by Colin Eatock

Western classical music has generated a mountain of critical words: not just snarky reviews of specific performances and compositions, but also broader criticism of the genre itself. Of late, a small army of writers has stepped forward to declare classical music elitist, boring, passé, financially untenable, etc., etc.

I claim no personal exemption from this trend. A few years ago I wrote an essay called “What's Wrong With Classical Music,” that was, I believe, read pretty widely. My words were linked and re-posted on numerous websites, and were even quoted in a book by David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) called How Music Works. Encouraged by the world's fascination with in my insights, I wrote a second essay called “What Else Is Wrong With Classical Music.” (This second essay was, frankly, a bit of a rant.)

Recently, I was contacted by someone who read my first “What's Wrong” essay, and who put forward a challenge. “I was wondering,” she began, “if you have ever considered writing about what classical music means to you personally or has meant to you in your own life. You cherish it, right? (C'mon, of course you do!)”

Yes, I do cherish it. All my life, Western classical music has been my “home” musical environment (with occasional forays into other musical realms). So in accepting this challenge, I feel a little bit like a fish writing about how wonderful water is – not an easy thing to do. Nevertheless, I'll give it a try.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

I visited Turkey in July 2013; this was 2-3 weeks after the protests and riots that rocked Taksim Square in Istanbul. Ramazan began on July 08, the day I arrived. After 3 days in Istanbul I flew to Erzurum, a city in Northeast Turkey. From there I hoped to visit villages and towns close to the Georgian and Armenian borders. My longtime Turkish friend, Serhat, joined me for the first half of the six days I traveled in the region. Some informal impressions below.

1. Erzurum

The flight from Istanbul to Erzurum took a course parallel to the northern Black Sea coast of Turkey, before turning inland for the final approach. The landscape was consistently mountainous: lush green and covered with cloud when close to the Black Sea, and dry in the interior, the mountains casting long shadows in the late afternoon light.

Erzurum, a city of about 367,000, lay in a sprawling plain at the base of one such dry mountain range. A haphazard checkerboard of farms stretched for miles and miles around the city. Many of them were hay farms, important in a region whose economy depends heavily on stock breeding. We rented a car at the airport. On our way to Erzurum center, we passed by the gates of Ataturk University.

By the time we had checked into the Esadaş Hotel along Cumhuriyet Caddesi (Erzurum's main street), it was close to iftar time: light was fading fast and the Ramazan fast would soon be broken, at 7:53 pm. On the way to the popular Gelgör Restaurant, we passed by two historic mosques: the Yakutiye (1310, Mongol) and Lala Pasha (1562, Ottoman). In the courtyard of the Lala Pasha, there were two boys, aged between six and ten. The younger one was selling tissue paper neatly folded in a plastic cover; the older one was selling small contraptions, one of which looked like a low plastic bench.

Serhat got to talking with them. He told them that I was from Hindistan. Almost immediately, the boys started repeating a few words excitedly to me. The younger one said “Amita..bhaccha” at least five times, before I realized he was referring to Amitabh Bachchan. The older one was saying Shahrukh Khan in his own way. Bollywood's popularity in unexpected places is not unusual — from West African tax-drivers in Minneapolis, to painters on the streets of Lima (Peru), to an Uzbek man I met on a Grand Canyon hiking trip: everyone was familiar with Bollywood. The bigger surprise was that these kids, making do with basic Turkish, were not locals but from Kabul, Afghanistan; they had entered Turkey illegally after what must have been a long journey from home.

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Myths, according to Barthes, follow a complex structure. There are two levels to be distinguished: The linguistic from the mythological one. On the linguistic level, we have Saussurean signs. The myth is a second order sign, made up of a Saussurean or linguistic sign as its signifier and a concept as its signified. To distinguish the sign as such from its use in the myth, Barthes introduces the two terms meaning and form. Meaning picks out the sign as an independent entity (3. Sign). When this sign or meaning is used as a signifier in the myth, it is called form (I. SIGNIFIER).
The important contrast is that meaning is rich, while form is impoverished. Meaning, according to Barthes, has a history. Form then empties meaning of its history and content, in order to use it as a signifier. The concept here, then, is the mythological signified (II. SIGNIFIED). The correlation of form and concept is called signification or myth (III SIGN).

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by Maniza Naqvi

There are of course the details. Details before the day's important work begins, the creating of facts on the ground and endless meetings. Details which the mind notes, discards but even so, they persist to pinch later on. The large flouncy bunches of bright red flowers, like the skirts of flamenco dancers, crinkly petals furled at the edges, glistening in the bright sunlight, a variety of poinsettias, specific to here, swaying outside the window. The cool breeze gently lifting the edges of the table linen and the newspaper. Then, closer in, the jar of marmite near at hand attached to the wrist dressed in white cuffs clinched by links—blue stone set in gold—still further up it– pink striped sleeves. At this early hour of the morning inch by inch one increases the territory of one's observance with each sip of caffeine as it hits the bloodstream. Yes, excellent brew! This. Very good indeed: from the tea estates further south. The TV is on —-algorithming images— girls, girls, girls—shot, raped kidnapped, women, young women, students, slaves— and always, always, crazies carrying guns–shouting jihad. Then, coverage of Twelve Years A Slave–lovely star wearing a forest green outfit with feathers attached to it at the Met Gala—- Then more stuff about Malala and then there is the White House initiative for preventing rape on campuses. And then there's Mrs. Clinton…talking about Girls Empowerment. Such a perfect alignment of sentiments and stars.

One's gaze, in this crowded breakfast room—this very full and hopping breakfast room in a hotel in a sleepy town, a long, long way away, kind of town, here, so far away, at the heart of it, yes, one's gaze travels in search of something, the eyes need a place to rest. There are the two AFCOM military men-bleary eyed—small wonder—seen last night leaving the lobby with two young ladies of the night— and just behind them, this morning, breakfasting, over there at one o'clock, are the two from a trading community with their gleaming dyed black unruly beards and wearing robes underneath which they wear loose pants pulled up above their ankles, as if they anticipate a flood or some sort of a dirty puddle—and there's the priest and an accompanying nun—To the side sit the brothers Karamazov or some such name—profiting from the proffering of private jet planes, small and not so small arms and grains. There's the Development set—the NGO workers in their “Njoeeyness” all so organic food, and fit and toned bodies, wearing their tone revealing clothing—as if they are all about to break out into pilates and sun asanas any moment. Yeegads. Yes all here—all present and good. But wait where are the Chinese? No doubt steadily putting down roads and conference halls, shopping malls and hotel complexes since the break of dawn. Steel and chrome. Staying somewhere else. In their own hotels?

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Mandi (1983) – The Marketplace

Shyam Benegal's film Mandi or the The Marketplace has been largely understood as a black comedy satirizing middle-class morality. Set in a brothel,Mandi is a rollicking drama of excess. This establishment is faced with a sad decline as its patronage withers in the face of changing times. Middle-class morality is posed against the bordello, with the conflict being played out as the agenda of a hypocritical, desirous, yet authoritarian and morally adjudicating middle-class civil society. The alchemy of this sharply performative delineating breaks down at several points when the madam of the bordello Rukmini Bai retorts with the very same discourse that society uses to attack the establishment, thus exposing the ephemerality and absurdly unquestioned character of such narratives.

The characters are strong, differentially positioned entities with various roles to play within and without this market for women. Rukmini Bai, the madam of the bordello is probably one of the most nuanced characters played by women in Indian cinema. Shabana Azmi executes the role of a ruthless madam who wants the sex trade to flourish with a flavor that is almost schizophrenic[i]. The nature of her various alliances with men outside and women inside is a tension filled process alternating between dominance, negotiation and acquiescence.

She wields power in knowing and serving their secret desires while allying with them to serve her own. With the women or her girls, she is maternal and paternal at the same time[ii] while also ruthless in her understanding of their value as commodities. Her care and concern are instrumental in being able to maintain a household of service workers but she also considers them as her own children much in the manner of a capricious parent. Watch the scene where she negotiates the purchase of Phulmani[iii], playing concerned parent one moment and seasoned buyer the next. In the tone of stern parenthood, Bai seeks to break the virginal girl gently into sex work thus almost erasing her complicity, but the first few frames detailing the actual act of purchase ensure that the audience will not forget. The film further complicates this notion of functional and adoptive parenthood when focusing on the behavior of Mrs. Gupta, a member of respectable society and an associate in the movement for women's upliftment when we see her gently coercing her reluctant daughter into an arranged marriage[iv].

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by Thomas Rodham Wells

The material prosperity that capitalism has wrought is the product of technology as well as markets (and social norms and state institutions). Markets enhance the efficiency of allocation of resources, such as human labour, between competing projects, while technological innovations enhance the productivity of our use of those resources, the ability to produce more with less. As Keynes prophesied in his famous essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930), the seemingly relentless trend of rising productivity promises to finally end the ‘economic problem': the struggle to overcome scarcity that has characterised the human condition since our beginning. Finally, we could turn as a society to considering what our enormous wealth can do for us, rather than what we must do to get it.

Yet this is not a time for complacency. Unless we intervene, the same economic system that has produced this astonishing prosperity will return us to the Dickensian world of winners and losers that characterised the beginning of capitalism, or worse. The problem is this, how will ordinary people earn a claim on the material prosperity of the capitalist economy if that economy doesn't need our labour anymore?

The original industrial revolution was basically an energy revolution that replaced puny human brawn with fossil fuel powered machines that were orders of magnitude faster and stronger. Human workers were displaced into the new jobs created by this prosperity – some managing and servicing the machines that made actual things, but most into ‘services', producing intangible goods such as education by cognitive efforts that the machines couldn't yet reproduce. We are now living through a second industrial revolution that is replacing puny human brains with machine intelligence. Any kind of work that can be routinised can be translated into instructions for computers to follow, generally more cheaply and reliably than human employees can. That includes increasingly sophisticated cognitive labour like driving, legal discovery, medicine, and document translation. Even university lecturers are at risk of being replaced by technology, in the form of Massive Open Online Courses, while the digital cloning of actors promises to allow filmmakers to cheaply manufacture whatever cast they please.

Just like the original industrial revolution this will create large numbers of losers whose skills are no longer valued by the market. But this time it is not clear that new jobs will appear for these people to move into, for this time it seems that the machines will be able to follow us nearly anywhere we try to go, perhaps even including the management of corporations themselves. This time technological unemployment may become a permanent fact that we have to deal with by changing how capitalism works. Our birthright as humans – the ability to produce things by our labour that others find valuable – may become economically worthless.

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by Gerald Dworkin

Some of my readers may recall from an earlier blog post or Justin Smith's review of my Philosophy: A Commonplace Book that for many years I have been collecting humorous quotes, epigrams, aphorisms, parodies, etc. that have some connection to Philosophy. The connection is sometimes that it is from a philosopher, or specifically about a philosophical topic–particularly ethics. Sometimes it is a joke that I see has a philosophical point behind or around or under it. Perhaps any great joke can be seen to be philosophical in some sense if one squints hard enough at it. But many of the quotes are just interesting and thought-provoking without being humorous.

Since publishing my book I have continued to mine for gems. One of the advantages to publishing an ebook is that it makes second editions easy and I intend to revise one of these days. But in the interim I provide a sampling of my sampling for your Monday morning amusement and edification.

If you can only be good at one thing, be good at lying. … Because if you're good at lying, you're good at everything.

Anonymous tweet

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

Einstein

An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a- half.

—————————

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

Karl Kraus

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

Hume

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by Paul Braterman

That's my friend Ramin Forghani from Iran, standing next to Maryam Namazie, carrying a placard outside the Law Society offices in London. He knows that what he is doing, and what he is about to say, could get him killed.

Imagine that you want to write your will according to sharia law, which in England you are perfectly entitled to do. You can go to your friendly neighbourhood Imam to discuss the matter, ask him to explain what is actual law, and what mere custom, talk about the various different interpretations available), and consider how best to apply them to your own family circumstances. This could be quite a long conversation; there are at least six main traditional schools of sharia jurisprudence, to say nothing of modernisers like Musawah who seek to accommodate Islamic practice to present-day principles of equality.

Or you can go to your solicitor, who handles all your ordinary legal business. And if that solicitor follows the guidance issued by the Law Society, he will simply tell you that sons inherit twice as much as daughters, adopted and illegitimate children do not inherit at all, neither do divorced spouses, and marital status is defined according to religious marriage and not according to the law of the land. Tough, by the way, on your orphaned grandkids; in the Law Society's version of sharia law “it is not possible to inherit under Sharia rules by a deceased relative.”

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First Love

I’m falling
for you
falling falling

the ground’s given way
I’m tumbling sprawling
space space —my mind

my heart, my heart
is in a parabolic arc
in a plane devoid of gravity and time

I float I float
I’m in a massless boat
sailing sailing

the truth of gravity is failing
the sadness of abrupt conclusions gone
I’ve come apart, I’m flailing
flailing

up is all around
it’s merged with down
if I weren’t so glad
I’d certainly be wailing
.

by Jim Culleny
5/2/14

by Katharine Blake McFarland

Jennifer Bornstein, Untitled, 2014. © Jennifer Bornstein

On a trip to New York to visit friends last month—a trip that coincided with the city's first beautiful spring weekend after a grueling, endless winter—I walked four miles uptown to see the Whitney Biennial exhibit. Mostly I found the show to be difficult and pedagogical, but there were a few standout pieces, works I will remember for their ability to open up some previously closed part of the heart. A pencil drawing by Elijah Burgher; a massive series of paintings by Keith Mayerson called My American Dream, which sets iconic images next to the personal moments of the painter's life; a kind of totem by Jimmie Durham called Choose Any Three, made of stacked wood pieces inscribed with names like Malcolm X, Annie Wauneka, and Kafka.

But one of the most unforgettable moments of the exhibit wasn't an installation. It was a conversation I overheard among young girls about an installation.

In a small dark room, a short film played on a loop. The film, Untitled by Jennifer Bornstein, features a group of naked women dancing. In true modern dance form, the women are barefoot, pushing and pulling their bodies across the barren backdrop, dragging and circling, arching and caving in. At one point, two of the dancers seem to be in struggle, gripping each other's bodies like wrestlers; other times, the movements are languid, more peaceful and maybe even sad. The dancers themselves are beautiful—capable bodies, confident movements, their long brown hair falling in front of their faces.

As I stood with my back to the wall, just about to leave, three little girls scurried into the room, full of secrets, followed by a bedraggled-looking father. They couldn't have been more than six or seven years old.

“Eeeewwww” the tallest girl whispered loudly.

“They're JUST NAKED!” gasped another, which prompted a general chorus of audible, enraptured disgust (that kind of disgust, so familiar to childhood, that prohibits the possibility of looking away).

“Girls,” whispered the father, “if you don't like it, let's move along.” The girls reacted to this suggestion by taking a seat on the front-most bench, closest to the screen, and continued their chorus. The father tried a different approach: “What do you find so gross about it?”

“Their vaginas!” said the tallest girl. At this, the father glanced around the room embarrassedly, caught my eye, and I smiled.

“What about them?” the father asked, turning back to the girls.

“They're hairy!”—and then, after a reflective pause, “They look like men pretending to be women.”

As I left the dark room and walked into the bright white hallways of the museum, I immediately thought of Barbie. Her impossible proportions, gravity-defying and devoid of muscle; her smooth, and (of course) hairless, plastic skin.

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by Matt McKenna

A story was recently imported from France to America, and it has since become a national sensation. It is the story of inequality and the danger of capitalism run amok. It is a prophecy for social upheaval if this inequality isn't handled in a timely manner. It is, by all accounts, an important story. Of course, I'm referring to Paul Walker's penultimate film, Brick Mansions, a parkour action flick he co-stars with David Belle and RZA. A film this dense begs for analysis, and fortunately there's already a compendium on the market whose popularity is threatening to rival that of the film itself. This study-guide, written by French economist Thomas Piketty, is called Capital in the Twenty-First Century and is essential reading for any American attempting to explore the economic allusions within Brick Mansions.

Brick Mansions is an American remake of the 2004 French film, District B13. While the remake does Americanize its subject matter, the larger plot elements of the story remain intact: as crime in Detroit increases to horrifyingly high levels, the government erects walls around the city's most dangerous neighborhood, a large block of rundown high-rises known as Brick Mansions. Lino (David Belle) is a resident of Brick Mansions and parkour enthusiast who is interested in killing drug kingpin Tremaine (RZA) for kidnapping his girlfriend. Lino is joined in his quest by Damien Collier (Paul Walker), a naive cop sent into Brick Mansions to deactivate a rogue neutron bomb that found its way into the area. As to be expected in an action film, our heroes are ceaselessly bombarded by henchmen with terrible aim and a proclivity for standing near the edges of rooftops. As the duo battles their way through the parade of bad guys, Lino's parkour skills prove to be an invaluable resource as he deftly traverses terrain filled with just-out-of-reach ladders, windows, and objects from which he can perform flips and other incredible feats of jumping. Collier is less agile than his counterpart, but a deep-seated rage over the death of his father affords him superhuman tenacity and an exceptionally wry wit.

You'd be forgiven if you read the above description and came to the conclusion that Brick Mansions is nothing but a brainless action movie whose core audience's age tops out at fourteen. In fact, you'd still be forgiven if you watched the movie and came away with the very same conclusion. Because the film is so oblique, it is easy to miss the nuanced social and economic critiques amongst the plethora of kicks and fist-bumps. Thankfully, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, an impressive work in and of itself, decodes Brick Mansions and provides viewers with the opportunity to understand this frequently difficult film.

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by Grace Boey

What is it like to be a bat? Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously posed this question in 1974. As he noted, the question is one that cannot be answered: no matter how many objective, scientific facts we may discover about a bat’s physiology or neurobiology, we can never access its subjective, personal experience. Phenomenal consciousness – or qualia – is a private, opaque matter. Nagel’s question (and lack of an answer) is one that almost all philosophy freshmen are acquainted with.

But long before I’d heard of Nagel – or the mind-body problem of philosophy – I’d already developed a few ideas of my own about bats. As a child, I’d been enchanted by the tale of Stellaluna, a baby fruit bat who is accidentally separated from her mother. My own mother would often read the book to me at bedtime; I’d fall asleep thinking about brave Stellaluna who befriends a group of baby birds, reluctantly learns to eat worms, and is taught to sleep the wrong way up. When Stellaluna and her mother are finally reunited, both are overjoyed – and the baby bat finally feels like she is someplace she belongs. According to the story, bats are capable of complex emotions, preferences and desires – just like us.

Stellaluna is a wonderful children’s tale. But, as a scientific description of bat psychology, the text is clearly lacking. It is questionable whether bats are capable of possessing mental states such as ‘bravery’, ‘love’ or ‘belonging’, or whether they are capable of establishing ‘friendships’. The text commits what scientists refer to as ‘anthropomorphism’ – the act of assigning human-like qualities to non-human animals. Among scientists, anthropomorphism has become somewhat of a dirty word.

It is certainly unwise to blanketly assume that non-human animals have inner mental lives identical to those of humans. Yet it also seems unlikely that non-human animals have no mentality at all. If excessive anthropomorphism is a sin, then so is excessive anthropocentrism. In all likelihood, the truth about non-human animal minds lies somewhere in between. What, then, is the ‘correct’ way to interpret animal behaviour? This question comes with significant stakes, since how we relate to non-human animals is guided by what we believe about their minds. Unfortunately, the task of animal psychology is rife with methodological and philosophical difficulties. It would certainly be responsible for us to gather as much accurate, relevant scientific data as we can – but as Nagel has pointed out, the best we can do from there is still to guess.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

“”If you want to to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things.” ― Umberto Eco, Baudolino

It was every Medieval person's greatest aspiration. For, of course, finding Prester John would bring about the most glorious-not to mention grandiose– conclusion to the Crusades. In their rich imaginations, the Medievals believed that this would culminate in the return of Jerusalem from “the Moors” and the making way for the Second Coming–and the Kingdom of Heaven.

No small undertaking, the search for the Prester was just as mind-bogglingly quixotic as the other European obsessions, like for Eldorado and Atlantis and the Grail. And, like the search for the Holy Grail, this sone had the added imperative and will to power borne of religion.

I imagine my favorite Portuguese fidalgo not taking the news well. But maybe Pêro da Covilhã was no real fidalgo anyway–of humble birth, it was his wit and skill with languages that had brought him this far up the aristocratic ladder in Lisbon. Called to court in 1487, he arrived to a room full of Jesuits.

Not the bloody Jesuits, he must have thought, Anything but them.

His despair must have only deepened when he heard what the king had in mind for him.

He was being asked to lead an emissary to Abyssinia.

As he struggled to recall where Abyssinia even was located, one of the council map-makers probably appeared and unfurled a large map of the known world; one with Jerusalem lying smack in the middle. As they explained the route he was to take, a Jesuit confidante and adviser to the viceroy explained that it was the Court of the King of Abyssinia at which they believed the legendary Prester John resided.

Prester John? Not this Catholic nonsense again? Pêro da Covilhã must have struggled to keep his disbelief from showing on his face over what they were asking of him.

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by Josh Yarden

Actor Clayton Moore, TV's Lone Ranger, rides to the rescue circa 1955. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Some people like the idea that education is the great leveler of the playing field. They believe, or at least they repeat the slogan that everyone can attain the American dream if they work hard enough in school. The truth tells a different story: A great education puts you ahead of the game, but that advantage is for a select few, not for everyone. The World Series and The Superbowl may be played on level fields, but most people, even those who try their very hardest, never have an opportunity to attend the game.

If you want to examine social inequality in America, the easiest place to begin is by taking a look at the socio-economic stratification of our schools. We have several parallel educational systems. Among them are elite private schools funded by foundations and private citizens, well-funded public schools in communities with relatively affluent populations, some high quality magnet public schools that do not offer open access to all students, more schools that are funded below desired levels, and many crowded under-resourced public schools. A more detailed look at the nature of poverty points toward particular issues such as homelessness, absenteeism, illness, the low educational levels of parents and substance abuse, among others. Politicized issues such as vouchers, school choice and test scores create a lot of noise that drowns out some of the most important signals communities are sending about the real issues that impact the quality of American education.

There seems to be an insatiable desire in some corners of American society to discover the silver bullet. We want a hero to ride into town on a white horse, clean up corruption and… Hi-Yo Silver! Away!… then leave us alone. We don't like paying taxes, and we don't like it when public officials spend our money on someone else's issue. But decades of reform initiatives have proven time and again that there are no silver bullets.

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by Eric Byrd

“Called the ‘real origin' of Zola's Nana“! What 1950s drugstore customer, twirling the rack of paperbooks,
could resist that pitch? I will assume most contemporary readers are like me, and know the Goncourt brothers best by reading or rumor of their incomparable Journal. In the Journal their novels figure as neglected masterworks pillaged for themes, plots and argot by a generation of younger and more celebrated novelists – pillaged most shamelessly by Zola, who they frankly call a plagiarist. Their rancor and wounded pride made me curious, and when a copy of Germinie Lacerteux (1864) serendipitously surfaced in a dollar bin, I grabbed for it.

It's a failure, at least on the terms the Goncourts set forth in their polemical preface: they wanted to admit the lower classes into literature, via a new, scientific kind of social novel. (They diligently scouted slums and toured hospitals, between art auctions and literary dinners.) The problem is that Germinie – a lady's maid based on the Goncourts' own Rose, an irreproachable retainer of twenty-five years posthumously revealed to have stolen money and wine to fund secret sprees and support a rogue's gallery of gigolos – is dead on the page. On Germinie, the narration sounds here like a detective baldly noting the comings and goings of a mark under surveillance, there like a smug psychologist, righteous with phrenology or eugenics, composing a floridly prejudiced case history of some helpless imbecile. The Goncourts seem content to pass along maxims of human perversity, while remaining uninterested by, or incapable of, the portrayal of humans behaving perversely. They maintain a fastidious distance from scenes, from characters interacting; so much is distantly summarized; and their descriptions frequently become declamations. For all the verbosity lavished on her, Germinie is in the end hardly more vivid that her original, sketched in the Journal.

And yet Germinie Lacerteux has its pleasures, and the Goncourts their strengths. They have a genius for little misanthropic cartoons. Germinie gives everything for the sake of her lover Jupillon, an androgynous momma's boy, prole dandy and tavern idol. Jupillon is no more complex a character than Germinie, but he twitches with vile animation when touched with the Goncourts' galvanic disdain. I enjoyed reading about him. A glovemaker's boy who works in the shop window, he preens and pouts while on view; in the music halls, where he's petted and plied with drinks by fishwives and shawl-menders and depilatresses, Jopillon flaunts his “dubious elegances – hair parted in the middle, locks over his temples, wide-open shirt collars revealing his whole neck,” his sexless features “barely penciled with two moustache-strokes.” Through Jupillon – a prince, a promise of happiness to sad crones “still unused in their innermost depths, who had never been loved” – the Goncourts evoke the drabness and melancholy of the milieu through which he moves (according to his mother) “like a gentleman.”

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by Bill Benzon

Distant Reading and Embracing the Other

As far as I can tell, digital criticism is the only game that's producing anything really new in literary criticism. We've got data mining studies that examine 1000s of texts at once. Charts and diagrams are necessary to present results and so have become central objects of thought. And some investigators have all but begun to ask: What IS computation, anyhow? When a died-in-the-wool humanist asks that question, not out of romantic Luddite opposition, but in genuine interest and open-ended curiosity, THAT's going to lead somewhere.

While humanistic computing goes back to the early 1950s when Roberto Busa convinced IBM to fund his work on Thomas Aquinas – the Index Thomisticus came to the web in 2005 – literary computing has been a backroom operation until quite recently. Franco Moretti, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford and proprietor of its Literary Lab, is the most prominent proponent of moving humanistic computing to the front office. A recent New York Times article, Distant Reading, informs us

…the Lit Lab tackles literary problems by scientific means: hypothesis-testing, computational modeling, quantitative analysis. Similar efforts are currently proliferating under the broad rubric of “digital humanities,” but Moretti's approach is among the more radical. He advocates what he terms “distant reading”: understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.

Traditional literary study is confined to a small body of esteemed works, the so-called canon. Distant reading is the only way to cover all of literature.

But Moretti has been also investigating drama, play by play, by creating diagrams depicting relations among the characters, such as this diagram of Hamlet:

The diagram gives a very abstracted view of the play and so is “distant” in one sense. But it also requires Moretti to attend quite closely to the play, as he sketches the diagrams himself and so must be “close” to the play.

His most recent pamphlet, “Operationalizing”: or, the Function of Measurement in Modern Literary Theory (December 2013, PDF), discusses that work and concludes by observing: “Computation has theoretical consequences—possibly, more than any other field of literary study. The time has come, to make them explicit” (p. 9).

If such an examination is to take place the profession must, as Willard McCarty asserted in his 2013 Busa Award Lecture (see below), embrace the Otherness of computing:

I want to grab on to the fear this Otherness provokes and reach through it to the otherness of the techno-scientific tradition from which computing comes. I want to recognize and identify this fear of Otherness, that is the uncanny, as for example, Sigmund Freud, Stanley Cavel, and Masahiro Mori have identified it, to argue that this Otherness is to be sought out and cultivated, not concealed, avoided, or overcome. That it's sharp opposition to our somnolence of mind is true friendship.

In a way it is odd that we, or at least the humanists among us, should regard the computer as Other, for it is entirely a creature of our imagination and craft. We made it. And in our own image.

Can the profession even imagine much less embark on such a journey?

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