Sughra Raza. Untitled. Cambridge, 1999-2000.

Acrylic on canvas.

by Claire Chambers

Having begun Hindi and eventually reaching an intermediate level, I sailed into the vast ocean of the Urdu language. There, a novice again, I felt lost amid roiling currents. Yet I kept my compass pointed towards receptivity, hoping the winds of curiosity would steer me to the shores of understanding. I’m not there yet, so join me in my voyage.

As Liz Chatterjee wryly notes, ‘It is obligatory to point out that Urdu is a cognate of “horde” and its name came from the Muslim occupiers’ ordu, camp’. This is because the language developed among the armies of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire, whose soldiers used a mixture of Indian languages and Persian as a lingua franca. Over time, this melange of languages came to be known as Urdu, and the Perso-Arabic script was used to write it.

Leaping forward a century or two, the Partition of 1947 was a traumatic event that left many Urdu-speaking people feeling alienated and excluded from the new Indian society. Partition has caused a shift in the perception of Urdu, which has been reduced to a language spoken primarily by the elderly and by Muslim minorities in India. After Partition, Urdu became the national language of Pakistan, while Hindi was India’s official language (soon joined by English). Despite this, Urdu continued to be spoken by millions of people in India, and it is still one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. In the decades following Partition, however, the use of Urdu in India declined due to a variety of political, social, and economic factors. Many people who spoke Urdu as their first language began to switch to Hindi, and the use of Urdu in education, films, and government business also languished. Today, Urdu remains an important language in India, but it is not as widely spoken as it once was. Read more »

by Eric Bies

On the night of July 13, 1977, the old god Zeus roused from his slumber with a scratchy throat. Reaching drowsily for the glass by his bedside, his arm knocked a handful of thunderbolts from the nightstand. Swift and white, they rattled across the floor to the mountain’s, his home’s, precipitous edge: off they rolled and dropped to plummet through the dark. That night, great projectiles of angular light splashed against and extinguished New York City’s billion fluorescent eyes.

A week later, John Gardner turned 44—a fortuitous number, for the American novelist and medievalist was on a roll. That year alone he was set to see the publication of two children’s books, a collection of short stories, a work of criticism, and a biography. Six years had passed since the release of a short novel, Grendel, his ingenious Frankenstein-ing of the Beowulf myth that is read in American high schools to this day. Eleven years later, at the age of 49, Fate would see fit to fling him from his motorcycle and strike him dead. But first, in 1977, he had to publish his Life and Times of Chaucer. Owing to novelistic tendencies, the work has probably received more admiration from laymen than academics (rather redemptive as far as literary legacies go, actually). It is one of those books, unhampered by its erudition, that is a joy to read all the way through to the bitter end, and its final paragraph, as Steve Donoghue has pointed out, remains one of the strangest, strongest, and most memorable deathbed scenes in our literature:

When he finished he handed the quill to Lewis. He could see the boy’s features clearly now, could see everything clearly, his “whole soul in his eyes”—another line out of some old poem, he thought sadly, and then, ironically, more sadly yet, “Farewell my bok and my devocioun!” Then in panic he realized, but only for an instant, that he was dead, falling violently toward Christ.

The “bok” to which Chaucer says his goodbye is, of course, The Canterbury Tales. Had he had the time, Chaucer would have gladly doubled the length of his book. Who knows what he must have truly felt to take leave of his Knight, his Miller, his Pardoner, his Monk? Readers of this magnificent story cycle will readily sympathize. For even a writer as self-assured as Chaucer could not have anticipated how well and how dearly his countrymen would come to know his characters. The fact that the book remained unfinished at the time of his death did practically nothing to impede its momentous rise. Thankfully, just sixteen years after Chaucer fell violently toward Christ, England got its Gutenberg. When William Caxton set up press in Westminster, the first pages he printed were wet with the ink of Chaucer’s quill. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Tim Sommers

“Cleave,” “buckle,” and “dust” are contranyms. They are their own opposites. To dust means to remove, or sprinkle, with dust. To buckle means to collapse or secure. To cleave means both to divide and to stick to tenaciously.

In that spirit, an astro-turf Federalist Society group, opposing affirmative action and pro-active diversity in college admissions, calls itself “Students for Fair Admissions.” The Supreme Court is on the brink of using two upcoming cases brought by Students for Fair Admissions – SFA v Harvard and SFA v the University of North Carolina – to end the last vestiges of any attempts to address discrimination in the college admissions process.

One of the most widely-quoted slogans in Supreme Court history – right up there with ‘You shouldn’t shout fire in a crowded theatre’ and ‘I can’t define obscenity, but I know it when I see it’ – is “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

This approach to equal protection and fair equality of opportunity suggests that the way to address racial discrimination is to not see race, to be, metaphorically at least, color-blind. This is called the “categorization” approach to jurisprudence about race and it echoes the ‘Don’t say gay’ law in DeSantis’ Florida. It’s the ‘Don’t say race’ approach. (Also, the ‘Don’t say sex,’ but here I’ll stick with race, though I would be happy to discuss sex and other protected categories in comments.) Can we solve racism by being blind to race? Well, can we end discrimination against people with mobility challenges by not seeing wheelchairs? Read more »

Part of the train station in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Paul Braterman

There are two possible attitudes towards Scripture. One is to regard it as the direct and infallible word of God. This leads to certain problems. The other one, equally compatible with devotion, is to regard it as the recorded writings of men (it almost always is men), however inspired, writing at a specific time and place and constrained by the knowledge and concerns of that time. This invites deeper study of what was at stake for the writers, the unravelling of different narrative strands and voices, and discussion of whatever message the Scriptures may have for our own times. I expect that most readers here will adopt the second approach, while those who adopt the first are not to be dissuaded by mere rational argument, so why am I even discussing it?

Because we need to expose the hypocrisy of those powerful false prophets who, while claiming to be guided exclusively by Scripture, systematically misapply, distort, and even completely misquote the sacred text. That exactly is what Answers in Genesis, like other creationist organisations, does in its online writings, and in its Creation Museum and Ark Encounter.

I have come across four specific areas that concern me (no doubt there are many others):

• Climate change
• Abortion
• Entry into the Ark, and subsequent dispersal
• Biblical marriage

I have written here before about the lengths to which all the major creationists organisations will go, acting in concert, to downplay the significance of human-caused global warming. Here I want to draw attention to just one of their regular arguments, most recently presented as a refutation of Greta Thunberg’s compilation The Climate Book. Read more »

by Ethan Seavey

The extant Kin of the Colonizer are paralyzed but that doesn’t stop them from running their mouths. They yap and yell and are filled with angst and guilt. Their rage fuels something, but that rage is only easy to find when they are pinned up against that Last True American Colonialist. Otherwise they surround themselves with each other and in there it is hard to be mad.

They hop in a rental car and they cross fields of naked-armed trees talking about that mythical land that once existed, before this one had paved it over. How beautiful New York state must have once been, before there were cameras to capture it. They cross the border into Canada and talk borders, how wide and unmanageable, how purposefully desolate, how torturous to cross without a white face. Their white lips talk of white powers and their pink tongues get lost and meander in circles. They ask if Canada is any “better” than the US and they see parallels but such vast differences that the question asked in the first place is deemed irrelevant.

At Niagara Falls they are like everyone else. They watch the falls in mostly silence. They take pictures and selfies. They walk up the cement pathway slowly and turn around every few steps. Again they talk about how it used to be. A sacred site for hundreds of years before white settlers. Then, a spiritual experience for earlier white settlers. They talk about how it is now: a strip of skyscraping hotels towering high over the wonder, dwarfing its excellence in order to give a white man in a business suit a better view. They notice the cemented pathways and the bridges spanning and the boats crossing and the people crowding and the spirit fading or already gone. They find the road lined with ferris wheels and go-carts and haunted houses and kitschy white nostalgia. Read more »

“But in 2500 B.C. Harappa,
who cast in bronze a servant girl?
No one keeps records
of soldiers and slaves.”
… —from At the Museum, by Agha Shahid Ali

In Jerusalem

I’ve learned a new word:
asafoetida, or asafetida,
which is a gum ground from
Near Eastern plants of the genus Ferula
which smells fetid

…. and was used once as an antispasmodic,
two qualities which seem apropos
as news grinds down days from Gaza
to Homs to Aleppo

pulverizing both Us andThem
between a wall that wails
and a dome-sheltered rock
in Jerusalem which, by god,
is ever spastic and nothing
seems regretted

…. this new word came in a poem
of an Indian poet
who ran his pen across a page
to tell the fetid bitterness
found in bond of slave to lord,
bitterness cast in bronze in which,
by sculptor’s art, blood and pain
were vetted

Jim Culleny, ©5/23/18
____________________________
*The earliest mention of asafoetida in the historical record dates from the eighth century BC, when the plant was listed in an inventory of the gardens of Babylonian King Marduk-apla-iddina II. Not long after that, in Nineveh (near modern Mosul, Iraq), asafoetida was included in a catalogue of medicinal plants in the library of King Ashurbanipal.

Sughra Raza. Just a Street Corner. Boston, 2022.

Digital photograph.

by Varun Gauri

At the University of Chicago, I majored in an interdisciplinary concentration most easily characterized as Great Books. I studied with an Indian poet, a Japanese postmodern literary critic, and an historian who admired Michel Foucault, but my most influential professors were men influenced by Leo Strauss, including Allan Bloom, Joseph Cropsey, Leon Kass, and Nathan Tarcov, a smart and stirring group of teachers. They were also politically conservative, though I was too politically naive, and too flattered by their approval, to notice. Junior year, invited to speak about my selected Great Books at a humanities conference, I talked about the changing valence of cleverness in Homer, Aristotle, and Descartes. The conference took place in the context of the canon wars, and when during Q&A people asked me if there were women or non-European authors on my list, I offhandedly threw out a few names. A mentor would later compliment my disarming ingenuousness.

Some of the professors regretted their Eurocentrism but felt helpless to correct it, given their linguistic limitations. Others wore it proudly. Most notoriously, Saul Bellow supposedly said, “When the Zulus produce a Tolstoy, we will read him,” a position that Charles Taylor would take down in “The Politics of Recognition” (though, sadly, after I graduated). Even in the 1980s, though, many of us could tell there was something odd about the idea of a literary or philosophical canon in a multicultural society and long globalized world of letters. For what it was worth (and it wasn’t much, since canon expansion grows out of the same impulse as canon construction, tokenism in response to fetishism, still the scorekeeping), I made a point to include Hannah Arendt and The Mahabharata on my lists.

Looking back, I’m stunned not so much by the program’s male Eurocentrism, which was advertised (caveat emptor), but its insularity. Why did no one tell me about Becker’s Denial of Death, whose reinterpretation of psychoanalysis would have informed my essay on heroism? I read Nietzsche’s takedown of Christian morality but had no idea that Dewey had developed a more American and optimistic response to the death of God. I wish I’d known about Charles Taylor’s work on moral horizons, Margaret Atwood’s world-building, Tagore’s cosmopolitanism. The Great Conversation, it turns out, is much wider than I knew. It is, in fact, still going on. I might even have been a participant, in my own way, not just an eavesdropper.  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by David J. Lobina

In this misguided series of posts on large language models (LLMs) and cognitive science, I have tried to temper some of the wildest discussions that have steadily appeared about language models since the release of ChatGPT. I have done so by emphasising what LLMs are and do, and by suggesting that much of the reaction one sees in the popular press, but also in some of the scientific literature, has much to do with the projection of mental states and knowledge to what are effectively just computer programs; or to apply Daniel Dennett’s intentional stance to the general situation: when faced with written text that appears to be human-like, or even produced by humans, and thus possibly expressing some actual thoughts, we seem to approach the computer programs that output such prima facie cogent texts as if they were rational agents, even though, well, there is really nothing there!

Naturally enough, many of the pieces that keep coming out about LLMs remain, quite frankly, hysterical, if not delirious. When one reads about how a journalist from the New York Times freaked out when interacting with a LLM because the computer program behaved in the juvenile and conspiratorial manner that the model no doubt “learned” from some of the data it was fed during training, one really doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry (one is tempted to tell these people to get a grip; or as Luciano Leggio was once told…).[i]

More importantly, when people insist that LLMs have made passing the Turing Test boring and have met every challenge from cognitive science, and even that the models show that Artificial General Intelligence is already here (whatever that is; come back next month for my take), one must at least raise one eyebrow. Here’s a recent, fun interaction with ChatGPT, inspired by one Steven Pinker (DJ stands for you-know-who):

So, no, LLMs definitely don’t exhibit general intelligence, and they haven’t passed the Turing Test, at least if by the latter we mean partaking in a conversation as a normal person would, with all their cognitive quirks and what not. Read more »

A view of the river Eisack flowing through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.