“(Swifts) feed in the air, they mate in the air, they get nest material in the air.
They can land on nest boxes, branches, or houses, but they can't really land on
the ground.”— Researcher Susanne Åkesson

Swift

I’ve been airborne since
Augustus layed the footings of the Roman Peace
……—in that alone I flew two hundred years
without alighting once. My forebear’s bodies
so studied the inclinations of drafts
they bequeathed me wings and means
to defy grounded predators (their craft
is stealth and might while mine is
lift and flight)

Angels I’ve known I met
in clouds real as the dust
of parched whirlwinds,
but sweet and wet

free in vapor we rolled and bet
that a universe of soil and stone
may last but that of blood and bone,
ligaments, limbs and breath
will be snapped as short
as the short straw
in the short-sighted lottery
of man
…………………. alone
…………………. bereft

Jim Culleny
10/30/16

by Paul Braterman

A 1929 law* imposes three unelected clergy on each of Scotland's local Education Committees. This was based on practice dating back to the 1870s, with the formation of the Scottish educational system from a merger of church and non-church elements, and to the 1918 incorporation of Catholic schools into the system. The Catholic state schools are clearly denominational, the others officially non-denominational, but all alike fall under the control of the relevant Committees. There are currently moves to free Scotland's Local Authorities from this undemocratic imposition, using Scotland's admirable Public Petition process, and you can help with this (see end of post for more).

Few topics are less exciting than the mechanics of local government. Nor would I expect the world to pay much attention to the details of these mechanics in a small, only partly independent, country of no particular economic or strategic importance. Nonetheless, the case exhibits some interesting general features regarding the legacy of religion in an incompletely secularised Europe, and the realities of effecting change in a diverse and pluralist society.

The petition has attracted international attention, most notably from Michael Zimmerman, as director of the Clergy Letter Project, who in a Huffington Post article has eloquently described the current structure as “bad for science education as well as for religion”. The Clergy Letter Project itself is an impressive assemblage of over 15,000 ordained clergy, from various denominations and creeds, who argue that the correct response of religion to scientific discovery is acceptance and celebration. The image above symbolises this view, by combining the memes of DNA and Divine Creation. Accommodationism, in the best and truest sense of this much misused word.

Michael Zimmerman expresses his reasons for concern as follows:

There are many reasons why a law of this sort is inappropriate and undemocratic, and you can read most of them in the petition, but rather than focusing on those aspects of the situation, I want to address the potential for serious problems associated with science education. As we have seen in far too many instances, some with deeply held fundamentalist beliefs, beliefs that are well out of both the religious and secular mainstream of society, feel compelled to promote their narrow perspective rather than the consensus of the scientific community. These extreme views are almost always at odds with the religious beliefs that are held just as deeply by the vast majority of the religious community.

And events have shown this concern to be well justified.

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by Katrin Trüstedt

With very little international attention, a major terrorism trial is entering its final stage in Munich, Germany. Beate Zschäpe, the only survivor of a right-wing terrorism trio, is facing charges of complicity in ten homicides, two bomb attacks, and 15 armed robberies, as well as membership in a terrorist organization, attempted murder, and arson. The victims are mostly people with a Muslim migration background. If the situation had been reversed with a “Muslim” group assassinating “Germans” for over a decade, then international interest would most likely have trumped the reporting on the recent Paris or Brussels attacks. This attentional asymmetry is in many ways also what the trial is about.

Over the course of more than a decade, the self-declared “National-Socialist Underground” (NSU) managed to go on a killing spree across the country, and, in some troubling sense, they did so on the government's watch. Germany's domestic intelligence agency (Verfassungsschutz) was aware of the right wing terror cell before they went underground in 1998 and began their series of assassinations. And yet, for more than a decade, the police who were investigating the individual murder cases never considered the possibility of a right wing background as a motivation for the killings. Instead, in all of the various instances, the police only investigated the assumed criminal backgrounds of the victims as possible leads, presuming hidden ties to some Turkish mafia or criminal masterminds abroad. When people from the Turkish community suspected xenophobic motives, they were labeled as conspiracy theorists, as police documents show. The media went along with these assumptions and reported accordingly, and we all ate it up. The extent not only of right wing terror in Germany, but also of stupefying institutionalized racism in the Verfassungsschutz and the police, major fuck ups in the investigations, and collective blindness slowly came to light since 2011. All of this happened before the recent rise of the new right in Germany and elsewhere that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

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by Elise Hempel

Recently, needing a change from my standard breakfast of yogurt, I decided to make myself a nice omelet with cheddar cheese and tomatoes. Not having made an omelet for many months now, I'm out of practice a bit, but everything was going fine, my omelet cooking nicely in our cast-iron pan – not sticking, not burning, looking restaurant-pretty. I was almost done, almost ready to perform the fold, and then…. And then somehow, suddenly, I had a combination of omelet and scrambled eggs, or what, from here on out, I shall call a “scromelet.”

My partner, Ray, informed me a few months ago that this “linguistic blend of words” (Wikipedia) – not to be confused with a compound, in which both/all of the spliced-together words remain fully intact – is called a “portmanteau” (port-man-toe), a term I'd never heard before. My 2002 American Heritage college dictionary defines “portmanteau” first as “a leather suitcase with two hinged compartments” and goes on to define a “portmanteau word.” And a British website tells me that the word “portmanteau” is itself a portmanteau originating from the French word “portemanteau” which blends “porter” (to carry) and “manteau” (cloak). A further look at Wikipedia also reveals another interesting fact – that the term “was first used in this context by Lewis Carroll in the book Through the Looking-Glass (1871).”

Little did I know that I'd been creating portmanteaus for many years already. And since the term has come up, Ray and I can't seem to stop ourselves from creating them almost continuously. For instance, our dog, Groucho (neither “cockapoo” nor “puggle” but, as genetic testing revealed, a combination of Akita, greyhound and boxer, or a “groxita”), who likes to lie (with his front paws crossed) across the threshold between the porch and the living-room, or between the dining-room and the kitchen, is now a “threshound.”

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by Maniza Naqvi

For the past eight years, when I walk past it in the early mornings on my way to work, I've imagined the elegant, refined, educated, decent family that currently lives in the White House. They look so good and they talk so fine. A made for TV family. Making most of us feel good and feel great. Making America look good. I always pause at dusk to gaze at their residence, on my way home and think how lovely it seems because of them inside it. Change is coming. They are leaving soon.

But beyond the poetry and photogenic poise they don't matter. And whoever comes in after they are gone from here, won't matter either. The change won't matter. The incoming scandals won't matter. No one who lives here ever does. Matter. Much. You live here as a servant. No, not of the people.

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by Christopher Bacas

After Allen fired Mike, I replaced him the next Friday night. Mike showed up for the gig anyway. That's how we first met. He was not tall, solid, short grey hair, onyx eyes, and all Baltimore: the accent, the indestructible Hunky genetics, the edge that let you know it might get real, right now. Before he spoke, he cleared his throat; that reflexive grunt, grammatically sound and ever present. His voice wasn't just gritty, it came out in cinderblocks; the kind with corners shorn, that scuffed skin off your palms when you picked them up. He often used the word bark. It described a responsive saxophone (“that horn barked”), the ability to play something (“you barked off those fourths”), or an aggressive person (“they barked at me, but fuck 'em!”). Mike's voice barked, too.

I was uncomfortable walking in on his gig. Allen was solid on his invitation. Earlier in the week, on the phone, he precisely quoted, in Bela Lugosi accent, Lenny Bruce's bit where a junkie jazz musician gets a gig with Lawrence Welk:

“you're perfect boy for my band…..YOU'RE DEAF….we play a lotta college dates,mostly industrial colleges.”

Selling me on a fifty-dollar-a-night weekend gig in menagerie of drunks. With travel, it amounted to seven hours.

Immediately, I said yes.

Before the drive to Baltimore, Allen invited me into his apartment. He lived alone and was raising two sons with a combative ex. It smelled of sandalwood inside. A Ben Webster record was playing. Allen always taught me, even things I thought I already knew. Ben shaped notes with exquisite varieties of breath: some had glowing El Greco halos, others popped like champagne corks or made panting dives into nothingness. I knew his sound, but hearing his loving care was the night's first lesson.

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by Holly A. Case

Alen R. (left) and Arkan (right)

Is there a relationship between politics and madness? The history of the legal strategy known as the insanity defense offers some clues. One thinker, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, was so haunted by the moral confusion of the insanity defense as to wonder whether there is a way to tell right from wrong without reference to right and left.

Last month before a packed courtroom in Graz, Austria, a man stood trial for three counts of murder and 108 counts of attempted murder. The defendant, Alen R., appeared each day in a white suit. His face, like his last name, was obscured in the Austrian media, but the case was such a high-profile one—all seven days of the proceedings were broadcast live and it was front-page news in every one of the Austrian dailies—that Alen R. became something of an anti-celebrity.

On June 20, 2015, just after midday, Alen R. ran down pedestrians and cyclists with his SUV along a route stretching more than a mile through the city center of Graz. Witnesses estimated his maximum speed to be over 60 miles per hour. At one point he stopped to attack two people with a knife. Over the five-minute duration of his “mad driving spree,” he killed three people and injured thirty-six, many of them seriously.

The focus of the trial came down to one question: “Is Alen R. so mentally ill that he can assume no responsibility for the apocalyptic drive in his SUV through the pedestrian zones of Graz?” At issue were the conflicting expert assessments of psychiatrists and a psychologist regarding the defendant's sanity: one had concluded that he was “of unsound mind” and should therefore be referred for psychiatric treatment rather than given a prison sentence, and another believed Alen R. to be very much “of sound mind” and said he should stand trial as an accused criminal. To break the tie, a third (German) psychiatrist was called in who diagnosed him with schizophrenia. In the end, the jury deferred to the testimony of a fourth expert, a psychologist, who declared Alen R. to be of sound enough mind to be criminally responsible for murder and attempted murder. He was given a life sentence (though it is not yet binding) along with a referral for incarceration in a facility for the criminally insane.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

There are interests that lie dormant within us, waiting to take hold some day. If someone had said ten years back that I'd be into birds, I would have been skeptical. It's true that I always had a fondness for animals: in high school, I spent a lot of time following neighborhood stray dogs and watching cheetahs chase gazelles on National Geographic. After moving to Arizona for grad school, I sought out every opportunity to hike and visit the famous national parks of the American southwest. But despite all the time spent outdoors, birds had never intrigued me. I used to be puzzled, even amused, by people who showed up at a trail with binoculars.

For many, it's the sighting of a particular species, usually a rare or colorful one, that sparks an interest. In my case, it was a very common North American bird – the cardinal. This was in 2011. I'd been living in Amherst, Massachusetts for three years. I had heard of cardinals, mostly as the name of a football team, and had never spotted one.

But in March that year, I suddenly starting seeing them: outside my apartment, during my walks in the woods around Amherst and while driving (they would often fly across the road). The crested bright red male was a thrill to watch. I felt privileged every time I saw one. Something was being revealed just to me! I asked others if they had seen any and would feel proud if their reply was negative. There was probably a simpler explanation of course. It snowed and rained a lot that year, and the population could have spiked for some ecological reason. Or the sight of the first made me look for more every day, with the result that I had simply begun to see what had always been there.

Whatever the reason, cardinals sparked a wider interest in birds and indeed all other species. It all seemed a tremendous mystery.

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by Richard King

The late Alexander Cockburn once suggested – mischievously, as was his wont – that the principal reason The New York Times published a “Corrections” column every morning was to convince its readers that everything else in the previous day's paper had been 100% true, morally as well as factually. In this way The Gray Lady maintained her reputation as America's premier clearing house for “All the News That's Fit to Print”: by reminding the world that she, too, was ever-so-slightly fallible.

Observing the meltdown in the US media in the weeks since Donald Trump became the GOP's man, it is hard not to think of Cockburn's zinger. Faced with the prospect of a President Trump – now highly unlikely, post-the Access Hollywood controversy – the media has moved from shock to repentance: Grub Street is jumping with journalists eager to take their share of the blame for the elevation of the Orange One. Nor, I think, are they wrong to do so, though the terms in which the mea culpas are currently being offered in the press manage both to miss the point and to highlight the very attitudes for which they should be apologetic. I'll get to those a little later. Suffice it to say, for now, that the media's self-flagellation in this instance smells strongly of self-aggrandisement.

The self-flagellation was discernible even before Trump's nomination. The New York Times' Jim Rutenberg, for example, suggested as long ago as May that the media was failing in its duty to voters, so wide of the mark had its predictions been. But it is only in the last few weeks that the sound of hats being dutifully chewed has yielded decisively to the rustle of sackcloth. Nicholas Kristof, also writing in the Times, struck an especially masochistic note: “Those of us in the news media have sometimes blamed Donald Trump's rise on the Republican Party's toxic manipulation of racial resentments over the years. But we should also acknowledge another force that empowered Trump: Us.”

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by Emrys Westacott

Donald Trump epitomizes extravagance. Not the imprudently living beyond one's means sort of extravagance criticized by Ben Franklin, but the kind that spares no expense in the quest to gratify one's desires and impress people.

Gold-gilded towers, marbled mansions, emblazoned private jets: all of them scream out, “Look how f____ing rich I am!”

There is a paradox here. You'd think that Trump flaunting his wealth so unabashedly would turn off the majority of voters. You'd expect it to especially turn off the ones that the polls say make up his base–men without a college education who feel they are losing out in a changing world. After all, most people aren't rich. That's why politicians like to present themselves as commoners: so that voters can identify with them. Even those who ate baby food off silver spoons will typically tell stories about some parent or grandparent who was dirt poor and worked their way up.

There is also a deep strain in American culture that has always been highly critical of luxury, extravagance, boastfulness and pride. These are, after all, the opposite of: simplicity, frugality, modesty and humility–the traditional Christian values taught by Jesus, practiced by the Puritans, and associated with the rural homestead.

Furthermore, a preference for frugal simplicity and related values is not just a Puritan prejudice. It's supported by a rich philosophical tradition, from Socrates and Epicurus in ancient times to Thoreau and Wendell Berry more recently. Like our religious heritage, this tradition has left its mark on our thinking. According to these sages, frugal simplicity is the path to both virtue and happiness.

Now some might argue that these traditional values are out of fashion. But that's not entirely true. Simplicity is still respected. When the current pope was chosen in 2013, his simple lifestyle was hailed on all sides as a sure sign of his moral integrity. Warren Buffet, “the sage of Omaha,” has a reputation for wisdom that is decidedly enhanced by his choosing to live in the same unexceptional house that he bought in 1958.

So how is Trump able to turn not just his wealth but his showy, extravagant lifestyle into political capital?

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by Humera Afridi

On a recent weekend morning, I spoke with eminent writer and intellectual Gündüz Vassaf at his home on the island of Sedef in Turkey. I was calling from Manhattan, New York, via Skype, and the distances of space and time between us collapsed to make way for a conversation that felt like a natural continuation of a felicitous meeting earlier in the summer.

Vassaf, the author of 14 critically acclaimed books of nonfiction, fiction, essays and poetry, had just returned from a brisk swim in the Sea of Marmara. It was a chilly 20 degrees Celsius on the island, the sun suspended low in the late October sky, but that did not deter him. I sense there is not much that can restrain Vassaf from following his heart. His is a quest for freedom—in work, in life, in mind, in body—a right that he asserts not just for himself, but, judiciously for all sentient beings, and does so with a rare ebullience, one balanced with wisdom.

In his 1987 bestseller, Prisoners of Ourselves, Vassaf writes:

“This book is about freedom. It's about freedom we avoid, freedom that we fear to have in our everyday lives. Even with our simple daily acts we subject ourselves to a totalitarian order of our creation and subservience.

My first idea was to write a book about our accommodation of totalitarian regimes. Throughout history, millions across the world have experienced changes in regimes from a relatively democratic state to a totalitarian order.

In the end and over time, we acquiesce to these regimes. We internalize the new norms. The very few who don't, become martyrs, unknown patients in mental hospitals, forgotten prisoners of conscience.

I did not write a book about the above because I realized that also in “democratic” regimes we can become prisoners of ourselves.”

Prisoners of Ourselves explores the psychology of totalitarianism in every day life and is a profound elucidation of human consciousness. It sold over 70,000 copies when it was published and quickly rose to the stature of a contemporary classic in Turkey. Vassaf has written many other works in between this astute and marvelously prescient book of lyrical essays—one which I find illuminates the present historical moment—and his most recent, What Can I Do? that was released, serendipitously, a week after the recent failed coup attempt in Turkey.

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by Carl Pierer

Much has been written about Zeffirelli's adaption of Romeo & Juliet, in particular its focus on the themes of youth and beauty. A neat narrative lends itself to explain the films popularity and immense success: Zeffirelli catered for a teen audience (choosing unknown, very young lead actors, exploring themes of sexuality) in a time where precisely this teen audience was preoccupied with similar explorations – the film was released in 1968 – need more be said? Today, it seems, Zeffirelli's once progressive interpretation has become canonical. The film, to a modern audience, seems a trifle antiquated: the romance, the costumes, the operatic acting all add to its heaviness. Yet, beneath this striking opulence, the film is a subtle and skillful interpretation of Shakespeare's text. It is a nuanced study of the consequences of patriarchal structures based on a phallic conception of masculinity, which has not lost any of its actuality. More so, it treats women as agents by painting them as complicit supporters of the patriarchal hierarchy.

*

In a brilliant essay, Peter Donaldson has explored some alternative themes dominating Zeffirelli's adaption. One of them is its treatment of the homoerotic undercurrents in Shakespeare's text. Donaldson reads Zeffirelli's film as visually underscoring Shakespeare's social criticism of the patriarchal structures which form the social context of the play. The feud, which produces the tragedy, is understood, on this reading, as a symptom of a much deeper illness: “misogyny and its corollary, male fear of intimacy with other men.” (Donaldson, p. 153)

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Interviews and dates begin thus, “Tell me something about yourself”. In that moment, I balk. After all, what among a dozen different things might this question demand? Must I confess? Shall I tell all? Shall I say everything there is to say? Do I even know? Come to think of it, is who I am right now tantamount to who I will or want to be? Breathing deep, I brush away the doubts. I condense. I offer caveats. I make self and knowledge palatable to my interviewer. Eyes shining, legs crossed, smile wide, back straight, I produce all of the everything that must mean so little.

There is so much I'd like to say. But I fear incomprehension, and derision, and the walls between people that render them interested mainly in self. And yes, I know. This essay. But surely, things about self are also things about the world? In David Szalay's recent work, “All That Man Is”, one of his protagonists is dismayed that the world he knows ends with him; there is only one person capable of knowing this world, and he is afraid of mortality and how it will destroy this world. I wonder that he didn't ask the other question; if this world even exists. So in hopes that it does, and in trying to grapple with its ultimate destruction, let me tell you some things about myself.

Most times, I am not even sure I exist. I am wholly and entirely the Descartian subject, however. I walk around with a body from which I feel an arm's length distance. We live together, my body and I, in a tenderly choreographed dialectic. I marvel at it sometimes, so full in its materiality and definitive weight. I wear it like raiment; other times, it wears me. And some very rare times, like when I manage to hold a tree pose, we are one.

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by Hirsch Perlman

The name of the street I live on is Bargen Way and The Battle at Bargen Way is the term I long ago gave to my studio practice. So, let me tell you about the battle at Bargen Way.

I had a mind to make a mechanical, articulated joint, perhaps for an unknown figure. And for some reason (because this is what artists do— close down the infinite possibilities, the infinite freedom we have to reveal a set of seemingly random finite possibilities) I would have to do this with no hardware, no glue, no fittings, just wood.

Two years of tooling up and experimenting followed and I arrived at an odd daisy chain design of interlocking wooden axles, nuts, and bolts. These parts were infinitely adjustable and could be locked in any orientation. I toyed with a variety of uses, placement, attachments, and configurations of the joint. Many kinds of wood were put to the test. The best wood, lignum vitae (wood of life), comes from South America. It's an extraordinary wood, with a resin that acts as a natural, built-in lubricant that has a lovely smell. Believe it or not, it's used to make large bearings in hydro-electric generators (I purchase the cut-offs from the manufacture of those bearings). It lasts longer than steel in that application. One of the first mechanical clocks was made out of lignum vitae.

Another year of toying and the real meaning of the joint unfolded. It's a mechanical schematic of thinking, the brain as an versatile tool. These parts were too flexible to be regular joints, they were “mind,” not body.

I built a number of prototypes. 10-12 foot tall “stick person” bodies/limbs with my adjustable joint as neurons/hair/headdress, each thinking itself.

If I'd managed to properly anchor any of the them to the ground, they might still stand. I missed the storm and the battle, but not its aftermath. I would need to draw this out, look at the carnage for a long time, before I knew what it meant.

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by Paul North

Fate is a conspiracy between past and future, a compact, mostly secret, that forbids us to deviate from what was decided ages ago. Fate is a keyhole through which you glimpse the secret compact. Fate is also a feeling. Out of a series of little glimpses arises an overwhelming sense that there is nothing to be done.

The last person we would associate with a predetermined future, oblique glimpses, and a feeling of paralysis is Charles Darwin, who liberated natural history from a pre-existing plan. In a certain sense, after Darwin, nature becomes a zone of freedom. For a quick comparison, some of the most forward-thinking of his contemporaries, the geologist Charles Lyell for instance or anatomist Richard Owen, believed in fixed species—despite their commitment to evolutionary ideas considered radical in the day. What separated Darwin from many of his contemporaries was the inkling that became his theory of “natural selection.” The theory says that little has been decided in advance. A “species” is a complex, contingent negotiation between a generation and its environment, as well as between the species and its past, not to mention between that species and its ongoing possibilities for transmutation—its future. At any moment the environment could find itself at a turning point, and the species could find itself, without the inherited resources, unable to transmute sufficiently in order to survive. Then the species goes extinct and an unanticipated form of life takes its place.

“Natural Selection” does sound like a force beyond our control, a force that, although we can't see it, nevertheless controls us. Say “Natural Selection” and the three Greek old ladies, the fates, appear before us, laying out our destinies on their great loom. It also sounds like the “invisible hand” in laissez-faire economics. “Invisible hand” was Adam Smith's phrase that became a popular metaphor for the orderly distribution of wealth without any external source for that order. Isn't it odd? To describe a situation without an external force governing events, we use a phrase that means precisely an external force governs events. In economics as well as in biology, when we want to say there is no such thing as fate, we name an intractable, invisible authority, an economic hand that orders, a natural hand that selects.

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Of Enlightenment

clicking buttons of a remote I dream of enlightenment
of crammed refugees in boats I dream

in flickering glow of screens I dream of enlightenment
of history that still careens I dream

hearing sirens in the dark I dream of enlightenment
of popping guns in parks I dream

seeing new corpses in the street I dream of enlightenment
of black men beaten by blue I dream

tasting the sky of a hard rain I dream of enlightenment
of earth recoiling from human stain I dream

feeling the blast and bite of drones I dream of enlightenment
of streets of blood and bones I dream

seeing skeletal forms of girls and boys I dream of enlightenment
while surfeit banquets cloy I dream

while glittering glass cubes burn and fall I dream of enlightenment
while no one seems to learn at all I dream

.
Jim Culleny
10/11/16

by Michael Liss

Sixteen. That was the percentage of respondents in a snap CNN post-second debate poll who said that they had heard about Donald Trump's “sex tape” and that it made them more likely to vote for him. 16 Percent. One in six voters surveyed, likely one in three (or more) of Trump supporters. Here's another number–Eighty-Three. In a WSJ/NBC News Poll, again, taken after the release of the tape, 83 percent of Republicans believe that the party should back Trump through the election.

Perhaps that is just circling the wagons–a later Washington Post/ABC News Poll showed the number of “mores” evaporating, but still had 83% of Trump voters saying it made no difference to them–and they were backed by a number of Evangelical leaders. A reasonable person might ask, why? Why would anyone with a girlfriend or a wife or a daughter or a mother (everyone has a mother) ignore the coarseness, to say nothing of any of the other controversial and even inflammatory things he's said and done? Their answer is that are with Trump, come hell or high water, and they aren't going to let any pointy-headed, liberal MSM pollster (or sanctimonious Establishment Republican) tell them otherwise. Trump is their guy, and there is nothing further to discuss.

That odor you are detecting is from the dumpster outside RNC Headquarters. It already had a distinct bouquet, but now is accompanied by occasional puffs of smoke. It's not the only dumpster in town—there is one near virtually every conservative think tank in America. What you are witnessing, in real time, is possibly the final death blow for Ronald Reagan's Republican Party, and Ronald Reagan's Conservative Movement. When this election cycle is over, win or lose, there will still be a Republican Party, and there will still be a Conservative Movement, but Donald Trump may very well have vandalized the two into unrecognizability.

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