The Strange Energies of Images, and the Humility of Language

by Tom Jacobs

ScreenHunter_43 Jun. 18 14.27How many stories are born of images? All of them? Most of them? Without some founding image (of a person, of a family, of a moment) is it even possible to conceive of a story? The relation between an image and its story—all of the resistances and exchanges between these two very different forms of expression and representation—is both important and incredibly slippery. In a Paris Review interview, Faulkner was asked “How did The Sound and the Fury Begin?” His answer is struck with the force of a small revelation, in part I guess because it is so simple. It began with a mental picture.

I didn't realize at the time it was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl's drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother's funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below. By the time I explained who they were and what they were doing and how her pants got muddy, I realized it would be impossible to get all of it into a short story and that it would have to be a book. And then I realized the symbolism of the soiled pants, and that image was replaced by the one of the fatherless and motherless girl climbing down the drainpipe to escape from the only home she had, where she had never been offered love or affection or understanding.

He notes that he tried to tell the story through the eyes of several characters, and even to “gather the pieces together and fill in the gaps by making myself the spokesman,” and ends up admitting that he “never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I’d probably fail again.”

Kundera, too, in his excellently-titled, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, explains that his characters came into being by virtue of a haunting image. I have been thinking about Tomas for many years. […] I saw him standing at the window of his flat and looking out across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do.” He is trying to figure out if what he feels for Tereza is hysteria or love.

This puts me in the mind of (as most things that I find incredibly engaging interesting do), Walter Benjamin. He has a castoff comment in his Arcades Project where he is thinking about why criticism and analytical thinking are so much less successful than advertising. And he says this: Not what the moving red neon sign says—but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt. That, to be sure, is the kind of declaration that will, if you are so inclined and share a similar sensibility, make you stop and think really hard.

There’s something there, but what does it mean? Why does the reflection of something affect us in such a different manner than the thing itself, unmediated? We have all seen an advertisement or a sign or whatever via its reflection and been kind of startled by it. It’s hard to know why our sensuous assimilation of things is so hard to talk about or describe or explain.

Read more »

On Eating Animals

by Namit Arora

MollyCowSome years ago in a Montana slaughterhouse, a Black Angus cow awaiting execution suddenly went berserk, jumped a five-foot fence, and escaped. She ran through the streets for hours, dodging cops, animal control officers, cars, trucks, and a train. Cornered near the Missouri river, the frightened animal jumped into its icy waters and made it across, where a tranquilizer gun brought her down. Her “daring escape” stole the hearts of the locals, some of whom had even cheered her on. The story got international media coverage. Telephone polls were held, calls demanding her freedom poured into local TV stations. Sensing the public mood, the slaughterhouse manager made a show of “granting clemency” to what he dubbed “the brave cow.” Given a name, Molly, the cow was sent to a nearby farm to live out her days grazing under open skies—which warmed the cockles of many a heart.

Cattle trying to escape slaughterhouses are not uncommon. Few of their stories end happily though. Some years ago in Omaha, six cows escaped at once. Five were quickly recaptured; one kept running until Omaha police cornered her in an alley and pumped her with bullets. The cow, bellowing miserably and hobbling like a drunk for several seconds before collapsing, died on the street in a pool of blood. This brought howls of protest, some from folks who had witnessed the killing. They called the police’s handling inhumane and needlessly cruel.

It’s tempting to see these commiserating folks as animal lovers—and that's how they likely see themselves—until one remembers what they eat for dinner. A typical slaughterhouse in the United States kills over a thousand Mollys a day—lined up, shot in the head, and often cut-open and bled while still conscious, an end no less cruel and full of bellowing—all because Americans keep buying neatly-packaged slices of their corpses in supermarkets. Raised unnaturally and inhumanely, over a million protesting birds and mammals are violently killed in the U.S. every hour (that's 300 per second!). Is it then unreasonable to say that nearly all meat-eaters in America participate quite directly in a cycle of suffering and cruelty of staggering scale?

Read more »

Monday Poem

Speed and Trouble

Sunday
……………… —my head spins
suddenly it’s Saturday again

wind whistles through hours
days are bullet trains

yet in this garden
long as the space of a light year
crows drop in to listen for the bristle
of worms making way below
through a sea dark as biker leathers
black as predator feathers

I love these crows
……………………… —being so
we-are-masters-of-this-row

they strut with natural equanimity
unlike cocksure CEOs who strut
but with a limp of sociopathy

meanwhile, two blood red cardinals
perch upon a limb outside our room
much nearer god then those of
the red-habit class

our fat cat’s
laser gaze nails them, though she looms
impotent behind the slider glass

—in this leisure garden bubble
these crows and I know zip
of speed and trouble
.

by Jim Culleny
6/14/12

Interlude in Brown?

by Omar Ali

Pakistan’s existing political and administrative system is based almost entirely on Western models. but the official national ideology is ambivalent or even hostile to Western civilization and its innovations. In the past this was less of a problem since “national ideology” was not very well developed (Jinnah himself was famously confused about what he wanted and while the Muslim League used Islamist slogans freely during the Pakistan movement, a number of its leaders and ideologues were happy to go along with vaguely left wing justifications for the state once they were comfortably in power after partition), but ever since the time of General Zia, there has been a steady push to establish a particular Islamist version of Pakistani nationalism as the default setting. The process has not gone entirely smoothly and significant sections of the super-elite intelligentsia remain wedded to Western left-liberal(and more rarely, frankly capitalist/”neo-liberal”)) ideologies while the deeper thinking Islamists tend towards Salafism, but it has gone further in the emerging middle class and within the armed forces. There, a superficially Islamist, hypernationalist vision has taken root and can be seen in its purest form on various “Paknationalist” websites. PakNationalists

This “paknationalism” is an extremely shallow and rather unstable construct. It is not classically Islamist but it regards Islam as the main unifying principle and ideological foundation of the state. In practice, it is more about hating India (and our own Indian-ness) that it is about any recognizable orthodox form of Islam. It is also very close to 1930s fascism in its worship of uniforms, authority and cleansing violence. People outside Pakistan rarely take it too seriously and prefer to get their versions of Pakistani nationalism from more liberal interpreters, but the “Paknationalists” are serious and one of these days, they are going to have a go at Pakistan if present suicidal trends persist in the civilian elite. Their interlude may not last very long, but it is likely to be exceptionally violent and may end in catastrophe.

BOOK-SIZED-Vaiell-Productions-1024x613Some idea of the ambitions and self-image of the Paknationalists can be gauged from a few recent examples; Pakistan's former ambassador to the United Nations, senior diplomat Munir Akram, penned a piece in “DAWN” on 27th May in which he repeated the usual “Paknationalist” themes but went a little further than usual by explicitly suggesting that if the US picks a fight with Pakistan, it may face an “asymmetrical nuclear war”. This, unfortunately, is not an isolated example of an Ambassador Sahib wandering off the reservation. Former director general of the ISI, Lieut. Gen. Assad Durrani, wrote a bellicose piece a few days earlier in which he suggested (among other things) that we could exchange Dr Afridi for Aafia Siddiqui and then give Aafia Siddiqui the Nishan e Haider (I am not kidding, check it out for yourself). Certified Paknationalist Ahmed Quraishi suggested that the CIA has been at war with Pakistan since 2002, though interestingly he also said that the CIA is doing this to “poison Pakistani-American ties”, (perhaps in a rogue operation not supported by the “good” or soft-touch faction of the US regime?).

Read more »

A Poem

PASSIVITY

Two Birds of Paradise
On the Tree of Life
Dazzle the wall above
His king-size bed

He names the female bird
After my cousin Sofia
Heartless tease at fourteen
I too fancy her

Feigning sleep in his bedroom
On a corner chaise
My fingers tremble
Above combed fringes

Perched on a branch
The male yearns for flight
His one-eyed gaze fixed
Upon Grandfather’s hand

Fondling Sofia on the bed
The female flutters in midair
Plumes fanning out
Brilliant madder dyes

by Rafiq Kathwari, guest poet at 3Quarks Daily.

Correspondences: Unsent Letters on Racial Crimes, American College, and Interracial Marriage

by Mara Jebsen

What has happened before can happen again– and so can what hasn’t.

— Bertolt Brecht

Constellation_north-1When I was in college, I wrote angry letters to the controversial and often political poet, Amiri Baraka. The letters were neither kept nor sent, but I remember what it was like to write them. I remember the yellow legal pads, crammed with inky scrawls.

In the old Mercer Street Books in the village, where I buy myself used plays and spy novels once a week, I spotted “Preface to A Twenty-Volume Suicide Note” heaped in the dusty Rare Books cabinet and bought it, for seventeen dollars and ninety-five cents. Opening the mildly aged volume, I had that strange feeling you get when you’re flooded with a whiff of more recent history. It is the sense that something was fresh and current in the time when your mother was younger than you are now. It has magic like moon-rocks because it's stylistically foreign, yet deeply known. In this case, so perfectly 1961, Village. A whole flavor of semi-bullshit, semi-real bohemia surrounds this little paperback. On the last page, Corinth books advertises Ginsberg’s Empty Mirror for a dollar twenty-five, and works by Kerouac and O’Hara for ninety-five cents. I remember as I thumb through it that Baraka wasn't yet Baraka; this book was written by a very young man. His name was Leroi Jones.

It is interesting to think about how and when you come across the seminal poems of your life. “And each night, I count the stars/and each night, I get the same number/ and when they will not come to be counted/I count the holes they leave”—These 28 words, in this order, have appeared, unbidden, at some of the most poignant moments of my life, arriving from beneath me like a wave, or seeming sometimes as if they'd never left; are more like an invisible walking companion whose steps match mine—company I will keep as long as memory holds.

Why was I angry? To remember properly, I have to contextualize those unsent letters with other unsent letters:

From Durham NC to Lome, Togo, 1997

Dear Mom,

I am taking another class in the Africana studies department. It kind of can’t believe this is happening/I am choosing this. Those tomes you and Kodjo lugged from Philadelphia to each of our houses in Lome always struck me as such a waste of time; so dry. The sex life of savages? Folktales from Cameroun? And now… They’re actually assigning me some of the same books. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. The Black Jacobins. And I’m into it. Will everything that bored me to tears when I was a kid come back and claim me? And would this be a happy or a sad thing?

I really, really love it here. But it is a strange place, haunted. Makes you want to write poems. Here is how I would describe Duke:

That place with its gothic architecture lit under floodlights at night like a stage; the whole of it a show. Magical-ghostly. At night black men came and planted. We’d wake in the morning to fully-grown beds of dusty miller, pansies, geraniums, azaeleas, rows and rows of sweet-smelling things I couldn’t name. At night black women cleaned the vomit from the bathrooms stalls and commons room, made us steaming trays of chicken and dumplings, macaroni and cheese; cabbage stewed down in butter to practically nothing; in the cranky mornings ladies in hairnets served up buttered grits, fat rashers of bacon and fluffy biscuits. One of them looks like Auntie Rogatthe.

I am hanging out mostly with these brilliant Asian and Latina girls. We are trying to figure out how American we are. We are trying to figure everything out. Poetry seems more and more interesting to me. Also, I met someone I really like. His name is x. I’ll tell you about it later

Love,

M

Read more »

Monday, June 11, 2012

And Now For The Monsoons

by Gautam Pemmaraju

The migratory Pied-Crested Cuckoo is believed by some to ride the seasonal winds of the South West Monsoon to arrive in the sub-continent in late May to early June. It makes the journey from sub-Saharan Africa, traversing the Arabian Peninsula, across the ocean, visiting the Seychelles and Lakshadweep, only to arrive in Kerala at first, as the overheated land solicitously lures the ardent monsoon winds in. They breed during the rainy season, and leave the subcontinent in September. Clamator Jacobinus, the Rain Bird, or the chatak of Indian antiquity, is believed to be the ‘harbinger of monsoons’, proclaiming, as ornithologist Hugh Whistler has said, the imminent rains “with its unmistakably loud metallic calls”. There are several who keep a keen eye out for its mantic presence, but its parasitic proclivities cause much distress to the resident avian populace. I am yet to read of any sightings, far less encounter one, and its typical song is not one of the several songbird tunes that I hear everyday. However, it is raining as I write. Although a steady drizzle now, it was far more animated early this Sunday morning. Lest I am fooled into thinking that the monsoon has arrived, the first “impressions of a chaotic sky”, the teasing, ‘towering cumulus clouds’, are merely bold heralders of the much anticipated annual visitation, at once cooling down the region and giving the city a thorough wash.

As Alexander Frater writes in Chasing The Monsoon, he too gets caught up in the collective febrile anxiety leading up to the first rain, and then:

At 1 p.m. the serious cloud build-up started … At 4.50, announced by deafening ground-level thunderclaps, the monsoon finally rode into Cochin. The cloud-base blew through the trees like smoke; rain foamed on the hotel’s harbourside lawn and produced a bank of hanging mist opaque as hill fog… At Fort Cochin they were ringing the bells in St Francis Church. In the dark harbour small boats ran for home. Waves bursting over the scalloped sea were suffused, curiously, with pink light. The jetty, set under a small wooden gazebo, vanished beneath heavy surf.

The monsoons, “a creature of grandeur and complexity that defies comparison with anything”, in the words of MS Rajagopalan of the Trivandrum Meteorological Department who Frater meets early on, are meant to officially arrive in Bombay on the 10th of June. This year they have been announced in Kerala on the 5th of June, which is five days late, according to a press release (and weekly update) by the local Meteorological Department of Mumbai, and the cumulative seasonal rainfall in the first week for the entire country is 32% below the LPA (Long Period Average). The department however predicts that the monsoon will be a normal one this year. (See here).

The ‘big bang’ theory, of the rains arriving in one dramatic burst is disputed, and some researchers claim that there will be “less rainfall if it sets in suddenly”.

Read more »

Monday Poem

Storm

whips crack over the
back of Massamet

lurid light
color of lime

May spits crazy
cat calls through
the wet lips of June

croaks
big threats

groans like distant trains
hauling mayhem up slopes

sky, a mad gymnast of electricity
tumbles and casts bolts
that land like T-Rex bones
upon a timpani

drums thump down under
circumambulating blasts of Jericho
let-loose spirit

uncorked jinn
flattens new corn low
upon a bed of fresh compost

god’s blow

blow god
blow!

god above god
below!

.
by Jim Culleny
6/8/12

Overwhelming, Oppressive Reality

by Hasan Altaf

BourdieuIf you search on Google or Wikipedia for “Pierre Bourdieu,” the results will paint you a picture of a man who was very much a theorist, an intellectual in the fullest sense of the word. Bourdieu contributed to the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, literature, and politics; he was influenced by Bachelard, Pascal, and Durkheim, and himself became an influence on younger intellectuals such as ‪Loïc Wacquant‬. In an obituary in the Guardian, after Bourdieu's death in 2002, Douglas Johnson described him as being “as important to the second half of the 20th century as Sartre had been to the generation before”; you could easily imagine an ivory-tower life. What cursory internet searches and obituaries do not reveal, however, is Bourdieu's beginnings as a photographer, and the importance of his photography to the rest of his work.

In Picturing Algeria: Pierre Bourdieu (Columbia University Press), the sociologist Franz Schultheis and the curator Christine Frisinghelli offer the reader an unprecedented selection of Bourdieu's photographs from Algeria, where he traveled for the first time as part of his national service, at twenty-five. He was to return again a few years later, as a lecturer at the University of Algiers, and he joined a research effort run by the Algerian arm of the French statistical institute. He helped produce two important books – one on labor migrants, and another that depicted the impact of brutal French resettlement policies. The photographs in Picturing Algeria date mostly from the time of this research, between 1957 and 1960, but they aren't just the snapshots of a researcher with a camera and some free time. Bourdieu's experiences in Algeria were to have a profound impact on his later life and work; as Craig Calhoun notes in his foreword, in Algeria Bourdieu was learning his trade, and “photography was one crucial way in which [he] gathered data – and developed his sociological eye.”

There is a strange kind of distance and balance in Bourdieu's photographs. Calhoun writes that “they are neither the completely naive snapshots of a newcomer nor products of a fully formed sociologist” – that is, they are neither picturesque, touristy snapshots, nor rote illustrations of theories. Even without any background information, the pictures suggest study, learning, research. They are usually square (he used a medium-format camera, rather than the standard Leica, partly to be more unobtrusive) and generally harshly lit – the highlights (a turban, a veil, a white teacup in the sun) can be almost painful. The picture that most struck me was of an elderly woman sitting in the dirt outside her home. She's sitting in the shade, but has one arm, elbow on her knee, stretched out, and in the sun her forearm bleaches transparent, pure white, like a negative or an X-ray.

Read more »

A spacemusic primer (plus bonus ambience)

by Dave Maier

PhaedraIn my previous posts on the subject, I have assumed, or anyway not worried about, a basic knowledge of what spacemusic is, and simply presented sets of classic or recent vintage. But that was negligent of me, as for most people this material remains an entirely closed book. Maybe they've seen a movie (Risky Business, or Sorcerer) with music by Tangerine Dream – which band does turn up in the Rolling Stone Record Guide (described there in a five-line review of two mid-70s LPs as “kings of the synthesizer, German-style”, with all that that implies to rock 'n' rollers) – but they'll draw a blank on “Berlin-school spacemusic” in general. Today we rectify that omission, so if you skipped the other installments you may want to check this one out. We begin at the beginning, long before our story actually begins….

From the perspective of the new millenium, the origins of electronic music are obscured by the mists of a bygone era. Indeed, the term seems no longer to refer to anything worth picking out as a distinct type of thing, as many rather different types of music-making nowadays are dependent in some sense on electricity. We still use the word, but usually to mark an emphasis on electronic means in some one music relative to another: we can refer to techno as “electronic” relative to other types of dance music, without denying the use of electricity in making, say, funk. If we want to make an absolute distinction, we often speak of “acoustic” music rather than its opposite (although here too a relative use is available).

Early electronic musiciansEven in the dawn of time, however (= the 1950s or so), there was an important disctinction to be made. “Electronic music” was made with electronically generated sound, e.g. with voltage-controlled oscillators and amplifiers. But another important use of electricity, one which had been around for many years without (significantly, in our context anyway) affecting musical composition or performance, was the electronic capturing of sound, or recording. This was the basis for the other main approach for making music electronically in the early days: rather than generating sounds electronically, musique concrète pioneers like Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry composed by manipulating recordings of previously existing, often non-musical, sound.

Read more »

Abbas and Morgan’s Alpine Adventure: A Photo Essay

by S. Abbas Raza and Morgan Meis

01

Abbas: Some months ago when Morgan told me he was going to come and visit me in Südtirol from Sri Lanka in the first week of June, I stupidly agreed to go on an extended trek through the alps with him for several days. The idea was that we would hike to the tops of various peaks in the Italian alps around here, stay in huts overnight, and then move on to a different peak, doing this several times. Luckily, I quickly realized that neither he nor I was in good enough physical form to last more than at most one day of climbing followed by a day of coming down, plus I also realized that what the locals call “walks” could pose a severe challenge to my fear of heights. After consultations with my wife and a few other local denizens of Brixen whom I now suspect of being talking mountain goats disguised as humans, it was decided that we would do a hike/climb from the Seiser Alm to the Tierser Alpl Hütte, the red-roofed hut shown in the center of the picture above, stay there overnight, and come back down the next day. Lest you think this looks easy, consider that we were planning on coming over the ridge that you see directly behind the hut from the other side. We would then take the easier route coming down towards the lower left in the picture. You should also know that in the four years since moving to the Tyrol I’ve done lots of little two-hour hikes in the mountains, but never anything like this. I was scared. And as you’ll soon see, for good reason. [Click photos to enlarge a little bit.]

Read more »

Monday, June 4, 2012

Found In Translation

Akim Reinhardt

Jasper Johns, I have taken several famous political passages from American History and run them repeatedly through Google Translator. I present them here in verse form. An explanation follows, but first, please enjoy these poems.

Join the Team (The Declaration of Independence: Opening)
He joined the team
and they have a separate equal station
to understand and to be separated from God
Human, land, honor, human activities such as authority,
is required to follow the natural laws,
and growing in another way

Self-Evident Truth: Hynaur (Declaration of Independence)
We had a life, liberty and happiness
of the invasion of the rights of the creator,
it is clear that he believes
that like all men are created equal …. hynaur

Our Sacred HonorStatue of Liberty (The Declaration of Independence: Conclusion )
This announcement:
The organization and protection of Providence
To give our lives
To help our country and our sacred honor.

A More Perfect Union (Preamble to the Constitution)
American people
in their ability to protect the U.S. Constitution
welfare for children in public,
system security state and to keep the peace,
could be more perfect union.

The Right Combination (Second Amendment to the Constitution)
Freedom of speech,
or of Congress
or newspaper religion
or people
do not get the right combination
Of passive or prohibiting
the free exercise,
and asks the government for redress of the complaint.

Read more »

WTF in China

by Sarah Firisen

The Forbidden City

I expected China to be different; exotic, challenging, overwhelming in its otherness. But, in many ways, it was depressingly familiar; the mall next to my apartment building had a Gap, an H&M, a Subway and a Baskin Robbins. The New York Pizza restaurant was always at least as busy as the excellent Dim Sum restaurant a few doors down from it. Beijing and Shanghai each have a 5th Avenue equivalent sporting a Louis Vuitton, an enormous Cartier, an equally huge Tiffanys, gigantic Apple stores and all the brands that you'd expect to accompany these. I saw a few Aston Martin and Porsche dealerships and it seemed like every other person was driving an Audi.

My tour guide at the Great Wall of China, Leo, looked at my iPhone and asked, “4S?” I replied yes and he bemoaned the fact that his was only an iPhone 4. By the way, you can get great 3G phone reception at the Great Wall. The Pudong area in Shanghai, which was all farmland 20 years ago, is now adding fantastical skyscrapers so quickly that, when I left for a week to go to Beijing, I thought buildings would pop up while I was away.

There is restricted access to the Internet in China, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be and clearly the barriers are pretty easy to work around. Leo asked if I'd like to be his Facebook friend and told me he'd friend me when he got home and could get on the VPN that went around the country's firewall.

But in ways that I wasn't expecting, China was as foreign and incomprehensible as anywhere I've ever been in my life. In the roughly 5 weeks (on and off) that I was there, I had more truly inexplicable encounters and conversations than in the rest of my life put together. My colleague Diana and I coined a phrase, WTF in China (WTFIC). We'd say this to each other every time there was really nothing else to say because words failed us.

One day in Beijing, we were sitting in a taxi in heavy traffic. We noticed a few vendors going between the cars selling mobile phone car chargers. This seemed like a clever idea. Then Diana noticed that each vendor had chargers in one hand and a live turtle in the other. What was the deal with the turtles? Were they selling them? Were they a marketing gimmick? We emailed Leo, who had offered to help us post-tour with any questions. Before I got his reply back, I said to Diana, “you know, even once he answers us, we're not going to be any more illuminated. I just know it's going to be a WTF in China issue.” And indeed, this was Leo's answer, “For turtles, they are the symbol of longevity and fortune, so people may buy when they get bored in traffic!” Clearly, this answer made perfect logical sense to Leo. And to all the people sitting in rush hour traffic jams making a spur of the moment purchase of an animal that would probably outlive them.

Read more »

Monday, May 28, 2012

Are Millennials Less Green Than Their Parents?

by Evan Selinger, Thomas Seager, and Jathan Sadowski Slacktivism

A highly publicized Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study depicts Millennials as more egoistic than Baby Boomers and Generation Xers. The research is flawed. The psychologists fail to see that kids today face new problems that previously weren’t imaginable and are responding to them in ways that older generations misunderstand.

The psychological study seems persuasive largely because the conclusions are supported by massive data. Investigators examined two nationally representative databases (Monitoring the Future and American Freshman surveys) containing information provided by 9.2 million high school and college students between 1966 and 2009. Such far-reaching longitudinal analysis seems to offer a perfect snapshot of generational attitudes on core civic issues.

Comparison makes Millennials look bad. According to the study, they aren’t just primed to consume more electricity and pass on community leadership. Overall, they’re ethically deficient: concerned less with the environment and keeping up with political affairs, while driven more by extrinsic values (money, fame, image) than intrinsic ones (self-acceptance, community, and group affiliation). The media couldn’t wait to spin these characterizations into headlines, running pieces like “Millenial Generation’s Non-Negotiables: Money, Fame, and Image” and “Young People Not So ‘Green’ After All”.

Jean Twenge, the study’s lead author, seems entitled to sit back with a told you so look on her face. For some time, she’s contested portrayals of Millennials as “Generation We.” The new study updates her anti-entitlement manifesto, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–And More Miserable than Ever Before, and she presents more damning information in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article accusing Millennials of declining empathy.

Read more »

postcards from srinagar

by Vivek Menezes

Nigeen Lake 27/05/2012

I am writing this lakeside in Srinagar, at the end of a month-long stay in this amazing, ancient city, along with my wife and three young sons (12, 8, 4). This is high season in Kashmir – the authorities expect as many as two million tourists by the time winter sets in. But with the exception of Dal Lake – certainly one of the great marvels of the subcontinent – we’ve found ourselves just about the only “outsiders” almost everywhere we’ve gone. It has been quite a strange phenomenon, I think largely explained by the reluctance of most travel agents and tour operators to venture off a narrow beaten track that takes in Dal, the (vastly over-rated) Mughal Gardens, and day trips to trample snow in Gulmarg, etc. There needs to be more and better information about Srinagar made available for travellers, and over some time I hope to contribute some.

But right now, because connectivity is deeply intermittent here, I am going to quickly post a few images, and scribble comments postcard-style

3QD-dara1

3QD-dara2

Our first few days in Kashmir couldn’t have been more eye-opening. This is because we became immediately immersed in the fourth annual festival hosted by the Dara-e-Shikoh Centre. The initiative of Jyotsna Singh, grand-daughter of the last monarch of Jammu and Kashmir, the event was mostly held outdoors, and had a terrifically positive energy. There were art, writing and puppetry workshops, training sessions for teachers and counsellors, and terrific interactions between the overwhelmingly young audience and visiting resource people, most notably Gopal Gandhi – grandson of the Mahatma, senior bureaucrat and diplomat, and author of several books, including a play about Dara, the Sufi Prince. It was a remarkably inclusive event, with every possible viewpoint freely exchanged with an unusual spirit of acceptance. Here at the Dara Shikoh Centre, I realized that this is actually a bedrock Kashmiri virtue. This was particularly underlined during a spellbinding performance by one of the last surviving Bhand Pather (folk entertainers) groups of Kashmir, directed by M. K. Raina. It turned out that most of the almost entirely Kashmiri audience had never seen such a performance – big-shots, students, security guards, drivers, all screamed with delight together all through the show. No translations needed for my kids either, they laughed along with everyone else.

Read more »

When the Fruit Ripens Seed Scatters: Notes towards a History of Motility

by Liam Heneghan

Quum fructus maturus semina dispergat. Linnæus, Philosophia Botanica, 1751

1. In The Beginning Was the Verb

Male-SpermIn the beginning was the Verb, and the Verb was with God, and the Verb set all things in motion. More than just any Word (Latin verbum, word) the God who is, was, and shall be a Verb commuted motion of an Absolute form to Relative Motion. In the universe created of the Verb everything moves; absolutes have no meaning.

And some things rose and other things fell. Those which rose remained in constant motion until impeded and of those which fell some acquired spontaneous motion. These self-moved movers, called motile, include some cells, spores, the quadrupeds, and the bipeds. The Philosopher studied the motile keenly, since the prime mover and all that had risen remained less accessible to knowledge. Since the self-moved require the unmoving for motion they must themselves be, he concluded, comprised of a series of both fixed and moving parts at the seat of which is an unmoved mover – the animal soul. In this way the motile mimic the first mover.

Living things move and they share this characteristic with every other thing; stasis, that is, there can only ever be relative stasis. Movement differs from motility in as much as the latter, in its most fully expressed form, is movement where a purpose that goads, a desire that compels, and a body that advances, converge.

Read more »

Only Philosophers Go to Hell

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

HellThe Problem of Hell is familiar enough to many traditional theists. Roughly, it is this: How could a loving and just god create a place of endless misery? The Problem of Hell is a special version of the Problem of Evil, which is the general challenge that a just and loving God would not intentionally create a world with excessive misery, and yet we see the excesses all around us. Hell, on its face, seems like it is actually part of God’s plan, and moreover, the misery there far exceeds misery here. At least the misery here is finite; it ends when one dies. But in Hell, death is just the beginning. Those in Hell suffer for eternity. Hell, so described, seems less the product of a just and loving entity than a vicious and spiteful one. That’s a problem.

There are two standard lines in defense of Hell. The first is the retributivist line, and the second is the libertarian line. We think that if either succeeds, only philosophers could go to Hell. This is because only someone who understands exactly what she is doing in sinning or rejecting God could deserve such a fate as Hell, and only a philosophical education could provide that kind of understanding. So, it follows, only philosophers can go to Hell.

Retributivism with regard to Hell runs as follows: Those in Hell are sinners, and sin demands punishment. Therefore, Hell is necessary; it is the place where that punishment is delivered. This seems reasonable as far as it goes, and it does work as a nice counterpoint to the regular complaint that sometimes the wicked prosper in this life – they will suffer appropriately in the next. But retributivism about Hell ultimately seems problematic. Grant that sinners deserve punishment. Nonetheless, the amount of punishment being visited upon those in Hell is objectionable. Sinners can’t do infinite harm, no matter how bad they are. But they get an eternity of torment. Punishment is just only when it is proportionate to the wrongs committed by the guilty. So even if Hell’s express purpose is to enact retribution on those who are guilty of sin, and even if the guilty do get what’s coming to them in Hell, making that punishment eternal is moral overkill. Again, disproportionate punishment is morally wrong, and Hell is guaranteed to be exactly that for everyone there.

Read more »

Monday Poem

Boy in an Apple Tree Grappling
with Happiness

sun through leaves shadows
on his face
as on a dappled stallion

time was a tick, a heartbeat
drawn out
long as the orbit of Uranus

84 to 1 of our years
slomo
heartbeat that sustains us

in a capsule with companions
in a memory
in a moment that contains us

thread of something through the raptures
of the changes of dominions that remains us

in our sky nearby a star affirms
holds feet to fire
a blistering gold medallion
.

by Jim Culleny
5/26/12

Gillian Wearing at the Whitechapel, London

by Sue Hubbard

GW_Image 04“Happy families are all alike”, claimed Tolstoy, while “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The same could be said of individuals. Happiness, a sense of well being, involves a feeling of rightness with the world, of belonging in one’s own skin, while unhappiness and dysfunction have their own infinite variety. The mind’s response to emotional pain is ever inventive. Self-destruction is a creative business. In many cases it turns out to be a life’s work, as those who give their true confessions to the artist Gillian Wearing attest.

In his book I’m Ok, You’re Ok (1969), Eric Berne’s post-Freudian model of transactional analysis, the relationships between internal adult, parent and child are explored so that the maladaptations embedded in old childhood scripts can be confronted in order for an individual to become free of inappropriate emotions that are not a true reflection of the here-and-now. Because people decide their stories and their destinies, attitudes, it is argued, can be changed. That is the ideal anyway. Yet for many of those who chose to answer a small ad placed in Time Out in 1994, which read: ‘Confess all on video. Don’t worry, you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian’, they may have felt that they had little choice when it came to addictive, sad or compulsive behaviour.

It was this act that set in motion the artist Gillian Wearing’s work with strangers. Whilst she explores cultural notions of production versus the finished work such technical niceties are much less interesting than the stories that her sitters have to tell and the apparent compulsion that they have to share their pain, on record, with whoever happens to be listening. Wearing first began to use masks, along with joke shop wigs and false beards, in this 1994 video in which variously disguised figures speak straight into the camera. Confess All on Video… consists of ten voices edited into a continuous 30 minute piece. There is an array of confessions from the admission of a first visit to a brothel to an incredibly sad narrative from a nervous man disguised as George Bush who tells of an incestuous relationship with his siblings that has quite literally ruined his life. Protected by their anonymity and free of any judgmental response the participants are remarkably candid. This seems to connect back to the use of masks in ancient Greek drama. The mask, then, was a significant element in the worship of Dionysus and is known to have been used since the time of Aeschyluss by members of the chorus, who were there to help the audience know what a character was thinking. Illustrations from 5th century display helmet-like masks, covering the entire face and head of the actors, with holes for the eyes and a small aperture for the mouth, as well as an integrated wig. It is interesting to note that these ancient paintings never show actual masks on the actors in performance; they are mostly shown being handled by the actors before or after a performance, emphasising the liminal space between the audience and the stage, between myth and reality. The mask melted into the face allowing the actor to vanish into a role. Research suggests that the mask served as a resonator for the head, thus enhancing vocal acoustics and altering its quality leading to an increased energy and presence that allowed for the more complete metamorphosis of the actor into his character. Many of these aspects remain true in Gillian Wearing’s work.

Read more »

Take The Skyway, Part 2

by Misha Lepetic

There wasn't a damn thing I could do or say
Up in the skyway
~
The Replacements

Dal_downtownAn empty downtown, with boarded-up shops and desolate sidewalks, is truly a sad sight to behold. It is also symptomatic of much larger forces, namely the flight from the urban core into the suburbs that wound up decimating the vitality of American cities during the second half of the 20th century. Last month I argued that the urban form of the skywalk was a partial and misguided response to reviving the emptied-out downtowns of American cities. In most instances these structures, which sought to connect buildings without touching the street, were a prolonged, painful failure, because they further segregated street life and did not succeed in drawing people back into that urban core, at least in a way that could be considered dynamic and responsive to the larger needs of the urban fabric. In a sense, much was expected of skywalks, but in fact they were little more than a Band-Aid, and served to only exacerbate the problem through the fundamentally anti-social tendencies that underlie their design and use.

And yet, like any other urban form, skywalks are agnostic – what determines their success is not just their design and implementation, but also the problem that they seek to address. It is perhaps more accurate to say that skywalks, along with many other forms of intervention in the urban built environment, reveal the question that designers have posed themselves, believing that that question, whatever it might be, is in fact the correct and most pressing one. So, in the case of American cities, skywalks were employed to revive downtowns, and, generally speaking, failed. Other cities around the world have enlisted skywalks not because there is too little density, but because there is too much. Does this new context increase the possibility of success? In order to understand what a difference a difference makes, we first need to consider the forces that shaped cities in the West, and what the difference might be between this phenomenon and that of the global urban South.

The narrative describing the development of American cities can be retold as a narrative of excessive space. When energy and labour are cheap, economic logic drives growth outward; it is always easier to build on virgin ground rather than re-organize an existing built environment. This is especially true when urban areas are not bounded by geographic obstacles such as water or mountains – a condition true of most mid-Western cities and not a few coastal ones.

Read more »