by Emrys Westacott

Just as Anteus in Greek mythology renewed his strength by touching the earth, so emigrés who live abroad often draw some sort of cultural or spiritual nourishment from returning to their roots. In my case this means returning to Britain, and specifically to the countryside that remains, for the most part, green and pleasant. Usually I do this in the summer, so it made a nice change this year to be in Britain at the beginning of Spring. The trees not yet being in leaf left more of the landscape open and visible. There were fewer flowers, of course, but there were also fewer holiday makers clogging up the roads and the honey pot tourist sites.

The British countryside, especially the Derbyshire Peak District (full disclosure–it’s where I grew up, and I’m biased), is simply fabulous for its combination of natural beauty, historical interest, scientific significance, variety and accessibility. When out walking, the superb large-scale ordinance survey maps–now available as a phone-app– are indispensable aids and do much to enhance the experience. I never fail to be amazed at how, in spite of there being over sixty-five million people crammed onto a small island, one can so easily enjoy in virtual solitude fields and hillsides, rivers and streams, woods and moorlands. One sunny afternoon I walked out onto a moor just a few miles East of greater Manchester, and in three hours met no-one. Read more »

by Shawn Crawford

Like most Kafka stories, “A Hunger Artist” inserts you into a bewildering situation, appears to offer you some solace and meaning, and then bewilders you all over again.

The Hunger Artist is just that: a man that starves himself for a living. But unlike Gregor Samsa awaking to find himself an enormous insect, this story echoes Kafka’s actual time and place (Europe from 1883-1924). Hunger artists traveled the continent, creating a craze like flagpole sitting or MMA fighting. Generally confined, guards watched over the artist to ensure he did not eat. Crowds would gather to take stock of an artist’s slow emaciation; postcards were sold with photos of the artist at his most gaunt state.

The hero of our story resides in a cage filled with straw. Children gather, clinging to each other in terror and wonder. The Artist’s handler, the Impresario, determines that forty days of fasting produces the largest crowds and peak interest before attention begins to wane. On the final day, the Artist emerges from his cage to great acclaim, angry that he cannot pursue his craft for even longer. Simply the delirium of hunger, the Impresario assures the crowd.

As the fad begins to decline, the Artist finds himself relegated to a circus, living in a cage surrounded by the show’s menagerie. But while he laments the lack of attention, he can now fast for as long as likes. He can take his art to the ultimate extreme. Spoiler alert: the artist starves himself to death. It’s Kafka after all. Read more »

Long exposure of evening scene from my balcony after a rare spring snowfall in March of 2016. The white streaks on the street are from the headlights of a car driving by; the blue ones from a speeding police car.

by Samia Altaf

In May 2014, a young man beat his twenty-year-old sister, Farzana, to death by hitting her head with a brick. He did this in broad daylight just outside the High Court building in Lahore, the cultural, artistic and academic capital of Pakistan. He did it as local policemen and passersby looked on, lawyers in their black flowing robes went in and out of their offices and barely fifty yards away, inside the building, the bewigged and begowned Chief Justice sat with his hand on the polished gavel.

Farzana, a young woman from a lower-middle-class family, had married a man against her family’s wishes. She had come to the High Court that day to provide proof that she had married voluntarily and had not been abducted by her husband as her family claimed when they filed the case to “get her back.” Farzana was dead, the bridal henna still bright red on her hands and feet, before her case was called for hearing by the court.

Though this was one in a string of incidents of violence against women, and though many similar incidents have happened in Pakistan since, the shock and horror of the murder consumed us for a few days and became international news. On May 29, 2014, the BBC asked, “How can families do this?”

One answer to the question is that families can perpetrate violence against their daughters because they have years of practice doing so every day. Women in Pakistan live in a culture of ambient violence, and incidents of exaggerated violence labeled “honor killings” are just lamentable spikes in the ambient violence of their everyday lives. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

Springtime always reminds me of Johann Sebastian Bach. When I was young, my father coaxed me to go to a concert celebrating Bach’s 300th birthday. I used to think it was arcane knowledge, Bach’s date of birth, but Google recently featured it on their homepage–he would have been 334 on March 21. He belongs to everyone, even if it feels as if he is communicating to you personally. His music speaks of emotion, vitality, and renewal, which makes it fitting that his birth rings in the spring. Scholars and performers have of course written much about Bach, so I mainly would like to write about my own experiences and to comment on his Well-Tempered Clavier, two volumes of preludes and fugues in each of the keys of the scale, meant at least in part for students learning keyboard. It is much more than exercises, though; as the critic Harold Schonberg wrote, “if music does have a Bible, it is Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier.”

There is a terrific video on YouTube of András Schiff playing Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier live at The Proms in 2017. It is as good an accompaniment to this article as any. Even Schiff’s facial expressions tell a story about the emotion inherent in this music. Bach has sometimes been played in a dry, clinical, “sewing machine” style, as Schonberg described in his 1972 column for the New York Times to mark the Well-Tempered Clavier’s 250th anniversary. Schonberg notes, however, that Bach would not have played it that way himself: “His pupils testified that he was always interested in the emotional content of a piece — the Affekt.”

The conductor John Eliot Gardiner writes in Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven that “Bach’s keyboard works maintain a tension — born of restraint and obedience to self-set conventions — between form (which we might describe variously as cool, severe, unbending, narrow or complex) and content (passionate or intense) more palpably and obviously than does his texted music.” The Well-Tempered Clavier pieces reflect this tension, as beneath the orderly facade lies deep emotion. The first prelude of Book I, in C major, is celestial in its stillness and simplicity. At the same time, it contains near-constant striving: delicious, arpeggiated chords are ever-moving to the end goal of C major where they began. This is one to listen to when you want to believe that life is pure, simple, and good, but you suspect danger lurks under the surface. It is followed by the C minor prelude, in contrast, which is dangerous throughout. After that journey, the accompanying C minor fugue’s eventual arrival at C major is cathartic. Read more »

by Robert Fay

Being American, as well as a Gen X-er who grew up on the lyrics of the Sex Pistols, “God save the queen…she’s not a human being,” I never quite understand the U.K.’s loyalty to the British Royal family. Up through the Edwardian era, aristocratic veneration made sense in many ways, but the horror and folly of World War I should have thoroughly wrung that ancient habit from the English soul. But a young Queen Elizabeth took the reins in 1952, and proved an admirable monarch, and then Princess Diana arrived two over decades later adding a much-needed bit of Hollywood glamour to the House of Windsor. But I still didn’t pay the Royals any mind until I discovered a video of Prince Harry in a firefight with Taliban gunmen in Afghanistan.

Now this was interesting, I thought. Here was one of the world’s most privileged, poshest individuals and he was in Helmand Province, arguably one of the most dangerous places on earth in 2008.

I assumed it had been some kind of publicity event, until I did some research and found out Prince Harry had actually attended Royal Military College Sandhurst, the officer candidate school for British Army officers, that is six-months long, and has a solid reputation for toughness and professionalism. Prince Harry went on to serve as a Forward Air Controller in Afghanistan in 2008 and then as an Apache fighter pilot, also seeing action in Afghanistan in 2012. He was the real deal. Read more »

Tool Series

by Akim Reinhardt

You shouldn’t curse. People will take you less seriously. Cursing also reveals a certain laziness on your part, suggesting that you can’t be bothered to come up with more descriptive language. In the end, when you curse, you short change both yourself and your audience. Instead, take the time to use the language more fully, more carefully, and more artfully. In so doing, your message will be clearer, more forceful, and better received.

April Fools!

Seriously, are you fuckin’ kidding me? Do you have any idea just how fucked up the world is? I’m sorry, but polite language simply will not do.

The president of the United States is a foul mouthed racist and serial sexual molester. Donald Trump has referred to neo-Nazis as “nice people,” and repeatedly called for a group of incontrovertibly innocent black teenagers (now grown men) to be executed for supposedly raping a white woman. In other words, he’s a failed lyncher. He also brags about committing sexual battery, specifically grabbing women’s “pussies,” and I think you’d be pretty naive to insist he’s never actually raped anyone. By some estimates, 1/5 of all American women have been raped; honestly, what are the odds that this nasty, little motherfucker has never been one of the millions of perpetrators during his six decades of sexual activity? Read more »

Dextro. Algorithmic images; generative art.

More here, and here.

by Richard Passov

Stealing gave me currency with the older kids who hung in front of the apartments on weekend nights. Anything I got from our local supermarket was of value, especially cough syrup with codeine and flasks of rum or vodka.

One of the older boys, who was soon to die in a train accident, showed me how to tie the end of a sleeve on my windbreaker. When I flipped the jacket over my shoulder the tied sleeve rested unnoticed against my back. He also showed me which bottles of cough syrup to slip into the sleeve.

One night, my sleeve full of cough syrup, I exited the store near closing time. Just outside two men stood in front of me.

 A third man approached. “We’ve been watching you,” he said. I knew the mirrors high up at the back of the store were windows. “We’re just going to call your parents.”

He wore a long sleeve white shirt and dark, ill fitted slacks held up by a belt. A pack of cigarettes pressed against his front pocket. I looked only as far as the two red stripes visible under thin cloth: Taryetons, which I remembered my father smoking.

“I’m the store manager. We’re just gonna take you upstairs and call your parents.”

We backtracked through the store, through vinyl slats that hung next to the cold cabinets, into a storage space then up a stairway that led to a long hallway. We walked past the fake mirrors to an office. The manager took the seat behind a desk. The other two stood away from me but stayed in the room. Read more »

by Bill Murray

Two dozen strangers meet by the fjord at the edge of town. We are utterly out of our element, tourists through and through. Today we shall pound across the tundra on snowmobiles, a means of conveyance most of us have never been aboard.

We’re all curious about our tour company-issued Arctic wear. We paw through different sizes and splay ourselves out across the room pulling on one-piece snowmobile suits.

The outfitters can’t be responsible for your hypothermia, so you strap yourself into their suit, boots, helmet, goggles and today, double balaclavas because it is cold cold, the guide named Hans Peter says. One man opts out of the trip rather than surrender his medical shoes for mandatory fur boots.

The suits work. They keep you if not warm, not cold either. The danger is the contact points between goggles and balaclava because if you expose skin there while moving at 35 or 50 kilometers per hour, wind chill will cause frostbite in short order.

All suited up, everybody looks like everybody else. Anonymity serves as metaphor for the dark season here, where the sun set on October 25th and only rose again (for an hour) on February 15th.

This is Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway, eight hundred miles from the North Pole. Our destination, across the island, is a Russian settlement called Barentsburg.

They put 22 of us through a precious few novice moves, how to drive a snowmobile. Just a five-minute lesson because there really isn’t much to learn. Push this to start the engine, pull that to go, wiggle your body with the curves. And supervision is close at hand. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Maniza Naqvi

Now in this damp, stiff swollen fingers, mine, once slender, of gossamer touch, which pierced skin with steel, silk, molded spheres, to be kicked by heroes, turned warriors, turned champions, turned angels in distant lands, on green fields and roaring theaters of fierce contest of fury and cheer. Yet I am not there, at the game, but I am present, in every single game. They don’t know do they, that without me, the game would not be, that without me, they, howling with joy, howling in expectant yowls and cheers awash in victorious and defeated tears, and beer, this ritualistic collective catharsis, all of this, without me, would not happen, would not be. This story. Where am I in it? What is history but unspeakable violence, erasure and invisibility, spat and polished into and put a sheen upon, to create a mirror for those who look. Yes, a mirror, after all that effort to put a spin on it, we can’t get away can we from ourselves? Won’t we all in trying to cross drown in our collective grief? It is I, bobbing in steel on these shores, not allowed in, who’s fingers bloodied by a thousand pierces, who’s eyes blinded by constant attention who brings them this. These intricate delicate, fine, exquisite fingers, this attentive keen sight, this laboring, I bring them this, the very thing they claim as their soul a distilled meaning and morphing to something sublime. I who they bar from entering. I, who has been left un-reading, unread, now thirsty, hungry, suffocating. I who makes all of this. I who am their constant dread. Left for dead. But I am here, here, off shore, there in that field, in that theater, amidst the squeals of joy. No, the game does not happen without me. And now, hidden here, bobbing, stealing away in steel, floating, lurching on waves upon waves, broken away from that bondage of needles and stretching skin for a perfect sphere for kicking, I am here. A prisoner of contained fates. The Adriatic laps outside: the smell of salt, octopus, fir, citrus and jasmine presents itself in the way of salvation in the way of pain, unforgettable almost impossible to conjure in language, in memory, how to give words to the scent of lavender and black pine and Crni bor. Or those left behind. Equally uncontained perfumed keys unlocking the mind. No, the game doesn’t happen without the likes of me. But I am suffocating now, I am contained here in a coffin of steel, upon the sea, unwanted, unwelcomed, unseen, listening to the cheering roar of a crowd ecstatic as some adored gladiator whips it into net—that sphere of skin I have sewn. The game, I cannot enter, does not happen without me.

Lizard on my balcony railing, June, 2018.

by Bill Benzon

A small-state world would not only solve the problems of social brutality and war; it would solve the problems of oppression and tyranny. It would solve all problems arising from power.  – Leopold Kohr, Breakdown of Nations

This insight was the late Thomas Naylor’s lodestone; it informed and animated everything he did. Primarily an economist – who taught at Duke University, University of Wisconsin, Middlebury College, and the University of Vermont ­– he had also been a businessman, running a small software firm, and he advised corporations and governments in over thirty countries, an activity that lead him to predict the political upheavals of the Soviet Union. He moved to Vermont in 1990 in search of human-scale community, which he found, and a decade later founded the Second Vermont Republic, which advocated Vermont secession from the USA to become an independent state, which it had been from 1777 to 1791. Time magazine named the Second Vermont Republic as one of the “Top 10 Aspiring Nations” in the world as recently as 2011.

In Thomas Naylor’s Paths to Peace: Small is Necessary (Wheatmark, 2019) I have collected nine essays and two manifestos Naylor published in the last decade of his life – he died in 2012 – and a long interview in which he placed his ideas and activism in the context of his life. A fond eulogy by Kirkpatrick Sale and a forward and afterward by Charlie Keil place Naylor’s life and work in a larger context. Here is Keil’s forward.

Forward: Naylor’s Arguments in a Broader Context

by Charlie Keil

First, some frameworks, contexts for understanding the importance of Thomas Naylor’s contributions to the Great Transition and a paradigm shift in consciousness: 1) Cosmic; 2) Philosophic; 3) Green or Natural; 4) Self-determination of peoples and persons, the liberation of nations/peoples/cultures and persons/individuals, especially women and children, currently trapped in obsolete state formations. Read more »

by Michael Liss

How do you raise kids in an increasingly harsh and atonal world?  

We all have our templates for seeking harmony. Mine were my own parents. They were not performing artists or even musicians; neither played an instrument (I think the kazoo doesn’t qualify), and neither could sing. But, as listeners, they were virtuosos. Classical, of course, but also big band and swing, boogie-woogie and jazz, klezmer, folk and protest songs. My father even harbored a secret passion for some pretty hardcore mountain music—the real thing, serious pickin’ and fiddlin’ without the Nashville gloss. My sister and I think he gave this up, along with drinking and smoking, when he met my mother.

Then, there was opera. I’ve written before about being tied to a chair in the Orchestra section of the old Met when my legs were still too short to make it all the way to the floor. It was all true: I saw Tosca jump off the parapet, and Madame Butterfly do herself in, and Mimi tragically pass, and Violetta tragically pass, and Radames and Aïda jointly and severally tragically pass, and Baron Scarpia and Don Giovanni not-so-tragically pass. All that passing was inescapable; to quote Bugs Bunny in the towering “What’s Opera Doc?” (as even he passed, a victim of Elmer’s spear and magic helmet), “What did you expect in an opera, a happy ending?” 

In retrospect, I should have been honored that my parents had such confidence in my emotional stability that they felt assured I could cope with all that passing. In the moment, however, I don’t think it ever entirely registered with me, especially since all the adults would then cheer wildly. Brava, she’s dead? Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

One commits the straw man fallacy when one distorts an interlocutor’s argument or claim in a way that makes it more easily criticized. In effect, one replaces an actual opponent with one made of straw – a new figure that is easily knocked over and who cannot fight back. For example, consider:

Students request that there be a bar on the college campus for informal gatherings and receptions. The administration opposes the bar because they “refuse to subsidize student bacchanalia.”

The problem here is that the request for a bar, even from college students, is not identical to a call for wild, destructive drinking binges. The administration has constructed a straw man of the students’ request.

The straw man fallacy comes in a variety of forms. These range from the standard version captured in the case above, to the selectional weak man, the hollow man, and the iron man. However, a unique kind of straw man is perpetrated when one creates a pastiche of distortions of one’s dialectical opponent – it is not composed simply of a single distortion, but rather a slew of mischaracterizations bent on representing one’s opponents in the worst light. We call this the burning man. In deploying the burning man fallacy, one not only stuffs an opposing figure with straw, but then proceeds to surround it with more tinder and additional flammable material, with the intention of committing the view at issue to the flames, along with whole traditions, movements, and ways of thinking. Read more »