by Pedro Rosa Mendes

1.

It rained forever the whole night. There was no other sound other than a woman weeping or praying or begging,

“I did not, I did not, I did not“

in the house next to our miserable hotel, the Dokone, formerly the Florida before the war ravaged the old quarters of Mamba Point in Monrovia.

From one of my notebooks:

12 November 2003. There is no light. Wolf lyes flat in bed, on his boxers. He meditates. The woman stopped crying after I shouted

Stop it!

to the darkness and the rain. I shouted to the man beating the woman with a belt, or with a whip. Eventually, Wolf rises and sits. He starts recalling:

There was an offensive from the Northern Alliance against an area under Taliban control but which was not affiliated with their regime. There was a bizarre military alliance between enemies back then. General Dostum’s forces stormed the region, including the village from where my interpreter came from. Everything was brought down. When we reached the village, my interpreter looked for his house. Dostum’s men had killed is entire family. My interpreter had six children. From newborns to grown-ups, like a staircase. It was still possible when we arrived to the village to see where Dostum’s had crushed the children’s skulls. A stain… It looked like the victims had been grabbed by their ankles, or so I guessed, because one could still see purpled marks of hands printed on the babies’ legs. The heads… Just like that. Young skulls are soft. I entered one of the houses and there was the body of a girl. I couldn’t exactly understand what happened with her since her dress was folded back, covering her head. I mean, the place of her head. My interpreter cried out, desperate. He cried and cried and cried. I walked outside and raised my hands high:

how? How?…

It was winter. It was Winter 2001. Everything was frozen. I tried to dig a grave for my interpreter’s children. I didn’t succeed. Everything was frozen. I remained with him for three days.

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by Michael Liss

What moves the American soul?

We love arguments, contests, and elections. Love the drama, the passion, the polarizing candidates, the fake piety, the rank partisanship, the heart-felt and often appallingly disingenuous editorials, and the heavy dose of moral relativism.

It’s that time again. Baseball Hall of Fame ballots for the class of 2018 had to be postmarked as of Sunday, December 31, 2017. The final results will be announced January 24, but the angst is well underway. This year, in particular, the garden-variety question of who, on performance, merits induction, has been largely dominated by the public evaluation of a generation of original sinners, the steroid boys.

It’s been more than a decade since the first retired PED’s user came on the ballot, but this year’s discussion was juiced (sorry about that) by Hall of Famer Joe Morgan’s November letter to every member of the Baseball Writers Association of America (the voters) essentially begging them not to admit tainted candidates.

Morgan is right to be concerned. In a manner that mirrors the chaos and distrust in our political system, the fans and the writers are gradually turning towards acceptance of behavior that was once considered disqualifying. They aren’t alone—institutions and people in positions of authority are doing it as well. The Commissioner’s Office itself has a bifurcated approach—significant punishment for present users, but a queasy truce with the past. Retired offenders are no longer persona non grata. Fox Sports hired former litigant/third baseman Alex Rodriguez as a color commentator last season, and, if there was resistance from the league, it was very hard to hear. Other ex-players have begun to drift back into the game, and their presence no longer is seen as controversial. That couldn’t have happened without at least a wink and a nod from the Commissioner’s Office.

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More Legal by the Minute, More
Difficult to Fire

photo of a rightist with gun, FB 2016,
pistol pointed right at camera
barrel practically screwing the lens
bright silver halo at the business end
the moment the flash went off:
………………………………. lightning! lead
dressed in camouflage he was
neat.beard.militarish. intending
to be a threat maybe pretending
to be a threat who knows
what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
of course, the shadow knows
but that was then on the radio
and it was fiction in a way
but there he was in 2016
and probably still is a year later
more trumped up with a sense of reality tv on steroids
becoming more legal by the minute
and more difficult to fire
.
.
Jim Culleny
12/29/17

—the Shadow

.

by Dave Maier

A reader writes in to ask a question about skepticism. Enrique asks:

I get confused with the dream argument. It confuses me to read the argument of the dream because I see several interpretations. Do they refer to the dreams we all experience while sleeping? Or do they refer to a class of dreams that has nothing to do with our sleeping bodies?

Enrique goes on to note that philosophers like Barry Stroud seem to equivocate when they talk about this argument, saying both that the argument refers to ordinary dreams (that is, the ones we have while sleeping) and at the same time that ordinary dreams do not pose any particular skeptical problem (although "philosophical dreams" do). In either case it seems that the dreaming argument is not where the real action is.

I agree with Enrique that the dream argument does not seem to get at what is really driving the skeptical worry. It’s true that a lot of philosophers address that argument specifically, which makes it look more important than it is, but Stroud is right that that’s not the real issue. And indeed there are a number of perfectly good answers to the dreaming argument in the literature, none of which put to rest the skeptical problem as a whole. So I advise noting the historical importance of the argument, but not to take it (or its refutations) too seriously. But since understanding the skeptical dialectic is essential for understanding modern philosophy, let’s go past that particular formulation to say more about skepticism in general. (See also an earlier post on the subject.)

One way of making progress here is to distinguish different kinds or aspects of the Cartesian commitments driving the modern skeptical dialectic. First, of course, we know that traditional Cartesian metaphysics divides the world into mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa), and we naturally think of the epistemological puzzles as following from that: if we are constituted as knowers by one sort of substance, how do we come to know about another sort of substance entirely? We are used to regarding our senses as delivering knowledge about the physical world, and indeed how could we not? But on Descartes’s mechanical conception of the physical body, our senses themselves are physical processes outside the mind, and thus on the other side of the metaphysical (and thus epistemological) gap. This is one thing making it look like dreaming is a good example: our purported sensory perception during the dream is itself (as it happens, and as we see when we wake up) a merely mental process – one which is, unfortunately for our knowledge, subjectively indistinguishable from “real” perception. But of course as we’ve noted this way of thinking of it leads to further puzzles.

We might do better to put the metaphysics to one side for now (but bring it back in at just the right time). The skeptical conclusion seems most dramatic when it concerns our knowledge of an “external world”, but its lasting significance has depended on considering it purely as an epistemological puzzle – that is, independently of what exactly it is that we seem both to know and (thanks to skeptical considerations) not to know. After all, the ancient skeptics didn’t need Descartes’s dualistic metaphysics to get their argument going, and they didn’t attack knowledge of the “external world” in particular.

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by Thomas Manuel

In both academia and in the minds of the general reading public, there seems to be a hierarchy when it comes to fiction. ‘Literary’ fiction is (infuriatingly) deemed to be more noteworthy than genre fiction, for example. Similarly, within the supercategory of genre fiction, there are some subtle, mystifying hierarchies. Most readers identify genres as sets of tropes, archetypes and milieus and know they’re employing purely subjective preferences when picking one set over another. But at the hands of many literary theorists, thought leaders and my mother, obscure aesthetic principles are deployed to bolster these hierarchies – such as the claim that science fiction is somehow more redeemable than fantasy fiction. This has gotten my one-horned, fire-breathing goat.

Dragons and faster-than-light travel

Science fiction possesses the heady connotations of science-ness, extrapolative thought experiments and futurism. Fantasy, on the other hand, seems to lack any logical rules whatsoever and is thus relegated to the dustbin of escapism. Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone, opened one of the show’s episodes with the claim that science fiction was the improbable made possible and fantasy was the impossible made probable. While framing the dichotomy as the improbable versus the impossible is cool, it’s also completely wrong. As China Miéville once wrote, “a certain generic common-sense… has allowed generations of readers and writers to treat… faster-than-light drives as science-fictional in a way that dragons are not, despite repeated assurances from the great majority of physicists that the former are no less impossible than the latter.”[i] Science fiction’s embrace of the language of science and technology makes it seem particularly rational and forward-thinking but on closer inspection, exceeding the claims of science – being irrational – is one of the key features of the genre. And that’s okay.

If this fact has to be elided over at all in the popular discourse, it’s because the benevolent dictatorship of our Silicon Valley saviours depends to a certain extent on the blurring between the idea of science and technology – that iPhones somehow take us closer to Mars. The reputation of technology as the only thing that still works in a nonsensical world that’s choking on itself is propped up by a lot of questionable assumptions. A similar situation exists with the industry of futurism. These institutions never seem to like science fiction for the complex philosophical and moral questions it raises about the world as it exists today. How strange.

While space is cool, it’s the philosophical and moral weight of science fiction that makes it such an affecting experience as a child. We definitely come for the robots but we stay for the humanity.

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Daan Roosegaarde. Gates of Light. Windvogel. Glowing Nature. 2017.

Installations by Studio Roosegaarde.

by Leanne Ogasawara

It was 2011. I knew it wasn't going to be easy moving back in with my mom after all those years away. Two decades was a long time and now I had a little boy in tow.

But at least it was home, I thought.

My son would be going to the public elementary school I attended. He hardly spoke any English at all and couldn't read or write his own name, so he was a bit nervous on his first day. I decided to walk him over to make sure he found the room okay and didn't have any communication issues.

And it was the strangest thing. The suburban streets on the way to school were lined with big cars like the cars the secret service drives in the movies. Big and heavy-looking, they were everywhere. Wondering if something was happening, I asked in the office about it, but was told nothing special was happening that day. Then, later I told my mom about it only to be informed that no, those were the parents' cars of the kids being dropped off at school. She told me that everyone now in our neighborhood drove large minivans and SUVs. She hated the cars and hated what had become a big traffic jam every morning because of what she called "the drop off line."

So, let me get this straight, I thought. In the past twenty years, while people in Japan or Germany have been making use of light, fuel-efficient cars and public transportation, parents in the US started buying big cars to drive their kids to school everyday and wait in line while the car idle. Isn't that illegal? What about the bus?

Of all the things that I found myself unable to adjust to on my return, maybe the biggest shock of all was how little has changed in terms of the environment. Wait, let me rephrase that. people are talking about it a lot more. Maybe even talking in inverse proportion to lack of doing anything. A few things have gotten better but in general the consumption patterns are so much worse than I had even remembered. Today's hyper-consumerism: for me that is the bottom line.

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By Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

Democracy is supposed to be OK. It's supposed to reflect the will of the people.

So how come our government has just passed a big tax reform bill that most of us don't like?

How come we've got a president whose approval rating is totally meh?

A president who is not only the biggest asshole of all presidents ever, but also the biggest asshole among all current world leaders, the biggest asshole among all current business leaders, the biggest asshole among all rich New Yorkers, the biggest asshole among all assholes from Queens, the biggest asshole sitting on any gold toilet, and maybe the biggest asshole among all contemporary members of the human race extant, with the possible exception of Ted Cruz?

How come our government is filled with assholes of immense assholicity — the president, his staff (how about John Kelly?), his cabinet (how about Jeff Sessions?), Congress (how about Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan?), the Supreme Court (how about Clarence Thomas?), etcetera into an infinite totality of utter assholicity?

Aren't we as a nation supposed to be better than these assholes?

Maybe not.

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by Brooks Riley

by Akim Reinhardt

"….Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart." -Donald Trump via Twitter (January 6, 2018)

Oh, that was good. But here's the thing. What exactly are his two greatest assets? Or yours? Or mine?

Trump's tweet is funny/horrifying not only because it's the exact opposite of correct, but because he has failed spectacularly at the most timeless and profound of human pursuits: to know oneself.

Socrates admonished us that the unexamined life is not worth living. But the world's most powerful man seems to live in open mockery of the ancient Greek. To gaze upon him is to be cast in the dark shimmer of a soul so thoroughly incapable of introspection that when Trump is on his deathbed, his "Rosebud" moment will be pronounced in tones of "Everyone says I'm the best," or "No one dies like I do," or "Bring me a diet Coke."

Thus, as if by sit-com writing formula, Trump's cavalier effort to engage the greatest of challenges was doomed to a banana peel slipup far more jaw dropping and painful than anything ever filmed by Buster Keaton or The Three Stooges. Give him the setup ("What are your two greatest assets?"), and he can't help but write the punch line.

For many of us, however, the grand quest for introspection is more tragedy than comedy, a tortured, unfinished novel rather than a furious tweet, the cruel taunting of unanswered questions as opposed to firm, imperial pronouncements from the White House bedroom as the Gorilla Channel booms in the background.

We are all quick to judge Donald Trump then, in part, because it seems so easy; his character is so achingly shallow, but also because it is always far safer to judge others.

To judge oneself is to play Russian Roulette with your spiritual essence. Because for every laudable attribute there is a bullet or two of dark secrets, disappointing shortcomings, and crippling fears.

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Sughra Raza. Celebrate Symbiosis – Spanish Moss/Live Oak. New Orleans, Feb 2015.

Digital photograph.

by Katrin Trüstedt

"Next time Feminism will not be a tragedy, but a comedy"

—Carla Lonzi

Kottbusser Tor, Berlin. On the second floor of one of the large buildings surrounding this place you can currently find yourself in an exhibition by Ariane Müller and Verena Kathrein on comedy and feminism, entitled "Then I would like to make a happy end for once." This seems like an apt title for the end of this year. It has been a particularly intense year in many respects. Among other things, it has been particularly intense in terms of gender relations. There has been wide-spread outing of sexual harassment and sexual violence of all kinds and degrees. There have been various forms of criticism of this outing. There has been backlash. And there have been discussions about the nature and the future of gender relations.

The danger at this point, it seems to me, is that of reaffirming and hypostatizing the very gender categories that have been at the heart of the problem in the first place. The suggestion, for instance, that men, per se, are predators, that it is the very nature of male behavior to be sexually transgressive and aggressive; and that woman are, per se, victims, and dependent – such suggestions are in danger of reproducing the very problem they are addressing.

Acts of sexual harassment including many of those that have been outed in the past couple of months seem to show, on the contrary, that something like masculinity is not a given, but in need of constant performative reestablishment. To come back to something like a "primal scene" of the current developments – the Weinstein case, and in particular one piece of "evidence" that is out there, namely the audio from a wire tap – it seems like the masculinity in question here is in rather desperate need of violent performance with elaborate arrangements. Trying to bully Ambra Battilana Gutierrez into joining him in his hotel room by repeating what a powerful man he is, appears on tape as a pathetic attempt to performatively produce manliness as power. Not only does the repeated claim suggest the lack of what this performance is intent to prove ("I am a powerful man"). It also exposes the very need of this position to be performed, enacted, and reaffirmed by its other. Needing the woman to feed back to him what a powerful, powerful man he really is, he also needs to emphasize how powerless she is by contrast in this situation ("you don't want to ruin your friendship with me for five minutes").

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by Maniza Naqvi

Sue Hubbard's lovingly mapped novel Rainsongs is a gentle gem of quietly shimmering intellect. I read it twice to savor its sense of place. It is rooted in the abstractions of land and memory, the magical thinking of a bereaved woman.

Hubbard's expressive talent is in full display through her descriptions of the south western Irish landscape of Kerry, so that the reader feels a sense of belonging and a resonance with its emotional and social fabric. I read this book the week before the year changed, curled up in bed, tucked in against the winters bone-chilling cold outside, deeply aware that I was savoring a rarity, seeing through words a remote land. Seeing it through the eyes of the main character, Martha Cassidy who, herself not Irish, has returned after a period of decades of absence.

In the end of December 2007 Martha Cassidy is a woman in mourning who returns to her late husband's cottage in search of solace from grief. Rainsongs approaches the peril and remoteness of relief through the certitude of both storm and calm and its attendant pain on the journey towards consolation. Martha is a beautiful, mature-minded, self-assured woman in her fifties, focused on her own inner journey. Yet she is neither weak nor in need of comforting or saving. And perhaps because of her demeanor, is orbited by men who knew her husband and, as in the case of the young poet-musician, Colm Nolan, is the same age as her son.

Driving rain and wind are the song and silence of the inner drama where Rainsongs will take you. That place within yourself of sorrows, solitudes and solaces, the spaces you have been through, the ones you are passing through, the ones you surely will go through. That place is lit up momentarily like a revelation, then gone and, in the novel, searched out metaphorically through the beam of a lighthouse – beckoning, saving, warning – on Skellig island as it sweeps across the darkened sea and landscape on Bolus Head and shines into the room in the cottage where Martha sleeps. Periodically, as if a monitor for a heartbeat.

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by Brooks Riley

by Dwight Furrow

The claim that wine is a living organism is something I hear often from people in the wine world impressed with the capacity of wine to evolve. Writer and sommelier Courtney Cochran writes:

Wine, with its clear ties to the lifecycle of plants, its ability to evolve and change (to grow) and its delicate fragility in the face of danger (TCA, oxygen, light), fairly screams "alive." In today's overly sanitized, automated world, could our wine be more alive – perhaps even more ‘human' – than us?

Wine grapes react in a very sensitive way to the conditions under which they are grown. They are a product of an ecosystem as well as a reflection of that ecosystem with the characteristics of the vineyard, community, winemaker and weather living on in the wine—a storehouse of the past, a series of "memories" that are transmitted to the consumer in the flavors and textures of the wine.

Even after the grapes are harvested and fermented, wine as it ages responds to stimuli, adapts to its environment, and like a child, requires guidance and nurturing to reach its potential, expressing its aesthetic worth through its own "evolutionary" path, influenced but not wholly directed by the winemaker. People in the culture of wine think of it as "living" because wine not only persists but changes and in some cases improves with age. There is a trajectory of maturation that is in some respects similar to the development of living organisms.

The claim that wine is a living thing has also received philosophical endorsement. In philosopher Nichola Perullo's introduction to his edited, online anthology "WineWorld: Tasting, Making, Drinking, Being", he advocates treating wine as a living thing in order to reform tasting practices and gain a deeper understanding of the aesthetics of wine production, especially in light of the fact that wine is ultimately assimilated to our own living tissue. If we take this view on board, wine is best understood not as a commodity but as something with emotional resonance and authenticity, an object we can engage with as emotional beings, not just through analytical tasting.

But is wine really a living thing or is this discourse just making use of a particularly resonant and vibrant metaphor?

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Writing lives in the gut, like the good bacteria and the bad; it carries on an endless flirtation, an infuriating, nagging conversation with the gut’s long-married partner, the psyche. From time to time, it may traverse its underground-cityscape of anxiety, nostalgia, compulsion, its contradictory pull between instinct and fact-checking, its love-hate habits— to ascend through the pathway of the spirit and become actualized. It may show up on the page ripe and bright as a field of mustard, or as a well-fitting dress, an ammunition depot, a seam of eternity, a sufi’s orchard, or, as too often in my case: a colossal, squandered energy.

This piece of writing, I promise you, is neither about the gut-brain axis, nor is it about writing. It is the first of a short series of essays on my views as a feminist. I have always believed and stated repeatedly in interviews that it is enough to deal with this subject in poetry, that so much of my poetry–nearly all of it—assembles the many facets of feminism important to me, that talking about womanhood requires a language that does not exist. The topic is like handling a slab of granite: a paradox of sheer heft and delicacy, better conveyed through poetry— reduced, ignored, exoticized and caricatured as it has been through the ages. We must mold the language first and create our own terms. I changed my mind, however, after mulling over a few significant discussions, the first of which began as a direct question about the women’s movement from a noted Pakistani poet, the feminist legend Kishwar Naheed at my poetry session at Lahore Literary Festival, the second at SOAS, London, with my activist-academic friend Dr. Maria Rashid, and the most recent one with Rafia Zakaria whose writings on the subject I find truly impressive; I have now begun to see the value of articulating, in prose, how I see gender dynamics and how I have fared as a woman of multiple identities.

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