by Evan Edwards
Amble
And that's why I have to go back
to so many places in the future,
there to find myself
and constantly imagine myself
with no witness but the moon
and then whistle with joy,
ambling over rocks and clods of earth,
with no task but to live,
with no family but the road.
– Pablo Neruda, El Viento
by Dave Maier
While some of its characters haven’t quite thought all this through, Dark Orbit itself is quite thought-provoking and well worth reading for this and other more conventional sci-fi reasons (like that it’s a cracking read). I found particularly interesting the conceptual difficulties the characters run into when dealing with the nature of the senses and their relation to the reality beyond our heads. Naturally this discussion may involve some **SPOILERS**, but not, I claim, anything particularly serious.
by Brooks Riley
by Humera Afridi
Ensconced in the knowing that the world familiar to me still reliably exists, I wondered, but, for how long? I read first one book and then the other, compulsively. I am acutely aware that my position as a reader of these books is privileged, precarious—vicariously experiencing the trauma of ongoing wars, through the written word, and at a safe distance, on the shores of a country that has its own dubious hand in the strife-riven lands of these magnificent narratives. Here I am, a person in command of her body, with the freedom to move, in safety, to places of her own choosing, needing the assistance of the sky and deep inhalations of fresh air to get through descriptions of unspeakable torture and imprisonment.
I looked at my surroundings with new eyes. Every person bumping past me in the crowded public spaces in which I chose to read these intimate portraits of war—amid chatter and laughter, and freshly harvested bunches of tender dandelion greens—carries within them a hidden world. How many of these hands, these feet, passing me have touched the skein of war? How many harbor memories of trauma, of elsewheres that shadow them here, in the present of this life, in this city, in this square?
by Sarah Firisen
The more one knows and thinks about other living things, the harder it is to privilege one's own interests over theirs. The empathy escalator may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, in which journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the precariousness of one's own lot in life, more palpable—the feeling that “there but for fortune go I.” —Michael Tomasky
And for the most part, what has brought us increasing exposure and engagement with each other has been advances in technology; from better boats, to planes, to computers and the Internet, it seems that while exposure to “the other” often aggravates fears, eventually, the ever adaptable human being learns that other people are far more similar to us than they are different. As we become exposed to people of different religions, cultures, beliefs, sexual orientation, it becomes harder and hard to see them as “the other”. There’s nothing radical or surprising about this. While there were clearly many complex issues at play, there seems to be real evidence that one of the major factors in the radical change in attitudes towards homosexuality in the US can be put down to the TV show Will and Grace, which, if nothing else, exposed gays to be much like the rest of us: self-absorbed, looking for love and acceptance and really in need of best friends who get us no matter how self-absorbed we become.
Martha Mills came to Mississippi as a young civil rights lawyer, looked racists judges, lawyers, and Ku Kluxers in the eye, and never backed down–in court or out. Small in stature, huge in guts, as far as I was concerned she was the smartest, bravest, and just plain toughest of that corporal’s guard of dedicated lawyers committed to giving life to the law.
—W. Hodding Carter III
On February 7, 1969, The New York Times ran a story on page 20:
Woman Lawyer, 27, Jailed on Contempt In Grenada, Miss.
Special to the New York Times
GRENADA, Miss., Feb. 6–A 27-year-old woman lawyer was jailed for three hours here today after being held in contempt of court by Circuit Judge Marshall Perry when she attempted to file a bill of exceptions to a case involving a Negro civil rights worker.
Miss Martha M. Wood, an attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, based in Jackson, was released under $300 bail.
An offense that merits release after only three hours in jail and with bail at $300 can’t have been much of an offense. And it wasn’t. But it involves a kind of
intricate legal obfuscation that defies easy summary and that is characteristic of race relations in the United States, then and alas now. If the prospect of summarizing it brings me to the edge of extreme annoyance you can imagine what it did to those who suffered through and by it, day after day.
Such is the texture of the story that Martha Mills recounts in a memoir of her years as a civil rights attorney, Lawyer, Activist, Judge: Fighting for Civil and Voting Rights in Mississippi and Illinois (2015). In this particular case the obfuscation was also the occasion of a little theatrical detail in the manner of arrest: “The deputy grabbed my arm roughly and hauled me out of the courtroom. As soon as we were out of the courtroom, however, he dropped my arm, apologized, and said he had to do that for the judge” (p. 277). You gotta’ love it, the delicate egos of those racist judges. The Lord does indeed move in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.
by Matt McKenna
Sully is based on the real life story of Captain Chesley Sullenberger who, after having a bunch of birds slam into both engines of the airliner he was flying, lands the aircraft on the Hudson River. Miraculously, everyone on the flight survived. Understandably though tiresomely, the movie repeatedly revisits the moment the birds hit the engines, probably because it's one of the few dramatic events in an otherwise pretty thin story. Not that I mind a short movie, but even after showing a dozen views of the plane splashing into the river, Sully still clocks in at only ninety-six minutes. And outside the water landing, the story that does exist is mostly fictional including the comically evil antagonists of the film, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigating the incident. For unexplained reasons, the NTSB desperately wants to prove that Captain Sullenberger should have turned the plane around to land back at LaGuardia Airport instead of dropping it into the Hudson. In reality, the NTSB didn’t try to prove that at all, but it’s hard to blame screenwriter Todd Komarnicki for adding this twist since it is the film’s only source of drama after the landing itself.
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
To begin, consider the fact that so much of what is called public philosophy is politically oriented. Some candidate's pronouncements may come under philosophical scrutiny, a conceptual argument for one policy or another gets given, problematic assumptions are laid bare, hidden premises are challenged, or certain norms are critiqued along some theoretical line or another. That's the philosophical part, and it is nothing new; it is the kind of thing has been done by academic philosophers since the inception of academic philosophy. The distinctively public component emerges as the commitment to philosophizing about public matters in a mode that is accessible to the public itself rather than only to academic philosophers. Public philosophy, then, is philosophy about social and political matters that is for public consumption. Put otherwise, public philosophy is political philosophy intended for uptake by the public.
So far, so good. But notice that the need for philosophical examination, critique, and elucidation is most pronounced when matters are deeply conflicted. Philosophy does its work when intellectual materials stand in need of clarification, when disagreements prevail and there is no clear or obvious way of finding a resolution. In this way, philosophy is driven by conflicts that appear to be intractable. It is the controlled attempt to rationally address conflicts that look like impasses. And the deeper the conflict, the more urgent the need for philosophers to go to work.
The Spectacle is not a collection of images,
but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
~ Debord
It's worth mentioning that augmented reality broke into the national consciousness in the form of a game. Educational tools have a limited audience and their effectiveness is difficult to measure. Workplace applications are either niche or still undercooked – for example, if we're to go by this recent video by AR darling Magic Leap, work seems to entail checking the weather and stock prices, at least until you're interrupted by your kid sharing his school report on Mt. Everest. After buying some spiffy orange boat shoes, there's not much left to do but look up and zone out to the jellyfish languidly passing across the ceiling. Clearly, this is a job that is safe from automation.
Games, on the other hand, are the perfect vessel for distributing a technology such as AR. Software is a contained system; it is built according to specifications and anticipates a gamut of interactions. There are rules – visible or invisible – that tell you what the system may or may not do. And engagement with the system is based on the fact that identity and progress can be established and measured, with performance compared and contrasted with other players.
All of this makes software ideal as the substrate for the gamification of, well, everything. If you've ever used Uber, you can see the available cars trundling along the streets in your vicinity. Once you complete your ride, you rate your driver. What's a rather lesser-known fact is that your driver rates you. Silicon Valley abhors a data vacuum, and a great way to get people to provide data about anything is to make a game out of it. The genius of this is that, consequently, people are really convinced that it's just a game.
by Brooks Riley
by Olivia Zhu
The poet examines his assured aging first by casting himself as small in comparison to the world that surrounds him. The sky is “cavernous” and the moon is “high,” situating the speaker far below either. This very careful placement makes it impossible for Larkin—someone who has difficulty returning to bed at night—to have any effect on the heavens, let alone the passage of time. Critic Nicholas Marsh agrees, suggesting that the speaker’s realization of his physical size in proportion to that of the universe “reminds him of his own insignificance and mortality” (124). Moreover, the moon is incredibly powerful in “Sad Steps.” It is emotionally striking and compelling, certainly, but it is also described as a cannonball that “dashes through clouds that blow,” making it unlikely that the speaker would be able to resist its momentum and pull. Just as the moon wanes after it waxes, so must Larkin. He recognizes his youth “can’t come again,” so unlike youthful “others,” he is not “undiminished.” The period in which he was able to be strong is over, and all young people are aware of the “pain” of the prospect of growing older. The speaker has cast aside the “thick curtains” of the very beginning of the poem, no longer living in some form of denial, to stare openly on the moon and remind himself of who he is now.
Don W. in Manhattan
—eating the dust of 2001
Dining in Soho alone, a man
served by a girl with lip studs, nose ring,
and serpent tattoo uncoiling
from deep cleavage,
sees the new man of La Mancha,
in dim light across the room,
seated with his back to the street:
This new La Mancha man
topples a pepper mill with his fork
gesturing to his wife, Sancha,
vowing he'll avenge New York
Sancha smiles and re-sets the mill in place
among constellations of pepper stars
strewn across formica space
Between them supper's done:
spent dinnerware, filaments of flaked filo
circling half a buttered bun,
remnants of dense moussaka,
and that pepper mill now standing like a dustbowl silo
near languid cubes in tepid water
Don Doble U, enemy of disorder,
sweeps a hand through this small universe
upending the pepper mill once more
and plows a thousand minuscule black galaxies
into his cupped palm
and dumps them on the floor
He takes his tined baton
between forefinger and thumb
and sets a cadence in the atmosphere
thumping on his different drum
Then Don (el hombre fútil),
maestro of mishap,
conducts the ice and water glass
into long-suffering Sancha's lap………………..
……………….
Jim Culleny; 2001
by Dwight Furrow
The question of whether food preparation can be a fine art turns on two issues:
Does food have the rich assortment of meanings typical of fine art? and
Does food express emotion in the same sense that music or painting does?
As I argued in American Foodie, both these questions depend on whether food can function as a complex symbol or metaphor. Food exemplifies or shows what it's trying to say via its flavors and textures, just as a painting displays its meaning in colors, lines, and brush strokes or a piece of music in its melodic/harmonic structure and timbres. As a conceptual matter these questions can be answered in the affirmative. However, the problem is that chefs must satisfy hunger, cater to taste preferences, and make a profit, and these practical constraints often limit their artistic aspirations.
Thus, when restaurants make an effort to highlight the artistic aspirations of their chefs, it is a special occasion, so I could not resist a trip to Chicago to sample the Art Menu of Rick Bayless and his chefs at his restaurant Topolobampo. Bayless is the acclaimed auteur of refined Mexican cuisine. Each summer his chefs create a tasting menu in which each dish expresses an emotion. The chefs then select works of art from the restaurant's collection of Mexican art that expresses the same emotion as each dish—all explained and depicted in a helpful brochure that is given to guests who order the menu. This is a fascinating experiment in cross-modal metaphor that if successful adds another data point favoring the artistic credentials of food.
by Gerald Dworkin
The Wire, which ran from 2002 to 2008, was created, and largely written, by David Simon, a former police reporter on the Baltimore Sun. It is a systematic examination of the oppression of poor and black Baltimore citizens by five major institutions as they interact with the criminal justice system. These are drug trafficking, the seaport and its unions, city hall (politicians and bureaucracy), the school system, and the press.
The series is brilliant both artistically and sociologically. Using mainly unknown–at the time–actors, kids from the streets of Baltimore, as well as real-life characters from Baltimore, superbly written and directed, it exposes how these institutions not only oppress the poor but corrupt and compromise all those who act with power within these institutions.
This spring HBO introduced a new eight part series The Night Of, henceforth TNO. It was presented as a crime series with the crime being the murder of a young woman, and the person arrested for the crime being a young Pakistani college student, Naz. The show received quite favorable ratings although also some criticism as to pacing and some implausible plot points.
Considered as a police procedural or as a mystery I think it is excellent watching although not in the same class as, say, the first series of True Detective, the first series of Broadchurch, Happy Valley, River, or the Fall.
However I am going to argue that viewing the series as the sixth episode of The Wire it is a brilliant success as a portrait of the criminal justice system– the institution that The Wire never got around to portraying in detail.
Now the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb
They all fall there so perfectly
It all seems so well timed
……………….. —Bob Dylan
.
Wabi-sabi
upon first hearing
I knew the perfection
Dylan wove that verse around
(as if anything on earth could be so flawless
as to deserve the divinity of that word)
which says:
………………...could be here now
and so well timed that all the angles
of Pythagoras and all the angels
of Einstein’s curly gravity
and all of Kepler’s mathic motions
and all of Shakespeare’s mythic tragedies
are met in streets laid in English Bond
as beautifully sublime as the Pietá
whose only imperfection
is in the brutal timeless tale it tells in stone
in which Michelangelo distilled so perfectly
the failed perfection of the world
.
Jim Culleny
3/25/16
__________________________________________________
Note:
Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art
of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature.
.
by Katalin Balog
This is the third of a series of four essays on the mind and the brain. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.
Conscious will is our curse and blessing. It can seem our highest faculty, to be used for good or ill; it also can seem as the source of a particular kind of disgrace – or rather, lack of grace. As Heinrich von Kleist points out in his short story “On the Marionette Theater“, the conscious effort to succeed can be the death of innocence and genuine charm; the ruin of the dancer and the actor; more generally, can cause any of us to seem stilted and inauthentic – as the political arena amply testifies.
Nevertheless, conscious will, our capacity to act or refrain from action voluntarily, is widely held to be our most human capacity, a condition of human dignity and worth. But there is reason to think that on the most natural understanding of what this capacity involves, there is no room for it in the scientific world view.
In the first two parts of this series of essays, I have looked at how each side can – mistakenly – see the other as wrong or irrelevant. In this essay, I will continue to explore the conflict between the two approaches in our understanding of agency and the self. In the last part next month, I will argue for the need to better balance the role of the subjective and the objective in theory and practice.
by Paul Braterman
Part 1 of this series, “Atoms Old and New: Atoms in Antiquity” can be read here.
The transition to modern thinking
“It seems probable to me, that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles… even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God Himself made one in the first creation.” So wrote Sir Isaac Newton in his 1704 work, Opticks. Apart from the reference to God, there is nothing here that Democritus would have disagreed with. There is, however, very little that the present-day scientist would fully accept. In this and later posts, I discuss how atoms reemerged as fundamental particles, only to be exposed, in their turn, as less than fundamental.
The scientific revolution and the revival of corpuscular theory – 1543–1687
Before this scientific revolution, European thinking about nature still followed that of Aristotle. The Earth lay at the centre of the Universe. Objects on Earth moved according to their nature; light bodies, for instance, containe, air or fire in their makeup, and these had a natural tendency to rise. Earth was corrupt and changeable, while the heavens were perfect and immutable, and the heavenly bodies rode around the centre on spheres within spheres because the sphere was the most perfect shape. By its end, Earth was one of several planets moving round the Sun in elliptical orbits, the movements of objects were the result of forces acting on them, the laws of Nature were the same in the heavens as they were on Earth, and all objects tended to move in straight lines unless some force deflected them from this path. The Universe ran, quite literally, like clockwork. This mechanical world-view was to last in its essentials until the early 20th century, and still remains, for better or worse, what many non-scientists think of as the “scientific” viewpoint.
by Brooks Riley
by Katrin Trüstedt
No other show seems to capture the schizophrenic dynamic between an apparatus and its leader quite as well as The West Wing. The show mainly features the behind-the-scenes life of politics and reflects its apparatus and machinery, its procedures and mechanisms, not only on the level of ‘content,' but also in the makeup of the show itself: the famous walk and talk in the literalized corridors of power, the dialogues switching between different topics (as befits the specific medium of television with its program switching possibilities). Everything is procedure in action, and every piece and every person is part of the procedure and influenced by it – be it regarding the internal political negotiations of the government itself or the exchange with the ‘outside world.'
by Elise Hempel
And that was the aura over the visitation and funeral service this past Wednesday and Thursday, with the TV-sized electronic picture frame and its continuous loop of photos, as well as all of the traditionally framed photos around the room – photos of family vacations in Michigan, of my friend's parents in a wedding party together before they were married, of my friend's mother in 1951, posing in her own wedding dress she had sewn herself, complete with satin buttons. For those who don't believe in auras, there was the tangible presence of my friend's 90-year-old father – stooped and small now, more white-haired than when I'd last seen him decades ago – who steadfastly sat in the first pew before the open casket festooned with yellow flowers, unbudging from that final view of his wife. It was impossible to leave the visitation and service without dwelling on their partnership, on the idea of a marriage lasting 65 years.
