Withered Rose
A version after Iqbal
By what words can I deem you
desire of the nightingale's heart?
The morning breeze was your cradle,
the garden a tray of perfumes.
My tears rain like dew,
and in my barren heart your ruin
an emblem of mine,
my life a dream of roses.
By Rafiq Kathwari, whose debut collection, In Another Country, is available here.
aby Maniza Naqvi
The first time I saw razor wire was along the checkpoint at Eretz in Gaza, a dozen years and change ago. And then more recently I'd seen it coiled atop the compound walls of the offices and homes of donor agencies in Addis Ababa, a city changing fast with shanty towns being mowed down to create overpasses and underpasses, Malls and residential paradises for the purchasing powerful foreigners and visiting and returning diaspora. And I'd seen it at the peripheries of a holiday lakeside resort in Malawi built on land grabbed from fishermen, razor wire, presumably to keep the animals out. Now I stared at the knife's edge of gobs of razor wire at ground level in Lahore. And the last time I'd seen such an array of foreign corporate journalists passing through the barricades to speak to the local citizens as the notable and primary experts on that country, on just about every aspect of it, was well—in Bosnia. Now here they were, ‘conflict' experts, some the same, doing the same thing in Lahore.
by Brooks Riley
The City
After Faiz Ahmad Faiz's “Yahan Se Sheher ko Dekho”
Look
My city bedecks itself in fetters
The carefree walk
The careless talk
No more
The head held high
The feet unbound
No more
No more
I trust
Light from dark
Wine from blood
Joy from mourning
Flowers in my city
Wilt into the dust
by Anjum Altaf, who curates the The South Asian Idea Weblog, a learning resource for college students in South Asia.
by Ali Minai
Following the Paris attacks, President Hollande of France declared, “France is at war!” Similar pronouncements have been made by world leaders, analysts and pundits since 9/11. Some see the conflict with jihadi terrorists as a “clash of civilizations”; others as a “battle of ideas”, pitting modern liberal democracy against a regressive ideology. Yet others have declared it to be a “battle for the soul of Islam.” Those wedded to conventional geopolitics see it in terms of military engagements, covert operations and counterinsurgency. There is some element of truth to all these characterizations, but only in the sense that the five blind men of India had some part of the truth about the elephant. What has remained largely unacknowledged is the terrible truth that this is the first war of its kind – a brand new thing never before seen in history, and therefore one for which there is no prior wisdom. It is the first great conflict of the age of globalization, and its phenomenology reflects that of a complex, nonlinear, self-organizing networked world. To make an imperfect analogy, it is to ordinary warfare what quantum physics is to Newtonian physics. It is a war where things don't add up normally, where distant events can be strangely entangled, where common sense may be a liability, and where the very geometry of comprehension is distorted.
Aging Face
With mirrors the aging face became personal.
It hung before only on the heads of others,
but with realization that the still surface
of a pond returned the image of the seer,
when polished metals revealed a clear and troubling truth,
when a silver-backed square of glass
served up serial images of hard fact so precisely
denial was impossible,
the aging face became a self portrait
in intimate time, like a film frame
on a reel of a fresh spring field
which, between glimpses,
had been raked by a ruthless gardener
determined to turn new life into that
which can only be remembered
Jim Culleny
11/16/15
by Carl Pierer
Suppose ¬Φ. Then γ.
Δ.
∴, ¬γ.
Contradiction! ∴ Φ.
Here, we deduce an immediate consequence (γ) from the assumption that ¬Φ and then proceed by a sequence of logical steps (Δ) to show that this leads to ¬γ – a blatant contradiction. For example, let us say our statement to prove is:
Φ: is not a rational number
Then, ¬Φ is ” is a rational number” and an immediate consequence of this would be:
γ: Then we can write √2 = m/n , where m,n are natural numbers, such that m,n are coprime. That is, m/n is an irreducible fraction.
One standard proof then goes as follows:
1. Then, 2 = m2/n2
2. So, 2n2 = m2
3. This means, m is even.
4. So m can be written as m = 2k for some natural number k.
5. Thus: 2n2 = (2k)2
6. Ergo, 2n2 = 4k2
7. And hence: n2 = 2k2
8. So n is even.
9. Then 2 divides both n and m.
10. Therefore, ¬γ.
Now, we have the desired contradiction, and therefore we conclude Φ.
Suppose ¬Φ. Then:
Δ.
∴ μ.
But ¬μ! Contradiction. Therefore, Φ.
Here, ¬μ is some generally accepted mathematical truth, such as 1 ≠ 2. In contrast to the internal contradiction, it need not be a statement that is a consequence of ¬Φ. ¬μ is some statement in the general corpus of mathematical truths (i.e. proven statements) and is not necessarily linked in its content to Φ.
Now, the astute reader might question the meaningfulness of the distinction between internal and external contradiction. In particular, since μ appeared in the proof of Φ, there must be a sequence of logical derivations that relate the two. So, one might ask, how much sense does it make to distinguish between a “direct” consequence of ¬Φ and one that is related by a longer sequence of logical steps? Certainly, formally speaking, such an objection is valid. But there seems to be an intuitive sense in which some consequences are more immediate than others, and this is all that is needed at this stage.
by Charlie Huenemann
Plato, as we know, told tales of an abstract realm beyond the senses, a realm beyond the dim and dark cave we call “the world.” It was a realm of forms, first glimpsed through the discipline of mathematics, and more thoroughly known through philosophical cross-examination, or dialectic. It’s not clear just how much religion there was in Plato’s own philosophy, but that philosophy certainly was enlarged into mystical proportions by the time of Plotinus (204-270 c.e.).
Hypatia's life and death has been refashioned many times over the centuries, usually in the attempt either to attack or to defend organized religion. Just reading a pair of book titles is enough to give the general idea. In 1720, the infamous atheist John Toland published Hypatia, or the History of a Most Beautiful, Most Virtuous, Most Learned and in Every Way Accomplished Lady; Who Was Torn to Pieces by the Clergy of Alexandria, to Gratify the Pride, Emulation, and Cruelty of the Archbishop, Commonly but Undeservedly Titled St. Cyril. (Earlier times featured the most informative book titles!) Toland's book was answered promptly in a pamphlet by Thomas Lewis, entitled The History of Hypatia, a Most Impudent School-Mistress of Alexandria: In Defense of St. Cyril and the Alexandrian Clergy from the Aspersions of Mr. Toland. I know of these titles from a more recent work with the decidedly more neutral title, Hypatia of Alexandria, by Maria Dzielska (1995). Dzielska offers an overview of all the various uses in both fiction and scholarly literature to which Hypatia has been put to use, and then delivers a very plausible and thorough account of what we can plausibly put forward as the facts of the case.
by Brooks Riley
by Mara Naselli
One evening in February 2012, I was in a Chicago noodle shop looking for a table for one. The television was on—a news report from Syria. The Syrian Army had begun its attack on Homs. The frame of the screen, jostling in the confusion, captured the faces of a woman and a boy. The woman was distraught. The boy, bewildered. I watched agape, for an instant transposing myself in the place of the woman and my own sons in the place of the boy. Children cannot take in their shattering world. The slight young man waiting tables that evening must have seen something in my expression. He changed the channel to a soccer match.
The poet and artist David Jones was just nineteen years old when he enlisted in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers as an infantryman in the British army in January 1915. Later that year, just after his twentieth birthday, he was serving on the western front until he was wounded in July 1916.
For the next two decades Jones wrote In Parenthesis, his account of his experiences in the First World War. It is not an easy read. There are many different kinds of language at work in Jones’s modern epic—not just the Welsh, English, and Cockney of the infantrymen and officers, but also the military jargon and slang, rhymes, and popular songs. There are also the well-known allusions to Arthurian legend, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Hopkins, Coleridge, and others. Jones’s language—its syntax, sound, and diction—was so foreign to me, I found myself enchanted and lost. I copied out long passages, including the footnotes, to track this myriad mind at work.
A Professor To His Coy Doctoral Student
(with apologies to Andrew Marvell)
Had we but world enough, and time,
Procrastination were no crime.
We would sit down and think, and talk,
Sketch plans for drafts in yellow chalk,
Read, discuss, and once again read . . .
We'd hardly ever feel a need
To put ourselves upon the rack
And pick up pen or plug in Mac.
Thou in the library would find
Countless delights to charm thy mind.
An hundred years you there might spend
Perusing volumes without end,
Gathering insights, culling quotes,
Checking references and notes,
Rounding out your self-instruction,
Just to draft your Introduction.
Two hundred more to settle on
A good title for Chapter One;
And thirty thousand for the next
Ten pages of completed text.
An equal time I'd grant for you
Simply to outline Chapter Two.
And after that, at least an age
To bring perfection to each page;
'Til you, clearing each confusion,
Reach your breathtaking conclusion.
But looming up ahead, I fear,
The final deadline drawing near.
And after that before you lie
Deserts of aidless penury.
And then your struggle will indeed
Be hard, with nought on which to feed
Save thoughts and theories from the past.
Do you with these wish to hold fast?
Ideas may be food for thought
But you need quite another sort
Of sustenance, else hunger must
Reduce you and your dreams to dust.
The grave is not the worst of states,
But no-one from there graduates.
Now, therefore, while upon you lies
The sheen of youth; and in your eyes
A gleam of sense can be discerned,
Make use of all that you have learned!
Don't wait 'til you're beneath the net
Of unpaid bills and mounting debt,
With spouses nagging in your ear
About your lack of a career,
And kids who keep you up all night,
And pee all over what you write.
Abandon your imprudent ways!
Bring to an end your student days.
Though you may not have wisdom's keys,
At least you will pay no more fees.
And if, having fir'd your best shot,
You realize that you have not
Broken through the gates of knowledge–
You'll at least be out of college.
by Emrys Westacott
by Sue Hubbard
Until 19th October 2015, Ambika P3 Gallery, University of Westminster, London
Born in 1950, an adolescent viewing of Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot Le Fou (1965) decided her career as a film-maker. After moving to Paris she took part in the seminal events of May 1968, then in New York met the cinematographer Babette Mangolte and hung out in avant-garde circles with the likes of Jonas Mekas and Michael Snow. Mostly widely known as a film-maker, her Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, made in 1975 when she was 24, is said to have influenced film makers from Michael Haneke to Todd Haynes. But it was to the cavernous underground industrial space of The University of Westminster's Ambika P3 gallery that I went to see, what has turned out to be, her swan-song exhibition. The central work, NOW, was commissioned for this year's Venice Biennale. Akerman was working with curators on the show until close to her death.
Her work requires patience, like the reading of a complex modernist poem. It unfolds slowly, so there is not an obvious sense of a coherent whole but rather images that fit together to create associations and metaphors. Maniac Summer (2009) is a disquieting piece that explores, among other things, the passing of time. A digital clock counts the seconds of each recording, evoking Hereklitian notions of being unable to step into the same river twice. Though, of course, the irony is that the technical innovation of video allows for a constant revisiting. Shot from the vantage point of her surprisingly bourgeois Parisian apartment, the camera is left unattended so we see her at her desk fiddling on her mobile phone and taking care of daily appointments, pottering around her kitchen amid normal domestic clutter, or isolated alone in dark silhouette. Outside children play in the park and the camera pans along empty streets, their pulled shutters closed like eyelids. Some of the images are manipulated, moving from colour to black and white. Shadows appear smudged on the wall like the afterglow of a nuclear holocaust. There is singing or, perhaps, chanting. Doors bang. This is the minutiae of life. Yet there's a sense that everything is vulnerable, everything transient. That all we will leave behind are traces.
by S. Abbas Raza
Some of my nieces and nephews are now at an age where they sometimes call me to ask how to cook simple Pakistani dishes (Pakistani cooking is the same as Northern Indian cooking, while the cuisine of South India is very different) and this gave me the idea of writing a cookbook specifically for South Asian students in the West who miss home-cooked food. I am quite proud of the book since it seems that it does what it claims to do quite well, which is teach complete beginners how to cook this kind of food. About forty people (about half South Asian and the other half hailing from countries in four different continents) have tested recipes from the book and I am pleased to report that their responses were unanimously very positive. Here is the Foreword from the book, written by my friend and 3QD colleague Robin Varghese:
Following this unlikely education, I would regularly ask my mother for recipes for my favorite of her dishes. But the sequence of my learning was wrong. I hadn't learned the basics first, and without them, my cooking would never evoke home.
Many of you who are reading this now are probably very far from South Asia. More to the point, you are very far from your family kitchen and cook. Chances are that you find yourselves somewhere rather alien, and what you really need is something that conspires to make your new surroundings, to borrow from a poet, “assume the furniture of home”. And since, for most of us, nothing creates the sense of home better than a dish that tastes of home, what you could really use is a cookbook that lets you recreate the food you miss.
Abbas has written that cookbook, but it is meant to be more than that. For those of you who are far from India or Pakistan, what you have is a way back for a time. For those of you from elsewhere, the pages that follow will allow you to get a solid foundation in the basics. And most of us—South Asian and non-South Asian alike—could do with a foundation in the basics.
When I say the basics, I mean the basics, and here that simply means, reliable, and perfectly repeatable recipes and techniques. A lot of cookbooks these days start off “against” authenticity, push impermanence, and celebrate “new expressions”. But the basics come well before and that is where we all should start.
Abbas once asked me if I've ever made the same curry twice. (Yes, he plays a culinary Parmenides to my Heraclitus.) While I'd like to think I can, I don't truly know if I have. He asked me this because making the same spot-on queema or chicken salan or rice again and again is second nature for him. Once you're done with this book, it will be for you too. In any case, as you will soon discover, Abbas is very good at explaining things.
Here is a website for the book where you can learn much more about it and also get a copy:
My wife and I had great fun cooking and testing all the recipes and photographing all the finished dishes (it took a few months), and we had even more fun one day (with my friend Georg Hofer) making an extremely silly book trailer video in the beautiful dolomite mountains just a few minutes from where I live. You might be amused to notice that I am also nervously flying the drone which is doing the photography. 🙂
by Tasneem Zehra Husain
The development of [my] thought-world is in a certain sense a continuous flight from wonder.
—Albert Einstein
We are marked in large part by our celebrations: what we celebrate, and how we choose to do so, says a lot about who we are. As a global society, we seem to be increasingly fascinated with genius, and almost sixty years after his death, Einstein continues to be emblematic of this phenomenon. Over time, he has become larger than life – more myth than man.
In the annals of physics, Einstein's footprints are everywhere; his contributions as various and scattered as if they too, were subject to the brownian motion he elucidated. Along most paths he trod, he left staggering achievements in his wake. Einstein made crucial contributions to a nascent quantum theory, his incisive explanation of the photoelectric effect was so brilliant, it won him the Nobel Prize, and yet, most physicists, if asked to name Einstein's definitive work, would unblinkingly pick general relativity. The theory celebrates its hundredth birthday in a couple of weeks, and festivities are underway across the globe.
Over four successive Thursdays in November 1915, Einstein presented his (still developing) theory to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. He laid down The Formal Foundations on 4 November 1915, and worked feverishly every day, polishing and honing the theory, coaxing out some of the gems that lay hidden within, until finally, on 25 November he unveiled the spectacular Field Equations of Gravitation.
“Hardly anyone who truly understands it will be able to escape the charm of this theory,” wrote Einstein in this final paper, and his remark has stood the test of time, just as well as his equations have. The General Theory of Relativity is a work of unparalleled beauty; in fact, it exemplifies what it means for a physical theory to be beautiful, and is often quoted as the canonical example of such.
There is an air of inevitability about general relativity, which Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg equates with beauty. “In listening to a piece of music or hearing a sonnet one sometimes feels an intense aesthetic pleasure at the sense that nothing in the work could be changed, that there is not one note or one word that you would want to have different,” he writes. It is so with general relativity. No idea or symbol seems extraneous or out of place.
by Paul Braterman
For disrespectful blogging and criticism of the religious authorities, one thousand lashes, to be administered 50 at a time. A fine of one million Riyals (roughly £170,000). 10 years in jail. If, like me, you have been wondering what horrible crimes could merit so severe a punishment, now you can find out.
I 
Having read the offending blog posts, I am shocked. Not because they are strident, or violent, or opposed to religion, or subversive of government, but because they are none of these things, and yet have attracted so extreme a reaction.
A brief foreword to the book (see below) is followed by a short preface, by the bilingual TV journalist Constantin Schreiber. This places Badawi's writings in context, and describes how the hopes he expressed in the days of the Arab Spring have been dashed by events. Unlike Schreiber, I am neither an Arabic speaker nor an expert on events in the Middle East, so I am doing my best here using the English language translation and my own limited background knowledge. If I have been guilty of any mistakes or misinterpretations, I hope that better-informed readers will point these out.
The first piece is a plea for freedom of thought and expression, using a quotation from the Quran itself in support. The second, a complaint against censorship and the outrage synthesised to justify it, begins with the unconsciously prophetic words
Many of the Islamist activists of Saudi Arabia dream of the return of an era along gone: they fantasize about the times of the caliphs. Those caliphs were known to banish and murder their opponents.… The modern Islamists hope history will repeat itself.
Indeed, we now once again have a self-styled caliph, at the head of the entity known as Daesh, [1] that now of all times needs no further discussion by me.
.
.
Fundamental Misunderstanding
— thoughts on Charlie Hebdo, and Kenya and Beirut …and Paris
everything ever written or said
everything drawn or played or sung
every headline that cried or bled
every fresco, every poem
everything wrung from our cranial sponge
every inky insult flung
every instrument ever made
every expletive blasted from lungs
every face on a canvas hung
every righteous canto prayed
…. that pounded the planks of heaven’s floor
every school Kalashnikov-sprayed
every smartass quote with bite
every thought of rich or poor
every Icarus grasping at height
…. whose waxy wings soon came apart
every joke and laugh and snort
every misbegotten poison dart
every sentiment or thing
…. that burst from brain’s well-tensioned spring
every sura, gospel or verse
every prayer that followed a hearse
every love, lost or won
every song and every hum
every murmuring merciful must
that reached the sky or bit the dust
are not of a glad or angry God
…………………..but of life that thrusts,
from inner to outer, the stuff of us
Jim Culleny
1/6/14
.
.
by Akim Reinhardt
Why a duopoly? Probably because of they way the U.S. electoral system is structured. Duverger's Law tells us that a two-party duopoly is the very likely outcome when each voter gets one vote and can cast it for just one candidate to determine a single legislative seat.
However, in order to maintain absolute control of American politics and fend off challenges from pesky third parties, the Democrats and Republicans needed to remain somewhat agile. The times change, and in the endless quest to crest 50%, the parties must change with them.
Since the Civil War, both parties have shown themselves flexible enough to roll with the changes. The Civil War, the Great Depression, and Civil Rights era each upended the political landscape, leading political constituencies to shift, and forcing the Democrats and Republicans to substantially and permanently reorient themselves.
Now, several decades removed from the last major reshuffling of the two major parties, we may be witnessing yet another major transformation of the duopoly as the elephant and the donkey struggle to remain relevant amid important social changes. The convulsions of such a shift are reflected in the tumultuous spectacle of the parties' presidential nomination processes.
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
Redouble our efforts to fight ISIS?
No. How about the exact opposite?
Why not stop fighting ISIS? Why not let America and the West — the former colonial powers — get the hell out of the Middle East, and let those troglodytes fight their own battles among themselves?
Let me state the plain truth: if we got the hell out of the Middle East, the terrorists would get the hell out of our lives.
So, please, sil vous plait: let them have at one another in their horrorshow dance of damnable death without us helping anyone kill anyone else.
Let ISIS have their damn Caliphate.
Let Syria fight itself empty of people, where they cannot feed themselves because of a drought brought on by climate change anyway, with millions fleeing the country (from 22 million people, they're now down to 16.6 million, with millions in neighboring refugee camps, or on their way to Europe, or already there).
Let Saudi-Arabia clobber Yemen, and keep treating its women like shit, and keep publicly beheading people for blasphemy and witchcraft, and stone women to death for adultery, and continue being the worst state on planet Earth (naturally, we are their best friends, which probably makes us the second worst state on planet Earth).
Let the Taliban battle the corrupt leaders of Afghanistan.
Let the Iraqi Shiites continue giving their Sunnis hell, so ISIS keeps growing.
Let Israel do battle with Hezbollah and the Palestinians on their own till the day there are more Arabs than Jews in Israel, when the Israelis will finally have to give up and make a deal.
by Matt McKenna
by Bill Benzon
No, I don’t think it is, morally repugnant; quite the contrary. But it IS controversial and problematic, and that’s what I want to deal with in this post. But I don’t want to come at it directly. I want to ease into it.
As some of you may have gathered, I have been trained as an academic literary critic, and academic literary criticism forswore value judgments in the mid-1950s, though surreptitious reneged on the deal in the 1980s. In consequence, overt ethical criticism is a bit strange to me. I’m not sure how to do it. This post is thus something of a trial run.
I take my remit as an ethical critic from “Literature as Equipment for Living” by the literary critic, Kenneth Burke [1]. Using words and phrases from several definitions of the term “strategy” (in quotes in the following passage), he asserts that (p. 298):
… surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images, and to so organize them that one “imposes upon the enemy the time and place and conditions for fighting preferred by oneself.” One seeks to “direct the larger movements and operations” in one’s campaign of living. One “maneuvers,” and the maneuvering is an “art.”
Given the subject matter of The Wind Rises, Burke’s military metaphors are oddly apt, but also incidental. The question he would have us put to Mizayaki’s film, then, might go something like this: For someone who is trying to make sense of the world, not as a mere object of thought, but as an arena in which they must act, what “equipment” does The Wind Rises afford them?
I note that it is one thing for the critic to answer the question for his or herself. The more important question, however, is the equipment the film affords to others. But how can any one critic answer that? I take it then that ethical criticism must necessarily be an open-ended conversation with others. In this case, I will be “conversing” with Miyazaki himself and with Inkoo Kang, a widely published film critic.
