What The Old Woman Said

I will tell you this. There was a garden by the pump. Fallow land given me.
My father built flowerbeds. Offshoots of paths. Geometric patterns.
Cuttings. Bulbs from my mother. The texture of earth.
Stone. The smell of water. I could grow anything.

I will tell you this. There was a pond. Wrinkles of mud. Pups that were drowned there.
Dragged to the bank. Sacksful slit open. Way beyond saving.
Names that I gave them. Returned to the water. Each small splash.
Spirals expanding. My own face rippling.

I will tell you this. There was a heron. Constant. Returning.
Stilt-leg. Growing above water. Curtain of willows.
Everything still. A crowning of feathers.
Inflections of music. Nothing was moving.

I will tell you this. There were meadows. Light. Nectar from clover.
More flowers than I could name. Armfuls I carried.
Stems that I split. Smelling of summer.
Chains on my neck. Ankles. The bones of my wrists. Knowing nothing.

I will tell you this. There was a boy. Eyes like the sky.
Eyes like my father's. Children imagined. Rooms that were borrowed.
Rooms that were painted. Stories invented.
Histories. Futures. We knew everything.

I will tell you this. There was a man. Veins under skin.
Bones. Barely there. His stuttered breathing.
Green light on a screen. Intermittent beeping.
False light. False music. Someone was dying.

I will tell you this. I had seen his face on the shroud.
Running and bleeding. Wounds on his hands.
Pictures on glass. Coloured and leaded.
Faces on statues. A cross through his heart. Light always fading.

I will tell you this. There was a room. White. A white plate on the table.
A man at the table. Notes in his voice. A tune that I knew.
Beauty in the movements of his face. His arms. Frisson of wings.
Touch. Touch me. But he already had. I had forgotten everything.

I will tell you this. Some days are unbearable. Horizontal planes.
Moment to moment. Each long tick. I have been lonely.
Last night. A dream of a heron. The span of his wings.
Sounding through air. Listen. Listen. I am disappearing.
.

by Eileen Sheehan
from Song of the Midnight Fox
Doghouse Books, Tralee, 2004,

Sibtain Naqvi in The Express Tribune:

It is serious eating here, with no fancy presentations or garnishes, just honest, good food that lures the eater into a bacchanal of gluttony. My first experience was no light hearted affair but a complete immersion in the victuals on offer.

While perusing the various places, even the most casual observer will notice the predominance of restaurants that hark back to the city of Delhi. You can hear the echoes of Chandi Chawk and Nizammuddin and, in fact, I found more than a passing resemblance between a Nihari place here and the famous Karim restaurant in Delhi.

According to senior denizens of the area, many people who migrated from Delhi to Karachi preferred to live on Burns Road.

“In the 1950s, the newly migrated people were looking for dishes that were famous in Delhi and the shopkeepers of that time not only adapted the names and reproduced recipes of Delhi’s traditional fare but also decided to include the name Delhi while naming their shops to conjure an effect,” said Abbas Raza, an elderly resident of Burns Road.

Before partition, Rizwan’s grandfather was running a sweets shop near Jama Masjid Delhi and today he owns an establishment that is now known as Delhi Darbar Sweets.

More here.

James Bamford in Wired:

The message arrives on my “clean machine,” a MacBook Air loaded only with a sophisticated encryption package. “Change in plans,” my contact says. “Be in the lobby of the Hotel ______ by 1 pm. Bring a book and wait for ES to find you.” ES is Edward Snowden, the most wanted man in the world. For almost nine months, I have been trying to set up an interview with him—traveling to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro twice, and New York multiple times to talk with the handful of his confidants who can arrange a meeting. Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government’s domestic surveillance programs? In May I received an email from his lawyer, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, confirming that Snowden would meet me in Moscow and let me hang out and chat with him for what turned out to be three solid days over several weeks. It is the most time that any journalist has been allowed to spend with him since he arrived in Russia in June 2013. But the finer details of the rendezvous remain shrouded in mystery. I landed in Moscow without knowing precisely where or when Snowden and I would actually meet. Now, at last, the details are set.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Katrina Sifferd in 3:AM Magazine [Photo: Marcela Rafea Photography]:

3:AM: You’re interested in criminal responsibility and punishment. One thing you’ve defended is common-sense or folk psychology when used in law. So you say the law should take the state of mind ‘intent to kill’ or ‘knowingly’ seriously. Before saying why, can you outline the main reasons some say that this folk psychology is all wrong and shouldn’t be used in law?

KS: When folk psychology was under attack twenty-some years ago by eliminativists, the practice of holding persons responsible was threatened. If Paul Churchland is correct and folk psychological terms are radically false, then when judges and juries are trying to determine if a criminal defendant intended to kill someone, or knew that their act was likely to result in a death, they are looking for nothing real in the world, and criminal verdicts are nothing but post hoc just-so stories. One goal of my PhD thesis was to show how radical of a claim ontological eliminativism is from the perspective of the criminal law: if folk psychology is false, criminal verdicts, which of course result in very serious consequences for defendants, cannot be justified.

I think most of the elminativists, and behaviorists such as Gilbert Ryle, were motivated by the idea that folk psychology isn’t “scientific” enough. They were dubious that we can use our perceptions of people’s outward behavior to postulate true claims about what is going on in their heads. But this suspicion seems unjustified: a quick examination reveals that folk concepts tend to be roughly accurate, not radically false. Folk physics concepts, for example, appear to have captured true distinctions in the physical properties of objects. Solidity doesn’t really mean “no spaces between”, but folk concepts of gas, liquid, and solids do capture real differences between these states of things in the world, and such concepts have predictive power (liquid undergoes displacement whereas solids do not). So it seems a safe basic supposition that folk psychological concepts are likely to capture real categorical differences in the brain between states of desire and belief, or happy and sad, for example, especially as they seem to be so useful to understanding and predicting behavior.

Nobody really takes the elminativist position seriously anymore, but worrying about eliminativism is an effective way to begin exploring how true folk psychology has to be for our system of criminal responsibility to be correct, especially given data from neuroscience, and how we might effectively translate neuroscientific data into the folk psychological terms the criminal justice system uses.

More here.

Ted Steinberg at Dissent:

New York has a long history of thumbing its nose at the sea. The Dutch colonists took some of the initial steps to wade out into the water—building a pier, for example—but it was the British who followed them who transformed underwater land into a commodity. This move formed the basis for the physical expansion of the island of Manhattan. Back in the 1600s, the lower part of the island ended at what is now Pearl Street, a couple of blocks inland from where it ends today. But grants to underwater land, made by the Crown and then the state of New York, expanded the city’s underwater real estate. By 2010 such expansion had added 2,286 acres—the equivalent of more than 1,700 football fields of land—to the island.

The process of encroaching on the sea, which began at the tip of Manhattan, was then replicated in other places around New York Harbor, including Brooklyn and Queens and, across the Hudson River, in Jersey City and Hoboken. Indeed, before massive landfilling operations in the 1800s, Hoboken was an island community, and Jersey City little more than a spit of land connected to the mainland at low tide by a soggy marsh.

As New York rose to become the nation’s largest city—a position it has retained for some 200 years—it continued to grow at the expense of its surrounding waters. The rise of the city’s red-hot real estate market in the latter part of the 1800s, meanwhile, helped to underwrite the idea of New York City as a limitless proposition.

more here.

Rhett Miller at Bookforum:

“So what is the prophet Cohen telling us? And why do we listen so intently?” Liel Leibovitz asks at the outset of A Broken Hallelujah, his moving portrait of the songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen. The author pursues the answers to these questions with the diligence and reverence of a religious scholar. Thank God. But Leibovitz recognizes that Cohen deserves more than mere rock biography, and so he structures A Broken Hallelujah around the premise that his subject is, indeed, a modern-day prophet.

Leibovitz’s account abounds with proof of this assertion, even as it charts the many other personae that Cohen has assumed through his long life and distinguished career. Still, to grasp the man’s peculiar sense of spiritual mission, one really need look no further than the greatest hymn of the rock ’n’ roll era, Cohen’s “Hallelujah”; in its closing verse, the singer proclaims, “I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you / And even though it all went wrong / I’ll stand before the Lord of Song / With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.”

Leonard Cohen grew up in a wealthy Jewish family in Montreal. When he was nine years old, his father, Nathan Cohen, died from lingering injuries sustained in World War I. Young Leonard was left with his sister and mother, as well as an extended family that included his maternal grandfather, a fiery rabbi named Solomon Klinitsky-Klein, “a celebrated scholar who was known as Sar haDikdook, or the Prince of Grammarians.”

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Alberto Manguel at the New York Review of Books:

Only a few centuries after the invention of writing, some six thousand years ago, in a forgotten corner of Mesopotamia, the few who possessed the ability to decipher written words were known as scribes, not as readers. Perhaps the reason for this was to lend less emphasis to the greatest of their gifts: having access to the archives of human memory and rescuing from the past the voice of our experience. Since those distant beginnings, the power of readers has produced in their societies all manner of fears: for having the craft of bringing back to life a message from the past, for creating secret spaces which no one else can enter while the reading takes place, for being able to redefine the universe and rebel against unfairness, all by means of a certain page. Of these miracles we are capable, we the readers, and these may perhaps help rescue us from the abjection and stupidity to which we seem so often condemned.

And yet, banality is tempting. To dissuade us from reading, we invent strategies of distraction that transform us into bulimic consumers for whom novelty and not memory is essential. We reward triviality and monetary ambition while stripping the intellectual act of its prestige, we replace ethical and aesthetic notions with purely financial values and we propose entertainments that offer immediate gratification and the illusion of universal chatting instead of the pleasurable challenge and amiable slow pace of reading.

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Steve Almond in Salon:

It’s been something of a shock — and a joyous one — to see how quickly John Oliver’s HBO program, “Last Week Tonight,” has gone from an awkward up-and-comer to an outright hit.

Not only is the program wildly popular with critics in the big markets, it’s being hailed in plenty of smaller regional venues. It’s pretty safe to say that landing an extended rave in the Auburn Citizen — circulation 10,000 — means you’ve broken out of the New York City media bubble.

The significance of the show’s surging popularity goes beyond its various laudable, and widely lauded, elements (the more diverse writer’s room, the commercial-free format, and so on). What the success of “Last Week Tonight” suggests, on a deeper level, is that American television viewers may finally be tired of the frantic bombast generated by the Stimulation Media.

What’s more, after years of making do with the therapeutic jibes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, they are finding in Oliver a figure more interested in making sense of the world than in making them laugh.

This is not to say that Oliver isn’t funny. He and his writers and guests have come up with some uproarious bits, most recently an infomercial supplied by comedian Sarah Silverman urgingAmericans in dire financial straits to do anything other than borrow money from a predatory payday loan firm. “People will pay you to pee on them,” she confides. “That’s true. Doodies too! Doodies are more. Like double.” But a bit like this is not the point of the show. It’s merely the scatological kicker to a much larger story, one about the rapacity of an industry dedicated to exploiting our most economically vulnerable citizens.

Oliver spent more than 15 minutes detailing what payday loans are, how the industry targets desperate consumers with misleading ads, conceals its draconian fees and dodges regulation. It was a tour de force of explanatory journalism.

More here.

Fashion Craze

We die more and more beautifully
in Gianni Versace’s collection.
Elegance is aesthetics’ nestling.

We bustle about the churches of fashion
believing that the orange will suit us.

You kiss me in a changing room
Look, it’s just Rome’s fall in green.

We solve the puzzles of our archetypes.
Translate berets into foreign languages.

Tonight we are invited
to the opening of the Last Judgment.

We enter without tickets.
Today is dead admission.

by Ewa Lipska
from Sklepy Zoologyczne
publisher: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001
translation: Robin Davidson & Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska

Read more »

Laura Miller in Salon:

The final novel in Lev Grossman’s bestselling, genre-bending trilogy, “The Magician’s Land,” landed in the No. 1 spot on the New York Times Bestseller list this week, following on more than one enthusiastic review. But when Grossman published the first book, “The Magicians,” in 2009, he felt some trepidation. Although it told the story of a young man, Quentin Coldwater, whisked from anomie in contemporary Brooklyn to a secret wizardry university in upstate New York, the novel was written in the sort of wised-up, self-conscious tone literary writers use to convey stories of tottering marriages and waylaid careers. Would it be too realistic for fantasy readers and too fantastical for fans of realism? Grossman, a book critic for Time magazine, describes himself as “risk-averse,” but he gambled, and it paid off. The Magicians trilogy has won a sizable and devoted readership, and a pilot based on the first book is currently in production for the SyFy channel. I recently spoke with Grossman about breaking the rules of the fantasy genre and the similarities between magic, writing code and clinical depression.

But the magic itself doesn’t represent depression surely? Depression seems so disempowering.

When you’re depressed, when you’re in bed and feel like you can’t get out, you can’t imagine doing work or accomplishing anything or anybody loving you. So when you look around you and you see these things happening to other people, they look like magic to you. They look that exotic, that strange, that impossible. And when you begin to crawl out of the pit and reengage with the world, it seems very magical. It felt as though getting out of bed yesterday was impossible, but now you’re doing it. Just by returning to daily life, you’re a magician.

More here.

Emily Underwood in Science:

Alan Wall in The Fortnightly Review:

Geoffrey Hill’s poetic career has been mediated through his engagement with the dictionary. And that dictionary is first and foremost the OED. There is no greater dictionary in the world, and its making constitutes one of the great intellectual events of the twentieth century, though it started life in the nineteenth. There had never been anything like this before. Now the language itself has become the documented labyrinth of its own manifold meanings. Now history can be traced uttering itself thus and thus in one mutating word after another. The thought of a poet writing in English who would not grow excited turning the pages of the OED, or clicking on the electronic version, is so dismal that one wishes such a personage an even smaller readership than modern poets normally manage to acquire.

The anti-self to our word-blind, purblind poet is undoubtedly Geoffrey Hill. His verse uses lexicography and philology as heuristic principles. Where Robert Graves leapt out of the window after Laura Riding (even if he did go down a storey first), one suspects it would require the defenestration of Hill’s beloved bound set of the OED to elicit any such voluntarylapsus from him. The White Goddess, being no better than she should be, might have had a slightly harder time of it, had she been strutting her stuff in Worcestershire. With A. E. Housman to the left of her, and Geoffrey Hill to the right, she would have received some very old-fashioned looks indeed; chilly gazes from fellows not so easily beguiled. And acerbity is a necessary part of our theme. Acerbity is integral to Hill’s achievements in both verse and prose. Sentimentality is anathema. There are no flies on this fellow. The constable’s son is nothing if not forensic. Every emotion is likely to be treated as the scene of a crime, past, present, or to come.

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Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

I, being sick of an Ague, have come out to Country for a change of Air. But in truth I am not so sick at all, and I embrace this circumstance with whole Heart, for it enables me to pursue, as is my true Vocation, still further Observations touching upon divers questions of Natural Philosophy.

The Duke, when he comes galloping through England between diplomatic missions to Vienna and Constantinople, makes light of my inquiries, and says mockingly how good it is that Philosophy now includes matters suitable for Ladies too. There was no room for the feminine sex in the Schools and their endless debates about the Quiddity of this and the Thisness of that, he laughs, but how fitting for a Duchess, with leisure to spare, to look with her magnifying Lens at the industry of Silkworms, at the fine detail of the leg of a Flea, or to place two such Lenses together within a Tube, and to look out at the Heavens, to chart the Eclipse of the Moon or to follow the path of a shooting Star.

But the Duke cannot see past his own Nose, I tell him, for in truth such matters were always of great concern to the Philosopher. For did Aristotle himself not wade in the Tides, searching for ever new forms of Corral, of Medusae and Polypi? Did he not describe the formation of Clouds and other Meteors, and the fatty exhalations of earth that we call Comets? No, ‘tis the Schools that shrank Philosophy down to the mere quarrel over Words, distorting the legacy of the great Aristotle, while neglecting altogether the work of Hippocrates, the Elder Pliny, Isidore of Seville. As if these too were not Philosophers! What these men possess, and the discoursers uponQuiddity lack, I believe, is Curiosity. Those discoursers suffer from Wind. They do not hunger for the World, nor have they Appetite for the astounding and infinite diversity of its Particulars.

More here.

I went to Cairo to present Egypt's leaders with evidence that police slaughtered 1,000 people at Rabaa Square. They wouldn't even let me out of the airport.

Ken Roth in Foreign Policy:

Some combination of denial and fear led the Egyptian government to refuse my colleague and me entrance to the country on Sunday night. The form wrapped around my colleague's passport describing why we were being denied entry was checked, “For security reasons.”

It was an unprecedented step. No one from Human Rights Watch had ever been barred from Egypt, even during the darkest days of former President Hosni Mubarak's rule. But the reason for my visit was also unprecedented — a massacre that rivals the most notorious of recent times, such as China's Tiananmen killings in 1989 and Uzbekistan's Andijan slaughter in 2005.

I went to Cairo to present the results of a detailed investigation that Human Rights Watch had conducted into last year's massacre by Egyptian security forces of protesters at a large sit-in demonstration in Cairo's Rabaa al-Adawiya Square, which was organized to oppose the military's ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first elected civilian president. In one day — indeed, in some 12 hours — security forces killed at least 817 people, each of whom has been individually identified by Human Rights Watch, and quite likely more than 1,000. The slaughter was so systematic that it probably amounts to a crime against humanity under international law.

More here.

Michael Hofmann at the Times Literary Supplement:

All his life Brecht had an instinctive originality that may once upon a time have been contrived in the form of a conscious and perverse style, but again maybe wasn’t: I tend to suspect it was always in him. This underwrites numerous remarks and positions of effortless carry and suggestion, whether he is discussing desirable qualities in acting (“Witty. Ceremonious. Ritual.”) or, in another, equally dazzling collocation, noting that “I keep coming back to the fact that the essence of art is simplicity, grandeur and sensitivity, and that of its form coolness”. In thirty years of translating, I have known nothing like the feeling of a joyfully manipulative intelligence I had when working on the wedding scene in The Good Person of Sichuan. Aesthetic assumptions are confounded wholesale by Brecht, whether it is an unhesitating, dumbfounding rejection of depth (“Depth takes you no further. Depth is a dimension of its own, just depth – which is why nothing comes to light in it”), or naturalism (imagining a possible play on a nineteenth- century slave rebellion, Brecht wanted the slaves speaking standard English, no questions asked) or entertainment (following The Threepenny Operaof 1928, “he would never again allow his audience to enjoy themselves in such an unfettered way”) or metaphysics (“For Brecht, militant opposition to metaphysics was an article of faith”). His favourite book – although he said, “Don’t laugh”, was the Bible. He was uninterested in personal matters.

more here.

Andrew Brown at The Guardian:

But there remains the question of whether humanism is in fact a religion, or something more like a religion than it is like any other sort of social movement. This is complicated because of the way in which “religion” has become a toxic brand. But if we go back to the science, I think the answer is clearly that it is. Emile Durkheim, who pretty much founded the scientific study of religion, defined it as “a unified set of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions – beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in a single moral community called a church”.

So, can you have religions without a church? Humanism almost qualifies. It sacralises humanity, claiming for us a significance that is not to be derived from either biology or physics. Organised humanism clearly has unified beliefs and practices. It even has the world’s most lugubrious and sentimental hymn: John Lennon’s Imagine. Like all modern religions it has universalist aspirations, claiming to explain the lives of non-believers better than they can do so themselves. It can inspire heroism and self-sacrifice, but also be used to legitimise intolerance – see Sam Harris and his friends.

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Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

The photographer Garry Winogrand had night vision. With it he saw not only the dark side of his own time in America, he saw the first flickering of our hopelessly polarized and fissuring future—its paranoia, rage, and blind righteousness. Winogrand, who was born in 1928, took his first picture when he was 20 years old and never really put down the camera again. And I mean never. He moved like a meteor from city to city, neighborhood to neighborhood, returning to the same sites, always finding people devoured by desire, resignation, and nonbeing. He called himself “a gypsy.” Winogrand peered through the mist of changing America, saw brittle invalids, rich guys with rheumy eyes, figures acting prescribed parts, people frozen in hatred like the plaster figures in Pompeii. His pictures startle with their rawness. Almost always close in to his subjects, he’s aggressive. By the end of his life, he was shooting so incessantly he wouldn’t even take the time to develop his negatives, much less make prints from them. “I sometimes think I’m a mechanic,” he said. “I just take pictures.” In those years, he nearly stopped editing, or even looking at, his work. Other people did his printing and put his books and shows together. He died, too, with the same headlong drive. Diagnosed with cancer in January 1984, he went immediately to Tijuana to seek an alternative cure and was dead two months later. He was only 56.

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