by Samia Altaf

After an anxious and grey winter, the gloom of an unraveling economy, topped by the ominous beating of war drums, spring arrived in Punjab and Lahore’s academies and activists put aside their concerns to celebrate Women’s International Day on March 8. Amidst the blooming of flowers and the heady fragrance of newly sprouting jasmine—feminism and feminist concerns and the doings of women suffused the air.

There were reviews of achievements by Pakistani women—Malala, Sharmeen Chinoy, Mukhtaran Mai, Fehmida Riaz, Hina Khar were lauded. There was the woman’s march of sisterhood and solidarity. The Prime Minister wants to ‘create an environment in which women can play their rightful role.’ Lively discussions were held on university campuses and in exclusive clubs. Television channels and talk shows competed to give more upbeat views of the whole  ‘woman question’ that included duties of women, responsibilities of women, rights of women, clothes of women as well as the pro-women actions undertaken and being planned. A female student of an elite university dared to attempt to wear shorts. Thankfully that is where it remained, a dare. We spoke of the hijab, the veil, its ‘badness’ and ‘goodness,’ and so on. All discussions ended with exhortations for ‘women’s empowerment.’

Ah, that word. What does it even mean? Read more »

by Shawn Crawford

In 1987, Anderson University, an Evangelical school in Indiana, acquired 140 works by the artist Warner Sallman, including Head of Christ. You may have never heard of Sallman, but in terms of sheer sales and presence, his Head of Christ makes him the most popular 20th Century artist in America. Exponentially more popular than Warhol or Wyeth. If you are a Boomer or Gen X Evangelical, Head of Christ provided the definitive image of Jesus, in a way that you can never shake.

At my house, this was the only “art” hanging on the wall. Many of my friends could say the same. One of the wealthier families in our church also had a copy of Sallman’s Christ at Heart’s Door, with a heavy gilt frame and one of those fancy lights attached at the top to better illuminate Jesus trying to get in. The painting has obvious echoes to William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World without thePre-Raphaelite theatrics. Our Jesus did not wear a cape. And that beard needs a trim. As a freshman in college I learned Hunt had also painted The Awakening Conscience, a painting so erotic to my sheltered sensibilities I could not reconcile the two. I also stared at the reproduction in my British literature anthology for hours on end.

If you are wondering just how ubiquitous Sallman’s picture is, over 500 million copies have been sold since he painted it in 1940. That’s enough for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. with plenty left for Justin Trudeau to pass out to his disillusioned base. Oh pretty, pretty Justin. Read more »

Saw this hunting blind while walking in the woods near Raas last week.

Sughra Raza. Ice Shards on The Charles. Boston, March 3, 2019.

Digital photograph.

by Bill Murray

Just about everyone who visits the famous South Luangwa wildlife park drives through Mfuwe, Zambia. A mere wide spot in the road, a trifle to tourists, Mfuwe holds a fearsome, searing memory. It will forever be known for the Man-Eater of Mfuwe, a lion that killed six people over two months in 1991.

There are more famous man-eating tigers than lions in the literature. Tigers and people live in closer proximity in India than lions and people in Africa. I’ve seen an estimate of as many as 10,000 people killed by tigers in India in the nineteenth century.

The Champawat Tigress, the most infamous Panthera tigris, was said to have killed 436 people before she was killed in Nepal, then part of British colonial India, in 1911. After a spree of terror, hunters having failed to kill her, the authorities ultimately called in the Nepalese army. In Kenya’s Tsavo Park two lions killed perhaps two dozen Indian railroad construction workers in 1898, halting the colonizing Brits’ project to connect the port of Mombasa with the interior of British East Africa.

But the Mfuwe man-eater was no colonial-era killer. Its attacks occurred less than thirty years ago, thoroughly terrorizing an overgrown village of scarcely a thousand a spare 60 miles west of the border with Malawi, oriented toward the Malawian capital, Lilongwe. Lusaka, the Zambian capital, is 300 miles away. Read more »

by Robert Fay

Lake Simcoe, Canada. The sound of the Chickering piano. Bach.

He is lazing down a wooded foot path, teasing his collie Banquo with a stick. He wears gloves, a wool Donegal cap, muffler and long coat despite the July temperatures. He is not being self-consciously eccentric; he simply fears getting a chill, and therefore sick. The film is black-and-white, giving the imagination ample room to conjure up the verdant rapacity of the brief northern growing season. He is then pictured inside the cottage seated before the Chickering, swaying and rocking as he alternately taps and presses the keys, his hands occasionally leaping back from the instrument as if caught in flagrante delicto.

The regal pianissimo of the Italian Concerto.

He is humming. He will always hum when he’s secluded within the architecture of the immortal scores. Recording engineers will despair of this harmonizing, but the microphones must be present, and he will sing as he plays, because the two expressions are a hypostatic union, an indivisible entity offering themselves to the music. He hums because the composition is only a series of notations until it becomes a part of his body, a force within, causing him to sway and vocalize the rapturous melody.

The cottage is the perfect bourgeois expression of respectable 1950s Toronto. It is not to be confused with a cabin. It is the weekend retreat of prosperous fir merchant, not a sportsman. And the Toronto of the 1950s is Victorian, hardworking and Protestant, and Glenn Gould will decide he can live nowhere else, despite his fame and financial success. Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

My seventy-something year old uncle, who still uses a flip phone, was talking to me a while ago about self-driving cars. He was adamant that he didn’t want to put his fate in the hands of a computer, he didn’t trust them. My question to him was “but you trust other people in cars?” Because self-driving cars don’t have to be 100% accurate, they just have to be better than people, and they already are. People get drunk, they get tired, they’re distracted, they’re looking down at their phones. Computers won’t do any of those things. And yet my uncle couldn’t be persuaded. He fundamentally doesn’t trust computers. And of course, he’s not alone. More and more of our lives have highly automated elements to them, “Autopilot technology already does most of the work once a plane is aloft, and has no trouble landing an airliner even in rough weather and limited visibility.” But the average person either doesn’t realize that, or they console themselves with the knowledge that humans are in the cockpit and could take over. Though perhaps the more rational thought would be to console themselves that if something happens to the pilot, the computer could take over. Maybe it’s the more rational thought, but most of us aren’t perfectly rational beings.

Society is predicated on a level of trust, we couldn’t function as communities, as towns, as countries, if it wasn’t. We trust that the food we buy in the store isn’t contaminated, we trust that the water coming out of our taps won’t make us sick, we trust that law enforcement will protect us, we trust that we pay our taxes and that money isn’t embezzled. Sometimes, this trust turns out to be misplaced, just ask the people of Flint, but even when that happens and we’re all appalled, we mostly go back to a state of trust. Because it’s hard to function in society if you don’t. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

The Anna Karenina Fix, by Viv Groskop, is subtitled “Life Lessons from Russian Literature.” It is an entertaining book, part memoir, part cultural criticism. Each chapter takes on a different work from Russian literature–mostly novels, although it also features Anna Akhmatova’s poetry. Interwoven with plot synopses are biographical details about the authors, many of which are arguably tangential to their work, such as Tolstoy’s love for eggs prepared in a multitude of different ways. Groskop is keen to humanize these writers, so this is part of the process. Layered on top of the works themselves and trivia about the people who wrote them are autobiographical snippets from Groskop, mainly drawn from time she spent in Russia during her university years. Finally, true to the book’s subtitle, there are the “lessons” that she has purportedly learned, or perhaps that we could all learn, from these works.

Groskop’s research was impressive. For each literary work featured in one of her chapters she also incorporated background material to flesh out the narrative–for example, Pavel Basinsky’s Tolstoy biography Flight from Paradise or Pasternak’s mistress’s account of their time together. Alex Beam’s The Feud, describing a protracted and heated spat between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson about translations of Pushkin, is now on my reading list. There weren’t more than one or two outside sources per chapter, so the book was not cluttered with references.

There is something funny about the phrase “life lessons.” You don’t know if someone is being ironic or not. Even after having read the book, I don’t quite know if Groskop has meant it in earnest. Read more »