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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Still reeling from the unexpected outcome of the US presidential election, commentators understandably have begun diagnosing the political and intellectual condition of the country. One assessment that has been gaining traction especially among Left-leaning intellectuals is that, in electing Mr. Trump to the Presidency, the United States has embraced a “post-truth” politics. Though quickly becoming a predominant theme of political commentary, as yet the term does not have a unified meaning. Arguably, it refers instead to a several related but distinct phenomena. But if the term is going to serve any useful diagnostic function, it is necessary to disambiguate its central uses.

Most commonly, “post-truth” is employed to mark the fact that apparently a large segment of the electorate holds that although Ms. Clinton's alleged dishonesty disqualifies her for office, Mr. Trump's dozens of demonstrable lies, deceptions, and whole-cloth fabrications are acceptable, if not positively admirable. That is, our politics has become “post-truth” in that lying and dissembling no longer necessarily count against a politician. But when one regards lying as disqualifying only for one's political opponents, one reveals that one's concern isn't really with truth telling at all. One is appealing to truth in a strictly opportunistic way.

A second deployment of “post-truth” is closely related, though more radical. It concerns the newfound force of unrelenting denial. When caught in a lie or fabrication, Mr. Trump's leading tactic is to flatly deny that he ever said the lying or fabricated thing that, provably, he said. This goes beyond President Bill Clinton's infamously tortured semantics concerning “the meaning of ‘is'.” Here, Trump embraces the view of Humpty Dumpty, whose words mean whatever he at any moment declares them to mean. When meaning is fixed wholly by the speaker's will, what the speaker has said is no long evaluable by anyone but the speaker himself. Hence our politics is post-truth not only in that lying, and even asserting falsehood, is conceptually impossible. There could be no such thing as lying for those who, like Carrol's egg, refuse to be mastered by words, even by their own words.

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Richard & Louise Guy [1]

by Jonathan Kujawa

On the occasion of Richard Guy's 100th birthday.

Human beings have a talent for spotting patterns. No doubt this was handy in our early days. If both Ug and Oka were violently ill after eating purple berries from a particular bush, our clan was well served to notice and avoid those berries in the future. If anything, evolution encourages us to be overly quick to infer patterns. Better safe than sorry. No need for a double blind, randomized trial with a large sample size when life and death are on the line.

Our keen sense for what is random and what is not works both for and against us. After all, as we saw last month, it was Pick's keen eye for patterns which lead him to discover his beautiful formula. For an easier example, let's write down the first few numbers of the Fibonacci sequence:

1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,….

It only takes a minute to spot the rule used to generate these numbers. With a little more time we can even guess exactly which ones are even and which ones are odd [2].

Now imagine I tell you that I flipped two coins twenty-one times and got:

Coin A: TTTTHTTHHTTHTTTTHHHTT,

Coin B: HTTHTTHTTHTTHTTHTTHTT.

You would have to be an awfully trusting person to believe that both are fair coins and that I faithfully flipped and recorded the results. Our pattern seeking brain notices the regularity of Coin B. It violates our sense of what a “random” sequence of coin flips should look like. Mathematically we know each string of coins flips is equally likely. But even the most steely mathematician would be hard pressed to bet against Coin B next coming up heads.

A great icebreaker on the first day of teaching is to ask the students generate two lists of 100 coin flips: one by flipping a real coin and one by hand. Even though they do this while the instructor is out of the room, the instructor invariably can identify which is list is which. The secret is to look for long runs of heads, tails, or other patterns (like Coin B). Since all outcomes are equally likely to the coin it will happily generate strings of heads in a row. Human brains, however, notice such patterns and veto them in their effort to fake a random sequence of heads and tails. There is a running joke on this theme in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

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In Books

when words make love sentences are born
the world’s heft is changed by the weight of nouns,
the hesitations of hyphens and commas,
like the space between breaths,
tell the rhythm of what’s new and what’s been,
the dead stops of periods spell the end of what a breath holds,
adjectives, like the blood blush of infants
color clauses, articles wrap things in skin,
pronouns, unlike the particular names of new beings,
often identify the generalities of their forms by inclusion,
by saying, “We,” suggesting that mine and thine share,
and verbs are the darting eyes of fresh life,
the spastic gestures of unfamiliarity, the random smiles
that pass in the features of infants, sudden, uncalled-for
and of course the cautious steps of the old
reaching for footholds that once came naturally,
without thought, before the foreshadows of final words
.

Jim Culleny
12/1/16
.

by Daniel Ranard

you cannot
turn around in
the Absolute: there are no entrances or exits
no precipitations of forms
to use like tongs against the formless

—A.R. Ammons, in Guide

The world is usually grasped by its pieces. We may speak of a “holistic” perspective, but it's hard to understand all of a thing at once, or even to talk about it all at once. So we delineate pieces within the whole; we analyze the pieces and their interactions. For instance, to understand the recent political changes in the United States, it is uninformative to treat society monolithically. On the other hand, it's impossible to consider the disparate lives of every citizen at once. Instead, we delineate groups within the whole of society – political groups, racial groups, geographic groups – and discuss their interplay. Some delineations are more useful than others; it's probably difficult to understand the 2016 election in terms of cat- and dog-lovers. And all delineations share some degree of blurriness or arbitrariness: race is already a blurry construction, and though it may be crystallized in a bureaucratic form, the distinction only makes it more arbitrary. Through these delineations, we come to understand the otherwise formless and chaotic world and even to create our experience within it.

Imagine viewing all of human history as a video on fast-forward; observed all at once, you see only the tangled scurrying human beings. You cannot usefully describe what you see, nor guess what might happen next. But to the historian, history is not formless, though it may require hard work and ingenuity to find the right units of analysis. The traditional divisions of global society into self-described nation states and political institutions may serve you well, but new divisions may also be informative. In What is Global History?, Sebastian Conrad outlines the view that historians must not “accept political entities a priori as the boundaries of analysis, but instead trace the actual scope of entanglements and interconnections and work form there.” For instance, Marx chose to analyze history as an interplay of social classes. New perspectives might require more than the simple re-organization of people into different groups; historians might also invent new abstractions, such as the concept of capital, that help organize their observations.

These abstractions can be world-changing and world-making. That is, we live in the world of our chosen abstractions, which shape our narratives about ourselves and society. Although we choose these delineations and abstractions ourselves, I would not draw the radical conclusion that all choices are equal, or that the world is anything we make of it. Some choices are more useful, or maybe also more true or beautiful.

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by Olivia Zhu

A month ago, I wrote about haikus that wended their way through the Internet and found me. Really, truly—I hadn’t gone looking for them, had read them casually, and thought I might forget them. “And yet, and yet…” Chiyo-ni’s and Issa’s haikus kept nagging at me, so I looked for the translations that spoke most to me and wrote about them. Their mark lingers still, though, and when I passed by a used copy of Harold G. Henderson’s An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Bashō to Shiki in a bookstore, I had to pick it up.

Relatively speaking, it’s quite an old book on haiku. Published in 1958, it now appears to be out of print—so I really felt quite fortunate stumbling across as a clueless neophyte. It’s so old that inflation dictated I pay almost double the $1.45 that’s listed on the duck-decorated paperback cover, even in the book’s well-loved condition—still well worth it, of course. From what little I’ve read online, it seems likely that Henderson might have contributed to initial interest in haiku in America, as he helped found the Haiku Society of America and published some of the earliest English-language works on Japanese haiku.

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