by Hari Balasubramanian

I've noticed that it isn't easy to strike up a meaningful conversation with someone who doesn't fit into your professional or social circle. Even among strangers we look for clues and – understandably – seek out people with whom we might have something in common. This behavior appears to erect subtle barriers between groups of people who live or work in the same physical space – say the same neighborhood or even the same building – but hardly interact.

One example of this I experienced dates back to my graduate school days. I worked as a research assistant for six years (2000-2006) on the fifth floor of the engineering building at Arizona State University. I noticed I could easily strike up a conversation with professors and fellow graduate students, who were from very different backgrounds and countries. But I somehow found myself shy in the afternoon and evenings in talking to the janitor who cleaned and maintained the two dozen rooms on our floor. I wanted to connect with him but found it difficult to step out of my comfort zone. I wondered what the reason was. Was it because our work was so different? Because we were from different countries? Would I have managed to strike up a conversation more easily if he too was from India? Was it his personality?

Mark was a constant presence in the hallways and restrooms every weekday from four in the afternoon. Most times you just heard his presence: the clink of his thick bunch of keys; the rumble of the large trash-can-on-wheels; a pause; a knock on an office or lab door; the emptying of trash; and then clink and rumble again before the next pause. And at times you heard an insistent squeak in the hallway – that was Mark using his sneakers to erase a smear off the linoleum floor.

Read more »

The past is inevitable.
…………—Delmore Schwartz, Poet

Hadn’t Thought of it Like That

Though likely, tomorrow is
not set

This day’s loose ends twist in the wind
like kite tails jerked in blue at the end of present’s string
becoming codas no one can sing—
the future’s not something on which you should bet

Only Now sings real arias

If you stand on the bridge in the middle of town
where the river parts at abutments in bow waves
—splits as the bridge’s foot in the stream
becomes a ship’s prow plowing north to nowhere
and gives the early crimson sky
an oscillating rendition of itself in its otherwise slick mirror
you catch a glimpse of your bobbing head
in flames of pleated clouds

You are its aria

As you turn and walk off you get
that the past is inevitable
and set
.

Jim Culleny
12/17/15
.

Photo: The Bridge of Flowers
by Martin Yaffee

by Mara Naselli

The literary debate over the role of fact and invention in essay now appears to have foreshadowed our own post-fact moment. Suddenly this is not an idle matter. When writers knowingly take liberties with the facts in the name of art, they demote the reader from fellow traveler to spectator. Trust me, they say, it will be fantastic. For those who feel tricked, the betrayal is more than just bad feeling. An essayist who flagrantly manipulates fact fails to appreciate the essay’s greatest strength—the convergence of intimacy and shared inquiry.

The most recent review to enter the fray is William Deresiewicz’s “In Defense of Facts,” just published in The Atlantic. Deresiewicz attacks John D’Agata’s three essay anthologies for many things, notably a disregard for history. Deresiewicz rightly situates the historical origin of both fact and essay in tandem. For they are cousins, born out of the same revolutionizing changes that moved the Western intellectual tradition from the medieval world to the Renaissance. These changes laid the path for empirical science in the process. Montaigne’s “scrupulous investigation,” Deresiewicz writes, was the essay’s distinguishing feature in the sixteenth century.

If we pause to consider Montaigne and his time, we may make an even bolder claim that could renew our own contemporary relationship to the essay as an instrument of inquiry. Montaigne’s inward turn was not simply introspective. His scrupulous investigation was in service to a more ambitious endeavor: the relocation of the authority of judgment from the external authorities of the Church and ancient texts to the inward authority of the self. It was the act of investigation and inquiry toward understanding that made Montaigne’s work so remarkable.

Read more »

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

My time-travel fantasies often include a return to my first memory of romantic embarrassment, wherein I had shied away from the unknown boy in front of me, one who I had seen lurking around five feet away the many past weeks, and who had emerged from the shadows to ask, “Will you make friendship with me?” At that time, I had experienced embarrassment and romantic fulfillment in the same breath. In that moment, I had thought myself a lawful entrant into the mysterious world of boy-girl relationships. And in that very knowledge, I had exercised my rights to refuse and walked away. Now, I wish I had been a different person who had paused to find out. Now, I wish I had for a moment, doubted the common knowledge of what a question like that might mean, and instead, waited. Now, I wish I had taken up the possibility of friendship. For what more a radical question than that can there be? To extend one's hand out to a person of unknown and little experienced character, disposition, and gender. To state merely that one's purpose in approaching, was friendship. Thus far. The no further could have come later on. Or not.

Since then, I have been better at allaying my expert suspicions. I have made friends. And I have grown further fascinated with the set of relationships we so summarily explain away with the term, “friendship”. Movie stars in India, when interrogated as to possible amorous connections between them, often respond in the coded phrase, “just friends”. But how could there be mere-ness in the relationship of being friends?

Read more »

by Carl Pierer

In 1786, Goethe began his famous journey to Italy, of which he kept a diary to be published as The Italian Journey in 1816. Even though his main interest lies elsewhere, he finds time to write about Italians. Early on his journey, he writes, for example (Goether, 1982):

So far I have seen only two Italian cities and only spoken to a few persons, but already I know my Italians well. They are like courtiers and consider themselves the finest people in the world, an opinion which, thanks to certain excellent qualities which they undeniably possess, they can hold with impunity.

22. September 1786

The generalisation at hand is striking. Whilst admitting a very limited experience, Goethe feels in a position to talk about Italians, as a whole. Or does he?

Who are the Italians Goethe is talking about? It seems unlikely that he is talking about all of them, at all times. Yet even restricted to his contemporaries, it would be bold to assert that this is a necessary feature of being Italian. Such a reading most surely would miss the point. It seems more appropriate to suggest that he is talking about some sort of Mentalität, a commonality or stereotypical property of Italians. Even if this were so, it would be a confusion to suggest, anachronistically, that Goethe means by “Italians” the citizens of Italy. The “Italians”, it seems, have a rather different, curious status.

Read more »

by Richard King

A blast from Hollywood's golden past …

In a dry valley in the Italian countryside, the remaining members of Spartacus' slave army sit in chains, surrounded by their Roman captors. At the front of the group sits Spartacus himself (Kirk Douglas) and next to him Antoninus (Tony Curtis), a slave entertainer and Spartacus' favourite. The victorious Roman general, Marcus Licinius Crassus (Laurence Olivier) sends a disdainful eye over the survivors. His herald speaks:

“By command of His Most Merciful Excellency, your lives are to be spared. Slaves you were and slaves you remain. But the terrible penalty of crucifixion has been set aside on the single condition that you identify the body or the living person of the slave called Spartacus.”

Cut to Spartacus, looking steely: he knows the jig is up and rises to his feet. But Antoninus rises with him and speaks first. “I'm Spartacus!” he shouts, as another slave stands: “I'm Spartacus!” And another: “I'm Spartacus!” And so on and so on, until the valley is alive with voices. “I'm Spartacus! I'm Spartacus! I'm Spartacus!”

Cheesy, yes; but stirring all the same. And Douglas's flinty visog is a picture: mud-streaked and tear-stained, like an Easter Island moai after a downpour. We know the scene was personal – an allegory of the solidarity shown amongst writers and performers in the face of intimidation from the HUAC – and it would be nice to think that Douglas had certain US Senators in mind when he aimed those piercing eyes at Olivier. At any rate, it was a great day's work.

Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands…… Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again. (Fukuyama, The End of History)

Liberalism is facing its most severe challenge for 70 years. In country after country across the comfortable, safe, prosperous western world populist parties and movements dedicated to its overthrow have been advancing steadily towards power. How can this be? Politics is particular, and particular explanations have been given for the triumphs of Orban, PiS, Brexit and Trump. But while these may explain the timing and building blocks of each particular populist victory, they do not explain the pattern. Why do so many people around the world hate liberalism so much that a Trump election became possible?

Another class of explanations seek to pin the blame on the liberal order, most commonly by characterising populism as a revolt by the losers of globalisation. Except that globalisation has been a tremendous success. Of course there have been some losers, especially in countries like America and Britain with feeble policies for using the winnings from freer trade to compensate and retrain workers in unlucky industries, but not enough to win elections. And populism is riding high even in European countries with elaborate compensation and retraining schemes.

I have another explanation. Liberalism works just fine. It's just that the people got bored with it.

Read more »

by Stephen T. Asma

According to U.S. border patrol, Donald Trump's wall scheme (and Hillary Clinton's amnesty proposal) have inspired a northward rush to our border in recent months. Trump's proposed wall is unrealistic and unlikely to happen. But his desire to build it, and the giddy excitement it has inspired in his supporters, reminds us that “a wall” is a longstanding cultural answer to fear and xenophobia. The West has a storied tradition of trying to contain the foreign hordes –people who we recreate as monsters and barbarians.

The xenophobic idea of dangerous barbarians culminated in a popular story about “Alexander's Gates.” The European version of the story, of a barrier erected against savage enemies, seems to have first appeared in sixth century accounts of the Alexander Romance, but the legend is probably much older. Alexander supposedly chased his foreign enemies through a mountain pass in the Caucasus region and then closed them all behind unbreachable iron gates. The details and the symbolic significance of the story changed slightly in every medieval retelling, but it was very often retold –especially in the age of exploration.

By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the meaning of Alexander's Gates had long since been Christianized, and played an important role in both the geography of monsters and the ultimate end-time purpose of such fiends. The maps of the time, the mappaemundi, almost always include the gates, though their placement is not consistent. Most maps and narratives of the later medieval period agree that this prison territory, created directly by Alexander but indirectly by God, housed the savage tribes of Gog and Magog. Recall that Gog and Magog are referred to, with great ambiguity throughout the Bible –sometimes as individual monsters, sometimes as nations, sometimes as places. In the story of Alexander's Gates, a kind of synthesis occurs, in which “Gog and Magog” becomes a label for designating infidel nations and monstrous races –a monster zone, which different scribes can populate with all manner of projected fears.

Read more »

by Paul North

In the tale about the princess and the pea, the pea is more than a tiny little irritant, it is more than an interrupter of a good night's sleep. The pea is the enemy of desert. The princess doesn't deserve such bedding. She is someone who's deservingness is so thorough and so refined that it is an insult to her very being, this one tiny pea. We accept some things without question as what we deserve—shelter, food, human relationships. Some things we struggle to claim that we deserve—a voice in politics, hope for the future, freedom for self-determination. All this is trivial to this girl. The princess deserves all that of course, but as a princess she deserves even more: she deserves every single thing to her liking, down to the smallest pea.

This is obviously a comic situation. So let's talk about comedy for a minute. At first look ‘deservingness' doesn't seem like a fateful word and comedy has little to do with huge, sinister forces. Tragedy is the place for those. The tragic hero stands up against the gods and gets crushed. This is how ancient audiences learned the workings of fate. No matter how good or how noble the hero, forces beyond her were stronger than her will. Antigone wanted to bury her brother. She was caught in a clash of principles much bigger than she was, bigger even than the cause of her unburied brother. Her death was inescapable, and in a sense trivial. Mortals were not supposed to cry for Antigone so much as learn that the gods' law was the highest and had to be respected.

By mortal standards, Antigone doesn't deserve her fate—from this springs its tragic character. Still, we don't usually talk about tragic fate as a matter of desert. Fate is neutral. It is the way it is, the way it must be, irrespective of the worth of the participants. Mortals have a kind of horrible freedom to stumble into fate regardless of what they personally deserve. Aristotle does say that a tragic hero should be noble. Even this is not a matter of ‘desert,' however. It is only so that the hero looks like they have something to lose.

Read more »

Love Kitchen
—Mary Mraz Culleny, 12/8/17-3/2/03

The tsunami scent of yeast inundated our house
the mornings our mother baked bread
up through floorboards it came, up the stairwell
it spread stirring our dreamselves alive—
fresh loaves, bells for the nose
their toll sent sleep from somnolent heads

I’d written that thinking of her floured hands,
sifting, kneading, table strewn
with the tools of her art and the stuff she teased
and blended with such skill, without need to measure,
knowing by sight and weight —by feel, what it took
to fold matter and love into sustenance
in her confectionery mill, her love kitchen
.

Jim Culleny
5/8/16
.

by Leanne Ogasawara

Two months ago, I wrote a post in these pages called The Romance of the Red Dictionaries. It was about the possibility of romance without a shared language; that language can make things more complicated and, well, less, fun and romantic! In my case at least, things went downhill fast the more I learned my husband's language–and indeed, I always looked back on our early days of mutual incomprehension as a golden time.

While love may have declined, my experience of thinking and dreaming in Japanese allowed me to experience life through a different mindset. And that was an experience I would not trade for anything.

I was like a different person in Japanese. I certainly said thank you more often, and I believe I became more considerate and compassionate. Speaking in particular, allowed me to gain a certain kind of inner harmony, as I have always been much more agitated in English.

I also think in the spoken language, there was an element of fun to be had with verbs coming at the end of sentences. Endless jokes could be made as a person expected you to say one thing, only to be taken off guard to see the action verb was something quite different from where they thought you were going with the sentence. I felt more on my toes and tended to listen more carefully than I did in English till I found out the verbs of each sentence.

Read more »

by Dave Maier

It's that time of year again, when lists of all sorts start appearing everywhere you look. 2016 featured a *lot* of ambient, space, and other electronic releases, and only the hardiest of us got through more than a small fraction of it. I certainly didn't, anyway, so while our list (and accompanying podcast; see widget below) features excellent music released in 2016, it is in no way a best-of. Just so that's clear!

Now here's our list:

Steve Hauschildt – Same River Twice [Strands]

We’ve heard from Steve before on our journeys, when he was channeling Jean-Michel Jarre as I recall. His new record is not quite so retro, but on the other hand this particular sequencer workout is well within the boundaries of its genre, which is fine by me. Steve tells us that

Strands is a song cycle that is about cosmogony and creation/destruction myths. The title alludes to the structural constitution of ropes as I wanted to approach the compositions so that they consisted of strands and fibers which form a unified whole […] I was also inspired by the movement of rivers, particularly their transformative aspect and how they’re in a state of flux and change, in particular the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland where I live, which notoriously caught on fire thirteen times because of industrial pollution in the 1960s and before. I was very interested in the dichotomy of oil and water and the resulting, unnatural symptoms of human industry. It’s a very personal record for me as it is a reflection of my hometown where I grew up and where it was mostly recorded.

Read more »

by Michael Liss

Are opera singers dumb?

As a child, dragged to the Metropolitan by opera-obsessive parents in order to practice sitting absolutely still for three hours, I sometimes wondered about this. Certainly, on stage, there was a lot of dumb going on. What intelligent person could possibly trust evil Baron Scarpia to keep his word, or would sing full-out when dying of tuberculosis, with only a delicate, tuneful cough to show the gravity of the situation?

Opera singers were like Rat Pack Era movie-stars—they dressed well, they smoked and drank, they seemed always to be alighting from planes surrounded by Rolleiflex-bearing photographers. I heard a great story about Franco Corelli, the “Prince of Tenors,” who, when irritated by a soprano lead, would have a pre-performance meal laced with garlic. Did wonders for the love scenes. To an eight-year old that sounded pretty darn smart.

Yet, if you ask many musicians, they will tell you that the average opera singer just isn't that bright. I had a conversation a few months ago with a classically trained instrumentalist who is now a cantor. In his conservatory, the pure vocalists were looked down upon as lesser beings. He used the example of a Stradivarius. If he were suddenly to hand me this most cherished of instruments, I would scrape the bow across the strings and produce a sound similar to an alley cat. Without learning how to play, how to sight-read, without hours and hours of daily practice, I would never have the ability to make music. That was a musician's burden–endless efforts towards perfection, and the instrumentalists paid it. But the singer, through some completely random mixing of DNA, almost as God's afterthought on a busy day, got the Strad implanted, and all she needed to do was open her mouth and beauty would pour out.

This “Strad Complex” is not confined to instrumentalists and vocalists. There is the brilliant scene in Amadeus when the desperate Constanze brings Mozart's music to Salieri. Look at F. Murray Abraham's face as he leafs through page after page—it's just eating at him. In the space of a few moments you see incredulity, envy, opportunism, but, above all, an anguish that can only come from being talented enough to grasp that, on his best, most creative day, he can't even approach what this silly little man-child writes as a first (and only) draft.

Read more »

by Bill Benzon

What then are we to make of the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, an event as preposterous as the title of this essay? However fervent his supporters were, and are, it appears that, come Election Day, not even Trump thought he would win. And now he’s stuck with having to govern. He’s caught the tiger by the tail and now he’s got to hold on to stay alive.

To be sure, I wasn’t at all happy voting for Hillary, for she seems to be more of the same. Obama is in many ways an admirable man and leader, but he’s also the Drone president and, though he did something about health care – Thank you, Obamacare! – he also seems to be out of the Clintonist triangulation Wall Street school of governance. Of course, Hillary is also a Clintonist, and even more of a hawk than Obama.

No, Hillary did not fill me with joy. I felt the Bern.

But Donald Trump? I cannot comprehend. Hence the term “singularity” in that preposterous title. The term is best known in the context of computing and artificial intelligence, where The Technological Singularity is when the machines become self-aware, bootstrap themselves into Superintelligence, and take over the joint, lock stock and barrel o’ monkeys. I think that’s nonsense, but the machines surely have been busy.

Read more »