by Jeff Strabone

Another U.S. presidential election is upon us, and once again the electoral college looms large as a threat to the legitimacy of government and people's faith in democracy. On the eve of what may be another split between the electoral college and the nationwide popular vote total, we are no closer to a direct popular election than we were twelve years ago when the winner was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

But that may not be such a bad thing for those of us who want to see the electoral college abolished. In fact, the best chance for abolition may lie in sharing the pain by reversing the party polarity of the 2000 split: i.e., for President Obama to win the electoral college and Mitt Romney to win the popular vote. With the likelihood that the electoral college will favor the Democrats for at least the next few elections, our best hope may lie in a split that infuriates Republicans so deeply that they would clamor for reform as Democrats did after 2000.

Perhaps the worst idea out there for ending the reign of the electoral college is an effort called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). The NPVIC reminds us of all that's wrong with the clause in the Constitution that leaves the choosing of the electors to the states. The more we mess with the state statutes governing the awarding of electoral votes, the more we may regress to a past when popular votes for U.S. President were not held at all by the states.

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APPETITES

For Ravi Shankar

He will bring you croissants in bed
Come to you as clouds
Gradually discover the moon
Unstring you knot by knot
Feast with you on the roof
Weave you out of yourself
Uncork your drunkenness
Into cups made from skulls
Wrap you in a robe of words
Chew on your spicy locks
As sometimes in the madhouse
Men gnaw on their chains

By Rafiq Kathwari, guest poet at 3Quarks Daily.

by Tom Jacobs

The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”

~ David Foster Wallace

One of the things that Hurricane Sandy draws to our attention are all of the bureaucratic forces that quietly and almost imperceptibly but decisively shape our lives and the world we inhabit. Bureaucratic institutions like FEMA, City Hall, the NYPD, the Department of Sanitation, Con Edison, and so forth. Catastrophes tend to offer them a moment to step into the spotlight and either dazzle or utterly fail. One of the reasons their emergence in the public’s attention is interesting is that the work they do in non-catastrophic circumstances is so workmanlike and dull that it’s boring to even think about.

In one of the more amusing passages in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, a character mistakenly enters the wrong university classroom and finds himself developing an unexpected interest in accounting. The Jesuit accounting professor delivers remarkably fascinating reflections on the subject during his lectures, at one point making the following claim:

Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is… The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valour. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all – all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience… Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality – there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire… actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.

The real heroes, it seems, are perhaps not those who make grand gestures or defeat foes but rather people like accountants: those who toil in obscurity and make the wheels of commerce and bureaucracy turn. Wallace called his last novel a “portrait of bureaucracy,” and the portrait offers is both horrifying and hopeful. His work explores this dialectic of ecstasy and crushing boredom, and the relation of freedom and rigid structure. Most intriguing is the way he understands the ecstasies and freedoms to be found even in the most boring and structured of scenarios—like working for the IRS.

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by Anis Shivani

First fisting faggot,
we must outlaw reproduction
of everyone with a natural blonde,
except other. It is scary knowing
he has that football
to carry around.

Michelle Obama shakin her thang
to Beyonce’s song,
you go girl!

Terrorist fist bump
devolves into intimate
fisting for the Obamas.
He's really saying 69 sacks,
because they were talking about football.

Her character is blonde,
wears J.Crew and Theory suits (just one).
Tagg Romney whispered an apology
to Obama for wanting to punch
Michelle Obama nude redtube
candy everywhere (no, I’m not talking
about the blonde rookie, you pervs).

Three down, two to go:
Obama gives veiled threat to violent Syrian.
To re-elect Obama would be like the Titanic
backing up and hitting the iceberg again.

Blonde has given up the noc list
and I’ve been Valerie Plame’d.
Timberlake says taking blonde corporal
to the Marine Ball “changed my life.”

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by Mara Jebsen

The idea of civilization, bit by bit, helps holds together opposites, whose only former identity existed in the opposition to the Other.–Edouard Glissant

No one has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.–Zelda Fitzgerald

America is always far away, particularly in November. In November in New York, the mind bends toward California, or any way of imagining how chaotically big the country is. Is it possible to fathom that all of these people really belong together? This November, we are asked to consider the narratives and ideas that yoke us so uncomfortably. But we all seem to know different narratives and to consider them differently. For this reason, we should reflect on the rather remarkable combination of faith, apathy and sophistication that prevents us from resorting to bloodshed if we find ourselves governed by a party we dislike.

For some reason, in November, I become transfixed by the image of a transcontinental train. I think of the train tracks spanning from New Orleans to Los Angeles, carrying lots of hopeful and deperate families during the second wave of the Great Migration. I try to imagine this moment for this population: the first unsegregated streets, these first palms, the first blue glimpse of the Pacific. It is a moment in our history I do not know enough about.

Personally, I feel most patriotic when I am listening to Bob Dylan or Ray Charles. So much of American music seems to contain, and melodically resolve, our violent narratives within it. It makes one vainly wish that music could be a model; could be the idea that holds opposites together. All citizens, even musicians and poets, are occasionally called upon to test how much the heart can hold. Some artists can even make a career of it. I think of Whitman, containing, stretching, containing. I want to tell him: I, too, contain multitudes, but they don't always get along.

To expand the container, to even name the sensation of holding in your consciousness the idea of multitudes, the geographic vastness of this place, the strangeness of belonging to it, is very difficult. One November I mashed-up “Dying Swan” by the Duke Quartet, a snippet of Dylan lyrics, and a poem first published at fogged clarity as “Mirages,” but now renamed “America is Always Far Away.” I offer it in this container because I think it sounds a little like what it feels like to be here, now, nervous and determined, imagining America.

Download LightComeShining

by Dave Maier

My grad school colleague M.B. once told me about an exchange he had had with one of our professors. His area was personal identity, and his dissertation advanced a view about same which our professor found counter-intuitive – or at least worried about whether most people would do so. His response, he told me, was this: “Why should I worry about what most people think about this issue? Who is more likely to be right about it – someone who has spent five years becoming an expert on this very topic, considering the arguments for and against it in minute detail? or someone who knows virtually nothing about it, but simply asserts his immediate intuitive reaction as fact?”

I thought this was very well said, but I still wasn't sure. One of the tradeoffs of highly technical philosophy is that the more comprehensive and ironclad a theory is, the more likely it is to stretch our ordinary concepts to the breaking point. Whether or not this is a bad thing will depend on how you feel about comprehensive, ironclad philosophical theories, as opposed to speaking normally with one's friends and neighbors (should they not be professional philosophers).

As the “experimental philosophy” movement is typically construed, it joins this battle of philosophical intuitions firmly on the side of the folk. It's not, as critics sometimes charge, that x-phi wants to put philosophical theories to a vote – after all, my colleague had plenty of arguments to go along with his intuitions – but to the extent that it is indeed a battle of intuitions, x-phi is determined not to let traditional philosophers get away with simply saying “it seems to me that in such a case we would say that _______”.

3QD readers know all about x-phi, naturally, as our Top Philosophy Quark for 2012 was Wesley Buckwalter's most interesting post on an x-phi consideration of non-factive conceptions of knowledge. I say “an” x-phi consideration because x-phi is no one monolithic, um, monolith, but an umbrella term for a wide variety of related approaches (for more on this see here, and the links therein). That is, it doesn't have to take the form of surveys of intuitions; but sometimes it does, and in this post I wonder aloud about what we should really make of the results of such surveys.

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by James McGirk

After four debates and with a tsunami of political advertising inundating the United States, it is clear that neither presidential candidate is willing to act decisively on what should be the most pressing issue of our day: student loan debt.

Democrats offer crumbs. Republicans even can’t be bothered to pander to young voters. Yet no other issue so neatly encapsulates the miseries of contemporary American existence. An entire generation of smart, educated people are being crippled with debt. Without some sort of relief, upward mobility will vanish, the gap between rich and poor will yawn wider, our economy will be left in ruins, and what’s left of our once vaunted ability to innovate will die. The parasite is killing the host.

The time has come for decisive action. Student loan debt must be forgiven completely. The federal government should not be lending money to students. All it does is drive up prices and push us deeper in debt. Offer amnesty, get rid of the program, and let colleges pare down tuition until it makes sense for a family to save up or borrow money privately for their children to go. At the very least, let these loans be dischargeable in bankruptcy. This may seem like a drastic thing to do, but the situation is out of control. Something has to be done.

Student loan debt now accounts for 18 percent of American consumer debt. Unlike a mortgage there is no way to discharge a student loan (short of total medical disability). The interest is painful: 3.4 percent for a loan taken out as an undergraduate, and a usurious 6.8 percent for a graduate student. The interest capitalizes. Not only is it charged on the principal, but on any unpaid interest as well, meaning that a loan balloons while student is in school, or during the increasingly frequent forbearances necessary during periods of unemployment. There is no risk of default to the lender. The government guarantees all student loans. Nor is there any risk to universities. It is a trough of free money and these swine have gorged themselves, shamelessly raising tuition year after year, at a rate far outpacing inflation.

The class of 2011 graduated with $26,600 worth of debt each. That’s just for a bachelor’s degree. And those numbers include the lucky third that graduated with no debt at all. For a shot at a job that might offer entrée into a white-collar career you need a graduate degree and a year or two of unpaid internships. Lawyers and doctors, the traditionally secure gateways into America’s upper middle class can easily amass hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt. A year of unemployment could wipe them out completely. Very few people who graduate with six-figures of un-dischargable debt will take risks. Every wonder why so many math and science PhDs are taking jobs on Wall Street? Wonder no more.

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by Maniza Naqvi

I called this essay “Owning our Stories” when it was published as a paper for a conference on sustainable development held in Islamabad in 2003. At the time I wrote this I was becoming increasingly anxious and worried about one of the greatest dangers facing the world: the justification of terror and war through the dangerous revival of a singular and value laden narrative and image of good and evil with its time released poison of hate.

At the end of October 2012 we are all aware of the results of this narrative: there are at least four wars underway that are justified through this narrative. There is the surveillance of Muslims in the US (here). There is the Supreme Court of the United States decision in 2010 in the case the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission which ruled that under the First Amendment corporations are people and can not be prohibited in election spending (here). Private militaries and security corporations, are participating in the prosecution of wars in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan (here,here,here, here and here). There is the National Defense Authorization Act which allows the indefinite detention of anyone in the world including Americans citizens without trial (hereand here); Under the provisions of the Military Commission Act of 2006 the President can declare anyone an enemy combatant and order their execution or assassination (here and here); the President of the United States has a kill list and can and does order extra judicial killings including with drone attacks. (here, here,here,here, here, here).

I was invited to the conference in December 2003 in Islamabad as an artist, as a writer:

All Our Stories: Stories, I think do not reveal the truth, they do however expose untruths. A multitude of narratives, all versions of perceived reality prevent the rise and tyranny of a singular narrative. And in this way, through a multitude of stories, a balance is maintained and truth whether it exists or not is safeguarded by not being singled out. In receiving these narratives we are able to reason that all versions matter; all must be given consideration; that all opinions must be questioned and that all perceptions have validity. All truths are untruths all untruths are true. In the absence of a multitude of narratives, reason remains ruined.

I see reason ruined every day in newspapers, in images on TV channels and in the stacks of books, the so called literature of experts on all things Muslim, Pakistani and Middle Eastern. One of the greatest dangers facing the world today is the dangerous revival of a singular and value laden narrative of good and evil with its time released poison of hate. This view perceives the world in terms of fenced in real estate not as Earth and in terms of corporate interests not cooperation. These story-tellers with their narratives of antipathy are given credence branded as secular as they view the world through an optic of fear and control while weaving stories full of hate: Stories that justify the existing divisions in our world geographical, social and economic. Language today continues to be used as a weapon with representations of whole peoples in dangerous ways instead of building understanding.

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

We really do coinhabit the earth with mythical creatures. Werewolves have recently occupied my home. Let me explain: Two of my kids are young teens, who have transformed practically overnight into hairy, musky, snarling, nocturnal beasts with insatiable appetites for food, media, novelty, and the company of other werewolves.

Of course, I am not the first to make this lupine-teen connection, and I can still appreciate the situation from my kids' perspectives: One day you're a fairly carefree child and suddenly you have hairs sprouting in new places, insistent demands from your digestive and reproductive tracts governing nearly every decision (tubular hells?), and are facing fear and loathing from peers and parents alike while trying to decipher and navigate a suddenly unfamiliar, yet vitally important social landscape.

Adolescence is a human universal, yet there are some features that make our 21st Century, First-World situation a bit unusual. One is that our kids are entering adolescence earlier than ever. Whatever mismatches exist between our bodies and brains during this transitional period may be exaggerated as a result of this shift in timing. Immature minds partially in control of mature bodies is less than ideal for lots of reasons. Another feature of our society is that it fetishizes teenhood and young-adulthood to an extraordinary degree. Yet another feature unique to our situation may be that so many more of us actually survive adolescence and live to a ripe old age. For much of our evolutionary history, the aspects of our lifecycles that have mattered most, played out while we were still essentially adolescents. Teen marriages were common. Vanishingly few of us made it past the age of 30. No wonder we, as a species, are such crooked timber! Only recently, have there been enough older folk in the population to have much of an effect on population level characteristics, or even merely reflect on the phenomenon of puberty itself.

Adolescence is akin to metamorphosis from a tadpole into a frog or a caterpillar into a butterfly plus all the angst of being somewhat self-aware. You couldn't pay me enough to relive those years, yet I suppose it is a form of karma to have to relive adolescence from an adult's perspective:

Could I have possibly been this irrational, self-absorbed, and ungrateful?

Afraid so.

Should I try to impart to my kids what little I've learned in the roughly three decades that have elapsed since my own adolescence?

Of course.

Will it do any good?

Probably not. They will have to learn these lessons themselves.

We are consigned to an intergenerational version of “Groundhog Day:” The same mistakes over and over again with seemingly little chance of resolution. Perhaps this is one aspect of the cycle of suffering that the Buddha alluded to. In some ways, youth is wasted on the young and by the time we begin to figure it all out, we're in decline or perhaps even nearing the end of our time on this planet.

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by Akim Reinhardt

I’ve never voted for a major party presidential candidate.

In 1988, the first time I was old enough to cast a ballot, I declined. Just shy of my 21st birthday, I was an angry young man living in a Midwestern college town. I was cynical. I was determined not to be anyone’s chump. I was convinced my vote didn’t make a difference. My older girlfriend (24) was riveted by the showdown between Michael Dukakis and George H. Bush, so I followed matters through her eyes. I remember Lloyd Bentsen’s “You’re no Jack Kennedy” zinger to Dan Quayle in the vice presidential debates. And I remember it not being enough to overcome Dukakis’ disastrous campaign, which squandered a 17-point summertime lead. After it was all over, I eventually came to feel that there had to be a better way. Perhaps I shouldn’t simply sit on my thumbs just because I didn’t like either candidate.

By 1992, living back home in New York City, I was more engaged. But not in the manner that drove so many twenty-somethings into the arms of a young, smiling Bill Clinton, who was so keen to feel everyone’s pain, to “rap” with the kids on MTV, and barely kinda cop to maybe having once smoked cannabis. No, when I say I was more engaged, I mean I attended a Halloween costume party dressed as a young James Stockdale. For those of you who don’t remember, Stockdale was independent billionaire H. Ross Perot’s running mate. And long before John McCain ever made a run at the national ticket, Stockdale already had “Survived a Vietnam Prison Camp” on his resumé. At the time, Perot and Stockdale looked like the perfect vehicle for expressing my disgust with a broken, homogenized political system, and they got my vote.

In 1996, while living in Nebraska, I again voted for Perot. This time, however, it was more out of desperation than inspiration. The first time around I was eager to throw a monkey wrench at Washington. More than anything, I'd wanted to shake things up. I also hadn’t been alone. Perot scooped nearly a fifth of the popular vote in 1992, essentially clinching the election for Clinton. But in 1996, I punched his ticket out of exasperation. His crazy uncle routine, which had seemed charming in 1992, was tired and annoying by then (and apparently it’s since gotten worse).

And so I went into the booth, sighed, and pulled Perot's lever mostly because I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for either Clinton or Bob Dole. It was obvious long before Clinton ever stepped into the White House that he was a lying piece of shit. Four years in the White House had only further exposed him as a pandering, philandering, center-right, NAFTA-whoring scumbag (There truly is no joy in saying “I told you so.”). And back then, before the Republican Party went completely bat shit crazy, guys like Bob Dole and George H. Bush seemed pretty goddamned awful. Nowadays, by comparison they seem like old, white versions of Barack Obama.

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by Sarah Firisen

When a vote carries quite this much weight
Should it really all hinge on debate?
Was this truly the key
To help you finally see
A choice that good sense should dictate?

Undecided, it's all up to you
You're the one that both parties must woo
You're the one in the polls
That they court with their souls
My vote is hardly a coup

So you're watching and waiting for what?
What new line are you hoping they'll trot?
Are they really such kin
That it's just a roulette spin?
Do you think any difference is rot?

Did you watch those debates with chagrin?
And think, “what was up with Joe Biden's grin
Now it's all clear to me
I suddenly see
Who I clearly must want to win”?

So undecided, let me just say
That this elections is all yours to sway
Shows this system is bust
And is not one to trust
The electoral college just isn't the way

Lolla Rossa

in a field behind our house
Lolla Rossa transfigured in morning light
becomes

at the instant a groundhog
just on haunches drops
and scuttles under the shed

becomes
the very light
that shaped her—

becomes the very particles or waves
(as the truth may be
or both) which transcendentally
show themselves
to us here
in this room
and out there
fifty feet down the slope

present themselves as ruby lettuce whose leaves,
tightly packed and convoluted at their mortal edges,
echo the muscle songs of our personal star
who blows trumpet too to praise her
—Miles Davis from the corner
of this universal room
spinning past the iris of a laser
in the dark reaches
of a CD tray

—Lolla Rossa now un-transfigured
as a cloud comes between
pause and play

by Jim Culleny
10/20/12

by Liam Heneghan

From my book in progress Fields of Love: Themes of Romance and Agricultural Reform in the Work of Leo Tolstoy (this volume is not yet under contract).

Leo Tolstoy started Anna Karenina, arguably his finest novel, with a hypothesis. “Happy families”, he conjectured, “are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This is the first general systems theory of love. Tolstoy investigated his thesis by means of a set of rather elaborate case studies: principally those of the troubled marriage of Stiva and Dolly Oblonsky, the crumbling marriage of Count Alexei and Anna Karenin (Oblonsky’s sister), the ill-fated romance of Anna Karenin and Count Alexei Vronsky, and starting the cycle over, the courtship and marriage of Konstantin Levin and Kitty Shcherbatskaya. My task here is to translate Anna Karenina from this series of informative but ultimately idiosyncratic case studies into a more precisely formulated theory of love, one that might be helpful to any one of us in navigating the vicissitudes of love.

***

The novel starts with consternation in the Oblonsky household. Stiva’s dalliance with the French governess (Mademoiselle Roland of the roguish black eyes and that smile!) has been discovered and Dolly wants him out of the house. Assuming that his wife was aware and had turned a blind eye to his shenanigans, Oblonsky, despite his feelings of guilt, concludes that an injustice is being perpetrated on him. The upset in the home is precipitous, coming as it does somewhat out of the blue. A situation deemed tolerable before is tolerated no longer; a full-blown crisis has emerged. Those forces that had held the family together function no longer and Stiva is propelled out the door.

Stiva is everyman. Likable, thoroughly average: his newspaper, by way of illustration, is Liberal but not extreme. He is not however a self-deceptive fellow. The incompatibility of his corporeal needs and his obligation to family consigns him to a life of deception and lies that run contrary to his generally open and affable nature. His wife is no longer attractive to him and he is not yet prepared to retire to a life without frolics. He will fornicate again one suspects.

Dolly is everywoman, though she is less mitigatingly described than her husband, at least in the opening scenes. Her once lustrous hair is knotted into thin plaits. Her face is gaunt. On the morning when we join them Dolly receives her husband in her chambers from which he had been expelled. It is but a few days after the discovery of his indiscretion. He weeps, she spurns. “Your tears,” she exclaimed, “are water.” There is apparently no turning back. So seemingly small a catastrophe – after all, the tryst with the smiling Mlle Roland was by no means Stiva’s first infidelity – has sundered the mechanism that had previously bound their home together.

***

Let us, for the purposes of theory-making, call the Oblonsky family a system. We will simply define a system as a set of elements that have a pattern of interrelations.

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by Misha Lepetic

“This is what a million people looks like”
~Blood Diamond

The visual and journalistic rhetoric of refugee camps, as produced and consumed by the West, follows a well-known script. Following some armed conflict and/or natural catastrophe, tens of thousands star-crossed innocents cross into a foreign land with whatever they can carry, and into the waiting arms of whatever the (generally reluctant) host country has managed to jury-rig, along with the help of IRC or UNHCR or any of the other major players in the global humanitarian complex. Once the camps are established, they are quickly brought to capacity and then some, at which moment the journalists descend, documenting the misery, the helplessness and the usual hand-wringing on the part of all involved. We see how initial, optimistic talk of rapid repatriation by various officials eventually gives way to finger-pointing and panicky fund-raising as the temporary situation assumes increasingly permanent characteristics. Finally, unless or until famine or disease reinvigorate coverage of these sites, our awareness of these unhappy situations slips unnoticed into the collective memory hole.

However, there is another, far more compelling and humane way to view these camps, and that is as prototypical urban types. The various ways in which we define the urban, such as population density, non-agricultural economic activity, and reasonably well-defined boundaries, are conditions that are here amply met. And when one considers the ways in which people artificially conjure cities (consider a company town, built for the sole purpose of extracting a natural resource), then why shouldn’t we consider refugee camps to be cities? More importantly, if we do consent to think of them as cities, what is it that we can learn from them?

Consider, for example, the three refugee camps collectively known as Daadab, in northeastern Kenya. Founded in 1991 to take in Somali refugees from the then-new civil war, the camp is now the world’s largest, and is still growing after 22 years; the influx of new arrivals has been guaranteed not only by the still-unresolved civil war, but also by the added stress of two failed monsoons in the Horn of Africa. As a result,

Dadaab is now the third-largest city in Kenya, but there are no Kenyans living there. Instead, it is home to 450,000 Somalis in a camp that was built for 90,000 people. Refugees…are not permitted to leave the camp, because the Kenyan government wants them to remain refugees and not become illegal immigrants. The government also prohibits them from working.

This illustrates the paradox of the refugee camp and why, at first blush, it may seem counterintuitive to think of this form as a fundamentally, if prototypically, urban one. For one, the restrictions on the freedom of mobility violates our contemporary conception of the city: as a place to which people migrate in order to seek economic opportunity (I should note that this is debunked below). The additional perception of refugees as victims dependent on the largesse of both host country and humanitarian organizations – which, of course, operate under their own incentives that are not necessarily aligned with the long-term desires of the refugees – further removes them from the perception as independent actors.

And yet, as the case of Dadaab reveals, we really do have a city on our hands. The logistics of housing and feeding nearly half a million people are formidable, and to facilitate an organized approach the camp is laid out in a grid, with every family assigned an address. Even though it may be motivated only by pragmatism, this is de facto urban planning.

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Tell Me Something I Don't Know

Don’t tell me the earth’s a sphere
and the sun’s kiss planted there
amounts to half-day terminal bliss
with a dark end

or that winters have to do with angles
mystics have to do with angels
and lovers are about orbiting passions
that whirl like eclipsing binaries—
star pairs that pulse across light years
to come in telescopes
before they're spent

Don’t tell me the wind’s a metaphor
for a longing to fill vacuums
that sometimes spit typhoons

or that a red cardinal seen
in the high reach of a cherry tree
is no more sublime than worms
who burrow among turnip roots
for a living

Don’t tell me the chances of being
are equal to the odds of not being

—tell me something I don’t know

Tell me how to weave
tomorrow into yesterday
without tangling, without
strangling today

Jim Culleny
10/10/12

by Sue Hubbard

What is a portrait for? What does it tell us? Before the camera it was the only way of recording human presence. All other images of the human face were transient: a reflection caught in a pool of water or a pane of glass. To put paint on canvas was to render a person immortal and, in many cases, it gave the sitter authority, status and power. For women it was often a passport to marriage (though the perils of lying paint were demonstrated when Hans Holbein’s portrait of the dumpy Anne of Cleeves beautified the princess so that on her arrival in England in 1539, Henry VIII, already in his late 40s, sick and ageing and married three times, rejected his prospective bride as not attractive enough.)

But with the invention of the camera ‘truth’ became the domain of photography, while painting was left to ‘express’ the soul of the sitter though, as John Berger points out in his essay The Changing View of Man in the Portrait, town halls and provincial museums are full of lifeless, boring likenesses that reveal little skill and even less about the human soul. Berger asks whether you would rather have a photo of someone you love or a painting. Go on, be honest, you’re not really going to keep an oil painting propped up on the pillow beside you when yearning for an absent love, are you? This suggests, then, that the average painted portrait was traditionally – with honourable exceptions such as Rembrandt or Van Gogh – about something else: status, aggrandizement, a legacy to history. Each year the BP Portrait Award is full of achingly skilful works that say little about the sitter and even less about contemporary painting. Those that do manage to do so stand out like diamonds. So what is the point of the contemporary portrait and why has an artist such as Thomas Schütte returned to concentrate on figures and faces?

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by Quinn O'Neill

Everyone knows there are crazy people around. You probably know a few personally and you can find plenty on the television and internet. These are the days of Honey Boo Boo and political attack ads that feature Big Bird. We live in a crazy world.

Crazy, however, is a pretty subjective term. It might mean delusional or stupid, or maybe just of a perspective that’s radically different from our own. The people you think are crazy might think the same of you and almost no one thinks himself crazy. Craziness is in the eye of the beholder.

Craziness also takes many forms, including religious fanaticism, science denialism, daredevilry and behaviors that might be described as “all kinds of crazy”. Folks who partake in such practices are often referred to with a variety of colorful terms like wingnuts, ass-hats, and dumbasses.

Given the amount of senseless and stupid behavior that we perceive, it might seem outrageous to claim that people – all people – make perfect sense. The crux of my argument rests on the idea that behaviors are caused, and to the extent that they are caused – fully, I believe – they will always make sense if the causal factors are understood.

This seems to be the approach that we intuitively take when we observe unusual behavior in animals. We don’t blame the animal and label it a dumbass, we assume there’s something causing the behavior, like an illness, the presence of another animal, or the animal’s having been trained by humans. A bizarre behavior could also have a strong genetic component; maybe it’s evolved because it’s adaptive or maybe it’s the result of a spontanteous deleterious mutation. In any case, we're likely to attribute the behavior to material causes rather than to blame the animal.

As animals, we should look at our own behavior in the same light. We can think and reason, but reasoning is just one of many factors that shape our actions. If we consider all of the relevant causal factors, even the most extreme human behaviors become comprehensible. A man eating another man’s face, for example, can be understandable in light of drug abuse or psychiatric disorders.

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