by Brooks Riley
Poem
Childhood
A Version after Iqbal
Earth & sky were new realms for me
My mother’s embrace the world
If anyone made me weep, I found
Comfort in rattling the door chain
O to gaze for hours at the moon
Journeying silently amidst clouds
Above mountains & deserts
Astonished at the blend of truth & lies
I trained my eyes to see, lips to move
My heart yearned
Translated from the original Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari whose collection ‘In Another Country’ is available here.
The Big Chill—The Missing Publishers
by Gail Pellett
The books published by Mighty Current had survived in the lively Hong Kong book market for two decades while being banned in China. They were particularly popular with mainland day tourists visiting Hong Kong. Now their popular bookstore is closed and the press is shut. Like any troubling story there are complexities and mysteries.
On Dec. 30, Lee Bo, one of Gui's business partners in the publishing company, suddenly disappeared as well. Lee and his wife owned the bookstore that sold their publications. Soon after disappearing Lee made a strange communication to his wife from Shenzhen that he was “working on an investigation.” His wife noted that he had left his passport at home. A passport he would need to enter Mainland China from Hong Kong. Lee Bo is a British citizen.
Last weekend, Sunday, Jan. 17, Gui, who is a naturalized Swedish citizen, suddenly showed up on CCTV —China's official TV network—confessing tearfully that he had violated his probation back in China for a drunken driving accident in 2003 that had ended in a fatality. Hong Kong based China watchers were quick to point out the edits in the video as revealed by the fact that Gui‘s t-shirt changed color mid-way.
Monday, January 18, 2016
David Bowie: An Appreciation Of A Life Of Dazzling Multiplicity
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
I once met David Bowie in London in 1972. He was wearing a pastel-pink, wide-brimmed, floppy, very girly hat. His face was lightly dusted with powder, his lips shone with a touch of gloss, his eyes sported pale blue eyeliner.
He was beautiful, ethereal, and otherworldly. Also friendly: an amused smile on his face, probably amused at my stuttering admiration. He seemed a creature from another dimension, a sprite, a ghost, an elf, a race unto himself. A presence more than a person. I felt I needed an unknown language to communicate with him. English would not be enough.
His smile appeared to appreciate me from a distance. He neither indulged nor disdained my admiration, simply took it. A gracious fellow. A gentleman. In fact, he was grace personified. Elegance emblemized.
Let's face it, the man had style. Like no other. He looked great, whether he was glammed out as Ziggy Stardust, or suited as the Thin White Duke.
I've related to Bowie — more than to Dylan and Lennon, my other pop heroes — because he kept changing. He showed us there is more than one way to be in the world. He made being an outsider OK. He made art out of alienation. Gender, music, identity — all was very fluid to him. I found him more congenial as a fellow creature than other stars, because he was so different, so original, and so various.
And his songwriting was pretty weird on top of being utterly wonderful — think of straight pop songs like Starman and Let's Dance, and then of really weird songs like Is There Life On Mars? and Space Oddity and Cygnet Committee.
Bowie was a freak. Who else was as freakily different and original as Bowie? And who has had such an influence on his fellow practitioners? One could not imagine Madonna without him, or Lady Gaga.
Is there too much competition in sport?
by Thomas R. Wells
Sports are mere games, “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” as Bernard Suits, the founder of the philosophy of games, puts it. So why do we care about them? The pleasure of sport has three distinct sources – competition, drama, and craft. Although each has their own logic and appeal, the defining characteristic of a flourishing sport is the harmonious balance it achieves between all three. In this light, the increasing dominance of competition across all sports is distinctly worrying. In the long run it may squeeze the very life out of them. The thin zero-sum perspective on sports that it embodies is already the source of the pernicious doping scandals, nationalism, and sexism in modern sports.
I
Competition – the chancing of fate and divine favour – is important but it is not the only kind of pleasure that sport can and should afford. The others though tend to make more demands on the spectator.
Biedermeier Sunset
by Carl Pierer
Published in 1932, Sunset Song is famed as one of the most important Scottish novels of the 20th century. As the first part in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Trilogy A 
As a classic text, it has received much attention and suffered many an interpretation, ranging from Marxist and Feminist to humanist and nationalist. But despite many doubtful attempts at classification, the work has defied reduction and remains a vivid testimony of rural life.
Perhaps the most striking of the novel's virtues is its language. Written in a distinctive style, it infuses Standard English with the rhythm and words of Scots dialect, giving the prose a unique lyrical flavour. Gibbon skilfully and consistently uses dialectal terms to be true to his motive, without rendering the text unintelligible to a non-Scots speaker. That the melody of the text is deeply rooted in the highlands has provoked remarks of the following sort:
The non-Scot can get a great deal out of Mitchell [i.e. Lewis Grassic Gibbon], but one can sympathize with Donald Carswell when he says that he did not appreciate the prose of Sunset Song until he heard a north-east girl reading it.[i]
Comments of this kind aptly illustrate the difficulty of appreciating the literary value of the novel without sliding into dubious political territory, against the author's intent.
A note on peppers
by Hari Balasubramanian
In the newly globalized world since 1492, American ‘peppers’, better known as chilies, began to make their way to the rest of the world and took hold quickly. Indeed, all the chili peppers that the world uses today, without exception – from the mild bell peppers used primarily for their deep flavors to the hot ones that Indian, Thai, Chinese, Korean and other cuisines take for granted – all are descended from the varieties cultivated for millennia by pre-Hispanic farmers in southern North America (Mexico primarily) and northern South America (Peru and Bolivia have many varieties). The fiery habanero, which scores high on the Scoville Heat Scale, is originally from the Amazon from where it reached Mexico.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
On Sepulchral Culture
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy
The dictionary tells me that a sepulchre is “a small room or monument, cut in rock or built of stone, in which a dead person is laid or buried”. I worry at the oxymoronic, “dead person”. Other romanticized words like “crypt”, “catacomb”, and “sarcophagus” serve as synonyms for those who do not quite like the cadence of “sepulchre”. Together, in medieval-esque glory, they capture for us the stories of death, memory, and memorialization, and cultures of dying. For this we share with all humankind, in that people die. The sorrow of their loss is mitigated by cultural processes that allow us to believe that their lives meant something.
There are no sepulchral museums in India. But memorialization is seen across the length of the country, from the sepulchral urns excavated at Adichanallur in South India, to the stone circles of Junapani in Nagpur, to the evidence of pit burials in Burzahoma, Kashmir. The Iron Age in these regions marks the beginning of the creation of separate areas for the dead.
The Insulated Lifestyle
by Emrys Westacott
Earlier this month I visited Florida for the first time in my life, staying for a few days with relatives who own a house in Vero Beach on the Atlantic coast. The good company, mild January weather, enjoyable outings and excellent grilled fish dinners made for a pleasant trip. My brief glimpse of this bit of the country was also most thought-provoking.
The house we stayed in is situated in a gated community, an extensive complex of large detached houses, each one different, but all built in a similar style surrounded by similar, highly kempt, low-maintenance landscaping–palm trees, shrubs, spiky green grass, brown bark mulch. Nearby are tennis courts for use by community residents. The gates to the complex are set back from a busy main road. Residents open them by punching a pass code into a machine at the entrance. Across the road is another set of gates leading to a private beach, also for the exclusive use of the community's residents.
One afternoon we took a walk along this beach, which was long, narrow, straight, and largely deserted. Big handsome waves came churning in, but no-one was to be seen swimming, or paddling. Nor were there any children playing on the sand. Not a bucket or spade in sight.
On another occasion I strolled all around the complex, exploring every cul-de-sac that branched off from the principal street. It was certainly peaceful. The speed limit throughout is 15 mph, and the few cars that passed me were sticking to that. There were hardly any other people on foot: in the course of an hour I encountered only one or two. And strangely, given the number of trees, I neither saw nor heard any birds. Not far away is the Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge which we visited one morning to observe pelicans, herons, egrets, and cormorants. But here among the houses there seemed to be no birdlife at all. Perhaps it was the time of day, or the time of year. Perhaps the birds didn't have the pass code needed to enter the complex. Or perhaps it was connected to the pesticide warning signs that dotted the lawns throughout.
Experiencing the moment
by Charlie Huenemann
“I must confess I can no longer reason with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu’d, which he calls himself; tho’ I am certain there is no such principle in me.”
It wasn’t long before alarm bells went off. In an appendix to his treatise, Hume admitted he was in deep trouble. The basis of his entire philosophy was the view that distinct events are, well, distinct: it is only our thinking that combines distinct events into ideas of enduring things, into stable causal regularities, into expectations of uniformity in nature, and so on. Our minds create the universe out of the diverse. But if we ourselves are diverse – if there is no unity even in us – then how we ever be able to pull off such a trick? Without a simple and continued thing to assemble all the broken fragments into a whole, how is the appearance of a whole ever to come about? “All my hopes vanish,” he wrote, as he entered into this deepest of all labyrinths. He provided no solution, not ever, and he never wrote on this subject again.
Monday, January 11, 2016
Mary Astell: The Conservative Feminist
by Grace Boey
“If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves?”
“She who Marrys ought to lay it down for an indisputable Maxim, that her Husband must govern absolutely and intirely, and that she has nothing else to do but to Please and Obey.”
– Mary Astell, Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1700)
* * *
Mary Astell, writer and philosopher of the late-17th and early-18th century, provides an intriguing paradox for the contemporary feminist. Modern scholars of her work have referred to her as the 'first English feminist'; yet, she was unabashedly conservative in ways that severely limited her ability to push boundaries for women.
Astell's fierce advocacy for women's education is perhaps her biggest claim to contemporary fame. 1694 saw the first publication of her book A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, in which she argued that women had the same intellectual and moral capacities as men, were equally deserving of education, and ought to emancipate themselves from the the vain and foolish social customs that bound them. To this end, Astell proposed the formation of a female-only educational academy.
Such views on women's education were remarkably radical for Astell's time, and her claims that women could be just as rational and virtuous as men went against popular sentiment. Her position on these matters will resonate strongly with the modern-day feminist. Consequently, the following excerpt from her later 1700 book, Some Reflections Upon Marriage, will come as a surprise—and perhaps disappointment—to some:
“She who Marrys ought to lay it down for an indisputable Maxim, that her Husband must govern absolutely and intirely, and that she has nothing else to do but to Please and Obey. She must not attempt to divide his Authority, or so much as dispute it, to struggle with her Yoke will only make it gall the more, but must believe him Wise and Good and in all respects the best, at least he must be so to her. She who can't do this is in no way fit to be a Wife.” (Reflections)
Despite what one might hope, the passage above isn't an isolated call by Astell for wives to submit to their husbands, no matter how lacking in wisdom or goodness he may be. Nor is it the case that Astell had changed her mind about the status of women by the time she started writing the Reflections; the Proposal itself is littered with calls for female subordination.
No Solace For Children
by Akim Reinhardt
I had arrived at the time and date requested. However, my initial visit to her room had been cut short amid the beeps and whirring of machinery. After some brief exchanges, she began to raise herself and then asked me to summon her aide.
“Please get Dr. Reinhardt some tea while he waits for me.”
During the whole of the visit, that was the one time her eyes sparkled and she was fierce and energetic, full of bearing and dignity. That she was truly herself.
I went to the kitchen with the aide. She had already poured me some iced tea when I'd first arrived. I retrieved the glass and said, “I think she wants you to go back in and help her come out.” The aide smiled and returned to the bedroom laboratory. I found a seat on the living room couch and took small sips while she helped my friend get herself together.
It took a few minutes. Terminal lung cancer patients move slowly. When she finally came out, it was with the help of the aide and a multi-pronged cane. Trailing behind her was a machine that facilitated breathing; she was tethered to it by a clear plastic tube attached to her nose with fasteners looped around her ears. She sat down gingerly and was engulfed by a wing back chair.
As we talked, we knew it would be the last time. Adults don't have to explain these things to each other. She gave me a colorful pouch with a drawstring. It contained a small gift of remembrance for a mutual friend who was out of town: polished stone jewelry from Afghanistan. The pouch itself, made in Oman, was for me. I asked if there was anything I could do for her.
“Take me to Oregon,” she responded.
I was puzzled. So far as I knew, she didn't have any family or friends in the Pacific Northwest. Indeed, I doubted that she'd ever even been there. She was originally from Ohio, started her family and got her doctorate there. She had lived in Maryland for decades, and had conducted her research in sub-Saharan Africa. I looked at her quizzically. “Oregon?”
“They have that law there.”
It took a moment, then I understood. Physician assisted suicide. She nodded, wheezing and in pain.
Eyes Swimming in Tears (Stendhal Syndrome)
by Leanne Ogasawara
Have you ever been moved to tears by a painting?
There is a wonderful letter, in James Elkins' Pictures and Tears, about museum goers looking at a landscape painting in Japan. The lady who wrote the letter to Elkins was in Tokyo as part of an Andy Warhol exhibition. Unable to speak the language and perhaps not all that knowledgeable about the culture, it had to be based on some kind of misunderstanding that she came to believe that the painting of a waterfall on rare display at the Nezu Museum, called Nachi Waterfall, was “a picture of God.”
This painting is a National Treasure of Japan and is not displayed so often (I never managed to see it in 22 years there). So, not surprisingly, the exhibition was jam-packed full of people there to see it.
In the letter, she described how beautifully dressed the people were, many in formal kimono and some looked to be college professors. She said it was like going to the Met, except that when she finally got near the picture, she found the people around her to all be silently standing there crying.
It is an extraordinary story in an extraordinary book.
Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever been overcome to tears by a painting? (It has to be a painting and it has to be tears).
Strained Analogies Between Recently Released Films and Current Events: The Road Chip and Powerball
by Matt McKenna
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed
Audiences spoke solemnly of “seeing the elephant” as an awe-inspiring encounter with a wondrous being. Others, who missed her appearances, pined for an opportunity to “see the elephant.” Soldiers during the Mexican-American War and Civil War even spoke of “seeing the elephant” as a metaphor for the incomprehensible experience of battle.
The sensational popularity of the Crowninshield Elephant led the way for others. The first elephant appeared in an American circus at the turn of the 19th century, and by the 1870s, impresarios defined their shows’ worth by the number of elephants they had. In response to decades of evangelical censure for displaying scantily clad human performers, circus owners pointed to their popular elephants as proof of their broader mission to educate and entertain.
With the advent of moving picture in the 20th Century the circus film became a minor genre. Charlie Chaplin made one, the Marx Brothers made two, Charlie Chan did a circus film, and Tod Browning’s Freaks is one of the greatest horror films ever made.
Disney too made a circus film, Dumbo, released in 1941, and it centers on a baby elephant whose extraordinarily large ears made him, and his mother, pariahs in the closed community of the circus’s animal menagerie. The circus’s association with small-town America played to Uncle Walt’s nostalgic streak. And the comfortable exoticism of the elephants is dead center in the weakest aspect of the Disney sensibility.
Yet in some ways Disney chose to play against his carefully cultivated small-town sensibility. Dumbo exploits the circus setting in ironic ways that are not characteristic of other Disney films, before or since. In the first place, this circus is not depicted as a source of wondrous entertainment. It is depicted as a place of hard work done by bored and cynical animals, avaricious and cruel clowns, and a megalomaniacal ringmaster. Dumbo himself is treated rather cruelly by vicious and snobbish matrons. This circus is not at all the Magic Kingdom of Disney’s TV series and theme parks. Rather, it is a biting depiction of mid-century America.
The Unknown Battle of Midway
by Eric Byrd
Becoming Moses: Part I*
by Josh Yarden
The shepherd in the cartoon gets it: You want to free the slaves? Why waste time appearing in flaming bushes, casting ten plagues and creating high drama. Just free the slaves. The Moses in the Bible, however, finds himself in an existential crisis: Why me? How? Who will listen to me? What should I say when I myself doubt I am capable of achieving my mission? The hero is perplexed… like everyone else who ever desired to change the world, yet also realizes that the challenge may be too great.
You don't have to be a prophet or the inspired leader of a nation to ask yourself, ‘Why me? Who will listen to what I have to say?' We all ask these questions in the face of the injustices we see. Regardless of what you believe about the origin and the meaning of the Bible, grappling with oppressors and oppression is a matter for humans to deal with. The biblical narrative reinforces this idea in multiple ways, from the Garden of Eden to the River Jordan. Humans have to make it on their own, enduring the hardships of everything from childbirth to cultivating the land in order to provide food for themselves to famine, slavery and battles to be free. That's life.
Monday, January 4, 2016
The Myth of Simple Truths
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
A minute in the Public Affairs section of any bookstore confirms this: Conservatives should talk to liberals “only if they must” because liberalism is a “mental disorder.” Liberals dismiss their Conservative opponents, since they are “lying liars” who use their “noise machine” to promote irrationality.
Both views betray a commitment to the Simple Truth Thesis, the claim that Big Questions always admit of a simple, obvious, and easily-stated solution. The Simple Truth Thesis encourages us to hold that a given truth is so simple and so obvious that only the ignorant, wicked, or benighted could possibly deny it. As our popular political commentary accepts the Simple Truth Thesis, there is a great deal of inflammatory rhetoric and righteous indignation, but in fact very little public debate over the issues that matter most. Consequently, the Big Questions over which we are divided remain unexamined, and our reasons for adopting our different answers are never brought to bear in public discussion.
This brings us back to our original observation – there seems to be so much debate. Yet what passes for public debate is in fact no debate at all. No surprise, really. Debate or discussion concerning a Big Question can be worthwhile only when there is more than one reasonable position regarding the question; and this is precisely what the Simple Truth Thesis denies.