by Bill Benzon

Music has been extraordinarily important to me. I’ve listened to and been moved by a lot of it, of all kinds, polka, jazz, classical, rock, and who knows what else. And I’ve performed in various settings – dive bars, concert halls, the streets of New York, weddings, even a funeral or two. And, as I am a thinker, I’ve tried to understand how it works. To that end I published a book some years ago, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture.

This article is adapted from the opening chapter. These are some of the things I set out to understand. Did I succeed? Of course not, but who knows? I’d like to think that I’ve asked some fruitful questions.

Tears for Johnny

On May 21, 1992 Bette Midler was a guest on the “Tonight Show.” She had been on many times before; the show had, in fact, been important in launching her career, as it had been for many performers. But this appearance was special: the next-to-last show for Johnny Carson, the show’s longtime host and star. He had decided to retire from television and the shows that week in May were planned and publicized as a farewell to Johnny.

Carson, himself a skilled drummer, liked swing-era jazz and popular music. The band he maintained for “Tonight” was a fine swing band. Midler was at home in that repertoire and was able to cajole Carson into singing a duet with her on a song she knew to be one of his favorites, Jimmy van Heusen’s fine ballad “Here’s That Rainy Day.” Carson was certainly more proficient as a drummer than as a vocalist, but his difficulties on this performance were more emotional than technical. The strain on his face was that of a man holding back tears.

The duet starts at roughly 7:16.
Read more »

“The stars are raining down upon me. I know this is not true,
but it is the truth.” —Michel Foucault

But it Is

the stars are raining down on me
I know this is not true, but there are so many,
as many as every drop in a deluge,
as many as if the earth had been upended
and the sands of every beach of every sea
were falling into my hair—  I know,
I know this is not true ….. but,

as if the multitude of all words ever spoken or written
had been heaved into the sky and were falling back
as they always are upon my head—
I know this is not true  ….. but,

as if their vertical boomerang effect
were returning them to their source,
as if Logos were doing it again, beginning,
stuttering as it does with each year . day.  minute.  second
nano or otherwise, drenching me with every drop of time—

I know, …I know this is not true

but it is
.

Jim Culleny
5/17/18

by Anitra Pavlico

In Louise DeSalvo’s introduction to a 1991 edition of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, she describes Woolf’s childhood incest and how she incorporates it into the novel. DeSalvo also discusses an earlier incarnation of the novel, Melymbrosia, which is much more overt in its references to incest. The Voyage Out, on the other hand, can easily be read without guessing at any of its author’s tragic history. DeSalvo, a scholar who spent seven years assembling Melymbrosia from Woolf’s papers in the archives of the New York Public Library, points out that it would have been illegal for Woolf to render incestuous experiences in print.

DeSalvo discusses Woolf’s half-brothers, Gerald and George, and their disturbing misdeeds. They were the sons of Woolf’s mother Julia and her first husband Herbert Duckworth, who died when Julia was pregnant with Gerald. Woolf described only many years later how Gerald had manually fondled her “private parts” when he was seventeen and she was five. George’s actions are harder to pin down. It seems he was someone who wanted to push boundaries, veering into flirtation and overly physical displays of affection, but still wanted to come across as the lovable, amiable older brother. Viviane Forrester notes in her 2015 biography of Woolf that Virginia and her sister Vanessa ruthlessly denounced George for the rest of their lives, but Virginia kept to herself the details of Gerald’s assault until only three months before her death. Read more »

Camille Hoffman. Here We Land. 2019.

“The current migration crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border factors heavily into Camille Hoffman’s work. The artist created collages from leaked photos from the border with images of America’s lush natural landscape. These collages are part of the exhibition ‘Here We Land,’ on view at Wave Hill through July 14.”

More here, here, and here.

Current show.

by Thomas Manuel

Born in France in the mid-14^th century, Christine de Pizan wrote possibly the first work of women’s history that was by a woman for women. She remains one of the era’s most fascinating writers but considerably less well-known than other writes of her time like travelling scholar and professional complainer, Ibn Battuta, or Christian fan fiction writer extraordinaire, Dante Alighieri. Her father was a kind of royal astrologer to the King of France and growing up at the court, she probably received an excellent education. But, in her own words, she only really experienced the “sweet taste of learning” when her husband died. Widowed in her twenties and with children to raise, Christine de Pizan began a remarkable literary career which gave us among other works, Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (‘The Book of the City of Ladies’).

City of Ladies is a reaction against the rampant misogyny that so deeply permeated Christine’s time. In the book, she laments that every book by a male writer that she opens has some sexist generalization about women. Amidst all of this, the specific instigating factor was an extremely popular romance that had been published called La Roman de Rose (‘The Story of the Rose’). This romance was an epic poem of two parts. The first part predates the second by about half a century and is all about chivalrous love. The second (and much larger) part, written by a different author, takes a much more cynical view of love, essentially labeling all women as cruel seducers. (Clearly, the universe is crying out for a 600 page History of the Incels.) Christine publicly lambasted the book and wrote City of Ladies as a counterweight, becoming in the words of Simone de Beauvoir, the first woman to “take up her pen in defence of her sex.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Tim Sommers

“The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” –Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Here’s an apocryphal story that is so good, it should be true. In 1770 Captain Cook became the first European to land in Australia and so the first to encounter a leaping animal with a baby in its pouch. He pointed at it and asked a nearby aboriginal, “What is that?”

“Kan-ga-roo,” our fictional indigenous person responded. And, so, we call them “kangaroos”. Which means, in that local language, “I don’t know what you are saying.”

I always associate that story with Willard Van Orman Quine’s essay, “Ontological Relativity”, because the centerpiece of the essay is what he calls a “radical translation” scenario. We are trying to learn to translate a language that we have no independent knowledge of, a language that, as far as we know, is not related to any other language that we already know how to translate. Suppose a rabbit goes hopping by and a native speaker points at it saying, “Gavagi!” Even assuming we all agree on what pointing is, and we all think that pointing and talking at the same time associates the pointing with the talking, and we are sure that the spatio-temporal area occupied by what we would call a rabbit is what is being pointed at, assuming all that, how do we know whether they mean “There goes a rabbit!” or “Look at those undetached-rabbit-parts!” or “Some rabbitizing is going on over there”. Or, if you do the pointing, how do you know that what they are saying to you is not just, “I don’t know what you are saying”.

I know, I know, only a philosopher would wonder that. But, consider: what we think exists should be revealed by what we say, but what if it’s not? What if what exists is relative to what we say, but we can never be absolutely sure what anyone is saying about what there is? What if ontology, the part of metaphysics that is supposed to be, at a minimum, a catalogue of things that we think exist and are real, is relative to language and language is always indeterminate with respect to ontology. Should we be worried about this? Read more »

by Adele A Wilby

Although a further eighteen months remain till the next Presidential elections in the United States, speculation as to whether Donald Trump will be a one-term or two-term president is starting to gain momentum amongst political pundits and politicians across the globe. The reasons for the growing interest are varied, not least because for many the thought of another four years of Trump in office sends chills down the spine. His two and half years in office have revealed an astounding lack of knowledge and political skill by an individual with such wide-reaching global power and influence, represented reactionary policies, and a limited communication ability laced with a liturgy of lying that should outrage the sensibilities and conscience of a people, and provide justifiable grounds to disqualify him from any hope of returning to occupy the office as a representative of the American people. Yet the probability of Trump in the Oval Office for another four years is not yet off the table.

This stark reality became apparent recently in a brief interview on a news programme during which Alice Butler-Short, the President of the Virginia Women for Trump (2017) organisation, expressed what could only be considered an impassioned loyalty and defence of Trump, following the disclosure of the Mueller Report. Indeed, so enamoured was she of Trump, Butler-Short articulated a plan to campaign on the virtues of Trump amongst all levels and sections of society not normally Trump supporters, with a view to widen his voting appeal, and to put him back in office. But Butler-Short is not the only woman, or more specifically white woman, in the US, who views Trump through rose-coloured glasses; an army of female Trumpites, as the 2016 election results reveal, are an electoral force to be reckoned with by any politician who aspires to occupy the most powerful office on earth. How do we account for this support for Trump amongst white-women in the US, and what is the possibility of that history of support repeating itself? Read more »

Train station in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in May of 2019.

by Niall Chithelen

I tried to accelerate out of winter, really speed through things, but I think I messed up and broke spring. Definitely something amiss—nothing grew in; instead a green city flashed into a grey one. Lawns were unfurled overnight, flowers appeared, and now I sneeze many times in a row each morning. This, I think, must be a sign.

I spent the winter going from indoors to indoors. I put my coat on the back of the chair before sitting down. I took 90-minute subway rides and 12-hour train rides. I overstayed my welcome on every phone call. I made mistakes.

Some might tell you that our haphazard “spring” originates with much larger forces, that its sudden appearance is in fact the party-state at work, its conflation with summer the result of climate change, its wonders and tatters all borne of humanity. They might mention beautification and propaganda. They might use the word “anthropocene.”

But I don’t know. I suspect it was probably some moment, something I did. Next year, everything might go back to normal, and next spring’s problems might once again be caused by humanity. I will make amends, do better, and maybe we can all go back to how it ought to be—locking eyes after a fifth sneeze, pausing, and then laughing together through our uncertain spring.

by Nickolas Calabrese

I don’t know anything about music. I make art, and like many artists I listen to music while working. Nearly every kind of music, but mostly metal for those time-to-get-serious moments. Atmospheric black metal with little discernible speech tends to work best, because it provides a setting such that one can become lost in the droning distortions when working on something. The music I like to hear is that which Kant would endorse as sublime – enormous walls of sound that result in a distractedness where one can go undeterred by outside forces. Of course an fMRI could show what is happening in the brain, what psychically galvanizes me while I listen to music in those moments, but I’m less interested in what’s happening to me as much as what’s happening to it: what happens to artworks when produced to a soundtrack?

Stepping back for a moment, it should be obvious that people of all stripes use music as a tool. Not just those who play instruments or sing or generally make music, but anyone who listens to music. It has an instrumental value in human culture. For instance, when the organ roars over the congregation the parishioners prepare to chant hymns to God. Or when you’re about to do a hard workout and you blast 50 Cent to get in the zone. Perhaps you want to set the mood for making love—easy, Marvin Gaye. When studying, many turn to classical because of it’s melodic flowering as ambient background noise. It is uncontroversial to say that many of us at some point or another use music as an instrument to hype us on what we are actually trying to achieve in that moment. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

As the job-displacing effects of markets and global integration and the cultural shocks of large immigration have rattled workers, particularly the less skilled ones, their reactive turn to populism in different parts of the world has dismayed liberals. This has been reinforced by resentment against centralized bureaucracies (not just in Brussels or Washington but also in Mexico City or Delhi or Jakarta) run by professionals and technical experts whose dispensations often ignore local realities and sensibilities. The alliance between liberals and workers that used to form the backbone of centrist democratic parties is getting frayed, as in the minds of many blue-collar workers the liberals with their mobile professional skills come across as privileged meritocrats and rootless cosmopolitans (‘citizens of nowhere’).

Global markets and mobility of capital have required standardization and harmonization of local rules and regulations, which some communities feel are ironing out their local distinctiveness and proximity-based personalized networks. Increasing market concentration in large corporate firms, their blocking of small business, capturing of state power in democracies through strong lobbies and copious election funding, and weakening of labor organizations and depressing labor share have made many small people precarious in their livelihood and suspicious of markets.

State-provided public services which are supposed to relieve the harshness of the market are everywhere riddled with bureaucratic indifference, malfeasance, and resistance to reform, while the better-off liberals are increasingly seceding from them. In developing countries the public delivery of social services is often so dismal (with inept, corrupt or truant official providers) that in contrast the image of voluntary community organizations (including charitable religious institutions run by Muslim, Hindu or Christian evangelicals) trying to fill in the gap is often much better than that of the state. Even when the state delivery mechanisms work reasonably well, the projects often do not involve the people but simply treat them as passive objects of the development process. (In rich countries communities have sometimes rejected negotiations over their heads by corporate and city officials to help investment in the community—as in the recent case of the failed Amazon investment proposal for Queens in New York). Read more »

.
—Thoughts of 77 summer solstices,
hopefully anticipating 78

Sughra Raza. Enlightened, April, 2019.

Digital photograph.

by Mary Hrovat

When I returned to school after my first marriage ended, I had to decide what to study. I’d been working toward a degree in history when I dropped out of a community college to get married, but I’d always been drawn to astronomy. One of the reasons I chose astronomy over history, or any other option, was that I felt that astronomy contained many of the other things I was interested in. To put it another way, I thought that if I didn’t study astronomy, I would regret it, but if I did study it, I wouldn’t necessarily lose touch with the other things I was interested in because they were all part of astronomy, in one way or another.

My degree is actually in astrophysics, and obviously it involved a lot of physics and mathematics. To see how the universe works, you have to understand gravitation, nuclear fusion, thermodynamics, atomic physics, and much more. In addition, to use and design telescopes and detectors, you need to know about optics, electronics, and materials science. Although I started out with very little background in math, I wound up with a minor in mathematics. By the time I had taken all the math classes required for the degree, and a fourth semester of calculus (which I hoped would help me understand my physics classes better), I was only three credits away from a math minor, so I took a class in linear algebra.

Astronomy also has obvious links to chemistry and geology. The story of the universe is, from one viewpoint, the story of chemical evolution, the development of more complex chemical elements as stars turned hydrogen and helium into more complex elements through nucleosynthesis. To study planets and moons, we can sometimes apply what we know about the rocks and weather and geological processes of Earth. Geology also comes into play in other ways. For example, one piece of evidence for the dinosaur-killing asteroid that struck Earth around 65 million years ago is a thin layer of iridium in Earth’s crust. Read more »