by Gus Mitchell

Professor, writer, talk show host, part-time guitarist–Robert Pogue Harrison stands in a category of one among American intellectuals of his generation.

His first book, The Body of Beatrice (1988) a study of the Vita Nuova, lay well within his wheelhouse as a Dante scholar; since then, however, Harrison has charted an increasingly idiosyncratic course as a thinker, a writer, and an educator––in the broadest sense of the word.

Harrison joined the faculty of Stanford in 1986 and became chair of the Department of French and Italian in 2002. He turned 70 this year and announced his retirement. (Andrea Capra’s tribute, part of at a day-long celebration of Harrison’s career at Stanford held on 19^th April, was recently republished by 3 Quarks Daily.)

Harrison has written books at a steady clip, each beautifully written and finely wrought, combining intensely felt thought and erudition with quietly challenging daring. His subjects–the forest, the garden, the dead, our obsession with youth–might appear dauntingly bottomless. Yet Harrison’s style, a graceful inter-flowing of literary, philosophical and (increasingly in his recent work) scientific reference-points, gives the impression that one is both ascending and descending, reaching strange giddy heights while delving deep to the essential mysteries at the core of the matter in hand.

It’s the same style that marks the conversations and monologues of his radio show-cum-podcast, Entitled Opinions. I stumbled across an episode of Entitled Opinions sometime in 2020 on the iTunes Podcast app while looking for something about W.H. Auden. But the show has been broadcasting for almost 20 years, “down in the catacombs of KZSU” (Stanford’s local radio station) where, in Harrison’s phrase, “we practice the persecuted religion of thinking.” Read more »

by Barry Goldman

Suppose a cop pulls you over for speeding. What do you think should happen? My guess is you think he should give you a warning and let you off without a ticket. Why? Well, because you will, no doubt, be polite, respectful and contrite (or at least you will attempt to appear to be) and because you are a generally law-abiding citizen, you aren’t drunk, and you are not obviously transporting guns, drugs or kidnapped children.

That’s fine, but now let’s take your personal interest out of it. Suppose a driver gets stopped for speeding. The reason for the stop is that speeding is unsafe. A speeder presents a danger. That danger has nothing to do with whether the driver is polite. Politeness and rudeness are completely beside the point. So how would you want the cop to decide whether or not to write a ticket? What criteria would you want him to use?

How about tribal membership? When I was a kid my world was divided into two tribes. There were long-haired, hippie pot smokers like me on one side and short-haired, beer-drinking cops on the other. It was a simpler time. We made life miserable for each other whenever we got a chance. I suspect none of us today believes that tickets should be issued or not issued based on tribal membership, however delineated. Too much room for mischief. But we also don’t think everyone who gets pulled over should get a ticket. So, if it isn’t politeness, and it isn’t tribal membership, what should the determining factor(s) be? Read more »

Compost

wonderstuff of summer declination
that’ll grow my beets and beans and other rations

browner than the mere idea “earth”, archetypical
as sacrifice, more wonderful than virgin birth

more promising than the phantom wealth of nations
more essential than human beings of highest stations

shoveling this wonderstuff into my wagon
sifting it through hardware cloth,

screening stems & stones until it’s light and soft
to turn into my garden till my ass is dragging

to reap its harvest then until my light turns off,
then lift my harvest to the sun which causes
without ever bragging

by Jim Culleny
6/1/13

by Derek Neal

There is a meme on the internet that you probably know, the one that goes, “Men will do x instead of going to therapy.” Here are some examples I’ve just found on Twitter: “Men will memorize every spot on earth instead of going to therapy,” “men would rather work 100 hours a week instead of going to therapy,” and “men would literally go to Mars instead of going to therapy.” The meme can also be used ironically to call into question the effectiveness of therapy (“Men will literally solve their problems instead of going to therapy”), but its main use is to mock men for their hobbies, which are seen as coping mechanisms taking the place of therapy (“men will literally join 10 improv teams instead of going to therapy”). The implicit assumption in this formula is that the best way for men to solve whatever existential problems they may have is to go to therapy. I don’t particularly like this meme, and I don’t think therapy is necessarily the best way for a man to solve his problems (although it may be in some cases), but what do I know? I’m setting myself up for this response: “men will write a 2,500-word essay about why you shouldn’t go to therapy instead of going to therapy.” Fair enough. I should specify that I don’t have an issue with therapy itself; instead, I have an issue with a phenomenon I find pervasive in contemporary American culture, which is the assumption that therapy is a sort of magic cure for any ills one may have. Read more »

by Rebecca Baumgartner

The short stories in Kindergeschichten (Children’s Stories, 1969) by Swiss author Peter Bichsel are not actually for children. True, they are short, easy to read, and feel a bit like spare, minimalist fairy tales. But the moment you think you’ve grasped what they’re all about, they slip away. In the introduction to my German language edition, the stories are said to “seduce us, playfully, into thinking,”* and this was exactly my experience reading them. It’s not that they’re inappropriate for children, but more that children will likely only find them silly, whereas an adult will very likely see layers of meaning and existential crisis.

Some of the stories are about a person who takes an absurdly skeptical stance about something that is widely known. For example, in the story “Die Erde ist rund” (“The Earth is Round”), the protagonist knows intellectually that the Earth is round, but he doesn’t truly believe it, so he undertakes an absurd journey to prove it to himself. 

The stories also feature characters who ridiculously imagine that they can live outside the confines of society and pursue radical autonomy. For instance, the protagonist of “Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch” (“A Table is a Table”), having grown bored with his humdrum life and grown frustrated with how things always stay the same, decides to give different names to everyday objects, with the result that no one can understand him when he speaks. He ends up forgetting the original names for things and eventually falls silent, able to talk only to himself.  Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self Portrait After Dark, Butaro, Rwanda, November 2023.

Digital photograph.

by Thomas R. Wells

Taiwan is an independent prosperous liberal democracy of 24 million free people that the Chinese Communist Party solemnly promises to annex to its empire by whatever means are necessary. Although Taiwan’s flourishing capitalist economy once allowed it to outgun and hence straightforwardly deter China from a military invasion, this military advantage has switched to China over the last 20 years. If Taiwan is to be kept free it must find another means to deter the CCP.

In fact it makes sense for Taiwan to develop a new deterrence that rests on multiple pillars and is thus robust to the failure of any one of them. Hence Taiwan appears very sensibly to be pursuing closer and more militarised alliances with America and other democracies of S.E. Asia threatened by China’s imperial expansionism (especially Japan and S. Korea). At the same time, Taiwan is moving to adopt a ‘porcupine’ strategic posture, investing in large numbers of cheap access denial weapons such as sea mines, torpedo boats, and anti-ship missiles that would exact catastrophic losses on any amphibious invasion fleet.

An additional possibility is for Taiwan to develop an independent nuclear deterrent of its own, which would be well within its technological capabilities (and something the KMT dictatorship actively pursued in the 1960s to 1980s before America persuaded them to drop it). On the one hand a nuclear deterrent would free Taiwan from dependence on US promises to risk a direct large-scale war with a nuclear armed super-power to stop a Chinese invasion (and the presidential elections that determine the worth of those promises). On the other hand, the ability to escalate a Chinese invasion to a nuclear conflict would also allow Taiwan to coerce its allies into upholding their promises of conventional military aid in case of an invasion, thus increasing the deterrence value of those promises in the eyes of the CCP. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Clouds above Berlin this past Thursday.

by Barbara Fischkin

It was the summer of 1961. I was six years old. My mother and I had arrived in Omaha the night before, flying out of what was still “Idlewild,” not JFK International Airport, as it is now named. We would visit relatives with roots in the same Eastern European shtetl as my mother. Unlike most of the family, this branch had left the New York area for the cornfields of the American Midwest.

The relatives—Max and his wife, Sarah, their grown children Geraldine and Stanley and a bachelor brother, Sam—were the only Jewish people on their street. My mother told me this before we left—to prepare me. She knew that coming from the Midwood section of Brooklyn, I would find this odd. No other Jews? My mind, though, was fixated on adventure, being so far from New York for the first time, meeting new cousins and taking my first airplane ride.

Cousin Sarah, her hair already white, told me she had never been on an airplane. I remember the envious tone in her voice. I noticed her tone carried a signal that I was too young, thus undeserving, to have been granted this privilege.

I blew that off, as kids do at an age when guilt does not, or should not, get in the way of a good time. My mother suggested that I go across the street to play with a little girl who lived in a big house. I probably guessed she wasn’t Jewish but my mind was still fixated on this new adventure. Read more »

Standing Under Without Understanding

Horizon’s circle, beyond which
you can see no further in any direction
other than up, hems us in, but
looking up you can see forever,
or as far as lightspeed allows,
or until more time passes or,
more accurately, until
it shifts again, now.

But by then, you yourself may have passed,
whatever that means, since “to pass”
is merely an oblique expression that hints of
standing under without understanding,
although there’s so much in life that shows
the truth of things spoken is deficient, yet
has become second nature, and acceptable.

We’ve become creatures of
holy misunderstandings and
miss the mark, we sin, and
live by those misunderstandings

………….. up,
looking

rather than around
and in

Jim Culleny 9/21/21

Firelei Baez. Untitled (A Corrected Chart of Hispaniola with the Windward Passage), 2020.

Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas.

More here, here, and here.

by Rafaël Newman

Those of us employed in the city of Zurich got some extra time off last week. Every year, on the third Monday in April following the vernal equinox, the Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs—the Central Committee of Zurich Guilds, also known by its German initialism ZZZ—stages Sechseläuten, a festival featuring a parade and a bonfire. The event, whose pronunciation in the local dialect—Sächsilüüt—makes it sound a good deal sexier and lewder than it actually is, draws in equal parts on history, historicizing revival, and mythology, and is advertised by its promoters, with a prudent hedge, as “the largest Swiss Volksfest in Zurich.”

First the history. During the 14th century, in what would one day become Switzerland’s biggest city, the tradesmen’s guilds used their growing economic might to challenge the local patriciate and were able to establish a power-sharing arrangement, with the guilds and the nobles organized into a council with variously weighted competencies. Rudolf Brun (c. 1290-1360), the leader of the guild revolution in 1336 and Zurich’s first independent mayor, is commemorated in the name of a bridge over the Limmat in the Altstadt, on the route of the Sechseläuten parade.

Brun’s newfangled corporate oligarchy lasted into the 19th century, when, as the power of the guilds was waning amid the rise of capitalism and popular democratic ambitions, the traditional medieval and Renaissance costumes of the guildsmen began to be trooped each spring as a reminder of their bygone importance: this is the historicizing element in the etiology of Sechseläuten, akin to the “revival” and marketing of allegedly traditional tribal tartans in the early modern period in Scotland, as local Scottish power had in fact been weakened.

And finally, there is the festival’s mythological source: in memory of what the ZZZ insists on calling a “heathen” custom, the advent of spring in Zurich is celebrated in mid-April with winter burned in effigy, in a recreation of a putatively prehistoric rite. Read more »

by Brooks Riley