by Samia Altaf

Soon after President Obama moved into the White House, Mrs. Obama set up her vegetable garden. She planted tubers like carrots and turnips, leafy veggies such as spinach and kale, and herbs—thyme, sage, mint, and whatnot. But she did not plant beets. Why? I was quite perplexed and tried to find out the reason. I called the White House but did not get a satisfactory answer. “What the hell are you talking about?” said someone who picked up the phone. Maybe her children do not like them, said my child who was not overly fond of the vegetable. Not like beets? How is that possible? Of all the tuberous veggies available to man, the beet in my view is one of the best and the most poetic.

I, too, as a rebellious ten-year-old, did not quite like beets. Well, I liked them all right, I just did not like to eat them. I liked looking at them laid out with the dirt still clinging to the quivering roots. And the color! The color, that deep dark red verging on purple, intrigued me. In Urdu poetry, the idiom khoon-e-jigar is central. Though the literal translation (“blood of the liver”) is both prosaic and meaningless, it leaves the Urdu poetry buff aswirl with the despair of true or imagined loss mixed with the exquisitely tender pain of thwarted desire. The color of beets would be the color of that pain. If the liver bled that would be the color of its blood, as I confirmed during surgical training when I saw blood in the hepatic vein. So, whenever I heard Ghalib’s immortal line dil ka kya rang karoon khoon-e-jigar hone tak I’d think of beets and feel that the great nineteenth-century poet was thinking of them too. Concentric circles of dark and darker still, altogether a swirl of vivid colors and smoldering passions and black brooding juxtaposed against the colors of the leaves, the dull green of the old on the outside and the fresher lighter tone of the new, tender and vulnerable on the inside. I loved cutting a beet in two, looking tentatively inside, and rubbing it on my lips till grandmother gave me hell. My mother, who had much disdain for new-fangled cosmetics like lipsticks, said that brides in her time rubbed bleeding beets on their lips, a practice that was strictly prohibited for the unmarried.

I loved beets. I just did not like to eat them. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

In our pluralistic society, could First Amendment protections of religious freedom, say, clash with other firmly entrenched legal norms? So, to take a particular example, suppose a Muslim woman was called as a prosecution witness in a criminal trial. Could her religious obligation to wear the niqab trump the defendant’s right to confront his accuser?

I began thinking about this particular sort of case because of a September 2018 decision in the Pennsylvania murder trial of Tyreese Copper, who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. One of the witnesses for the prosecution was a Muslim woman named Davina Sparks, who insisted upon being allowed to wear the veil covering her face while giving testimony in open court.

Here’s what happened next, according to the account at the Volokh Conspiracy blog. The defendant’s attorney

objected to Ms. Sparks testifying while wearing her Muslim garb that covered her face. Ms. Sparks refused to remove the garb, citing her religion as the reason for her refusal. Out of deference to Ms. Sparks’s religious beliefs, the court decided to clear the courtroom for Ms. Sparks to testify without her face garb “so I can at least have her taking off her covering only in the presence of the people who are absolutely essential to being here,” i.e. the jury, court staff, defense counsel, and defendant.

Now, as Volokh goes on to discuss in his post, Commonwealth v. Copper has become an object of debate because the judge’s clearing the courtroom impinged upon Copper’s Sixth Amendment right to a public trial (via the Fourteenth Amendment). But I want to look at the case from a different perspective. Read more »

I’m trying to get down the light:
smooth-pooling & blue midday
a touch of peach and green
rising off the street at night
& casting against my face.

I try to get the light into my body
so it won’t leave me
I swallow everything glowing:

it started with leaves hanging
coated with a dazzling frost
then I started chewing
water glasses, I enjoyed the crunch–

then lit cigarettes flicked from fingers
thick sludge gleaming in gutters
(I bring my own cup)
and artificial emeralds
ripped from a passing stranger’s neck.

by Tamuira Reid

Nadia was missing. She had been missing for three days. Three days, two hours, six minutes. Each time a pair of feet clunked up the stairs, a set of keys jangled, someone coughed, laughed, sighed, or took a piss I’d push the door open a crack, still bolted, because it’s New York, because I am conditioned into doing these things. I’d peer into the long hallway, searching for her face only to come up empty.

****

We officially met in the middle of the night, after a failed attempt at baking on my end. I was standing on a chair, half-naked, using a throw pillow to fan the air around the smoke detector. Ollie cried from the bedroom.

Are we on fire?

It’s okay, baby. Nothing is on fire.

There was knocking at the door. A pounding at the door. I jumped off the chair and put a jacket on.

It’s the firemen, mama! Did they bring a dog?

I stared through the peephole and saw the big blonde Russian from next door. She moved in a month before, right after the drummer moved out. She was a lot quieter than him and wore winged eyeliner and red lipstick and had tattoos wrapped around her neck like scarves. Sometimes I’d see her at night, when I’d climb out onto the fire escape and smoke a guilty cigarette after my boy had fallen asleep, stretched across the width of our bed. She was out there smoking too, hips bumping against the metal rail, looking up at a starless sky.

Can I help you?

Shut that shit off.

I’m trying.  

Let me in. I’ll do it. 

I pulled my jacket tighter around me. She was even taller than I remembered, and somehow prettier. In a matter of seconds, she pushed past me, grabbed an umbrella from its hook on the wall, and gutted the detector with one swift swing. Silence.

It was love at first sight. Who cared if I was straight.  I’d make it work somehow. Read more »

Solitary swan outside the Diocesan Museum, Brixen, South Tyrol, in April, 2014.

by Emrys Westacott

Recently, I was waiting to board an American Airlines flight from Boston to Rochester, when, along with ten of my fellow passengers, I was summoned to the desk in front of the boarding gate. There we learned, by listening intently to what the AA gate agent told the first passenger in line, that we were being bumped from the flight, that AA would try to find alternative flights for us, and that we would each receive a voucher worth $250, redeemable on AA bookings, valid for one year.

Of the eleven victims, reactions were mixed. Most of us chunteringly but passively accepted our fate. But two or three individuals kicked up nasty. One woman smacked her hand on the counter in front of the agent and declared loudly, “Listen. I’m not interested in your excuses. I am getting on that plane!” A tall man with an incredulous sneer fixed on his face continually informed both the AA agents and the rest of us for the next half hour that the reason they were giving for why we had to be bumped was “bullshit, pure bullshit.”

He seemed to have a point. The reason provided for why we were being bumped was that, given its required fuel load, this particular plane would be too heavy with us on board. I’m not sure how many passengers actually boarded the plane, but I would guess it was fewer than sixty; so the ratio of bumped to boarded seemed remarkably high. We all assumed that AA had simply overbooked the flight, as airlines regularly do in order to make more money, and the agents were following a script which involved feeding us a bogus justification. “Safety regulations require that…..” is always going to sound more acceptable than “Our concern to maximize profits has led us to….”

Asked how they chose whom to bump, the supervising agent said the selection was based on who had checked in last. This, too, seemed dubious since some of us had checked in online the night before. He didn’t mention the fact that bumpees were chosen exclusively from the cheap seats, although this is standard practice.

Still, every cloud, etc. Observing the behaviour of the outraged and vocal bumpees, provided an occasion for reflection on the ethics of dealing with bureaucracy when one feels one is being in some way wronged or treated badly.

First, we need to make a basic distinction between (a) a jobsworth, and (b) institutional bullshit. Read more »

Investment

every day I am
in vestment

it’s morning

I dress in
sunskin
cloudskin
earthskin
in the skin
of a universe

though I’ve hoped to slough
them off, to be unveiled
as they’re outgrown,

I’ll always be,
while I’m here, in
vestment

Jim Culleny
4/10/19

by Robert Fay

During the annus horribilis of 1968 when it became clear the U.S. would never “win” in Vietnam, John Wayne decided to star and direct in a propaganda film called The Green Berets. Wayne was a die-hard Orange County anti-communist who believed that the U.S. military was winning on the battlefield in South Vietnam, but losing in the media and public relations realm.

Rather shrewdly, Wayne centered his film on the U.S. Army Special Forces, a.k.a. the Green Berets, whose small 12-man A-Teams lived and trained with the anti-communist Montagnards, the indigenous peoples of Vietnam’s remote central highlands. The Green Berets in the 1960s were an all-volunteer, highly-selective outfit with both mystique and a bit of holdover, Kennedy-era glamour. These teams spoke the local languages and formed close and often lifelong bonds with their Montagnard peers. This mission profile remains to this day the classic Special Forces game; make contact with local populations and then fight alongside them against a common enemy.

If John Wayne had depicted the typical American military units in Vietnam, main-line U.S. Army or U.S. Marine Corps infantry troops trudging through rice fields—even with all the hilarious puffery of Hollywood special effects—he’d have had far-less glamour to work with. These units were often filled with draftees who went out on company-sized operations supported by massive amounts of artillery and air support, some of it indiscriminately unleashed upon the countryside. There were generally no Vietnamese speakers among the troops, and the cultural and historical knowledge (e.g., of the recent Indochina War between the Vietnamese and the French) was nil. Read more »

by Bill Murray

My wife and I live in the southern Appalachian mountains across a narrow valley from Georgia’s highest mountain. Most of our farm borders the United States Forest Service, pretty far up in the woods. If we don’t go out, we might not see anyone for a week.

It’s so far up in north Georgia that we shop in North Carolina, which is way more cosmopolitan. In Murphy (population 1638), they have a shop that sells different kinds of cooking oils.

Just 2-1/2 hours north of Atlanta, up in the mountains, isn’t like you might expect in the southern United States. It snows in winter and you usually can’t get a proper grip on spring until the middle of April. Like this year.

Our view to that mountain, called Brasstown Bald, is all natural.  From the farm to the peak there’s not a manmade thing to see. The Bald, at 4783 feet, makes its own weather, and ours, too. We wake to its lenticular top hats, revel in its autumn flamboyance and in summer, cower under its electric fury. That requires periodic replacement of our home electronics. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Holly Case

About 1,500 years ago, the Chinese literary critic Liu Hsieh wrote The Literary Mind. It includes a section on metaphor—hsing—which he describes as “response to a stimulus.”

[W]hen we respond to stimuli, we formulate our ideas according to the subtle influences we receive…. the hsing is an admonition expressed through an array of parables.

I first came upon The Literary Mind some months ago and was immediately fascinated by Hsieh’s elucidation of hsing, but will confess to having had no idea what he meant, even after studying his examples. It remained in the back of my mind.

Some time after discovering Hsieh, I was having a series of intense discussions with a group of students on the theme of apocalypse. Again and again, two of them mentioned a story by Ursula K. Le Guin from 1973 called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Omelas, Omelas, Omelas.

Some weeks later, the word “Omelas” occurring to me in flashes, I printed out a copy of the story and read it. You should read it. Omelas is a mythical city where the mood is festive and everything and everyone appear in good form and spirits. The narrator begins by describing and defending how Omelas functions as a great festival of summer unfolds in the background. “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy?” the narrator asks the reader. “No? Then let me describe one more thing.”

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window.… In the room a child is sitting.… The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes—the child has no understanding of time or interval—sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes.… It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually. They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.

Sometimes it happens that, after seeing the child, a person from Omelas sets out on a road that leads away from the city. And keeps walking. The story ends: “The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

The story troubles me. It’s the leaving. What does leaving do for the child locked in the cellar? Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

I was standing in Penn Station the other day waiting for a train and someone passed through begging for change. I’ve lived in New York City long enough that I don’t just start taking my wallet out and going through it in crowded public spaces, but beyond that, I don’t have change. I normally don’t carry cash. If I have cash on me its for one of two reasons, either someone has paid me back for something in cash (which in these days of Venmo is increasingly unlikely) or I have a hair or nail appointment where they like their tips in cash. So even if I have cash, it’s bigger bills and certainly no coins. And I’m sure I’m not unusual. I pay for things with credit cards. I pay other people using Apple Pay or Venmo. I mentioned this thought to someone who told me that they had seen someone begging in New York with details of their Venmo account. On the one hand, there seems to be a certain chutzpah to that, after all, if you have a bank account to receive the money in and some kind of smart phone to access it, is your situation as dire as you’re making out? On the other hand, it’s pretty smart. Of course, there are serious privacy issues involved in giving money to a random stranger through an app like Venmo, it’s not private, so I probably wouldn’t do that either, but it’s an interesting idea, if it could be made more anonymous and secure. Apparently, at least in China, the virtual beggar is a thing, “Even beggars have begun to accept wireless payments by offering QR codes…That’s mostly down to the proliferation of cheaper smartphones in China and the dominance of the WeChat and Alipay apps – which both support direct mobile payments.”

What this whole thing makes me think about though is that this is yet another way that modern digital life is exacerbating the divide between rich and poor. Read more »

Moonrise over a mountain called Plose. Photo from my balcony in October of 2016.

by Michael Liss

“Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.” —Henry David Thoreau

It has been a little over a week since the redacted Mueller Report was released, and so many words have been spilled that there could be a drought by summer if the umbrage reservoirs are not refilled. Can we just retire the word “closure”?

The legal verdict is in, and I don’t plan to re-litigate it here. Robert Mueller determined there was not enough to charge President Trump with collusion, and Attorney General William Barr decided that Trump did not obstruct justice. We all can look at the (unredacted) facts they based their judgments on, and question whether those judgments were correct, but this phase of it is almost certainly over. The President and his inner circle are not going to be indicted.

That certainly is life-affirming. What’s next? How do we read our fate, see what is before us, and walk on into futurity?

We might start with perhaps the most under-reported angle of the cycle: the practical implications of Mueller’s finding that the Trump Campaign’s scores of contacts with the Russians and WikiLeaks were not, per se, illegal. Despite diligent efforts, despite countless dots, Mueller could not find what he thought would have been determinative—a hard agreement that would have nailed down collusion. His team evaluated a lot of meetings, a lot of discussions, a lot of timing coincidences, but, in the absence of a specific exchange of quid pro quos, smoke, no fire.

I’m not critiquing Mueller’s thought process. I accept it. But it leaves us with a serious problem. Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Epictetus’ Enchiridion 52 is an exercise in metaphilosophy. It captures the double-vision students of Stoicism must have about their own progress. The core insight of E52 is that the tools of philosophical inquiry and progress toward insight can themselves become impediments to progress. E52 is the last entry of the Enchiridion in Epictetus’ own words (with E53 being inspirational quotations from Cleanthes, Euripides, and Plato), and in it, a decidedly practical program is endorsed. The key to this endorsement is the contrastive case Epictetus makes. Here is E52 in its entirety:

[1] The first and most necessary subject in philosophy is the application of philosophical principles, such as ‘Don’t be a fraud’. The second is that of proofs, such as why it is that we ought not to be frauds. The third subject is that which confirms and articulates these proofs, such as, how is this a proof? For, what is a proof? What is inference? What is contradiction? What is truth? What is falsehood?

[2] Therefore, the third subject is necessary because of the second, and the second is necessary because of the first. But the most necessary and the one where we must linger is the first. Yet we do it backwards, because we devote time to the third subject and entirely busy ourselves with it, while we completely neglect the first. Consequently, we’re frauds, but we’re ready to prove that we ought not to be frauds.

The problem, of course, is the last sentence: though we have proofs we should not be frauds, we nevertheless are frauds. How, given the Stoic program of philosophical training – that we have the proofs precisely in order to remind ourselves not to be frauds – does this result come about? And more importantly, how, with these tools, can we prevent it? Read more »