by Mary Hrovat

A couple of weeks ago, the main healthcare provider in my city sent me a newsletter. One of the items was a brief blurb about how laughter is good for you, with a link to “Learn More About the Benefits of Laughter.” No! If you think laughter is good for our health, link to a video of a cat riding a Roomba or bear cubs on a hammock. I might click through to see those; I might even laugh. I’m not going to look at an article about the benefits of laughter, because it will become another open tab, a nagging chore, an obligation that stands between me and the conditions for laughter.

David Graeber wrote about bullshit jobs, which involve activities that are not in themselves necessary but provide an appearance of something valuable. Sometimes it feels like I fill my life with bullshit activities, things that look valuable or even essential but that I wouldn’t miss if they were gone.

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I thought of this again when I started reading a book of advice on writing. I want to learn about the practical aspects of writing for money and the options for people who do the kind of writing I do. I was taken aback to find, in the first chapter, a couple of action items: Write a mission statement and begin writing down goals, for example, a target word count for each day.

My spirit is downcast by the phrases mission statement and action item. Even goals is sicklied over with the pale cast of performance reviews past. These words remind me of office jobs, of confinement and boredom and other people’s agendas. In addition, there’s nothing about organizational mission statements to suggest that the concept is useful for capturing my aspirations for a writing career. These highly abstract communications operate in a realm where solutions are provided and expertise is leveraged. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Mood … , Our Pale Blue Dot.

Digital Photograph, August 2014.

by Brooks Riley

by Mindy Clegg

Back in 2018, police raids shut down some New Orleans strip clubs in the famed French Quarter for alleged drug and sex trafficking. In the aftermath, several venues closed for good even though there were no arrests for sex trafficking. In an op-ed, dancer and activist Reese Piper argued that rather than being trafficking victims, most dancers were there by choice and sought greater legal protections for their profession. Rather than making arrests for trafficking, the NOLA police made arrests for prostitution, which they conflated with trafficking. But many sex work activists opposed this characterization of both prostitution and stripping. In her article at The Appeal from 2018, Melissa Gira Grant described how the city proposed changes, such as capping the number of clubs allowed in the French Quarter. Such measures failed because of a protest led by the dancers from the raided clubs. Many connected these raids to the gentrification sweeping the city since hurricane Katrina in 2005, recently described by Joseph Chanoff. As in many other American cities, working class residents, especially people of color, are being priced out of their communities in the wake of Katrina. Many fear that the nature of the city will change, making it a simulacra of itself, an image of New Orleanian culture rather than the thing itself. But what does it mean to change a culture by “sanitizing” it? What about pricing out one community in favor of another? Does revitalization always mean driving out the things that make a local culture unique for a tourist-focused commodified version? What sort of world-view does gentrification create? Making cities safer and more livable should be a priority, but not at the expense of some people in favor of others as Chanoff argued. Read more »

Self-portrait in a passing train window at the Munich East train station in February, 2022.

by David J. Lobina

A testy title for an article about James Joyce in this centenary year of the publication of Ulysses, but all the more pertinent for that, especially in the context of this series on Language and Thought (and I don’t really mean that he was wrong, actually). After all, last month I brought up the role of “talking to ourselves” in reasoning and decision-making – to think – and the narrative technique of interior monologue, amply used in Ulysses, is precisely meant to depict the phenomenon I was dealing with – inner speech, in the parlance of philosophers and psychologists. Not to be confused with the stream-of-consciousness technique, though they are related, the interior-monologue technique is a linguistic rendering of a character’s thoughts, whereas a stream of consciousness may include the character’s perceptions and impressions (visual, aural, what have you) in addition to their inner speech, and it typically comes from the pen of a narrator rather than directly from the mind of a character as is the case in inner speech.[i]

As a case in point:

—Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?

Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?

—Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been first a sundering.

At first sight the presence of interior monologue in this exchange (signposted by my italics, here and henceforth), as imagined by Joyce in the Ulysses, seems a plausible rendering of the thoughts Stephen Dedalus was having at the time. Is it psychologically plausible, though? I don’t mean whether Stephen was really having such thoughts – he did, Joyce wrote so. What I mean is whether Stephen was actually verbalising these thoughts to himself in inner speech as he was having them. Read more »

Lenin in the Presence of God

A trans creation after Iqbal, by Rafiq Kathwari

God
Aha! Comrade Ulyanov—
Welcome! Or I should say,
Dobro Pozhalovat!

Lenin
You’re alive? But “God is dead,” they said.

God
I inhabit men’s heart: passion’s home,
and for a moment
my angels swayed to your tune.

Lenin
So, this is the source of the babble in churches.

God
Command and Control.
Shock and Awe.
@NoGodButGod

Lenin
I need a drink…

God
Heaven is not your local pub,
but we’ve a house white on tap:
Water of Life. Glass or Goblet?

Lenin
Shot glass. Neat.

God
Think of it as Korsvodka.
Red blush on your cheeks—
it’s not rouge. Is it?

Lenin
‘Tis, but O All Knowing, when will the boat of capitalism sink? Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

In both ISI and DSE there was one problem I faced in my research that was something I did not fully anticipate before. Some of the major international journals had a submission fee for research papers which was equivalent to something that would exhaust most of my Indian monthly salary. In the US authors mostly charged the fee to their research grants, which was not a way out for me. I once wrote about this to the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association (AEA), and suggested that for their journals they should have a lower rate for authors from low-income countries. I got a reply, saying that after careful consideration in their Committee meeting they had decided against my suggestion. Their rationale was a typical one for believers in perfect markets: since an article in an AEA journal was likely to raise significantly the expected lifetime earnings of an author, the latter should be able to finance it. (I visualized the dour face of an Indian public bank loan officer trying to comprehend this).

I also found out that using Indian micro-level data for a research paper in a mainstream American journal in those days was considered so exotic that more often than not the editors, even before reviewing the paper, would immediately suggest sending it instead to an Indian journal or at best a field journal. Read more »

by Emrys Westacott

Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is clearly a historically momentous event, already appearing to cause a seismic shift in the geopolitical landscape. What the long-term consequences will be are hard to say. The most obvious losers are the millions of Ukrainians–killed, injured, bereft, and displaced–who are the immediate victims of Putin’s onslaught. The most likely winner will probably be China, on whom Russia is suddenly much more economically dependent due to the sanctions imposed by the West, and who can therefore now expect Putin to dance to whatever tune it whistles.

The heroism of President Zerlensky and all the other Ukrainians willing to risk their lives in resisting the Russian military juggernaut is remarkable and inspiring. But exactly how countries who wish to support Ukraine should respond to what Putin has done is a question to which no-one has an entirely satisfactory answer.

Supplying the resistance with weapons and ammunition will make the war more costly to the Russian military. Confiscating or freezing the foreign assets of Russian oligarchs will “hurt” these people in limited ways (e.g. by messing up their foreign holiday plans). Economic sanctions will inflict considerable damage on the Russian economy, and the effects will be felt across the board, primarily, as is usually the case, by those who are not well off. Cultural sanctions, such as FIFA barring Russia from international soccer competitions, and universities cutting ties with academic institutions in Russia, will communicate to the Russian population the extent to which the country is isolated as a result of the invasion.

On moral grounds, all these measures are justified, even obligatory. But one also has to ask the pragmatic question: how are they supposed to work? That is, how might they lead to an end to the war–an end that consists of something other than a long -term Russian occupation or a Putin-propped puppet government? Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

The Ouvroir de Littérature  Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), Oulipo for short, is the name of a group of primarily French writers, mathematicians, and academics that explores the use of mathematical and quasi-mathematical techniques in literature. Don’t let this description scare you. The results are often amusing, strange, and thought-provoking.

The group, which was founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in Paris in 1960 and is still somewhat active, searches for novel literary structures that arise from the imposition of mathematical constraints and methods of systematically transforming texts. Theophile Gautier has written that the rigidity of the constraints ensures the durability of the work, whether in poetry, art, or sculpture. More graphically, Queneau described the group’s activity as “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”

Simple combinatorics plays a role in many of Oulipo’s efforts. Queneau’s 100 Trillion Sonnets is a prime example of its approach to literature. The work consists of just ten sonnets, one on each page of a ten-page booklet. (Note that the 14-line sonnet is itself a product of an artificial restriction.) The pages of the booklet are cut so that each of the 14 lines of the ten sonnets can be turned separately. Thus, we can combine any of the ten first lines with any of the ten second lines, which results in 10² or 100 different pairs of opening lines. Any of these 10² possibilities may in turn be combined with any of the ten third lines to yield 10³ or 1,000 possible sets of three lines. Iterating this procedure and utilizing the multiplication principle, we conclude that there are 10¹⁴ possible sonnets. Queneau claimed that they all made sense, although it’s safe to say that the claim will never be verified, since there are probably more texts in these 10¹⁴ different sonnets than in all the rest of the world’s literature. (His claim could, of course, be easily refuted.)

Incidentally, years ago I was inspired by 100 Trillion Sonnets to patent a variant of a Rubik cube that I called About Face. Each of the cube’s six sides pictured a face that remained a face when any of the sides were subjected to a certain class of rotations. The result was a gazillion possible mugshots. Alas, it never went anywhere. Read more »

by Raji Jayaraman

Despite living here for nearly three years now, I have no social life to speak of. At risk of sounding self-loathing, a not insignificant part of the problem is probably just me: I’m not the most social person in the world. Plus, there’s the pandemic, which hit six months after we moved here. But I don’t think it’s just me, or even just the pandemic. An awful lot of people who moved here as adults, decades ago, and are much nicer and more sociable than I am, have said the same thing: making friends in Toronto is hard.

What avenues are there to building friendships? I’m sure it’s different for different people, but looking back to where my closest friendships originated, you have the usual suspects: 1. school, 2. university, 3. parents of my kids’ friends, 4. work, and 5. neighbours.  I realize that this list is incomplete. A more well-rounded person would probably have a sixth item: an activity of some sort. A sport, maybe, or a cultural undertaking. But this is Canada. It’s cold for most of the year, and ice hockey is not my thing. (There are certain sports, which require you to travel at unnaturally high speeds on your own two feet, that you will never master unless you learned them at a young age, before you realize that you are not immortal. Most winter sports fall in this category and I was raised in the tropics.) As for cultural activities, they are usually organized around homogenous groups—bound by things like religion or ethnicity—and getting away from that kind of uniformity was precisely the attraction of a place like Toronto.

Options one to three have served me well in the past. My largest and oldest single group of friends date back to school; I’m still close to a couple of friends from university; and occasionally go on holiday with one set of parents of my kid’s school friend. But time moves inexorably forward, and I was fully aware that as a middle-aged woman with teenage kids, these first three options were off the table. I had, naïvely as it turns out, banked on options 4 and 5, given Canada’s reputation for friendliness and love of diversity. You must understand, I moved here from Germany, where “integrate” is often code for “assimilate”, except that assimilation is purely aspirational for anyone who does not look the part.

Canada was supposed to be different. Read more »

“Parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds all learn new vocalizations. The calls and songs of some species in these groups appear to have even more in common with human language, such as conveying information intentionally and using simple forms of some of the elements of human language such as phonology, semantics and syntax. And the similarities run deeper, including analogous brain structures that are not shared by species without vocal learning.” —Smithsonian Magazine, Do Birds Have Language

What Needs to be Sung

and I thought I was descended from apes,
but it may be birds who speak from trees
rather than primates who swing through them
with whom I am more comfortably close
because they sing! and singing’s a beautiful thing
if done with the art of Cardinals, but
still, I can’t fully renounce the grunts of apes
who share my lack of precision when it comes
to telling things as they are, who pound chests
and rattle undergrowth in the midst of jungles
when other brutes enter their perceived turf,
they too share my penchant to articulate,
though in more bellicose poetry
while from the canopy above
singing their way through the world
under the threat of hawks and cats
or a fox who would steal their young
they employ the syntax of a piccolo
the semantics of a violin
the phonology of a trill
to say what needs to be said
what needs to be sung

Jim Culleny, 3/2/22

by Michael Abraham-Fiallos

I was sixteen years old the first time I went to a drag show. It was an all-ages show in the Capitol Hill neighborhood—the gayborhood—of Seattle. My two best friends, Nalani and Shreya, bought tickets for my birthday. The performer was Jinkx Monsoon, who would go on to fame as the winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, season five. But she was only locally famous back then, which, I have come to learn in the years since, is a special kind of thing—there is a charm and a camaraderie and a deep mirth to a local show that you don’t find when you go see an internationally famous drag queen or when you watch drag on television. 

If you never were one yourself, you must understand something about being a sixteen year old gay boy. To be gay at that age is to fumble. Everything feels like fumbling: sex, friendships, school, work, home. The very acts of identification and relation, of situating oneself in the matrix of the social world, are a brilliant, painful, altogether necessary fumbling. I remember that I wore a beanie over my messy, blond hair that night, and I had my chunky, black glasses to hide my face. I looked like a proper Seattle hipster. I was confident walking into the venue. It was my birthday after all. We took seats in the back, Nalani and Shreya one and two seats in, and me on the aisle. I have been thankful ever since that I was sat on the aisle. 

When the lights came up and Jinkx walked out, my confidence poured from my head through my chest, past my stomach and into a puddle at my feet. Never before had I seen someone so camp, so ravishing, so perfectly and inimitably themselves. Never before had I seen someone so gay. Suddenly, I was fumbling. I did not—could not—belong in such a place, in the direct line of sight of such a performer. It was not that I did not want to be there; I very much did. I was enthralled. But that uneasy sense of self, that fumbly uncertainty about where I belonged in the world, came roaring up. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Countries exist. They are places on the map which have a political identity and borders and which people or things can live in, come from, or go to.

But countries are not anymore than that.

Firstly and most obviously, countries are merely a social construction. They are collectively produced fictions (like money or religions) rather than mind-independent objects (like stones). Being fictional does not mean that countries do not matter, but it does mean that they only exist so long as enough people agree to act as if they do.

Secondly and more significantly, countries are locations, not organisations. Organisations are things like armies or corporations that convert groups of human individuals into a coordinated and powerful actor. Unlike countries, organisations are a kind of collectively produced fiction that can actually do things, often very significant things. What we call governments are a particular kind of organisation, one that has achieved the power to make and enforce rules over the inhabitants of a country, for example by hurting those who persist in daring to disagree and by preventing outsiders from entering. (In Max Weber’s famous definition, it “successfully claims a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence”.) This power is called sovereignty and it is an attribute of governments, not countries.

A common mistake is to confuse a country with its inhabitants with its government. This leads to statements that are strictly meaningless at best and deeply misleading at worst because they are category errors on the order of ‘Green ideas sleep furiously’. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self-portrait With Trees. Seattle, February, 2022.

Digital photograph.

by Dick Edelstein

On 4 October 1957, in my mind’s eye, I was playing alone in the back yard when the radio in the breezeway broadcast a special news bulletin that changed my life. We had moved from Chicago to Minneapolis in 1951 and my parents had bought a recently built house on a dead-end street in a relatively cheap residential area out near the airport. The house was built in the modern suburban style that people called a ranch-style bungalow and its most interesting post-war feature was the breezeway, a screened-in patio attached to the house. The screens that kept flies and mosquitos at bay in warm weather were swapped for glass panels when the weather turned cold and we changed our window screens for storm widows.

The radio voice announced that the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite orbiting the earth. This turned out to be one of the most significant events in my life since it determined the course of my education. And that education determined the sort of person I was to become.

Changes quickly rippled through the educational system once our nation found out that it was behind in the space race with its cold war arch-enemy. The leaders of the Soviet Union knew their narrow lead was imperiled once they had awakened the sleeping giant, so they too launched an urgent campaign to train scientists and engineers of the future to fight a crucial ideological battle through space and weapons programs. Read more »