by Brooks Riley
Where Do You Live: Part 3
by Christopher Bacas
Our papers arrived in the mail; envelope a bulging fish, its paper crinkled into rows of scales and ball-point lettering murky. When I opened it, bracing saline flooded my belly. The terms were stark: without a timely response, Marshalls would forcibly remove us and all our possessions. My family home was remarkably stable. As a young professional, I’d spent 600 nights in motels, I wasn’t prepared to spend much time on the streets.
Eviction papers require a tenant to answer in person. In each borough, a special court convenes for housing cases. In Brooklyn, the court building is downtown, wedged in a sprawl of vertiginous modern gantries, gaslight storefronts and acres of cheap, street-level shopping. The entrance floor is a glassed box, furnished with two walk-through metal detectors, their conveyor belts, and steel tables stacked with tubs for personal items. The hard faces and surly voices of the entry guards clarify the tenants’ place: slightly above farm animal. Beyond the gauntlet, a bank of elevators, squalling up and down on greaseless cables. Indicator lights broken, mostly shuttling between upper floors, they arrive every 15 minutes or so. Even for the infirm, the stairs are quicker and actually, more dignified. Officers of the Court enter quickly on the side, through a secure door into a private elevator.
Monday, April 2, 2018
Preston Brooks Canes the Union
by Michael Liss
History is fractal. Zoom out, and you see grand themes, mass movements, stirring oratory, and profound ideas. Zoom in, and it is countless individual acts and choices, smaller moments that often seem to be just footnotes, but are, on closer inspection, immensely revealing.
On May 22, 1856, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks entered the Senate Chamber, strode purposefully over to the desk of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, and beat him senseless with a gold-headed, gutta-percha walking stick. So forceful, and so numerous were his blows, that Brooks shattered his weapon. And so much the damage done to his victim, both physical and psychological, that Sumner was unable to resume his Senatorial duties for nearly three years.
Matter of honor for Brooks. Sumner had just delivered a two-day jeremiad, “The Crime Against Kansas,” which was laced with insults against Brooks’ home state and his kin, South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler. As for the need for 30 swings of the cane on a bloodied, helpless victim, anyone who understood the profound passion of offended dignity of the Southern Gentleman could explain it. Who, of Brooks’ stature, wouldn’t have acted the same way when faced with the same provocation?
Brooks’ choice of a weapon said as much as his words. It was not an accident, not something grabbed in impulse. In the Southern Code, you dueled with an equal, but thrashed an inferior. Sumner, for all his refined manners, Harvard education, and the classical allusions in his speeches, was clearly a social inferior—a “Black Republican” of the worst type. Once Brooks settled on a course of action, he grappled with the choice of cane or bullwhip, but he never, ever, considered pistols.
Most of the South cheered. Fire-Eaters made similar threats against other Northern leaders, and Brooks mused, “It would not take much to have the throats of every Abolitionist cut.” He became a sort of a pop hero, the very exemplar of chivalrous Southern manliness. Among his adoring acolytes were students from the University of Virginia, who sent him a golden-headed cane, inscribed, and etched with the image of a cracked human skull.
Dance beyond words
by Dave Maier
The viewer’s emotion is born of a profound recognition of himself in the story that is being played out onstage before him. He engages in a participatory, embodied mirroring reaction with the dancers, which evades articulation in language. Susanne K. Langer is writing about music in the following passage from Philosophy in a New Key, but her commentary can be applied equally well to dance: “The real power of music lies in the fact that it can be ‘true’ to the life of feeling in a way that language cannot; for its significant forms have that ambivalence of content that words cannot have.” Musical meanings arrive, as Langer puts it, “below the threshold of consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking. […] [Bausch:] “For I always know what I am looking for, but I know it with my intuition and not with my head.” Indeed, many artists work this way, even artists whose medium is words. There is always a preverbal, physiological, rhythmic, motoric, ground that precedes language and informs it.
Okay, that’s quite a mouthful. Let’s unpack it (as my anthropology teacher used to say).
If the experience of Café Müller reaches “beyond language,” a natural question is: what is it about dance, a non-verbal art, that allows it to do what words cannot? Is it that it is physical/gestural rather than verbal, or instead that it is characteristically artistic experience rather than everyday discourse? To answer this, we must also consider for comparison the two other possibilities: non-verbal non-art and verbal art (literature/poetry).
If everyday non-artistic gestures reach “beyond language” simply by being non-verbal, then it is hardly remarkable to say of dance that it does this as well, and thus it cannot be this mere ability that makes possible the latter’s power. It must be that what does the trick instead is that dance is an art of gesture, that it takes advantage of its non-verbal nature in a way that everyday gestures do not, in order to allow the exceptional experience that moved Wenders to tears. But what does that difference amount to here?
I’m a Lot Like Donald Trump
by Akim Reinhardt
But it should go without saying that any decent human being is, in many ways, not much like Donald Trump. Indeed, it is so obvious, that to even mention one's dissimilarities from The Donald is not only unenlightening but likely self-serving.
Much more interesting, I believe, is to consider the ways in which you really are quite similar to someone you find repugnant, to someone who is broken beyond repair, to someone you have absolutely no respect for whatsoever. Because when you acknowledge those features you hold in common with a disgusting, heinous wretch who fouls the earth with his very existence, then you can begin to penetrate your most obscure attributes, peel back your complex layers, and really learn something about yourself.
A well examined life cannot be lived amid self-congratulation or comfort. We can only discover our true selves by embarking upon difficult journeys to our inner souls and by confronting our deepest unpleasantries. Be happy and modest about any common ground you may stand upon with the hero. But know thyself when you turn to the mirror and chance upon fleeting glimpses of the villain. It is in that spirit of deep self-scrutiny that I must confess: I'm a lot like Donald Trump. Let me count the ways.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Digital remembrance of things past
by Sarah Firisen
In response to my last piece on 3QD, a colleague, Josh, wrote the following thoughts to me: “Roots. Are at our very core. We can live without them for short periods, but to have soul, you have to listen to a record, not just hear an iphone stream, you have to turn the page of a book, not just flip an ipad, you have to hold the tattered edges of an old family picture and see the soul in their eyes to grab the essence of time capture. “
Increasingly, we don’t have photos to become tattered, new books to become dogeared, let alone records. Is my colleague Josh right, are we losing our roots and our souls? Something that is easy to forget is that many people would have said this when the phonograph was first introduced, or the first cameras. There have always been luddites, sometimes with legitimate concerns about technology, sometimes with just fears of the new. There have always been people worried that new technology will change fundamental things about who we are as people and how we interact with each other, and believe that those changes will only be negative. I don’t think the question is, “will we grow different roots with digital photos”, but rather, why is it that these “roots” are necessarily inferior? The albums that I scoured for photos yesterday were buried in a box in the back of a closet. I haven’t looked at any of them in years. My children don’t even realize I have most of these photos. But in our digital, social media lives, we’re sharing our photos all the time. One of my more favorite Facebook features is when it shows you photos of this day on x year and it shows me some adorable photo of my kids when they were little or reminds me of a great trip I was on. Often, I repost these photos and tag my kids. I know that some people will say that most of us overshare, and perhaps we do, but, just as with my cousins’ sharing of photos of our grandmothers on Facebook, this kind of sharing can do its part to fortify relationship bonds. Years ago, I would have brought those photos to lunch, everyone would have passed them around and that would have been it. Now, I’ve digitized them, posted them on our Facebook group and we have online discussions about them including in cousins who weren’t able to attend the reunions, we give these photos a life beyond a dusty photo album in the back of a closet.
Leapin’ Lizards: Three Lessons I Learned in Marching Band
That experience was a rich one. But it was also complicated and fraught with anxiety and ambivalence.
These lessons are about the lizard brain and its problematic relationship with civilization. Not merely Western Civ, mind you, but any civilization whatsoever.
Lesson the First: It’s the Groove, Baby
Those aren’t the words he used, but that’s what he meant. It’s the groove that tells the story; it’s the groove that moves the feet.
I’m talking about something told to me, though not to me personally, by Richard Cuppett, director of my high school marching band. Cuppett was something of a taskmaster and worked us hard. Because he did so, the band was an excellent one, so good, rumor had it, that some people came to football games—we’re talking Steeler country, folks, the coal mines and steel mills that fed the fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers—as much to see the band as to watch the football game.
Cuppett was talking to the band about excellence. How can you tell that a band is really good? If kids march alongside the band when it is on parade, the band is a good one. He passed that on to us as a lesson, though I forget whom he attributed it to. Perhaps some bandleader he’d worked with, or perhaps some legendary figure, like John Philips Sousa.
It sounded strange when I first heard it, gathered there in the band room along with the other bandsmen. It didn’t quite make sense to let little kids be the judges of band quality. But Cuppett was the director, so it must be true—I was just a kid then, and so inclined to believe things told to me by someone in authority.
His point, of course, is that when music is really grooving, it’s infectious. It will attract those little kids and get their fidgety feed to move in time with the music. For that to happen, two things are necessary: the musicians have to play together, and they have to play with passion. Not just one, or the other, but both at the same time.
Everyone, together, passion.
Monday, March 26, 2018
The Owl of Minerva and the Fallacy Fallacy
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
The fallacy fallacy is a good way to appreciate the Owl of Minerva Problem. The fallacy fallacy occurs when one starts seeing fallacies everywhere. In the same way that the college sophomore taking Abnormal Psychology becomes convinced that everyone in her dorm suffers from some disassociative disorder, students of informal logic frequently become convinced that fallacies are everywhere. That's fine, in a way. There are lots of fallacies and bad reasoning. That's because reasoning well is hard, and humans are regularly pretty bad at it. But once one starts seeing fallacies everywhere, one is tempted to think those who say so many things on the basis of fallacious reasons are thereby wrong about the things they say. But that inference, too, is a fallacy! Here's the basic scheme:
S is committed to p
S gives argument A for p
A is a fallacy
Therefore, p is false
The conclusion does not follow. Just because people have terrible reasons for some conclusion, it doesn't mean that the conclusion is false. Your uncle may believe something on the basis of wishful thinking, but that doesn't make it a false belief. So if he believes that the sun will rise tomorrow because he just can't go on in the dark, he's got a dumb reason, but his conclusion's still right. That's why we evaluate reasons as reasons independently of evaluating the conclusion. That's the whole point of critical thinking – keeping those questions separate.
This point about the fallacy fallacy is important because it provides a case where training in informal logic and fallacy detection actually creates a new kind of error. Nobody could commit the fallacy fallacy if there were no vocabulary of fallacies to begin with. The metalanguage of logic, which is supposed to help make us better reasoners, ends up making possible a particular kind of argumentative pathology. From the project of fallacy correction arises a new fallacy. Now, if that ain't ironic, we don't know what is.
A-Tisket, A-Tasket, an Apollonian Gasket
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Apollonius of Perga (262-190 BC) was a well known and prolific geometer in ancient Greece. He is mainly known for his surviving work on the conic sections. Indeed, he gave us the definition of the ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola we use today. In some circles, Apollonius's most famous theorem is the fact that if you have three circles which are mutually tangent, then there always exactly two ways to add a fourth circle which is tangent to all three. That is, you can always fit exactly one new circle tangent to the original three within each interstice made by the existing circles. In the picture to the right if you start with the three black circles, then you can complete the picture to four tangent circles by adding either of the gray circles.
One thing I've learned in math is: anything worth doing once, is worth doing many times. Once you add the two new circles you've now created six new gaps. This, in turn, can be filled with circles, creating yet more gaps. And so on. You can keep adding circles forever:
Image from [1].
The fractally looking result is an Apollonian Gasket. There is a delightful Gasket maker available here. You get fun pictures like this one:
As we did above, it is common when drawing Gaskets to start with two circles inside of a third, but this is only for convenience and isn't needed for Apollonius's result. Indeed, if you start with three circles which are tangent to each other and none contains the others, then one of the two new circles you add will encircle the others, so you'll end up with the outside circle, anyway.
When looking at pictures like these, it is natural to ask how much of the big circle is filled by the smaller circles. At each stage there will always be little slivers of empty space. But perhaps eventually every gap is filled with a circle. If you know about fractals, you'll know the answer to this question is not so obvious.
The Superlative form of Love
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi
And there was evening– you were born (raging like a lioness). A monsoon evening– the window wide and the world awash.
And it is evening, here in California, evening of a melon-sherbet sky and birds with pencil nibs for beaks. In the ultrasound image, my baby is an amphibious enigma— a riddle wafting in unfathomable love, thumb in mouth, curled like a golden promise, a dreamscape reminding me of a flock of starlings forming a dancing cloud— I shudder at his vulnerability, recall a verse from the Quran:
“Do they not see the birds above with wings outspread or folded in? None holds them (aloft) except Ar Rahman, the Most Merciful One. Indeed He is, of all things, Seeing.”
The word Ar Rahman comes from Raham or "womb," the superlative form of merciful love—the most exalted of the ninety-nine beautiful names of God.
Driving back from the clinic in the fading light, I feel vulnerable and empowered at the same time. Hand on my belly, I imagine the warmth of the womb waters. As my husband opens the door, Yaseen, my two-year old shrieks in delight, arms thrown wide; the sight quickens my heartbeat and baby Yousuf, weeks away from being born, feels my burst of joy and starts kicking in response: Love was never spoken with more eloquence. And I, the poet in the house, had nothing to do with it.
The Science of Tomato Flavors
by Jalees Rehman
In a recent article, the scientists Harry Klee and Denise Tieman at the University of Florida summarize some of the most important recent research on the molecular biology of fruit flavors, with a special emphasis on tomatoes. Our perception of "flavor" primarily relies on two senses – taste and smell. Taste is perceived by taste receptors in our mouth, primarily located on the tongue and discriminates between sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savory. The sensation of smell (also referred to as "olfaction"), on the other hand, has a much broader catalog of perceptions. There are at least 400 different olfactory receptors present in the olfactory epithelium – the cells in the nasal passages which perceive smells – and the combined activation of various receptors can allow humans to distinguish up to 1 trillion smells. These receptors are activated by so-called volatile organic compounds or volatiles, a term which refers to organic molecules that are vaporize in the mouth when we are chewing the food and enter our nasal passages to activate the olfactory epithelium. The tremendous diversity of the olfactory receptors thus allows us to perceive a wide range of flavors. Anybody who eats food while having a cold and a stuffy nose will notice how bland food has become, even though the taste receptors on the tongue remain fully functional.
perceptions
Snapshots of a Karachi Spring
by Claire Chambers
As I step, bleary-eyed, out of my PIA aeroplane from Manchester, UK, I notice a door sign warning of the danger 
In the car on our way to my hotel, we follow a man in a shalwar kameez the colour of lapis lazuli, one leg hitched over the tailgate of a Toyota Hilux, caressing the shaft of his gun. Our security guard occasionally uses his walkie-talkie to give a number and a crisp 'Roger' to a disembodied voice at the other end, which responds with another number and a 'Roger'. There must be some logic to it, but amidst my jet-lag pea-souper I can't see what.
A wall darkly proclaims: PREPARE ANY STRENGTH YOU CAN MUSTER AGAINST THEM. Countercultural stencils sunnily protest this authoritarianism with such slogans as 'I Am Karachi — United for Peace'. Banksy-style balloons brighten one Maersk Sealand container, and a lotus painted using truck-art techniques adorns a grim underpass. American sociologist Anita Weiss has regularly spent time in Pakistan since the 1970s. She is currently researching wall art, and calls the I Am Karachi group a 'guerrilla art movement', especially when it comes to the challenge they are sending out to sectarianism.
On the main road we see Land Cruisers rather than the Pajero jeeps I remember from 1990s Pakistan. Men hang off buses, and my eyes are assailed by a dizzying array of hoardings. KK Rehabilitation Centre. Handi Inn. Baithak Peshwari. On dusty slip roads, I notice a family eating their dinner under bedraggled trees on the pavement near the glittering Park Towers. Four men on the pavement are smiling, perspiring and conspiring. Yameen Chicken. Mutton and Beef Centre. WalkEaze. A school advertises its 'salient features' in businesslike bullet points. A beggar pleads at our car window on his bachche's behalf, exposing the lack of government capacity to deal with the country's grinding poverty.
Artifact and Affect
"Genuine aura appears in all things,
not just in certain kinds of things."
~ Walter Benjamin
To be clear, convenience and practicality still rule the roost when it comes to the secondary market. Twitter user Tom Corremans posted a picture of a stall in an open-air market somewhere in Mexico, a beautifully composed shot that shows off the neat boxes of USB sticks, all grouped by genre: 'Rancheras Mexicanas,' 'Cumbia Villera,' '70-80-90.' I like the notion that you are buying into a grab-bag of music on each stick. How much music does each stick have? Does each box consist of copies or is each stick unique, so one stick will have more 70s hits than 80s? Who gets to decide what gets put on each one, and is there a note from your curator saved on the stick? There must be a fascinating set of social practices that constitute the development and maintenance of this form of music piracy, but the only thing that I can say for certain is a variation on the caution one should exercise when sampling the street food of any foreign country, however delicious it might seem: I'm sure that, in additon to tasty grooves, there is plenty of indigestion awaiting the incautious consumer, in the form of whatever malware happens to be lurking on those drives.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Liquid Kitsch: Wine, Beauty and the Obsession with Smooth
by Dwight Furrow
Sacred, lifesaving, having as precedent only those things which are themselves unprecedented, beauty has a fourth feature: it invites deliberation….Beauty almost without any effort of our own acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labour, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction – to locate what is true. (Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 26-31)
For wine lovers scouring the globe for a glimpse of vinous perfection, Scarry's account of what beauty does surely rings true. However, although we toss the word beauty around quite freely, in the aesthetics of art it has fallen on hard times since early in the 20th Century. With the display of Duchamp's upside down urinal in a New York art studio in 1917 and the mass atrocities of WW1 and the Holocaust haunting artistic production throughout the rest of the century, the idea of beauty no longer seemed to capture what the art world was selling. The problem was that by the 20th Century beauty had been assimilated to what was "pretty", "charming", and easily accessible and had thus lost its power to enthrall or represent the more difficult aspects of human existence. Thus, the art world dumped beauty and embraced the sublime. Art became abstract, difficult, and for most of the public, inaccessible.
There are interesting parallels and cross-currents to this story about art that are beginning to unfold in the wine world today. In the past, prior to the 1980's, great wines were tough when first bottled taking years to develop in the cellar at which time they often developed aromas such as cigar box, old shoes and barnyard. Vintage variation was enormous especially in the storied vineyards of central France where unpredictable weather from the Atlantic Ocean inhibited the consistent ripening of grapes. In some years even great vineyards could produce only thin, weedy wines with harsh acidity and aggressive, under-ripe tannins prompting the addition of sugar to make the wine palatable. Furthermore, the presence of bacteria and the unpredictability of fermentations produced off flavors in the wine that contributed to a wine's character but also to a sense of adventure when opening a bottle. That was the good stuff. Vin ordinaire performed a plausible rendition of battery acid.
Maybe Something
by Tamuira Reid
Monday, March 19, 2018
Dreams of a technocrat
by Ashutosh Jogalekar
The Second World War was a transformational conflict in terms of applying the techniques of statistics and engineering to war problems. In many ways the war belonged to technocrats like McNamara and Vannevar Bush who was one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project. The success that these technocrats achieved through inventions like radar, the atomic bomb and the development of the computer were self-evident, so it was not surprising that scientists became a highly sought after voice in the corridors of power after the war. Some like Richard Feynman wanted nothing to do with weapons research after the war ended. Others like Robert Oppenheimer embraced this power. Unfortunately Oppenheimer’s naiveté combined with the beginnings of the Cold War generated paranoia and resulted in a disgraceful public hearing that stripped him of his security clearance.
After McNamara was appointed to the position by Kennedy, he began a tight restructuring of the defense forces by adopting the same kinds of statistical research techniques that he had used at Ford. Some of these techniques go by the name of operations research. McNamara’s policies led to cost reduction and consolidation of weapons systems. He brought a much more scientific approach to thinking about defense problems. One of his important successes was to change official US nuclear posture from the massive retaliation adopted by the Eisenhower administration to a strategy of more proportionate response adopted by the Kennedy administration. At this point in time McNamara was playing the role of the good technocrat. Then Kennedy was assassinated and the Vietnam War started. Lyndon Johnson put pressure on McNamara and his other advisors to expand American military presence in Vietnam.
Monday Poem
I’m listening to something.
I don’t know what it’s called but it’s Chopin.
It’s something Alexa pulled
from the high capacity byte magazine
of her small black canister
which sits under a lamp upon a table
against the wall (where most of us have spent
at least a little time, sweating)
it’s power umbilical plugged to an outlet,
its invisible wireless thread stretched taut to a router
it’s bluesy halo perfectly apropos—
but whatever it is, it is necessarily of the moment
and I had asked for classical after all,
so I’m thinking Alexa must know more than I
of what this now must consist
Of what it partially consists are bell sounds
—not bells really but the closest thing
Chopin could come up with
to be played on an instrument
that sounds bell-like but which again
I admit: I haven’t a clue.
Despite having a poet’s surfeit of words
you’d think I’d not have come up short
before committing to a page, but it
is spontaneous magic as I sit here
among Chopin’s frequencies listening,
applying Chopin to the day’s doing,
wondering why, suddenly! Alexa has
shuffled Ahmad Jamal into the mix
and left me mulling what Ahmad’s
poignant jazz has to do with
what this now is
.
Jim Culleny
3/16/18