by Emily Ogden

Because I wanted to write about something I believe in, my topic today is irony.

The alert reader is already asking, can you believe in irony? The ironist is widely supposed to be a person who doesn’t really believe in anything. Disavowing her attachments as soon as she forms them, holding nothing sacred, she occupies a stance of cool detachment. I don’t think this picture is right. Far from detaching us from the world, irony allows us at once to hold fast to our attachments and to hold them at a distance; to be convinced about our convictions and to be willing to question them.

Such a definition of irony doesn’t necessarily change the ironist’s outward aspect. Go ahead and imagine the same cool customer as before, if you like. But reconsider what might lie behind her performance of detachment. She doesn’t simply say the opposite of what she means for comic effect, as a sarcastic wit might do. Instead, the ironist means everything she says and more besides. If I say that irony is the one thing I really and truly believe in, for example, I’m deliberately invoking the conflict we think exists between irony and belief. I invoke that conflict not to cancel the belief with the irony, but to show that these attitudes can survive their mutual antagonism. Not all conflicts have to end in the extermination of one combatant. Read more »

by Joan Harvey

What made him a great poet was the unprotesting willingness with which he yielded to the ‘curse’ of vulnerability to ‘human unsuccess’ on all levels of human existence—vulnerability to the crookedness of the desires, to the infidelities of the heart, to the injustices of the world. —Hannah Arendt on Auden[i]

Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible. —Angela Davis

. . . something undaunted wants to move no matter how inauspicious the prospects, advance no matter how pained or ungainly. —Nathaniel Mackey

A man goes door to door, wearing his murdered son’s shoes, to ask voters to make him their state representative. His son, Alex, 27, had been gunned down in the Aurora theater shooting. The man, Tom Sullivan, is elected, even in a very conservative district, and shortly afterward sponsors an Extreme Risk Protection Bill to give law enforcement the ability to temporarily remove guns from people having a mental health crisis. He wears his murdered son’s leather jacket when he speaks on behalf of the bill. It’s too late for his son. But, he says, “I’m not doing this for Alex and my family, I’m doing it for yours. Watching your child’s body drop into the ground is as bad as it gets, and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that none of you have to do that.” The bill passes. And then comes the campaign to recall Sullivan, organized by Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, a group who claims the NRA is a sellout, and whose executive director will get a cut of every dollar that the group raises. Republican Patrick Neville, Colorado House minority leader, is helping to organize these recalls.[ii] And this is only one of nine recalls proposed in Colorado.

In the film Knock Down the House, the three women profiled along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all ran based on their experience with systemic violence. Amy Vilela of Nevada lost her daughter when a hospital refused to admit her because she didn’t have insurance. Paula Jean Swearengin of West Virginia lost many friends and family to cancer caused by coal mining. Cori Bush of St. Louis lived in close proximity to Ferguson. All these women ran tough campaigns against entrenched incumbents and all three lost their races. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Mid-day Still. Chitwan Forest, Nepal, 2017.

Digital photograph.

by Jeroen Bouterse

The Big Bang Theory has been one of the most successful sitcoms in TV history. Last month it ended. In many ways, it ended a long way from where it had begun; many commentators have noticed how the show has evolved together with cultural norms in the past decade. Its first seasons milked gender-stereotypes to an embarrassing extent; later, the main cast included more women, and generally changed its tone on gender and science – even making it a theme in several episodes.

Still, a sitcom like BBT needs its stereotypes, and BBT’s idea of geek culture did remain stereotypical; if not on the level of gender, then in other ways that I want to explore here. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Two Poems by Muhammed Iqbal (1877-1938)

Bright Rose

You cannot loosen the heart’s knot,
perhaps you have no heart

no share in the turmoil
of this garden where I yearn

but gather no roses.
Of what use is wisdom to me?

Once out of the garden,
you are at peace. I am anxious,

scorched as I search.
Even Jamshed’s empty cup

foretold the future,
may wine never touch my lips,

open circle in a mirror.

Withered Rose

By what words can I deem you
desire of the nightingale’s heart?

The morning breeze was your cradle,
garden a tray of perfumes.

My tears rain like dew,
and in my barren heart your ruin

an emblem of mine.
My life a dream of roses.

Trans-created from the original Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit.

Fruit in a bowl in the kitchen of a B&B in Basel, Switzerland, in January of 2017.

by Mary Hrovat

Books about how to write are so frequently described as life-changing and essential (usually by publishers, but sometimes by reviewers) that I was initially unmoved by enthusiastic reviews of Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose, by Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner. However, the praise seemed to focus on the fact that the book had changed the reviewers’ attitudes toward what writing is and how it works, and that interested me. I decided to get a copy, and I’m glad I did. The book describes and illustrates a particular style of writing but also, and perhaps more importantly, it really did give me a different framework for thinking about what style is and, yes, what writing is. Read more »

by Gabrielle C. Durham

Did completing your taxes seem a Herculean task? Did cleaning your adolescent bedroom compare to mucking the Augean stables? Are you more jovial or saturnine by nature? Do you or anyone you know suffer from narcissism? Did you see the movie Titanic? Have you ever been hypnotized? Do you want to go on an odyssey? These questions are all so tantalizing, no?

These are not the non sequiturs they may initially seem. Each one refers to Greek or Roman mythology. From echoing valleys to arachnophobia, mythology is a vocabulary geyser for so much of the Western world. Mythology serves us so well for these are the timeless stories of our culture. Depending on how you ethically roll, mythology tends to be more convenient, more easily encapsulated than most forms of organized religion. There’s no grey area with the Greek and Roman gods: Zeus/Jupiter was a tramp, Ares/Mars was a hothead, and Aphrodite/Venus was trouble to any romantic union.

After reading and hearing some of the myths and how they reverberate through literature and entertainment, we grasp some universals of human behavior. The characters and their situations serve as shorthand. Don’t we all understand the admonition not to be arrogant like Icarus and fly too close to the sun with our waxen wings? For those of us who indulge, perhaps overmuch in some bacchanals, we know In vino veritas (In wine there is truth), courtesy of Dionysus/Bacchus. This saying conveys in many languages.

Here are some of the stories behind the terms used in the first paragraph. Read more »

by Emrys Westacott

The relation between what is natural and what is morally good is a topic that has concerned philosophers from ancient times to the present. Those who view the part of a human being that belongs to the material world as sordid, unclean, and irrational have understood morality to require the suppression or the taming of nature; the angel in us must control the beast. This outlook is endorsed by Plato and is commonly found in Christian theology. Hobbes’ social contract theory, which presents moral life and political order as the way we escape the miseries of the state of nature, also takes morality and nature to be in certain respects opposed. Many others, though, have looked to nature for some sort of moral guidance. The Stoics viewed the implacable order observed in the heavens as a model for a serene human life. Defenders of rigid social hierarchies pointed to the successful arrangements in a bee hive. Critics of homosexuality argue that it is “unnatural,” while advocates of gay rights deny this. Appeals to what one finds in nature have bolstered social Darwinism, the subordination of women, arguments for and against slavery, egalitarianism, and the idea of universal human rights.

In Against Nature, Lorraine Daston (Director of Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), poses the following question: “Why do human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, pervasively and persistently, look to nature as a source of norms for human conduct?”[1]The book belongs to the Untimely Meditation series published by MIT Press. At seventy pages, nine of which are taken up by illustrations, and four of which are blank, the book is essentially an 18,000 word essay on this topic.

The modern view of nature that emerged and took hold during the scientific revolution is that it contains no values. In the thought of intellectual pioneers like Descartes and Boyle, the material world is best understood as a vast machine operating predictably according to universal laws of nature. The implications of this outlook for ethics were first noticed by Hume when he observed that there is a logical difference between “is” statements that describe facts, and “ought” statements that express values; moreover, because of this logical difference, it is impossible to fully justify the latter by appealing to the former. Descriptions, by themselves, never logically entail prescriptions. Since then, the “fact-value gap” has haunted much moral philosophy. But even though John Stuart Mill and others have warned against using nature as a moral guide–think preying mantis and sexual relations–according to Daston, “the temptation to extract norms from nature seems to be enduring and irresistible.”[2] Read more »

Sughra Raza. Wabi-sabi. Botswana, 2015.

Digital photograph.

by Thomas R. Wells

The authority of scientific experts is in decline. This is unfortunate since experts – by definition – are those with the best understanding of how the world works, what is likely to happen next, and how we can change that for the best. Human civilisation depends upon an intellectual division of labour for our continued prosperity, and also to head off existential problems like epidemics and climate change. The fewer people believe scientists’ pronouncements, the more danger we are all in.

Fortunately I think there is a solution for this problem. Unfortunately, it looks like some people are going to have to die. Read more »

by Samia Altaf

Last night I dreamed I was on my way to the tailor’s in the H-Block market to pick up the outfit that Mrs. Obama was to wear at President Obama’s second inauguration. The State Department official who was to transport it in the diplomatic pouch was on the tarmac waiting in the military plane with its engines revving. Everything was set.

But real life is unpredictable and the best laid plans of mice and men, and women too, can get derailed. As I skirted the roundabout to go north, traffic stalled in the circle of Lalikjan Chowk. A crowd of bearded and turbaned men, their trouser-ends hoisted above the ankles, was milling around, waving their arms and shouting, their teeth gleaming white through their black beards. Some energetic ones, skinny and intense, also with black floating beards, were rerouting the traffic advising the cars to turn back. That I could not afford to do. This was a mission-critical errand—the first lady was to wear the outfit in the morning and it was already night in Washington, D.C. All I had was the ten-hour time difference in Lahore.

I figured it was a religious demonstration, one faction of Muslims upset at another’s manner of dressing or eating or laughing or standing. Then I saw saw women and children holding placards protesting power failures and the increased cost of the whatever little electric supply that came their way for couple of hours in the day. Keep your focus I told myself, circling around, zigzagging through the utility shops on the left of the roundabout, past the back wall of the S-Block graveyard, navigating the Z-Block bylanes across from the padlocked library, lurching over the empty lot behind the big mosque to finally arrive at the complex housing the tailoring shop. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Shawn Crawford

Growing up, a lighter branded you as suspect to any Baptist worth his King James Version. Because really, other than smoking and setting houses on fire to incinerate the family within just for kicks, what did you need a lighter for anyway?  If you wanted to light something righteous like a candle or the water heater, you reached for the box of safety matches next to the paprika in the spice cabinet.  They had SAFETY written on the box in case you felt tempted to go astray. Lighters should have had Iniquity Equipment inscribed on them as far as we were concerned.

Naturally I pined for one.  Especially a Zippo.  Oh that beautiful sound they made opening and closing.  The glamour of a seasoned pro twirling one absentmindedly while he drank some exotic cocktail whose name you were forbidden to speak.  I once suggested Bloody Marys for everyone after church one evening and was interrogated the rest of the night to learn in what seedy environment I had acquired such knowledge. I was eight.

But the absolute, most breathtaking moment of the Zippo Lifestyle occurred in any movie when the dashing hero brandished his gleaming beauty to light the femme fatale’s cigarette.  Zippo informs us the lighter has appeared in over 2000 films. Read more »

by Abigail Akavia

When I was in my early twenties I watched Catherine Breillat’s 2002 film Sex Is Comedy. It tells the story of a female director struggling to shoot a sex scene between her two young leading actors, who clearly can’t stand each other. The film follows the director through a series of off-camera shenanigans, including fitting the male actor with a ridiculously large prosthetic penis. Ultimately, the scene is successfully shot; this success is presented as a triumph of the only two women on set, the director and the actress (played by Anne Parillaud and Roxane Mesquida respectively). It is a radically feminist feat, whose value may today be marred for reasons both universal and personal: first, the general changes to the film and television industries brought on especially by the MeToo movement have affected also how simulated sex scenes are produced; second, Breillat’s remarks against MeToo specifically may prompt us to reevaluate her avowedly feminist work. 

My initial impression of the film was not directly affected by its feminist import. I remember being absolutely stunned and deeply touched by the film’s ending, which zeroes in on the teenager’s naked body and face, depicting the simultaneous shame and pleasure she feels as she has sex for the first time. The embodied struggle, this bittersweetness of young sex, is also the struggle and bittersweetness of acting, of a surging yet somehow controlled creativity that stems from pain and demands a dangerous level of exposure. If up until that point the female protagonist is the film-within-a-film’s director, it now becomes the actress. Her courageous vulnerability positions her as a great artist, precisely through the act of “submissively” becoming a woman. The men around her, co-star and cameramen in particular, are awed by the trueness she revealed, by how unlike “acting” and entirely not-fake was what they witnessed. As the shooting ends, the sounds of the actress’s sobs make way for an awkward silence, one that hovers between uncomfortable and reverent, as if all those present have transgressed something entirely too personal. A few seconds afterwards, the director tenderly holds the actress in her arms. They share the frame, and we see the relief and pride they both feel at their joint acting-directing accomplishment. The tears of pain and delight of the simulated sexual act turn into an ecstatic release of the artistic energy needed to conjure that simulation. Read more »

Denver, Colorado, in May of 2015.