by Angela Starita

In October, I received a jury summons for Kings County Supreme Court. The first day—exactly two weeks before the presidential election—lawyers vetted potential jurors for a case made against the defendant, David Cruz, who was on trial for second-degree murder and related gun charges. Looking down at my hands when the charges were announced, I had to consciously take in the severity of the case since, of course, the judge had taken a dispassionate tone, the same one he might have used in a civil trial around a sidewalk fall or a landlord withholding heat. I immediately began dreading the possibility of being on the jury, fearing an ambiguous case with vindictive or thoughtless jurors. With an hour to go before dismissal, the lawyers choose me to serve. The judge told the 17 of us to return the following Monday, the day the trial would begin.

I spent the week trying to stop myself from imagining possible scenarios. I met up with a friend whose mother, a smart, generous woman who like most of her family loved Donald Trump, was dying of lung cancer. At the end of the evening, I told my friend my fears about jury duty, possibly jailing the wrong person, and even jailing the right person considering the state of our prison system. Though I hadn’t named the crime, he assumed murder and then stood over me and said, “Well, you’re just better than the rest of us. I guess you’re ready for your robes and sandals.”

Like the rest of his family, my friend is witty, quick with a comeback, and much of our closeness rests on my appreciation of his humor. So standing there on that subway platform, I wondered if he were joking. I said nothing, not quite sure what had just transpired. He took a step back looked worried, then asked what was wrong. Not yet sure what had happened, I made some sort of excuse for going still. Another beat passed, and then he stepped close again and made another holier-than-thou crack. This time, it was clear there was no humor intended.

To be fair, he was drunk and exhausted after months of worry about his mother.  At the same time, his wife has been searching for work, and he really couldn’t see how he could build a reasonable future for his son with only one income. His stress was palpable. Read more »

Wild apple tree still hanging on to its apples, if not its leaves, in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Rafaël Newman

Saidiya Hartman made her second trip to Ghana in 1997. She had visited the country briefly the year before, as a tourist, but now, having recently completed a doctorate at Yale and published her first book, she was in Ghana as a Fulbright Scholar searching for historical evidence of local resistance to slave raids. She was also, as a Black American, in quest of a connection with her putative ancestral homeland, and hoping to flesh out her work, both scholarly and personal, in the archives, where she had had a fleeting glimpse of her heritage as the descendant of people kidnapped and indentured, as “chattel,” to slave-owners in the New World.

I chose Ghana because it possessed more dungeons, prisons, and slave pens than any other country in West Africa—tight dark cells buried underground, barred cavernous cells, narrow cylindrical cells, dank cells, makeshift cells. In the rush for gold and slaves that began at the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, Danes, Swedes, and Brandenburgers (Germans) built fifty permanent outposts, forts, and castles designed to ensure their place in the Africa trade. In these dungeons, storerooms, and holding cells, slaves were imprisoned until transported across the Atlantic.

Until it wrested its independence from the British in 1957 Ghana was known as Gold Coast, a name that commemorates the commodity that had first brought Europeans to the region in the 1400s, but which belies the more nefarious commerce that kept them there four centuries long. The country we now call Ghana, named by its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, for a revered but defunct medieval kingdom to its north, was until the 1800s the crossroads for several slave routes from the inland to the sea, and to passage, for those kidnapped, across the Atlantic to a life of servitude. Ghana’s coastline is studded with forts and castles—command centers and entrepôts for the trade in people enslaved from throughout west central Africa: effectively concentration camps—like a string of poisoned beads. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by William Benzon

If Harold Bloom is correct in asserting that, in some sense, Shakespeare invented the human, not in the sense that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, Alexander Graham Bell the telephone, Thomas Edison the light bulb, Hedy Lamar got a patent for frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology, not to mention Yahweh’s work on Adam and Eve, but in the modest sense that he bequeathed us a deeper understanding of ourselves through giving voice to aspects of human behavior that had hitherto gone unremarked. Bloom singles out Hamlet for special consideration, arguing that he is perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest gift – though Falstaff is in the running. Hamlet has come down to us as the melancholy Dane. Accordingly, let us conjecture that modern man was born in melancholy.

A few years later Robert Burton would publish The Anatomy of Melancholy. It was a smash hit and went through five more editions during Burton’s life. It made Burton’s printer a fortune. While the book is indeed about melancholy, it is also about damned near everything else under the sun. It was subsequently parodied in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, no mean feat as the original has something of a parodic character unto itself.

Here is how Burton defined melancholy:

Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or habit. In disposition, is that transitory melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dullness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions, no man living is free, no stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, some time or other he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality.

To live is to know melancholy. We post-moderns are more likely to call it depression.

That’s what this post is about, depression, but also growth. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Science Experiment as Painting. April, 2017.

Digital photograph.

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Purse Strings

My mind’s a purse in which
I keep my stash
if its purse strings are loose
I might add to its load
when new coin comes to town
but if I tighten down
the purse strings of my mind
they’ll garrote its capaciousness
and all that God might have me be
may be hopelessly consigned
to dangle from their noose

Jim Culleny, 2014

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by David Greer

My friend R is a man who takes his simple pleasures seriously, so I asked him to name one for me. Boathouses, he said, without hesitation.

To the best of my knowledge, R has never owned a boat. No canoe or coracle, not a dinghy or dory, nor even a yacht. His abiding passion has always been small planes, especially the four-seat Beech Bonanza he likes to fly to tiny airstrips scattered about the continent, which serve in turn as starting points for terrestrial excursions (folding bicycle) to the back of beyond with his lady love, B.

So why boathouses?

“Well,” said R, “I love the light of the water reflecting on the walls and ceiling of the boathouse. And it’s hard to imagine a more relaxing sound than the gentle lapping of waves against a boathouse slip. It’s a sound that accentuates the pleasure of writing or reading or simple conversation. If you’re inclined to nap, as one does on holiday, there’s nothing more conducive to drifting off to sleep, and then you have the pleasure of a gentle awakening to a charming view of lake or ocean. All nicely framed by the boathouse doors.”

All of which explains why R and B, on their forthcoming trip to Austria to ride motorcycles on winding mountain roads, plan to rent a lake boathouse (mod cons included) as their base. It will be a peaceful counterpoint to the frenetic ecstasy of navigating the “twisties”, as they call the alpine hairpin turns.

Once upon a time, boathouses were simple affairs, erected for the sole purpose of providing safe haven to boats, the kind operated by sweep of arm and sweat of brow. As with all things simple, times changed. Complexities ensued. The two-stroke engine was invented, so boathouses expanded to accommodate motorboats. Motorboats got bigger, and boathouses got larger still. That gave someone the notion to take advantage of the swelling footprint and add a second storey with a bedroom or two, maybe throw in a bathroom, above the boat slips, to the point that many lakeshore boathouses today are more guesthouse than boathouse. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

A pen between God-fingers, a walking stick dragon,
my blind mind taps along its cane of thought. Rumi (trans. Barks)

Saturday morning. Not quite ready for coffee from the espresso machine. Eyes closed. Brooding over the thises and thats. Remembering the start of a thread of thought that wove forward and backwards over the last couple of days. Now trying to remember and writing some of it down.

Here’s the poem which started it.

Map of the New World

1. Archipelagoes

At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.
At the rain’s edge, a sail.

Slowly the sail will lose sight of the islands;
into a mist will go the belief in harbors
of an entire race.

The ten-years war is finished.
Helen’s hair, a grey cloud.
Troy a white ashpit
by the drizzling sea.

The drizzle tightens like the strings of a harp.
A man with clouded eyes picks up the rain
and plucks the first line of the Odyssey. Derek Walcott

Reading it touched something that’s been on my mind. I found myself wondering how long it would be before the Homer in the last lines would go unrecognized by everyone except scholars. I fear the loss of the mythologies of Greece and Rome that provided a binding field of imagery and felt-meaning to centuries of poets of the West. Yes, it is part of the general down grading of the humanities but also an understanding that one can no longer be well-educated and eurocentric. And we are finite. We do not have “world enough and time,” memory enough and time. So much must be lost, replaced, Forgotten. Read more »

by Ed Simon

Paradise Lost

BOOK I

Editor’s Synopsis – As the narrative of Homer’s epic poem The Iliad begins, the Trojan War whose violence it recounts is nearly at an end. Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector, and the rest of the invading Greeks had already been arrayed about the besieged city for a decade at the point where Homer invokes the muses. Homer’s other great epic, The Odyssey, similarly begins in the middle of things; not with brave Ulysses having left Troy to return home to Ithaca, but rather with the hero imprisoned on the idyllic isle of the nymph Calypso. Because Milton was a keen reader of the Greek and Latin classics, he too begins his epic in the middle – in media res – not with the epic War in Heaven whereby Lucifer and a third of the angels who had chosen to rebel against God were caste out, but instead after they’ve already been exiled into the inferno, regrouping following their defeat by the divine host. As a rhetorical gambit, in media res engages the reader by rearranging the chronological expectations of the epic, understanding that implication can often be more effective than straightforward recounting. Arguably the most eminently quotable books of Paradise Lost, with some of Milton’s most familiar turns of phrase, the beginning of the epic lays out its authors purpose – to tell tale of humanity’s initial disobedience and the nature of our fall, to justify the ways of God to man, and to do all of this in a language that had never before been accomplished. What follows is Satan’s rallying of his demonic troops, his justifications for their coming assault on God’s new creation of humans, and his self-serving philosophy of greatness. – E.S. Read more »

by Azadeh Amirsadri

The gym I was trying to like last year had a manic male trainer who wore tight shorts and had a microphone attached to his head. He ran around on a firm mattress-like floor giving members high-fives like the good participants we were supposed to be, and even telling us to high-five each other or clap for ourselves after each section. I introduced myself to him before the session started and told him about my knee issues. He looked at me and then looked away, and said “Only do what feels comfortable because you don’t want to get hurt.” Then he added with enthusiasm ”You will rock this”, giving me a high five. I was secretly worried that I wasn’t going to rock much, given that I was one of the older participants. I felt overwhelmed by the loud music pumping through the big open space, but as I usually do with gyms in general, I thought I had found a place where I could attend the least number of times and get the most amount of benefit, so I signed up for one month to give it a try. This is a gym that offers free childcare and is geared towards women, most of them moms who really like the day care option. The club advertised itself as a place where you give them a week and you will fall in love with the process. When asked if I loved the place during my second visit, I replied “I am trying to figure out if I like it” but the over-enthusiastic receptionist didn’t care for my answer. She asked what I wasn’t sure about and I told her the noise level was too high for me. She had an even louder laugh than the music and the trainer on the microphone combined, and said “Hahaha, you will get used to it. It motivates people to work out longer”.

Another gym I tried for a few months was a high intensity place that was run by very kind people; for most of them, this was their second job and for some, it was their religion. I felt seen and accepted, and the trainers made a lot of accommodations for me. I didn’t have to jump over high black boxes, or climb the wall, or run. For the warm up, I was allowed to walk or use the stationary bike. It was all too good to be true, and everyone would call me by my name, as in “Azi, you are doing great” or “Azi, you are strong today.” Soon enough though, about five weeks in, I hurt my right knee and couldn’t participate anymore. Someone there told me there is no shame in getting hurt and I could still participate in the Murph, even if I don’t complete it. I shook my head in agreement and when I got home, I googled The Murph to see what she was saying. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

Continuing my previous 3QD post about Pamela Sneed’s Funeral Diva, and an earlier piece contextualizing literary representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, today I want to discuss the work of Sindiwe Magona. She is one of South Africa’s most renowned Black women writers, and her autobiography To My Children’s Children (1990) is required reading about apartheid in the 1950s and 1960s. Magona went on to publish Beauty’s Gift in 2008, a novel dealing with the devastation of AIDS in South Africa during the early twenty-first century. The protagonist is called Beauty and she lives up to that name, being beautiful inside and out. But she exists off-stage, so to speak, since the novel narrates in a non-linear manner some events from August to December 2002.

These are recounted from the perspectives of Beauty’s four closest friends, Amanda, Edith, Cordelia, and Doris, all women in their early to mid-thirties. The novel opens on Beauty’s funeral, described in free indirect discourse through her oldest friend Amanda’s focalization. We find out quickly that Amanda hates Beauty’s surviving husband, Hamilton, as ‘a silent message of loathing’ is exchanged by the two. The reason for this hatred, readers discover, is that the suave ‘man of substance’ Hamilton had conducted multiple love affairs. As a consequence he had infected his wife with HIV, which in her case leads to rapid physical deterioration and death from AIDS soon afterwards. In her ‘Introduction’ to the ten-year anniversary edition of the novel, Magona writes of ‘the raging fire in the country of my birth – a veritable catastrophe that was laying waste to all life – especially young life. Absolute devastation’. She also explores the initial assumption that this was a plague affecting gay men, and her horror on realizing that hardly a home in South Africa would be unaffected by the disease. Accordingly, even as they mourn her, Beauty’s friends start looking at their own marriages, discovering husbands’ infidelities, and worrying about tests and HIV status.

Early on, Magona presents readers of Beauty’s Gift with a startling image: the beautiful and ‘beloved’ Beauty laid to rest in an opulent casket, which is then fixed in the earth with cement to prevent theft. Her friends’ memories of Beauty’s charisma and kindness are concretized by the weight of her death from AIDS. From the outset, funerals emerge not merely as a plot point but a structuring device for understanding the social and political implications of the AIDS crisis in South Africa. After opening her novel with Beauty’s funeral, Magona continues with vignettes about various stages of illness, death, and grief. These include a wake, the mourning period, Beauty’s posthumous ceremony of drinking water and the spade-washing rite, followed by other people’s funerals. Through this framework, Magona creates a narrative of gendered suffering and resilience. Read more »

Broken symmetry: a high-altitude airliner above Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Jeroen van Baar

Humans are beings of staggering complexity. We don’t just consist of ourselves: billions of bacteria in our gut help with everything from digestion to immune response.

In recent years, scientists have started to uncover how this ‘gut microbiome’ shapes a variety of health outcomes including obesity and depression. For instance, when researchers transplanted fecal matter from depressed humans to rats, those rats started showing signs of depression themselves. We’re still unsure why this happens—it could have to do with the production of neurotransmitters, which depends on how food is processed—but the gut microbiome forms a promising horizon of health science.

This has raised the obvious question why the biome in your belly looks the way it does. Where did it come from? We normally assume that the microbiome is mostly shaped by the food we eat. But a new Nature study provides a radical refinement of this story: our social interactions can shape the microbial communities living inside us.

The study involved mapping the social networks and sequencing the microbiomes of 1,787 adults in 18 isolated villages in Honduras. Participants were asked to self-collect stool samples, which were stored in liquid nitrogen and shipped to the USA for analysis. A detailed survey and photographic census helped participants identify their social connections, including their friends and family.

Analyzing the data, the research team found that the gut microbiome looked the most similar between members of the same household: they shared up to 14% of the microbial strains in their guts. However, even friends who see each other regularly shared about 8% of strains, while strangers from the same village shared only 4%. Microbiome similarity even extended to friends of friends, forming potential transmission chains that spread strains within communities. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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Sughra Raza. Self Portrait Against Table Mountain. August, 2019.

Digital photograph.

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