Uroboros

new year, end day of a beginning,
two limits of an endless rope,
sunup/sundown, the day we split infinity
that lazy 8 napping on its side as time goes by,
the day we draw a deep breath
in belief that its undulant line may really be broken
regardless of the will of a universe to ever be
unsplittable in the extent of its being,
as if a year arbitrarily set to solar cycles
marks anything but a wish to apply human order
to a thing as opaque but terse as a snake biting its tail,
yet it can be done, and is
in love    by love

Jim Culleny
1/2/2022

by Rafaël Newman

Beginnings are a theme for sages,
For adepts of our Golden Ages:
When the victuals were prodigious,
And division un-litigious—
Since the stores, in their abundance,
Rendered striving a redundance;
Why in gardens Paradisal
Our ancestors scorned reprisal
As they supped upon the flower
That was bounty, boon, and bower;
How dread Rome was born from zero
When a hapless, vagrant hero
Laid the fundaments imperial,
Having shunned the charms venereal
Of a likewise diasporic
Queen of Carthage, prehistoric;
That the very Earth we tread on,
Raise our children, earn our bread on,
Once was spoken into being
By a deity all-seeing,
Whose division was prodigious—
Not, however, un-litigious. Read more »

by R. Passov

Eldon Hall spent the first seven years of his life climbing hills alongside Oregon’s Snake River, trailed by a faithful Shepard dog. He and his father “…went fishing in the mountains…” and “… slept outdoors while his mother, safely residing at home, worried about the poisonous snakes that might bite [them.]” In 1926, when Eldon was seven, his father passed. If not for that, Eldon would have carried on farming alongside the banks of the Snake.

Unable to hold onto the farm, Eldon’s mother took her three children across the river to Paytte, Idaho. There she married a subsistence farmer. While Eldon was tempered working as a farmhand, she held his dream of getting an education.

The day before Pearl Harbor, Eldon defied the odds by enrolling at the University of Washington. The war dried up funding. On the verge of dropping out, he joined the ROTC. In 1943 he was called to active duty. The few college credits he brought along gained entry into a newly formed “Army Specialized Training Program” that led to City College, NY where his days were “…filled with lectures, testing, military instruction, calisthenics, and some free time to tour the Big Apple.”

After 18 months he was sent across another river to Rutgers University to begin a “training program” in electrical engineering. Of the two hundred or so men who started the program, 65 finished. The top four graduates joined the Manhattan Project. Eldon graduated in 5th position. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Rainy Reflection Self-portrait for 2022.

Digital photograph.

by Eric J. Weiner

January, 2022. East End, Long Island, NY. It’s getting colder. I just recovered from a bout with COVID. I am sitting around the fire pit sipping tequila, drinking homemade bone broth from a mug, and watching lists of very important dead people, ripped from various newspapers and magazines, burn in the fire. Life is good.

It is curious to me that the ending of each calendar year should signal the production of these lists. Against the backdrop of so much death from COVID in 2021, they are exclusively brief and, in the Marcusian sense, one-dimensional. Commodify your nostalgia: the bad and ugly exchanged whole cloth for the good. Death as salve, all is forgiven or, at the least, quickly forgotten. Beck got it right: “Time is a piece of wax falling on a termite/Who’s choking on the splinters.” No one gets out alive. But for those of us who are teachers, the lessons we learned from our dead brothers and sisters, those intimates who have touched and transformed our lives in deep and meaningful ways, can be reanimated through our teaching.

From the pedagogical perspective, the lexicon of death is not about lore, myth-making, or some other practice of forgetting. Rather, it suggests a critical practice of recognition that is concerned with how they lived their lives; how they taught their own students; how they treated their colleagues; the way they represented their work; the way they situated themselves within and beyond the university and school; the way laughter informed their interactions; and the seriousness by which they undertook their various social/political/educational projects. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

2022 is alive, a babe come hale and hollering to join its sisters 2020 and 2021, siblings bound by pandemic. Everybody stood to see off 2022’s older sister 2021, like we all did 2020 before her. Out with the old. Quickly, please.

2022 debuts with a striking resemblance to her sisters, just more evolved. So that by now some Americans signal their freedom by avoiding vaccination while others seek freedom by staying indoors. Meanwhile Europeans ban each other, for a moment there the whole world tried to put southern Africans out of mind entirely, and every country tortures its airlines. Hi ho the derry-o a quarantining we will go.

The Die Welt UK correspondent lamented that should she visit her homeland this holiday, she couldn’t even test her way free. Test your way free.

Consider the world in which 2022 will make her mark. Look east from Kyiv and please find Russia issuing un-agree-to-able demands and backing them with the rattling of 100,000 human sabres. It would be utterly incredible if Putin were to start a land war in Europe. But those who claim knowledge of his inner thoughts cite a deep, consistent grievance. Indeed they find it in the public record, in his 5000 word ‘Ukraine is not a real country’ article back last summer.

As far back as 2008, at a NATO-Russia Council meeting in Bucharest, Putin declared to W. Bush, “George, do you realize that Ukraine is not even a state? What is Ukraine? Part of its territory is Eastern Europe but the greater part is a gift from us!” Read more »

The massif named Plose towers over the east side of Brixen, South Tyrol, as seen from my window in Franzensfeste. Photo taken in the early morning a couple of weeks ago.

by Bill Benzon

I don’t remember just how I first became interested in jazz as a child growing up in Western Pennsylvania in the 1950s. There was always music in the house, but it was mostly classical music, often on big old 78s. My father had a particular affinity for Beethoven.

Walt Disney is part of the story. Not Uncle Walt himself, but a Dixieland jazz band, The Firehouse Five Plus Two, consisting of personnel from his animation studio. They’d show up regularly on “The Mickey Mouse Club” TV program back in the 1950s, and I’m sure I heard them there. Here’s a clip where they play “Muskrat Ramble”:

I have no recollection of having seen any particular performance of theirs, but I could well have heard them play this one.

Dixieland, as you may know, is a style closely based on traditional New Orleans jazz from the first quarter of the 20th century. It was enjoying a resurgence, perhaps in part as a reaction to bebop, and was sweeping college campuses. But me and my friends knew nothing of that. We just knew that we liked this music.

One of those friends, David Leffler, actually his mother, introduced me to Louis Armstrong. I was down the street visiting David late one afternoon when somehow or other his mother asked whether or not I’d heard Louis Armstrong. I’d never heard of him. She put a record on and I listened. I don’t remember what it was. All I remember is that it sounded a bit thin. But – and here’s the thing – I remembered it.

When my father joined a record club – you know, one of those deals where you could by records and they’d be mailed to you – I was allowed a selection in the first buy. I read through the little pamphlet and picked something called A Rare Batch of Satch. Again, lots of tinny sound. And a lot of what I would come to recognize as standard repertoire: “Basin Street Blues,” “High Society,” “St. James Infirmary” (which I loved), “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” (Armstrong’s theme song), and others. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

At my ISI office there were several good economists. Apart from TN, there was B.S. Minhas, Kirit Parikh, Suresh Tendulkar, Sanjit Bose (my friend from MIT days), V.K. Chetty, Dipankar Dasgupta, and others. Of these in many ways the most colorful character was Minhas. A shaved un-turbaned Sikh, he used to tell us about his growing up in a poor farmer family in a Punjab village, where he was the first in his family to go to school. He went to Stanford for doctorate, before returning to India. He relished, a bit too much, his role as the man who spoke the blunt truth to everyone including politicians, policy-makers and academics. He illustrated his Punjabi style by telling the Bengalis that he had heard that in Bengal when a man had a tiff with his wife, he’d go without food rather than eat the food his wife had cooked; he said at home he did quite the opposite: “I go to the fridge, take out my food and eat it; then if I am still upset, I go to the fridge again and take out my wife’s food and eat it all up—serves her right!”

At ISI Bose, Dasgupta and Chetty were theorists; Minhas, TN, Parikh and Tendulkar did multi-sector planning models as well as quantitative studies of particular sectors like agriculture, water, energy, etc. TN, as probably India’s most versatile economist ever, did both theory and empirical quantitative work. (He and I started editing a new journal on Quantitative Economics, which later became the journal of Indian Econometric Society). To my great benefit, TN was also most knowledgeable about Indian data.

Without TN’s guiding hand at the beginning I’d have felt completely out of my depth in the data world. These were days when data were stored in boxes of computer punch-cards. Data storage was often in awful condition—I used to jokingly ask how we could be sure that some of the data in the form of holes in the punch-cards were not made by the insects that infested the store rooms. Read more »

Temporal Christmas

the verge of something new—
solstice, sunrise, a comet coming through,
sometimes it seems that angels tend,
stars align, low meets high—-
even ass and oxen gain a sense
that mutual otherness has been pretense,
a tale begins that glorifies the plain,
low things are magnified:
a snowball rolls through time,
gathers rituals, books, saints,
gains velocity, and multitudes believe
God’s entangled now, today–
homeless, streetwise, poor,
an ordinary human’s deified, yet
ultimately is turned away

Jim Culleny
12/24/17

by Adele A Wilby

In today’s political world where liberal democracy is purported to have triumphed and ‘the end of history’ is supposed to be with us, many people might be content to rest on their laurels that fascism has been confined to the dustbin of political history, and at most its supporters on the fringe of contemporary politics. Not so however, for Paul Mason. For him ‘fascism is back’ and poses a real threat to democracies. Indeed, so convinced is he of his argument that fascism is emerging as a force to be reckoned with, his recent book How to Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance is a call to arms for greater understanding of its modern manifestations, and to resist its influence in politics.

An award-winning writer, Mason has many books to his credit. He is also a broadcaster and filmmaker and his reporting on events during the Greek debt crisis in 2015 while working as the Economics Editor for Channel 4 for several years, are memorable. But Mason is also one of those human beings who matches his intellectual work with political activism. He has been a relentless political activist with decades of resistance to fascism behind him that gives him the edge over the topic he takes on in the book: he has been exposed to the phenomenon and is familiar with fascism in political activist terms. Read more »

Review of Fernando Castrillon and Thomas Marchevsky (eds) Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy: Conversations on Pandemics, Politics, and Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021)

by Claire Chambers

In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the first-person narrator Saleem Sinai invites readers to imagine themselves in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality.

This is a figurative way of talking about history’s distortions, or the difficulties of exploring contemporary events given the incomplete view afforded by a nearby vantage point. 

Such a confusing closeness to dramatic and discombobulating scenes is discussed in some detail by both the editors of Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy, as well as by Rocco Ronchi, an Italian philosopher and one of the contributors to the volume. In his essay ‘The Virtues of the Virus’, Ronchi observes: ‘We are too close to the Covid-19 event to be able to catch a glimpse of the future it bears. Our fear is human, and this makes us unreliable witnesses’. Meanwhile, in ‘Introduction: Of Pestilence, Chaos, and Time’, editors Fernando Castrillon and Thomas Marchevsky praise their authors’ boldness for investing in the risky business of writing about the coronavirus pandemic even while ‘knowing full well that they might be ridiculed or even dismissed outright for what at a later date could be read as ill-informed, judgmental, or simply short-sighted’. These are salient warnings for those of us who also wish to make a modest intervention into public debate on the current fast-moving and time-sensitive situation. Read more »

Dorothea Tanning. Notes for An Apocalypse, 1978.

Oil on canvas.

More here, here, and here.

by David Oates

Once again, wilted evergreen trees are appearing on city streets on trash day, with remorseful hints of tinsel and that gritty feeling of morning-after. And we are reminded that the mightiest of all our mongrel holidays has once again had its way with us.

Though Christmas is of course the master-holiday of the (mostly) (or at least somewhat) Christian West, it has long showcased the curious persistence of non-Christian and pre-Christian ways. Christmas trees and mistletoe ­­­­are holdovers from the forest-worshipping northern Europeans. There’s literally nothing Christian about them. When we welcome “Yuletide” we’re unwittingly celebrating a pagan festival –Yule from the Anglo-Saxon iul or giul ( and behind that from the Old Norse jol)  having been the winter solstice celebration of Druids and Vikings which our Christmas has, um, replaced. Or continued.

So the way we celebrate Christmas offers a fine meditation on the empty fantasy of purity, which plays almost no role in history as actually lived. Heathen traditions and pagan symbols: we just can’t quit you! It’s been on my mind lately because, on some rather more serious fronts of the culture wars, the Judeo-Christian Tradition has once again been trotted out to do battle, like some creaky, rusty old Crusader not allowed to go to a decent rest. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Facing immanent death, his friends and followers inconsolable, Socrates, according to Plato, attempted to console them.

He called fear of death “the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown,” adding that “no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.”

In other words, (i) death should only be feared if it is known to be bad; (ii) no one knows that death is bad; therefore, (iii) death should not be feared. The problem with (i), of course, is that some of our greatest fears, of the dark, for example, are fears about the unknown. Maybe, we should be afraid because we don’t know.

But Epicurus argued. “[D]eath is nothing to us, since everything good and bad lies in sensation, and death is to be deprived of sensation… [W]hen we are, death is not, and when death is present, then we are not.” So, (i) after we die, we no longer exist (or have sensations); (ii) Nothing is bad without being bad for someone who exists (and has sensations). Therefore, (iii) nothing can be bad for us after we die. Of course, (i) depends on already believing that we cease to exist at death, which seems obvious to me, but clearly a lot of people disagree.

But back to Plato. He had a better argument than “we don’t know”. Here it is. (i) Death is either like a peaceful, dreamless sleep, which is a good thing; (ii) Or death involves joining a permanent community of heroes and philosophers, which is also a good thing. Therefore, “Whichever of these it is, death is a good thing.” Now, the “permanent community of heroes and philosophers” bit is very culturally specific, so let’s adjust (ii). Replace the “permanent community of heroes and philosophers” with whatever you think the after life is like. Or we might just say that if death is more than a peaceful sleep, it involves something new and, hopefully, interesting, or at least not terrible. But this has a problem similar to the one that bedeviled Socrates’ first argument. Read more »