by Derek Neal

If Joan Didion were alive today, she might write an essay about Prince Harry and include it in an updated version of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. She might write a passage like the one she wrote about Howard Hughes:

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

Didion’s comment about finding a restaurant open for a sandwich comes from a remark she’d heard as an explanation for Hughes buying up real estate in Las Vegas. It may seem a bit much to procure a whole town as a way of ensuring you can get a bite to eat at 3 pm in the afternoon, or 3 am in the morning, but have you ever been to Europe? My first experience of Europe was a year abroad studying in Nice, France. One day, I planned to get together with an American friend for lunch. We figured we’d meet up in the old city center, walk around a bit, then pick a place that looked good. As it happened, we were both running a little late, then we strolled around a bit too long, and finally we walked into a restaurant at about, well, 3 pm. Ever the innocents abroad, we had yet to realize our fatal error. The restaurant was deserted, and we had difficulty finding someone who worked there. Eventually, we did. After we bumbled along in our best French, asking if we could eat there and feeling confused as to why we had to ask, the proprietor cast his cold gaze upon us and proclaimed that, in France, restaurants close between lunch and dinner time. The kitchen, he said, is closed. We were stunned. Were the social conventions truly so strong that they couldn’t be amended for us, two Americans, who just wanted something to eat and secretly felt that we deserved something to eat, as well? Were we really going to be turned away? We had money, after all. Read more »

Conversation

. . .—on a painting by Jack Braudis

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Boat:
. . .Your slope is russet and graceful; seems soft.

Land:
. . .It is. I see it echoes the grace of your gunnels, stem to stern.

Boat:. . .
. . .We approach your still grace, having been upon water the day.

Land:. . .. . .
. . .Who is that with you, the who with articulating sticks?

Boat:
. . .He rows, he brings me to you to lie in your shade.
. . .He imagines the sky would be good to gaze into
. . .with you beneath his back; our painter has
. . .rendered us true and sure & his clouds
. . .follow the breath of wind as they must

Land:
. . .But I’m confused, what painter?
. . .I am real and true and so is sky.

Boat:
. . .Yes, and so is he and so am I.

Jim Culleny, 11/16/22
Painting by Jack Braudis

Ada Beams. Landscape Somewhere in France, 2022.

Digital photograph.

With permission from the artist.

by Rafaël Newman

It’s been 90 years since Hitler was appointed German Chancellor, on January 30, 1933, despite his party, the NSDAP, having failed to achieve a majority in the elections to the Reichstag held the previous year; so naturally I’ve been thinking about Max Liebermann.

Born decades before the establishment of the German Empire, or Second Reich, in 1871, the painter Max Liebermann (July 20, 1847—February 8, 1935) was to die just as the Third Reich was rising to its hideous feet. Liebermann was a pillar of the German art world—or rather, he had become one by 1933, when he resigned from the Prussian Academy of Arts, the body he had served as president, but which had now fallen into line with the Nazis and had ceased exhibiting works by Jewish artists.

Max Liebermann was himself Jewish, but by the time of his death at the age of 87 he had long been accepted in the wider German bourgeois society into which he had been born, and which had persisted in its Prussian, Wilhelmine, and Weimar variations. After a rocky start to his career with scandalously “ugly” scenes of working-class life and “blasphemous” depictions of religious motifs, Liebermann would go on to play a leading role in the Berlin Secession, the fin-de-siècle movement opposed to the strictures of academic painting, which championed Impressionism and Realism and counted among its members such notable artists as Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, and Otto Modersohn. Liebermann resisted the Secession’s eventual support for Expressionism, however, which moved him towards the conservative camp and prepared his entry into the Academy, the establishment’s artistic watchdog, and the mainstream of German culture. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

I’m scared of birds. They’re dinosaurs, you know. They descend from the Jurassic when, just like in Jesus Loves Me, ‘they were big and we were small.’ Did you see those huge dinosaur tracks they found in Texas last summer? You were a scurrying little proto-mammal, foraging and minding your own business in the underbrush when that thing came along and blotted out the sun.

Birds are not cute little hopping around pixies, as likely shitting on your hand as sitting on it. Birds don’t have the presence of mind to fly off the hand that feeds it before despoiling it. Hummingbirds don’t even make sense in theory.

After the noise and furor that humans send up, birds are this world’s most insistent, annoying noisemakers, operating in the frequencies between bad manners and prison. The vocal rancor and pith of seagulls (find and bring to me a seagull that calms you) and the cage of two, three, four notes the rest of the bloody lot are doomed to stand inside and repeat all morning before it’s time to wake up, between those is where madness lies.

Privileged humans love birds. Birds’ appeal, they say, stacks right up alongside the majesty of the lion and the cheetah on safari. After you and your safari guide have rooted around for your fill of those mud trenches hippos make, say, and avoided the tse tse fly outbreak in day long pursuit of the famous muttering toad of this unique valley, somehow apparently, accidentally spying a dwarf cassowary in the sawgrass makes the day perfection. Read more »

Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, at night.

by Bill Benzon

“I’m trying to treat her as an equal.”
– Moe, talking about Sutan

Of philosophy and food

Moe, the name has two syllables, is Moto’s wife and Sutan’s mother. Though it may also be a play on “a Japanese word that refers to feelings of strong affection mainly towards characters in anime, manga, video games, and other media [and] has also gained usage to refer to feelings of affection towards any subject.”

“Tan” is an honorific, roughly meaning small, and is used with babies, though I would say that Sutan is more a toddler at this point than a baby – at least in the usage common in my own (American) culture. She was a baby of 10 months when Moe started making Kimono Mom videos.

Moto, then, is Moe’s husband and Sutan’s father. When Moe started making her Kimono Mom videos Moto worked in the restaurant and hospitality business. But now he is business manager and partner in Moe’s YouTube business, which is centered on Japanese home cooking. And on Sutan.

Kimono Mom, though, is a cooking show in the way that Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown was a food and cooking show. Yes, Bourdain traveled all over the world and showed us the food of many different cultures. But he used food as a vehicle for revealing and reveling in human diversity, for talking philosophy in plain language, for fun. Think of Kimono Mom as a philosopher with Sutan as her Socrates. She uses the cooking video the way Plato used the dialog form. It’s a vehicle.

Let’s walk through the video at the head of this article. (When watching the video be sure to click the “cc” button at the lower right. That will give you English language captions for people’s speech. You can set the language with this settings menu, the small “gear” to the right of cc.)

Moe, Sutan, Moto.

Sutan, Moto, Moe.

Moto, Moe, Sutan.

Read more »

by Tim Sommers

What’s the greatest prediction of all time?

By “greatest,” I mean something like how big a deal the thing predicted is multiplied by how accurate the prediction was.  I would love to hear other proposals in the comments, but mine is Andy Warhol’s prediction that, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”

It was made somewhere around 1968. Not only were there no social media and no internet at the time, but computers were barely even a thing. Could you have looked around at celebrity culture in 1968 and predicted Instagram and Twitter and influencers?

Yes, I know. Many doubt that Warhol said this. Wikipedia, for example, baldly asserts that this quote is “misattributed” to Warhol, while the Smithsonian Magazine more judiciously reports that he “probably never said” that. But I don’t think the evidence that they cite really confirms their skepticism. The Smithsonian Magazine, for example, reports that art critic Blake Gopnik (never even mentioned as one of the suspects in the Wikipedia article) claimed credit for the quote, and then they take it as confirmation of Gopnik’s story that later on Gopnik also said that he (Gopnik) heard Warhol say that he (Warhol) never said that. It’s like Wittgenstein’s example of someone trying to confirm what’s in the newspaper by buying a second copy of the same newspaper. Yoko Ono, John Lennon, and David Bowie all credit the quote to Warhol. That’s good enough for me.

On the other hand, maybe the fact that it’s hard to figure out to whom to attribute the quote, works better for our subject. Which is this. ‘If the medium is the message,’ as media theorist Marshall Mcluhan said, ‘what is the message of the internet as a medium?’ (Mcluhan, despite being an academic, became so widely recognize, largely for that line, that he did a cameo as himself in Annie Hall.)

My philosophy training forces me to begin by saying that I think Mcluhan should have said, ‘The medium of any particular media technology is itself also itself a kind of message in addition to the particular messages merely conveyed by that medium…” (Or something like that.)

Anyway, what is the message of the internet as a medium? The techno Utopian message of the internet, according to early enthusiasts, is that, “Information wants to be free.” Unfortunately, that’s wrong. The real message of the internet is, “All information is equal.” Read more »

Sughra Raza. Early Winter Shapes, January 2022.

Digital photograph.

by Dwight Furrow

If we are to believe the most prominent of the writers we now lump under the category of “existentialism,” human suffering in the modern world is rooted in nihilism. But I wonder whether this is the best lens through which to view human suffering.

According to existentialism, as the role of God in modern life receded to be replaced by a secular, scientifically-informed view of reality, the resulting loss of a transcendent moral framework has left us bereft of moral guidance leading to anxiety and anguish. The smallness of human concerns in a vast, uncaring universe engenders a sense that life is inherently meaningless and absurd. There seems to be no ultimate purpose in life. Thus, our individual intentions are without foundation.

As Camus wrote:

The absurd is born in this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. (From the Myth of Sisyphus)

And so, for Camus, human suffering is like the toils of Sisyphus condemned to endlessly roll the boulder up the mountain only to have it roll down again—life is a series of meaningless tasks and then you die.

Sartre, for his part, argued that the demise of a theistic world view means we must now confront the incontrovertible fact of human freedom—no state of affairs can cause us to act in one way rather than another. Furthermore, there are no values that have a claim on us prior to our choosing them. Instead, at each moment, we make a choice about the significance of facts and our relation to them. If life is to be meaningful, we must invent that meaning for ourselves. We are thus “condemned” to be free and must take full responsibility for our actions and the meaning we attribute to them. Read more »

by Eric Bies

Jules Verne sent Lidenbrock and Axel over—to crawl down the throat of a dormant volcano.

W. H. Auden visited between wars and found the place wanting for souvenirs. “Of course,” he wrote, “one can always bring home little bits of lava for one’s friends—I saw the Manchester school-teachers doing this at the Great Geysir—but I am afraid I have the wrong sort of friends.”

William Morris went twice: once in 1871, again in 1873. To what purpose he did, his daughter, May, elucidates in her introduction to the Journals he kept during those journeys:

not to shoot their moors and fish their rivers but to make pilgrimage to the homes of Gunnar and Njal, to muse on the Hill of Laws, to thread his way round the historic steads on the Western firths, to penetrate the desert heaths where their outlaws had lived…. The whole land teems with the story of the past—mostly unmarked by sign or stone but written in men’s minds and hearts.

In the summer of 1627, a decade after the death of Shakespeare, a trio of ships appeared off the southern coast of Vestmannaeyjar. The people of the island—the Einars, Helgis, Gudrids, and Sigrúns—assisted by nearly eighteen hours of sunlight, kept their eyes fixed on the horizon for close to an entire day, during which they convened and debated; they watched and waited, weighing their options. In the end, they threw up a meager bulwark of stone and went to bed.

The following day, just when it seemed they could stand the menacing presence no longer, the ships dispatched a fleet of boats: then the boats disgorged a mass of men ashore—pirates—who descended on the town with spears drawn. Those who were quick on their feet managed to flee over hills and down through the caves that dotted the erupted landscape. The rest were captured or killed. Among the former was a man in his sixties, the Reverend Olafur Egilsson, who was taken together with his wife and children. Read more »

by Brooks Riley