by Raji Jayaraman

An American parent who named their child “Kamala Devi” in the 1960s is likely to have been either Indian or a hippie. When I first heard Kamala Harris’ name during the 2020 Democratic presidential race, I assumed it was the latter since she was generically described as a “black woman”. What I have since learned is that her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an Indian immigrant. I barely understand my own personal life, so I won’t pretend to have any insight into Kamala Harris’s. Maybe she’s close to her Indian family, maybe she’s not. I’ll never know, and frankly neither will you. The only thing I can safely conclude from this information is that Kamala Harris has an Indian side.

As a country of immigrants, Americans are familiar with diversity even if they are not always accepting of it. Diversity across different people is, however, different from diversity within the same person. Americans seem disoriented by individual diversity. My admittedly rudimentary understanding is that they alleviate this unease by reducing the dimensionality of ethnic, racial or cultural identity in a person. The thankfully obsolete one drop rule is an example of this.  Harris’s mother seems to have understood it early on. As Harris explains in a New Yorker profile, her mother “knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya [Kamala’s sister] and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”

We know by now that the description of Harris as a “black woman” is incomplete. The opening paragraph of “Kamala’s story” on her new campaign website describes her as both “Black” and “Indian”, and notes her parents’ immigration to the U.S. from Jamaica and India. Then, in her DNC convention acceptance speech, she gave a shout out to “my uncles, my aunts and my chithis”. Padma Lakshmi, the model-turned-celebrity-chef, explained through tears of joy that chithi meant “auntie” in Tamil. Harris didn’t announce the fact that her mother’s side of the family is Brahmin, but that would have been obvious to any Tamilian looking at Harris’s Indian family photo. So now, on her Indian side alone, we have geography, language, religion and caste in the mix. Sorting all of that out has got to be confusing for anyone. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Lincoln consistently scores top or at least top 3 in every ranking of US presidents. This high standing has long puzzled me. After all, this is the leader who presided over a long brutal civil war that killed 620,000 of his own people. For context, as a percentage of the population, that is more American lives than all other presidents put together have managed to expend in all America’s other wars. On the face of it, that is a massive failure of statesmanship. The usual response is that the war was a necessary sacrifice to end the supreme evil of slavery. I do not find this convincing.

I. The civil war was not inevitable: Lincoln caused it by his election and choices

War happens because politics fails. Lincoln’s Republican party was perceived as anti-Southern, as evidenced by its immediate promise to impose import tariffs that would hurt the South’s economy (to the benefit of the industrial North) and long-term commitment to the abolition of slavery. Although not the most radical candidate the Republicans could have nominated (more on which below) Lincoln was thus an extraordinarily divisive presidential candidate who was elected entirely by Northern voters. The Southern states launched their secession as soon as they heard Lincoln had won because they believed he (and his Republican party) intended to pursue an anti-South agenda that would further cement their political marginalisation within the USA. Perhaps reflecting his party’s political ignorance of the South and his administration’s inexperience, Lincoln seems not to have understood this. He therefore dramatically underestimated popular support for secession in the South and assumed a show of force would quickly crush it.

It is reasonable to suppose that if a different party’s candidate had won the 1860 election, secession would not have happened then (or perhaps at all), despite the long-running tensions between South and North. Moreover, it seems likely that a different president could have managed any secession crisis without resorting to war because that president would have had the trust and legitimacy in the South that Lincoln lacked. (For example, one of Congress’s various efforts to resolve the secession crisis by constitutionally protecting slavery might have succeeded.) Or the South could have been allowed to secede, on the same principle that the colonies had claimed in declaring their independence from Britain. The South’s goal was just to leave the USA, and this was perfectly compatible with the continued existence and flourishing of the country that remained (though perhaps not with its pride). It was the South’s choice to declare independence from the USA, but it was the choice of President Lincoln’s government to go to war to force them to stay. Read more »

Ostinato

first their concerted honks—
unseen, …………then
as apparitions they rise
from foliage at the foot of the hill
framed in a window sash
they rise to the cackles of crows
already at breakfast in our yard
arrayed upon green, black notes
of an almost endless chord,
ostinato of the articulated
sounds of vees that appear overhead,
levitating geese in glass,
all of a boundless chord drawn-out,
a day in the life
……………………..they vanish
over the window top
truck tires hum on tar
dopplering down around a bend
played out
a last crow lifts off
speaking a
……………………..last word

Jim Culleny
9/5/18

by Joseph Shieber

As the quadrennial presidential and vice presidential debate season nears once more, we’ll soon see opinion pieces reminding us that debates have at most a very slight impact on the outcome of presidential contests.

Typically, the writers of those pieces frame their discussion as a warning not to place too much importance on the debates. I want to make a different argument about the presidential and vice presidential debates: we would do better to get rid of them altogether.

The crux of my argument against the presidential and vice presidential debates is that they don’t serve any of the audiences who might tune into them.

Those who follow politics already know the candidates’ track records and plans, so — as anyone familiar with the literature on the informativeness of job interviews can tell you — the debate doesn’t provide any salient information, just noise.

And what about those who aren’t informed consumers of political information? Focusing on the effect of debates on uninformed or undecided voters arguably distorts the discussion of the relative merits of the presidential candidates in ways that damage substantive coverage of political issues.

This is because, if they’re even watching the debates at all, uninformed or undecided voters are almost certainly focused on the wrong signals. Appreciating who refrained from perspiring, who wasn’t sighing annoyingly, or who had the snappiest one-line rebuttal doesn’t actually tell voters anything about who would promote policies that best represent those voters’ — and the country’s — interests.

And for the media, debates just provide another excuse to focus on horse race and style over track record and substance. Read more »

by Jackson Arn

It used to be
the guilty fantasy
of theory bros and voluntary beggars.
When turning points expired or wavered
they’d hold it to their chests at night,
a Molotov they didn’t dare ignite:
Could revolution, usually so plodding,
be brought about by some proud, precise Nothing?

By standing very still
and thinking, could you will
the universe into your orbit?
Rather than Changing
or its hotter cousin, Rearranging,
why not secrete a thin disinterest
and let society struggle to absorb it?
The best part was, it made the change-obsessed
look foolish for their interest
in lobbying, petitions, and the rest—
in lieu of noisy sawing, one sharp swish
to make the engagé seem babyish
and also, one supposes, slay the state,
though even that might be too animate,
too quick to grant the state its dying wish.
Put better: one smart drop of crimson paint
to make the canvas as a whole look faint.

When it came true,
as guilty wishes often do,
the shrieks of celebration shattered glass:
ten million bros in witty dresses
deadpanning in manufactured messes
or scribbling alien Os in fields of grass—
anything at all that had once seemed Nothing
now marked, from skydiver eyes, a happening
alloyed with Nothing, stronger than Nothing alone,
shuddering at so many hertzes
it made dogs moan,

dogs and the unlucky some
born with an ear for pandemonium,
who hear at all hours what they cannot see,
chords rich and fat and spoiled as gravity,
and feel, in bed or in the shower, a gnawing
lust for slow chromatic scales of sawing.

by Jackson Arn

Sughra Raza. Zoom patterns, July 2020.

Credit to whoever created these amazing video effects!

by Brooks Riley

by Robyn Repko Waller

Lack of choice is frustrating,  but sometimes choice — choosing for others — can be equally daunting

This August parents and guardians of children across the country are facing unenviable decisions about childcare and school in the time of COVID. Carers of school-age kids have been surveyed by the school district, if they are lucky, as to their preferences for the fall term: Would you prefer that Kid to return to face-to-face instruction, attending class with their teacher and friends, all while social distancing in masks? Or would you rather Kid learn remotely, in your home via Zoom class meetings and online apps? Perhaps you prefer to homeschool Kid this year? 

And then comes the long-awaited roll-out of the official school reopening plans: For some, there are disappointingly limited options, only the course of delivery chosen by the district or institution; that or homeschool. But, for some, there are more options: Kid can learn in the classroom, remote, or be homeschooled. It’s up to you, the parent or guardian. You’ve been afforded the gift of freedom of choice (unless those free will skeptics are right about our reality)! 

Now there are numerous ways in which this freedom of choice is problematic — or  perhaps isn’t actually a freedom of choice in the first place. These complicating factors of childcare have been much discussed in recent months: The reality on the ground is that COVID-related childcare changes have exacerbated existing socioeconomic inequalities, especially for those with essential or essentially in-person jobs, single parents, or those without back-up carers. On the one hand, those parents face job loss (and so critical income) if reliable workday care is not available, and on the other, they must send children back to f2f schooling even if they don’t believe it is wise to do so. Learning pods — small groups of children with private instruction — aren’t an option for most considering the cost. In this way, the choices made aren’t from an expansive freedom of choice.  Read more »

by Eric Miller

Syrinx

What was it, again, that, by 1877, Thomas H. Huxley decided to call the voice box of a bird? Syrinx. He alludes to a tale from Ovid.

Rough Arcadia’s peremptory god, Pan, bears a name proclaiming an appetite that would have everything. Now he wants sex with Syrinx. The nymph refuses. She sprints as far as the marshy bank of the river Ladon, asks her sisters to rescue her, and (perhaps with their assistance) evasively adopts the shape of a hollow reed. Frustrated of his object—using beeswax as connective matter—Pan confects his typifying pipe from the stems of the calamus plant that Syrinx has become. Unlike Pan, a bird carries its pipe internally. Its wild music pleasingly resembles that of Pan’s instrument, but enfranchised or escaped to an original nymph-like liberty. In a bird, the air resounds independently of human artifice. It is worth listening while the song lasts.

Does the name syrinx conjure not just Ovid, but the reed, also, that shakes in an oboe’s mouthpiece, a chanter’s, a bassoon’s? Located, often, where the trachea branches, equipped with a tympanum on the right side and on the left, a bird’s cartilaginous syrinx can produce two separate voices—the note held by neither a harmonic of the other—as the singer breathes out. Jean Dorst explains that an avian ear responds ten times faster than ours and, further, that the Wood Thrush of North America, in whistling, may alter its pitch—its frequency of vibration—two hundred times per second. I used to hear these thrushes in Toronto. Formerly, they nested near the house where I was raised. Read more »

I took this photo of a car passing by at night with a slow shutter speed (for the streaks of light) and with a quick flash at the end to freeze the darker parts of the car (that’s why the wheels, for example, are not blurred), and I liked the resulting effect. Photo taken on Brennerstrasse in Brixen, South Tyrol, in February of 2014.

by Alexander C. Kafka

“The forest is deep. It’s easy for those unfamiliar with its ways to find themselves lost.”

So says a beguiling young woman, Danae (Anastasia Rafaella Konidi), who lives in a tumble-down cabin in the woods. She says this in caution to Panos (Prometheus Aleifer), a doctor who has just moved to a nearby village. Panos, in a moment of cell-phone distraction, nearly ran her over and has tracked her down to see if she’s OK. 

She’s not. Marring her wholesome beauty is an alarming intermittent skin condition, although it doesn’t seem to bother her very much. And her father, an old, long-bearded flesh-and-bone maniac, molests her. 

Panos wants to go seek help for her. After all, as he tells a villager, “we’re not living in the Middle Ages.” But some women are hard to leave. Very. 

Panos and Danae become, as the film’s title reflects, Entwined.

Danae speaks in a peculiarly old-fashioned, literary manner. Obsessed with keeping her hearth fire lit, she lives primitively and seems not of this time, nor of any specific time really. She dresses in loose white skirts and blouses, cooks simple fare, gathers branches, and listens to an eerie violin tune on an ancient, warped phonograph. She’s hospitable, tender, and has a pantheistic reverence for her surroundings. 

As Danae casts her spell over Panos, so this defiantly minimalistic, low-budget Greek horror fantasy, director Minos Nikolakakis’s first feature, casts its spell over us. 

Its screenplay by John de Holland, who also plays Panos’s half-brother George, is willfully gaunt, though it unmistakably underlines the idea that science can’t explain everything.

Cinematographer Thodoros Mihopoulos brings the woods very much alive — beautiful and more than a bit threatening. Composer Sotiris Debonos’s score combines scratchy strings, neo-baroque themes, and electronic atmospherics. These enhance the resonant tree creaks and bird calls mixed by editor Giorgos Georgopoulos into a hallucinogenic, lulling, primal embrace.

Every now and then we cut away to George, back in civilization and calling repeatedly to see what’s become of Panos. George’s wife assures him that Panos is probably doing just fine. 

After all, what horrible force could involuntarily isolate us so completely in the modern world? Add to the 2019 film’s chilling characteristics its power as premonition. 

“I need light, not prayers,” Panos irritably tells a muttering villager at a patient’s bedside. But as it turns out, the good doctor may need both.

by Eric J. Weiner

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.—James Baldwin

Real social transformation, real change has to come out of a love of life and a love of the world…—Adrienne Rich

Finally, outrage. Intense, violent, peaceful, burning, painful, heart-wrenching, passionate, empowering, joyful, loving outrage. Finally. We have, for decades, lived with the violence of erasure, silencing, the carceral state, economic pain, hunger, poverty, marginalization, humiliation, colonization, juridical racism, and sexual objectification. Our outrage is collective, multi-ethnic, cross-gendered and includes people from across the economic spectrum. One match does not start a firestorm unless what it touches is primed to burn. But unlike other moments of outrage that have briefly erupted over the years in the face of death and injustice, there seems to be something different this time; our outrage burns with a kind of love not seen or felt since Selma and Stonewall. Every scream against white supremacy, each interlocked arm that refuses to yield, every step we take along roads paved in blood and sweat, each drop of milk poured over eyes burning from pepper spray, every fist raised in solidarity, each time we are afraid but keep fighting is a sign that radical love has returned with a vengeance.

In this time of civil unrest and democratic insurgency, the kind of k-12 and university education we are providing to the nation’s children and young adults is of paramount importance. A democratic education, following Dewey, is the keystone to a functioning democratic society. Public schools are responsible for providing our children and young adults this kind of education. Within schools, teachers-in-relation to their students are the engines of learning and intellectual/emotional development. A teacher who teaches in the service of democracy in the United States, regardless of grade-level and content area knowledge, has three primary objectives: 1) To teach their students how to think critically; 2) To help their students develop habits of mind/body that are consistent with the demands of democratic life; and 3) To protect and nurture their students’ natural curiosity and creativity. In order for them to be able to meet these objectives within our current historical context, we must reassert the importance of what bell hooks calls an “ethic of love” and Paulo Freire called a “pedagogy of love” into the praxis of teaching/learning. Read more »

by David Oates

My decision not to go into downtown Portland for the protest demonstration has held up for four weeks now. The Federal provocateurs have finally begun to leave, and the threat of violence has been reduced to comparative insignificance. . . so it seems that if I were to show up now, it would merely underline that I am a craven fair-weather sort of progressive. That die is cast.

What have I been doing instead? Well, same as everybody. Sheltering in place. Cooking dinner. Trying to stay on my path. I’m a writer born in 1950, so I’m past the ditch-digging and hustling part of my life. But my path hasn’t changed.

I read things. I write poems or essays. I think about that next book. I take long walks to mull it over. I come back to our quiet, clean-but-becoming-threadbare home, ascend the stairs to my cluttered study, find the book or page or little stack of half-realized ideas, and make some tiny increment of progress. Two words that fit together. Two ideas. Two sentences. This is my near horizon.

It feels very far indeed from the Federal Courthouse. The anger of Black Lives Matter (which makes sense to me). The anger of Trumps and Trumpies (which seems evil and hard to account for). Just two miles from my house – I’ve walked it often. Across an elm-shaded neighborhood. Over the Hawthorne Bridge. And then there I am, staring at the plinth where the bronze elk ought to be standing. The boarded-up shops. The beaten-brown grass. The sprawl and slash of graffiti covering nearly every surface.

I’ve been there by day, but never at night.

This is my far horizon: discord, the derangement of politics, slogans, lies and delusions, conflict, power plays. Shouting. Orderly protest. State-organized cruelty. Aspiration for democracy. Truncheoning of democracy.

* * *

How to navigate between and among these worlds? Flailingly is my usual answer, as it for most of us. Just muddling along.

But a Chinese poet from the 700s is also, often, my guide: Tu Fu, a minor court official of the Tang era. A wry, thoughtful guy who lived on a houseboat and liked to drink. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Charles River Esplanade. Boston, August, 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Usha Alexander

[This is the second in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

When I was a kid, I used to wonder about the possibility that the planet could slip back into an ice age. I grew up in the Rocky Mountain region of the northwestern USA, where winters lasted half the year and summers were brief and blustery. I hated being cold all the time. Aware that ice ages result from some sort of natural cycles, I worried what might happen if the planet should head that way again. I tried to imagine how we would construct cities and farms, how we would travel between countries or even build roads, if huge glaciers grew down from the Arctic Circle and smothered our little mountain town. 

So I was surprised to learn, much later, that we actually do live in an ice age. In historical memory, we’ve been enjoying a warmish, rather pleasant phase of this ice age, to be sure—an interglacial phase, called the Holocene, that’s persisted for about ten thousand years. But interglacial phases, like our present one, have only been brief respites, as the ice age has cycled between glacial and interglacial phases over the past two million years. Past interglacials never lasted very long and, left to its own geological devices, all signs suggested that this one would end too, to be followed by a much longer glacial phase—the stuff of my nightmares. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

On the first day of August in Year One AC (anno coronae), I boarded an Intercity train in Zurich bound for Singen, in the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg. In Singen I transferred to the Intercity headed to Stuttgart but left the train a few stops shy of the state capital, at the town of Horb am Neckar, where I was met by friends and driven to Burg Hohenzollern. Looming over the mild and hilly Swabian countryside, the castle is the ancestral seat of the senior branch of the dynasty that would go on to rule Prussia, and eventually the German Empire, before retiring to wealthy obscurity at the end of World War One.

What was noteworthy about my first excursion across the Swiss border in over six months, since a winter holiday spent in Alto Adige before the lockdown, was not so much its particular destination (although that will bear mention below) as its timing: August 1, or Erschtouguscht in Swiss-German dialect, is the annual commemoration of Switzerland’s founding, and thus, depending on your political coloration, either a uniquely unpatriotic day to leave the country, or the ideal moment for an escape from the pathos and pyrotechnics of a populist rite.

European national holidays are typically history-laden affairs, at least in their original conception. Of the countries just beyond Switzerland’s borders, France hosts the most venerable festivities. The Quatorze Juillet marks the significant initial, if not particularly effective, revolutionary gestures of July 1789, and lends the symbolic elements of its exercise – stormed ramparts, tricolore, battle hymn – mutatis mutandis to the general vocabulary of national identity. Italy’s is the next eldest, although it celebrates a political event fully two centuries later: the Festa della Repubblica, on June 2, commemorates the referendum in 1946 in which the Italian electorate opted for a republican form of government following the fall of fascism, and features wreath-laying and a military parade. Read more »