by Charlie Huenemann

Luxuriating in human ignorance was once a classy fad. Overeducated literary types would read Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, and soak themselves in the quite intelligent conclusion that ultimate reality cannot be known by Terran primates, no matter how many words they use. They would dwell on the suspicion that anything these primates conceive will be skewed by social, sexual, economic, and religious preconceptions and biases; that the very idea that there is an ultimate reality, with a definable character, may very well be a superstition forced upon us by so humble a force as grammar; that in an absurd life bounded on all sides by illusion, the very best a Terran primate might do is to at least be honest with itself, and compassionate toward its colleagues, so that we might all get through this thing together.

But classy fads fade. Indeed, one seemingly inviolable law of philosophical thinking is that any forthright declaration of human ignorance will be followed by a systematic explanation of that ignorance, decorated with special terms and diagrams. We just can’t let it go. Aristotle began his Metaphysics with the claim that all men by nature desire to know, and we would be right to quibble a bit: maybe some men do and some men don’t, and maybe some women also desire to know, and some don’t, and perhaps the most sensible thing to say is that many people like to pretend to know — which would have made for a much more promising beginning to his treatise, come to think of it. But we weren’t there, and Aristotle chugged on ahead as a man who desired to know everything except his own limits.

These days we are more Aristotle than Kierkegaard, and not without some reason: the work in telecommunications and particle accelerators and medical labs suggests that we are not merely banging rocks together. But there is a sizeable gap between (a) separate individuals who, one after another, know quite a lot about baud rates, gluons, and mRNA, and (b) individuals who greedily stake their claims to species-wide knowledge of all these thing together, summed up into a comprehensive idea of the nature of reality as a whole. That is to say, it is not at all difficult to find books on the broad scope of human knowledge written by authors who really know nothing other than that there are other people who know a lot about many separate things. We might simply call these authors journalists, but truly they include people from all walks of life; really, just about anyone with an internet connection. And those with academic degrees are the worst offenders. (Hello, my name is Charlie.) Read more »

by Azra Raza

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

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
—Walt Whitman

When King Midas asked Silenus what the best thing for man is, Silenus replied, “It is better not to have been born at all. The next best thing for man would be to die quickly.”

Herein lies the essential contradiction; we begin to die from the moment of birth.  Walt Whitman not only embraces this existential incongruity, he asserts that being contradictory is a positive, desirable virtue: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes).” If you don’t contradict yourself, you are leading a simple, unexamined inner life. His large persona contains opposing, conflicting, paradoxical “multitudes” providing opportunities for self-discovery, and for change. Change is a good thing. Whitman’s friend Emerson summed it up: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Enter cancer. The only known lifeform that defies mortality, surpassing the life-death contradiction by achieving man’s ultimate dream of living forever. But at what cost? The immortalized cells burn and blast their way through membranes and organs, scorching tissues, fracturing bones, leaving behind a bloodbath of death and destruction, creeping and crawling into local sanctuaries, swimming in blood vessels, riding in lymphatics, invading new sites, deforming, butchering, exterminating, annihilating, until, in a final act of genocidal-suicidal-homicidal carnage, consuming the mortal host and the immortal unwanted guest alike, a wasted body ends upon a funeral pyre with kilograms of tumor.

Cancer can be perceived as an independent life-form. It is not a parasite because it originates in the host tissue. It is not a “normal” tissue culture cell line that has been induced to grow in vitro, already half-way to transformation. And it is not like jellyfish and other lower order species that can revert to an earlier stage of their lifecycle under stress and restart as newborns. It behaves like a new animal that arises within an animal. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

“To bring attention to this sort of issues is to venture into the psychological factors that underlie nationalist beliefs…and here too the linguistic input is relevant”, I concluded last month, promising to return to this issue in four weeks’ time. And to promise is to send forth, so here we are now.

What else can the linguist say about the nationalist phenomenon, then? As I was at pains to stress last week, the generative approach to the study of language constitutes a cognitive as well as a psychological theory of cognition, and in this sense, its theoretical tools can potentially characterise other mental phenomena, especially those that may be similar to language in one way or another.[i] This seems to be the case for a number of cultural customs, some of which are rather central to the nationalist outlook. Speaking a common language is often the key to developing a national identity within a large population (and thus to properly establish a nation-state), but other factors can be as important.[ii]

The point of contact between language and culture as the linguist views these phenomena is the fact that the linguist’s is a story of how a collection of units and principles combine to yield a rich set of possibilities – mental grammars and the external languages these grammars produce – and something along these lines appears to be true of some forms of culture as well. A number of examples can be found in some of the fields linguistics has influenced over the years, from cognitive psychology and sociology to philosophy. In A Theory of Justice, that well-known classic of political philosophy, John Rawls draws an analogy between the moral judgements people entertain in day-to-day situations and what linguists call grammatical judgements, the also common-enough ability to judge whether a sentence is acceptable or not in one’s own language.[iii] And just as the linguist argues that the capacity to draw grammatical judgements is based on a rich underlying grammar that native speakers are not privy to and whose study require the skills of linguists, Rawls wondered whether this sort of approach was also necessary to account for our capacity to draw moral judgements. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Untitled. April 2021

Digital photograph.

by Nicola Sayers

I recently spent a couple of years living in Chicago, a city that I loved so much it still looms in my daydreams as my ‘one that got away’. During that time, in addition to exploring the many and varied neighbourhoods that make up the city itself, I also found myself regularly drawn further afield, where I developed something of an unusual pastime. I would take the train from the city, where I lived, to one of Chicago’s many suburbs — Winnetka (of Home Alone fame), Oak Park (of architect Frank Lloyd Wright fame), Glen Ellyn (of absolutely no fame) — and spend the day wandering aimlessly, dawdling, observing. Flâneur-ing, if you will.

The flâneur is an unlikely figure in the American suburbs. Implausible, even. The term is best known from the writing of Walter Benjamin, in whose reflections on Baudelaire’s Paris the flâneur is seen as an essentially modern — and urban — figure. The flâneur, as (s)he walks, encounters the city as a place of surprising turns, forgotten histories, discordant presents, and unfulfilled pasts.

In explicit contrast to such a Baudelairean scene, theorist Marc Augé describes what he calls ‘non-places’: motorways, hotels, airports; the stripmalls and largely purpose-built neighbourhoods that make up suburbia. If the Baudelairean city is one in which layers of history sit atop and astride one another, are built into its very fabric, it is exactly this presence of the past which is missing in Augé’s non-places. The aimless wanderer is implausible precisely because these spaces — these non-places — have typically been planned from scratch with very specific purposes in mind (transport, commerce, leisure, etc), and it is true, in this vein, that many people move through the suburbs in the way the planners intended: they drive from their houses to the malls when they want to eat, to the gyms at the stripmalls when they want to work out, and so on.  Read more »

by Deanna K. Kreisel (doctorwaffle.substack.com)

One of the most painful aspects of losing a beloved to death is the feeling that you, and the world, are moving on while they remain forever in a rapidly receding past. I think a lot about how my dear friend Elizabeth will never know that the star of “The Apprentice” became President of the United States of America, and it grieves me that my mom and dad will not get to enjoy my moving closer to home again after they died. Probably there’s a lengthy German compound noun for this phenomenon, but I will coin the English term “fugitive melancholy” to refer to this painful sense of time fleeing away from dead ones left behind.

We can also feel fugitive melancholy, proleptically, for ourselves. We will live to see only a little bit of the future, compared to the sweeping sense of historical scale we gain by contemplating the past. Retrospection gives us the narcissistic sense that we are omniscient observers of human events, and also tricks us into thinking that this moment in which we are living is the culmination of time. We are always in the position of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, his face turned toward the past while history “unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.” In the same essay, Benjamin remarks that we do not feel envy for the future, that our idea of happiness is steeped in the time in which we happen to live. Yet I disagree. The melancholy we feel at the prospect of our own deaths is indeed a species of envy, at least of the near future: of those who will witness the outcome of current events. As we grow older we fall prey to a frustrated desire for narrative closure, knowing that we will not get to see how everything turns out.

Fugitive melancholy might help us understand our mass resistance to meaningful action on climate change. Unconscious resentment at the thought of our own deaths leads to an inability to fully imagine—or care for—the world after we are gone. Naomi Klein recently differentiated what she terms “soft denial” from the hard-core refusal to believe the consensus of the scientific community on climate change. Those in soft denial understand that global warming is happening and are even capable of occasionally—briefly—taking in its full implications, “but then, inevitably, we seem to forget. Remember and then forget.” Yet in the seven years since Klein coined the term “soft denial,” the problem has mutated, shifted form: “denial” no longer seems to capture our current state of near-constant helplessness and despair. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mark Harvey

In the spring of 2018, Earl Cooper noticed that the wild horses roaming on the desert where he lived were suffering terribly from the ongoing drought in eastern Utah. The springs where they watered were drying up and there was very little grass with the lack of moisture. On his forays into the desert, he came across horses too weak to stand up and some that had already succumbed to starvation and thirst.

Cooper was a white man who had been living on the Navajo Nation near Monument Valley for about 25 years. From a young age, he had been obsessed with horses, and his home in the Utah desert afforded him endless opportunities to ride for miles and miles with distant horizons of vermilion cliffs and canyons.

On his rides, he could see the two rocky lobes that defined the Bears Ears 40 miles to the north and he could see Navajo Mountain, known to the tribe as Naatsisʼáán, 40 miles to the south. And there were the bands of wild horses roaming the country, sometimes curiously approaching Cooper and sometimes gliding away from him at a graceful lope over the rugged terrain.

Cooper had found companionship with horses nearly his entire life. “There’s a feeling you get with them,” he says. “It’s a camaraderie. Horses are our best friends and helped us pioneer the west.”

So that spring as he saw more and more horses where he lived suffering, he said to himself, “I gotta do something. If I don’t, no one will.” Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

A rose is a rose is…well, you know. Botanically, a rose is the flower of a plant in the genus Rosa in the family Rosaceae. But roses carry the weight of so much symbolism that a rose is seldom only a rose.

Their symbolic luster is so intense that it casts an alluring light not only on the word rose itself but also on many of the phrases that contain it. A song called “The Last Zinnia of Summer” could never be as melancholy as “The Last Rose of Summer,” no matter how much you like zinnias. When I was a child and a teenager, I read a lot of things that I only half-understood. One of these was the phrase attar of roses, which had a mysterious and lovely sound to me. I eventually learned that it’s an essential oil made using damask roses—a beautiful common name for Rosa damascene. I had a vague impression of damask as a luxurious silky or satiny fabric, so I thought damask roses must have especially soft satiny petals, but in fact the species name was given to them because they were thought by some to be native to Damascus. The fabric is also named for Damascus, which was once an important producer and trade center for damasks.

There’s also a glow in my mind around concepts that are less directly related to roses. Rose gold is an alloy of gold with copper and perhaps silver; the phrase is especially luminous to me and reminds me of sunrise. Ashes of roses—another term I ran across in my early reading, and one that delights me still—describes a soft dusty pink color. Read more »

you whos teh aiye
ait nus korook wahv rai
ais see chzut na sue kul
ais ma che sanaan uth bilqul

—Rehman Rahi

this year again they came
wavered warbled
where we thoughtlessly
felled that tree

—Translated from the original Kashmiri by Rafiq Kathwari

by Mindy Clegg

Today punk is a relatively celebrated subculture. Amy Poehler recently directed Moxie, a film about teen girls influenced by the punk riot girl movement of the 1990s, using zines (a self-published magazine popular in punk circles) to combat misogyny at their school. The film includes an appearance from the Linda Lindas, an all-girl punk band from LA covering Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl.” Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill was recently interviewed with her partner Adam “Adrock” Horowitz of the Beastie Boys by none other than journalist Dan Rather. A recent Guardian article argued that pop punk is the “sound of 2021.” But mainstream culture was not always accepting of punk. During the 1980s, a “punk panic” emerged that positioned punk as a dire threat threat to public order. Punks were cast as nihilistic, destructive, and dangerous villains. Punk panic was found in the west and in the communist East. Two examples are in the US and in East Germany. In both cases, the authorities considered punks to be a danger to the social fabric, showing that during the Cold War, public order was considered critical in both the capitalist west and the communist east. Read more »

Some kind of water lily-type plants growing on the surface of a pond in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Photo taken last week. Do you know what exactly these flowers are?

by Pranab Bardhan

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

By the time I started regular school my father’s home-schooling had prepared me enough to sail through the various half-yearly and annual examinations relatively easily. Indian exams, certainly then and to a large extent even now, do not test your talent or learning ability, they are mainly a test of your memorizing capacity and dexterity in writing coherent answers in a frantic race against time. I found out that I was reasonably proficient in both, and that it is for the lack of proficiency in these two qualities some of my friends, whom I considered highly imaginative and creative, were not doing so well in school.

My father did not believe in ‘positive feedback’, would not praise me for doing quite well in the various exams in school (and later in university)—he used to tell my mother that overpraise may go to my head– instead, he’d ask me why the gap in my marks (those days marks were in absolute numbers) from the student who was ranked second has not increased compared to last time!

Looking back, I think this lack of positive feedback served one good purpose in my later life. It has helped me in trying not to overestimate myself in any capacity. Even when other people have gushed with praise for me on various occasions in my professional career, while that has been pleasant, it was for myself largely water off a duck’s back (in a symmetric way, facing attacks and criticisms has not usually dislodged my footing). I usually tell myself that I more or less know what I am worth, nothing more, nothing less. I think I am not prone to false modesty, but I remember what Churchill said, in his usual pompous haughty way, about Attlee: when someone praised Attlee as a modest man, Churchill reportedly said, “He has much to be modest about”. I know very well I have much to be modest about. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

On June 15 of this year, the National Constitution Center hosted a session entitled, “Free Speech, Media, Truth and Lies”. The topic for the session, as described by the National Constitution Center website, was “Should the government or private companies identify and regulate truth and lies?” There were three speakers. Harvard Law School Professor (and former Dean) Martha Minow argued for the role of government regulation to reverse the tide of internet misinformation, the Cato Institute’s Paul Matzko argued against a government role (predictably; he’s at the Cato Institute), and Jonathan Rauch (of Brookings), author of the seemingly omnipresent recent book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, landing somewhere in the middle. (There’s a nice write-up of the discussion by Rachel Reed at Harvard Law Today.)

Minnow sketched a number of remedies to address the problems plaguing today’s online information ecosystems. To reverse the decline of local newspapers and legacy media publications, Minnow suggested that online media outlets should be required to provide “payment for the circulation of material developed by others.” Minnow also discussed the revival of the Fairness Doctrine for the internet age, mandating coverage of a range of ideas by online media sources.

Matzko pushed back most directly against this latter suggestion of Minnow’s, the idea of reviving the Fairness Doctrine. As he put it, “Few things send a shudder down my spine quite like hearing we should apply a public interest standard.” (Remember, Cato Institute.) Matzko drew on research that he did for his book, The Radio Right, which documented how the Kennedy Administration used the Fairness Doctrine to censor critics of Kennedy’s legislative agenda. Read more »

by Azra Raza

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

Everyone agrees that early cancer detection saves lives. Yet, practically everyone is busy studying end-stage cancer.

Reviewing the history of carcinogenesis from 1911 on, I become unspeakably, depressed. Demoralized. For fifty years, massive intellectual and financial resources have been invested pursuing one dream. In the 1970s, a model evolved suggesting that one or a handful of mutations cause cancer that can be cured by one or a handful of magic bullets. Following a couple of early successes, the paradigm was tacitly accepted and has prevailed ever since. Sadly, it has not delivered as well for other cancers. Benefit to patients is nowhere near the enormity of the capital sunk.

The confidence in the model is such that most financial incentives are offered for studying advanced cancers with the wishful thinking that targeting mutations will save dying patients. Perhaps targeting mutations is the key, but all treatment works better in early disease.

It is not cancer that kills but the delay in treatment. The writing is on the wall. Treatment of end-stage cancers, for the most part, is at a dead end since 1930s. The disease has to be found early. As early as possible. There is no reason to settle for Stage I because, the treatment, even for this early stage, is still Paleolithic. We must find cancer at its birth. Every one claims to know this. So why isn’t everyone studying it? Read more »

Six years ago at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, I was standing under sculptor, Xu Bing’s, two Phoenixes.  The cathedral is huge and beautiful and so were the artist’s sculptures. Our friend, Bill, who is a warm, personable, and very knowledgeable docent at the cathedral had suggested to my wife and me  that we should see the Phoenix exhibit, and he was right. Standing in the nave under Xu Bing’s creatures I was awed.  While Bill, his wife, and mine went on ahead I lingered until Bill walked back, smiled, and asked, “Are you having religious experience?” As I recall I said, “I don’t know— maybe.” The fact was, the beauty Xu Bing had created with his assemblage of common, industrial materials, all in flight in that still, immense, gothic space was stunning. The poem came a couple of days later.

Xu Bing’s Phoenixes At The Cathedral Of St. John The Divine
.

standing under Phoenix and his lofted bride
both newly risen in the nave of a church
at a quarter of the height from floor to vault
—I am small and still beneath their static glide.

a cross in the distance where they might have perched,
is centered on choirs set on either side
as simple as the nexus of sinners’ faults
at the crux of the moment their songs might rise.

these ninety foot creatures made of sweat and steel
and of light and of industry and touch and feel
and of hoses and spades and of wire and sight
and of chain and of pipes and of silent nights
and of canisters pulleys ducts and vents
and of reason for rebirth to where innocence went
and of hope and contrition and of blood and bone
all Phoenixes together here un-alone

Jim Culleny
1/4/15

by Derek Neal

As an aspiring writer of fiction, I like to try and understand the mechanics of what I’m reading. I attempt to ascertain how a writer achieves a certain effect through the manipulation of language. What must happen for us to get “wrapped up” in a story, to lose track of time, to close a book and feel that the world has shifted ever so slightly on its axis? The first step, I think, is for writers to persuade readers to believe in the world of the story. In a first-person narrative, this means that the reader must accept the world of the novel as filtered through the subjective viewpoint of the narrator. But it’s not really the outside world that we are asked to accept, it’s the consciousness of the narrator. To create what I’m calling consciousness—basically, a feeling of being in the world—and to allow the reader to experience it is one of the joys of reading. But how does a writer achieve this mysterious feat?

One way may be to have the narrator use language that mirrors and reproduces their inner state. This is often easiest to see in the opening pages of a novel, as this is where a writer will establish a baseline for the story that follows. One such example is Teju Cole’s novel Open City, which begins mid-sentence: “And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.” It is a strange sentence with which to begin a story. The “and” implies something prior, but we are oblivious to what this could be. The “so” is a discourse marker, something we would say after a lull in spoken conversation, perhaps to change the subject. But once again, we’re unaware of what the previous subject might be. The effect is that we, as readers, are swept along with the narrator on one of his walks, beginning the novel in step with him, in media res not just in plot but also in terms of grammar. Read more »

by Dick Edelstein

Following Hulu’s release of “The United States vs Billie Holiday”, the singer’s musical career has become a topic of discussion. The docu-drama is based on events in her life after she got out of prison in 1948, having served eight months on a set up drug charge. Now she was again the target of a campaign of harassment by federal agents. Narcotics boss Harry Anslinger was obsessed with stopping her from singing that damn song – Abel Meeropol’s haunting ballad “Strange Fruit”, based on his poem about the lynching of Black Americans in the South. Anslinger feared the song would stir up social unrest, and his agents promised to leave Holiday alone if she would agree to stop performing it in public. And, of course, she refused. In this particular poker game, the top cop had tipped his hand, revealing how much power Holiday must have had to be able to disturb his inner peace.

Writing in The Nation, jazz musician Ethan Iverson noted that all three films based on Holiday’s life have delighted in tawdry episodes without managing to convey the measure of her musical achievement. Hilton Als, in a review in The New Yorker, was unable to conceal his disdain for the recent biopic, observing “you won’t find much of Billie Holiday in it—and certainly not the superior intelligence of a true artist.” Both writers insist that Holiday’s memory has been short-changed in the media, and it follows that the public cannot be fully aware of her contribution to musical culture. Iverson’s thoughtful piece analyzes her many innovative contributions to musicianship and jazz vocal interpretation, while here I propose to comment on only a couple of these. But first I want to call attention to the ineffable quality of Holiday’s singing, how her delivery of lyrics and free-flowing phrasing of melody tug at the emotions. Those effects defy analysis; you have to hear Billie Holiday’s singing to know the excitement it conveys. Feeling that emotion comes easily, but describing exactly how she generates it is impossible. Read more »