Earthy
.
Religious scripts:
Vedas, Gospels, Surahs,
Qurans, Hadiths, Bibles, Torahs
are tools like any others
which may be used to trip or lift
Not divine in this, but practical as axes,
shovels, guns and drones or verbal tricks
and as earthy as earth's flora and its fauna
.
Jim Culleny
11/6/16
by Emrys Westacott
Here are seven reasons for keeping worms.
1. Worms are dirt cheap. You don't have to buy them kibble or tinned food or overpriced little liver treats. They don't need shots, collars, leashes, or toys. You never need to take them to the vet, or to the groomer. You don't have to board them when you're away, or hire a pet sitter, or a dog walker. A wormery can involve a one-off outlay of around $80 (less if it's used), or you can make one yourself for virtually nothing.
2. Worms are very clean. They stay in their wormery. They require no house training. From day one, they only poop where they are supposed to. They never throw up on the carpet. They don't roll in deer carcasses, get themselves sprayed by skunks, or bring dead birds into the house.
by Carol A Westbrook
On Labor Day we honor the contributions of the hard-working people who helped build our nation. Many of them were immigrants who fled war, religious persecution, and poverty, who gave up their own countries to become Americans. This cycle of immigration and assimilation has been repeated since the founding of our nation, and arguably it is one of the most defining aspects of being American. Most of us have immigrant roots.
An elderly Lithuanian woman told me the story of how she moved to America at the end of World War II. Like many Europeans, her family had been displaced due to changing boundaries and Soviet annexation after the war. Though she was only five years old, she remembers this as one of the most fun and exciting times of her life. Her family was housed in a German castle for months with other Lithuanians, where there set up a church and a school; there were lots of other children to play with, and they looked forward to going to America! They had so much fun! I'm sure it was anything but fun for her parents. They had lost their homeland, and the Russians forced them to move. Theirs was an uncertain future, confined to an immigration camp and waiting for resettlement in any country that would take them in.
I nodded in understanding and sympathy.
"Like the Syrians," I said.
"No No NO, " she exclaimed, with a horrified look on her face. "We were not like the Syrians!" She explained that she was, after all, a Lithuanian, and is now an American. She insisted it's not the same!
But isn't it? Resettled World War II refugees like her faced hostility and resistance in the US. They were insultingly called "DPs" (Displaced Persons), and ridiculed for their strange language, peasant clothes, and unpronounceable names. Yet today, they are as American as anyone else. As a matter of fact, almost all of us have immigrant roots — even the founding fathers.
Today's Middle Eastern, Latin and South American immigrants are refugees from war and oppressive governments, or fleeing soul-destroying poverty. We fear their strange customs and clothing, their alien religions, and the threat of terrorism. Yet it's not much different today than it was in the past.
by Brooks Riley
by Max Sirak
What are your five favorite things?
No. Seriously. I'm asking.
Can you – lovely reader you are, patron of this fine site, gracing us with your most precious of resources (attention and time), answer my question?
What are your five favorite things?
No one's here to judge you. Hell, unless you speak them loudly and in public, no one will even know your particular quintet. And it's not like there's a wrong answer.
It's just an exercise in self-knowledge. An excuse for each of us to take a moment, reflect, and become consciously aware of things in our lives which we love. No more. No less.
Here, I'll show you. I'll go first.
1) Conversation
For about as long as I can remember, I've always felt my most authentic self when I'm in the middle of a conversation. I'm not talking about small talk. Trivial banter about unimportant matters with acquaintances doesn't count. I mean an honest-to-goodness conversation about life and ideas.
I remember being in Whole Foods a number of years ago and seeing a rack of magnets being sold near the checkout. You know how it is, little knickknacks conveniently placed near the cash registers in hopes of inspiring impulse buys. Well, I can't say I'm much of an emotional spender, but I remember that magnet to this day.
It was a riff on something attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt. "Small people talk about people. Average people talk about events. Great people talk about ideas." While I'm not trying to feign greatness here (despite the fact, that is what my name actually means…), I do think the magnet's wisdom holds, at least for me.
YOU AND I
By Mohammad Iqbal
You know the secret
I lack depth
You govern the sky
I am desire’s hostage
You have a home
I am a nomad
You profit by interest earned
I am losing the duel
Your ship sails in the air
Mine has no sails
There is no rest in this garden
You are spring; I am fall
You are weak; you are strong
I am this; I am that. So?
Translated, from the original Urdu, by Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit
by Maniza Naqvi
The total eclipse of the sun, a one in several lifetimes flood, a jester becomes king. Through the emulsion coating of a negative containing memory of childhood—that image protecting me from the searing blindness of light, I watched the moon block out the sun.
National Geographic
At the beginning of summer a National Geographic cover promised to tell us why we lie. Declaring us all liars by doing so. As if we all did this and it was okay and would be scientifically explained to us. The article mentioned all sorts of sweet things. But never Iraq. Never why we all lied and let the lie, lie. The last page of the issue was as if on our tolerance. It was on Himalayan bees that produce a hallucinogenic honey. The honey produces a psychotropic effect that lasts awhile.
Violence Vortex.
Violence is a vortex. A whirlpool. You can join in at the edge of it on one end and pick your side but you will quickly get swept up into the velocity of its madness, the whirling and spiraling. Quickly disoriented and forgetting where you had entered, how, when and why. Only the what will remain. Violence.
What's Not to Like?
We're all in boot camp now with Mr. Trump. He's sandblasting, blow-torching and yelling the safe spaces out of us. Pulling the trigger on the triggers. He's triggering the triggers right out of us. He's lacerating the growing blister full of unspoken pus of self-righteousness, latent racism and hate that is thinly veiled as liberalism in America. Whether he is doing this consciously or not, it seems as if that's what's happening. We're toughening up, able to argue and withstand an opposing point of view an argument delivered loudly without shrinking away and wilting, as if we were all Victorian ladies, fainting and in need of protection. We're no longer concerned about niceties. Or maybe we're exhausted and just not concerned. As long as Netflix and Amazon Video keeps streaming.
by Christopher Bacas
The first time I saw A was backstage at Ravinia, summer of 1984, holding court, in blazer and turtleneck, amid a thicket of horn players; his new band. He came out of retirement to front a group playing his music. One of the true masters of his instrument and a complete musician, A stopped playing nearly 30 years before. That quitting both a petulant and supremely honest action; ending a long personal struggle with celebrity and the corrupt music business. He also told a much younger musician that he had been "a slave to the instrument" and wanted to do other things. In bright sun and a festival atmosphere, a guitarist and saxophonist played "Sweet Sue" for him, the guitar accompanying intricately. After listening a bit, A barked:"He was always a brilliant man…and a fucking pompous ass!"
The band was a crack outfit: Boston cats, a mix of generations and built around the Soloist's long-running small group. That core group, the strong soloing, a program of choice arrangements from A's huge library and the excitement of presenting this music with the man who created it, made an inspiring set. A professorial air hung around it, but this wasn't a ghost band. A didn't continue long as Maestro,though. With no patience for nostalgia-heads, slick promoters or fawning radio personalities, he left the road and let Soloist run the store.
by Samir Chopra
Of course, not all brown folk are alike, for I, given my linguistic capacities, and perhaps even my ‘appearance,’ cannot pass for Bangladeshi. I do not ‘look like’ a Bengali, even though most Americans might not be able, or willing, to tell us apart. But then, truth be told, I have little interest in passing for Bangladeshi. As a person of Indian origin, history, geo-politics, and culture often make it the case that—justified or not—Pakistan suggests itself as being of far more immediate interest to me; my ethnic identity makes it so that if I had any aspirations to ‘filling it out’ the Pakistani Punjab, as much as the Indian one, is where I would look. (Thanks to the ethno-cultural differences between Bengalis and Punjabis, my interactions with Bangladeshis are marked by a distance I find forbidding, even though as someone who grew up in one of India’s largest cities, I made many Bengali friends.) As residents of the subcontinent well know, a Punjabi Hindu and a Pakistani Muslim Punjabi have far more in common with each other than they do with a Keralite Muslim or a Gujarati Hindu.
Wovoka (named Jack Wilson in English), a Northern Paiute, dreamed
he was taken to the spirit world and saw all Native Americans being
taken up into the sky and the Earth opening up to swallow all Whites
and to revert back to its natural state. He claimed that he was shown
that by dancing the round-dance continuously, the dream would become
a reality and the participants would enjoy the new Earth. This was also
called Ghost Dance.
Ghost Dancing
I was ghost dancing a dream
I am ghost dancing a dream
I'm a dancing ghost,
a lone ghost dancing
between surf and horizon
from where sun sets to
when it rises
a ghost whose dance is familiar,
so familiar it reminds me
of one I did not know
but whose breath was mine,
and whose skin
but who, now dancing
in this skin, breathing,
is less unfamiliar than that ghost
who danced on tenderfeet, tripping
(but not the light fantastic,
just a young klutz who looked up
while dancing close to an edge
being, dreaming)
dancing on a brink
like a will-be ghost
……….. dancing
……….. dancing
still….. dancing
ghost . dancing
………..
.
Jim Culleny
8/25/17
by Carl Pierer
Sometimes, speech achieves something. Sometimes even, speech is necessary to do something. For instance, in the now famous example, somebody is getting married by uttering "I do." Austin's theory distinguishes three aspects to such utterances. First, what is being said: the locution. Secondly, what effect it has (on, for example, the hearer): the perlocution (or perlocutionary force or act). Thirdly, what is being done in saying so: the illocution (or illocutionary force or act). Austin's main interest lay with the last, the most subtle and difficult one.
He gives a rough-and-ready marker: "in saying" for the illocutionary act and "by saying" for the perlocutionary act: In saying "I do", she was marrying. By saying "I do", she upset her mother. The right context for the utterance ensures that it in saying "I do", she was indeed marrying, that it achieved its illocutionary act. That she also upset her mother by saying so is an effect the utterance produced in the hearer, its perlocutionary act.
These acts are, of course related: one person urges another: "Read the book" and the second person reads the book. The illocution here is the urging. The same locution may have a different illuction: the first person could have advised or ordered the second.
Austin argues that illocutionary force is institutionalised, that is, in order to achieve the act, it has to obey certain felicity conditions: in the above example, it is the context (the priest's question in the setting of the marriage ceremony, for instance) of her uttering "I do" that ensures that she is marrying.
This is the background in the philosophy of language that Langton develops in a much regarded article published at the height of the feminist debate surrounding the prohibition of pornography. The aim, of that article is not, at least not primarily, to argue for the prohibition, but rather to show that the claim that pornography subordinates makes good sense. In a second part of this article, not discussed her, she also argues that pornography silences women.
by Leanne Ogasawara
My 2017 expedition had its start in a conversation about supernova.
"Wouldn't it be amazing to look up one night and see a supernova as bright as the full moon?" I said to him.
An astronomer, he looked worried and began mumbling about how hard it is to predict something like that. No one can say when a star will explode, after all. But then, he brightened up and asked,
"Maybe it's not exactly a supernova, but what would you say about a total eclipse of the sun?"
Hmmm, I thought. That did sound rather intriguing. So, I began reading everything I could get my hands on about totality. And the more I read, the more excited I became. For totality is much more dramatic than a supernova. Day becomes night? And as the stars and planets become visible in mid-day, people can easily become overwhelmed by it all. Some are terrified; while others become utterly beguiled by what they see unfolding in front of their astonished eyes. There are those sparkling beads that shine out like laser beams as the light of the sun comes streaming through the valleys of the moon's surface. And what about the famed diamond ring that encircles the moon as it comes seemingly to rest for a moment in front of the sun. Then there is the corona–something most people will never have the chance to see in their lifetimes if they don't experience a total eclipse of the sun. Reading, I realized that there are few natural phenomena that have the power to awe people like this.
by Brooks Riley
by Richard King
Personally I doubt Trump has any true colours. He is too chaotic an individual to have a consistent ideology, save for the usual dog-eat-dog shtick that passes for wisdom at the big end of town. But there's no doubt he represents something in the minds of the millions of Americans who voted for him, and the question of what that is is crucial. One doesn't need to have read Sun Tzu to know that in order to defeat an enemy it is first necessary to understand it, and at the moment we are presented with very different interpretations of the reasons for Trump's ascendancy and the rise of rightwing populism more generally. To a great extent these interpretations reflect broader ideological frameworks. These, too, need to be named and delineated before liberals and leftists can begin to construct a coherent platform from which to fight back against right-wing populism in the US and beyond.
In what follows I want to offer an overview of what I take to be the two main analyses, and suggest, not only that both are limited, but also that the simplistic opposition of the two is based on a false antithesis. As tempting as such posturing is at present, crude characterisations of Trump's constituency as reflexively racist, economically neglected, or just plain dumb do nobody any good. God knows, I'm not proposing to Unite the Left, or suggesting that "the left" can be united. But I do think a more granular analysis of this question has the potential to instil a bit of solidarity in the shadow of this ongoing calamity. So, with your indulgence comrades…
by Justin E. H. Smith
On August 7, The Nation announced the appointment of Steph Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith as its new poetry editors. Beginning in the Fall, they will be soliciting and commissioning a wide range of American and international poetry, and will begin accepting submissions on September 15.
Steph Burt is Professor of English at Harvard University, and the author of several books of poetry and criticism, including The Poem Is You (Harvard University Press, 2016).
Carmen Giménez Smith is Professor of English at Virginia Tech, a CantoMundo fellow, and the author of a memoir and four poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award.
On August 15, Carmen and Steph joined Justin E. H. Smith by Skype to talk about their work to come at The Nation, and about poetry in America.
* * *
Justin E. H. Smith: What is poetry doing in The Nation? Does it fit within a unified mission that the magazine has, or is it something more like a breath of fresh air that one can take while absorbing all the difficult news? How do you see it?
Steph Burt: That's a good question. There are a couple of answers I'd want to give to that. The first is that different poems do different things. Carmen and I are only going to print poems we like a lot. But we're not going to like them all for the same reasons. I assume that you like more than one kind of food and my guess is that you listen to more than one kind of music, and that you like different foods and different kinds of music for different reasons. This is sort of the argument of the book about how to read poetry that I'm working on now, so we're talking about that at the same time as we're talking about poetry at The Nation. Different poems do different things. We might print a poem that is a breath of fresh air and a break from thinking abut the struggle against white supremacy; and then we might print a poem whose subtle, careful way of examining language and history shows us how complicated the roots of the problem of white supremacy are; and then we might print a third poem that is a turning-it-up-to-eleven, articulate expression of the need to stay outraged. Those are three good kinds of poem. Three poems in one issue might be a bit much, though if they're short we could do that. Take another urgent problem of politics and culture that The Nation frequently addresses: we might print a poem about the delights of a fruit orchard; we might then print another poem that is a very cold, scientific look at how the earth has changed; and we might print another poem whose emotional undercurrent is, Holy cow! Miami's going to be underwater really soon. Those are three poems that all address the same urgent issue, that's a political issue, but in three different ways, one of which might seem non-political if you're looking at it in a certain way. It is true that in some sense everything is political. It is true in another sense that if the only question you ask about something in your life is, How can I address this as a matter of public policy? Or, How can I address this as a community activist? that's not a life, as someone who is concerned with public policy and with communities, that I want anyone in my community to have to live. So poetry in general can speak to what we need to do together, and it can speak to the lives and the experiences that it is the job of politics to make possible.
Carmen Giménez Smith: I think poetry has always had a role in social-justice movements, and I think rhetorically that there is a way in which theoretical approaches and descriptions, and reportage-based work is vital to changing the world. But I also think that there's a kind of new world-building, a kind of optimistic possibility that gets expressed in art that sometimes can't get expressed in journalism. I also think, again rhetorically –and I think of all writing as having a rhetorical purpose–, that art can say a lot of things and have a tone that cannot be expressed in journalism. So my goal as an editor is to bring works that complement the rigorous journalistic work in the same pages, that add nuance to it, that deepen it, that humanize it. That's how I imagine the curatorial work that Steph and I will be doing for The Nation. I wouldn't necessarily dichotomize poetry into political and apolitical, because in some countries merely expressing the gaze is transgressive, writing a poem is transgressive. I think that having the liberty to look into the world and describe it in itself can be a highly transgressive mode. Having subjectivity isn't a guarantee, no one is guaranteed a subjectivity, and so any kind of expression in art, I think, is implicitly resistant. It's not the way we talk, it's not the way we think, yet we're still moved to be in the world in that way. So I do think that there's a kind of political charge in every expression of poetry, whether it's about just the changing of the seasons or, whether it's about the change of seasons representing the coming of the apocalypse. Which it sure feels like these days.
by Evert Cilliers
And twice as many American working class men voted for a man who habitually stiffed his suppliers than for Hillary.
I actually met someone whose Dad supplied Donald Trump with 200 pianos for his hotels, Trump didn't pay him, and the guy's business went kerflooey.
That's how bad Trump is. You can meet people in your every day life here in Manhattan that he conned and cheated and pussy-grabbed and fucked up their innocent asses.
So the fact that he gave the KKK, the neo-Nazis, and the white supremacists at Charlottesville a bit of a pass by saying there were others there who only wanted to defend the right of Confederate general statues to publicly exist — there were not, ALL those marchers were ONLY well-organized KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists — should be no surprise. (Though he was right that there were violence perpetrators among the counter-demonstrators there — the Antifa, whom he ignorantly dubbed the "alt-left".)
We wanted him as our president.
What does that say about us?
Does that say out loud that we are a nation of bigots, sex assaulters, crooked businessmen, fraudsters, and cheaters at golf?
Yes.
Absolutely.
That's what we are.
And does that mean we're totally fucked?
Yes. Absolutely.
Let's run it down.
by Paul North
Charlatans, Failures, and Frauds
These three undesirables have one thing in common, they don't live up to expectations. What seems full of promise turns out to be empty. The product is different than you anticipated, worse than you wanted; promises turn out to be either fast talk, impotence, or lies. Charlatans, failures, and frauds: we want none of them in this Academy. Or, more precisely, we accept a certain amount of failure, but only if it is limited in scope, and it is really only tolerable if failure points the way to success. We must always learn from our mistakes. We must always learn from our mistakes.
Today I report on a point of indistinction. There is a point, hard to reach, even harder to recognize, when the three—charlatan, failure, fraud—become virtually indistinguishable. At this dicey point, someone presents an experiment, a historical thesis, a speculative proposal and neither you nor anyone else can tell whether the hypothesis is trumped up, whether the scientist or researcher has talked themselves into something they will later repudiate and regret, whether the world is simply not as they say and the thesis is flat wrong, or whether they are lying to themselves and as a consequence to others. It is a moment of high dubiousness. Then again, it is also a moment of possibility, where something unexpected could happen. We are not accusing our colleagues in the profession of anything. In fact, they show the utmost in professionalism, thoroughness of research, methodological rigor, and integrity. Yet there used to be a type…
It began with Emmett Till.
He was a fourteen year old black boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1954 when two white men lynched him to death for whistling at a white woman. That in itself, sadly, wasn’t so unusual. Thousands of African Americans were lynched to death during the first half of the 20th century. What was different about this particular lynching was his mother’s response.
Till’s mother demanded her son’s body be returned to Chicago instead of getting a quick burial in Mississippi. She then insisted upon an open-casket funeral so the world could see what they had done to her boy. The black press covered the funeral as upwards of 50,000 black mourners passed by the coffin. Jet magazine and The Chicago Defender newspaper published photos of his body, mutilated almost beyond recognition. Afterwards, mainstream (white) national publications also ran the pictures and covered the story in depth, and Emmett Till entered the larger white consciousness as a martyr of racial violence.
Needless to say, there have been countless black (and Latinx and Indigenous and Asian) victims of racial violence in America over the last four centuries. How many black people have been killed or maimed by whites for, essentially, being black? The number is impossible to know. As an American historian, I suspect that tens of thousands would be an underestimate. When considering the ravages of slavery and decades of subsequent lynch violence, the number could easily be in the hundreds of thousands.
Yet prior to Emmett Till, almost none of them ever entered white consciousness as martyrs. Till became the first, the token black, the only one from among the countless thousands who most white people ever learned about in school or could cite by name. That slavery and Jim Crow repression wrought horrible violence was no secret. But upon whom, specifically?
In the 1960s, Till was joined in this sad canon only by Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers (briefly), and Malcolm X (only to a minority of whites). However, with the death of King in 1968, white consciousness considered the civil rights era over, largely went into hiding on the issue of race, and stopped acknowledging new black martyrs of white racial violence.
Why?
by Michael Liss
I don't want to talk about affirmative action. It's a messy, horrible topic.
I just don't want to talk about it. But earlier this month, the New York Times reported on a new Jeff Sessions initiative to hire political appointees for the DOJ's Civil Rights Division for "investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination." By "intentional race-based discrimination," the AG means race-based discrimination against races other than African Americans or Latinos.
And I don't want to go there. Republicans, largely speaking off the record, see this as a win for Sessions personally, as it pleases Trump at a time where Trump-pleasing might be important for Sessions. And it's a win for the GOP, where affirmative action is broadly unpopular not only among party members, but also with more moderate suburban middle and upper middle class voters who approach the college application period with dread.
I'm still not going to going to be sucked in. Sessions' motives and whatever political calculations they reflect are irrelevant. The historical record on the systematic exclusion of minorities is an irrefutable disgrace, but, when it comes to remedies, particularly their legality, reasonable people can disagree. Either affirmative action is Constitutionally permissible, or it isn't, and the Supreme Court gets to make that decision. To be technical, there's no such thing as affirmative action—it's been banned by the Supreme Court since the Regents vs Bakke decision in 1978. What has been permitted, although narrowed by an increasingly conservative Court (see last year's 4-to-3 decision in Fisher v. University of Texas) is that universities can continue using race as one of multiple factors in their admissions decisions. This is what Sessions is targeting. He really isn't talking about pure merit—he's fine with the 21 other herbs and spices that are the alchemy of determining an incoming Freshman—but race will be out, and he's prepared to use the considerable power, and budget, of the DOJ to make sure it stays out.
What's next? It's not hard to predict that a lot of people who are enthusiastic about Sessions' goal will be end up being both disturbed and disappointed. Until the Supreme Court rules, he can't just snap his fingers and erase any and all considerations of race in the process. And, even if he were given an unlimited budget to pursue this, he wouldn't be able to investigate hundreds of colleges. The best he can do in the short term is to mount a few selective prosecutions of those he sees as excessively friendly to minority applications, and, by extension, hope to intimidate/influence the rest into altering their stated policies.
But here's his real problem (and it's the problem of applicants who expect to benefit from the new policy): The existence of a stated "pro-minority" process is easy to prove. Demonstrating the adverse impact of it on an individual basis as means of achieving redress might be much more difficult. To do that, to find out who really benefited and who was "wronged," he's going to need a lot of personal and granular data on every applicant, not just minorities, and then try to reverse engineer the admissions calculus, substituting his own views of who is worthy for the judgment of the school.
by Brooks Riley
