by Tim Sommers

Even as we want to do the right thing, we may wonder if there is “really” a right thing to do. Through most of the twentieth-century most Anglo-American philosophers were some sort of subjectivist or other. Since they focused on language, the way that they tended to put it was something like this. Ethical statements look like straight-forward propositions that might be true or false, but in fact they are simply expressions or descriptions of our emotions or preferences. J.L. Mackie’s “error-theory” version, for example, implied that when I say ‘Donald Trump is a horrible person’ what I really mean is ‘I don’t like Donald Trump’. If we really believed that claims about what is right or wrong, good or bad, or just or unjust, were just subjective expressions of our own idiosyncratic emotions and desires, then our shared public discourse, and our shared public life, obviously, would look very different. One of Nietzsche’s “terrible truths” is that most of our thinking about right and wrong is just a hangover from Christianity that will eventually dissipate. We are like the cartoon character who has gone over a cliff but is not yet falling only because we haven’t looked down. Yet.

On the other hand, there is Sam Harris’s widely-read book from a few years ago: The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Now, if “science” could determine human values, depending on exactly how it did so, we might well have an answer to Nietzsche and subjectivism. Unfortunately, if I had been asked to review that book, I might have followed Wittgenstein who once said of a book that he would agree with it if you put the entire text in brackets and wrote in front “It is not the case that…” Just one example: Most philosophers would tell you that the project of offering a rigorous methodological distinction between a science and a non-science or even a pseudoscience, the so-called “demarcation problem”, is hopeless. So, Harris’s central claim that “science” will save ethics is either tautological – because whatever objective methods we develop to answer ethical questions will be, by an expansive enough definition, some kind of science – or false – since none of the existing sciences – physics, chemistry, or even biology – are likely ever to answer ethical questions. Read more »

by Niall Chithelen

Our first act of communication is to look in each other’s eyes, or not to. Many descriptors center subtly on the gaze: I might be shifty if I’m looking away from you too often and too purposefully, diffident if I cast downward when I ought to be looking you in the eyes, or unsettling if I never stop looking at you.

And in observing others’ interactions, it seems body movements have to catch your attention; you were not looking at a person’s hand until they put it on another’s shoulder. But what were you watching before?

The Maltese Falcon is a classic noir centered on private detective Samuel Spade. It is not a verbose novel, but it is a novel of details. Despite featuring morally grey characters who share a deep wariness of one another, it reads as intimate, taking place mostly in closed rooms as these people become embroiled in a plot that isolates them—and us—from the world around them. The author, Dashiell Hammett, does not explain his cast, he has them interact until we start to understand them. Character introductions are mostly physical; the novel opens with the protagonist’s jaw, chin, and mouth, and then makes its way around his face such that we learn he “looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.”

Within his physical sketches, Hammett permits the eyes a special depth. The next character, Spade’s secretary Effie Perrine, has eyes that are “brown and playful,” and the novel’s femme fatale, Miss Wonderly, appears in the doorway with “cobalt-blue eyes that were both shy and probing.” These descriptions are coy, as we have not quite been told that Effie herself is playful or that Miss Wonderly is shy and probing. We simply know what their eyes suggest, and with such guarded or duplicitous speech from the characters, we cannot trust that the eyes tell us a more honest story. Read more »

Birthday 77
………… —next morning

time’s getting blurry out there
it’s like trying to snap a bullet train
with an old kodak,
like trying to catch the wind
as one songwriter said.
time is a jet plane
it moves too fast said another,
there’s no end to metaphor
but lousy imagination,
no end, but

the sky’s clear blue this morning
sun is raking the arbor vitae
making each east limb-tip lemon
crab grass is thick and green after rains
my feet would sink four inches deep
if I stood there
the road’s yellow lines
tend somewhere,
but

Jim Culleny
8/10/18

by Lexi Lerner

Traveling to a place where no one knows you, nor where anyone’s particularly interested, is terrestrially analogous to Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. So far away from home, you look over your shoulder at that bright, dense pinprick of everything you’ve ever understood, valued, loved, identified as… and think to yourself: That means nothing out here.

Of course there is the celebrated, luxurious trope of “finding yourself” through travel. But after staring for a long while at the Pale Blue Dot, a disconcerting tannin lingers: a smallness, an inconsequentiality, that renders you and that dense dot mutually invisible, mutually unintelligible. While everything in the universe gravitationally pulls at each other – Voyager 1 to the Dot, me to you – distance makes that attraction faint to the point of unaccountability, or (the semblance of) estrangement. A homelessness that cannot be shaken once felt, even after some sort of return or reconciliation. It’s not finding, it’s losing – irrecoverably.

If all the contextual factors that justified my personhood, that explained the aggregate of my experiences, carved a river of my self, moving to Vienna caused that river to pool out into senseless water: atomized, oceanic, dilute… it could no longer be called a river, or anything at all, really. No house of language could domesticate this gargantuan puddle.

And perhaps there was no river from the start – just a canal calling itself destined so it could keep flowing when it needed to.

First week field notes:

• In summertime the Viennese expel themselves into the countryside like fry from a seahorse. The city is left flabby, its stretch marks the too-wide streets and the too-wide sidewalks. In fact, two sidewalks often run parallel to each other on the same side of the road, accompanied by a stately line of maples, plus an extra bike lane or two, then six lanes of traffic, and the same pedestrian palace road mirrored on the other side. Anticipating throngs that never come.
• There is a preoccupation with modern interior design: mod shapes in natural fibers like wool and wood and cotton and bamboo, the furniture interesting as art pieces but wholly unwelcoming to engage with. In every living room hangs the same Ikea light fixture that looks like a dandelion made of spikes. The chairs purse their lips as you sit. Most don’t have arms.
• Vienna has shoe culture (no trekking dirt into any room past the foyer.) Yet the Viennese don’t walk quietly. Boots clomp on hardwood, on cobblestone. But the architecture is so gaping that it leaves enormous space for silence. That silence fills space.
• The same wind roars through the Augarten tree corridors and the Untergrundbahn tunnels. It’s a kind of wind that sneaks up on you, where you only hear it and see it as you feel it.

Read more »

by Amanda Beth Peery

Ms Green didn’t believe her mind
was a dark room full of poisons—
a room cluttered with rags
pills, torn tinsel, perfume
in lavender glass. She got stuck sometimes
inside her mind like a bit of lint
caught in a web meant for a fly.
She got stuck sometimes
sitting still, almost polite
with every limb consumed by fire—
she told herself her mind
was a buried animal a burning light.
But today Ms Green learned to reach inside
and touch her own mind, lightly—
her mind more like
a stalled record player playing
one song in deep-grooved vinyl—
today she learned to pick up the needle
and move it a little to the right—.

by Brooks Riley

by Katrin Trüstedt

The major “National-Socialist Underground” trial ended this summer in Munich, under the applause of neo-Nazis and with little international attention. A recent US research study found that while white and rightwing terrorists carried out nearly twice as many terrorist attacks as Muslim extremists between 2008 and 2016, terrorist attacks committed by Muslim extremists receive 357% more press coverage than those committed by non-Muslims.

That’s right: 357%.

In many ways, this massive asymmetry is what the NSU case is about. For more than a decade, the self-declared “National-Socialist Underground” went on a killing spree across the country, assassinating nine “foreigners” (mostly Muslim men with migration background) and a police officer, carried out two bomb attacks and committed 15 armed robberies. Only after they released a video claiming responsibility did the police, the investigators, and the press realize what happened. Instead of considering right-wing terrorist attacks, the police was blaming the victims themselves, suggesting they must have been involved in criminal activities. The press referred to the crimes as the “Döner murders.”

What the trial has brought to light is, among other things, the fantasmatic scenarios of this right wing extremism, attacking the present German state as weak and aiming for a nation state of masculine strength and potency. At the announcement of the verdict, many neo-Nazis were in the audience. Their behaviour was explicitly signaling an attempt to dominate the courtroom. “We are many”, one of them said to a woman entering who expressed surprise at seeing the neo-Nazis in the audience next to Turkish speaking people. To these “foreigners”, to the court, and to the world at large, they aimed to show who’s really “the Man.” Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The danger in being the people’s poet is that the poet may end up being reduced to the limited capacity of his people’s reading, his message shrunken to reflect their superficial grasp of his poetry, his work bent out of shape, and the complexity, depth and subtlety critical to understanding it, utterly lost. While he may remain their beloved representative voice, the people’s poet is ultimately as shallow or enlightened as his people, and no one is less deserving of the punishment of being misconstrued than a poet whose life’s work is to define his people’s angst in all the rawness and refinement due to a poetics honoring both the political truth of the moment as well as the larger forces of history and culture that shape the language in which it is expressed; this is undoubtedly tricky terrain, because he bears the simultaneous (and contradictory) burden of being a singular visionary and having mass appeal. In order to have a reasonable appreciation of such a poet’s message, his people need to step up, and reach for better comprehension.

In recent days, a new rendition of “hum dekhain gay,” a poem by Pakistan’s best loved revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, elicited a strong response on social media, exposing not only political biases but also the extent to which the impassioned debaters understood the poem. Read more »

by Thomas O’Dwyer

When Mrs. William Shakespeare died on this August day in 1623, her family and friends believed they would lay her to eternal rest beside her renowned husband. They did not. They did inter an ordinary wife and mother, but the memory of her went out to become a Frankenstein monster, cut up and reassembled down the centuries. Few of the many makeovers done to Anne Hathaway Shakespeare since her passing have been flattering.

It’s hard to say how Anne came to deserve this cruel fate. Gossips, academics and a myriad of random scribblers have mocked her in many contradictory guises. She is a dumpy, illiterate house wench who clamped herself like an iron ball to the ankle of an unfortunate great man. She is a calculating promiscuous slut having a fine time with young men on the coin of a struggling genius. A dreary drudge, or a vicious vamp – sound familiar, ladies?

In a once common version of her story, 26-year-old Anne Hathaway seduced the boy William, eight years her junior. She became pregnant and forced him to marry her. Poor Will had no choice but to flee from the provincial prison of Stratford to London. There he blossomed as the world’s greatest playwright before returning to Stratford as a tired old gentleman. He never wrote again and was dead within six years. There are many versions of this theme. Some purport to be factual portrayals of Anne Hathaway’s life, some admit to being fictional-but-possible. Facts do not get in the way of the tall tales because there are so few of those – rare brief mentions of Anne in legal documents. In place of the facts, we got the twisted facts and then the fictions. Original documented references to Anne Hathaway are like a few random pencil marks on a blank white canvas. Biographers and faux biographers, mostly men, have each in turn approached the canvas to draw a complete picture. What they have left behind are portraits of their own male fantasies and misogynistic inventions unrelated to any real woman. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

I’m tempted to describe Marion Milner’s book A Life of One’s Own as the missing manual for owners of a human mind. However, it’s not didactic or prescriptive. In fact, it’s useful mainly because it’s nothing like a manual or a self-help book. The book is more like an insightful travelogue by an articulate and honest observer with a gift for using vivid physical imagery and metaphors to describe her inner world.

Milner held a degree in psychology from University College London and worked as a psychologist and psychoanalyst. In 1926, when she was 26, she began keeping a diary in an attempt to understand herself better. She recorded and interpreted her experiences for seven years; the result is A Life of One’s Own, which was published in 1934 (and reissued by Routledge in 2011). The diary covers a period in which Milner married, conducted research in her field, visited the United States on a Rockefeller scholarship, and had a child. These events, and all the happenings of everyday life, are background material rather than the focus of the book.

Milner wanted to discover what made her truly happy. In a changing world full of conflicting advice on how to live, it would be easy to unthinkingly follow a path laid down by someone else. She also found within herself a confusing variety of wishes and goals; it was hard to know what her true purposes or needs were, and it was no better to be pulled along by fleeting impulses of her own than to automatically follow another’s lead. In addition, she sometimes felt cut off from other people, anxious to please or worried about their opinions rather than truly connecting with them. She felt that life was slipping by unexperienced, going on somewhere other than where she was. Does any of this sound familiar? It certainly did to me. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joshua Wilbur 

The 2020s will have a name. In the nursing homes of the future, Millennials’ grandchildren will hear all about the coming decade. Gran will remove her headset, loaded out with VR-entertainment and the latest in biometric tech, and she’ll tell the kids about the world as it was in the third decade of the 21st Century. For now, we look ahead to the Twenties, a decade certain to be charged with meaning, roaring in one way or another.

Our current moment isn’t easy to define. Since the start of the new millennium, there’s been much confusion about what to call the times. First, there’s the period from 2000 to 2009. Was it the “Two Thousands,” the “Zeroes,” the “ohs,” the “aughts,” or the “noughties?” None of the above, it seems: a name never really caught on.  In 2010, looking back on the decade past, a number of commentators remarked on this fact, as will surely happen again in 2020 when retrospectives are faced with a similar semantic problem. Rebecca Mead, writing for the New Yorker in January 2010, noted: “[…] the decade just gone by remains unnamed and unclaimed, an orphaned era that no one quite wants to own, or own up to—or, truth be told, to have aught else to do with at all.”

The same can and will be said for the current decade, and with a similar feeling of embarrassment. The “Twenty Tens,” the “Tens,” “the Twenty Teens,” the “Teens?” Again, we lack a name with real currency. The “Teens,” like the teenagers of stereotype, resist description and brim with angst.  

Maybe it’s too soon to declare our decade unnamed and unnamable. With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps the period from 2010 to 2019 will acquire a title and, with it, an identity. History, though, suggests otherwise. Read more »