by Robert Fay

Kit Moresby, the enigmatic heroine of Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky sits in a café in a French colonial city in North Africa. It’s 1949 (or thereabouts) and on the terrace Arab men wearing fezzes drink mineral water and swat flies. Kit and her American companions have just arrived by freighter and they sip Pernod and discuss their initial impressions. They are planning on traveling into the Bled, the vast interior, where they hope to find lands and people untouched by the war and the contaminates of European civilization.

These three are the opposite of the “ugly American” stereotype of the post-war era. They are pessimistic, worldly and bored with America. If anything, their Americanness is revealed in their unwillingness to accept that life and suffering could possibly be synonymous. They are world-weary Bohemians who recognize the America of the 1950s will be a consumer-orientated project. These characters are, in a certain sense, proto-Beats, and in fact the actual Beat writers, men like William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac admired Bowles and eventually befriended him.

“It seems as though there might be some place in the world they could have left alone,” Kit says. She is a woman of omens. A person of great strength, yet because of the restraints of the era, must admit “other people rule my life.” She wants to truly live, to push aside the veil separating her from raw experiences, but she is fearful and superstitious. “The people of each country get more like the people of every other country,” she says. “They have no character, no beauty, no ideals, no culture—nothing, nothing.” Read more »

In January of this year I was walking along the main road in the small village of Klerant up in the mountains above Brixen, in the Südtirol, when I heard a rooster crowing loudly. I looked up to see these two posing perfectly for a portrait in this window. One can also see part of the steeple of the village church in the reflection in the window.

by R. Passov

Johnny spoke softly in a voice just past the threshold of manhood. His smile, mistaken for charm, was longing. I could see the pentimento of the child still in him.

One day I watched a conversation that confirmed my suspicions. Johnny had returned from somewhere Big Greg had sent him. He danced as he spoke, swinging a long arm up over his head, around and down.

“The dude’s wife’s right there. I grab his guitar and bust it all up. Broke that shit right in front of em. Yeah, I said, this is what I mean.”

He had tried to be violent but in the retelling I could see his heart wasn’t in it. “Davy doesn’t play guitar,” Big Greg said. “Where the hell did you go?”

To the wrong house.

He was tall but thin. Black, but feline. Not black like the men he hosted when he had his apartment. Men who turned the living room into a weight room, sitting on benches all day doing curls, out of prison but still in. Johnny wasn’t like that.

Though I didn’t know of Lou Reed, didn’t have a radio, or a stereo or even a record, Johnny belonged in a Lou Reed song. He wanted to be a colored girl.

I know that now. Then I spied his gentleness, his out of place-ness, his role playing, that he lived between lives. Someone with you and somewhere else at the same time. Something children see but not adults.

He and Big Greg wore their green shirts, sleeves cut off, Alexander and Diles marked in black over their hearts. I decided to believe their experience in war freed them of law. Read more »

by Bill Murray

What you pay attention to depends on where you are.

“In an old city, a tourist hears the rumble of wheels over cobblestones that the native does not and notices sound bouncing differently between walls more tightly constructed than in spacious American cities.” – Alexandra Horowitz

She’s right. With the clatter of hoofs from horse-drawn carriages-for -hire in the tourist-center of Dresden a couple of weeks ago, you could see it; the locals plodded on; the tourists perked up and searched out their source.

With sound, personal space is different in different places, too. On the 13th floor of a 21-floor building in Ho Chi Minh City in April, we might as well have been invited guests in the skybar above us. Live Viet Pop invaded our personal earspace the same way a plane flies over your house’s airspace. With utter impunity.

Something else about listening: silence is a sound of its own. After a month in Vietnam, the silence of the Finnish lakeshore, where we are now, is music I was overdue to hear.

Not that it’s entirely silent. Birch leaves rustle like fresh linen sheets. Gulls shriek and shriek at constant calamities. Is there a more easily affronted creature?

On our waterfront this year we have three flocks of ducks, a grebe with an astonishing trail of a dozen babies, and a swan couple with a brood of five. They are doing what they do, growing kids each day, adults teaching kids how to be water birds. Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Everybody knows what real-world political disagreement is like: shouting, name-calling, dissembling, browbeating, mobbing, and worse. As it is practiced, deliberation in actual democracy has little to do with collective reasoning about the common good; it’s instead a constrained, but nevertheless ruthless, struggle for power. Notice, however, that hardly anyone embraces this condition. When people describe democracy in such terms, they are most often complaining. But notice that lamentations over the cut-throat nature of politics make sense as criticisms only against the backdrop of an aspirational alternative. Our forthcoming book, Democracy in a Divided World, develops a democratic ideal worth aspiring to. According to that ideal, democracy is a system where political equals govern together by means of well-run political argument.

This ideal is admittedly distant, but it hasn’t been plucked from thin air. Despite the condition of our democracy, citizens and officials alike hold one another to high standards of civil conduct. When the President characterizes those he perceives to be his critics as “very dishonest people,” he appeals to the public virtue of honesty. Charges of bias uphold the related public virtue of evenhandedness. When one criticizes a news organization for being slanted, one is insisting upon a public virtue of fairness. Note, too, that it is common now for the word “partisanship” to be used as a criticism; when one official charges another with being “partisan,” she is claiming that the other is dogmatically committed to a party line. Such charges uphold the ideal of proper argumentation. The fact is that real world politics, warts and all, is still animated with the aspiration to democracy as a system of well-run argumentation.

This occasions a puzzle. We all embrace the same democratic ideal of well-run argument and joint governance. And no one wholeheartedly approves of the political status quo. So why is our democracy so dysfunctional? Call this the debasement puzzle. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

It does not take long for history to repeat itself. It was only a little over a decade ago that overzealous lending, lax underwriting standards, unrealistic collateral valuations, borrowers not understanding loan terms, an exploding derivative securities market–and a dozen or so other factors–led to a massive crash in the housing market. Today in the United States we have outstanding student loan debt of $1.5 trillion. Average debt per student is $37,000, and over 44 million Americans have student loan debt. Default rates are rising. The situation is unsustainable on a grand scale, and on a personal scale is causing millions of people untold stress. At the same time, the prospect of debt cancellation seems too good to be true.

There are some interesting parallels to the housing market of last decade and some key differences. (This is a non-economist’s view from someone who has worked on litigation arising from defective mortgage-backed securities.) One parallel is that demand has pushed the costs of college higher and higher, just as it did in the housing market–and another similarity is that easy credit has pushed costs higher. Financing creates a sort of reality gap between cost of the goods and ability to repay. If you have to save for school in advance, you will be keenly focused on rising costs of your end goal. If costs rise too quickly, you will never be able to save enough, and you won’t be able to go. If costs rise quickly but you will get financing for whatever part you can’t afford, you are not necessarily so focused on the ultimate cost. Whatever it is, you will be attending the school. Some observers have blamed the federal government for guaranteeing almost all student loan debt, thus making lending to students a very attractive proposition. It is painfully similar to the government’s magnanimous emphasis on expanding homeownership. Read more »

Water Lilies At Lido

saucers in space, a flock,
a green gaggle of water lilies
upon cool liquid too precise
to be Monet’s, too crisp
but let me lie upon your quietude
let me swim among your green voids
let me calculate the diameters of your circles
with the calipers of my eyes
yes even the yellow renegades you harbor
how they lie within your circle of still
simultaneously blaring sun
from the deep black of your pond
which has also given us
with your cool rectitude
a glimpse of sky

Jim Culleny
7/9/19

Photo by S. Abbas Raza: Water Lilies at Lido in Brixen, South Tyrol, July 9, 2019.

by Katrin Trüstedt

While Trump’s immigration politics makes international headlines almost every day, the disaster of the European immigration policies rarely becomes international news. A recent exception is the case of Captain Carola Rackete, and it is a telling one. With all the potential for a good story, Rackete’s journey is both standing for and at the same time distracting from the actual complex mess of European immigration politics.

NGO rescue boat Captain Carola Rackete was arrested after forcing her way into the port of Lampedusa, in defiance of a ban by Italy’s far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini, bringing 40 migrants and refugees she had rescued from the sea off Libya to the Italian island. The young activist’s two-week standoff with the far-right minister Salvini and Italian authorities is the stuff of political mythmaking. La Capitana – as she is called in the Italian News in provocation of Salvini who likes to be called Il Capitano – gives the European Migration Crisis and the resistance to its exclusionary politics a face. What she has come to stand for is of mythical proportion: On the cover of Der Spiegel, she is featured as “Captain Europe,” and in various other media she has been called a modern-day Antigone. Just as Antigone resisted the command of Kreon, the official sovereign and legal authority, by reference to a higher law, Rackete opposed the directives of Salvini in the name of international maritime law. And just as Antigone’s standing up to Kreon by burying her brother has become the material for an ancient myth, Rackete’s face off with Salvini lends itself for contemporary mythical elevation. Her story evokes a mythological battle between good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice, law and counter-law in the political arena of our times. It is the story of an underdog, standing up against overwhelming forces to do the right thing for those who are rightless. Read more »

by Niall Chithelen

When the flight delay is announced, we ask what it is we have done wrong. From airlines and the world at large, the answer is rarely forthcoming, so we must look inward instead. 

This I did while waiting for my rescheduled connecting flight. I contemplated, for hours, my life, my mistakes, my goals. I thought about how I had gotten to where I am today. I thought about what it is that, to me, means greatness; I thought about what it is that makes a coffee taste good and why it was absent from each coffee I consumed that day. 

The airport was not too full, and so I had space to think. I was in Frankfurt, one of Germany’s largest cities, near the geographic center of Europe. Europe has in recent years been roiled by the rise of illiberal so-called “populists,” and these developments have given rise to serious questions about the politics of our time—are these new far-right and far-left movements primarily responses to globalization and financialization, do they stem more from existing social and political currents? Should I have put more sugar? 

At this point, five or so hours into my time at Frankfurt, I had been thinking intently for hours, a hum emanating from my now slightly vibrating frame. My eyes were laser-bright with analytical fervor. How many cups of coffee is too many? I was approaching this number.  Read more »

Leonardo Da Vinci. St. Jerome Praying in The Wilderness, begun Ca. 1482; unfinished.

“…The painting shows St. Jerome at prayer at the end of his life, a hermit in the wilderness, alone save for his lion companion—a common Renaissance subject. And yet it stands alone in its deeply moving, intimate depiction of the penitent saint in a moment of private reverie. As Jerome stares up at his crucifix, his spiritual struggle is plain to see, even though many passages of work show little more than the ground preparation on the wood panel, with hastily sketched outlines.”

“A close examination of the paint surface reveals the presence of Leonardo’s finger prints in the upper left portions of the composition, … Leonardo used his finger to distribute the pigments and to create a soft focus effect in the sky and landscape.”

More here and here.

by Adele A Wilby

There is a great deal of literature available on the experiences of the horrors, suffering and the injustice that the Jewish people experienced during World War II. Bart Van Es’s The Cut Out Girl adds to that literature.

Bart Van Es’s The Cut-Out Girl is the winner of the 2018 Costa literary prize. It is an admirable winner: the story of Lien de Jong, and how she experienced her childhood as one of the Netherlands’ 4000 ‘hidden’ Jewish children during the Nazi occupation of the country in World War II, and her life thereafter. Lien and her immediate family were part of the 18,000 Jews who resided in The Hague in 1940, out of which only 2,000 survived the war.

The book offers revelatory insights into the precarious existence of a Jewish child constantly exposed to the danger of round-ups by Nazi troops and the possibility of betrayal of her location by local Nazi sympathisers. Inevitably her story is interconnected with the families who provided her refuge, in particular the Van Es family.

Had Oxford academic Bart Van Es not been curious about the ‘lost’ member of his family, Lien, it is doubtful that her story would ever have come to light, and the experiences of a Jewish child caught up in a struggle to survive would have been lost to the world. Van Es’s journey of discovery to learn of the ‘lost’ ‘family’ child not only leads to reconciliation with the descendants of the Van Eses who provided the refuge, but to closure for both Lien and the Van Es family saga. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Tim Sommers

In “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values” Sam Harris argues that the morally right thing to do is whatever maximizes the welfare or flourishing of human beings. Science “determines human values”, he says, by clarifying what that welfare or flourishing consists of exactly. In an early footnote he complains that “Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy.” But he did not do so, he explains, for two reasons. One is that he did not arrive at his position by reading philosophy, he just came up with it, all on his own, from scratch. The second is because he “is convinced that every appearance of terms like…’deontology’”, etc. “increases the amount of boredom in the universe.”

I feel like we should have a name for this second style of argument. The traditional thing to do would be to give it a Latin name, so let’s call it ‘Argumentum ab boredom’ – the argument from boredom. It’s not unknown in philosophy. Richard Rorty was fond of arguing that there was “no interesting work” to be done on the notion of “truth”, and that we should just “change the subject” when it comes to questions about the “mind” because these are no longer of interest. The trouble is, of course, that Argumentum ab boredom is a fallacy right up there with ‘Ad Hominem’ (“against the man”) or ‘argumentum ab auctoritate’ (appeal to authority). Whether or not something bores you has no bearing on its epistemic status or its utility. Here, for example, I will, in a roundabout fashion, defend the utility of “deontology” – without offering any evidence that it is not boring (though, of course, I hope it won’t be). Read more »

by Sue Hubbard

A response to the BBC’s Panorama programme and the Labour party crisis

I am Jew –ish. The ish is important. For although I had four Jewish grandparents and Hitler would certainly have turned me into toast if I’d been born a few years earlier over the wrong side of the Channel, my upbringing was more Thelwell Pony Club and Surrey Young Conservative tennis parties (apologies I was only 13!) than north London Bar Mitzvahs. I even went to a private Christian Science girls’ school, where the only other Jewish girl refused to say the Lord’s Prayer in assembly and I wondered if I should too. Our days were spent riding our bikes in the Surrey lanes and listening to the Beatles and Rolling Stones. And my mother – a bit of a snob – was more interested in gardening and horses than Golders Green glitz. My Jewishness then – such as it was – amounted to having a grandmother who’d arrive on the Greenline bus from London for Sunday lunch with a bag of gefilte fish. As a child I never attended a synagogue or a Friday night Shabbat. Didn’t even know what they were and felt very alien the first time I did.

So most of my life I’ve not thought about being Jewish. As a teenager in the 1960s I did rather fancy going to pick grapes on a kibbutz (it was a fashionable thing to do in those days when Israel was seen as a beacon of social democracy in a sea of despotism) because you were likely to meet arty boys. But that’s about it. Since then I’ve gone on marches protesting about the current Israeli government’s appalling alt-right behaviour towards the Palestinians. Injustice is, after all, injustice.

But suddenly I’m afraid. Aware of my Jewishness in a way I’ve never been before. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

A British friend of mine once told me that when he feels stressed he often turns to re-reading R.K. Narayan’s stories about Malgudi, the fictional placid small town in south India. Much earlier, in the 1930’s, a fellow-Britisher, the writer Graham Greene, had discovered Narayan and became his life-long friend, mentor, agent for the wider literary world, and even occasional proof-reader. He found a kind of ‘sadness and beauty’ in Narayan’s simple depiction of the idiosyncrasies and disappointments of ordinary lives which he imbues with a touching sense of gentle irony and compassion.

Over the last few decades the small town has been at the center of much of urbanizing India, but the depictions in fiction today of the lives there are, as expected, much more complex in their teeming conflicts and raw agony. The literature on this even in south India is quite large, but from my own limited readings, I shall select for discussion here only three books from the last two decades, two of them translated from their originals in Malayalam and Kannada, and the third written in English.

I shall start with the third, titled Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga, which is probably the furthest of the three in terms of dissonance from the life in Malgudi. Here we can definitely say: Toto, we are not in Malgudi anymore. The assassinations referred to are those of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and of her son, Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991, but in the book except for merely as a time-marker of those 7 years, they do not play any direct role. Adiga came to be widely noted after he won the Booker Prize for his short novel The White Tiger, a book of stridently raging fury at the crushing inequalities and depravity arising from India’s roaring economic growth and somewhat cardboard characters through which they are played out, a book I did not particularly like. Adiga wrote Between the Assassinations earlier but published it after The White Tiger. Here the fury is less strident, there is more nuance and variety in the characters, and along with aching sympathy there is all-enveloping hopelessness. Here is a typical scene: a lowly cart-rickshaw puller, straining hard going uphill with a heavy load, exhausted by the heat and humiliation and a painful neck, stops his cart in the middle of the busy road, shakes his fist in a futile gesture at the passing, honking traffic and shouts: ‘Don’t you see something is wrong with this world?’ Read more »

Diedrick Brackens. Immersion Circle, from the exhibition “Unholy Ghosts”, Los Angeles, 2019.

More here, here, and here.

Current show at the New Museum.