by Brooks Riley
Context Collapse: A Conversation with Ryan Ruby
by Andrea Scrima
Ryan Ruby is a novelist, translator, critic, and poet who lives, as I do, in Berlin. Back in the summer of 2018, I attended an event at TOP, an art space in Neukölln, where along with journalist Ben Mauk and translator Anne Posten, his colleagues at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop, he was reading from work in progress. Ryan read from a project he called Context Collapse, which, if I remember correctly, he described as a “poem containing the history of poetry.” But to my ears, it sounded more like an academic paper than a poem, with jargon imported from disciplines such as media theory, economics, and literary criticism. It even contained statistics, citations from previous scholarship, and explanatory footnotes, written in blank verse, which were printed out, shuffled up, and distributed to the audience. Throughout the reading, Ryan would hold up a number on a sheet of paper corresponding to the footnote in the text, and a voice from the audience would read it aloud, creating a spatialized, polyvocal sonic environment as well as, to be perfectly honest, a feeling of information overload. Later, I asked him to send me the excerpt, so I could delve deeper into what he had written at a slower pace than readings typically afford—and I’ve been looking forward to seeing the finished project ever since. And now that it is, I am publishing the first suite of excerpts from Context Collapse at Statorec, where I am editor-in-chief.
Andrea Scrima: Ryan, I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to start with a little context. Tell us about the overall sweep of your poem, and how, since you mainly work in prose, you began writing it.
Ryan Ruby: Thank you for this very kind introduction, Andrea! That was a particularly memorable evening for me too, as my partner was nine months pregnant at the time, and I was worried that we’d have to rush to the hospital in the middle of the reading. But you remember quite well: a poem containing the history of poetry, with a tip of the hat to Ezra Pound, of course, who described The Cantos as “a poem containing history.” Read more »
Poem Without a Title
Your laughter was a car engine sputtering. Your peers were whiz kids in the dot com world. You showed me notes you’d made in the margins of all seven volumes by Proust. You said Sentimental Education wasn’t sentimental enough. You rolled your own leaves reading Ulysses, finishing it in three nights flat, but you wished to read it in one day to parallel the book’s action. “Impossible,” I said. “Impossible doesn’t exist in my vocabulary,” you said. “This can’t be a poetic line,” you said, shaking your head at my poem. “It’s running all the way to Pakistan.” I was nearly your dad’s age, yet I looked up to you literally and physically. My last memory of you standing against a pine, at my brother’s home with views of Long Island Sound, aiming your pee at the tree. You were the pine you peed on. You were the sputtering car engine hugging the tree you peed on moments ago. I pointed to the crescent moon. “Wow,” you said, rolling your leaves, “let’s read Das Kapital.” Nearly 10 years after your childhood chum, my nephew, was killed in Afghanistan, you went from your basement to au petit coin retrouvé or, depending on mood, au petit coin perdu — your Acura parked in a shuttered garage of your home in Scarsdale. You reclined on the driver’s seat, popped a pill of Topamax to dumbfound the snakes in your mind, chased the pill with a gulp of Perrier and to warm up the car, you gunned the engine.
For R. Q. 25 December 1972 —17 March 2001
By Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit
Looking Up with 2020 Vision: Astronomers’ Views of our Night Sky
by Carol A Westbrook
Have you ever looked up at a dark night sky filled with millions of stars, and felt the wonder and awe of the universe? It’s a rare experience in 2020, since the night sky is so bright due to light pollution, that even the brightest stars appear dim. Fortunately, don’t need a dark sky to appreciate the wonder of the heavens; you only have to have a look at what today’s astronomers can see.
Astronomers now use telescopes that view with more wavelengths than the human eye can see, and process the images with advanced computing, to reveal fantastic visions that even Galileo could not have imagined as he turned his little telescope towards the moon and planets. Views of everything from our neighboring planets to planets in different solar systems, to distant galaxies and even black holes! Read on, I’ll show you some of my favorites from the skies of 2020. Read more »
Monday Photo
Photo taken from the window (with partial internal reflections) of a train speeding from Bruneck to Franzensfeste last week.
Stuck, Ch. 15. What We Become: Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit”
by Akim Reinhardt
Stuck is a weekly serial appearing at 3QD every Monday through early April. The Prologue is here. The table of contents with links to previous chapters is here.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was an odd fellow who eventually became someone else.
Born in 1832, he was the fourth of twelve children, and descended from a long line of English soldiers and priests all named Charles Dodgson. His parents were first cousins. He stuttered. A childhood fever left him deaf in one ear. As an adult he would suffer from migraines and epilepsy.
At age 12 he was sent away to school. He hated it. Still, he aced his classes and went on to Christ Church College in Oxford. He did not always apply himself, but nonetheless excelled at mathematics and eventually earned a teaching position. He remained at the school for the rest of his life.
Dodgson was conservative, stuffy, and shy. He was awed by aristocrats and sometimes snobbish to his social inferiors. He was mildly self-deprecating and earnestly religious. He had a reputation for being a very good charades player. He invented a number of gadgets, including a stamp collecting folder, a note taking tablet, a new type of money order, and a steering device for tricycles. He also created an early version of Scrabble. He liked little girls.
Dodgson enjoyed photographing and drawing nude children. He never married or had any children of his own. Whether his affection for pre-pubescent girls was sexual, or merely tied to Victorian notions of children representing innocence, is still debated. In the prime of his adulthood, one girl in particular caught his fancy: eleven year old Alice Liddell.
Dodgson spent much time with the Liddell family. A favorite activity was taking Alice and her two siblings out on a rowboat, where he would tell them stories. Alice so enjoyed the stories that she begged Charles to write them down. He presented her with a handwritten, illustrated collection in 1864. He called it Alice’s Adventures Underground. Read more »
Monday, February 10, 2020
The Feminist Case For Men’s Rights
by Thomas Wells
The case for men’s rights follows straightforwardly from the feminist critique of the structural injustice of gender rules and roles. Yes, these rules are wrong because they oppress women. But they are also wrong because they oppress men, whether by causing physical, emotional and moral suffering or callously neglecting them. Unfortunately the feminist movement has tended to neglect this, assuming that if women are the losers from a patriarchal social order, then men must be the winners.
While it is bad luck to be born a woman in our society, it is also bad luck to be born a man, in ways that relate directly and indirectly to gender norms and rules. For example, men die significantly earlier than women in just about every society and historical period known to us. The causes are manifold and interact in complex ways. They include physiological factors (notably the harmful effects of testosterone on the immune system) that make human males frailer than females at every stage of development, even before birth. Gender norms about the value of men’s lives aren’t directly responsible for this, but they nonetheless play an indirect role in deflecting away public concern and action. Other factors reducing men’s life-expectancy are more directly related to social context and upbringing, such as men’s propensity for risky behaviour (such as smoking) and violence. Not only are these intimately connected with gender roles and rules, they are also shielded from scrutiny by them: Men are supposed to be aggressive risk-takers, and we are also blamed for being so. Read more »
A Brecht Poem, On his Birthday
by Joseph Shieber
Bertolt Brecht, the German poet and playwright, was born on this day 122 years ago, February 10, 1898.
Fearing persecution by the Nazis for his writing and leftist political views, Brecht left Germany in February 1933, shortly after Hitler assumed the German Chancellorship.
At the time that he wrote the poem “Frühling 1938 / I”, Brecht was living in exile on the Danish island of Fyn.
Frühling 1938 / I (German)
Heute, Ostersonntag früh
Ging ein plötzlicher Schneesturm über die Insel.
Zwischen den grünenden Hecken lag Schnee. Mein junger Sohn
Holte mich zu einem Aprikosenbäumchen an der Hausmauer
Von einem Vers weg, in dem ich auf diejenigen mit dem Finger deutete
Die einen Krieg vorbereiteten, der
Den Kontinent, diese Insel, mein Volk, meine Familie und mich
Vertilgen mag. Schweigend
Legten wir einen Sack
Über den frierenden Baum.
Spring 1938 / I (English)
Today, early Easter Sunday
A sudden snowstorm came over the island.
Snow lay between the budding bushes. My young son
Brought me to an apricot sapling at the house wall,
Away from a verse in which I pointed with my finger at those
Who prepared a war that may well mean, for
The continent, the island, my people, my family and me,
Extermination. Silent
We placed a sack
Over the freezing tree.
Translation: Joseph Shieber
Disunity: the perennial problem that plagues progressives
by Emrys Westacott
“In unity is strength!” This is one of the foundational maxims repeated by progressive forces everywhere. As history has often demonstrated, though, unity is easier to affirm than to achieve. And the consequences of failing to achieve it can be dire.
Germany 1932
The direst of all dire examples of progressive disunity helping to bring about a horrendous outcome was that which allowed Hitler to attain power in Germany in 1933. Here are the results of the November 1932 general election:
Nazi Party 33.1%
Social Democrat Party 20.4%
Communist Party 16.9%
Catholic Centre Party 12.4%
German National People’s Party 8.3%
Bavarian People’s party 3%
The Social Democrats and Communists combined received more votes than Hitler’s Nazis. But in the early 1930s, even though the threat posed by the Nazis was becoming increasingly dangerous and apparent, those opposed to them could not form a united front. The Social Democrat leadership viewed communists and fascists as essentially the same, and they chose to support the right-wing Hindenburg government as a “lesser evil” to (and as a bulwark against) Hitler. The communists labelled the Social Democrats “social fascists” and also rejected the idea of collaboration against the Nazis. In January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Less than eight weeks later, Germany was a dictatorship. Many of those who couldn’t work together to oppose Hitler would soon find themselves suffering and dying together in Nazi concentration camps. Twelve years later, more than seventy million people lay dead, victims of World War II, and much of Europe lay in ruins. Read more »
Perceptions
On Loss and Stains
by Abigail Akavia
A. E. Stallings’ long poem “Lost and Found” (from her 2018 collection Like) delivers a mesmerizing meditation on loss in its various and myriad forms. I first encountered it read out loud, like a true epic, and I was gripped, astonished at once by the breadth of the journey Stallings invites us on as by the intimacy of its landscapes. A journey from the prosaic, to a Virgilian terrain of shadows and truths, and back again.
The protagonist of this journey is a poet-mother—can we just agree to call her Stallings?—who starts off on her hands and knees, crawling on the floor in search of a lost toy. In her dream that night, she is led by a woman—she later learns it is divine Mnemosyne herself, Memory, Mother of the Muses—on a guided tour through “the valley on the moon / Where everything misplaced on earth accrues, / And here all things are gathered that you lose.” I found it a delightfully feminist act on Stallings’ part, to cast herself as a hero who crosses the threshold between our world and the beyond, in order to come back to the land of bills and paperwork and lunches waiting to be packed for school, armed with wisdom. A journey that reveals and affirms her position in this mundane world as a poet, a “sieve” who lets the moments pass through her, an artist noticing and writing them down. Read more »
The Cancer Questions Project, Part 28: Jaroslaw Maciejewski
Jaroslaw Maciejewski, MD, PhD is a Chairman of Translational Hematology and Oncology Research at the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute, and a professor of medicine at Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. He is also Associate Director for Translational Research and Co-Leader, Hematopoietic and Immune Cancer Biology Program, Case Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Maciejewski is recognized for his leadership in finding better treatments and a cure for bone marrow failure diseases.
Azra Raza, author of The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, and 3QD editor, decided to speak to more than 20 leading cancer investigators and ask each of them the same five questions listed below. She videotaped the interviews and over the next months we will be posting them here one at a time each Monday. Please keep in mind that Azra and the rest of us at 3QD neither endorse nor oppose any of the answers given by the researchers as part of this project. Their views are their own. One can browse all previous interviews here.
1. We were treating acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with 7+3 (7 days of the drug cytosine arabinoside and 3 days of daunomycin) in 1977. We are still doing the same in 2019. What is the best way forward to change it by 2028?
2. There are 3.5 million papers on cancer, 135,000 in 2017 alone. There is a staggering disconnect between great scientific insights and translation to improved therapy. What are we doing wrong?
3. The fact that children respond to the same treatment better than adults seems to suggest that the cancer biology is different and also that the host is different. Since most cancers increase with age, even having good therapy may not matter as the host is decrepit. Solution?
4. You have great knowledge and experience in the field. If you were given limitless resources to plan a cure for cancer, what will you do?
5. Offering patients with advanced stage non-curable cancer, palliative but toxic treatments is a service or disservice in the current therapeutic landscape?
A Young Woman in Lahore
by Samia Altaf
Some months ago, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I went to my bank’s ATM in the main market close to where I live in the Defence Housing Authority, Lahore’s latest fancy suburb, which is organized and managed by the military.
The market, usually bustling, was quiet that day. There was barely anyone around, and no one at all where I was, at the end of the building. When I came out after withdrawing my cash, I saw a rickshaw parked between me and my car. The rickshaw driver was leaning out of his vehicle, his eyes red, hair dirty and uncombed, his clothes mismatched (a shirt of sorts, alternate buttons missing, and scruffy cloth trousers); he looked completely demented. He was looking intently at me.
Oh no, I thought. This is a holdup. There is no one around except the two of us, and this fellow knows I have just taken money out of the ATM and have to go past him to get to my car. I tried to be brave, and, clutching my purse tight, said in a gruff voice, “I do not need a rickshaw, I have my car right here.”
He stepped out in front of me, forcing me to stop, and said in Punjabi, “I am not offering you a ride, I need your help.”
“What kind of help?” I asked, stalling while contemplating a quick dash past his left side.
“My wife is sick and I need money for the doctor.” Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
“You know Her Life Was Saved by Rock & Roll”: Myth-making and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame
by Mindy Clegg
The Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame recently announced this year’s inductees; the Doobie Brothers, T. Rex, Nine Inch Nails, the Notorious B.I.G, Depeche Mode, and Whitney Houston, with the Ahmet Ertegun Award (for members of the industry who are not the talent) going to Jon Landau and Irving Azoff. Not too long after, the usual recriminations emerged; for example Judas Priest was on the list of bands for inclusion that did not make the cut this year. Richie Faulkner, guitarist for the classic metal band expressed his contempt for the institution on hearing the news. Some grumbled about Houston’s induction, as she was not a “rock” musician.1
Each year when new inductees are announced a fresh round of anti-Hall of Fame rhetoric bursts forth on blogs and in comment sections. There are some good reasons to criticize the process—plenty of foundational artists have been ignored, the fringes that have given rock its longevity are often glossed over, plus there has been a clear preference for white male artists over others. These rarely make up the bulk of the complaints though. I would argue that critics have missed the point of the institution (with the exception of John Lydon, perhaps). Rather than existing to promote an accurate history of popular music in the age of its mechanical reproduction and to celebrate one critical genre of music, the organization exists for one primary purpose: to promote the industry narrative of popular recorded music. This fact shapes all aspects of the induction process and the spectacle of each ceremony. Read more »
Poem
Socrates’ Complaint About the New Technology of Writing
This discord of words
left in our heads by dead men—their
twisted syllables—this braid is
coming loose again. Those yet-unborn will be
the guardians of our thoughts.
They will be the hearers of many.
They will have learned nothing.
***
Now what we had by heart
no longer belongs to us.
The things we find (blossoms unfurling beside
the road) we catalogue and collectively
keep.
We write them down as a memorial.
***
Though there are times
when we see into the blankness
beyond this world to Olympus—that rush of light—
when we try to write it, the vision
becomes a few chords cradled on a mountain wind.
And if you who are yet to live
ask us what it is we’ve seen—if you reach for me—even
in a dream—you will wake to your own world’s
empty wind and the silence
that comes after speech—.
by Amanda Beth Peery
Fleshy with a Bad Attitude: Metaphor and Wine Tasting Notes
by Dwight Furrow
The wine community is often accused of being snobby and elitist. The language used to describe wine is one source of this innuendo. Although most people have become accustomed to the fruit descriptors used in wine reviews, when wine writers wax poetic by describing wines as “graphite mixed with pâte de fruit”, even some wine professionals get up in arms.
The general complaint is that metaphorical attributions are too subjective and ambiguous. When a wine is described as “a streetwalker” or “sinewy” it’s unclear to some readers what features of the wine are being described. The further inference drawn is that these are just attempts to make wine descriptions less monotonous or call attention to the writer’s talent for verbal calisthenics without getting at something important about the wine.
There are several things to say about these objections. Read more »
Monday Photo
Surprisingly, one of my wife’s rose bushes outside our house started to bloom in January.
Stuck, Ch. 14. Finding Lemmy: Motörhead, “Ace of Spades”
by Akim Reinhardt
Stuck is a weekly serial appearing at 3QD every Monday through early April. The Prologue is here. The table of contents with links to previous chapters is here.
I first heard Motörhead in 1988. I was a DJ at WCBN-FM, the student-run college radio station in Ann Arbor, Michigan. During my late night shift, someone called in a request for “Ace of Spades” from the band’s 1980 self-titled fourth album. I shuffled through the station’s categorized, alphabetized library and found the record. Its cover featured three guys in the desert, sporting black motorcycle leather and cowboy hats. One of them wore a bandolero across his chest. Another was casually draped in a serape.
Maybe they’ve got a ZZ Top kinda thing going on, I thought to myself as I slapped the album on the platter and dropped the needle.
No. They did not sound like ZZ Top.
Motörhead was more like the rockinist rockety-rock any rockers ever rocked. As in, pure rock-n-roll, extra rock please. Hold the bullshit.
Bass, guitar, drums. Period. Turn it up and spit it out.
Their music wasn’t punk or heavy metal, and it couldn’t be bothered to actively defy or coyly mimic either of those genres. No, Motörhead was just simple, angry, ornery, hard, fast, stripped down, straight head, pumped up, rock n roll with just a dash of levity. They were a hard crack to the chops that made you smile. Read more »
Monday, February 3, 2020
Slave Play: Theater of Pain and Pleasure
by Eric J. Weiner
Slave Play is a comedy of sorts. It should be played as such. —Jeremy Harris
Jeremy Harris is a dark and stormy cocktail of Dave Chappelle, Augusto Boal, Boots Riley, and James Baldwin. The dark comedic energy that drives Slave Play, Harris’s provocative Broadway show about racism, sex, kinky fetishism, white supremacy, interracial relationships, slavery, the Antebellum South, post-colonialism, and psycho-sexual drama therapy, is the sort that makes you cry while laughing, tremble with anxiety, giggle from embarrassment, and question the sources of your own laughter. Slave Play riffs darkly on how black and white people in America live intimately together yet are essentially apart. Carrying the historical burdens of slavery and white supremacy into the 21st century, Harris shines a dark therapeutic light onto areas of our racial relations that are vibrating with pain and festering with pleasure.
Sitting restlessly within the tradition of black comedy while echoing Augusto Boal’s lesser known work Rainbow of Desire, Harris’s play pushes against some boundaries while obliterating others. He has created not a safe space but what one of the actors, Irene Sofia Lucio, calls a “brave” space:
I think that we’re all into safe spaces right now. But we might need more brave spaces, where people speak their truth and we start to lean in and listen to things that make us uncomfortable instead of walking away from each other. In a brave space, when you feel discomfort, you’re supposed to sit with it and acknowledge that that’s part of the process towards growth.
Slave Play’s provocative brew of dark humor, like the best Chappelle Show sketch, cuts deep into the social marrow of race and identity in America. During the presentation of the 2019 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor to Chappelle, Sarah Silverman commented that Chappelle’s “critical thinking is his art.” In a similar way, Slave Play is Harris’ critical thinking as dramatic black comedy. Read more »