Our cat, Frederica Krüger, has taken to spying on me while I work in my home office.
Appreciating Art
by Thomas O’Dwyer
The first real work of art I ever saw was Auguste Renoir’s Les Parapluies. I was a teenager, and the painting had arrived in Dublin following a 1959 agreement between the governments of Ireland and Britain. This they had signed to solve an arts wrangle as tortuous as the Greek Elgin Marbles saga. The Renoir was part of a collection bequeathed to Ireland by Sir Hugh Lane. A Cork-born art collector, Lane died on board the Lusitania, which a German torpedo sank off the coast of Ireland in 1915. His collection of 39 paintings include works by Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Morisot, and Degas. He had first left his collection to London’s National Gallery, but it was later found that he had attached a codicil to the will. It stated that he had changed his mind and wanted his paintings to stay in Dublin. The addendum was signed but not witnessed, and the London gallery declared legal ownership.
The dispute roused Irish nationalist passions, already at fever point in the fight for independence. Hugh Lane’s aunt was Lady Gregory, a patron of W.B. Yeats. They led Ireland’s cultural elites in a campaign to honour Lane’s last wishes. The governments renegotiated the 1959 agreement in 1993, and it comes up for renewal again this year. The new accord divided the paintings into two groups. London restored 31 of the pictures to Dublin, and every six years the cities trade the remaining eight, Les Parapluies among them. Read more »
Punctuation: What Is It Good for?
by Gabrielle C. Durham
My friend does not use punctuation when he texts, so there is a stream-of-consciousness quality to much of his communications. According to the fine folks at Buzzfeed, you would likely infer that he is a millennial, but that is not true. He conveys his points while eschewing syntactic finality fairly clearly, so when he does use punctuation, he makes a big deal of it, as in “Look. At. The. Punctuation. I’m. Using.”
According to this article, using ending punctuation (specifically a period) in a text can convey insincerity (by way of gratuitous formality) or anger due to code-switching. That sounds a little forced to me, but I’m a Gen Xer, so I do not fit in the classification of folks who are deemed to be responsible for killing half the industries your parents relied on utterly.
Punctuation, which comes from the Latin root punctatio for making a point from the verb pungere, which means to pierce (circa 1539), is the set of standardized symbols in every language, and the marks do vary, that clarify meaning by separating phrases, clauses, and sentences as well as by adding breathing cues. Pablo Picasso described punctuation marks as “the fig leaves that hide the private parts of literature.” The standard punctuation marks in English are period, question mark, exclamation point, comma, colon, and semicolon. Read more »
Monday, July 29, 2019
The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack: Review
by Ruchira Paul
Early in H.M. Naqvi’s new novel The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack (SWAC from here on out) we come across this exchange between Abdullah and a devout young Pathan as the former, in poor health and out of breath, is seen taking a drink of water from a thermos on a sweltering day during the holy month of Ramzan when most able bodied and observant Muslims choose to fast between sunrise and sunset.
“Tum Musalman ho?” asks the younger man offended by Abdullah’s transgression. “Are you a Muslim?”
Enraged by the man’s pious arrogance, Abdullah hollers, “This is Currachee! This is my city! I could be a Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, Hindoo, Amil, Parsee. I could be Shia, Sunni, Bohra, Barelvi, Sufi….If you want to ask such questions then go back to Kabul. …If you are sensible, then your God is sensible, but if you’re a dolt, your God’s a dolt.”
A dangerous confrontation follows from which the beleaguered Abdullah is rescued by a dark eyed stranger. Abdullah’s defiant bluster notwithstanding, the reader knows that in today’s Pakistan, even a Muslim in a Muslim nation and a lifelong resident of a large and cosmopolitan city like Karachi, a man cannot really expect to have his seeming lack of piety go unchallenged. Many of the adherents of other faiths on the list that Abdullah rattles off no longer live there and the few that do, are marginalized and often live in fear. Not just in Pakistan but in many parts of the world triumphalist majoritarian bullying now pervades the public mood. Read more »
The Right To Guns Against The State
by Thomas R. Wells
The right to own guns is typically justified by the fundamental right to self-defense against bad guys, either our fellow citizens or the state itself if it were to turn tyrannical. Both of these have a superficial appeal but fail in obvious ways. Guns are an effective means of defending oneself against bad guys only so long as they don’t have guns too (because being equally armed doesn’t add up a defense against those who can pick and choose their moment of aggression). Civilians with guns are also ineffective against the armies and ruthless terroristic violence of a truly tyrannical regime.
Here I want to discuss a more subtle and less ridiculous justification for the right to own guns. I think it drives much of the enthusiasm for gun rights but is rarely spelled out. This is the fact that widespread gun ownership forces liberal democratic governments to take the views of those citizens more seriously and work harder to gain their consent. In this way gun ownership operates as a drag on the ambition and scope of what has become a somewhat paternalistic form of government with an irritating tendency to micromanage its citizens’ lives. The hoped for result would be a more libertarian regime that leaves people better alone. Read more »
Monday Poem
My friend, poet Nils Peterson, sent me a new poem of his the other day. It moved me to spontaneously add a second verse which I presented to him and he liked. So this is a collaborative venture. The first stanza is Nils’, the last stanza, following the break, is mine. Two writers, one poem. The title belongs to Nils.
The First of July
Report to a Friend
Year half gone. Sometimes
I’ve been Noah hammering
away at my ark, sometimes
his wife who likes the rain.
Last night, I felt the wind
freshen and the few joined
planks of my hull strain
against their braces. I woke
thinking I haven’t called
the animals. This morning
I stand by the hull of my
salvation fiercely caulking,
calling out “Aardvark”
who come in my dream
twigs in mouths, innocent as doves
with proof the seed I’d planted
before the rains would come,
before a hammer would meet my hand,
before I ever imagined a reason for arks,
had become the tree I would fell
and cut and mill to build the story
of my salvation
by Nils Peterson & Jim Culleny
7 / 27, 28 / 2019
What’s so bad about smugness?
by Emrys Westacott
Elaine: “I hate smugness. Don’t you hate smugness?
Cabdriver, “Smugness is not a good quality.”
So goes a popular snippet from Seinfeld. In a 2014 article in The Guardian titled “Smug: The most toxic insult of them all?” Mark Hooper opined that “there can be few more damning labels in modern Britain than ‘smug.'” And CBS journalist Will Rahn declared, in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory, that “modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing [is] its unbearable smugness.”
But what is smugness? What, exactly, do people find objectionable about it? And is it really such a terrible moral failing, worthy of being described as “unbearable”?
What is smugness?
For an immediate graphic example of smugness, just look at a picture of Britain’s new prime minister Boris Johnson smirking in front of 10 Downing Street. For a less stomach-churning way of getting an initial handle on the concept, consider a few concrete instances. Here are four:
- Someone on a very high income says, “Yes, I am well compensated, but I like to think I’ve earned it, and that I’m worth it. As a general rule, I think it’s fair to assume that pay reflects merit.”
- A parent whose children have been admitted to prestigious universities, talking to one whose child is at a less selective college, says, “It’s nice to know that one’s kids will be taught by real experts in the field, and that their classmates will be at their intellectual level.”
- A punter who has won $500 at the race track backing a rank outside can’t help smirking at the crestfallen faces of his friends who all backed the favorite.
- A couple regularly preen themselves on their healthy and ecologically responsible eating habits.
Smugness is not arrogance. Arrogant people typically display a sense of their own importance and superiority with little subtlety: they strut; they are dogmatic; they are dismissive of others. Smugness shares with arrogance a high degree of self-satisfaction and a sense of some kind of superiority over others, but it typically manifests itself quietly and indirectly, without brashness. Muhammad Ali, who called himself “The Greatest,” was undeniably sure about his own superiority as a boxer, and he was called many things–arrogant, loud-mouthed, lippy–but I don’t recall anyone describing him as smug. Read more »
Is Knowledge Incompatible with Science?
by Joseph Shieber
There’s an interesting reaction that I sometimes get from my colleagues in the natural sciences when I describe what I do. When I talk about epistemology – the study of knowledge – I often hear a version of the following response.
“Well, in the sciences we don’t really deal with knowledge at all. At best, we have a high degree of confidence in a claim, but we’d never say that we know it.”
In the faculty dining room, there’s seldom time seriously to discuss philosophy with faculty from other disciplines. Also, if I tried it, I might find myself sitting alone in the very near future. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to respond to my (imaginary) colleague.
To do so, I want to start by considering an argument of Saul Kripke’s. Kripke achieved fame early as a philosophical prodigy. He enjoyed widespread acclaim within the philosophical community first for his work in modal logic and later for his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Kripke’s reputation also stemmed from his virtuoso lectures. He was able to lecture without notes on complex topics, the complete paragraphs tumbling out of his mouth, seemingly effortlessly. He was equally known as someone reluctant to put his ideas to paper, so for years many of the arguments attributed to him circulated in samizdat versions taken from notes from his lectures.
In the years in which many of Saul Kripke’s arguments circulated by word of mouth or in third-party notes of lectures, one of the most famous is what we can call the “Paradox of Knowledge’ argument. Read more »
Perceptions
Ode to Ida
by Shawn Crawford
A pioneer occasionally runs so far ahead of the culture the world forgets her contributions by the time they start to catch up. Such is the case with Ida Lupino, a woman so talented and visionary she practically invented the indie movie studio to achieve what she wanted.
If you remember Lupino at all, it’s probably as an actor. Originally from Italy, her family had entertained England for generations; her great-grandfather George provided background material to Charles Dickens for the theatrical family in Nicholas Nickelby. Lupino adored her father Stanley, an immensely successful musical comedian that would travel with his wife Connie to New York to perform on Broadway. Although she loved to write, her father insisted on her performing and had her schooled and trained to that end.
After appearing in some English films, Lupino traveled to Hollywood in 1933. Intelligent with a razor wit, the studios weren’t sure what to do with her and cast her in a series of comic films that did nothing to showcase her talent. She finally got a break appearing in The Light that Failed and then made two acclaimed pictures with Humphrey Bogart, They Drive by Night and High Sierra. Lupino developed a friendship with Bogart and got to witness first-hand the shouting matches between Bogie and his wife Mayo Methot. They christened their house Sluggy Hollow. Read more »
Saturday Night at the Club
by Samia Altaf
I was perhaps ten years old when I had unending cups of Eatmore’s fresh handmade mango ice cream while sitting on the lawns of Services Club Sialkot. It was one of the brightest days of my life, with my parents all to myself, undistracted by the demands of their daily doings, and the crystal cups of ice cream brought to us. We sat on reclining garden chairs on the perfectly manicured lawn, bordered by fragrant motia plants and the chambeli vine clinging to the tall peepal tree, all in full heady bloom.
My mother ordered Coca-Cola with crushed ice—a very hip fizzy drink that had just appeared in our lives and our city, taking sleepy Sialkot by storm. She ordered sizzling –hot shami kebabs and cool cucumber sandwiches and French fries—another recent and grand addition to the club’s menu. All of these were strictly forbidden to her because of her “weight problem” and her recent bout of “slipped disc,” which her doctor thought was the result of the former. But she was happy, breaking frequently into her characteristic ringing laugh, her head thrown back.
Clad in magenta-pink French chiffon sari, a daring sleeveless blouse and a string of pearls around her neck, pearls brought back all the way from Tokyo by my father. On her feet she had pointed-toe kitten-heel slides in pearl-colored leather, hand made by Hopson, the exclusive Chinese shoemaker on Mall Road, Lahore. She had just returned from the city, where she got, from Hanif’s Mall Road salon, the stylish Jackie Kennedy haircut that along with Coca-Cola and French fries had become quite the rage. My father in his white “bush-shirt”—half-sleeves, tennis collar, buttons down the middle, worn untucked, and white linen trousers sipping nimboo-pani in a tall glass with generous chunks of clinking ice, gazed lovingly at her, and since she looked so radiant, felt that nothing could do her any harm. Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
The story of a flea market purchase
by Cathy Chua
In that famous speech where Leonard Cohen told us ‘…never to lament casually’, he continued ‘And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.’
When I’m in Geneva I often go to the large flea market in Plainpalais. For most people it’s a source of bargains, or a way to pass the time. But I see death everywhere there, with no lamenting and a marked lack of respect. I am a mourning party of one. I see people’s lives laid out for a few francs. What’s there often tells a story. Curated collections of jazz music, or slightly kooky egg cups from everywhere. From the lost days of photographs, albums of happy tourist are muddled with strange books to see in this market, but put in place by the pictures. I even see home sometimes, a story of Indigenous people, or a guide to Australia, snapshots amongst them.
I lament not only the person who has gone, but the process which ends here, in a scrabble for a bargain. Did nobody care about this deceased human being, that their belongings have been tossed into cardboard boxes to be disposed of in indecent haste? Did the person who left behind this collection of sewing bits and bobs have no one to sew for? I spend a lot of time imagining what had existed. I am moved to buy things I shouldn’t. Does nobody want this framed picture of a child from the turn of the nineteenth century? Somebody must. I must.
But I mainly don’t. I can’t single-handedly save the small histories of these human lives. Instead I mostly stick to a reserved regret and try to honour what I see when it tells a story. Read more »
Wilderness, Walking, and Womanhood: Solitary Women in America’s Wild Spaces
by Katie Poore
“How will you defend yourself?”
It was one of the first questions my oldest brother asked me on the phone several months ago, along with: “Do you have a knife? Do you know how to use it? Maybe you should just buy a machete, if they sell those at REI. Do you know where you’re getting water? Is this really safe?” Another older brother said, “Are you bringing pepper spray?” A few weeks prior, my mom had asked, seemingly out of the blue: “Should you bring a gun?”
“No, absolutely not,” I told her. “And also, I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.”
When it trickled down the family grapevine that I would be backpacking alone in southern California for a few days, reactions were mostly alarmed. It didn’t matter that I’d been backpacking plenty of times before, nor that I had been teaching children outdoor survival skills for two summers, nor that backpacking was a mostly safe exercise, if one only took the necessary precautions. It didn’t matter that the risk of being attacked by an axe-wielding murderer—on whom I would, presumably, use the pepper spray, or maybe even the knife, or, as the oldest brother later suggested, a flare gun—were slim-to-none.
What mattered was that I would be alone, and that I was a woman, and that I was going into a so-called wilderness without a companion. My mother couldn’t even feign excitement, electing only to grunt begrudgingly as I told her my route and gave her my flight information. Before I left, my younger brother cautioned me: “You better call Mom every night.” The oldest only said: “You know it’s going to be cold, right?” Read more »
Monday Photo
My wife’s cactus plant suddenly produced this spectacular bloom a couple of days ago.
“You are More Than the Sum of What you Consume”: Generation X and Consumer Society
Public discussions of generations lately most often only focus on two generations–the boomers (1946-1965?) and millennials (1985-2000?). Yet many in our culture do not identify with either. One such group, Gen X, represents a midpoint between the two. And it’s a cohort that exerts more cultural influence than is generally understood.1 Once dubbed “slackers”, for a while Gen X elicited the concern common in our discourse since the 1950s (when “teens” as a social and consumer category were born2). Those who were born from the late 60s into the early 1980s qualify, around 80 million people by some estimates.3 But we rarely hear about the social and cultural contributions made by Gen Xers to the modern cultural landscape, despite the current surge in 80s nostalgia (such as Stranger Things, which is so full 80s nostalgia that they even brought back New Coke for a season 3 promotion!)4.
Despite the lack of attention from the major media outlets, several Gen X themed thinkpieces have been published in various venues across the web. They center on pop cultural phenomenon, generally speaking. Youth is also part of the prism, another unsurprising facet to these works. It is hard to ignore experiencing history in part through our relationship to pop culture in the postwar age or to fail to note how that shaped people (individually and collectively) during their teenage years. But these thinkpieces on Generation X rarely explore groundshaking events in the same way that discourses on boomers or millennials do, through events like the war in Vietnam and the anti-war movement for boomers or the 2008 economic crisis and the still ongoing student debt crisis for millennials. Nor do they seem to recognize the role Gen X played in shaping the modern subcultural landscape, which signals a deep politicization of popular culture. Gen X embraced subcultures readily, and carried that on into building the modern internet age.
As a cultural historian myself, I embrace the focus on pop culture in defining generational cohorts to a certain extent. After all, in the postwar consumerist world where young people had an increasing share of the buying power, cultural experiences helped define a generation’s cohesiveness – think of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan or Beyonce’s Lemonade album. But under closer inspection, those generational moments often break down. Read more »
Expressing Vitality: Wine as the Art of Life
by Dwight Furrow
If a rectangular canvas splashed with paint and lines can express freedom or joy, why not liquid poetry?
Works of art are pleasing but they are also intended to communicate or express something. Something is shown or made manifest through a work of art. In many cases what is communicated is some feeling or attitude that in some way belongs to the artist. But not all art is about self-expression. Some works are intended to reveal something about the artist’s materials when worked on in a particular way. For instance, many Impressionist works by Monet and others expressed a singular relationship between color and light, although these works also communicate something about the artist’s point of view regarding what is being expressed. Some works reveal something about their subject matter when placed in an assemblage with other subject matters regardless of whether they reflect anything about the artist. A landscape may express the relationship between a building and an atmosphere, without expressing something important about the artist’s psychology or biography. To express is to reveal something hidden or not obvious but that need not be restricted to human psychology. Works of art invite us to feel something about them but that feeling need not be something possessed by the artist. Hamlet expresses uncertainty and ambivalence independently of any feelings Shakespeare may have had and there is no need to investigate Shakespeare’s biography to grasp what Hamlet is expressing.
Even when art is expressing some human quality, the expression reaches far beyond facts about an individual artist. The 19th Century German philosopher Hegel argued that art expresses a shared sense of “the deepest interests of mankind, the most comprehensive truths of the spirit”. Art’s role for Hegel is to express something whole cultures can share when brought to light and put on a pedestal.
What about wine? Can wine be expressive in the way works of art are expressive? I’ve argued that wine can express emotion, although only occasionally is that related to a winemaker’s feelings. But here I want to focus on other dimensions of wine’s expressiveness that go beyond the expression of an individual’s emotions or attitudes. Read more »
Alternative Field Trips to the Art Institute of Chicago: Broken Art
by Liam Heneghan
The Art Institute of Chicago is unremarkable in this one respect: like every world class art museum its galleries teem with works representing indefatigable artistic industry besieged by the entropic desolation that all the works of humankind are heir to.
Our lot is to amass and assemble; the universe responds, dispassionately, with decay and dispersion. Millennia of creative effort crumble away. Walk through any decent sized art museum and behold the craquelure of old oils, the loss of patina in the watercolors, the splintering of carved wood, dents in metalwork, and the extremities snapped off old stonework. Can there be a pleasure in art that is completely unhinged from the intimations of loss ? The sense of loss that decay evokes may intensify pleasure if you incline to morbidity. Read more »
Monday, July 22, 2019
Suicide, Strictly Speaking
by Gerald Dworkin
In 1998 I was a co-author of a book called Euthanasia and Physician-assisted Suicide: For and Against. I was for; Sissela Bok was against. The point to note here is that the title used the concepts of euthanasia and assisted suicide. Euthanasia is no longer invoked by proponents of medically-assisted dying (hereafter abbreviated as AD) as all such measures explicitly prohibit the physician from administering the drug which causes death. Assisted-suicide is currently banned from their vocabulary by all groups advocating for AD.
I have been an advocate, and an activist, for passing legislation implementing AD in California (successful) and Illinois (on the political agenda). But I have some problems with the idea that AD should be excluded from the category of suicide. This is my topic today.
Advocates of AD have two reasons for their linguistic avoidance.
The first is a purely tactical matter. We are trying to get a social policy enacted and many people who might be won over have personal and religious objections to the very idea of suicide. They may believe that our lives belong to God. They may believe that there is a social stigma attached to suicide no matter how justified, in some cases, it may be. They may feel that the many cases in which suicide is committed by persons who are clearly psychologically disturbed and not capable of making rational decisions will be , mistakenly, extended to what they think are reasonable cases. They may fear that the idea that all suicides are sinful or irrational or cowardly will be applied to their loved ones if they commit suicide.
Since all these, in my view mistaken, attitudes will make it harder to get political support for legalising AD, I see this linguistic choice as a reasonable tactical proposal. Read more »
Monday Poem
Eye to Spirit
every year I’m given the gift of her garden
which she sweats over and in
which is all color, lush, side by side
soil to buds, roots to blossoms
edge to edge
eye to spirit
beginning
to end
.
Jim Culleny
7/17/19