May 29, 2017

Dear Babuly,

Here in America, it is Memorial Day— a day for the honored dead. (Different from Veterans' Day, observed in November, which acknowledges all who have served in the military). Memorial Day is dedicated to the remembrance of those who never came back, who lost their lives in armed conflict. Solemnity and reverence describe its mood. I am glad we have this day. But can a single day suffice? I worry that it signals a poverty of remembrance.

Lately, it feels like more and more remembrance is needed. The scourge of amnesia seems to have fallen upon us. Or, perhaps, we as a race are becoming incrementally more savage. Just this past week, so much blood spilled, I was hesitant to open the newspaper. Afraid to have the breath sucked out of me again. Even before I tell you of these events that hit me, I am conscious there are others I will not mention, that I do not know about, which by a failure of distance, or point of view, did not make the news, or my eye missed the fine print of their announcement. An unjustifiable erasure.

What would you say? I wonder.

It's these erasures, isn't it, these countless erasures that over time build up into a rage so huge it renders the wounded and desperate with a motive force? I sense it, alive and latent. A primal instinct: the will to be heard and seen by fellow humans, to scream out pain in the absence of empathy. In the darkest hour, that distorted impulse rises up and reaches out to inflict the abiding pain from within on to all those smug, laughing faces. The world is an ugly place right now. The pungency of fear sits on many tongues, poisoning the air.

On this Memorial Day, my mind conjures an image: miles of flat land marked by thousands of headstones, the graves of those felled in action. Bone-white headstones, almost translucent, against the canvas of night. The earth is rough, soil upturned beneath a turbulent sky. A vigorous wind blows across this forbidding landscape filled with the bodies of martyrs.

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by Bill Benzon

Some years ago I was reading an article in Krin Gabbard’s anthology, Jazz Among the Discourses (1995), one of a pair of anthologies arguing that “jazz has entered the mainstreams of the American academy”. The general purpose of the anthology is to help ensure that this new discipline is in harmony with the latest developments in postmodern humanities scholarship. One Steven Elworth contributed a paper examining the critical transformation of jazz into an art music: “Jazz in Crisis, 1948—1958: Ideology and Representation.”

In the course of his argument, Elworth observes: “The major paradox of all writing about culture is how to take seriously a culture not one’s own without reducing it to an ineffable Other. I do not wish to argue, of course, that one can only write of one’s own culture. In the contemporary moment of constant cultural transformation and commodification, even the definition of one’s own culture is exceedingly contradictory and problematic.”

My immediate response was “Right on! Brother!” But then I asked myself, “Just what ‘culture not one’s own’ is Elworth talking about?” Since this article is about jazz I assume that jazz culture is what he’s talking about. I further assume that Elworth is White, for I cannot imagine a Black scholar writing that way about jazz.

Cozy Cole, the drummer at the back. New York, N.Y., Sept. 1946. William P. Gottlieb/Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.

As we know, the jazz genealogy has strands extending variously to West Africa and Europe, has been and continues to be performed by Blacks and Whites, before audiences both Black and White – though, in the past, these have often been segmented into different venues, or different sections of the same venue – the music is conventionally considered to be Black. That convention is justified by the fact the music’s major creators have been overwhelmingly Black. Thus it follows that jazz culture is, as these conventions go, Black culture.

But, in what sense would jazz be foreign to Elworth, and so NOT his own culture? The fact that he is writing about jazz suggests that he likes it a great deal and knows more than a little about it. It is quite possible that he grew up in a house where folks listened to jazz on a regular basis. If not that, perhaps he discovered jazz while among friends or relatives and came to love it. He likely attends live performances; perhaps he is a weekend warrior, jamming with friends either privately or in public. He may well have been to weddings where a jazz band played the reception. He is comfortable with jazz; he knows something of its history and understands its conventions. It is not exotic music. That is to say, it is unlikely that Elworth discovered jazz in some foreign land where no one speaks English, nor eats and dresses American style, nor knows anything of Mozart or Patsy Cline, among many others. Jazz is a routine and familiar part of Elworth’s life.

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Dilemma

take the dilemma of the moon:
two horns one night, tomorrow
a small coin in a vast thought
simple as circle
things pass
which is small consolation
if they forever return as two horns
mercilessly at opposite corners
of a skewed smile
.

Jim Culleny
3/3/17

by Paul Braterman

Below, R: How not to; "The Scientific Method", as inflicted on Science Fair participants. Click to enlarge

Consider this, from a justly esteemed chemistry text:

Scientists are always on the lookout for patterns.… Once they have detected patterns, scientists develop hypotheses… After formulating a hypotheses, scientists design further experiments [emphasis in original]

Or this, from a very recent post to a popular website:

The scientific method in a nutshell:
1. Ask a question
2. Do background research
3. Construct a hypothesis
4. Test your hypothesis by doing experiments
5. Analyze your data and draw conclusions
6. Communicate your results [emphasis in original]

Then, if you find yourself nodding in agreement, consider this:

Since a scientific theory, by definition, must be testable by repeatable observations and must be capable of being falsified if indeed it were false, a scientific theory can only attempt to explain processes and events that are presently occurring repeatedly within our observations. Theories about history, although interesting and often fruitful, are not scientific theories, even though they may be related to other theories which do fulfill the criteria of a scientific theory.

If you are familiar with the creation-evolution "controversy", you may well suspect that last example of being so much creationist waffle, intended to discredit the whole of present-day geology and evolutionary biology. And you would be right. This quotation is from Duane Gish, a major figure in the twentieth century revival of biblical literalist creationism, writing for the Institute of Creation Research.¹

L: Mike Pence, " [N]ow that we have recognised evolution as a theory… can we also consider teaching other theories of the origin of species?"

Such nonsense isn't funny any more, if it ever was. The man who may very soon find himself President of the United States is an eloquent spokesman for creationism.

And yet Gish's remarks seem to follow from the view of science put forward in the first two excerpts. What has gone wrong here? Practically everything.

R: Kepler's first two laws: elliptical orbit; equal areas in equal times

Consider the first great accomplishment of modern science; working out the laws² of planetary motion, and Newton's explanation of those laws in terms of his theory² of gravity. Copernicus, picking up on an idea that dates back to the ancient Greeks and was also well-known to the astronomers of Islam's Golden Age, treated the Earth as a planet like any other, and had the planets circling the Sun. Kepler showed that the orbits were in fact, to a very good approximation, ellipses, and found out how a planet's speed varied during each rotation, and how the length of a planet's "year" depending on its distance from the Sun. Finally, Newton showed that Kepler's Laws could be explained using his theory of gravity and his laws of motion, and that the same set of laws explained the motion of the Moon, and the downward acceleration of falling bodies on the Earth.

So where are the experiments, said in the first two extracts to play an essential role in testing a hypothesis?

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by Jalees Rehman

Would you rather receive $100 today or wait for a year and then receive $150? The ability to delay immediate gratification for a potentially greater payout in the future is associated with greater wealth. Several studies have shown that the poor tend to opt for immediate rewards even if they are lower, whereas the wealthy are willing to wait for greater rewards. One obvious reason for this difference is the immediate need for money. If food has to be purchased and electricity or water bills have to be paid, then the instant "reward" is a matter of necessity. Wealthier people can easily delay the reward because their basic needs for food, shelter and clothing are already met.

Unfortunately, escaping from poverty often requires the ability to delay gratification for a greater payout in the future. Classic examples are the pursuit of higher education and the acquisition of specialized professional skills which can lead to better-paying jobs in the future. Attending vocational school, trade school or college paves the way for higher future wages, but one has to forego income during the educational period and even incur additional debt by taking out educational loans. Another example is of delayed gratification is to invest capital – whether it is purchasing a farming tool that increases productivity or investing in the stock market – which in turn can yield greater pay-out. However, if the poor are unable to pursue more education or make other investments that will increase their income, they remain stuck in a vicious cycle of increasing poverty.

Understanding the precise reasons for why people living in poverty often make decisions that seem short-sighted, such as foregoing more education or taking on high-interest short-term loans, is the first step to help them escape poverty. The obvious common-sense fix is to ensure that the basic needs of all citizens – food, shelter, clothing, health and personal safety – are met, so that they no longer have to use all new funds for survival. This is obviously easier in the developed world, but it is not a trivial matter considering that the USA – supposedly the richest country in the world – has an alarmingly high poverty rate. It is estimated that more than 40 million people in the US live in poverty, fearing hunger and eviction from their homes. But just taking care of these basic needs may not be enough to help citizens escape poverty. A recent research study by Jon Jachimowicz at Columbia University and his colleagues investigated "myopic" (short-sighted) decision-making of people with lower income and identified an important new factor: community trust.

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by Amanda Beth Peery

In this image produced by Google's DeepDream algorithm, a pattern of archways stretches across the screen in an Escher-esque eye-game, the intricate façade of a building with impossible architecture. This vision is the result of a computer program, a neural net that has been trained to recognize objects and, when looking at an image, amplify any hint or outline of an object it knows. So, in other DeepDream images, two dots might become two dark eyes or a leaf might become a dog's face. Here, DeepDream recognizes arches everywhere, and the original image is lost in arches that nest within and interrupt each other.

But what kind of meaning can we find in this image? Is there something essentially human—or inhuman—about it? In some ways, this image and others produced by DeepDream look like the hallucinations or dreams we know, but do these AI-produced images really mirror human visions? One way to think about this is to see DeepDream's images in the context of dream-art, art that follows the logic of dreams. The logic of human dreams and dream-art is different from the rational logic of our waking lives. Dream logic is what gives dreams a meaning of their own, making them more than a film-reel of leftover, twisted images from the day.

Many great artists, from the Lascaux cave painters to Tarkovsky to Lewis Carroll, created images and stories that follow dream logic. Dream logic is not arbitrary, and it's not an empty absurdity. One thing that makes a work of art like Alice in Wonderland powerful is that we, readers and viewers, recognize the logic of the story as the structure of our own dreams. The symbols, and the connections between them, feel coherent and right. Of course a vial of liquid or a little cake cause Alice to grow or shrink. Of course the Cheshire Cat's smile lingers in the tree. These are recognizable absurdities.

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by Misha Lepetic

"Machines…quell the revolt of specialized labor."
~ Marx

In my previous post, I wrote about alternative ways of viewing the encroaching effects of automation on employment. I suggested that, instead of viewing it as a zero-sum game, with industry hell-bent on automating everyone's jobs out of existence, that it is rather a phenomenon driven by firms' needs to maintain profitability and market share. In this sense, automation – and technology more generally – is an optimization function, but only in a ‘local' sense. The character of employment required by a firm is only commensurate to the needs that it can foresee in the near future. So for all the talk of a ‘post-work' future, we won't get there any time soon.

Nevertheless, this leaves open an important succeeding question: What does the technological substitution of labor actually look like, and what, if anything, can be done about it? The first thing that ought to be made clear is that the process of substitution is neither neat nor obvious. Introducing a single robot into the workplace does not necessarily displace a single human being. Indeed, in the case of industrial manufacturing, it may be more: a factory making cell phone parts in Dongguan, China, recently automated much of its operations and saw its headcount plummet from 650 to 60 workers. In a further blow against humanity, the output of the factory increased nearly threefold, and product defect rates declined from 25% to less than 5%.

It's worth noting that a factory making cellphone parts is an ideal subject for automation. A fully automated factory floor is the final reductio that, one might argue, began with Adam Smith's exposition of the power of the division of labor. But regardless of the factory's output – whether it's Smith's pins or components for mobiles – the fact is that we are making the same thing, thousands of times over. However, while significant, this kind of specialized manufacturing is but a fraction of global economic output.

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

We live in a fractured age when many seem to be convinced that their beliefs are right, and that they can never agree with the other side on anything to any degree. Science has always been the best antidote against this bias, because while political truths are highly subjective and subject to the whims of the majority, most scientific truths are starkly objective. You may try to pass a law by majority vote in Congress saying that two and two equals five, or that DNA is not a double helix, but these falsehoods are not going to stay hidden for too long because the bare facts say otherwise. You may keep on denying global warming, but that will not make the warming stop. What makes science different is that its facts are true irrespective of whether you believe they are true.

But combined with this undeniable nature of scientific facts exists a way of doing things that almost seems paradoxical to proclamations about hard scientific truth. That is the essential, never-ending role of doubt, skepticism and uncertainty in the practice of science. Yes, DNA is a double helix, and yes, it almost seems impossible that this fact will someday be overturned, but even then we should not hold the fact as sacrosanct. “Truth” in science, no matter how convincing, is always regarded as provisional and subject to change. Some scientific facts are now so well documented that they approach the status of “truth”, and yet considering them so literally would mean abandoning the scientific method. Seen this way, truth in science can be considered to be an asymptotic limit, one which we can always get closer to but can never definitively reach.

It’s this seemingly paradoxical and yet crucial yin-and-yang aspect of science that I believe is still quite hard to grasp for non-scientists. Niels Bohr would have appreciated the tension. Bohr bequeathed to the world the concept of complementarity. Complementarity means the existence of seemingly opposite ideas that are still required together to explain the world. In the physical world, complementarity was first glimpsed in the behavior of subatomic particles which can sometimes behave as waves and sometime as particles, depending on the experiment.

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Beginning

I’m thinking
of cartoons
that say
the end is nigh
on a sign
held by a guy
on a corner,
rag coat,
hunched,
forlorn,
whose years
went south,
didn’t pan out as
he thought they would
when he was a boy,
the way
they should’ve but
never made it
over a midlife hump
when the light at a
tunnel’s end
everybody talks about
when things fall apart
went
slowly dim
went
from sun
to lighted pinprick
in a scrim
on a stage
where all are merely
players,
women, men
strong, lame
clowns, crooks
politicians running
showing up
puking
mewling
like a child
in a
mother’s arms
….and I was thinking
of the moment just before
when
in the dark
nothing is
but a
beginning
that is always
coming
.

Jim Culleny
11/1/16
.

by Elise Hempel

It arrived today in the mail – a certain poetry journal I've been waiting for and wondering about, a journal I've been rejected by several times, that I've come to imagine, because of those rejections, as sophisticated and discriminating, a journal now containing a poem of mine nearly a year and a half after the poem was accepted. It's not uncommon for print journals to take that long, the time between acceptance and publication often being a full year, and I know that the editor of this journal was struggling with some personal difficulties during the publication of this particular issue, and had lost some of her production staff to boot. But still … though the journal looks good, professionally made – no stapled spine or cheap paper – the glossy cover sports a rather underwhelming photo, and my now-outdated bio in the contributor notes maintains the future tense for the publication of my 2016 book. Someone else's bio ends with a comma instead of a period, while several others are missing the italics on a journal or book title, sometimes randomly within a list of other, italicized titles. There are both missing and misused commas, and one poem title is, inexplicably, in all capitals amid its upper/lowercase neighbors. And though I've barely begun reading, I've already spotted some surprisingly awkward lines of poetry, not to mention a sonnet that's merely titled "Sonnet."

How can I be so tough on a poetry journal from a small press, one that most likely has limited funds, on a poetry journal that I know has just a small audience anyway? My displeasure with typos, errors, and general sloppiness springs perhaps from a perfectionist type of personality, a personality that won me a job as a proofreader in the Chicago area in the 1980s, that prompted a friend to say to me, as I pointed out a "grocer's apostrophe" on a bar sign one downtown Saturday night, "Relax, Elise, you're off the clock now." Perhaps. But my cluttered desk and dusty bedroom say the opposite about my personality. And I know I'm not alone, with many more of us throughout the world, including the "grammar vigilante" (or the "Banksy of punctuation") who secretly corrects the punctuation of business signs in the dark of night in Bristol, England.

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by Max Sirak

(Free audio version here. Or scroll down.)

Most of us, hunters and english teachers especially, know the answer to the question, "What's the most dangerous game?"

Maybe you remember reading Richard Connell's short story in middle or high school. Maybe, depending upon your age, you remember hearing Orson Welles portray General Zaroff. Or, maybe you've seen a variation of the tale told on a screen. It's been a steady storyline, easily found, since the titular RKO release in 1932.

Regardless of how it is you knew the correct answer, it's widely known. Humans are the most dangerous game. We aren't as strong as a bear, as fast as a cheetah, as poisonous as a snake, or as magical as a liger. But it doesn't matter.

We're smart and we're clever and that makes us perilous prey.

Now, if I were to ask you, what's the most dangerous word? what would you say?

A bit trickier, isn't it?

There are so many different directions you could go, which is why I've prepared some clues…

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LENIN IN THE PRESENCE OF GOD

a trans creation after Iqbal, by Rafiq Kathwari

God
Aha! Comrade Ulyanov—
Welcome! Or I should say,
Dobro Pozhalovat!

Lenin
You’re alive? But “God is dead,” they said.

God
I inhabit men’s heart, passion’s home,
and for a brief moment
the gods themselves swayed to your tune.

Lenin
So, this is the source of the babble in churches.

God
Command and Control,
Shock and Awe,
@NoGodButGod.

Lenin
I need a drink…

God
Heaven is not your local pub,
but we’ve a house white on tap,
Water of Life. Glass or Goblet?

Lenin
Shot glass. Neat.

God
Think of it as Korsvodka.
Red blush on your cheeks—
it’s not rouge. Is it?

Lenin
When will the boat of Capitalism sink?

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by Christopher Bacas

Every wedding merges rivers. In that confluence, ancient rites, family histories and baked-stuffed chicken breasts tumble in eddies and whirling spouts. As a hired hand, I looked for calm water, the safety of land and superior canapés.

Under crystalline light, I sailed the blacktop channel called I-95. My port, a giant shul in suburban Baltimore. The job was booked extra-long: pre-ceremony, ceremony, then marathon dance sets. In the parking lot, buses poured out throngs of dark-clothed men, women and scampering elves, some with bouncing side locks. Inside, I met my colleagues, mostly goyim, veterans of Orthodox gigs. In a dim storage closet, I put on my tux and fancy shoes. Three feet away, an ectomorphic man davened violently, as oblivious to my rituals as I was to his.

Our leader, the Rockin Rabbi, a Long Island kid. As a young guitar picker, he played along with Hendrix, T-Bone Walker and Les Paul, memorizing their brilliant commentaries on scripture. After Rabbinical school in Israel, he returned stateside; selling copiers by day, raising a family and playing weddings. In his yarmulke and frum black suit, he remained a virtuoso garage band rocker; undisciplined and selfish. Unwittingly, his repertoire a Downtown artist's conceit: Melodies by the Baal Shem Tov, yoked to a slamming backbeat, careening into grandstanding solos, a blur of blinding pick work and bent strings. Tunes couldn't end or segue; their exit strategy spinning out under bluesy hail. The horn section yelling to each other, searching for a cue or a bus gate, hopelessly lost.

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by Thomas R. Wells

The politics of populist rage are on the ascendant in every democracy, even if thankfully not always triumphant. Authoritarian regimes like China and Russia, and cynics like John Gray, are relishing the collapse of the moral high ground and the return to good honest Machiavellianism. The old calumnies against democracy seem to be coming true. That the rule of the people is just the rule of the mob. That order, the uncontested rule of the powerful, is the best we can hope for. That there is no higher moral principle for a people to aspire to than their country's domination over others.

Something has certainly gone wrong in how we do democracy. We have forgotten what it is and how to do it. Specifically, we have gotten the idea that democracy consists in our right to command the government to give us what we want, when actually it is collective self-government. Democracy is not a reality TV-style contest in which the people are spectators and voters on who gets to win the prize of ultimate power. Rather, it is a relationship to ourselves and our fellow citizens that we develop and practise in our daily lives.

I

So how did we go so wrong?

We allowed the bonds between us to decay. The collapse of civic institutions outside work, well noted by Robert Putnam in ‘Bowling Alone', left more and more people isolated, unable to relate to each other as fellow citizens, unable to organise anything together.

Cable news and then social media came along to reorder us into bubbles of those we agree with. But worse, the economics of both cable news and social media depends on engagement – the more time we spend watching, or liking and sharing, the more of our attention these companies can chip off and sell to advertisers. And it turns out that outrage – besides cute cats – is extremely good at generating engagement. That's why Facebook's news feed algorithm has gotten so good at serving up the exact stories from around the world most likely to send us into paroxysms of anger, or the other dark emotions such as fear and disgust.

And that's where we are now. A society of millions of strangers, all alone together in front of our televisions and twitter feeds, shivering with indignant rage.

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by Carl Pierer

Much has been written about how the political centre today can be characterised by offering a choice between two spins of the same idea. Essentially, a choice that is not a really choice. But this point is nothing new. Indeed, this very mechanism can already be found in the 1938 film You Can't Take It With You.

In line with his other films, Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You excels in a sentimentality and heart-warming humour that has won much popular appraisal. It is a film that is easy to watch, easy to enjoy and thus precisely of the charming sort that attracts fervent criticism. Too comforting, too nice, but most importantly too ideological. Capra's films are often seen to hide, behind a humanist façade, a stifling defence of the status quo and an outmoded idea of Americanness. This is not least due to his own descriptions in his autobiography. Against this sort of criticism, without defending Capra's non-existent ideas, it is possible to appreciate his You Can't Take It With You as a staple of ideological presentation of a pseudo-choice.

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