by Martin Butler

Patriotism is a contested ideal in the culture war which bubbles away in the UK.  It’s worth examining not only as an idea in itself but also with regards to how it is understood and expressed in the present cultural context of the UK. It seems to me that the debate is dominated by two ends of a spectrum, both misguided. At one end there are those who find the word itself too problematic to be worth salvaging. It is, they would argue, despite claims to the contrary, unavoidably linked to its ugly cousin, nationalism, with its xenophobic and jingoist associations.[1]  On the other end of the spectrum there is a strong pushback against this squeamishness, although this side of the argument, which I call politicised patriotism, tends to associate the sentiment with a narrow set of political views and promotes the cartoonish idea of patriotism focused on flags.

But what is patriotism? Whereas nationalism is the aggressive pushing of your own nation as somehow better than others, patriotism, understood in its benign sense at least, is just love of country.[2] But what exactly does this mean? We need to acknowledge here that, as Benedict Anderson points out, nations are to a large extent ‘imagined communities’.[3] They are constructed entities based on a particular narrative handed down through history and culture. Anderson makes the amusing point that “The Barons who imposed Magna Carta on John Plantagenet did not speak English and had no conception of themselves as “Englishmen”, but they were firmly defined as early patriots in classrooms of the United Kingdom 700 years later.”[4] Anderson, I think, would want to contrast an imagined community with communities of individuals who in some way have direct social interaction. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar famously identified the magic number of 150 as the maximum number of meaningful relationships a human being can maintain.[5] Evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer groups that exceeded this number tended to split.  But we use the term ‘community’ in a far broader sense than this, so most communities are indeed ‘imagined’ in Anderson’s sense, and we have no trouble understanding this sense as real community; although we can acknowledge that the word ‘community’ is perhaps often used too loosely.[6] Read more »

by Jackson Arn

They hired me as a go-between. The interview was quick.
Jazz on the bar. Fake palms. Pantomimed
whirls everywhere. The handshake lingered
for a week. By then I’d been promoted and had no
time for protégés. Smoke hid me from
the noise. The billboard stared back.
Cars whispered through their hurry. It was a week.

A week later we buried the final shard. It was
a modest ceremony and we tried to hide our
mirth from dogs. They’d get the wrong idea. One
by one we reentered and I was last of course.
I had almost forgotten what it was to want a shadow.
If you join will you remind me sometimes? Will you
forget also? Will you tap my shoulderbone?

by Joseph Shieber

Imagine, in a solitary clearing, a ballet dancer practicing a piece of choreography. The dancer, who is listening to music on earbuds, is so engrossed in their performance that they don’t notice the world around them. Anyone who happened upon the dancer would hesitate to disturb them, afraid that any interruption would break the transcendently beautiful spell they cast with their graceful and intricate movements.

At that moment, there is a commotion in the lake beyond the clearing from the dancer. A young child has fallen into the water and can’t swim. Nobody else is within earshot, and the child screams for someone to help.

The dancer, caught up in their solitary performance, closed off from the sounds of the outside world by their earbuds, never hears the child. The child drowns.

Let’s suppose that the dancer could easily have reached the lake and rescued the child, if the dancer had been aware of the child’s existence at all. But the dancer thought themselves to be alone in the clearing, far away from anyone else. There can be no question that the dancer bears no responsibility for not having saved the child. The dancer never heard the child’s screams, never saw the child splashing about in the lake.

Of course, were the dancer ever to learn of the child’s death, they might blame themselves for not having done more. Such self-blame, however, is clearly not rational. They knew nothing of the child’s existence!

But now, let’s vary the case a bit. To keep the two cases apart, let’s call the first case “Earbuds”. The second case, like “Earbuds” has a similar setup. Again, a solitary clearing. Again, a ballet dancer at the pinnacle of their art. Again, a drowning child.

Unlike “Earbuds”, however, let’s now imagine that the dancer is accompanied by music played on a boombox. Let’s call this second case “Boombox”. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

In memory of Joe Blades, Broken Jaw Press embodied

by Eric Miller

Copse and cosmos

Do you find that, even while garden-seated—garden-stirring—, you yearn after gardens? Or that, once you have gotten in, you dapple the place with other spots and then, like a mirage, abide in the very measure in which you cease to be? This is more than solitude’s swing, or Fragonard’s for that matter. Then, across the clearing—the clustering scuff, blur and spin of amenities, where even boulders flock, ruffle and (foliaceous) flutter—, planes in view dovish a work over which I bent a shadow, juvenile. I did not know any of the story of the story, I only tried looking. It said “The Book of Thel,” and weighed less than a sandal might. My saltatory eyes spanned phrases and figures, a treehopper, painless impingement, clicks, thorn-shaped, as it springs. That kind (Family Membracidae) is all there once it gets there but most it leaves out, with integrity jumping to inconclusions. Nature does make leaps. I mean, in no time. The author? William Blake, whom plenty consider out of date because he was born some while since which is reckoned a fatal shortcoming in many respects and whom others still enjoy and these latter extenuate their suspect pleasure as resourcefully as they can.

I don’t care what the opinion is, opinion is blather, a sort of breeze fitfully brisk and smoggy, I don’t care except about how the book lives in me not otherwise than I live, sometimes living in gardens for a time. In this sense I am Blake’s ideal reader because I am not reading Blake, he doesn’t matter, here are certain verses and truths of ultimately unknown make and these are like dreams in part recalled. In Van Dusen Gardens, as in all gardens, there are intimate places, more intimate than I am to myself, experiences more than memories I never had that I can occupy and vacate like a nest box, and in those places today I see Thel passing, her high-waisted dress. Read more »

Reflection of mountain in a school building in Brixen, South Tyrol. Photo taken a couple of days ago.

by Alexander C. Kafka

“My first experience home-brewing was before it was legal,” says Jim Koch, cofounder and chairman of Boston Beer Company, maker of Sam Adams. “I did it with my dad. He brought home some yeast … then he brought home some hops, and we made a beer. And I thought it was so cool when the yeast brought the beer to life, and it started to bubble and you got that foam on the top of it, and it had that wonderful bready, ester-y smell, and I was in love.”

Koch kicks off producer and director Christo Brock’s crisp, fizzy new documentary, Brewmance, as one of the elders in the high church of American independent brewing. They provide historical context for the current, competitive scene of some 7,000 craft breweries. The grandfather of the group is Fritz Maytag, who, in the mid-1960s, turned a closing San Francisco brewery into today’s Anchor Brewing, an exotic  alternative to the bland corporate six-packs. Also chiming in are Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head, and Charlie Papazian, the pied piper of the group, who founded the Great American Beer Festival, an annual three-day 60,000-attendee extravaganza.   

The festival started four decades ago with 20 breweries and 40 beers, Papazian explains. Two of the 2,300 microbreweries represented at a recent festival are startups in Brock’s hometown of Long Beach, Calif., and the bulk of his film explores the inspiration behind the grueling births of those businesses. Read more »

Illinois man arrested for spray-painting
swastikas on gravestones  —NY Daily News, 5/31/18

Epidermis

….. skinhead:
a thing shrink-wrapped in pink tissue,
shorthand for fear

….. epidermis of a skinhead:
a nonsensitive layer of skin
covering the true skin, or corium;
or the outermost living layer of an animal,
a layer so thin it flakes like filo 
when touched even lightly
by love or veracity

….. corium:
true skin the sheathing of ordinary saints,
a tougher, deeper covering than that
enveloping the shrunken skulls of
those who graffiti grave stones 
with swastikas; —typically absent
in skinheads

Jim Culleny
5/31/18

by R. Passov

A little more than five years ago, in a nice home in Sugarland Texas not far from where he once worked, Jack Garman gave me several hours of his day. I had reached out from New York, saying that I was a random retiree interested in learning about his career. Something in the way I phrased my introduction made him want to give me some time. As I got to know Jack, I came to understand that he knew what he wanted to say was special, that he liked an audience and had gladly told his story time and time again.

Five years from a stem cell transplant which provided a hopeful path in his fight against blood cancer, he had reserves of energy. I recorded our conversation. As much as possible, I’ll let Jack speak in his own words.

***

When I joined NASA, in April of 1966, since my birthday was in May, I could still claim I was 21. My wife, Sue, a Rockwell brat, moved to Houston in 1964. Since she wanted work but didn’t have a college degree, NASA hired her to be a Math Aid.

Sue helped NASA engineers see what they were doing. Those were the days before CRT screens (cathode ray tubes) were attached to computers. If output from a computer belonged on a graph, a plotter was engaged. Plotting was done by hand onto glass surfaces by women who knew how to translate output from a computer onto a graph, and who also knew how to get coffee for the engineers.

My father was a banker and had moved the family to Lebanon, Jordan in the 1960’s as then Lebanon was the West of the Middle East. Since there was no family left in Texas, Sue and I just went downtown and got married. Read more »

Sughra Raza. It’s Still Winter After All. March 2021.

Digital photograph.

by Michael Liss

Let’s talk about voter suppression. Not about whether it’s good or bad or legal or moral (you can get more than enough of that virtually 24/7), but about what practical implications it might have.

I have looked at the 35 Presidential Elections from 1880 to 2020 to see how tight they were, and where modern forms of voter suppression might have impacted past results.

I made a few assumptions. The first was to limit it to just suppression, and not include potential crossover votes. To make that a bit clearer, if you have an election that ends up 50-50, I propose to simply eliminate votes from one side, not add to the other. I set the bar at two suppressed votes per hundred (I’m going to call that a “Suppression Penalty”), which I think is conservative, given the extent of some of the new laws being passed. Applying that 2% Suppression Penalty, would it have changed the results of some of the closest and most controversial elections of the past?

Obviously, this is a crude method. Some states engage in suppression, others do not, and different forms of suppression will have disparate impacts. But I thought the exercise was worth it, as ever-increasing sophistication in targeting, along with a sense of anything goes, will encourage more use of the tactic. Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

Through the academic grapevine, it came; a story of an eminent sociologist who argued that he wouldn’t want to work with graduate students who he couldn’t fuck. The infamous statement was allegedly said in a faculty meeting in the 1990s at a progressive urban university where they were considering an official ban on faculty-graduate student sexual relationships. Most, if not all, of the female faculty at the meeting were appalled and offended. They accused the professor, to varying degrees, of being misogynistic, prurient, boorish, patriarchal, naïve, profane, immature, and, most stinging of all, willfully blind to inequities of power and the abuses that surely follow. He laughed good-naturedly, as was his wont in the face of intellectual disagreement, and tried to explain the reasoning behind his admittedly provocative statement.

He believed that adult women (and men) have sexual agency and should be free to pursue whatever consensual sexual relationships they desire; to argue for its regulation in the service of comfort and/or protection is to infantilize both women and men and repress, from a Reichian perspective, the “unified erotic impulse” of sexual desire, tenderness, and empathy.[1] Specific to women, he argued that feminist-driven policies that inadvertently deny, diminish, and/or discipline women’s sexual agency and freedom do not serve women’s liberation from male supremacist ideology, but provides the “self-perpetuating basis of a sadomasochistic psychology that is in turn crucial to the maintenance of an authoritarian, hierarchical social order.”[2] Policies that discipline the unified erotic impulse would impose a form of repressive libidinal desublimation in the name of liberation.[3] Regulating and disciplining sexual desire denies a women’s right to choose who, where, and when to fuck; furthermore, if equality is a precondition of sexual agency, then any erotic attention is “always already” problematic. Power between two (or more) intimates is never equal. He emphasized that he was not reasserting a notion of sexual freedom that ignores or denies the structural reality of male supremacy and the unfair burden it places on women who demand and deserve sexual freedom without apology. His argument, in other words, was not driven by self-interest, i.e., he didn’t actually want to have sex with any of his graduate students. He was fully aware of how “sexual morality, [even when it arises from the left] in a patriarchal culture becomes a primary instrument of social control.”[4] Nevertheless, he believed that policies that ban sexual relationships between graduate students and professors, in the final analysis, place too much emphasis on preventing sexual coercion and “undercut feminist opposition to the right.”[5] Equally concerned about the pedagogical implications of the proposed ban, the professor agued that it contradicted the progressive and critical modalities of education that they all supported and practiced. I am told the professor went on to link the imperative of sexual freedom to the praxis of radical social change. I do not know how the meeting ended, but I never forgot the story. Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

^
Royalty
Aristocracy
Church Officials
The Merchant Class
Skilled Crafts Workers
The Goddamned Peasants
The Unbelieving Under Class
Criminals to Be Caged & Tortured
Those Whom We Will Publicly Execute

^
WASPS
White Catholics
White-Skinned Jews
Model Minority Asians
White-Skinned, Anglo-Latinx
American Indians as they are Imagined
Dark-Skinned Hispanic Latinos and Latinas
American Indians in Real Life, Not Your Fantasies
African or Indigenous Americans, Depending Where You Are

^
Hahvahd
Harvard and Yale
Princeton, Cornell, Columbia
The Other three Ivy League Schools
Other Elite Private Colleges/Universities
A Small Number of Elite Public Universities
United States’ Elite Military Academy Universities
Flagship Public Research Universities in Most U.S. States
Second Class Public Research Universities across the United States
Former Teacher’s Colleges and Other Underfunded Public Universities
Real Colleges You Have not Heard of and Think, Huh, Is That a Real College?

^
University
4-Year Colleges
Community Colleges
Accredited Online Colleges
Sham, For-Profit Online Colleges
Secondary Schools (aka High Schools)
Middle Schools (aka Junior High Schools)
Primary Schools (aka Elementary or Grade schools)
Daycare Single Mom Sends Child to While Studying for GED

^
Profs
Associate Profs
Untenured Assistant Profs
1-Year Visiting Assistant Professors
Lecturers on Renewable 1-Year Contract
Long Term Adjuncts Who Keep Showing Up
Grad Students with New Syllabi and Fragile Dreams
Come-and-Go Adjuncts Juggling 6 Classes at three Schools
Politician Who Teaches PoliSci Class & Votes to Slash Ed Funding

^
The PhDs
The Medical Degrees
Law/Engineering Degrees
Other Hip Professional Degrees
Various Master of Sciences Degrees
Various Master of Art/Philosophy Degrees
Bachelor of Science Four Year College Degrees
Bachelor of Arts Four Year Degrees: Social Sciences
Bachelor’s of Arts Four Year Degrees in the Humanities
Associate of Arts Degree from a 2 year Community College
M.A., B.A., or A.A. Degrees from an Accredited Online Colleges
Four Year High School Degrees from Expensive Private High Schools
Four Year High School Degrees from Very Selective Public High Schools
Four Year High School Degrees from Open Admissions Public High Schools
General Equivalency Diplomas Earned Taking an Exam Instead of enduring HS

^
3QD Readers
Elite Mag Readers
NYT/WaPo/WSJ Readers
Tabloid Newspaper Readers
People Magazine and SI Readers
Facebook and Twitter Doom Scrollers
Young Adult Fantasy/Sci Fi Book Readers
Small Children Reading Cute Children’s Books
Readers of Graffiti on Doors of Bar Bathroom Stalls

^
Activists
Honest Critics
The Numb Underclass
The Blind Underclass Strivers
Paranoid, Neurotic Middle Classes
Justifiers, Rationalizers, & Excuse Makers
People Who Embrace, Profit from these Pyramids
Precious Children of Embracers & Profiteers of Pyramids
Parents, Furiously Indignant I Dared Slight their Precious Children
Me, Despite My Money & Credentials, Skulking Down Here Like I Belong

^
I
Us
You
Them
All of ‘Em
Eight Billion
Or Thereabouts
And Still Counting
The World’s Many Souls
Drifting and Stumbling About
Each 1 a Human Stone Slotted into
Pyramids of Social, Cultural, Economic
Ranking, Status, Power, Privileges, Opportunity
Perhaps Knowing, or Not, That They Are Very likely
Stuck in Those Slots, More or Less, for All of Their Days
Wallowing in Resentment or Finding a Way to Look Past It
Because At Least They Can Write their Name in Capital Letters

akimreinhardt’s
website is the
publicprof
essor.
com
.

by Rafaël Newman

By a quirk of the calendars, Passover, the annual commemoration of the flight from bondage, is precisely coterminous this year with Academic Travel. This latter, a twice-yearly feature of the university in Switzerland at which I am guest teaching this semester, is that institution’s “signature program”: a week-and-a-half course, typically offered in a location outside Switzerland, focusing on a topic arising from that site. A chance for students to read a city, as it were, like a text.

This year, for obvious reasons, Academic Travel has been canceled – or rather, radically curtailed, with students in the university’s home city of Lugano, in the canton of Ticino, required to produce negative virus tests before traveling merely to other parts of Switzerland, all reachable by train and bus, instead of, as in years past, flying to more appealingly distant locations, such as Poland, Greece, Turkey, and points further afield. For now even relatively nearby destinations, such as Italy or France, have been ruled out by the authorities, shrinking the offerings for the spring semester’s Academic Travel to the familiar hotspots of the Swiss grand tour – Lucerne, Zermatt, Geneva – which are then to serve as makeshift staging grounds for courses on topics in environmental science, history, economics, and the like.

And thus the Jewish festival of Passover, a holiday explicitly celebrating escape from plague, freedom of movement, and the crossing of borders, falls during a period in which students, under threat of contagion, are subject to personal restriction, and are confined within the borders of their current national location.

The convergence of a traditional commemoration of ancient release from bondage with a frustrated travel project in the present is especially poignant for me, perhaps yet more so for my students, since the course I am teaching them in regular session, on “Jewish Writing in German”, involves among other things the reading of three texts that treat themes of migration from a variety of perspectives, and in each of which a Passover scene figures centrally. Read more »

by Brooks Riley