by Anitra Pavlico

For millennia, humans have had a tradition of introspection and meditation. The Buddhist Dhammapada says that when a monk goes into an “empty place” and calms his mind, he experiences “a delight that transcends that of men.” The ancient Greeks exhorted one to know thyself. Montaigne wrote that the “solitude that I love and advocate is chiefly a matter of drawing my feelings and thoughts back into myself.” This was not so easy even in quieter times, but in the wired era, it has become almost impossible. When Bertrand Russell wrote his essay “In Praise of Idleness” in 1932, the threat to downtime and self-fulfillment was work: “I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.” This is still valid, as we work more than ever despite skyrocketing productivity thanks to technological advances. The trouble today, however, is that even our supposed leisure hours are spent on the grid, essentially ensuring that we never get a moment’s rest.

Over the past few years, numerous books and articles have sounded the alarm on how our online habits are affecting our mental health. Even individuals in the tech industry–including Tim Cook, the Apple CEO who prefers that his nephew not use social media, and Tristan Harris, former Google employee and founder of Time Well Spent, a group advocating for more sensible use of online tools—are joining the chorus. Against this backdrop, physicist, novelist, and essayist Alan Lightman has added his own manifesto, In Praise of Wasting Time. Of course, the title is ironic, because Lightman argues that by putting down our devices and spending time on quiet reflection, we regain some of our lost humanity, peace of mind, and capacity for creativity—not a waste of time, after all, despite the prevailing mentality that we should spend every moment actually doing something. The problem is not only our devices, the internet, and social media. Lightman argues that the world has become much more noisy, fast-paced, and distracting. Partly, he writes, this is because the advances that have enabled the much greater transfer of data, and therefore productivity, have created an environment in which seemingly inexorable market forces push for more time working and less leisure time. Read more »

Fireworks Makers, covered in gunpowder, as they prepared for New Year’s eve, 2019. Bulacan, Philippines.

More here and here.

by Robert Fay

On the morning of August 20, 1968, the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel had a serious hangover. He was at his country home in Liberec after a night of boozing it up with his actor friend Jan Tříska, who would emigrate to the U.S. in 1977 and eventually appear in The Karate Kid III (I’m not making this up), while Havel went on in 1989 to became president of a free Czechoslovakia (equally astonishing). But on that summer morning, these two men were still just creatures of the Prague theatre world. They caroused at night with their artist and intellectual companions, slept-in late and then worked diligently on their respective crafts in the afternoons, much as their colleagues in London or Paris did.

But these familiar routines came to a halt promptly on August 20 when the Warsaw Pact nations, led by the Soviet Union, invaded Czechoslovakia, ending eight months of political reform and expanded social and civic freedoms that has become known as “The Prague Spring.”

In the popular western imagination, the Prague Spring has been both sacralized and completely mischaracterized. It’s been crudely lumped in with the 1960s political unrest in the West, something like: “The Summer of Love—Slavic Style.” But the anti-establishment, countercultural youth rebellions (sexual freedom, drug use, feminism, gay rights, etc.) that were visible in cities like Paris, London and San Francisco had little in common with the Prague Spring. Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

Your numbers are off
I said your numbers are off
You forgot your watch
You forgot your glasses
You misread
You misunderstood
You’re missing the point
You’re naive
You’re irrational
You’re close minded
You’re vain
You’re shallow
You’re overly emotional
It’s wishful thinking
You’re too optimistic
You’re too pessemistic
You’re full of yourself
You’re self-serving
You’re self-conscious
You’re cliquish
You play favorites
I said you play favorites
You point fingers
You get personal
You’re taking it personally
You keep making it about you
It’s not about you
It is about you
You’re not that special
It’s not really about them
You’re clingy
You’re jealous
You’re judgmental
You’re a control freak
You’re manipulative and don’t even know it
You’re easily influenced
You don’t think for yourself
You shouldn’t speak for others
You didn’t do anything
The Devil’s in the details
You’re over complicating it 
You expect too much
You generalize
You fear meaninglessness
You fear the unknown
You crave explanations where there are none
You’re comfortable with you already know
You settle
You’re not discerning
You’re a creature of habit
You’re stuck in your ways
You’re really stuck in your ways
God damn, are you stuck in your ways
You’re stubborn
I said you’re stubborn
You already had your mind made up
Your head’s in the sand
You have blinders on
You’re shortsighted
You’re afraid to look in the mirror
Hindsight is 20/20
You’re looking at it backwards
It’s not too late
It’s later than you think
You’re not thinking straight
It’s not as bad as you think
There’s more to it
There’s a lot more to it
There’s not that much to it
You’re making excuses
You’re impatient
You’re in a rush
You have a short memory
You’re bad at history
I said you’re bad at history
Man, are you bad at history

Akim Reinhardt is a Historian.  And he’s usually wrong.  His website is ThePublicProfessor.com

by Bill Murray

John Allen Chau, the missionary killed in the Andaman Islands in November, reopened the ‘uncontacted people’ debate. An advocacy group called Survival believes “Uncontacted peoples make a judgment that they are better off remaining uncontacted and independent, fending for themselves.” Most everybody else wants in, missionaries on their missions, doctors preventing disease, linguists to study imperiled languages.

Outside the Amazon basin most of the world’s uncontacted people live in New Guinea. The world’s second largest island is divided between Indonesia in the west where – as far as we know – all remaining uncontacted people live, and Papua New Guinea in the east.

My wife and I took a peek into the interior of Papua New Guinea twenty years ago. To be clear, we sailed up the Sepik River, in the north of the country, a region that has had contact with Europeans since their ships scouted the coast in the late 18th century. European settlers pressed indigenous labor into plantation work on the north coast from the late 19th and then, in the 1930s Australian gold prospectors trekked into the interior highlands and climbed out with eyes big as saucers, having made contact with nearly a million previously unknown highlanders. (Here is a remarkable video.)

Apprehensive but with faith in the civilizing force of the five or six intervening decades, our upper lips stiffened by the hotel minibar, we flew into the highland town of Mt. Hagen, gateway to the interior. Mt. Hagen comprised a single downtown street, a rugby field, airstrip, unkempt housing and not much more. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

FDR? You mean Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32d president of the USofA?

Not quite. I mean FDR SK8park, in Philadelphia.

“SK8park”? What’s that? Can’t you spell?

Yes I can. Sound it out.

Oh, you mean “skate park”.

Right. SK8park, FDR SK8park. It’s at the southern end of Franklin Delano Park.

What’s this skateboard nation?

It’s a notion, if you will, a conceit, a turn of phrase, a way of speaking. Perhaps, if you will, an identity of sorts. And that’s what this is about.

The do-it-yourself “spot” or park is one facet of skateboarding. A bunch of skateboarders will find an out-of-the-way spot and remake it to their purposes, installing rails, half-pipes, banks, pyramids, and other features. Some of these are fairly small, like the one I ran into some years ago in Jersey City when I was photographing graffiti. Others are quite large, like Philly’s FDR, which is one of the largest and best-known DIY parks in the world.

FDR is festooned with graffiti and street art. Most of it is a grab-bag of standard stuff, tags, throw-ups, pieces of varying quality, posters and stickers and what have you. But some of it is of a different nature. That’s what I’m interested in.

As you read this, think of yourself as an explorer, an archeologist perhaps – Indiana Jones? You’ve come across a strange civilization. You’ve talked with a native or two, but mostly you’re examining the markings they’ve made. What do they mean?

Consider the photo  at the right (from 2014).  Up at the top it says “THIS IS LIVIN’”. Whatever ‘this’ is that, presumably, is what we see these two people doing, skate boarding. And they’re passionate about it. Read more »

by Timothy Don

In my capacity as art editor at Lapham’s Quarterly, I’ve spent the last six weeks researching images for our upcoming issue on TRADE. It was not a thematic that excited me when I started, I have to admit—I’m a curator and a writer, not a businessman or an economist, dammit! But after looking at more than 10,000 paintings, sculptures, and photographs that limn the human urge to exchange goods, a faint thrill and a growing sense of despair have both begun to take root.I’ve peered into the faces of Ferdinand Bol’s Syndics of the Wine Traders Guild of Amsterdam from 1660, looking for signs of avarice, prudence, and rectitude.

I’ve turned in my hands a 3rd century terracotta figurine of a camel carrying transport amphora (a secular, material expression of the nativity scene I just disassembled with my daughter). I’ve flipped through Alex Majoli’s 1999 series of photographs of the Roque Santeiro in Angola, the largest open-air market in Africa. According to Alex, the Roque attracts roughly one million people per day, and its vendors sell anything and everything: food, weapons, drugs, even people. It hosts church services and marriages. It shelters war cripples, homeless refugees, police, prostitutes, and the insane. Babies are born and the dead are interred within and beneath its stalls. At this “market of the damned,” Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th century visions of hell have been fully realized by the predations of 20th century capitalism.

A line and a theme have emerged through the iconography I’ve been following: to trade is human. We buy and we sell; we exchange, barter, haggle, negotiate, promise, vouchsafe, con, steal, acquire, and unload. It’s what we do; it’s what we’ve always done. The allure of trade lies not so much in the goods amassed as in the frisson of exchange: the contact with another human being that occurs in the act of trade. The slipping-ness from one to another. The handshake, the greased palm, the unctuous smile. The flow, the liquidity. The intimate bond that is established between two people when they make a deal. To trade is human. It’s dirty and oily and sexy.

And yet, underneath trade, there is something else going on. Something very faint, something very fragile, something that only adds to the excitement and the value of the goods on the table, is put at risk each time a trade is made. This something is trust. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

What is a number? Everyone who takes high school math learns about the real numbers. These are our old friends on the number line. You can hardly do classical algebra or geometry without them. We use the real numbers so often we find them comfortable and familiar. After all, they are just numbers you write as a (possibly infinite) decimal. They may be long to write, but numbers like

1.41421356237309504880168872420969807856967187537694807317667973799…

don’t worry us.

Let’s back up a step or two. The integers (that is, the counting numbers and their negatives: 0,1,-1,2,-2,3,-3,,…) aren’t very controversial [1]. We can all agree what it means to have 7 goats, no goats, or that I have -3 goats when I owe my neighbor 3 goats. The rational numbers aren’t too bad, either. After all, to have 7/5 of a hamburger is to slice two burgers into 5 equal pieces each and to take seven of the pieces. And, again, to have -8/3 of a burger is to owe someone two burgers plus 2/3 of a third [2].

The integers and rationals are down to earth, as numbers go. However, it doesn’t take very long before you realize you need more numbers. One day in geometry class you draw a one-by-one square, notice you can draw a straight line which connects the opposite corners, and that line self-evidently has a length. Whatever that length is, it is an honest-to-goodness number (call it D) which exists in nature. At some point, you notice two one-by-one squares can be cut along the diagonal and reassembled into a single, larger square with side length D. On the one hand, the area of this new square is D². On the other hand, it is the area of the two smaller squares taken together. That is, D²=2. The Pythagoreans already knew 2600 years ago there is no rational number whose square equals two. The apocryphal story is the existence of non-rational numbers was a closely held secret for the Pythagoreans, worthy of murder. Nowadays we tell it to school children. So much for the innocence of youth. Read more »

by Lexi Lerner

I call on the evening of the winter solstice. Two mornings later, I find myself boarding a plane to the Black Hills of South Dakota, soon to turn white from a Christmas blizzard. I have never experienced these mountains or this state before. But I have experienced many blizzards, the first of which occurred the night I was born.

Well, it’s been building up inside of me
For – oh, I don’t know how long

“I’m disappointed,” I explain in a SoHo café two weeks prior. “I thought I could find what I was looking for – maybe not in Jersey, but at least in New York. The people, the questions. But we are constantly out of phase. The people I seek don’t want to be sought by me, and vice versa. There’s nothing I can do. It just isn’t here.”

The boy listening to me looks startled, and a bit sad. Or worried? I glance down at the table and realize my tea had jumped from my clenched fists. The one-table radius around us has no audible conversation.

“Sorry,” I say.

The waitress comes over. “Would you like anything else?”

The first billboard that greets you as you leave the eight-gate airport has a cartoon diplodocus on it, featuring a generous view of its behind. A speech bubble says: “Welcome to Rapid City! Now what?”

I don’t know why, but I keep thinking
Something’s bound to go wrong

In his book Sonic Alchemy, David Howard writes that “Don’t Worry Baby” – unlike its Beach Boys A-side “I Get Around” and other emblematic California Sound hits – “suggested something entirely more pensive and even slightly dark underneath its pristine façade.”

We exit the airport on Terminal Road. The cabin itself, a good hour away, is on Last Chance Trail. Read more »

by Nickolas Calabrese

Robert Morris died last month on November 28^th at the ripe old age of 87. Very ripe indeed. If he was a fig he’d have been all jammy inside, dribbling the honeyed sugars of maturation. But he’s dead, and I’m glad he’s dead. Let me step back before explaining why – this isn’t an exposition, this is an obituary; I’m grieving; this is diffused ramblings at a podium. I went to Hunter College for undergraduate philosophy and flirted with the art department quite a bit. Morris’ legacy loomed large and hard over the department as he had both attended grad school and taught there. Any course in the art department was bound to encounter his work or his writings. I must have been assigned “Notes on Sculpture” a dozen times. Morris was, and still is, a great artist. His was a scholarly brand of art; neither annoying like Joseph Kosuth, nor dehydrated like Hans Haacke. No, Morris was a genuine student of art and thought. He studied its history, wrote about it emphatically, and contributed to its heritage. It is not difficult to view him as one of the several pillars that contemporary art stands upon today, and feel indebted to his legacy. One of his first well regarded artworks was Box for Standing, which was a handmade wooden box roughly the size of a coffin that fit Morris neatly. How fitting then, that his exit from this life should perhaps be in a box bespoke for his corpse, roughly the same size as his original Box? His expiration has a funny effect on that work, Box for Standing, where his actual death gives the work one last veneer of meaning to stack upon all the other layers. One might have seen similarity between the Box for Standing and funerary vessels before Morris died, but afterward it would be reckless not to see it. The work goes from being a sparse theatrical gesture contained in minimal sculpture, to something like a pragmatic Quaker coffin, verging on bleak humor. Read more »

by Ali Minai

Note: Translations in italics are literal translations by the reviewer, whereas those in bold italics are by the M. Shahid Alam in the book under review.

In reviewing “Intimations of Ghalib”, a new translation of selected ghazals of the Urdu poet Ghalib by M. Shahid Alam, let it be said at the outset that translating classical Urdu ghazal into any language – possibly excepting Persian – is an almost impossible task, and translating Ghalib’s ghazals even more so. The use of symbolism, the aphoristic aspect of each couplet, the frequent play on words, and the packing of multiple meanings into a single verse are all too easy to lose in translation. And no Urdu poet used all these devices more pervasively and subtly than Ghalib, and even learned scholars can disagree strongly on the “correct” meaning of particular verses. As such, Alam set himself an impossible task, and the result is, among other things, a demonstration of this.

But first the positive – and there is much. The translator has made an admirable decision to retain the couplet structure of the ghazal in all translations, and in some cases, rhyme and refrain as well. In doing this, he has often succeeded in capturing the flavor of the ghazal genre, which is defined by strict rules of form, as described in the book’s Introduction. And even where he has struggled as a translator – indeed, often most in those places – Alam has succeeded more as a poet. Ultimately, the best part of this book is its intellectually honest and diligent attempt to grapple with its difficult task. In the process, Alam succeeds in creating a valuable work of literature that many readers should find accessible and enjoyable.

Before getting to the translations, the reader must read through the translator’s Introduction, which introduces both Ghalib and the genre of ghazal simply and elegantly. Mirza Asadullah Khan (1797-1869) – better known by his nom de plume, Ghalib – is generally regarded as one of the two or three greatest poets in the rich literary tradition of Urdu poetry. He lived in “interesting” times and at the center of calamitous events. Associated with the court of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar – an emperor in name only – Ghalib saw even that nominal glory go up in smoke during the rebellion of 1857, which led to the final British takeover of India and the end of the Mughal period. In the aftermath, Ghalib saw his own prospects diminished, many of his friends executed or exiled, and his world destroyed by forces he barely understood. In both his poetry and in his marvelous corpus of letters that are regarded as masterpiece of Urdu prose, Ghalib was able to create a persona and an ethos that is simultaneously individualistic, irreverent, complex, long-suffering and – paradoxically – good humored. His poetry, which is the focus of the book under review, is famous for both its philosophical depth and its Shakespearean insight into human nature. Read more »

by Adele A Wilby

Britain’s large country houses are original and distinctive, and they can be seen gracing the landscape from prime positions in the countryside. They are admired for their many features: their elegant architecture, the artistic treasures they house, the curatorial opportunities they offer, their landscaped gardens and grounds, and their representation of British genteel living. However, despite the obvious elegance of these houses, my response to them has usually been to view them in terms of, at worst, expressions of the British class system, and gross inequalities of wealth, power and privilege, and at best, as monuments to the skills of the tradesmen responsible for the construction of those houses. But Martin Belam’s article ‘Glasgow University to Make Amends Over Slavery Profits of the Past’ (Guardian Sept 17, 2018) was to change all that. It sent me on a reading journey that ended in me rethinking the representation of those iconic features of Britain’s countryside.

Belam’s article is a commentary on the ‘Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow’ report (Mullen Newman 2018). The report acknowledges the University’s pride in its history of opposition to the transatlantic slave trade, the institution of slavery, and the involvement of many of its alumni in the abolitionist movement. However, the report concluded that ‘although the University of Glasgow never owned enslaved people or traded in goods they produced, it is nonetheless clear that the University received significant gifts and support from people who derived some or occasionally much of their wealth from slavery’, particularly in the West Indies during the 18^thand 19^thcenturies. The value of the financial endowments and prizes to the University runs into tens of millions of pounds, depending on how the amount is calculated in the present-day. The findings have prompted the University to commit to the implementation of a ‘Programme of reparative justice’.

The Glasgow University’s willingness to engage with the darker side of its history is admirable, and it is to be hoped that more institutions will follow suit and make known the origins of the financial contributions received during that period of British history, and embark on their own strategies of reparative justice should they need to do so. The findings in the report have also added to our existing knowledge of the relationship between wealth created from the enslavement of peoples and the establishment of institutions in Britain. Read more »