by Misha Lepetic

“The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.”
 ~ Thelonious Monk

It’s with a certain pleasure that I can recall the exact moment I was seduced by the musical avant-garde. It was in the fourth grade, in a public elementary school somewhere in New Jersey. Our music teacher, Mrs. Jones, would visit the classroom several times a week, accompanied by an ancient record player and a stack of LPs. You could always tell when she was coming down the hall because the wheels of the cart had a particularly squeak-squeak-wheeze pattern. However, such a Cageian sensibility was not the occasion of my epiphany. I’m also not sure if fourth-graders are allowed to have epiphanies, or, which is likelier, if they are not having them on a daily basis.

Rather, it was a record that she cued up for us one day: Henry Cowell’s ‘The Banshee’, originally composed in 1925. Originating in Irish folklore, the banshee is a female spirit whose keening announces the imminent death of a family member. Cowell sought to evoke the supernatural terror such an encounter might elicit by creating a composition for piano where no keys are actually depressed – instead, the performer plucks and rakes the strings of the piano directly. With the damper pedal pressed down, the tones so generated are freely sustained, and the adjoining wires ring out in consonant vibration, creating a rich set of overtone resonances that add to the unearthly textures that hang in the air. My fourth-grade self was transfixed, and although I can’t remember anything else we did in Mrs. Jones’s class, that occasion remains in my memory with an almost crystalline clarity. Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

My earliest encounter with English poetry drew a subliminal connection with the Irish poets, a connection I could not easily pinpoint as a student of literature in Lahore, Pakistan, but one that re-emerged with striking clarity on my first visit to Ireland. Seeing fragments of poetry adorning hotel walls, ceilings of pubs and elevators in Dublin, I was reminded of verses of Urdu poetry on the television screen, and verses, (often sentimental or humorous ones) painted on trucks and rickshaws back when I was growing up in Pakistan. Poetry in Urdu as well as the other (“provincial”) languages— written, recited, repeated as part of ordinary speech— is a dominant part of Pakistani culture as it is of Ireland, though Pakistan has yet to produce a Nobel laureate in Literature, as opposed to Ireland whose literary laurels, both in quantity and level of prestige, are an embarrassment of riches.

While in Dublin, I came across references to the Irish movement of Independence multiple times a day; reminders of freedom from British rule punctuate the city as landmarks and shapes its psyche. The historical moment of gaining sovereignty is key not only as a constantly (and proudly) visited chapter in mainstream culture, but also as a moment that hearkens back to the nation’s great literary figures who played a pivotal role in achieving independence— a scenario all too familiar to someone from Pakistan, a country whose nationhood was first suggested by a poet. The timeline of the struggle for independence from British rule is the same (late 19^th—early 20th century) for the Indo-Pak subcontinent and Ireland, as is the fact that the movement included a milieu of writers among the leaders. It is the partition of Pakistan from India and the defining and defending of a new identity that Pakistan has in common with Ireland, the “anti-partition” camp in the larger political conversation notwithstanding.

David Aberbach, in his analysis of some of the most influential poets who wrote against British Imperialism, says: “The British empire set off an explosion of poetry, in English and native languages, particularly in India, Africa and the Middle East. This poetry – largely neglected in the scholarship on nationalism – was often revolutionary both aesthetically and politically, expressing a spirit of cultural independence. Attacks on England and the empire are common not just in native colonial poetry but also in poetry of the British isles.” Some of the poets included in this work are: Tagore of India, Yeats of Ireland, and Iqbal of Pakistan. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Editor’s Note: Mohammed Hanif published a review of this film in Urdu at the BBC. A translation into English by Zahra Sabri is published below with Mr. Hanif’s permission. The film is the definitive story of Abdus Salam, the first Pakistani to win the Nobel prize. It captures in vivid detail his life’s journey—from a small village in Pakistan to worldwide scientific acclaim—and his fraught relationship with his homeland, where he faced rejection for being a member of the “heretical” Ahmadiyya movement.

by Mohammed Hanif, translated by Zahra Sabri

Dr Abdus Salam had once said, “It became quite clear to me that either I must leave my country or leave physics. And with great anguish, I chose to leave my country.”

I heard these words in what is probably the first documentary film ever to be made on the life of the Nobel prize-winning Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam. The producers of the film are two young men from Pakistan, Omar Vandal and Zakir Thaver. I’ve been hearing these young men go on about Salam since some ten years. They have been labouring over the film for more than a decade.

I had suspected that these two men might lose interest in this topic similar to the way that the whole nation of Pakistan has washed their hands of Salam, having labelled him a kafir. However, their efforts have borne fruit and the film Salam: The First ***** Nobel Laureate is ready for screening.

The asterisks in the title stand in for the space where the word ‘Muslim’ should have been, but since this word has been expunged from the inscription above his grave in the town of Rabwah, the filmmakers have used asterisks to describe Salam so as to evade the possibility of a fatwa. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

A new theory seldom comes into the world like a fully formed, beautiful infant, ready to be coddled and embraced by its parents, grandparents and relatives. Rather, most new theories make their mark kicking and screaming while their fathers and grandfathers try to disown, ignore or sometimes even hurt them before accepting them as equivalent to their own creations. Ranging from Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection to Wegener’s theory of continental drift, new ideas in science have faced scientific, political and religious resistance. There are few better examples of this jagged, haphazard, bruised birth of a new theory as the scientific renaissance that burst forth in a mountain resort during the spring of 1948.

April 2, 1948. Twenty-eight of the country’s top physicists met at the Pocono Manor Hotel near the Delaware Water Gap in Pennsylvania. Kept apart from their first love of fundamental research in physics by the war, they were eager to regroup and rethink the problems which had plagued the heights of their profession before they were called away for war duty to Los Alamos, Cambridge and Chicago.

The listing of participants provides a rare snapshot of one of those hallowed transitions in the history of science, a passing of the torch. Both the old and the new guards were there. The old guard was represented, among others, by Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac and Eugene Wigner – the men who had formulated and then shaped the material world in its quantum mechanical image during the 1920s and 30s. The new guard was represented by Richard Feynman, John Wheeler and Julian Schwinger – the swashbuckling young theorists who wanted to take quantum theory to new heights, even if it meant challenging the old wisdom. J. Robert Oppenheimer who led the conference represented a prophet of the middle ground; a guide joining old hands with new. In retrospect, a clash of worldviews seems almost inevitable. Read more »

Derek Parfit. Untitled (Thundercloud), c1980s .

C type digital print.

More here and here.

Current show “The Mind’s Eye”  at Narrative Projects, London, organized by Owen Laub with Samuel Sokolsky-Tifft. (Thanks, Sam).

by Gabrielle C. Durham

“Griselda was fighting against the patriarchy the only way she knew – through her unquenchable lust for venison.”

A romance or porn writer I am not, but what should strike you, other than the inappropriate sexualization of wild game, is the utterly superfluous preposition “against.” Why can’t Griselda simply fight the patriarchy? Why fight against? You got me, but the overprepositioning of English is driving me batty.

Why does this bother me? The short answer: Because it’s filler. Overprepositioning is the equivalent of “um, like, you know” without the obvious signposts of verbal dimness. If someone adds prepositions without regard to verbs, with no consideration of whether such appendages are required, then you are in the unsure-footed presence of a mediocre bullshitter. This is a writer who does not care about conventions such as transitive or intransitive verbs, dog-word-piling, or even the linguistic niceties that lubricate our written conventions. No, this writer is a cliché-spewing toad who only warrants pity for being ignored by a merciless editor.

If we were all native Turkish speakers, this would make so much more sense. Turkish is agglutinative, so prepositions are built into all the action. My Turkish friend who speaks English beautifully visibly falters with some predicate constructions. His tendency is to pile on the prepositions. Using prepositions feels so alien to him that he adds them scattershot to sentences. He becomes that hammer who sees every direct object as a nail. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Max Sirak

For the better part of a year I’ve been working with a behavioral and family play therapist.

No. Not like that.

I’ve been helping her write her book. Because, it turns out, for writers undaunted by long term projects, ghostwriting is a fairly lucrative freelance option. At least, as far as keeping food on a table and a roof overhead go.

My favorite part of ghostwriting is the learning. It’s my job to absorb my client’s wisdom, gained from their years of experience, distill it, and use my words to make it fit for general consumption. The process itself all but guarantees I’ll encounter new ideas to sip, swill, and savor.

Having just finished ghostwriting a chapter on the therapeutic power of board games and averaging at least one game night a week with my friends, I’ve had games on the brain lately.  And, because of it, I’ve stumbled upon some interesting connections I’d like to share. To explore them, we’ll answer three questions: Why do people play games? How does a person’s reason for playing affect the way they view other players? And finally, what traits and behaviors are being nurtured by the way a person plays? Read more »

Karl Marx Ignites the Millennials

after Mohammad Iqbal

Ah! Come! How can you not be roused! You are nothing but you are everything.
Recharge your IPhones. From each according to his feed to each according to his need. In
times of global deceit tweeting the truth puts you in the driver seat. Road to hell is paved
with fake tweets. Take a knee. Raise a fist. Do it twice: First as history, then as tragedy.

Ask the drones of democracy, Masters of Business Administration, what else is there in
their dens of depravity besides electronic hallucinations, market rallies, blow-dried heads
squawking, mad money spiritualists, Ponzi schemers, daybreak business briefs, nighttime
rundowns, snorting bulls, bashful bears, quarterly yearnings, a spill of crooked graphs?

Women on the March, place a halo back on family values. Disrupt patriarchies that claim
your wombs as mere tombs of production. Ban gunrunners who hawk capitalism past its
sell-by date. Exorcise temples, churches, and mosques for religion is the pox of the poor
hurting for pride. Abolish Wall Street. You have nothing to lose. Unite! Inspire! Reignite!

by Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit

by Christopher Bacas

We make unplanned pilgrimages; a friend, job or tragedy send us barefoot around sacred mountains. Eyes fixed on the path, we’re prevented from losing our way by loyalty, diligence or grief. Anyone we pass is possibly the most important person we will ever (not) meet.

A job: play half-hour concerts; moving from unit to unit in an eleven-story Upper West Side building. Our private audiences, home-bound seniors. We are a saxophone/bass duo. My partner, Joshua, sings in English and Spanish. Our employers provide a list with names, apartment numbers and an emergency contact.

On the ninth floor, our first stop, a caretaker slowly opens the door. A vector of heat escapes around her into the drafty hall.

“Musica?”

“Si, si”

We announce our sponsor’s name. She doesn’t recognize it. Voices inside call out, ricocheting off a bare floor. She opens the door all the way. In the center of the room, behind a walker, Nayeli slumps into a kitchen chair. Swollen with disuse, her feet rest on a fresh, spread out Depends. In the corner, her husband, Tolentino, in a jacket and spiffy sneakers, sits on the edge of a plush armchair, knees tight. He gets up to shake my hand. Then, I lean in to shake his wife’s.

I pull my horn out of the case, assemble it and get ready to play. With upturned eyes, the couple appraise our instruments as if they were caged snakes. A brief cloudburst follows; small sounds musicians make before playing: soft descending notes in whooshing funnels, rattles and clicks. Then, silence, awkward and centripetal, whirling us into the present. We look at them. Read more »

Snake Tales

1. Taking the Rap

. . . so I said to Eve the Courageous:

here’s something extraordinary—
a thing as sweet as knowing
but bitter too, possibly lethal,
and (at the very least)
a gateway to trouble,
yet a wonder worth the risk

while Adam (you must know)
was not off on some pious ramble
through the garden picking figs
and licking maple sap
….. praying, Lord, Lord,
but was right there,
his side with dubious absent rib
pressed against her, naked, attentive,
positively inclined but cautious,
prepared in case things went south
to slap a fig leaf on
and have the woman
take the rap

Jim Culleny
4/15/18

by Liam Heneghan

A celebrated altercation between Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), the Florentine artist, and fellow sculptor Bartolommeo Bandinello (1493-1560) resulted in the latter exclaiming “Oh sta cheto, soddomitaccio.” [Shut up, you filthy sodomite!]. The accusation had merit in the legal sense at least since Cellini had indeed been accused of the crime of sodomy with at least one woman and several young men. The incident is oftentimes recalled in writings about the period as it provides a compelling illustration of the sexual appetites of the artists of the Renaissance.

Bandinello unleashed his invective against Cellini in front of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Duke of Florence, who was patron of both artists. The incident is recorded in Cellini’s autobiography My Life. The insult is infamous, but events that culminated in the insult are remarkable in their own right for they shed light, not on the sexual peccadilloes of the times, but rather on the attitudes of Renaissance artist to works of antiquity. They also are helpful in thinking more generally about how the quality of works might be assessed.

As Cellini reports it, the encounter started with Cellini visiting the ducal palace in Florence, where the Duke is expressing his enthusiasm about a box sent to him by Stefan Colonna, a general employed in the Florentine services. Cellini opens the crate on the Duke’s behalf and marvels at its contents. It is a statue in Greek marble. Although the statue is damaged, as is the case of many of the works of great antiquity, Cellini writes, “It is a miracle of beauty.” Furthermore, he declares, “I have never seen a boy’s figure so excellently wrought and in so fine a style among all the antiques I have inspected.” High praise indeed. Read more »

Kassou Seydou. Bopu Kogn- coin de rue, 2017.

Acrylic on canvas.

More here, here, and here.

by Emrys Westacott

What do 21st century American college faculty and 19th century Church of England Clergyman have in common?  A surprising amount. This is one reason I would heartily recommend the novels of Trollope, Austen, and others to my colleagues in academia.

Clerics are interesting figures in a number of 19th century novels.  Sometimes they are portrayed sympathetically, as is Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey; often, though, they are ridiculed, either gently, like Bishop Proudie in Barchester Towers, or scathingly, like Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice. But what should draw rueful smiles of recognition from academics today is not the personality types represented but their situations within a complicated, hierarchical system that dispenses enviable benefits to some and chronic frustration to others.

Extrapolating from such novels with a little imaginative license, we can form the following picture. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Church of England had about 11,500 “livings”–positions tied to particular parishes. These typically came with a house (the vicarage, the rectory), and an income, often quite modest. Such livings were usually dispensed by individuals or institutions that were major landowners in the parish. They provided life-long security and social respectability.

Under the primogeniture system of inheritance, the eldest son inherited the bulk of his father’s estate.  This meant that younger sons of the gentry had to pursue some profession, and the respectable options for those who viewed trade as rather sordid were few: the military, the law, medicine, or the church. One of the important functions of the Church of England at that time was thus to provide socially acceptable employment to educated middle and upper-middle class men who lacked independent means.

Unfortunately, there were many more educated young men seeking positions in the church than there were “livings.”  Supply exceeded demand.  As late as 1830, about fifty percent of Oxbridge undergraduates intended to enter the church. Recently minted Ph.D.s seeking tenure-track positions will have no trouble relating to their situation. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Carl Pierer

Since 2014, various student societies at the University of Edinburgh have but on musical performances commemorating the first world war. This article takes a look at one performance in particular. The content is neither highly original nor particularly radical; others have written more insightful and more sophisticated pieces. It constitutes merely an attempt to formulate and to clarify what is problematic with these particular performances, thereby hoping to understand something about the greater memorial tradition in the United Kingdom. In other words, by examining how a nationalistic, martial and oppressive Erinnerungskultur is reproduced in an amateur to semi-professional context – be it deliberately or not -, we may see how these values become normalised and why it matters that this takes place in this particular context.

The most recent performance in this series was the Edinburgh University’s Brass Band spring concert. The programme featured some classical, some modern classical and contemporary pieces loosely linked by the theme ‘pictures, moving pictures’, as well as some others, which were put together under the theme of ‘war’. While this in itself might already be seen as problematic, there are three features of this programme that I would like to focus on: First, the introduction and subsequent dedication given by the band’s director. Secondly, the poem read to accompany a piece in the second part of the concert. Lastly, the omnipresence of poppies.

The evening’s programme was introduced by the band’s director as a mix of pieces fitting the ‘moving pictures’ theme and – because “to remember the Great War in our days is important” – others fitting the ‘war’ theme. There is something odd about this amalgamation of themes. For one, it seems to take away from the remembrance aspect to see it intermingled with unrelated pieces such as Mussorgski’s Pictures at an Exhibition.  What was even more bizarre was the almost casual introduction of the serious topic of remembrance. Yet, the most bewildering issue was that – in 2018 – such a memorial concert can be dedicated expressly and exclusively to the ‘heros’ of World War I. Of course, the term ‘heros’ in itself appears as a poor choice, for – unless problematised – it risks simply repeating the military distinction between soldiers willing to ‘die for their country’ (worthy of praise) and cowards, weaklings, traitors (who actively refuse to participate – and hence are worthy to be shot –  or who are excluded from becoming ‘heros’ because of their sex, age, gender or some other reason). But above that, it is the exclusive use of ‘heros’ that is deeply problematic. Aren’t all the people, who battled to survive through the First World War but who didn’t (or refused to) die a ‘heroic’ death worth being remembered? Moreover, even if we were to accept this terminology, how can we continue to praise only the male ‘heroes’ – all but erasing the female ‘heroines’? As will become clearer below, the ‘heroes’ comprised by this dedication were only British ones, an implicit nationalistic tinge that is uncannily present in too many memorial events for the first world war in particular. Read more »