by R. Passov

There’s a small, interesting book store in NYC, small enough for a pixie-of-a-lady and about 200, mostly rare, mostly old, and almost exclusively, cookbooks. The store is near my favorite bar and that’s all I’m going to say.

I first wandered into that shop while trying to walk off a handful of afternoon beers (at that favorite bar). I’ve since gone back many times, usually in search of quirky presents such as a picture book, made in the late 1970’s that contains a replica of every label for every bottle of Italian wine that had been offered in the prior one hundred years – exactly what to get an Italian friend who makes his own pasta and wine. For another close friend I procured a first edition of Diet and Reform by M K Gahndi, perfectly fitting in my view as I had come to believe that close friend was in need of both.

But this essay is not about that bookstore or the nearby bar nor the books in that store that I have found for others. This essay is about a rambling discourse, written as WWII approached its last summer, written mostly in Culoz, France, a small town much closer to Switzerland than to Paris, where Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas spent the last years of WWII.

Stein’s book, Wars I have Seen, is a repetitive reflection on living in the foothills during the waining days of the war. The French were emerging from one regret – that of having lived meekly under the dominion of the Germans – into another. They had allowed for their own subjugation by such a meek foe, as though the shame was not in having been conquered but rather that the conquerors turned out not to be all that.

I knew nothing about Wars I Have Seen. What caught my attention was first its cover – a distinctive jacket design by Cecil Beaton – and next that, unlike almost all other books in that shop, it was not a cookbook. Read more »

Sublime

I sometimes shudder at old pics,
their bittersweetness, their
cutting edge, their tricks:

….. daughter’s brilliant smiles,
….. mittens hung from cuffs,
….. Kodachrome taunts of time

….. —enough

I’d rather mine old stones, turn up
what’s scattered within my heart and head

….. —the gold

I’d rather stick with what’s been deeply sown,
take joy in what, within my heart, has grown.

I do not like as much, nostalgic risks.
The photo box stays beneath the bed
with CDs and snaps of bygone’s code
on paper, or on disks.

….. When memory goes will it matter?

Then, I may not even recognize the
aliens who peer from three by fours
or smile from screens in pixel splatters.

Love is as it comes in time, as it is in
moments real. Now is breath’s agency.
Now is never still, but alive, not held
in poignant frozen shots—

….. is immediate
….. is not mere blur
….. is true
….. sublime

Jim Culleny
Jan 29, 2011_Rev_032125

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by Christopher Hall

“In 2025, during an event to celebrate the inauguration of Donald Trump for his second term, the richest man in the world gave a Nazi salute to the crowd.” This is a sentence which, circa 2005, would have made for a rather overblown introduction for a YA dystopian novel. But here we are, and it did happen. It did happen – right? No, calling this a Nazi salute was leftist cancel culture in action. No, Elon is just very socially awkward and/or autistic. No, even the Anti-Defamation League says it wasn’t a Nazi salute. In many corners of the media, the message was simple: don’t believe your lying eyes.

What is inescapable is the sense of the ludicrous – you either think it’s ludicrous that we’re debating at all what was clearly a fascist gesture, or that there are people who think so, because it clearly wasn’t. The interpretational gambits being played here are both nettlesome and exhausting. And it isn’t solved by simply dismissing Musk as a troll. The strange loop of trolling, where we’re moving forward but we somehow end up at the beginning, usually involves the question of intention, always daring you to think both that he really means it and that it’s all a joke. And so maybe Musk’s gesture was innocent and maybe it wasn’t – but that’s all part of the troll. How can you take such a thing so seriously? (How can you not?) An arm raised at roughly a 45 degree angle – that’s what upsets you? (It’s literal Nazism, so of course it does!) But his hand was raised at a slightly higher angle – isn’t that just a wave? (Oh, stop bothering me and go read your Trump Bible.) It may be that Kekistan is long past its expiration date (the half-life of memes being pretty short), but the spirit remains intact and present. Trolling is a language game, and you lose if you react to it at all.

Trolling is also, as is frequently said, an art, and as perverse as it may sound, I want to look for a moment at The Gesture as a work of performance art. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

Today (June 13) is W.B. Yeats’s birthday. He would have been 157. I am compelled to remark upon the similarities between Yeats, the Nobel prize winner, and Peterson, the scribbler in the corner. I quote from a short Yeats biography, “he was lackluster at school,” an elementary report card said he was “Very poor in spelling,” and his early poems were described as a “vast murmurous gloom of dreams.” Peterson’s academic career and early poems could be described in a similar fashion. Where they differ is noted in that Yeats’s elementary report, “Perhaps better in Latin than in any other subject.” Peterson says of himself that the “D” he received in Latin was not earned, but a gift.

Yeats said of the woman he loved that she affected him as “a sound as of a Burmese gong, an over-powering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes.” Peterson says that that’s got it about right, “an over-powering tumult…[with] many pleasant secondary notes,” but adds “There are ‘dis-chords’ too. Music that is too sweet for too long gets tedious. One needs notes that grind against each other as well as those that get along.”

Yeats wrote that “Bodily decrepitude is wisdom.” Peterson is testing out that hypothesis. He’s not yet convinced. Yeats says, “This is no country for old men….” Peterson wonders if there is such a place, not wanting to end up as Yeats seems to as a mechanical cuckoo hanging in a cage in the emperor’s palace. Yeats thought of himself as kind of a jester, Peterson thinks himself as more of a clown. Both are useful, though the jester is more likely to get the Nobel prize.

Yeats, towards the end of his life after a dry period, wondered what the source of his poetry was and found it in “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart where the “old kettles, old bones, old rags” of his life lived along with “that raving slut/Who keeps the till.” He thought he “must go lie down there again” amidst the objects of his life to be refreshed. Peterson finds himself “Down in the Dumps” where he “sits on a bucket feeling/ supple as a seal” and bangs on “a bottle with his lost wooden horse leg, chinka chink-a chinkety-chaw-chaw-chaaah!” Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

What do an intoxicating drink and an ancient beauty ritual have in common? How did a word once linked to Roman roads become synonymous with insignificance? And what strange connection exists between human strength and a tiny, scurrying creature?

Language is a traveler. Words cross borders, crisscross centuries, and sometimes transform so completely that their meaning is completely altered. A term that once conveyed insult might, centuries later, become a compliment. A spice that once evoked luxury may later come to symbolize the ordinary. A simple verb in one language may be borrowed and reshaped into something spectacular in another.

The English language, restless and ever-expanding, is a patchwork of borrowed words, forgotten histories, and surprising transformations. While the English language’s primary roots lie in Old English, Old Norse, Latin, and French, it has also incorporated words from languages such as Arabic, Hindi, Dutch, Italian, and Japanese. Some words have arrived quietly, slipping into common speech without much notice. Others are shaped by conquest, trade, or scientific discovery. But every word has a journey—a story hidden beneath its surface, waiting to be uncovered.

Here are seven words whose unexpected and dramatic voyages through time and place remind us that language is not something static – it’s always moving and always changing.

1. Nice

For a word that now suggests something bland, colorless, and ineffectual, nice has had quite the rip-roaring journey. It started off as an insult. Originating from the Latin word nescius meaning “ignorant” or “unaware,” it entered Old French as nice, as in “careless” or “clumsy.” By the late 13th century, Middle English adopted nice to describe someone as “foolish” or “senseless.”

Over the subsequent centuries, nice experienced a series of dramatic shifts in meaning. In the 14th century, it conveyed the sense of being “wanton” or “lascivious,” a far cry from its modern use. By the 15th century, it had transformed again, then used to describe someone who was “fastidious” or “fussy.” It was only in the late 18th century that nice emerged as the polite and pleasant word we recognize today. Read more »

by Ken MacVey

As a lawyer I know too well that lawyers are infamous for looking for the dark lining in a silver cloud. That outlook goes with the territory of trying to look for legal pitfalls and hidden trap doors. That’s part of the job of what lawyers do—trying to protect their clients from legal liability and unexpected detours and disasters that could have been avoided by careful drafting or strategizing. That doesn’t mean lawyers are pessimists but sometimes it is taken that way.

This takes me to the glass half-empty/half-full trope. I have a different take on that trope. I think with a little reframing it tells a different story, illustrating a problem optimists and pessimists can share, and what to do about this problem. Here is the reframing:

There is a glass of water filled halfway to the middle.

The pessimist looks at the glass and says it is half empty. The pessimist goes on to say this is not enough, it won’t get any better, it might get worse with evaporation, maybe the water is contaminated, and we can’t do anything about it.

The result: nothing gets done. The glass stays filled halfway to the middle.

The optimist looks at the glass and says it is half full. The optimist goes on to say everything is good, we should count our blessings for having this nice crystal-clear water, everything is going to be great especially when we’re thirsty, there is no need to do anything, everything will take care of itself.

The result: nothing gets done. The glass stays filled halfway to the middle.

The activist looks at the glass and says: Fill it up!

The result: the glass gets filled up.

You see the problem that optimists and pessimists can share is that they both may rationalize not doing anything when something could get done. Read more »

Once there was a way, to get back homeward… Photo taken in Bruneck, South Tyrol.

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by Lei Wang

I have often been envious of how characters in stories don’t seem to need to do dishes or laundry or buy groceries, except when it serves their story, like a meet-cute at the farmer’s market or perhaps a juicy conflict between two in-laws over the most efficient way to load the dishwasher. Otherwise, in novels and TV but especially in short stories and movies, the refrigerator fills itself and even eating is an afterthought: food is for pleasure, not necessity.

The boring things of life are given the ax, or no one would watch; imagine a maximalist reality show, each episode 24 hours long, corresponding exactly to a day in the life of someone that you play alongside your own life, minute by minute. Even if it were your favorite celebrity, would you really want to accompany them as they sleep for seven hours? I suppose there are such dedicated viewers out there and also such dedicated livestreams, like Firefox’s red panda web cams. I remember years ago coming across a crowdfunding campaign by a European twenty-something who decided to reduce his carbon footprint by sleeping or otherwise staying in his room all day. He was asking for money in order to do nothing, to contribute as little to the world as possible, and prove it via the most boring livestream. If I remember correctly, he had quite a few patrons—if only for the novelty of the idea.

What are the boring bits of life? Sleep, except for dreams. Chores. The things we have to do, and the things we do again and again and again. Life seems to be a constant battle against entropy, and we are losing. “I don’t identify as transgender… I identify as tired,” said Hannah Gadbsy in the comedy special Nanette. Don’t we all. This was the true punishment of Sisyphus: not the moving of the boulder or even the futility of it, but the day-in, day-outness of it all. We just showered yesterday and our hair is greasy already. The kitchen sink was empty a moment ago, but now there are no forks. The dog needs to be walked, again. Why can’t there be a pet that truly eats one’s garbage?

In The Quotidian Mysteries, a book on the mystical aspects of laundry and other domestic tasks, Kathleen Norris writes of how she found her way back to Catholicism through an Irish-American wedding in which, after the ceremony was over, she watched the priest doing dishes. “In that big, fancy church, after all of the dress-up and the formalities of the wedding mass, homage was being paid to the lowly truth that we human beings must wash the dishes after we eat and drink,” she wrote. “The chalice, which had held the very blood of Christ, was no exception. And I found it enormously comforting to see the priest as a kind of daft housewife, overdressed for the kitchen, in bulky robes, puttering about the altar, washing up after having served so great a meal to so many people.” She couldn’t quite understand the service, but she could understand eating, drinking, and housework.

Sacred is something that is “set apart” from the ordinary; something is sacred because it is not meant to be ordinary. But to treat an ordinary task as extraordinary is also to stand out from the ordinary. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

One day I went to my workplace in York, northern England, where I checked my pigeonhole as usual. An airmail letter lay in the metal box. Its postmarks were from Pakistan, and a man’s name and a Karachi address were scrawled on the back of the envelope. Because of the bimonthly columns I write for Dawn newspaper, I sometimes get email feedback. Occasionally people send me their books for review. But this slim package surprised me – especially when I broke the seal and pulled out four pages of Urdu handwriting.

It had been years, probably over a decade, since I received a personal letter. My teenage sons and twenty-something Urdu teacher, Fareeha, claim they’ve never had one, apart from official dispatches. In this digital dunyā, what a privilege it is to get a letter, and that too a piece of mail which had travelled a long way.

This reaching out across distance and cultures reminded me of Saadat Hasan Manto’s ‘Letters to Uncle Sam’ – sharp, satirical notes dissecting international politics and American power. Balram’s letters to the Chinese Premier in The White Tiger also came to mind, with Aravind Adiga’s character telling Wen Jiabao about Indian corruption and inequality. My situation was different – I was in the UK, not the US or China – and the letter writer’s tone proved to be sincere rather than arch or ironic. Yet the impulse to communicate across borders felt equally urgent. In honour of Manto’s ‘Letters’ and to protect my correspondent’s anonymity, in this blog post I will call him Sami. I surmise, though, that he is much closer to my nephew’s age than my uncle’s.

I gazed at the pages, drawn in by the Urdu script and feeling enchanted that someone had created these words with such dexterity. I exulted even more at the newfound reading skills which allowed me to decode bits and pieces.

I wasn’t linguistically equipped to easily decipher the whole letter. The first few lines were straightforward enough. His postal address was repeated, this time in Nastaliq. However, tellingly for this bibliophile, he did not provide any email or phone details. A standard polite greeting was given, and Sami went on to introduce himself. He explained he was a food science graduate but that his گھر کا ماحول – ghar kā maḥol or home environment – had instilled in him a love of literature. Here he name-checked two authors. The first was a writer whose detective novels I had been harbouring an ambition of reading in the original Urdu: Ibn-e-Safi. The other was new to me but my teacher Fareeha later told me he is brilliant: Ishtiaq Ahmed, who wrote spy novels as well as crime fiction. Sami had devoured all the thrillers by these novelists, both of whom are no longer alive. After these childhood peregrinations, he told me, his reading expedition had continued uninterrupted. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Ed Simon

Impossible to know which one of those perennial evergreen subjects – love or death – poetry considers more, but certainly verse can be particularly charged when it combines those two. Love and death, the only topics worthy of serious contemplation, where anything else worth orienting the mind towards is merely an amalgamation of that pair. Maybe that seems counterintuitive, or worse still as mere sophistry, to claim that love and death are ineffable in the manner of God, for after all there are clear definitions of love and death, and furthermore everyone has an experience of them. But it’s their universality that makes them ineffable, because both are defined by paradox. Death, after all, is the one commonality to all of life, the only thing that absolutely every person will experience, but also that which nobody currently alive can say anything definitive about. A paradox, death. Love, though sadly not as universal as death, would seem to be less paradoxical, and yet genuine love is marked by a desire for personal extinction (not unlike death), a submerging of the self into the being of another. An arithmetic not of addition, but of multiplication. Of one and one equaling one.

In American modernist Edna St. Vincent Millay’s effecting “Dirge Without Music,” a free verse four-quatrain poem written in an alternate rhyme scheme that evokes a ballad first published in 1928, death is read in light of love in a manner that provides a glimpse of comprehension as regards those things which are ineffable. Her poem explores the tensions in love and death, not least of all in the title of the poem which is a paradox. A dirge, by definition, is composed of music, so that to have a dirge without music is nonsensical, like a sculpture without shape or a story without narrative. Yet that’s also precisely what death is, an experience of life – perhaps the sine qua non of life which gives it meaning – but also something that can’t be experienced in life since it marks the termination of existence. That particular aspect of death has long been remarked upon, a favored argument of the Stoics and Epicureans in ancient Greece meant as a comfort regarding the fear of extinction. Such an argument maintains that if eternity follows death than the later isn’t really death, and if death is marked by the obliteration of the self than we never really experience it, since experience requires a self. All well and good in terms of the logic, but not quite adequate to the phenomenological question of what death feels like, for what does it mean to experience something defined by an inability to feel (as if listening to a dirge without music)? Read more »

Sughra Raza. Reflection. Merida, Yucatan, March 14, 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Tim Sommers

In “Calculating God,” Robert J. Sawyer’s first-contact novel, the aliens who arrive on Earth believe in the existence of God – without being particularly religious. Why?

There are certain physical forces, they explain, that make life in our universe possible only if they are tuned to very specific values. Which they are. We are here, after all. But there’s no physical reason that the values need to be set the way they are. The aliens have concluded that someone, or something, set the values of these parameters at the beginning of the universe to insure that life would come into existence. That something they call God.

Here’s a much earlier, very different version of this argument. If you were hiking through the woods and you picked up a shiny object that turned out to be a small stone, it would probably not occur to you that it might have been made by someone. If it turned out to be a watch, however, you would immediately conclude that it had been intentionally created. So, is the universe more like a stone or a watch?

This argument from design was an especially powerful argument for the existence of God when very little was known about biology. The complexity of living things puts watches to shame. But then Darwin came along and used evolution to explain how such diversity, complexity, and apparent design could come about without a designer.

Just when the argument that the complexity of our world could only be explained by God seemed lost, a new, purely physical reason to think that the universe was designed appeared. The one the aliens embrace.

“A striking phenomenon uncovered by contemporary physics,” Kenneth Boyce and Philip Swenson write in their forthcoming paper “The Fine-Tuning Argument Against the Multiverse,” (Philosophy Quarterly) is that many of the fundamental constants of nature appear to have arbitrary values that happen to fall within extremely narrow life-permitting windows.” Read more »

1/1/26 Typhoon USA Aftermath Premonition

—This is a revised version of a poem I wrote when a newly insane river running
through our town one day came through, almost over-toping bridges, spilling
into streets with wild abandon during Hurricane Irene. 

One year back the river tore through
on its fall to the sea, courts and laws
slid beneath a steal (sic) bridge on Maga swells,
small shops (especially) pirouetted off their base,
rushed downstream to lodge against
the remains of a constitution compromised
by Magarussian jackhammers of mad winds.

Cellars of The People filled with mendacious mud
and whatever the river had dredged, whatever it had
sucked from cesspools of Oligarchs, whatever it had
ripped from the gardens of the free, of their
summer afternoons, of their homes and barns,
earth and offal left along its banks, in basements,
in streets, in the vacant classrooms of children before
books were banned, tongues of free speech
caught in eddies of choreographed confusion.

A cornfield, tall enough the day before when its
cobbed yield might have grinned yellow from humble
plates until a typhoon of raw, privileged intent laid it low,
its proud ranks of green stalks now laid flat from
sea to shining sea by Potomac’s winnowing rake, all now
lay supine as a woman or man, after a sweet or savage life,
lie still before the sweep of a polluted sea.
.
Jim Culleny
modified, 3/14/25

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by Katalin Balog

The mind-body problem in its current form – an inquiry into how the mind fits into the physical universe – was formulated by René Descartes in the 17^th century. In his Meditations, a thin volume of philosophy that had a monumental effect on all later Western philosophy, he famously argued that it is possible to conceive of a mind without extension – a disembodied soul – and a body without thought – a mindless zombie. And since whatever can be clearly and distinctly conceived, can be brought about by God, it is possible for there to be a mind without body and a body without mind. He concludes, based on observations about our concept of mind and body, that they are really distinct. His position is called dualism, which is the view that the world has fundamental ingredients that are not physical. Of course, dualism was not original to Descartes; from Plato to the Doctors of the Church and ordinary folks, most people up until the Enlightenment have advocated it. But his way of arriving at it – examining what he can “clearly and distinctly” conceive – has set the template for all subsequent discussions. Nota bene, he had more empirically based arguments as well; for example, he thought nothing physical could produce something so open ended and creative as human speech. He would have been very surprised by ChatGPT.

According to Descartes, the mind, or soul, is an exalted thing: it is non-spatial, immaterial, immortal, and entirely free in its volition. He also thought – reasonably enough – that it interacts with the body, an extended, spatially located thing. In Descartes’ view, there are sui generis mental causes; purely physical causes cannot explain actions. Descartes held that only the quantity of motion is strictly physically determined, not its directionality. In Leibniz’s telling of the story in The Monadology, Descartes believed that the mind nudges moving particles of matter in the pineal gland, causing them to swerve without losing speed, like the car going around the corner. He had a real, substantive disagreement with his contemporary Hobbes, a materialist who thought that there were only physical causes.

Developments in science have had an enormous impact on this debate. The gist is that advances in the physical and biological sciences ultimately ruled out Descartes’s idea of the mind as a sui generis force – though not necessarily other forms of dualism which we will talk about shortly. Not only is it hard to comprehend Descartes’ idea that a non-material mind can move a material body, but such sui generis non-physical causes are ruled out by what we know about natural processes. Read more »