About to land in Amsterdam in a Transavia Boeing 737-800 in December, 2018.
How Complex is too Complex? On the Accessibility of Analytic Philosophical Writing
by Joseph Shieber
Recently I came across Jonathan Rose’s thesis that it was no accident that the literary tastes of the working classes in Britain lagged behind those of the educated classes. According to Rose, the educated classes adopted ever-more-complex literary forms (read: literary modernism) to distinguish themselves from the “great unwashed”. (H/t Matthew Wills at the JSTOR Daily blog.)
Reading this account of the ascendance of literary modernism as a reaction on the part of the educated classes to rising literacy rates among the lower and working classes made me think of the role of complexity and difficulty in writing. Is it merely gate-keeping and/or signaling (to give a shout-out to my previous post)?
One of the criticisms of analytic philosophy that I often encounter is that it’s too complex or difficult. And there’s no question: it often IS extremely complex and challenging writing.
For example, here’s Geoff Pullam, a well-known linguist … not a philosopher, on this topic. In an essay entitled “Writing on Philosophy: It’s Not Rocket Science. It’s More Complicated Than That” for the unfortunately now-defunct Lingua Franca blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Pullam addresses the complexity of analytic philosophical writing:
I don’t know any academic field whose writing regularly indulges in sentence structure as complex as what you find in analytic philosophy.
Let me exhibit for you a wonderful sentence from Page 182 of a recent philosophy book by Ruth Garrett Millikan, Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information (Oxford University Press, 2017). I thought I might have it embroidered on a wall hanging. I omit only the initial connective adjunct “Second” (since the link to the previous paragraph is not relevant here) and a reference date (1957) at the end.
“In arguing for his analysis of non-natural meaning, Grice made the mistake of arguing from the sensible premise that a hearer who believed that a speaker did not intend by his words to produce in the hearer a certain belief or intention would not acquire that belief or intention to the invalid conclusion that a hearer who merely failed to believe that a speaker intended by his words to produce a certain belief or intention in the hearer also would not acquire that belief or intention.”
That is an 86-word sentence, so by the usual standards of readability it’s off the charts, even for high-school students. Yet it is perfectly formed; don’t imagine that I’m criticizing it. It’s just extraordinarily complex and demanding.
When Pullam notes that Millikan’s sentence is off-the-charts in terms of readability, he’s not exaggerating. Its Gunning Fog Scale Level score is 40.78, and its Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is 36.92. Read more »
Wine Worlds and Distributed Agency
by Dwight Furrow
Discussions of the factors that go into wine production tend to circulate around two poles. In recent years, the focus has been on grapes and their growing conditions—weather, climate, and soil—as the main inputs to wine quality. The reigning ideology of artisanal wine production has winemakers copping to only a modest role as caretaker of the grapes, making sure they don’t do anything in the winery to screw up what nature has worked so hard to achieve. To a degree, this is a misleading ideology. After all, those healthy, vibrant grapes with distinctive flavors and aromas have to be grown. A “hands off” approach in the winey just transfers the action to the vineyard where care must be taken to preserve vineyard conditions, adjust to changes in weather, plant and prune effectively and strategically, adjust the canopy and trellising methods when necessary, watch for disease, and pick at the right time.
Such modesty about winery interventions has not always been the norm. For a brief moment in time, beginning in the 1970’s and continuing into the first decade of the 21st century, the winemaker as auteur, a wizard at winery tricks, was ascendant. During this time, new winemaking technologies, viticultural methods, and remarkable advances in wine science were introduced into a formerly artisan practice. Only the wealthy, educated, and connected had access to these advances so the flying winemaker, a globetrotting consultant who made his knowledge and expertise available to the wider community, was common. Grapes were a blank slate upon which the winemaker’s vision could be implemented. This too was misleading; despite new technologies you cannot make good wine from bad grapes. Read more »
Monday, January 7, 2019
Climbing the Walls
by Michael Liss
What is it about immigration that causes us to lose our minds?
I’m not even referring to the absurd spectacle of toilets overflowing at national monuments and hundreds of thousands of federal workers going without pay. In theory, at least, there’s a reason for that: The President promised his supporters a magnificent structure across the Southern Border, and the Democrats don’t want to advance Mexico the money to pay for it.
I’m talking about the insanity of not addressing the root issue—actual immigration policy. Let’s be honest with ourselves, a few billion dollars for something that seems to be morphing in composition and cost every day doesn’t solve our immigration woes. It doesn’t build a Wall, either. We would be taking on the largest infrastructure project since the build-out of the national highway system, lasting many years and including enough eminent domain (because a considerable amount of border land in Texas is in private hands) to cause conservative heads to explode. A few billion is barely seed money for the lobbyists.
So, let’s talk about what we should be talking about: Immigration policy. And let’s start with a hypothetical: The nation has decided to make you Immigration Czar. You have the absolute power to determine policy for the next two years. What do you want to do with it? Read more »
Letting You In on a Secret: Alyssa DeLuccia’s Photographed Collages
by Andrea Scrima
Alyssa DeLuccia’s Letting You in on a Secret is an eloquent artistic inquiry into present-day politics, the media, and contemporary life—one that takes the form of a visual essay operating within the disturbance pattern of a subtle but crucial shift in medium that multiplies and compounds the power of the work and its message.
DeLuccia uses contemporary print media as raw material, fracturing the images and rearranging visual themes to create collages, which she then photographs. And for several important reasons, it’s the photograph and not the installed collage that is the final work of art. The media-reflective dimension of Letting You in on a Secret—the fact that it is based on print media, but locates its final manifestation in the realm of the photographic image intended not for mass-media reproduction, but for the reflective, contemplative context of the exhibition space—speaks to the dire state of imagery and language in the current media landscape and the need to find new methods to assess, decipher, and analyze conflicting and competing information. The new mistrust in the reliability and trustworthiness not only of the means of distribution through news channels, editorial boards, and social media, but in the veracity of the words and images themselves has, on a very basic level, changed the way in which we perceive and engage with the information raining down upon us. Read more »
Alan Lightman On Wasting Time
by Anitra Pavlico
For millennia, humans have had a tradition of introspection and meditation. The Buddhist Dhammapada says that when a monk goes into an “empty place” and calms his mind, he experiences “a delight that transcends that of men.” The ancient Greeks exhorted one to know thyself. Montaigne wrote that the “solitude that I love and advocate is chiefly a matter of drawing my feelings and thoughts back into myself.” This was not so easy even in quieter times, but in the wired era, it has become almost impossible. When Bertrand Russell wrote his essay “In Praise of Idleness” in 1932, the threat to downtime and self-fulfillment was work: “I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.” This is still valid, as we work more than ever despite skyrocketing productivity thanks to technological advances. The trouble today, however, is that even our supposed leisure hours are spent on the grid, essentially ensuring that we never get a moment’s rest.
Over the past few years, numerous books and articles have sounded the alarm on how our online habits are affecting our mental health. Even individuals in the tech industry–including Tim Cook, the Apple CEO who prefers that his nephew not use social media, and Tristan Harris, former Google employee and founder of Time Well Spent, a group advocating for more sensible use of online tools—are joining the chorus. Against this backdrop, physicist, novelist, and essayist Alan Lightman has added his own manifesto, In Praise of Wasting Time. Of course, the title is ironic, because Lightman argues that by putting down our devices and spending time on quiet reflection, we regain some of our lost humanity, peace of mind, and capacity for creativity—not a waste of time, after all, despite the prevailing mentality that we should spend every moment actually doing something. The problem is not only our devices, the internet, and social media. Lightman argues that the world has become much more noisy, fast-paced, and distracting. Partly, he writes, this is because the advances that have enabled the much greater transfer of data, and therefore productivity, have created an environment in which seemingly inexorable market forces push for more time working and less leisure time. Read more »
Perceptions: behind the new year’s eve celebrations
Vaclav Havel’s Guide to Politically-Dangerous Times
by Robert Fay
On the morning of August 20, 1968, the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel had a serious hangover. He was at his country home in Liberec after a night of boozing it up with his actor friend Jan Tříska, who would emigrate to the U.S. in 1977 and eventually appear in The Karate Kid III (I’m not making this up), while Havel went on in 1989 to became president of a free Czechoslovakia (equally astonishing). But on that summer morning, these two men were still just creatures of the Prague theatre world. They caroused at night with their artist and intellectual companions, slept-in late and then worked diligently on their respective crafts in the afternoons, much as their colleagues in London or Paris did.
But these familiar routines came to a halt promptly on August 20 when the Warsaw Pact nations, led by the Soviet Union, invaded Czechoslovakia, ending eight months of political reform and expanded social and civic freedoms that has become known as “The Prague Spring.”
In the popular western imagination, the Prague Spring has been both sacralized and completely mischaracterized. It’s been crudely lumped in with the 1960s political unrest in the West, something like: “The Summer of Love—Slavic Style.” But the anti-establishment, countercultural youth rebellions (sexual freedom, drug use, feminism, gay rights, etc.) that were visible in cities like Paris, London and San Francisco had little in common with the Prague Spring. Read more »
Why You’re Wrong
by Akim Reinhardt
Your numbers are off
I said your numbers are off
You forgot your watch
You forgot your glasses
You misread
You misunderstood
You’re missing the point
You’re naive
You’re irrational
You’re close minded
You’re vain
You’re shallow
You’re overly emotional
It’s wishful thinking
You’re too optimistic
You’re too pessemistic
You’re full of yourself
You’re self-serving
You’re self-conscious
You’re cliquish
You play favorites
I said you play favorites
You point fingers
You get personal
You’re taking it personally
You keep making it about you
It’s not about you
It is about you
You’re not that special
It’s not really about them
You’re clingy
You’re jealous
You’re judgmental
You’re a control freak
You’re manipulative and don’t even know it
You’re easily influenced
You don’t think for yourself
You shouldn’t speak for others
You didn’t do anything
The Devil’s in the details
You’re over complicating it
You expect too much
You generalize
You fear meaninglessness
You fear the unknown
You crave explanations where there are none
You’re comfortable with you already know
You settle
You’re not discerning
You’re a creature of habit
You’re stuck in your ways
You’re really stuck in your ways
God damn, are you stuck in your ways
You’re stubborn
I said you’re stubborn
You already had your mind made up
Your head’s in the sand
You have blinders on
You’re shortsighted
You’re afraid to look in the mirror
Hindsight is 20/20
You’re looking at it backwards
It’s not too late
It’s later than you think
You’re not thinking straight
It’s not as bad as you think
There’s more to it
There’s a lot more to it
There’s not that much to it
You’re making excuses
You’re impatient
You’re in a rush
You have a short memory
You’re bad at history
I said you’re bad at history
Man, are you bad at history
Akim Reinhardt is a Historian. And he’s usually wrong. His website is ThePublicProfessor.com
The Perfect Library
by Leanne Ogasawara
In heaven, there will be no more sea journeys, says Virgil. For much of human history, to journey by ship across open waters was thought of almost as an act of transgression. It was something requiring great temerity and audacity. It was therefore something not to be taken lightly.
Crossing boundaries, such journeys often ended in ruin.
CS Lewis once described the people of the Middle Ages, not as a pack of barbarians, but as a literate people who had simply lost all their books. Likening them to castaways washed ashore with just a few of their greatest volumes, the medievals, he said, set out to rebuild their civilization. Not an easy task to be sure; for not only had they lost most of their library, but what did survive, survived by nothing other than mere chance. This is how it came to pass that while all of Aristotle was lost, parts of Plato’s Timaeus somehow made it. (Of all the works by Plato, the Timaeus might be the last one that could have been any use to the people!) It would take centuries to rebuild what was lost–and this done through Latin translations made via the Arabic translations.
I like this way of imagining the medievals; for I too have suffered a shipwreck. This happened when I was 44 and walked away from my life in Japan. I left everything behind. All my beloved clothes, pottery, furniture, gifts– you name it. Just a few choice things to put in one suitcase –with the other suitcase devoted to things I imagined my son might want. Walking away from my belongings was a lot easier than you might imagine. Indeed, I found I didn’t miss any of it. Well, except for one important thing: I missed my books beyond belief.
My lost books in Japan haunted my thoughts. So a few years ago, my astronomer and I started recreating my library. Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
On the Road: Inside Papua New Guinea
by Bill Murray
John Allen Chau, the missionary killed in the Andaman Islands in November, reopened the ‘uncontacted people’ debate. An advocacy group called Survival believes “Uncontacted peoples make a judgment that they are better off remaining uncontacted and independent, fending for themselves.” Most everybody else wants in, missionaries on their missions, doctors preventing disease, linguists to study imperiled languages.
Outside the Amazon basin most of the world’s uncontacted people live in New Guinea. The world’s second largest island is divided between Indonesia in the west where – as far as we know – all remaining uncontacted people live, and Papua New Guinea in the east.
My wife and I took a peek into the interior of Papua New Guinea twenty years ago. To be clear, we sailed up the Sepik River, in the north of the country, a region that has had contact with Europeans since their ships scouted the coast in the late 18th century. European settlers pressed indigenous labor into plantation work on the north coast from the late 19th and then, in the 1930s Australian gold prospectors trekked into the interior highlands and climbed out with eyes big as saucers, having made contact with nearly a million previously unknown highlanders. (Here is a remarkable video.)
Apprehensive but with faith in the civilizing force of the five or six intervening decades, our upper lips stiffened by the hotel minibar, we flew into the highland town of Mt. Hagen, gateway to the interior. Mt. Hagen comprised a single downtown street, a rugby field, airstrip, unkempt housing and not much more. Read more »
A future without boredom
by Sarah Firisen
“I’m bored!”. How often I would whine that as a kid. How often my kids would whine that to me. “Go out and play” my mother would reply. I probably said some version of the same thing to my kids. And I usually would go out and play. I’d go to the park and wander in the wooded area making up stories and collecting flowers that I’d later dry between the pages of books. Or I’d go and knock on a neighbor’s door to see if a friend could come out and play. Then we’d ride our bikes, or practice doing handstands against someone’s house. Sometimes we had water fights or snowball fights in winter. I suspect that kids today spend less time rectifying boredom in these kinds of ways, as indeed do most adults. After all, between streaming media and mobile devices, who really needs to be bored anymore. A game of Words with Friends or Candy Crush, or a new show on Netflix is never more than a tap away.
And now, with automation in the workplace easier and more affordable than ever, the prospect of work without boredom is increasingly before us. We all have those tasks that we hate, normally the boring repetitive ones that just have to get done. It’s the rare job that doesn’t have some degree of mundane administrative activities attached to it. But thanks to AI and particularly Robotic Process Automation (RPA), companies, and increasingly individual employees, are able to automate many of these tasks. Anything that is a rules based activity that can be done at a keyboard is a likely candidate for RPA bots. These bots can be run server-side for enterprise-wide processes or from your computer, mimicking whatever security access your company account has to systems on your computer and throughout the network, including accessing web pages and scraping information. Many hours can be taken out of a worker’s days, with tasks performed more quickly and more accurately by these bots, and with the added advantage of being able to run anytime of the day and night 24/7. Leaving many white collar workers with the not so distant prospect of never having to do those kinds of tasks again. And while it is very possible, and even likely, that many if not most companies see at least some of return on investment from this technology as a reduction in their workforce, at least the stated goal of many companies is to free their workers up to perform higher value work. Read more »
Is FDR the capital of the SK8board nation?
FDR? You mean Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32d president of the USofA?
Not quite. I mean FDR SK8park, in Philadelphia.
“SK8park”? What’s that? Can’t you spell?
Yes I can. Sound it out.
Oh, you mean “skate park”.
Right. SK8park, FDR SK8park. It’s at the southern end of Franklin Delano Park.
What’s this skateboard nation?
It’s a notion, if you will, a conceit, a turn of phrase, a way of speaking. Perhaps, if you will, an identity of sorts. And that’s what this is about.
The do-it-yourself “spot” or park is one facet of skateboarding. A bunch of skateboarders will find an out-of-the-way spot and remake it to their purposes, installing rails, half-pipes, banks, pyramids, and other features. Some of these are fairly small, like the one I ran into some years ago in Jersey City when I was photographing graffiti. Others are quite large, like Philly’s FDR, which is one of the largest and best-known DIY parks in the world.
FDR is festooned with graffiti and street art. Most of it is a grab-bag of standard stuff, tags, throw-ups, pieces of varying quality, posters and stickers and what have you. But some of it is of a different nature. That’s what I’m interested in.
As you read this, think of yourself as an explorer, an archeologist perhaps – Indiana Jones? You’ve come across a strange civilization. You’ve talked with a native or two, but mostly you’re examining the markings they’ve made. What do they mean?
Consider the photo at the right (from 2014). Up at the top it says “THIS IS LIVIN’”. Whatever ‘this’ is that, presumably, is what we see these two people doing, skate boarding. And they’re passionate about it. Read more »
Monday, December 31, 2019
Visual Histories: Trade
by Timothy Don
In my capacity as art editor at Lapham’s Quarterly, I’ve spent the last six weeks researching images for our upcoming issue on TRADE. It was not a thematic that excited me when I started, I have to admit—I’m a curator and a writer, not a businessman or an economist, dammit! But after looking at more than 10,000 paintings, sculptures, and photographs that limn the human urge to exchange goods, a faint thrill and a growing sense of despair have both begun to take root.I’ve peered into the faces of Ferdinand Bol’s Syndics of the Wine Traders Guild of Amsterdam from 1660, looking for signs of avarice, prudence, and rectitude.
I’ve turned in my hands a 3rd century terracotta figurine of a camel carrying transport amphora (a secular, material expression of the nativity scene I just disassembled with my daughter). I’ve flipped through Alex Majoli’s 1999 series of photographs of the Roque Santeiro in Angola, the largest open-air market in Africa. According to Alex, the Roque attracts roughly one million people per day, and its vendors sell anything and everything: food, weapons, drugs, even people. It hosts church services and marriages. It shelters war cripples, homeless refugees, police, prostitutes, and the insane. Babies are born and the dead are interred within and beneath its stalls. At this “market of the damned,” Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th century visions of hell have been fully realized by the predations of 20th century capitalism.
A line and a theme have emerged through the iconography I’ve been following: to trade is human. We buy and we sell; we exchange, barter, haggle, negotiate, promise, vouchsafe, con, steal, acquire, and unload. It’s what we do; it’s what we’ve always done. The allure of trade lies not so much in the goods amassed as in the frisson of exchange: the contact with another human being that occurs in the act of trade. The slipping-ness from one to another. The handshake, the greased palm, the unctuous smile. The flow, the liquidity. The intimate bond that is established between two people when they make a deal. To trade is human. It’s dirty and oily and sexy.
And yet, underneath trade, there is something else going on. Something very faint, something very fragile, something that only adds to the excitement and the value of the goods on the table, is put at risk each time a trade is made. This something is trust. Read more »
The vast and mysterious real numbers
by Jonathan Kujawa
What is a number? Everyone who takes high school math learns about the real numbers. These are our old friends on the number line. You can hardly do classical algebra or geometry without them. We use the real numbers so often we find them comfortable and familiar. After all, they are just numbers you write as a (possibly infinite) decimal. They may be long to write, but numbers like
1.41421356237309504880168872420969807856967187537694807317667973799…
don’t worry us.
Let’s back up a step or two. The integers (that is, the counting numbers and their negatives: 0,1,-1,2,-2,3,-3,,…) aren’t very controversial [1]. We can all agree what it means to have 7 goats, no goats, or that I have -3 goats when I owe my neighbor 3 goats. The rational numbers aren’t too bad, either. After all, to have 7/5 of a hamburger is to slice two burgers into 5 equal pieces each and to take seven of the pieces. And, again, to have -8/3 of a burger is to owe someone two burgers plus 2/3 of a third [2].
The integers and rationals are down to earth, as numbers go. However, it doesn’t take very long before you realize you need more numbers. One day in geometry class you draw a one-by-one square, notice you can draw a straight line which connects the opposite corners, and that line self-evidently has a length. Whatever that length is, it is an honest-to-goodness number (call it D) which exists in nature. At some point, you notice two one-by-one squares can be cut along the diagonal and reassembled into a single, larger square with side length D. On the one hand, the area of this new square is D². On the other hand, it is the area of the two smaller squares taken together. That is, D²=2. The Pythagoreans already knew 2600 years ago there is no rational number whose square equals two. The apocryphal story is the existence of non-rational numbers was a closely held secret for the Pythagoreans, worthy of murder. Nowadays we tell it to school children. So much for the innocence of youth. Read more »
Divulging Nature
by Brooks Riley
Sometime in the late Fifties, Roman Vishniac, a pioneer of photomicrography, picked up a knife, cut a thick horizontal slice of skin from his own thumb and photographed it under a microscope using polarized light. The resulting image succeeded on two levels: the scientific parsing of human skin’s rich textural terrain; and the chromatic revelation of natural beauty at a visual scale heretofore inaccessible. By subjecting himself to that brief ouch, he was able to expose the intricacies of the body’s largest organ and dramatize a new frontier of optical exploration that would grow exponentially as the technology became more sophisticated. Since then, the dual roles of photomicrography—contributing to scientific investigation, and unveiling eye-popping, artistic devils in the details–has expanded, yielding hidden treasures of a microcosmic universe so populous and dense that the planetary universe of outer space seems paltry by comparison. In some ways this universe of the tiny is more forthcoming than outer space with its endless stretches of nothingness between the orbs.
It is almost impossible to contemplate infinity without feeling infinitesimal. The paradoxical effect of trying to wrap our brains around something as vast as the universe is the realization that we will always be tinier than the tiniest subatomic particle. Compare it to a single cell inside our own bodies trying to fathom the infinity of its host. Infinity makes us giddy.
The reach for infinity usually moves toward outer space and all those unimaginable yonders out there. But what of the other direction, the ‘infinitesimals’ around and under us, so much smaller than our own miniscule selves? What to make of the recently estimated 23 billion tons of microscopic life at ground level and below our feet, packed together like canned sardines in neighborly proximity to us? This macrograph of a mite on a honey bee isn’t a spectacular image, but it does suggest reverse infinity: Is there a mite on the mite? If so, is there a mite on that mite? And so on. Read more »
You Can’t Possibly Believe That
by Tim Sommers
Old joke. A Calvinist preacher, a firm believer in predestination, is moving his family further west. Seeing him packing his wagon, a neighbor stops to say goodbye. The preacher brings one last item out of his house, a shotgun, and the neighbor asks, “What good is that going to do you? If you get attacked by a bear, and it’s your time to go, that won’t help.” The preacher responds, “What if I get attacked by a bear and it’s the bear’s time to go?”
Predestination is not the same thing as lack of free will (according to Calvinists at least), but, maybe, close enough. On a recent episode of This American Life (episode 662) producer David Kestenbaum made his case against free will like this. “[T]here are only four basic forces in the world – gravity, electromagnetism, and two others, the strong force and the weak force…Our understanding of these forces has been tested and explored again and again…These four forces explain how atoms stick together, how every bit of matter moves, and yes, even the bits of matter that make up us and our brains. We are just collections of atoms. I don’t see how those atoms can truly have any will. When you think you’re deciding, I’m going to wear this shirt today, you can’t really have decided otherwise. We are subject to the forces of nature, not one of them.”
Very convincing all on its own. (I especially like that last line. “We are subject to the forces of nature, not one of them.”) But later on in the show Kestenbaum got some back-up from neuroscientist, and official Genius (Grant Recipient), Robert Sapolsky. Here he is talking about the movement of an eyebrow. “So, let’s simplify it. A muscle did something. Meaning a neuron in your motor cortex commanded your muscle to do that. That neuron fired only because it got inputs from umpteen other neurons milliseconds before. And those neurons only fired because they got inputs milliseconds before and back and back and back. Show me one neuron anywhere in this pathway that, from out of nowhere, decided to say something that activated in ways that are not explained by the laws of the physical universe, and ions, and channels, and all that sort of stuff. Show me one neuron that has some cellular semblance of free will. And there is no such neuron.”
Something has gone wrong here. Did you catch it? I’ll come back to it in a bit, but first I want to talk, not about a reason to believe in free will, but about why you can’t possibly believe that free will (in some form or other) doesn’t exist. Read more »
The Locked Doors of Delhi
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi
“I’m on a roadside perch,” writes Ghalib in a letter, “lounging on a takht, enjoying the sunshine, writing this letter. The weather is cold…,” he continues, as he does in most letters, with a ticklish observation or a humble admission ending on a philosophical note, a comment tinged with great sadness or a remark of wild irreverence fastened to a mystic moment. These are fragments recognized in Urdu as literary gems because they were penned by a genius, but to those of us hungry for the short-lived world that shaped classical Urdu, those distanced from that world in time and place, Ghalib’s letters chronicle what is arguably the height of Urdu’s efflorescence as well as its most critical transitions as an elite culture that found itself wedged between empires (the Mughal and the British), and eventually, many decades after Ghalib’s death, between two countries (Pakistan and India).
I write this on a winter day in California. It is Mirza’s two hundred and twenty first birth anniversary. There is a nip in the air and the sunlight is filtered through my carob tree; my notes, scribbled in Nastaliq, are dappled and illuminated by sudden flashes as the branches sway. Isn’t Ghalib’s Delhi a labyrinth of dappled alleys, a dream leaping from rooftop to rooftop, getting a stealthy taste of the saffron-cream dessert known to be prepared here under a full moon and left overnight to set in winter dew— a heady mix of in-the moment-sensations that vivify memory— rising with the city’s nimble frangipani, its famed red sandstone and marble minarets, returning reliably like its homing pigeons. Read more »
Now What (or, Scenes from the Black Hills Turned White)
by Lexi Lerner
I call on the evening of the winter solstice. Two mornings later, I find myself boarding a plane to the Black Hills of South Dakota, soon to turn white from a Christmas blizzard. I have never experienced these mountains or this state before. But I have experienced many blizzards, the first of which occurred the night I was born.
Well, it’s been building up inside of me
For – oh, I don’t know how long
“I’m disappointed,” I explain in a SoHo café two weeks prior. “I thought I could find what I was looking for – maybe not in Jersey, but at least in New York. The people, the questions. But we are constantly out of phase. The people I seek don’t want to be sought by me, and vice versa. There’s nothing I can do. It just isn’t here.”
The boy listening to me looks startled, and a bit sad. Or worried? I glance down at the table and realize my tea had jumped from my clenched fists. The one-table radius around us has no audible conversation.
“Sorry,” I say.
The waitress comes over. “Would you like anything else?”
The first billboard that greets you as you leave the eight-gate airport has a cartoon diplodocus on it, featuring a generous view of its behind. A speech bubble says: “Welcome to Rapid City! Now what?”
I don’t know why, but I keep thinking
Something’s bound to go wrong
In his book Sonic Alchemy, David Howard writes that “Don’t Worry Baby” – unlike its Beach Boys A-side “I Get Around” and other emblematic California Sound hits – “suggested something entirely more pensive and even slightly dark underneath its pristine façade.”
We exit the airport on Terminal Road. The cabin itself, a good hour away, is on Last Chance Trail. Read more »