View of the Dolomites from the Villanderer Alm in the South Tyrol. Photo taken last week during a walk in the mountains. Happy holidays!

by Carol A Westbrook

One of my earliest memories was of Christmas Eve in 1954. I was about 3 or 4 years old, playing under a table at my grandmother’s house. My sister and a cousin were with me, playing with a small wooden crate filled with straw. The crate represents the manger in the stable in Bethlehem 1,954 years ago, where the animals welcomed the baby Jesus, since there were no rooms in the inn. We three kids were waiting for the adults to come to the table to join us for Wigilia, the traditional Christmas Eve feast, after which we would move to the living room, sing Polish Christmas Carols, and wait for an uncle disguised as Santa to arrive with presents for everyone.

The wooden crate and the Christmas Eve feast were Polish traditions. This is not surprising since my grandparents were only a few decades away from their life in Poland, when they left the to marry and raise a family in Chicago. Like most of the other folks in our neighborhood, we still had strong ties to Polish customs and religion.

Our Catholic religion was full of magic, which we took for granted. Prayers to St. Anthony would help you find something you lost. Want something really, really bad? Say a novena, for 9 days of prayer. St. Jude can help solve hopeless cases, like cancer. If you were paralyzed or had some other awful condition, you might make a pilgrimage to Lourdes, in hopes of a cure. Many were cured there. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Over the years I have heard many stories about Mahalanobis. One relates to his youth. He and Sukumar Ray (Satyajit Ray’s father, a pioneer in Bengali literature of nonsense rhymes and gibberish) were the two contemporary Brahmo whiz kids active in literati circles. They used to arrange regular meetings at someone’s home for serious discussion. But as usually happens in such Bengali middle-class gatherings, much time was taken up in the serving and enjoyment of food delicacies. Mahalanobis objected to this and said this was leaving too little time for discussion. So he sternly announced that from now on no food should be served in the meeting. For the next couple of times people morosely accepted the rule. But Sukumar subverted it, by one time arriving a little early and persuading the food-preparers in the household (usually women) that for the sake of the morale in the meeting, food-serving should be resumed. By the time Mahalanobis arrived, everybody was relishing the delicacies, which infuriated him, but he gave up.

His sternness was evident also in the way he ran ISI in Kolkata. Those days most people there had as office space only a cubicle with adjustable wooden partitions. I have heard that Mahalanobis used to express his satisfaction/dissatisfaction with your work by overnight adjustment of those partitions. In the morning you arrive and find your cubicle shrunk, so you know the Director’s adverse evaluation of your work. I used to know a very decent soft-spoken artist, B.N. Parashar who at one time worked at ISI. One morning when he saw his cubicle shrunk, he was found quietly sobbing. (When I met Parashar later, he was a renowned artist in Kolkata. This generous unassuming man was very popular with the street children near his hostel. He trained a poor village woman, Shakila, to do montage art, and she excelled in it and had several exhibitions both in India and abroad.) Read more »

 by Martin Butler

This is what my dad used to say when as an idealistic teenager I would propose various utopian schemes for reforming society. I suspect it encapsulates the response of many who view themselves as grounded in the ‘real world’. We might want to dismiss the saying as crude anti-intellectualism, but it’s worth further examination if only because it’s such a widely held sentiment.[1]

As a teenager my first thought in response to this was that if a theory doesn’t work in practice, it can’t be ‘alright’. The only test of a theory, I thought, is that it should have a viable practical application. This makes sense when we consider scientific theories: it is simply nonsensical to say gravity might be alright in theory but not in practice. It’s only alright in theory because it works in practice. Einstein’s theory of general relativity only became more than ‘just a theory’ when measurements taken during the solar eclipse of 1919 corroborated its predictions. It was clearly alright in practice, therefore also in theory. Of course, there are other ways in which a theory might at least appear to be ‘alright’ – it might, for example, be an elegant theory or possess a satisfying simplicity. Perhaps this is all those who use the saying mean, although I think there are more interesting issues lurking in the background, especially when we come to abstract political, social or moral theories. Read more »

Woke up, fell out of bed,
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup,
And looking up I noticed (it) was late
………………—John Lennon, A Day in the Life

Mystical Fun

Jim Culleny
9/14/16

by Joseph Shieber

Within the last few weeks, a high ranking official within the municipal government in Philadelphia resigned for making anti-Semitic remarks. Among those remarks, apparently, was the claim that the Holocaust film Schindler’s List was “Jewish propaganda.” 

It’s probably a sign that I’ve been thinking about these issues for too long, but my first thought was, Why is it an insult to call something propaganda? What’s wrong with propaganda?

The term “propaganda” itself stems only from the 17th century, when the Catholic Church formed the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, a committee of cardinals responsible for the Church’s efforts to proselytize non-believers. The use of the term as a denotation for a strategy for influencing public opinion, however, only really exploded at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, as journalism became professionalized. It was then that practitioners, theorists and politicians began to reflect on the ways in which governments and other organizations could use media outlets to shape public opinion.

Here, for example, is the Google Ngram viewer of “propaganda” from 1600 to 2016:

Although the term is less than 400 years old, the phenomenon of propaganda is far older. The pyramids of Egypt, to take one example, are propagandistic, attesting to the power of the Pharaohs who could enslave thousands of people to erect them. (But see this.) So are the coins stamped with the likenesses of the Roman emperors and circulated throughout the Mediterranean.

Given its ubiquity as a phenomenon, it is surprising how meager the theoretical discussion of propaganda actually is. Although there was a surge in works attempting to treat propaganda as a subject of academic inquiry in the first half of the 20th century, since then there have been comparatively few studies of propaganda, apart from largely historical assessments. Read more »

Moth

A tap at the black glass,
discrete, but urgent.
A night moth, big as
a beech leaf, burnt,
brown, wind-ripped,
flaps in its frame,
peddling high-step,
then ascends the pane
as if winched, hovers
against the jamb,
plunges free fall, recovers,
begins again to climb,
then crabs sidewards
across the window,
drifts back, then upwards
again, this time slow,
as if searching the glass
for a seam to pick,
for some sort of puchase,
a fault line to attack,
to work on, to ply
its cotton-thin but
infinite industry
against and force apart
the bruisingly firm
petals of this strange
rectangular bloom,
first seen as a wink of orange
inviting it down
from the dark pasture
and across the lawn
to the one-eyed house where
it now, with more hope
than method, more drive
than design, gropes
at the glass as it strives
to leave behind the night,
to cross the invisble thin
barrier, and taste the  bright
sweet life of the world within.

by Emrys Westacott

Beauford Delaney. James Baldwin (Circa 1945-50).

More here, here and here.

by Guy Elgat

A couple of weeks ago, on the pages of this website, some critical comments on Richard Rorty’s general argumentative style were made, and, sympathetic to these comments, this inspired me to join the discussion with some criticism of Rorty of my own and, while I am at it, throw in some criticism of Daniel Dennett, for, as will be seen, they both have some mindboggling and implausible things to say about the experience of pain. This, in my view, stems from one of the things they have in common despite their many and substantial differences, namely, their deep animosity to anything Cartesian.

The experience of pain, and indeed any qualitative experience at all – what is referred to in philosophical circles with that ugly word “qualia” – is the bugbear of all hard-nosed and tough-minded philosophers who, enamored of the methods and results of the sciences, seek to eliminate or reduce any and every residue of the mental that is subjective, first-person, infallible, private, intrinsic, or indeed, qualitative. These properties, characteristic of the Cartesian mind, though certainly not conceived by Descartes in these very terms, threaten the scientific image of the world where everything is supposed to be objective, quantitative, extrinsic, and open to experimentation, verification and revision. As such, qualitative, first-person experiences are to be, if not explained away, expelled or expunged from any respectable philosophy. And while Rorty himself was not in any way a science-enthusiast, he shared Dennett’s scientifically-infused critical attitude to the Cartesian mind: the Cartesian legacy in the philosophy of mind must (not without some glee) be quashed, no matter the philosophical cost. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Derek Neal

One of those mysterious concepts that we use as a criterion for judging a novel or film is a “sense of place.” I call it mysterious because it’s so often poorly defined—we recognize it because we can feel it, but what goes into creating it? How can one go about transporting a reader, for example, into a time and place via text? I’m under the impression that if asked this question, most people would mention things like using the five senses to describe a character’s impressions of his or her surroundings, or providing detail via adjectives and adverbs. This may be a gross generalization, but it’s what I’ve gathered from my experience in creative writing courses. It’s also the sense I get from reading short stories in literary journals, which seem to be where aspiring writers publish their attempts at fiction. I often find this writing technically good, but lifeless; it has all the components of effective writing but doesn’t add up to anything compelling. I don’t mean to suggest that I could do better, but I do know what I enjoy reading and what I don’t.

Another way to create a sense of place, and this is my preferred method as a reader, is to include an abundance of proper nouns relating to real places, streets, and buildings. I’m not sure why this works. It would seem that this way of writing should only make sense for readers who have visited the places being mentioned, while readers unfamiliar with the locations might feel something lacking and be unable to create an image in their minds. But do we ever really create an accurate image of what we’re reading, or do the words on the page merge with our own ideas and create something unique in the mind of each individual reader? I’d say it’s the latter. Read more »

A vineyard in Bozen, South Tyrol, from a friend’s balcony. Photo taken this past Friday evening.

by Dick Edelstein

The notion of historical memory has to do with the ways in which social groups and nations construct and identify with particular narratives about historical periods or events. This is the third in a series of four articles on this topic. The first two can be found here. In the first I discussed the treatment of archival information on Spanish Civil War casualties and victims, and the activities related to that issue undertaken by the Spanish NGO Innovation & Human Rights. In the second I examined the activities of Fired! Irish Women Poets and the Canon, a collective that worked to redress the exclusion of Irish women writers from the historical record. The present article is not the final one, as I previously announced, because my topic became too broad to fit comfortably in a single piece. In the concluding column, which will be published here in four weeks, I will consider various manifestations in Spain of the issue of historical memory, and I will discuss the perennial conflict between the need to remember and the need to forget, as well as conflicts that arise when different groups appeal to the right to remember.

In this article I discuss several of the embarrassingly large number of recent situations in Ireland in which the issue of historical memory has irrupted into the news and the public awareness. Besides the Fired! movement and the previously discussed Waking the Feminists campaign, these occurrences include the exploitation and abuse of unwed mothers at the Magdalene Laundries, the secret burial of babies in Tuam, the Roman Catholic church cover-up of sexual abuse by priests and nuns, and perennial issues related to British colonial oppression and sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Though I decided to go back to India, which institution I’d join there took some more time to determine. I had a standing invitation from K.N. Raj at the Delhi School of Economics. Even before I left MIT he asked me to teach a course in MIT’s summer-vacation period. I went and taught part of a course, which had good students (including Amitava Bose, who in his later professional life became close to me, served as a Director of the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata, and finally lost his long battle against cancer). But I soon found out that the only job Raj could offer me was that of a Readership (Associate Professorship), as a full Professorship was not yet vacant. Amartya-da advised me against accepting a Readership, since in Indian universities there could be ‘many a slip’ even when a Professorship became vacant. I went back to MIT after the vacation, and soon after I got a message from T.N. Srinivasan of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Delhi, offering a full Professorship there, which I accepted.

I was somewhat familiar with the Kolkata headquarters of ISI, a world-class center for statistics those days, with a leafy campus, but I did not know much about the Planning Unit of ISI in Delhi where I was to work. It did not have a campus at that time, it was originally linked to the Indian Planning Commission, which was housed in a large Government building, called Yojana Bhavan. When P.C. Mahalanobis, the distinguished statistician and founder-director of ISI was a member of the Planning Commission, from 1955 to 1967, he wanted this unit to provide research input to the planning process. By the time I joined ISI Mahalanobis had left the Planning Commission, and this unit turned itself into a general research outfit, though later some teaching of post-graduate students started. It continued being housed in that Government building until a new campus for the Delhi branch of ISI was completed. Read more »

by Usha Alexander

[This is the fifteenth 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.]

I began writing this series eighteen months ago to explore the human experience and human potential in the face of climate change, through the stories we tell. It’s been a remarkable journey for me as I followed trails of questions through new fields of ideas along entirely unexpected paths of enquiry. New vistas revealed themselves, sometimes perilous, always compelling. And so I went. The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve come to realize that our present environmental predicament is actually far worse off—that is to say, more threatening to near-term human wellbeing and civilizational integrity—than most of us recognize. This journey is changing me. So when I now look at contemporary works of fiction about climate change—so-called cli-fi, which I’d hoped might provide fresh insights—so much of it strikes me as somewhat underwhelming before the task: narrow, shallow, tepid, unimaginative, or even dishonest.

At the same time, a few conclusions have begun to coalesce in my mind. Some of these may seem controversial, largely because they run contrary to the common narratives that anchor our dominant understanding of how the world works—our stories of human exceptionalism, technological magic, and the tenets of capitalist faith. Indeed, many of my own assumptions and worldviews have been challenged, altered, or broken. In their stead, new ways of thinking have taken root, as I began seeing through at least some of our most cherished cultural fabrications to understand our quandary with a different perspective.

Learning these things has been emotionally taxing, but I don’t believe there’s any way forward without a clear-eyed, big-picture view of our planetary and civilizational plight. And so, for better or worse, I wish to sum up my thoughts here, before ending my explorations through this series, which I next expect to turn toward thoughts on how one might respond to it all: hope, despair, expectation, fear, carrying on, looking ahead, finding new stories. I trust there are others out there, who would also rather reckon with what’s happening than go on pretending we needn’t adjust our expectations for the future… although, I confess, there are certainly days when I envy those who are able to go on pretending. What follows isn’t for the faint of heart: Read more »

A Question of Necessity

“Can you tell me a certain thing
that is a moral fact?” is a
specious question
because the fact of the thing
exists as something essential
to the survival of homo sapiens
in creating civilization, though civilization
does not always live up to the necessity
of its essential thing.(the root
of what it means to be civilized) so the fact
of chaos, or free natural inclination,
becomes the universal mode simply because
morality, being thought subjective, and a
hard taskmaster, cannot be universally defined
and we all become hawks or vultures
feeding on carrion doves. it’s a question
whose answer itself is not an easy act
but is, nevertheless, with or without definition, love,
which is foremost not a thing we feel, but … do:
………………………………………………………………a moral act
…………………………………………………………….. made fact

Jim Culleny
9/13/20

by Jeroen Bouterse

Permanent Crisis

In one of the opening scenes of The Chair (2021), we are treated to an ideal-typical self-diagnosis of a struggling English department. Its new chair, Ji-Yoon Kim, narrates:

I’m not gonna sugarcoat this: we are in dire crisis. Enrollments are down more than 30 percent, our budget is being gutted. It feels like the sea is washing the ground out from under our feet. But in these unprecedented times, we have to prove that what we do in the classroom – modeling critical thinking, stressing the value of empathy – is more important than ever, and has value to the public good. It’s true, we can’t teach our students coding or engineering. What we teach them cannot be quantified, or put down on a resumé as a skill. But let us have pride in what we can offer future generations. We need to remind these young people that knowledge doesn’t just come from spreadsheets or Wiki entries. Hey, I was thinking this morning about our tech-addled culture and how our students are hyperconnected 24 hours a day, and I was reminded of something Harold Bloom wrote. He said: ‘Information is endlessly available to us. Where shall wisdom be found?’

The idea that a humanities department would be experiencing rough times is not a hard sell. The series uses the high-mindedness of this speech to let the silly and petty behavior of the faculty stand out more, but it also leaves little question that Ji-Yoon’s diagnosis is basically right: it is simultaneously extremely hard to defend the value of the humanities in this day and age, and especially important, because they offer something that runs counter to what we tend to believe the tendencies of that day and age to be – instrumentalism, materialism, marketability, et cetera.

Precisely what that value consists of is contested, and generic crisis talk is also a way for the chair not to become too specific – in particular, not to choose sides between the older, canon-oriented generation (the men in the scene nod in relief when Ji-Yoon name-drops Harold Bloom) and the younger, progressive staff. The main point now, however, is that this diagnosis is immediately recognizable: while there are skills that fit comfortably within the modern economy, Ji-Yoon says, the humanities are untimely; they provide a kind of knowledge that our society both needs and undervalues. Read more »