So, Socrates to young Plato said,”The things we think we know are like shadows
cast on the walls of a cave by a distant light of unseen things we do not know.”.

A Hole in The Banal
-For L.

You called last night troubled.
Looking for something in particular
(a pink balloon shaped like the heart
of your long dead cousin)
you'd stumbled upon a hole in the banal:
a weakened spot in the thin skin of our conceits
stretched so taut over the otherworld
a hint of it broke through and pierced
your shell of rapt doing
and you glimpsed the truth of shades
that dance upon the walls of caves
to music most often unheard
under the rush of jets,
behind the daily brushing of leaves against sky,
drowned by the litanies of radios,
made almost silent by
the roar of willed tornadoes
blowing through the aisles of malls,
muted by the fierce narcissism of war,
the accumulation of stuff thrown up
as dikes to keep the unspeakable sea at bay
and you wondered if perhaps Socrates was right
So I recalled for you a day driving to Colrain
when a song bled from the dash
so filled with poignancy my heart broke too
and I sobbed from the steel arched bridge
where two rivers meet to the office door
remembering my mother,
my father, and Danny my autistic brother,
hearing them hearing me sob
through a veil of ordinary tears and regret
saltier than the Dead Sea
This is where you and I meet, where we all meet,
on the beach of that sea, catching now and then
between horizon and surf, glimpses of creatures
breaking through, breaching the membrane
between worlds unexpectedly
as we wonder how the dancing shadows
on cave walls can be true

by Jim Culleny
11/14/11

Plato's allegory of the cave

by James McGirk

Our brains are filled with the whispering of objects, the shrieking presence of things we lust after or despise or simply want to ignore but can’t for all the noise. It seems impossible to write fiction without addressing it but so little does. Part of this is the nature of the medium. The contemporary novel or short story is a ghostly place, a necropolis where memories are dissected and pinned to the page.

“Anecdotes don't make good stories,” the great Canadian short story writer Alice Munro once told an interviewer, “Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.”

Writing literary fiction is a bit like tunneling (minus the physical component). You gnaw a room out of the wall of the previous one, scaffold it with description and feed in a few disembodied voices, hoping the histories and hierarchies those voices are quibbling over create enough momentum to propel your reader into the next room. Munro takes this a step further, using the shape of those excavations to back engineer a second, deeper narrative structure from the first.

Hers is a second order of story, ideal for spelunking the complex residue of a lifetime of deep emotion, but one that seems to collapse the realm of the object. Unless an author like Munro is a pure technological determinist, a deep dive into character motivation seems unsuited to describing a world where the collective ache of consumer culture – and being left out of it – might manifest itself in something like the Occupy Wall Street movement. Yet it is not impossible to use intricately rendered characters as a way to roam the realm of material consciousness.

Read more »

Some Notes Made on Evacuation Day 2011

by Jen Paton

One hundred years from this moment, crowds in this same city would stand on the streets, in the rain, under “stars and stripes from every Flag-pole,” to commemorate this day, and to commemorate it for the last time on such a scale: “every tower, every steeple, every rooftop which commanded” river views would be “peopled with human beings,” and thousands would brave torrential rain to catch a glimpse of the festivities. Two hundred and twenty five years later, this would be the subject of a snarky Gawker Post. Two hundred and twenty eight years later, a humorous conversation in The Daily Show. But for now, in 1783, it’s just eight hundred guys waiting at Bowery, waiting for the signal.

Once this road was a footpath for the people who lived here first, a bit later it was a road that led to the Dutch Governor General's farm. At one o'clock, in the distance, they heard the cannon fire, fired from the departing enemy ship, and this meant it was safe to enter New York City. They marched in, a newspaper would say a few weeks later, with “an inviolable regard to order and discipline, as Tyranny could never be enforced.” (qtd in Hood, 2004). Quite.

The occupying British commander, Sir Guy Carleton, now on a ship living the island, had received the orders to evacuate months before. It was a delicate operation: the Americans wanted military control of the city as soon as possible, the better to quell any lingering dissent there, but they also hoped to keep the British army and their own from exchanging fire in the process. Carleton had to pull out not only his troops, but the thousands of refugees loyal to him, who had been streaming into this city since rebel victory became assured, as well as the slaves liberated from the enemy who had sought refuge within its walls. He would leave with thousands of refugees, including 3000 freedmen, whom the British promised to “pay” the Americans for at Washington’s insistence and, apparently, never did. Some would settle in Nova Scotia, of which some would end up in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Read more »

by Hasan Altaf

In their outlines, all of Joan Didion's novels seem more or less the same: The protagonist is always a woman, in some way “troubled”; there are always men, usually two, usually powerful in some way; there is sometimes a son but always a daughter, who is generally what the woman is “playing for,” as Maria Wyeth puts it in Play It As It Lays (1970): “What I play for here is Kate.” The stories of the troubled women torn between the two men and trying to save or reconnect with or find their children do not, in general, end happily; the children remain lost, the men too are gone (divorce, death, abandonment, some combination thereof), and at the end the woman we've been following is alone and still in some way “troubled.”

The first time I read Didion's novels, I read them all at once, and the similarities began to annoy me: If they were all going to be the same, what was the point in reading more than one? (There are other writers who do this, who write the same story time and time again, and those in general I abandon after the first; Didion's style is what always kept me coming back.) Recently, however, as a way of preparing for the publication of Blue Nights, I went back and reread the novels, starting with Run, River (1963) and ending with The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). The second read-through answered this question for me. It also answered another, perhaps more important question – what is the point for the writer in telling the same story so many times?

Read more »

by Kevin S. Baldwin

There is nothing quite like a serious illness or injury to focus one's mind on what is truly important. I recently injured my back (probably from lifting my 6 year old off the floor where he had fallen asleep). I do this about once a year, usually by forgetting to bend at the knees when lifting something. I bent my knees this time, but I guess it wasn't enough. I don't recall a pull or a pop, but over the next few days, things slowly deteriorated. I went from taking 2 Ibuprofen at a time to 4 at a time, and even that didn't help like it usually does.

Eventually, while climbing stairs, a turn on a landing threw my back into such spasms that I collapsed. Sweat began pouring off my face and I felt extremely nauseous. This was terra incognita for me. Had I ruptured a disc? (I guess I've been pretty lucky so far. I am pushing 50 yet have suffered no broken bones, major accidents, or diseases. I think I took a single Tylenol after my wisdom teeth were pulled). Suddenly, I was helpless and in agonizing pain.

Pain is one of these enigmatic aspects of existence. It serves a purpose, but there can be too much of a good thing. Pain and swelling keep you from moving or using an injured area so it can heal. Of course, a lot of pain is uncomfortable and has a way of consuming most or all of your mental bandwidth. People who are born without pain receptors tend to live short lives because of all the injuries they suffer without realizing it.

I remained crumpled on the landing while pondering my next move. Not enough room to stretch out: I would have to stand up. After several attempts that ended when my lower back locked-up, I finally convinced myself to work through that pain and made it back to being vertical. Standing was actually fairly comfortable as long as I didn't move. But I couldn't be stranded on the landing for the rest of the day. I ended up sitting down on the stairs and pushing myself up backwards one step at a time. I grabbed the handrails at the top of the stairs and managed to pull myself up and drag myself to the bedroom to lie down.

Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

On the morning after Mayor Michael Bloomberg had the New York City police expel the Occupy Wall Street Protestors from Zuccotti Park in the middle of the night, I wrote that the next 24-48 hours could very well be pivotal. Well, it’s now been forty-eight hours since I woke up to hear that Bloomberg had sent in riot police to clear out Zuccotti Park, supposedly in the name of a molly maid cleanup of the park; I’m writing this on Thursday morning since I will be traveling as of Friday.

The protestors have responded. Several hundred of them gathered this morning (last Thursday) and tried to prevent workers on Wall Street from working. Of course that literal action failed. But as far as this movement is concerned, it’s the symbolic actions that are most important, at least for the time being. Their presence was felt. Bloomberg’s actions have not put an end to this, far from it. And so the symbolism of Occupy Wall Street remains vital.

Why is the Occupy movement’s so important? The movement’s now famous horizontal organization, as opposed to a more typical top-down vertical structure, has created many opportunities for many people to participate. But it also means that specific agendas and specific action proposals have been sometimes slow to form. Consequently, in some way the real importance of the demonstrations thus far has been it’s ability to influence the national discourse and provide a symbolic stance against the corruptions and ethical shortcomings permeating American society.

It seems to me that of all the Occupy demonstrations that have emerged around the country, and indeed around the world (including the one right here in Baltimore where I live), that Occupy Wall Street is vitally symbolic for several reasons. Of course it was the first, the one that kicked off all the rest. But much more important than that, Occupy Wall Street is, well, at Wall Street. And I believe that matters quite a bit. To that end, Occupy Wall Street is central to the Occupy movement because nothing represents the current economic system in all its sodden disarray better than Wall Street.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“Cultures aren’t fixed or fixable. They are barely measurable…
Culture is not so much what you plan but what you get away with.”
~ Marcus Westbury

One could do worse than to think about a city as an endlessly frustrating exercise in the ongoing, suboptimal allocation of space, capital and – let’s not forget – humanity. Oftentimes we find ourselves contemplating extremes of density and sprawl, and occasionally the stark juxtaposition of the two (such as this notorious image which, despite having made the rounds over the last few years, has lost little of its shock value). These vistas further enervate us if we contemplate them from a divine, that is to say, aerial perspective. From this point of view, we become, by default, would-be SimCity urban planners, and consider that our benevolence, made manifest in the form of design, usually in the form of urban master planning, should at least be heeded, if not respected by those who we expect to live in our cities. This is the privilege and/or responsibility that this particular kind of view affords. At the same time, the obvious juxtapositions of sprawl and slum, of waste and want, re-assert the fundamental futility, and therefore irrationality, of many of our planning efforts. This may be conveniently summarized by the parental plea, “Can’t you kids just sit still for a moment?”

So, what gives? I have three examples in mind, although there are many more, the catalogue of which amounts to a comprehensive list of reasons that the more skeptical among us might call “Why You Can Never Win,” and the more optimistic might term “Why We Should Always Try Harder.”

At any rate, in the first case, what gives is, quite literally, the ground itself.

Informal settlements, to which I will informally refer as slums, are by definition built in undesirable places; citizens whose desire to live in proximity to city centers is contradicted by their inability to afford “legitimate” colonization of these spaces. Another significant attribute of slums is that services, such as transportation routes and public spaces, are foregone for the opportunity of proximity; the lack of zoning or property ownership results in even greater density. Finally and most critically, slums are oftentimes built in plainly dangerous locations, exposed to natural forces that can have disastrous consequences where not even the dead are spared.

Read more »

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

My first winter that could properly be called such seemed to be spent in frozen Northern wastelands, where the world was covered in snow and the sun seemed to leave for the day after lunch (recalling the work habits of a number of my relatives). The scenery alternated between the bleakly restrained (snow stretching under a wintry horizon, broken by an occasional shrub) and the melodramatically self-indulgent (winds howling around buildings in the night; afternoon blizzards). My initial reaction was delight. Winter is a much mythologized season and, like many a tropical child, I grew up with winter tales from books and movies. Two weeks in, after the inevitable disillusionment, I opted for the honorable exit and retreated to bed with a couple of bottles of brandy and a heavy blanket. Various circumstances forced me out after a few days (struggle with classes, the non-alcohol necessities of a fallen world) and like so many desperate people before me, I attempted to redeem the world in food.

There are several different culinary strategies for encountering the extremities of weather. The first and most classical involves hecatombs and frenzied appeals for divine intervention. Despite its old world charm, it is both expensive (especially for a student) and often fails spectacularly. In our latter day, god-devoid world we are left with the usual artistic options of fantasy and escapism on the one hand and of realism (that wanders between the brutal and the lyric) on the other. The escapist strategy (whimsical defiance, if you prefer; I prefer) evokes the productions of warmth and sun, letting displaced summer food alight on the palate amidst the barren winter wind. This is made easier by the wonders of the modern world, which allow us avocados and the occasional decent tomato in winter (one of the grandest triumphs of humanity over a world that does not love us)¹. The realist strategy is hearty comfort food. At the simpler end, this should be stodgy and meat-and-potatoes laden (the sort of medieval richness where Northern European peasants lurk behind each dish). At its grandest, it should sing of deeply concentrated flavors and long-reduced stocks.

What follows is something of an accidental hybrid. Its subcontinental origins and spice-heavy punctuation (ginger sweetness, the bite of chilli) suggest warmer lands and sunnier times. But at base its flavors are primarily warming – slow-braised meat, rounded onion sweetness, heavy dairy-warmed fat. This strategy drifts towards Orientalism, but remember that curry has a colonizing life of its own.

Read more »

by Quinn O'Neill

There’s been a lot of talk about reforming American K-12 science education and it’s getting difficult to take it seriously. Educators, scientists, and politicians have been sounding alarm bells over the state of American science education for decades. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education revealed the US to be trailing most other industrialized nations in science performance. The commission’s report began: “Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. […] What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur–others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.” It almost sounds as if the level of educational attainment isn’t as important as the rest of the world being below it.

Following the 1983 report, most states responded by revising their curriculum content standards.¹ In 1990, the president and state governors adopted a new national goal: “By the year 2000, United States students will be the first in the world in mathematics and science achievement.”¹ The statement proved about as genuine as Obama’s promise to close Gitmo. In 2000, a new national commission conducted an investigation and concluded that the performance of U.S. students at the 12th-grade level, compared to their peers in other countries, was “disappointingly unchanged,” with the US placing 19th out of twenty-one countries studied.¹

Similar calls for reform were made in 2005 with the publication of the National Academy of Science’s report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm”, which made a number of promising recommendations. Those anticipating improvement were to be disappointed. A follow up report in 2010 stated that “In spite of the efforts of both those in government and the private sector, the outlook for America to compete for quality jobs has further deteriorated over the past five years.” It found little improvement and noted that US K-12 math and science was ranked 48th worldwide.

Poor K-12 science performance is nothing new, nor are reports that are steeped in panic and urgency. The alarmist tone of the 2010 follow up to “Gathering Storm” didn’t go unnoticed. As reported in a Nature News piece, Jerry Marschke, an economist at the State University of New York at Albany, suggested that the report painted an overly dire picture. He put it simply: “The way they wrap up their policy recommendations, they're trying to scare people.”

Read more »

by Shailja Patel

Rockstar goddess of postcolonial studies. Leading feminist Marxist scholar of our time. Gadfly of subaltern studies: her seminal paper, “Can The Subaltern Speak?” seeded a thousand dissertations. Irreverent, iconoclastic, unfailingly taboo-busting, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a study in highwire intellectual risk-taking. As University Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, one of the world’s most elitist academic institutions, she trains upper-class graduate imaginations for epistemological performance. At the other end of the global spectrum, she has, for three decades, pursued the painstaking, backbreaking project of creating and sustaining schools for rural children in Western Bengal.

I want to understand something about bypassing the necessity of good rich people solving the world’s problems. Good rich people are dependent on bad people for the money they use to do this. And the good rich people’s money mostly goes to bad rich people. Beggars receive material goods to some degree and remain beggars. My desire is to produce problem solvers, rather than solve problems. In order to do this, I must continue to teach teachers, current and future, with devotion and concentration, at the schools that produce the good rich people – Columbia University – and the beggars, seven unnamed elementary schools in rural Birbhum, a district in West Bengal. This work cannot be done with an interpreter, and India is multilingual. I must understand their desires, not their needs, and with understanding and love try to shift them. That is education in the humanities. (Spivak, 2010)

What Spivak does in Bengal is the opposite of philanthropy, or uplift. At the 2008 inaugural World Authors And Literary Translators’ Conference, in Stockholm, she called for unflinching examination of the conference theme: “Literature And Human Rights”.

I take this idea extremely seriously, so I am obliged to critique it rigorously. We are self-appointed moral entrepreneurs, our mission predicated on the failure of state and revolution. We fetishize literacy, health, employability, without inquiring rigorously into what they have effected, or how we deploy them, in our own lives.

Read more »

by Justin E. H. Smith

[For the first installment in this series, go here.]

The idea that there is a hierarchy or ladder of world cultures, with European culture at the top (often promoted to the status of 'civilization'), was a cornerstone of most Enlightenment philosophy. It was rejected in the era by a handful of counter-Enlightenment thinkers such as Herder, but it continued to reign in the burgeoning discipline of anthropology until the early-20th-century innovations of Franz Boas and others. It was only definitively displaced from anthropology in the decade or so after World War II. In philosophy today, by contrast, though everyone officially abjures the ladder model of human cultures, it continues to determine much of our reasoning about what counts as philosophy and what does not.

It is worth pointing out that all societies that have produced anything that we are able to easily recognize as philosophy are ladder societies. We might in fact argue, if not here, that philosophy as a discrete domain of activity in a society is itself a side-effect of inequality. The overwhelming authority of the church in medieval Europe, the caste system in ancient India, the control of intellectual life by the mandarin class in ancient China (meritocratically produced by the Confucian examination system, but still elite) present themselves as three compelling examples of the sort of social nexus that has left us with significant philosophical works. The fact that philosophy always comes from the top rungs of ladder societies could have something to do with the difficulty, in spite of our best intentions, of de-Eurocentrizing the current academic discipline of philosophy: New York, London, and the idyllic campuses that are an easy commute from these metropolises are the true locus of philosophy today, in just the same way that royal courts were in ancient India. It is as hard for us to think of the intellectual activity of, say, some village sage in postcolonial, third-worldified India as 'philosophy', as it would have been for a high-caste member of the literate elite to think of the folk beliefs of some forest-dwelling ādivāsī in this way.

When philosophers try to get away from the ladder, as most agree for political reasons it is necessary to do, what they usually end up with is the museum, or perhaps, with apologies to André Malraux, the imaginary museum of philosophical multiculturalism. As the Soviets once did with the traditional costumes of their empire's ethnic minorities, those who aim to promote non-Western philosophy usually end up putting the Chinese and the Indians, and sometimes a slapped-together group they dub 'Africans' as well, in entirely separate, non-overlapping display cases, as if their philosophical traditions were just so many traditional costumes or pieces of pottery.

Read more »