a study of Oglala politics on Pine Ridge during the mid-20th century. This new book offers a more comprehensive political history of the Oglala Oyate.
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October
.
when the night chorus ends
its cricketed whine
(gone overnight when first frost came)
a new silence blends with pitch of pine
and barks of trees
………………………… what remains
when heat departs and dark descends
is a resonate wake of love in heads
of echo memories that will too
be shed
.
Jim Culleny
9/8/15
by Leanne Ogasawara
Not far from Amman, located just outside the city of Salt is the shrine of the Old Testament Prophet Joshua. It is a simple building containing nothing but a tomb. But what a tomb it is; for at about ten meters long, it makes quite an impression!
Indeed, ever since visiting the Tomb of Joshua, I've come to feel that all saints' tombs of saints should be super-sized like that.
It's not just saints either. Throughout Asia, one can follow the trail of the gigantic footprints of the Buddha (“Buddhapada”). These were the first “relics” of the religion before the rise of Greco-Buddhist art. From Japan to Sri Lanka, these monumental footprints abound and some are the size of a bathtub!
It is, you have to admit, somehow pleasing to see the great stature of these saints and sages reflected in their great physical size….a kind of inner greatness reflected in their after-impressions….
This larger-than-life quality is just one of the myriad of things I like about GK Chesterton. Not one to be outdone in anything, the prolific British writer had a massive final resting place. Like the prophet Joshua, his gigantic coffin was so huge that they simply couldn't get it down the stairs and out of his house for the funeral! Chesterton was, it seems, enormously fat. But as this wonderful old article in the Atlantic has it, this shows you how levity meets gravity– for he was in many ways a man of Biblical proportions!
Speaking of which, have you heard the Catholic church has opened an investigation into a possible case for his canonization?
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by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
There is something about Bernie Sanders that scares our establishment shitless. Their knickers are in a horrible twist, their sphincters clench in immense nervousness, and their gonads scuttle back into their bodies, at the very idea of Bernie Sanders.
Let us explore this bizarro fact of political life in these United States.
What's really ass-backwards odd about our establishment punditry, is that they've finally started accepting the fact that Donald Trump is leading the GOP presidential field (took them a while).
But when it comes to Bernie Sanders beating Hillary in recent polls in important states, and in the debate last week, not so much.
Just look at the pundit response to the debate. To a man and a woman, they think Hillary won. Every columnist in every major newspaper wrote that Hillary won. I couldn't believe it when I read them the next day. Were they watching the debate through their eyes or their butts?
Because everybody else thought Bernie won. Overwhelmingly. Check the chart for the numbers.
I watched the debate in a bar with a bunch of other folks, and it was clear to me and to them that Bernie won. He landed punch after punch, bang! bang! kerplatch! pashkaboom! and we cheered him far more than we cheered Hillary.
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by Matt McKenna
If Ridley Scott's The Martian is a science fiction story about stranded astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) struggling to survive on Mars until he can be rescued by his crew, CNN's recent Democratic primary debate is a political science fiction story about presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton (Hillary Clinton) surviving in the primary until she can be rescued by her fellow Democrats. Both the film and the debate were lengthy and exposition-laden affairs in which the audience was expected to be less excited about the content of the protagonist's speech and more excited that they were speaking at all. For example, it didn't matter what scientific flimflam came out of Watney's mouth, it just need to represent cocksure smart-guy talk well enough to impress the audience and elicit a laugh. Likewise, it didn't matter what political flimflam came out of Clinton's mouth, it just needed to represent mainstream liberal values well enough to impress the audience and elicit sycophantic rapturous applause. That said, if you were marooned on a desert planet in desperate need for entertainment, you could do worse than The Martian or even the debate. If you could only watch one, however, The Martian is the clear winner–at least it openly advertises itself as fiction.
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by Bill Benzon
What about television? The movies? Or, even, heaven forefend! the book? But then, what is a mind that it can be wrecked, or not?
The brain we know about, and what rots it. Cancer rots the brain. So do drugs of the wrong kind, and there are lots of wrong kinds, though there’s some dispute on specific drugs. But the mind, it’s not at all clear that the mind is the sort of thing that can rot, at least not literally. Metaphorically, sure.
But why would I even entertain the idea – and that’s all I’m doing, entertaining it – that the internets have wrecked my mind? Well, for one thing, I’m a mature adult and for several years now I’ve spent several hours a day, every day, not only working at my computer – which, in some uses is no more than a glorified typewriter – my cruising the web. And I rarely read an article all the way through. I’ll read a couple of sentences, maybe a few paragraphs, and then move on. In some cases I’ll link the article to my Facebook page or even cut, paste, and comment a post to my home blog, New Savanna.
And then I’m back on the prowl, checking out my Facebook friends, seeing how many hits I’ve gotten at Flickr, how’s the conversation over there at Crooked Timber?, any useful stuff at 3 Quarks Daily?, what’s the gossip on JCList? And so it goes. For hours. Everyday.
And you can’t even write a proper sentence! What kind of sentence is that: “For hours”? Where’s the verb? The subject?
Chill, dude. That’s not a sentence. It’s a mind fart.
Mind fart!? What kind of language is that for an intellectual publication like 3QD!
Dude, 3QD is on the internets, yo!
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by Eric Byrd
Three Wogs (1973) is Alexander Theroux's first novel – the fruit of a Fulbright year in London, and a National Book Award nominee. It is the work of a verbal sorcerer and deep-seeing satirist unafraid of prolixity or obscurity in the pursuit of a complex effect: the grotesque real, the situations in which social aversions reveal erotic fears and fantasies. Theroux's three stories are set in liminal or subterranean spaces – “the depths where horror and pleasure coincide,” said Leiris.
1. The theater where the Sinophobe and refugee-tormenter Mrs. Proby goes to be deliciously alarmed before giant projected scenes of Fu Manchu's lubricious villainy:
The theatre, with its smell of weak lilac and cheap caporal, was the perfect hush in soft red lights that Mrs. Proby loved: funereal, anonymous, the nethermost retreat where the tired, amorous, and lonesome could sleep or fondle or expatiate in ones or twos or threes, far from the madding crowd and unbothered in the reliquary of pure imagination.
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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse 
Ludwig Wittgenstein apparently once claimed that “a serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” It's not clear what might have led Wittgenstein to say such a thing. Indeed, it seems an absurd suggestion. Philosophy is largely an explanatory enterprise, and, as we all know, there's no worse fate for a joke than for it to require explanation. However, it is clear that jokes can provide an occasion for philosophical reflection. Even though we do not need an explanation of a good joke in order to find it funny, we nonetheless may have reason to look for an explanation of the fact that it is funny.
The distinction between explaining a joke and explaining what is funny about a joke is subtle enough to seem bogus. Yet surely there is a difference between having to explain a joke in order to make the case that it is funny and offering an explanation of what is funny about a joke that is already acknowledged to be so. The former project is, as we've already mentioned, a joke killer; a joke that needs to be explained in order that one might find it funny is arguably no joke at all. But the latter project of explaining why we find a particular joke funny can be elucidating. For one thing, it calls attention to the varied phenomena of humor, including the puzzling features of language and communication that are often put on explicit display in a good joke. Perhaps eventually such explanations may be helpful in drawing important distinctions between, say, comedy and cruelty, or satire and defamation.
The recent passing of Yogi Berra has rightly occasioned reflection on his famous quizzical remarks that are now widely known as “Yogisms.” What is interesting about Yogisms is that they're clearly funny, but it is not clear why. On the one hand, several look like simple conceptual errors. For example, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” “Pair up in threes,” and “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical” seem simply to misunderstand what forks, pairs, and halves are. On the other hand, others appear to be flat tautologies. Consider: “I knew the record would stand until it was broken” and “You wouldn't have won if we'd beaten you.” In the cases of both of these kinds, the comedy lies in a kind of unthinking tendency to malapropism. Had Yogi said only one such thing, there likely would be no humor in it; one would simply claim that he had on some occasion misspoken, or said something silly, and be done with it. It is Yogi's proneness to certain kinds of conceptual infelicity – his record of erring – that makes these slip-ups distinctively amusing.
But other Yogisms are more intriguing, and, importantly, these are his more widely-known sayings. Consider the most famous Yogism of all: “It ain't over till it's over.” On its face, it looks like another simple tautology. Yet it isn't. What's going on?
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by Tamuira Reid
I haven't had a drink in nearly a decade. Still think I should've gone out with more style. I chose beer to be my last drink. It was Corona. I remember because I cut my finger slicing the lime.
A decade. That's ten whole years. A lot can happen in ten years. Cities are built and destroyed. World records are broken. Lives begin and end.
Sometimes I would drink Corona and pretend to be on a beach in Mexico. I would wear big, colorful sombreros and curl my toes into the sand.
“I'm just taking a break.”
“But why?”
“I don't know. To see if I can, I guess.”
“Sounds pointless to me. It's not like you have a problem.”
Everyone has a drinking story. Everyone eventually shares it.
Corona tastes even better if accompanied by tortilla chips and some good pico de gallo.
I used to be a bartender myself. I learned that putting an alcoholic behind the bar is a lot like throwing water on a grease fire; it just makes everything worse. The managers all came at me the same way, with eyes cast down, wringing their hands. Words come out unevenly. “This is hard for me.” “We're going to miss you.” “Need to break professional ties.” There's only so many ways to tell someone they're getting fired. I'd nod my head and collect my stuff, usually a few scattered CD's, some cigarettes, and a copy of People magazine hidden behind the margarita machine for when it was slow.
I write about drunk people. Some of them are strangers. The postman who carries shooters in his saddlebag. The bank teller at Chase Manhattan who breathes whiskey fire when she asks “And how would you like your bills?” The teenage boy who runs the Laundromat next door, with his slurred speech and heavy gold eyes, clumsily doling out quarters to the women with their baskets of dirty clothes and half-naked children. He prefers to drink a forty of Old E that he carries around in a recycled brown bag.
Sometimes I know the drunk people I write about. Sometimes they are my cousin or my mother or my friend from college.
I try to make their stories sound more important. Less severe.
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.
Digging Potatoes with the Young
……….. — for George and Dacy
last week I dug potatoes
with the young
—granddaughter and son
.
I showed them how to sink the fork
in ground a bit away from desiccated tuber stalks
by leaning their slight weight in to force it down
then leveraging tines by length of haft
to bring the harvest slowly from below
so as not to bruise the spuds with too-rude heft
they saw the red roots rise by fork from aromatic soil
some with dangling threads attached
some already gnawed, previously shared,
some inevitably speared by fork and set aside
for sooner use, others for the moment spared
for winter use, to be stored then later speared
they raked their hands through tumbled dirt
to find the ones they may have missed
grinning when they found still-buried ones
—the russet square-inch sides of those by chance exposed
“there’s one,” they said,
“— and there!”
they pawed excited through the earth with me
from far start of row to here
.
Jim Culleny
10/9/15
by Jonathan Kujawa
Popular media loves nothing better than leaning on a tired trope when telling a tale. Mathematicians are always solitary geniuses who toil away in solitude on really hard problems. When they solve one nobody can quite say why anyone should have cared in the first place. But never mind that, it was really hard and it's all very impressive that they solved it all by their lonesome with their otherworldly brain. And they'd better be peculiar! Only Sheldon Coopers need apply.
Image from [1].
The truth is much more interesting. Of course breakthroughs are sometimes made by the hard work of single individuals (such as Grigori Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture or Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem). But much more often mathematics is a social, human enterprise. For me, at least, half the fun of it is in the give and take of sharing ideas with others. Ninety percent of my research papers are cowritten. Others may prefer to work alone, but even then they build on the work of others and hope others will read, appreciate, and use their work.
Heck, even the famously reclusive Perelman built his house on the foundation of using Ricci flow to study geometric objects provided by Richard Hamilton. And while Wiles worked in his attic office in complete secrecy for six years, he, too, depended on others. It was Berkeley number theorist (and oenophile) Ken Ribet who proved that Fermat's Last Theorem would follow from the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture about certain elliptic curves (those strange number systems we ran across last year). And when Wiles's proof of the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture looked to have a fatal flaw, it was in collaboration with Richard Taylor that a fix was finally found.
The collaborative and social nature of mathematics is exemplified by Paul Erdős. We crossed his path here at 3QD nearly two years ago. A mathematical vagabond, Erdős was famous for living out of a single suitcase. He traveled the world visiting math friends for a few days or weeks, doing math with anyone who was up for it.
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