by Pranab Bardhan

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

In my Kolkata neighborhood there was one kind of collective action that was unusually successful–this related to religious festivals. Every autumn there was a tremendous collective mobilization of neighborhood resources and youthful energy in organizing the local pujas for one deity or another, and on these occasions almost the whole community participated with devout dedication and considerable ingenuity (including openly pilfering from the public electricity grid for the holy cause—this art locally known as ‘hooking’).

These festivals had both religious and cultural dimensions, and Bengali society being highly politicized, politics was not far behind. In my childhood politics in my neighborhood was dominated by the Communist Party, and contrary to what you’ll expect, the communists were often enthusiastic participants in those religious festivals. The main difference with the pujas of non-communist localities was in the brochures they produced on these occasions (in our neighborhood they would, for example, invoke the goddess Kali, the fierce deity of destruction, to come and slay the forces of the evil demon of capitalism) and in the list of celebrity artists they’d invite for their cultural soirees, containing mainly those of leftist persuasion.

Many years later when my Italian classmates in England used to discuss Catholic Marxism in their country—on one occasion I even participated in a vigorous discussion with them on the famous film by the Marxist poet-director Pasolini titled “Gospel according to St. Matthew”—I told them about the communist Kali-worshippers of my neighborhood in Kolkata. I also told them of a communist activist Brahmin neighbor who combined, with touching sincerity, his daily activities as a mantra-chanting family priest in several households with his indefatigable party propaganda work every morning at the street-crossing near our house, trying to catch hold of passersby and apprising them of the evil doings of the ruling capitalist-lackey party and his marching in the streets in his lunch break from office work shouting slogans against American imperialism. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

There are momentary flashes in the aesthetic life of an individual which can’t be explained away by the exigencies of personal taste or the broader parameters of gender-biased inclinations. These random epiphanies may or may not have their roots in a psychologically identifiable pantheon of ‘likes’, but when they occur, they yank us from our routine expectations of a work and catapult us into a recessive-compulsive emotional terrain resembling infatuation—with a breathlessness induced by the sudden recognition of something strikingly familiar and yet completely unrelated to us.

It’s a given that the brain knows things we don’t know, even if it’s our own grey matter that’s withholding secrets from us. Forget the details of subliminal daily self-maintenance and logistics of being alive, whose rules hold little interest as long as everything is humming along. Consider the other, less tangible connections that the brain makes on its own, regardless of will, regardless of desire—in effect, regardless of me. At times, its affinities seem to have a life of their own, independent of my consciousness or even my history.

Not long ago, watching an emotional scene between two male Korean detectives in Beyond Evil, I was suddenly transported to Jean Renoir’s anti-war masterpiece La Grand Illusion, set during the First World War: Two aristocratic officers—Rauffenstein, the German commandant of a citadel for prisoners of war, and de Boeldieu a French captive there—are discussing the end of class-oriented military hierarchies and their own shared fate as a dying, useless breed of snobs in the new egalitarian world. Their acquaintance precedes the war, and transcends the level of hostility normally associated with enemies. Read more »

Railroad siding leading to the main Munich-Rome line in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. With a puddle with a reflection of a very tall cellphone antenna and a mountain. Photo taken last week while on one of my daily walks.

by Peter Wells

Beliefs tend to cluster in packages. It’s a fair bet that a member of the British Liberal Democrat Party will be an opponent of Brexit, and a supporter of Amnesty International, that doughty advocate of all good things. And one thing the Lib Dems, the EU, and AI have in common is that they all oppose the Death Penalty. However, package-deal thinking is not mandatory, nor universal. So perhaps one could call oneself a liberal (small <l>) and still contemplate the possibility of condoning Capital Punishment, especially as the great J S Mill (pictured) condoned it too (link).

Like Mill, I regret finding myself opposed to “those who are called the philanthropists,” those well-meaning people who are “so steadily and almost uniformly to be found on the side of right.” But Mill is convinced that in this case the ‘philanthropists’ have erred due to an “exaggerated application of [a] just and highly important principle.” Their ‘principle’ is to provide humane punishments, with opportunities for rehabilitation, for all criminals without exception. However, in the case of what Mill calls ‘aggravated murder,’ it leads them to opt for a punishment that is, in my view, and Mill’s, less humane than the death penalty: long-term imprisonment.

The arguments on either side of this hoary old warhorse of debating competitions are too well known to need rehearsing in detail. Supporters of capital punishment point out that keeping murderers jailed is expensive, and that the funds could be better used for the benefit of other members of our society. They remind us that prisoners can escape, and that even if they don’t, they can continue to do harm, especially to fellow-prisoners. They argue that there is a moral difference between a murder and a legal execution, and that the death penalty deters potential murderers.

On the other hand, opponents assert capital punishment to be morally indistinguishable from murder. They believe that there is no evidence that the penalty is an effective deterrent – rather the contrary. They point out that a wrong conviction is irreversible. As Mill himself remarks, “If by an error of justice an innocent person is put to death, the mistake can never be corrected; all compensation, all reparation for the wrong is impossible.”

My contribution to the debate, for what it is worth, arises from reflecting upon two meanings of the word ‘life.’ Read more »

by Thomas Larson

If we include in an overview of JFK’s classical musical legacy, those compositional masterpieces that honored him after his death, two pieces jump out of the field for me: Leonard Bernstein’s Mass and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

Mass was commissioned by his wife, Jackie, to open the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1971. Bernstein used the venue’s function—performance—literally: he stitched together a transmedial work that combined the best of Brahms’ German Requiem, The Who’s Tommy, and his own Candide.

Mass’s subtitle was “a theater piece for singers, players, and dancers.” It featured a rock band within a full orchestra, forty blues, rock, and light opera singers, two choirs, dancers, strolling musicians, and tape sounds produced quadrophonically. Among its highlights for me was Bernstein’s pairing an irreligious element with a Bible-based piety, especially in the gospel/sermon “God Said.” One wasn’t sure how much this jagged little tune embraced the tradition of preaching the Holy Fire or made a parody of it. Most memorable are the choral lines: “And it was good, brother / And it was good, brother / And it was good, brother / And it was goddam good.”

The work is like a top, spinning madly, gyrating and tilting, ready to fall, only to be re-spun by Bernstein’s gift of musical invention—his theatrical blood pumping his multiple moods, which range from meditative to melancholic to bossy to sardonic to unabashedly poppy and sentimental, equally unafraid of the raw and the honest. Read more »

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 »