Seon Ghi Bahk. Existence, 2001.

More here and here.

Richard Marshall interviews Allen W Wood in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: Isn’t Kant’s view about freewill problematic – isn’t he saying we don’t have freewill but nevertheless we must assume we have? Is this part of his argument for saying that the highest good isn’t knowledge but faith?

AW: Kant is not saying — about freedom or any other subject — anything of the form: “Not-p but we must assume that p.” That’s close to self-contradictory, like Moore’s paradox: “p, but I don’t believe that p”.

What Kant thinks is this: We can’t coherently deny, or even decline to affirm, that we are free. Not only our moral life, but even our use of theoretical reason — on which we rely in rationally inquiring into nature — presupposes that we are free. Not only in order to act morally, but even to formulate theoretical questions, devise experiments, choose which ones to perform and what conclusions to draw from then — we must presuppose that we are free. That’s the sense in which it is true that for Kant “we must assume we are free.”

Kant thinks we can show that there is no contradiction in supposing we are free. We can also establish empirical criteria for free actions, and investigate human actions on the presupposition we are free. We can treat human responses to cognitions as involving law-like connections grounded on free choices which show themselves in our character. But we can never prove that we are free or integrate our freedom in any way into our objective conception of the causal order of nature. If the problem of free will is to see how freedom fits into the order of nature, then Kant’s basic view about the free will problem is that it is insoluble. He puts it bluntly: “Freedom can never be comprehended, nor even can insight into it be gained” (Groundwork 4:459).

Kant’s position is therefore indeed “problematic” in the sense that he thinks freedom is a permanent problem for us, both unavoidable and insoluble. As with many metaphysical and religious questions, Kant thinks they lie beyond our power to answer them. If you can’t stand the frustration involved in accepting this, and insist on finding some more stable position which affords you peace of mind and intellectual self-complacency, then you will find Kant’s position “problematic” in the sense that you can’t bring yourself to accept it. You may try to kid yourself into accepting either some naturalistic deflationary answer to the problem or some dishonest supernaturalist answer. It would be nice, wouldn’t it? if we could get comfortable about the problem of freedom. Kant thinks that we can’t.

More here.

Mona Eltahawy in the New York Times:

After I gave a reading in Britain last year, a woman stood in line as I signed books. When it was her turn, the woman, who said she was from a British Muslim family of Arab origin, knelt down to speak so that we were at eye level.

“I, too, am fed up with waiting to have sex,” she said, referring to the experience I had related in the reading. “I’m 32 and there’s no one I want to marry. How do I get over the fear that God will hate me if I have sex before marriage?”

I hear this a lot. My email inbox is jammed with messages from women who, like me, are of Middle Eastern and Muslim descent. They write to vent about how to “get rid of this burden of virginity,” or to ask about hymen reconstruction surgery if they’re planning to marry someone who doesn’t know their sexual history, or just to share their thoughts about sex.

Countless articles have been written on the sexual frustration of men in the Middle East — from the jihadi supposedly drawn to armed militancy by the promise of virgins in the afterlife to ordinary Arab men unable to afford marriage. Far fewer stories have given voice to the sexual frustration of women in the region or to an honest account of women’s sexual experiences, either within or outside marriage.

More here.

From the Huffington Post:

Cindy Huyser: When did you first start thinking of yourself as a writer? What drew you to writing?

Anis Shivani: Although I’ve answered versions of this question many times before, it’s almost an impossible question to answer. I was always a reader, a reader not in the sense that people today like to claim they’re readers, but a reader in a sense that’s almost extinct. And that went back to earliest childhood, and has continued throughout life. One is a reader before one is a writer, one cannot be a writer without being a certain kind of persistent reader. When one reads so persistently it is not unreasonable to start thinking of oneself at some point along the line as someone who wants to write as well. In retrospect, a real reader is just learning to be a writer, even if the intention isn’t stated as such.

I became a writer because every other occupation seemed compromised and unsuitable to my character. Whatever job one takes on in the modern United States, besides creating art, only serves capitalism—and in fact most of writing and art only serves capitalism too. With writing there is at least the possibility that it allows one to develop one’s character to the fullest extent possible, that one can discover oneself through and in writing, so in fact deciding to become a writer takes enormous daring because that’s how one finds out what one is all about—if there’s any there there. Formal education, on the other hand, usually takes a person in the other direction, even if the education is in literature or the arts, it seeks to distance the art from real discovery.

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

The astrophysicist and author Janna Levin has two main offices: One at Barnard College of Columbia University, where she is a professor, and a studio space at Pioneer Works, a “center for art and innovation” in Brooklyn where Levin works alongside artists and musicians in an ever-expanding role as director of sciences. Beneath the rafters on the third floor of the former ironworks factory that now houses Pioneer Works, her studio is decorated (with props from a film set) like a speakeasy. There’s a bar lined with stools, a piano, a trumpet and, on the wall that serves as Levin’s blackboard, a drink rail underlining a mathematical description of a black hole spinning in a magnetic field. Whether Levin is writing words or equations, she finds inspiration just outside her gallery window, where a giant cloth-and-paper tree trunk hangs from the ceiling almost to the factory floor three stories below.

“Science is just an absolutely intrinsic part of culture,” said Levin, who runs a residency program for scientists, holds informal “office hours” for the artists and other residents, and hosts Scientific Controversies — a discussion series with a disco vibe that attracts standing-room-only crowds. “We don’t see it as different.”

Levin lives in accordance with this belief. She conducted research on the question of whether the universe is finite or infinite, then penned a book about her life and this work (written as letters to her mother) at the start of her physics career. She has also studied the limits of knowledge, ideas that found their way into her award-winning novel about the mathematicians Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel.

Lately she has been developing the theory of an astrophysical object she calls a “black-hole battery,” a circuit created by a black hole and an orbiting neutron star that discharges in a sudden flash of electricity, rather like a lightning strike in deep space. Her latest book, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs From Outer Space, rushed into print at the end of March, chronicles the dramatic history of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) experiment, from its fanciful conception in the 1960s to its recent, triumphant detection of gravitational waves — ripples in space-time coming from the distant merger of two black holes.

More here.

Idrees Ahmad in Medium:

Imagine Guernica. On April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Basque town was bombed for three hours by Hitler’s Luftwaffe in support of Francisco Franco’s fascist regime, leaving over 1,600 people dead. Picasso immortalized the episode in a celebrated painting, Neruda wrote poems about it, and it became an enduring metaphor for people’s suffering in war.

Now imagine a different response to Guernica. Imagine people applauding the bombings, reproaching the victims, and slandering the witnesses. If you can imagine that, then you know Aleppo.

Aleppo — one of the last major rebel strongholds — is on the verge of collapse. Backed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Lebanese Hezbollah, and US-equipped Iraqi militias, the Syrian regime army is advancing from the south; from the east, the Islamic State (IS) is rampaging ahead; and, exploiting the stretched rebel defences, the Kurdish YPG is sneaking in from the north. All have been assisted, directly or indirectly, by the relentless attrition of Russian bombs.

But as the conflict moves toward a grim denouement, its mounting toll has elicited a curious response. Many in the west, including prominent liberals, have used the logic of lesser-evilism to welcome this outcome. But to sustain this argument, they’ve had to battle the stubborn resistance of facts.

More here.

Nicholas Vaifdar in Booklust:

In 1943, Simone Weil lay dying. I have a private picture of those last days. I see her on a cot in rural England, in the green depths of that countryside, so pleasantly depressing under cloud cover to those eyes reared on California movies. Far off is the peevish thunder of late August and, even farther off, inaudibly across the channel, the disintegration of so much flesh and granite. Weil has withered to a stick figure in gray prole garb; her Gussie Fink-Nottle glasses rest with all the weight of artillery on her sharpened and sweaty nose. A cracked window admits the stink of humid vegetation into her Victorian sanitarium. This is a moment like any other, except for her soul it happens to be final, the last Pringle in the tube.

I have a reckless guess, too, about her last conscious and complete thought before her heavy mind dissolved. Earlier that year Weil had read Schopenhauer. Nothing wrong with that. Or, almost nothing: the tetchy bachelor of Frankfurt can have a weird effect on folks. Weil, for example, had stopped eating. Scholars disagree about her motive or even on whether this starvation was freely chosen and not a symptom of some deeper fleshly waste. I postulate that this most willful of women chose her own path to the grave. In doing so, she turned away from writing, working, teaching, experiencing sex, and even from seeing the day when her first book might appear in print. What a waste! the reader of her biography thinks, with all the snobbery that the living feel for the dead. Dead at thirty-four! And all that talent! And then, as an addendum, unconscious and implicit: Moron! She threw away the dearest thing she owned as if it were a careless trifle. And what for? To prove what? Here enters the influence of Schopenhauer. The first volume of The World as Will and Representation ends as follows:

…we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies is — nothing.

To the ascetic the world is nothing. Not seems, but is. Carnage was in stupid ascendance around the globe. But Weil had stopped eating and so the carnage was in a sense cancelled.

More here.

Clearances –Sonnet 3

When all the others were away at Mass,
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives-
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

by Seamus Heaney

Chris Carosi at City Lights:

CL: What’s the first book you actually finished reading?

AE: I recently finished reading Molly Crabapple’s memoir, Drawing Blood, which is a fascinating intellectual history of the roaring decade that preceded the Second Great Depression. She has this wonderful way with dropping scintillating poetic lines in the middle of her description, like she was hit by inspiration. There is something very raw about that kind of writing that really appeals to me. I wish more people wrote like that. But if that was the case we’d have more Molly Crabapples and then she would have to fight them all to establish her supremacy and that’s not good.

I’m sorry, I just reviewed the question and it appears I misread it. That raises a second question, do you really want to hear about the reading habits of a person who can’t read?

More here.

Amardeep Singh in his own blog:

Like many of my friends and colleagues, I found the recent broad critique of the Digital Humanities in LARB by Daniel Allington, David Golumbia, and Sarah Brouillette to be pretty gripping reading. I know many of those same friends and colleagues have many disagreements with the characterization of the Digital Humanities in that essay; here are a few of mine.

The first paragraph of “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): a Political History of the Digital Humanities” is carefully considered — the authors are not newbies to this debate, and know what they're doing. I'll work mainly from the paragraph in these brief comments, since it introduces many of the main themes of the essay that follows. I'm also much more interested in the overall tenor of this essay than in debating at great length every individual topic they cover. So here is the opening paragraph:

Advocates position Digital Humanities as a corrective to the “traditional” and outmoded approaches to literary study that supposedly plague English departments. Like much of the rhetoric surrounding Silicon Valley today, this discourse sees technological innovation as an end in itself and equates the development of disruptive business models with political progress. Yet despite the aggressive promotion of Digital Humanities as a radical insurgency, its institutional success has for the most part involved the displacement of politically progressive humanities scholarship and activism in favor of the manufacture of digital tools and archives. Advocates characterize the development of such tools as revolutionary and claim that other literary scholars fail to see their political import due to fear or ignorance of technology. But the unparalleled level of material support that Digital Humanities has received suggests that its most significant contribution to academic politics may lie in its (perhaps unintentional) facilitation of the neoliberal takeover of the university. (Source; my emphasis)

Many of the points Allington et al. make, here and throughout the essay, can be characterized as deflating a caricature of a DH-branded balloon: while the Digital Humanities positions itself as a “radical insurgency,” in actuality it is anything but. But I have to shrug a bit at these types of arguments: even if there's some truth in the idea that DH is not the vanguard of a progressive revolution within academia, so what? What actual harm is it committing? If you don't find the scholarship interesting, you don't have to read it.

More here.

From Edge.org:

KAHNEMAN: Let's begin with an obvious question. What is experimental philosophy?

KNOBE: Experimental philosophy is this relatively new field at the border of philosophy and psychology. It's a group of people who are doing experiments of much the same kind you would see in psychology, but are informed by the much older intellectual tradition of philosophy. It can be seen as analogous, on a certain level, to some of the work that you've done at the border of psychology and economics, which uses the normal tools of psychological experiment to illuminate issues that would be of interest to economists.

Experimental philosophy is a field that uses the normal approaches to running psychological experiments to run experiments that are in some ways informed by these intellectual frameworks that come out of the world of philosophy.

KAHNEMAN: I read the review that you were the senior author of in Annual Review of Psychology in which you dealt with four topics. It was all very summarized, and I don't pretend that I understood it all. I was struck by the fact that you run psychological experiments and you explain the results. There is something that sounds like a psychological theory, and yet, there was a characteristic difference, which I was trying to get my fingers on.

More here.

Patrick Blanchfield in The LA Review of Books' Marginalia:

If ever a person could kill a joke, it was Sigmund Freud. His exegesis of this “American Anecdote” in his “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” (1905) goes on for pages, slowly taking the life out of the already-barely-funny punchline : there is no “Christ hanging between the two thieves.”

Born one hundred sixty years ago yesterday, Sigmund Freud never cared much for America. No one is really sure why. He told one patient he had eaten something during his 1909 tour of the country that had “spoiled in his stomach.” Some historians speculate it had to do with Freud’s obsessional anxieties over his intellectual legacy, and his pique at Americans’ preference for the despised Carl Jung over Freud’s new favored son, Alfred Adler. Others suggest he may have disliked the sleaziness of American capitalism and its culture of crass fixation on money. That said, Freud, who admitted to admiring a single American genius, William James (“The man spoke better German than I did!,” he supposedly told a patient) knew cash value when he saw it. He insisted that an American patient in Vienna pay him only in $10 bills, deeming greenbacks “effective currency” compared to the Austrian kronen, a near-worthless medium of exchange after the First World War. More than anyone, Freud understood the Reality Principle; he had a family to feed. When it came to the American nation, though, Freud’s appraisal was grim: “America is a mistake; a gigantic mistake, but a mistake.”

A continent away from Freud’s place of birth, and a century-and-half later, Freud’s judgment hits, as it were, The Real. If you’re cynical enough, with the election season looming, the idea of gazing on the portraits of two thieves feels uncannily close to home. Freud unsparingly diagnosed the shallowness of American pretensions to national exceptionalism, technological progressivism, and social openness. He wrote about both American “prosperity” and “broadmindedness” only ironically, between scare quotes, and saw the opulence of American society and fervor of American patriotism as indexing something else entirely: “the psychological poverty of groups.” “The present cultural state of America,” he wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents(1930), “would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared.” He continued, bitingly: “But I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give an impression of wanting myself to employ American methods.”

More here.

Matthew Sturgis at Literary Review:

Beardsley had little formal training. He attended a few night classes at the Westminster School of Art. He learned by working – principally on two large commissions that he received in 1892 from the innovative publisher J M Dent, one for an illustrated edition of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, the other for a series of ‘grotesques’ to adorn three volumes of bons mots by the wits of the 18th century. He worked on both in tandem over the course of some eighteen months. There were lots of drawings to be done: more than three hundred illuminated letters, chapter headings, tail pieces, borders and full-page illustrations for LeMorte, and around one hundred and thirty images for the Bon-Mots. He got heartily sick of the work, but the sheer volume of it and the speed at which he had to produce improved his penmanship to the point of mastery, stimulated his powers of invention and turned him from an amateur into a professional.

Beardsley delighted in symbolism and hidden allusions. He often used to smuggle subversive details into his pictures, to vex either the public or his publishers. John Lane, who published many of Beardsley’s finest works at the Bodley Head, complained that he had to look at the works upside down to check them for hidden improprieties. Even so, Beardsley managed to introduce into his Salome illustrations a portrait of Wilde as the moon and some phallic candelabra. Such japes have made Beardsley’s drawings a rich ground for interpretative exposition and Zatlin draws together many contemporary and more recent commentaries, some more fanciful than others. The ‘baton’ held by the Maîtresse d’Orchestre receives multiple intriguing interpretations.

more here.

Edwin Heathcote at the Financial Times:

Modernism began with an image of clean, lean whiteness; architecture as machine, stripped to its bones. Yet it was resurrected in Brutalism as a fierce, almost aggressive style in which multistorey car parks took on the look of ruined medieval castles or the hulks of aircraft carriers. We have lost some of the best examples — notably the Owen Luder Partnership’s Tricorn Centre and Gateshead Car Park (both designed by the brilliant Rodney Gordon) and the exuberantly sculptural Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago by Bertrand Goldberg. Many of these monuments remain under threat — Peter and Alison Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens housing estate in London is due for demolition — just as they become fashionable again. Britain was a late-comer to Modernism but its Brutalism was in the vanguard, a world-class architecture that the host country is only now beginning to appreciate.

This is an architecture that contained the seeds of its own destruction in its name. “Brutalism” sounds alienating, savage, uncaring. Yet its origins are anything but. The term was coined in Sweden in 1950 to describe an inoffensive brick house that was, frankly, a bit boring. It was taken up with gusto by Brits on the lookout for the next big idea, then supplemented with the idea of béton brut — using raw concrete on the surface of buildings, as exemplified by Le Corbusier, who employed it in everything from housing estates to monasteries — and with Jean Dubuffet’s notion of l’art brut, or outsider art.

more here.

Edmund White at The New York Times:

Clébert writes of a place where you bought three Gauloises out of a pack, where beggars who’d been lucky stood their mates for a round and sang old ballads, then gathered a few butts “by way of provision for the night.” He visits the huts along the Seine where the ­corpses of suicides are fished out of the river. And he spends time in pitiful flea markets like the ones I saw in Montreuil in the ’90s, where vendors sell “unmatched pairs of boots, ragged jackets and trousers, garments at a hundred francs, surplus pieces of leather, printed papers much stained but still readable . . . bundles of postcards, bits of scrap metal, bags of bent and rusty nails, broken or defective concierge’s knickknacks, and so on. Unmatched, stained, bent, rusty, broken, defective — just like these poor devils, their ­faces plaster masks of ­no-more-hope.” Clébert is a master of the long, cascading list-­sentence, trippingly rendered into English by Donald Nicholson-Smith. His descriptions are mirrored by (not illustrated by) the bleak photographs of Patrice ­Molinard.

A connoisseur of chaos, Clébert is the poet of the lumpenproletariat and of a forgotten city: “Between the two ­bridges, mainly on the Left Bank, one’s sense of smell is overstimulated by a succession of odors, as follows (read slowly): cheese, very violent, then, by turns, gas welding, fresh periwinkles and new rust.” He has a very precise ­sensorium.

Luc Sante, who has written the informative introduction to this volume, has recently offered his own look at the city, “The Other Paris,” a brilliantly researched narrative that ­touches on everything from the Paris Commune to dime novels. Here he tells us that Clébert’s book was inspired by Henry Miller and Blaise ­Cendrars.

more here.