by Brooks Riley

I recently googled an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. Within seconds his image appeared before me, as compelling and alluring as it had once been for me so long ago. It wasn’t a living friend that I googled, never had been. It was a dead one, in more ways than one, the first painting that ever impressed me: L’homme mort, by Édouard Manet, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, there known as The Dead Toreador. [Click photo to enlarge.]

It may seem insulting to my living friends that I find myself revisiting the inanimate ones to try to understand their place in my personal pantheon. Friendship may even be the wrong word for the acquaintance one makes with a work of art. But the attraction is there, just as we are attracted to the singular mix of attributes of a person whom one knows will become a friend. The first time I saw my best friend, it was not in person, but in a thumbnail photograph of her among hundreds, of incoming freshmen at college. There was nothing unusual about that face, but there was a quality I noticed, something ineffable. When I later met that freshman, I recognized her immediately.

I was probably 14 or 15 years old when I first saw the Manet painting. Walking into the gallery where it hung, I was immediately drawn to it. From a distance, it was the dynamism within the frame, the chiaroscuro 20-degree angle slashed across the wide canvas from upper left to lower right, that made me want to move closer. It was also the proto-cinematic framing, heralding the 1.85:1 aspect ratio of modern cinema. The angle was formed by the body of a dead bullfighter, the only event in an otherwise nearly blank, dark canvas with little context. His head, upside down, is closest to us. His feet lie at the other end of the perspective.

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Solar Filaments

the sun's intense but placid
teasing this morning’s fog from the river,
at least from this vantage, sitting as we are
at a perfect distance from its orange firebox
safe from its arcing solar filaments,
the eruptions which suddenly uncoil like snakes
and would reduce me to cinders
with their dragon breath if not for
certain equations like those that render orbits
and the change of state that gives
this river its gray vapor coat
in which it rides its way to the sea
under the cool red blast furnace blaze
of clouds caught in the cup of two slopes
behind the phone pole’s tangle of wires
to the sound of water over the dam
speaking familiar alien tongues,
and footsteps curiously synced to my pace,
and the rhythmic exhalation
of my fog-spilling lungs
.

by Jim Culleny
1/19/15

by Claire Chambers

I recently wrote an essay for Dawn on general postcolonial rewritings of Shakespeare's Othello. For the present column, I turn to what Ania Loomba has called 'the made-in-India Othello fellows'. In other words, I am interested in those Indian writers who, from Henry Louis Vivian Derozio onwards, have looked to this play about love, jealousy, and race for inspiration and critique.

In her essay '”Filmi” Shakespeare', Poonam Trivedi defies accusations of 'bardolatry' and colonial cultural cringe to trace the history of Shakespeare on the Indian big screen. She shows that this history goes back to 1935 and Sohrab Modi's Khoon-ka Khoon, a cinematic rendering of an Indian stage version of Hamlet. Because the British colonizers laid emphasis on an English literary education for the Indians over whom they ruled, there were many filmic adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. Hamlet's blend of politics and metaphysical mystery seems to have proven the most popular of the Bard's plays for Indian auteurs. These directors, according to Trivedi, in the early days of Indian cinema found themselves between the rock of leaving Shakespeare 'pure and pristine' or the hard place of making him entirely 'bowdlerized and indigenized'. By the mid-twentieth century, the most successful adaptations relocated the plays to India in their entirety. Directors 'used' rather than 'abused' the Shakespearean originals, taking ideas from their plots and themes rather than critically writing back to the plays.

The Bengali film Saptapadhi was in 1961 probably the first to namecheck Othello. In it, a pair of starcrossed lovers − a Brahmin boy and an Anglo-Indian Christian girl − fall in love during a performance of that other text about a relationship transgressing social and racial fault-lines. Then came Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair's Kaliyattam (1997), a 1997 Malayalam remake of Othello. It is set against the backdrop of Kaliyattam or Kathakali, a devotional Keralan form of folk-theatre and dance also evoked in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. In Kaliyattam Jayaraaj transplants Shakespeare's racial concerns onto caste, since the plot revolves around a romantic pairing between a low-caste Theyyam performer and a Brahmin girl. Jayaraaj also changes Shakespeare's somewhat trivial, somatic device of a handkerchief that fuels Othello's jealousy into an opulent cloth that also served as a consummation sheet for the two protagonists.

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by Yohan J. John

[Warning: This essay will feature major spoilers for the latest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens.]

I had two reasons to watch the latest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, as soon as I was able. Firstly, I knew that despite all the talk of spoiler warnings and respect for “the fans”, I would have to basically avoid the internet until I managed to see it. (There's always some kill-joy on your facebook feed who gets a kick out of giving it all away, or an oaf who does not know what a spoiler is.) Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, I wanted to join in the conversation. One of the great things about a pop cultural juggernaut (such as Star Wars, Pope Francis, or the FIFA World Cup) is that a lot of people —friends, family, strangers in bars, members of the chatterati — will be talking about it. Pop cultural mega-events are like Rorschach tests: whether we enjoy them or not, we feel the urge to project onto them our emotions, our theories, our politics, our ideals. By virtue of their popularity, these events bring us together and draw our attention to a common focal point, at which point we can share our projections with each other.

In his book Finite and Infinite Games, James P Carse defines finite games as those that are played for the purpose of bringing play to an end. Infinite games, by contrast, are played “for the purpose of continuing the play”. When we think about games we typically think about the finite sort: their end goal is some victory or end state, at which point the game is over. Wars take the form of a finite game — they aim to bring an end to the adversary's 'play'. Debates takes this form too; their goal is to silence the opponent. A scathing critical review is meant to remove a work of art from the field of aesthetic play. But real conversations, by contrast, are infinite games. Their goal is to enlighten and entertain all the participants. A conversation is an occasion not only to look at a topic, but also to look through a topic, treating it as a prism that can be pointed at self, other, and world. A good conversation never comes to a definitive end; it is simply held in abeyance for a time, to be revisited later or carried on by new participants. The road goes ever on.

What follows are some impressions gleaned from the Star Wars Conversation, and some ideas for how we might carry on the infinite play and entice more people to join in. I'm not sure this will add up to a coherent essay, so feel free to skim, as you would a listicle or an annotated reading list. And by all means, contribute to the conversation in the comments section.

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Childhood

A Version after Iqbal

Earth & sky were new realms for me
My mother’s embrace the world

If anyone made me weep, I found
Comfort in rattling the door chain

O to gaze for hours at the moon
Journeying silently amidst clouds

Above mountains & deserts
Astonished at the blend of truth & lies

I trained my eyes to see, lips to move
My heart yearned

Translated from the original Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari whose collection ‘In Another Country’ is available here.

by Gail Pellett

On October 7, last year, Gui Minhai went missing from his Thai resort house, his daily medications that he was sorting left on the table. That month, three of his colleagues —Lu Bo, Zhang Zhiping and Lui Rongyi— disappeared from Hong Kong. Lu Bo and Gui Minhai are co-owners and the others are employees of the Hong Kong based Mighty Current Publishing House notorious for producing salacious books about China's top leadership—books long on lusty rumors and stories of corruption although short on sources. At the time of his disappearance, Mr. Gui was planning for a new book, The Pimps of the Chinese Communist Party.

The books published by Mighty Current had survived in the lively Hong Kong book market for two decades while being banned in China. They were particularly popular with mainland day tourists visiting Hong Kong. Now their popular bookstore is closed and the press is shut. Like any troubling story there are complexities and mysteries.

On Dec. 30, Lee Bo, one of Gui's business partners in the publishing company, suddenly disappeared as well. Lee and his wife owned the bookstore that sold their publications. Soon after disappearing Lee made a strange communication to his wife from Shenzhen that he was “working on an investigation.” His wife noted that he had left his passport at home. A passport he would need to enter Mainland China from Hong Kong. Lee Bo is a British citizen.

Last weekend, Sunday, Jan. 17, Gui, who is a naturalized Swedish citizen, suddenly showed up on CCTV —China's official TV network—confessing tearfully that he had violated his probation back in China for a drunken driving accident in 2003 that had ended in a fatality. Hong Kong based China watchers were quick to point out the edits in the video as revealed by the fact that Gui‘s t-shirt changed color mid-way.

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by Thomas R. Wells

Sports are mere games, “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” as Bernard Suits, the founder of the philosophy of games, puts it. So why do we care about them? The pleasure of sport has three distinct sources – competition, drama, and craft. Although each has their own logic and appeal, the defining characteristic of a flourishing sport is the harmonious balance it achieves between all three. In this light, the increasing dominance of competition across all sports is distinctly worrying. In the long run it may squeeze the very life out of them. The thin zero-sum perspective on sports that it embodies is already the source of the pernicious doping scandals, nationalism, and sexism in modern sports.

I

The pleasure of competition consists in the resolution of uncertainty combined with the validation of status rankings. There is a special thrill in the resolution of a sustained uncertainty about an outcome, and this is also behind the appeal of gambling. But in sport the resolution of this uncertainty is also meant to reflect merit: sporting competition provides an answer to the question of Who deserves to win? In the past, the Greeks saw the winners of sporting competitions as selected by the Gods and modern celebrations of gold medallists still echo of that. Hence the emphasis on fairness – level playing fields and anti-doping rules – to ensure the results reflect only the authentic natural merit of the contestants. The centrality of numbers – records, rankings, and numerous other statistics – also follows from this emphasis on outcomes. Competition is what makes sport exciting. It is also extremely accessible to those who know nothing about a sport (the familiar question of the noob 'Who's side are we on?') and can be repurposed as a relatively harmless expression of interregional or international rivalry, as when people identify with their national team in the soccer World Cup and go around talking about how 'we' beat 'Brazil'.

Competition – the chancing of fate and divine favour – is important but it is not the only kind of pleasure that sport can and should afford. The others though tend to make more demands on the spectator.

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by Carl Pierer

Published in 1932, Sunset Song is famed as one of the most important Scottish novels of the 20^th century. As the first part in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Trilogy A Scots Quair, it tells the story of Chris Guthrie coming of age in a rural community in Aberdeenshire. Set at the turn of the century, the novel depicts life in this traditional Scottish setting and explores how this age-old structure is transformed by the unfolding of World War I.

As a classic text, it has received much attention and suffered many an interpretation, ranging from Marxist and Feminist to humanist and nationalist. But despite many doubtful attempts at classification, the work has defied reduction and remains a vivid testimony of rural life.

Perhaps the most striking of the novel's virtues is its language. Written in a distinctive style, it infuses Standard English with the rhythm and words of Scots dialect, giving the prose a unique lyrical flavour. Gibbon skilfully and consistently uses dialectal terms to be true to his motive, without rendering the text unintelligible to a non-Scots speaker. That the melody of the text is deeply rooted in the highlands has provoked remarks of the following sort:

The non-Scot can get a great deal out of Mitchell [i.e. Lewis Grassic Gibbon], but one can sympathize with Donald Carswell when he says that he did not appreciate the prose of Sunset Song until he heard a north-east girl reading it.[i]

Comments of this kind aptly illustrate the difficulty of appreciating the literary value of the novel without sliding into dubious political territory, against the author's intent.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

The Indian subcontinent is well known for its spices, and one of its stellar contributions is the ubiquitous black pepper. Native to South India and Southeast Asia (see unripe green fruits in picture), it’s been around for thousands of years, making its way very early to Europe and other parts of Asia by trade. Black pepper and the related long pepper may have been the most prevalent hot spices east of the Atlantic. That was until Columbus blundered onto the Americas in 1492, inadvertently connecting the Americas – which at the time had a unique ecological and cultivation history because of its isolation – to Europe, Africa and Asia.

In the newly globalized world since 1492, American ‘peppers’, better known as chilies, began to make their way to the rest of the world and took hold quickly. Indeed, all the chili peppers that the world uses today, without exception – from the mild bell peppers used primarily for their deep flavors to the hot ones that Indian, Thai, Chinese, Korean and other cuisines take for granted – all are descended from the varieties cultivated for millennia by pre-Hispanic farmers in southern North America (Mexico primarily) and northern South America (Peru and Bolivia have many varieties). The fiery habanero, which scores high on the Scoville Heat Scale, is originally from the Amazon from where it reached Mexico.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Many months ago, I wandered along with a bunch of enthusiastic companions, into a museum for sepulchral culture. Nestled in the charming, modernist city of Kassel, Germany, we were part of a conference group discussing reproductive loss, and I suppose our hosts considered it fitting that we make communion with death culture writ large. As we flitted curiously around, and up and down, seeking shelter from the sleet and wind outside, we noted little skeletal figurines, gravestones, tombs, tombstones, and ritualistic instruments meant to ease passage to other worlds. For a museum devoted to the seemingly morbid phenomenon of death, it left us surprisingly sanguine.

The dictionary tells me that a sepulchre is “a small room or monument, cut in rock or built of stone, in which a dead person is laid or buried”. I worry at the oxymoronic, “dead person”. Other romanticized words like “crypt”, “catacomb”, and “sarcophagus” serve as synonyms for those who do not quite like the cadence of “sepulchre”. Together, in medieval-esque glory, they capture for us the stories of death, memory, and memorialization, and cultures of dying. For this we share with all humankind, in that people die. The sorrow of their loss is mitigated by cultural processes that allow us to believe that their lives meant something.

There are no sepulchral museums in India. But memorialization is seen across the length of the country, from the sepulchral urns excavated at Adichanallur in South India, to the stone circles of Junapani in Nagpur, to the evidence of pit burials in Burzahoma, Kashmir. The Iron Age in these regions marks the beginning of the creation of separate areas for the dead.

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by Charlie Huenemann

David Hume, that most sly student of human experience, declared he couldn’t find himself anywhere. As he gazed inward, he came across sensations, feelings, passions, and moods, but he had never come across a self in the way one might come across a vivid shade of turquoise or a lampshade or a heartbeat. He could find no “simple and continued” thing underlying his perceptions, as a bed of stone lies beneath an ever-changing stream. And so he haplessly concluded that he was nothing more than a stream, a bundle of impressions, a shifting mass of predicates without a subject. And if someone else has come to a different conclusion – if he stumbles across himself in his own experience –

“I must confess I can no longer reason with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu’d, which he calls himself; tho’ I am certain there is no such principle in me.”

It wasn’t long before alarm bells went off. In an appendix to his treatise, Hume admitted he was in deep trouble. The basis of his entire philosophy was the view that distinct events are, well, distinct: it is only our thinking that combines distinct events into ideas of enduring things, into stable causal regularities, into expectations of uniformity in nature, and so on. Our minds create the universe out of the diverse. But if we ourselves are diverse – if there is no unity even in us – then how we ever be able to pull off such a trick? Without a simple and continued thing to assemble all the broken fragments into a whole, how is the appearance of a whole ever to come about? “All my hopes vanish,” he wrote, as he entered into this deepest of all labyrinths. He provided no solution, not ever, and he never wrote on this subject again.

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by Grace Boey

“If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves?”

“She who Marrys ought to lay it down for an indisputable Maxim, that her Husband must govern absolutely and intirely, and that she has nothing else to do but to Please and Obey.”

– Mary Astell, Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1700)

* * *

Mary Astell, writer and philosopher of the late-17th and early-18th century, provides an intriguing paradox for the contemporary feminist. Modern scholars of her work have referred to her as the 'first English feminist'; yet, she was unabashedly conservative in ways that severely limited her ability to push boundaries for women.

Astell's fierce advocacy for women's education is perhaps her biggest claim to contemporary fame. 1694 saw the first publication of her book A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, in which she argued that women had the same intellectual and moral capacities as men, were equally deserving of education, and ought to emancipate themselves from the the vain and foolish social customs that bound them. To this end, Astell proposed the formation of a female-only educational academy.

Such views on women's education were remarkably radical for Astell's time, and her claims that women could be just as rational and virtuous as men went against popular sentiment. Her position on these matters will resonate strongly with the modern-day feminist. Consequently, the following excerpt from her later 1700 book, Some Reflections Upon Marriage, will come as a surprise—and perhaps disappointment—to some:

“She who Marrys ought to lay it down for an indisputable Maxim, that her Husband must govern absolutely and intirely, and that she has nothing else to do but to Please and Obey. She must not attempt to divide his Authority, or so much as dispute it, to struggle with her Yoke will only make it gall the more, but must believe him Wise and Good and in all respects the best, at least he must be so to her. She who can't do this is in no way fit to be a Wife.” (Reflections)

Despite what one might hope, the passage above isn't an isolated call by Astell for wives to submit to their husbands, no matter how lacking in wisdom or goodness he may be. Nor is it the case that Astell had changed her mind about the status of women by the time she started writing the Reflections; the Proposal itself is littered with calls for female subordination.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Have you ever been moved to tears by a painting?

There is a wonderful letter, in James Elkins' Pictures and Tears, about museum goers looking at a landscape painting in Japan. The lady who wrote the letter to Elkins was in Tokyo as part of an Andy Warhol exhibition. Unable to speak the language and perhaps not all that knowledgeable about the culture, it had to be based on some kind of misunderstanding that she came to believe that the painting of a waterfall on rare display at the Nezu Museum, called Nachi Waterfall, was “a picture of God.”

This painting is a National Treasure of Japan and is not displayed so often (I never managed to see it in 22 years there). So, not surprisingly, the exhibition was jam-packed full of people there to see it.

In the letter, she described how beautifully dressed the people were, many in formal kimono and some looked to be college professors. She said it was like going to the Met, except that when she finally got near the picture, she found the people around her to all be silently standing there crying.

It is an extraordinary story in an extraordinary book.

Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever been overcome to tears by a painting? (It has to be a painting and it has to be tears).

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by Matt McKenna

Unless you’re a parent, there’s a good chance you haven’t seen Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip, although you likely have been assaulted by the animated film’s ubiquitous trailer. When confronted by the trailer, perhaps you, like me, muted your TV/laptop/cell phone and wondered, why is there another Alvin and the Chipmunks movie? Or perhaps you, unlike me, had the wherewithal in that moment to realize the Alvin movies don’t exist because anyone particularly likes them but instead because parents are forced to bring their children to them regardless of their quality. What the Alvin movies are for children, the lottery is for adults–just as the Alvin movies don’t have to be good to sell tickets, neither does the Powerball lottery have to payout to sell tickets. With the Powerball jackpot prize shooting north of $1 billion, giddy adults are lining up to purchase tickets they know aren’t going to win. Indeed, it must be a cushy job to work either at 20th Century Fox on an Alvin movie or at the MUSL which runs Powerball since in either case, people will buy tickets despite their product providing no value to their customers.

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