by Brooks Riley
Vested in War
by Maniza Naqvi
Once again, as has always been the case come fall; September and October, all these past fifteen years and more, the so called leaders of the world have resolved to continue to bomb and bomb and bomb in order to save humanity. That's all they've got going for themselves, bombs. In the name of terrorism.
The Pentagon and its collaborators mainly in Hollywood, Media, Politics, Development and so forth, as the marketing agents for weapons manufacturers, have succeeded in only one project: the branding of a religion and therefore over 2 billion people, as being something else. Enemy combatants. In the name of vests. A vest trumps, drones, bombs, cruise missiles, uranium depleted ammunition, white phosphorus bombings. A vest.
This branding conversation, this fall too, remains and is in fact dialing up to maximize war profits and keep the world on the edge of suicide. As migrants fled war, and continued to don life vests and braved the seas between Turkey and Western Europe trying to wash up alive onto the shores of Greece to then walk further northward to refuge and away from war, and the latest pilgrims to become victims of the Saudis, died in their hundreds during the Hajj in Mecca, another set of migrants and pilgrims made their annual pilgrimage to the Mecca for diplomacy to the headquarters of the UN in New York to agree on one thing—more war, more bombings. The solutions, put forth, no matter what, revolve around religion and bombings. The Holy Roman Empire, it seems is on the rise, still glittering in the vestments of old.
Love and Sensibility
by Dwight Furrow
Philosophers have come down on either side of the dilemma. Luminaries such as Plato, St. Thomas Aquinas, Hume, and Kant have tried to argue without much success that beauty or sexual attraction are the precursors of love. But we can surely love things that are not beautiful or sexually attractive; in fact we often love what is ugly. More recently, Harry Frankfurt has argued that love is a kind of brute fact. We love things for no reason—it's just a fact that we do so and bestow value then on the things we love. For Frankfurt, things have value because we care about them and thus their value cannot be a justification of why we care on pain of circularity.
Monday, October 5, 2015
Banglaphone Fiction III
by Claire Chambers
Something rather different comes out of fiction by three Bengali women writers based in Britain, as compared to the male authors I examined in Banglaphone Fiction I and II. In this third and final part of the essay, I first examine Monica Ali who, in her novel Brick Lane, mostly evokes life in Britain, with only occasional and usually proleptic descriptions of Bangladesh. By contrast, Sunetra Gupta's Memories of Rain is at once intercontinental, urban, and stateless – often all within a single sentence. The final author Tahmima Anam deploys an alternative strategy again, choosing, in A Golden Age and The Good Muslim, to abjure representations of Britain altogether, in favour of a concentrated focus on the Bangladeshi nation.
Let us begin by looking at a resonant passage from the early part of Brick Lane, Monica Ali's 2003 novel that like Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize:
‘This is another disease that afflicts us,' said the doctor. ‘I call it Going Home
Syndrome. Do you know what that means?' He addressed himself to Nazneen. …
‘[W]hen they have saved enough they will get on an aeroplane and go?'
‘They don't ever really leave home. Their bodies are here but their hearts are back there. And anyway, look how they live: just recreating the villages here. … But they will never save enough to go back. … Every year they think, just one more year. But whatever they save, it's never enough.'
‘We would not need very much,' said Nazneen. Both men looked at her. She spoke to her plate.
No text exemplifies more clearly the contrast between the England-returned and the myth of return migrants that I discuss elsewhere than Brick Lane. The above quotation illustrates what the medical man Dr Azad calls ‘Going Home Syndrome', a disease that he claims afflicts Bangladeshi migrants. This links with a strand in the novel about the migrant's sense of being out of place, which can lead to mental illness such as Nazneen's collapse due to ‘nervous exhaustion'. (See Esra Santesso's Disorientation for a good reading of this.)
Probably the most important means by which migrants either try to assimilate in the host country or turn away from it towards the homeland is through education. At first, Nazneen's husband Chanu imagines himself to be immune to Going Home Syndrome, and tries instead to make a life for himself in Britain. When he arrives in England, all Chanu has is the usual few pounds in his pocket, along with the significant additional item of his degree certificate. In England he undertakes classes in everything from nineteenth-century economics to cycling proficiency, and acquires further certificates. These he frames and displays on the wall of his and Nazneen's poky Tower Hamlets home, as a talisman of his hopes of promotion at work and the consequent acquisition of a comfortable life in London. Yet his dreams remain unrealized, whether because of institutional racism at his work or his own incompetence is never made clear. Chanu's aspirations then take a bitter turn towards his becoming an England-returned success story. He clings increasingly to the fantasy of returning to Dhaka in financial and social triumph. However, as sociologist Muhammad Anwar argues, this notion of return migration often proves to be a myth, especially because wives and children help men to put down roots in the new country. Nazneen and especially her young daughters Shahana and Bibi fear their father's longed-for homecoming. The rationale for going back to Dhaka is tenuously based on a saviour complex – to rescue Nazneen's sister, the vulnerable ingenue Hasina whose unwittingly alarming letters to Nazneen about sexual grooming and exploitation pepper the narrative – but the three women now have roots in Britain. They decide to stay on. Trailing clouds of defeat more than glory, the patriarch Chanu goes home on his own.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
A Daytrip to the Calais Jungle: a problem on our doorstep
by Sue Hubbard
As the sun rises I stand on the deck and watch the White Cliffs of Dover disappear and think how easy it is for me to cross this narrow strip of water and how hard it is for so many others in the world.
Monday, September 28, 2015
Monday Poem
Gong and Pennywhistle
.
you can play a cheap pennywhistle
or beat on a big gold gong
down here on earth in the soft grass or stinging thistles
nobody stays here for long
those up on high
and those way down low
breath the same bitter air
we’ll just have to see how it goes
you can bring down the house with your gong if you’re not careful
the house can be had for a song
but many a song has been more than tearful
for both the weak and the strong
sing for the loss of the high
sing for the loss of the low
who breathe the same bitter air
we’ll just have to see how it goes
the future’s been sold, the contract’s more than settled
it’s clauses clear as a bell
no profit’s too high —the market in precious metal,
buy everything you can sell
those up on high
and those way down low
breath the same bitter air
we’ll just have to see how it goes
you can play a cheap tin pennywhistle
or beat on a big gold gong
down here on earth in the soft grass or stinging thistle
nobody stays here for long
by Jim Culleny
1/14/14
Copyright 2014
“We talked about passion, tenderness and love”
by Carl Pierer
A young man with a strong urge and deep conviction that he is destined to
*
Born in 1902 in Moscow, Alexander Koshevnikov (better known as Alexandre Kojève) is a truly iridescent character of French intellectual life in the first half of the 20th century. Aged 15, he determines himself to be a philosopher and starts keeping a diary. Coming from a well-to-do bourgeois family – his uncle is none less than Wasilly Kandinsky – the young man leaves revolutionary Russia for Germany in 1920. There, he studies philosophy in Heidelberg and Berlin, whilst acquiring Sanskrit and Mandarin, and publishes his dissertation about Russian religious mystic Vladimir Solovyov under Karl Jaspers.
In the mid-1920ies, he moves to France, where his family wealth allows him to live a comfortable life. When he loses most of it during the crash of 1929, he has to turn to work again. In the 30ies, he achieves what has been described as a “philosophical miracle”: the resurrection of Hegel in French intellectual life. Taking over from his friend Alexandre Koyré, he holds a series of lectures from 1933-1939 on Hegel. His contentious, eclectic Marxist interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit will have a strong influence on many of the post-war French intellectuals. These lectures are attended by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and Georges Bataille, among others.
The right to migrate trumps politics as usual
by Thomas R. Wells
The right to migrate is a meta-right. As a practical matter, access to human rights, including social and economic rights, depends on governments. Since some governments are uninterested or unable to protect or support human rights, people must be free to move to other states where their access to human rights is acceptable, including such socio-economic rights as a fair market wage for their labour. The very point of the idea of human rights is that human beings do not belong to their states, and what they deserve is not to be determined solely by the benevolence or otherwise of the state they happen to be born into.
I
My case goes beyond refugees – those fleeing armed conflict or persecution. But refugees are a good place to start because most sovereign governments have formally acknowledged, with legally binding treaties, that the right to migrate trumps ordinary political concerns. They did so in the aftermath of the ethnic cleansing unleashed by the conclusion of the second world war, and for the kinds of reasons identified by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the awful failure of European states to accept stateless Jewish and other ethnic minority refugees in the 1930s.
When refugees request asylum it must be granted, subject only to checking the basis of their claim. States acknowledge that they cannot refuse asylum merely on the basis of the economic costs or political unpopularity it would impose. The granting of asylum does not fall within the usual logic of statecraft in which a policy is considered from the perspective of the political interests of a governing party, taking into account how it will play to popular prejudices, how it fits with internal party disputes, its consistency with budgetary and other manifesto promises, its influence on the viability of other policies the government wants to pursue, and so on. None of these have standing in the face of the moral emergency of aiding refugees to regain their lives.
As Ban Ki-moon put it, “Refugees have been deprived of their homes, but they must not be deprived of their futures.”
As is clear from the present crisis in and around Europe, and in other parts of the world such as the Andaman Sea, many states are currently failing in their moral – and legal – obligations to refugees. This is often portrayed as an exercise of sovereignty. Actually it is a failure – an inability to govern oneself according to the principles one has laid down.
How not to accuse someone of prejudice
by Emrys Westacott
If someone confronts you with your own behavior that supports privilege, step off the path of least resistance that encourages you to defend and deny. Don't tell them they're too sensitive or need a better sense of humor . . . Listen to what's being said. Take it seriously. Assume for the time being it's true, because given the power of paths of least resistance, it probably is.[1]
The passage is well-intended and, up to a point, reasonable. But it should also be read with caution, since I believe it can easily encourage fallacious thinking and thereby harm the very cause it hopes to advance—a cause with which I fully sympathize. Of course, the tenor of the passage is to encourage a self-critical attitude, and we're all in favor of that. But the same kind of reasoning could also be used to fend off the advice being given. After all, one can easily rewrite the passage to put the boot on the other foot:
If someone tells you you're being hypersensitive or unreasonable, step off the path of least resistance that encourages you to defend and deny. Don't tell them their behavior supports privilege. Listen to what's being said. Take it seriously. Assume for the time being it's true, because given the power of the paths of least resistance, it probably is.
As my colleague and I found, navigating these shoals in our everyday interactions, achieving the proper admixture of knowledge, understanding, self-awareness, sensitivity, and reason, can be difficult. Still, I believe that in our attempts to manage this, it is important that we recognize and respect basic logical parameters. If we fail to do this, we do our cause a disservice.
In discussions of sexism, racism, heterosexism, heteronormativism, and other forms of prejudice, I have sometimes encountered two particular forms of specious reasoning. I will label these the appeal to subjective response and the accusation of privilege. My purpose here is simply to explain what these are and what is wrong with them.
“A Stranger to One’s Own Country”
by Charlie Huenemann
One of his friends went to visit Descartes at Egmond. This gentleman asked him about physics books: which ones did he most value, and which of them he did most frequently consult. ‘I shall show you’, he replied, ‘if you wish to follow me.’ He led him into a lower courtyard at the back of the house, and showed him a calf that he had planned to dissect the next day.
It is a suspiciously artful anecdote: Descartes prefers nature bound in calfskin to another person’s words bound in calfskin. But it gets something right: while Descartes did read and comment on books, and wrote many books himself, he steadily maintained, as did many early modern philosophers, that you can learn more by going straight to nature itself than you can by poring over old books.
Descartes spends several pages in his Discourse on Method relating his disenchantment with different sorts of books. He had studied at La Flèche, a great academy for classical education; but while he found the stories and histories of the ancient authors informative and entertaining, he was wary of the effect they had on him:
For conversing with those of other ages is about the same thing as traveling. It is good to know something of the customs of various peoples, so as to judge our own more soundly and so as not to think that everything that is contrary to our ways is ridiculous and against reason, as those who have seen nothing have a habit of doing. But when one takes too much time traveling, one eventually becomes a stranger to one’s own country; and when one is too curious about what commonly took place in past ages, one usually remains quite ignorant of what is taking place in one’s own country.
This is coming from a Frenchman who spent most of his productive years the Netherlands, where he could count on having few distractions. He devoted his attention to the abstruse studies of physics, metaphysics, mathematics, anatomy, and optics, and wrote virtually nothing on cultural issues and politics. The path he chose in life, it seems, was to be a stranger to his own country, and a resident of the world of ideas. He really wasn’t in any position to look over at the philologist studying Homer and fault him for knowing more about that world than this one.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Reflections on War and Peace, and The Inner Work of Pierre Bezukhov
by Hari Balasubramanian
War and Peace operates in two distinct parts. There's the story of two upper class Russian families and individuals – the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs and the inimitable Pierre Bezukhov – whose lives are directly affected by the Napoleonic wars from 1805-1812, including the French invasion of and subsequent retreat from Moscow. Here the narrative flows so seamlessly from one character to another, from one high society intrigue to the next, and so clear is the psychological detailing that it never feels like anything is being overdone. This despite the fact that Tolstoy likes to intervene constantly. His style goes against the “show but don't tell” advice that is nowadays given to writers. He takes great pains to tell us what's going on in each character's mind, how things have changed since we last met this or that person. Everything, internal or external – estates, battlegrounds, soirees, dinners, military offices, forests – is described with great precision. Sudden twists are not Tolstoy's style; the suspense instead comes from how a character will respond to changes in her circumstances.
Politics as Art, Art as Politics: Ai Weiwei and William Kentridge
by Sue Hubbard
Ai Weiwei: Royal Academy, London until 31th December 2015
William Kentridge: Marian Goodman Gallery until 24th October 2015
Monday, September 21, 2015
The Stateless Europeans
by Justin E. H. Smith
1.
‘Gypsy’ is a classic misnomer, a deformation of ‘Egyptian’, arising from a long-discredited theory that the people it denotes had wandered from that country into the Levant, Anatolia, the Balkans, and finally Europe proper. It gives us the French gitane, glamorized in a brand of cigarette, and the Italian gitano. There is the alternative generic term tsigane, which yields Zigeuner in German, ţigani in Romanian, and so on, and which likely arises from a Byzantine Greek word for fortune tellers (or, perhaps, for untouchables). These are exonyms, and they are considered derogatory, though as with any insult much depends on who is uttering them, in what tone and for what purpose. When in 2007 the Romanian president Traian Băsescu called a reporter a ţigancă împuţită (a stinking Gypsy), to unexpected outrage, he was plainly only using the adjective to make explicit what he already felt to be packed into the noun.
In recent years, ‘Roma’ (along with ‘Rom’ and ‘Rrom’ and the adjectival ‘Romani’) has gained currency, in part as a way of freeing the people it describes from the history of connotations, mostly negative, that have congealed around ‘Gypsy’, and in part to provide a cohesion at the global scale that is lacking in the various regional designations. ‘Roma’ is the term we are now obliged to use, and the term I shall use here, even though it is far from universally satisfactory. For one thing, it is a masculine plural noun: it means ‘the Romani men’, or, perhaps, ‘the Romani husbands’. Moreover, its resemblance to various other geographical terms from the region –notably the name of the capital of Italy, and of the country of Romania (which, like an ancient road, does lead back to Rome, the city of Romulus)– is only a coincidence. Yet, like the English ‘niggardly’, ‘Roma’ invites misunderstanding. Grassroots organizations of Romanians have even petitioned the European Parliament to ban it, in the hope of distancing themselves from their fellow citizens who, they believe, are tarnishing their reputation throughout Europe. And indeed many Western Europeans do have trouble grasping the difference in question, and lack the patience to stop and dwell on etymologies.
Monday Poem
Key
.
dangling from a ring my finger hooked
and drew from a jean pocket
is a burnished brass key warn smooth
from the ten thousand times
I put it to this lock and turned
to hear the delicious click
of entering home,
the place filled with
you
.
by Jim Culleny
9/18/15
Is the Syrian Refugee Crisis the Worst Since World War II?
by Akim Reinhardt
The Syrian refugee crisis is the worst refugee crisis since World War II.
It's all over the place. Just google the words “worst refugee crisis.” Don't even put “Syria” or “WWII” in the search bar. What follows is a string of mainstream media articles labeling the current Syrian refugee crisis as the worst since the big deuce. It has become conventional wisdom.
But is the flood of humanity currently vacating Syria really the worst refugee crisis of the last 70 years?
The United Nations High Commission on Refugees estimates that about 4,000,000 Syrian refugees have now left their homeland. Millions more are Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), people who have abandoned their homes but remain in Syria.
This is a formidable number, marking the Syrian exodus as certainly one of the worst refugee crises since World War II. And it may yet get worse. But is it actually the worst?
The GOP Debate Horrorshow — When Will Republicans Stop Embarrassing Themselves?
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
Forgive me for the following rant, but someone has to express the righteous rage of an actual human being of common humanity at the current GOP horrorshow. Nobody in our media will do that for you. Molly Ivins is no longer with us. Don't expect a living political pundit to engage with our politicians on a basis of actual human feelings.
So here goes, my corrective to the usual political punditry.
Let me ask: is this what our politics has come to, when a once great party (Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower) fields a big bunch of presidential contenders — eleven! — who are all of them such truly stupid and horrible people, they're unworthy of being humans, let alone politicians?
Robert Frost, Time Traveler: The Road Not Taken
After I’d sat myself down at my computer on Tuesday morning, and after I’d checked in at my blog, New Savanna, and at Facebook, I zoomed here to 3QD, as I often do, and saw a link to an article about a Robert Frost poem. I, being an American citizen in good standing, know a bit about Frost. He’s sort of the Walt Disney of American poetry, him and Carl Sandburg, but apparently Frost had a nasty side as well. He’s not our nation’s kindly uncle. But then who knows what really goes on in the minds of those kindly uncles, eh?
This post had an intriguing title: “The Most Misread Poem in America”. Really? I gotta’ check that out. So I read the posted snippet, which was about “The Road Not Taken” – I’ve read that one, I think, said I to myself, but it’s not the one about miles to do until we eat? pray? love? one of those basic things – and then followed the link the full article, which is in the Paris Review. It’s by David Orr, poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, and is an excerpt from a book he’s devoted to that one poem.
It'll take a pretty determined individualist to take this road that's not been travelled in a looong time.
The common understanding, Orr tells us, is that the poem is about staunch individualism. Everyone else hightailed it down the popular road but me, individualist that I am, I took the less popular road, and it turned out darn well. That just won’t wash, not when you actually read the words carefully.
According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
I’ll buy that. But what if there’s something going on in the poem that isn’t adequately captured by limning its meaning?
Strained Analogies Between Recently Released Films and Current Events: The Visit and Making M. Night Shyamalan Great Again
by Matt McKenna
The Visit is shot in a faux-documentary style from the point of view of a teenage siblings, Becca and Tyler, who visit their grandparents for the very first time. We are told that long ago there was a falling out between their single mother and their grandparents, and this first meeting between grandchildren and grandparents is meant to be a moment of bonding and forgiveness for the estranged generations. Of course, The Visit being a horror film, everything goes spectacularly wrong as the kids witness creepy occurrences on their grandparents' remote farm.