[This is the eighteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

Early in the story of The Walking Dead — the enormously popular, post-apocalyptic, television series — sharpshooting everyman, Rick Grimes, finds himself cast as leader to a group of beleaguered survivors, who must navigate the malignant chaos of a world suddenly overtaken by zombies. Every comfort, convenience, and civic structure of modern American life has collapsed. The threat of death lurks beyond every hillock or behind any tree. Ordinary people are left to fend for themselves against overwhelming forces, with nothing but guns (and the odd pickaxe or crossbow) for aid. And sentimental attachments to other people only leave individuals more vulnerable to attack. In this world that has slipped the grip of civilization, Grimes works to keep a strain of justice and mercy aloft within his desperate band.

But torn away from the cogency of his ordinary, 21st-century life, and cast into unrelenting danger and uncertainty, even Grimes’s kinder impulses are slowly ground away by his unabating experiences of horror and loss. His moral compass spins erratically. By the fifth season of The Walking Dead, the line separating Grimes from the threats he’s fought for years to hold at bay has worn distressingly thin. In fact, much before this, the show’s storylines and characters have already notably shifted their attention from the horrors of the zombies to the horrors of relying upon one’s fellow dislocated human beings for refuge and assistance in an ongoing crisis. Confronting the atrocities committed by the living profoundly changes Grimes and every member of his crew, as they also become more adept killers. Yet, uncannily, the social world they inhabit together doesn’t change much at all.¹ Read more »

War & Weekends

I’m writing from a list of prompts
in an exercise for loosening the tight grip
of uncertainty of mind in an effort
to knock the chocks from under its
big wheels to let the thing roll

yesterday’s was war, which I skipped,
never having been there but in books
and other vicarious means, safe
for the time being in my bubble—
yet there it is today, in news, on screen, its horror,
its devastation, its grief, its incendiary reality,
its cyclical road to nowhere
lined with corpses —immediate.

but today the prompt is: weekends,
two days arbitrarily set aside
as if they were, literally, the end of weeks
which themselves are inventions,
yet we love them so, respite as they are
from the famous dictum of Eden
at the moment of our eviction that: we
shall, henceforth, labor by sweat of brow

—at least until robots are conceived
further down the road and AI comes along
to relieve us from the ache of work
and thought, and knowing— and,

we shall sweat in sorrow, no less—

which brings us back to war and other
misapprehensions and monkey-wrenches
of thought and mind concocted by beings
who wage war and write poems

.Jim Culleny, 4/23/22

by Rafaël Newman

You’ve heard the story before. The poet Orpheus, celebrated for the enchanting quality of his voice, is grieving the sudden death of his young wife Eurydice. In his despair he resolves to harrow the Underworld, where he so impresses the god Hades with his singing that he is permitted to retrieve the shade of his bride and return with her, newly embodied, into the light—on one condition: that he not look back at Eurydice until they have attained the realm of the living. All is proceeding according to plan, and the pair have nearly made it to the world above, when Orpheus, overcome by the suspicion that he has been swindled, turns to assure himself that his silent wife is still following him—only to see her flee away, this time forever, back into the shadows.

Boy meets girl.
Boy loses girl.
Boy finds girl.
Boy loses girl again.
Boy founds enduring aesthetic tradition.

For the theme of the beautiful, irretrievable, now permanently dead woman and her endlessly grieving, magically gifted male lover, who nobly commemorates her in works of art, has been recycled time and again in the millennia since its mythical origins, in story, song, and the visual media, from the Roman elegists through the earliest Venetian opera pioneers to the Romantic poets, from the painters of the Renaissance through the Pre-Raphaelites to the Surrealists. Read more »

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Out of Egypt. 2021

Patchwork.

More here, here, and here.

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

I

Russia’s war on Ukraine is realigning geopolitics everywhere you look. The Germans and French want the conflict to end immediately. Others won’t be heartbroken to see fighting continue to degrade Russian capabilities. The UK, Poles and Balts come to mind here. An idea is settling in that the US, too, doesn’t entirely mind fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian. There’s no denying the war is less painful from forty five hundred miles away.

Look north and if Finland and Sweden join NATO, overnight the Baltic Sea becomes the beating heart of European security. The shallow, enclosed Baltic hasn’t played such a heady role since the days of Napoleon. Vilnius and Riga never dreamed of such proximity to power.

In 2019 Mikhail Saakashvili, a previous victim of Russian aggression, predicted Russia’s next attack would come against Finland or Sweden. He was wrong, but he might not be wrong forever. That’s the fear that fuels an astonishing rush toward strategic realignment around the Baltic Sea.

Finnish President Sauli Niinistö is two years shy of wrapping up his second six year term. The 73 year old son of a newspaperman and a nurse from Finland’s southwest coast, Niinistö consistently polls as the country’s most revered figure.

He was in Washington a week and a day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, already working to insure the American administration’s blessing for Finland’s accession to NATO. The Finns hold their president in such regard that his backing of Finland’s coming NATO application should insure the peoples’ approval.

Niinistö put it this way: “Sufficient security is where Finns can feel that there is no emergency and there won’t be one.” Joining NATO, he said, would be “most sufficient.”  Read more »

After Steve Jobs hit his VP of development on the forehead, called him a stupid fuck, then stormed out of a meeting that had been set up to see George’s invention, everything changed.

Read more »

Street scene in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Photo taken two weeks ago.

by Bill Benzon

What is the blues? It is a mood, a feeling, a sensibility. Feeling blue. Feeling blue?

It is a musical form, existing in its own tradition, but also as a form within the jazz tradition. The latter is what this series article is about, the blues as it functions within the evolving context of jazz.

The blues is also an object of wonder, fascination, and mystery. Back in the middle of the 20th century some curious and well-meaning white folks went looking for the blues. Marybeth Hamilton wrote a book about their quest, In Search of the Blues:

Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton-we are all familiar with the story of the Delta blues. Fierce, raw voices; tormented drifters; deals with the devil at the crossroads at midnight.

In this extraordinary reconstruction of the origins of the Delta blues, historian Marybeth Hamilton demonstrates that the story as we know it is largely a myth. The idea of something called Delta blues only emerged in the mid-twentieth century, the culmination of a longstanding white fascination with the exotic mysteries of black music.

Hamilton shows that the Delta blues was effectively invented by white pilgrims, seekers, and propagandists who headed deep into America’s south in search of an authentic black voice of rage and redemption. In their quest, and in the immense popularity of the music they championed, we confront America’s ongoing love affair with racial difference.

That’s from the publisher’s blurb. It sounds about right, though I’ve not read the book. I’ve read other books. I know a thing or two. In 1966 a man named Charlie Keil published Urban Blues. It blew the doors off that myth. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

Gérard Roland came to Berkeley only around the turn of this century. He grew up in Belgium, was a radical student, and after the student movements of Europe subsided, he supported himself for a time by operating trams in the city. When he was wooing his girlfriend (later wife), Heddy, she used to get a free ride in his trams. (A few years back when I visited them one summer in their villa in the Italian countryside near Lucca, Heddy told me in jest that those days she was content with a free tram ride, but now she needed a house in Tuscany to be placated). Gérard is also a good cook.

As with Andreu, my special link with Gérard was based on our shared interests in history, politics and culture. In addition, his research involves analyzing institutional rules in the economic development process and issues of comparative economic systems, which have also been part of my own research themes. He comes to this set of issues from his long-run interest in Russia in its process of economic transition after the fall of Berlin wall, and later in China.

At this point I might as well give some perspective for my interest in institutional and comparative-systemic issues in the context of the subsequent developments in the discipline of Economics. By institutions economists do not necessarily mean an establishment or organization. They apply the term to imply general rules and practice and custom in economic arrangements.  I have earlier talked about my interest in and detailed empirical work on agrarian relations in Indian villages—these relations are often examples of small-scale economic institutions at the micro-level. Thus sharecropping, that my early work was concerned with, is a prime example of an age-old economic institutional arrangement. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

The New York Times’ columnist who thought that a good way to capture the interconnectedness of the modern world was to say that “The World is Flat” – an idea, arguably, better captured by saying that the world is round (which it is) – recently joined the chorus of pundits saying, yeah, Putin started the war in the Ukraine, but the U.S. is also to blame – or at least, “America is not entirely innocent of fueling [Putin’s] fires.”

Former Kremlin advisor Sergey Karaganov has been widely quoted (more quoted, than vetted, I think) as saying “For 25 years, people like myself have been saying that if NATO and Western alliance’s expand beyond certain red lines, especially into Ukraine, there will be a war. I envisioned that scenario as far back as 1997.” Envisioned, maybe, is not the right word. As an influential advisor to Putin, it seems he advised Putin that destroying the Ukraine was necessary to prevent NATO expansion. In an interesting turn of phrase Karaganov now says that what Russia “needs is a kind of solution which would be called peace.” Which would be called peace? Right. That doesn’t sound ominous, at all.

There are plenty of other examples of the argument that the West, the U.S., and/or NATO, share blame for the war for not making clear that they would never, ever going allow the Ukraine to join NATO – even if that would have been good for both parties (absent Russian aggression). What if anything is wrong with this style of argument? Scholars and theorists of foreign affairs call the view represented “realism”. Personally, I’m against it. Read more »

Ménage à Trois

isn’t it a miracle that
three atoms have combined
in chemical love to become
the slippery substance of that which
both bears and wrecks ships,
of bays that breed and
shelter life —sustain it,
of that essential stuff of bodies,
of billows of mist that rain
and surge through taps,
of glaciers that have weighed
upon continents for millennia,
until now
?

Jim Culleny
4/13/22

Sughra Raza. Color Burst, Costa Rica 2003.

Analog photo, digitally edited.