by Robert Fay

The great Mexican writer Sergio Pitol died in April. He was 85, a recipient of the Cervantes Award—the highest honor for works in the Spanish language—and in his The Art of Flight trilogy, he writes of his 20 years living and working in Europe, “the thread that ties those years together, I’ve always known, is literature…for many years, my experience traveling, reading, writing merged into a single experience.” The particular life he lead as “a man of letters,” is now unrepeatable, even by today’s best writers. And it’s not a lack of talent or courageousness, but of the inevitable consequence of cultural indifference. Literature must be respected or at least feared to have relevance, and the resulting electricity from this attention is the crucial spark for great lives, competitive coteries, great books, and perhaps most critical of all, a savvy reading public who awaits genius, demands it, and who lives for the spirit of the logos.

The Art of Flight, written in Pitol’s final years, demonstrates a freedom of form that many writes yearn to explore, but find they have neither the courage nor the savoire faire to take on. The trilogy is a pastiche of memoir, travel reportage, literary criticism, dream diaries and stolen glances from Pitol’s working notebooks. In 1960 after scattered work as a translator, Pitol joined the Mexican Foreign Service as a cultural attaché and served for over 20 years at a number of posts, including Moscow, Barcelona, Belgrade and Rome. His career afforded him the privilege to meet an enviable array of international writers, artists, academics and diplomats, an opportunity well beyond what Mexico City and its regional, Spanish-language literary milieu could have provided. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

In April, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee voted favorably on a bill aimed at protecting Special Counsel Robert Mueller from being fired by the President without good cause. Some Republican senators doubted the legality of the bill, based on a one-judge dissent in a U.S. Supreme Court case decided in 1988, Morrison v. Olson. One senator even considered himself “bound” by Justice Scalia’s dissent in that case. A dissent in a case in Supreme Court, or any court, is the losing argument and cannot bind anyone to follow its reasoning. Was Scalia’s opinion correct and the rest of the Supreme Court justices made a terrible mistake? Maybe shooting down the bill is what the framers of the Constitution–because this is in fact a constitutional question–would have wanted? Well, no. As constitutional scholar Victoria Nourse writes, “Cloaking themselves in Scalia’s lonely and incorrect dissenting opining, senators opposing the Integrity Act are attempting to upend the Constitution by embracing a dangerous constitutional argument contrived to render the President immune from scrutiny.”

The so-called unitary executive theory animates critics’ claims that the bill impermissibly curtails the President’s authority. Under this theory, any attempt to limit the President’s control over the executive branch is seen as unconstitutional. You may recall it rearing its head during George W. Bush’s presidency, as its adherents relied on it to justify the infamous “torture memo” drafted by White House counsel John Yoo, who argued, “The historical record demonstrates that the power to initiate military hostilities, particularly in response to the threat of an armed attack, rests exclusively with the President. [. . .] Congress’s support for the President’s power suggests no limits on the Executive’s judgment whether to use military force in response to the national emergency.” Carried to its extreme, the unitary executive theory could potentially undermine a democracy. Read more »

by Bill Murray

Polynesia could swallow up the entire north Atlantic Ocean. It’s that big.

Only half of one per cent of Polynesia is land, and 92 per cent of that is New Zealand. Then there’s Tonga and Samoa, the Cook and Hawaiian islands, the French possessions, and back in its own lonely corner, Rapa Nui, the famous Easter Island. Four and a half hours flying time to South America and six hours to Tahiti, Rapa Nui is a mote, a tiny place that feels tiny, forlorn, a footnote.

How in the world did proto-Polynesians cast their civilization from Papua New Guinea all the way to Rapa Nui in canoes, with thousand year old tech, sailing against prevailing winds and all odds?

If you think about it at all, you might suppose Rapa Nui was an accidental discovery, storm-damaged canoes drifting off course, perhaps, or voyages of exile dashed upon obscure rocks. Who imagines resolute, purposeful voyages of discovery on stone-age ships no match for the vastness of the sea?

I do. I fancy single-minded voyages of exploration carried out by well-provisioned scouts sailing with, say, a month’s food, who set out in the more difficult direction, “close to the wind.” If no land were found in a fortnight, when half the food was gone, they could sail home downwind, faster. Read more »

by Richard Passov

Researching the history of a particular computer has taken me along an arc spanning George Boole to Claude Shannon. By some measures the works of these men combine to give us our modern, programmable computer. 

Shannon recast Boole’s Calculus of Thought into the modern symbolism for computer logic. And while that work has been labeled as the most important master’s thesis of the 20th century, ten years later Shannon would release a more profound work – his Theory of Information.

Profound works are sometimes simple and perhaps this is why a few mathematicians derided Information Theory. Shannon, secure in his finding, generally ignored his critics. Among his many endeavors and though unnecessary, John Pierce took up Shannon’s defense. That’s how I found his writings. 

Sometimes men have been concerned with religion, sometimes with mathematics and philosophy, sometimes with exploration, trade and conquest, sometimes with the theory and practice of government, sometimes with ancient learning, sometimes with the arts. —John R. Pierce in Electrons, Waves and Messages

*       *      *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Pierce and Shannon worked together at Bell Labs. By the time Shannon came aboard Pierce was a mainstay, having risen to director of “…all research concerned with Electrical Communications.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Michael Liss

Will you know what to do when the atomic bomb drops? This question, and others like it, are vividly on display in the 4K restoration of Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Pierce Rafferty’s 1982 documentary, The Atomic Café. Having seen the movie when it was first released (my kids’ reaction to this information was “of course you did”) I was determined to return to my roots. But, this being 2018, I took full advantage of technologies not available in the Neolithic Age: I quickly went online and bought two tickets for a night when the filmmakers themselves would be there for a Q&A. Then I fired off a few text messages to friendly liberals of a similar vintage to see who else was going, because you really don’t go to one of these things without a posse.  

I was not to be disappointed.  Six of us converged on the newly renovated, but still decidedly funky Film Forum.  First, my 26-year old son, who spared me the dubious honor of being the only person in the audience in a suit, white shirt, and dark tie (we looked like refugees from a Book of Mormon casting call). Then four of the like-minded, three of whom could be described as gracefully aging hipsters (wearing, respectively, a pair of gray braids, a great-looking gray Van Dyke, and a graying inside out T-shirt) and finally, my pal (and liberal conscience) Melinda.  

I could write books about Melinda, and I should, because there aren’t enough Melindas in the world.  She’s a Yellow Dog Texas Democrat who brought with her to New York an indestructible accent, an odd affinity for driving minivans as basic transportation in a car-unfriendly city, and an inexhaustible capacity for good works. If there was a protest anywhere, Melinda knew about it, probably organized it, and occasionally got arrested for it. There are still places that are off-limits to her, for a variety of Deep State-ish reasons. Greenwich Village, of course, is not one of them. Melinda is the genuine article.

But I digress. The movie is the thing you came to see, and the movie is what you should get. Read more »

by Nickolas Calabrese

There are two dogmatic justifications (or really non-justifications) that are provided time and time again when discussing the production of abstract art. First is ‘material exploration’, and second is ‘freedom’. If you have ever contemplated certain abstract artworks with skepticism, rest assured that your incredulity is not crazy. Even if the work has been accepted and defended by respectable critics, there is a profoundly problematic reasoning employed in the defense of a good portion of what I will call for present purposes dogmatic abstraction. This text will address what counts as weak justification for abstract art, as well as why justification in art is essential for understanding it at all. Justifying artworks is equivalent to having an alibi – it is the only good reason why the artist isn’t lying. It is the basis from which we can discern good from bad art.

The problem with speaking about art dogmatically is that it becomes an assumption, something taken for granted as true without proper interrogation. When reasons are supposedly beyond critique, then the artwork in question is bulletproofed. Providing and obtaining reasons in the artworld is something that is almost holy – it is a leap of faith because art usually has no precedent save for other artworks. Formally an artwork requires reasons because it did not exist hitherto and has no use until the maker wills it. Accordingly, the consecrated act of providing and receiving reasons – of justification – is what is at stake when dogma is offered instead of a shrewdly thoughtful account. These two dogmatic suppositions are not just false in general but false in detail. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

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

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

by Niall Chithelen

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

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

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

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

Birthday 77
………… —next morning

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

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

Jim Culleny
8/10/18

by Lexi Lerner

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

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

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

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

First week field notes:

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

Read more »

by Amanda Beth Peery

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

by Brooks Riley